Page 51 of Nobody's Fool

Gary swallows, his jowls shaking, and pushes out a hard breath. “So Richard goes to tap his three-incher into the hole,” he says, starting up again. “And that’s when he sees it.”

“Sees what?” I say.

“There’s a ball in the cup already.”

He turns and looks at me. I feel my heart sink for him.

“My first ball,” he says, though I guessed that already. “My original ball I hit off the tee. The one that hit the tree. It did indeed take a fluke bounce, I guess, but not into the woods. It rolled onto the green and into the cup. I’d hit a hole in one.”

I say nothing.

“Richard slowly reaches down and picks the ball up. My initials are on it, clear as day. Everyone is silent. They all know now. I’d hit a hole in one—and outed myself as a cheater.”

Gary grows silent now. I fear that I am going to say somethingstupid or patronizing, something like “one momentary lapse” or “hey, we all have our moments” or “it’s not really a big deal.” But I get it. Even before he continues to explain: The cheating destroyed the life he knew. Gary became an immediate social pariah. We love building people up. We love tearing them down even more. No one wanted to play with him anymore. The dinner invitations dried up. The local online newspaper, theShort Hills Patch, got wind of the story and published it. Their friends fled. Gary suggested they move, start fresh. They had a place already on Old Marsh Golf Club in Florida. They could move down there permanently. But the members at Old Marsh had heard the story too. And Wendy loved this life. She didn’t want to give it up. Yet there was no escape. So Wendy did what she could to survive: She divorced him, “cutting out the cancer so she could survive,” Gary said. Now she’d taken up with one of Gary’s friends—Richard Belthoff’s cousin, ironically, who had recently become a widower. Then the leftover cancer spread. A lot of Greg’s clients had been members of the club. They pulled their money out of his hedge fund.

In the end, Gary lost everything.

“I lost my membership, of course,” Gary says. “I don’t play anymore. But for some reason I still wear the clothes. A reminder maybe. Punishment. My own personal scarlet letter, albeit in bad golf fashion.”

Again I just want to say, “You got caught up in the moment, you made one little mistake,” and again I know not to insult him with something like that. Do you want the hard truth? Life isn’t about the big mistakes. It’s about the little ones. Think about the line between in play and out of play at a soccer pitch or in any game. The costliest mistakes are made right near that line, right when someone has laid down the line and you trudge back and forth across it and that line gets messy and now you see the ball go just over the line but maybe you can grab it in time, kick it back into play before anyone sees. Those are the mistakes that stay with you. Those, the small ones, the ones youdidn’t have to make—those are the ones that haunt you and change your life.

So I don’t offer Gary words of comfort. He looks shattered. There are some shrinks I know who would say Gary did it on purpose. This country-club life was suffocating him and so he found the only way out through an act of self-destruction. I doubt that was the case, but why not embrace it.

“Gary,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re in my class.”

He smiles. “Me too, man. Me too.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Marty lives in a three-story penthouse in the storied Beresford on Central Park West near the American Museum of Natural History. I googled the price on StreetEasy when Marty first moved in. Yes, it is none of my business, but this is the world in which we live. I don’t make the rules. It was on the market for $19 million. It sold for “far less” than fair normal market value because the previous occupant had been a notorious hoarder and criminal, who hid a stolen Vermeer on the premises. So Marty got a “steal” and paid a mere $14 million.

No, Marty, who I doubt is more than thirty years old, didn’t buy this place on his cop salary. He comes from money. Lots of it. His family lives in Houston and are what we used to call oil barons. He’s fourth-generation oil rich.

We sit on the terrace overlooking Central Park. The Beresford is noted for its three corner octagonal towers atop its twenty-two floors (there isn’t one on the northwest corner for some reason). Marty’s apartment has one of them. It looms next to us.

“I want you to know,” Marty says, “that we are going to put serious resources into reconvicting Tad Grayson.”

I don’t reply. I’m not saying the sentiment isn’t authentic, but no one in the department will care enough. That’s not a criticism. It’s justthe way of the world. If Nicole is going to get justice, it’s going to be on me.

“But you’re not here about that,” Marty says.

“I am not.”

“So let’s get to it. The Victoria Belmond case. First off, it’s three steps beyond bizarre.”

Marty hands me a power shake of some kind. It’s green. He loves power shakes and working out and eating right and he looks like it. It is hard to imagine a more perfect physical specimen than Marty. Tall, handsome, muscular, gorgeous, while I look more like something left in the bottom of a laundry hamper. We made, in that short time we were NYPD partners, quite a pair.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“First off, the FBI case file is locked, sealed, classified, private, not in the system. Only the top guys can access it.”

“Theories on why?” I ask.

“Not really, no.”