There's more to it, Ms Snippy.

Bellarosa asked, "Where'd they get all that shit on you, Counsellor?"

"I handed out press kits on myself."

"Yeah?"

"Just kidding, Frank."

Ms Alvarez was still at it. Where she got all that shit was from Mr Mancuso and/or Mr Ferragamo. This was called payback time, aka 'Fuck you, Sutter." Thanks, boys.

Frank Bellarosa said, half jokingly, "Hey, who's the fucking star of this show?

Me or you? I didn't know you were a big shot."

I stood and walked toward my bedroom.

"Where you goin'?"

The back'ouse."

"Can't you hold it? You're gonna miss this."

"I won't miss it at all." I went into my bedroom and into the bathroom. I peeled off my jacket and washed my hands and face. "Good Lord…" Well, aside from my personal reasons for being here, the fact remained that Frank Bellarosa was not guilty of the murder of Juan Carranza. "Not guilty," I said aloud. "Not guilty." I looked in the mirror and held eye contact with myself. "You fucked up, Sutter.

Oh, you really fucked up this time, Golden Boy. Come on, admit it." "No," I replied, "I did what I had to do. What I wanted to do. This is a growing experience, John. A learning experience. I feel fine."

"Tell me that in a week or two."

I am the only man I know who can get the best of me in an argument, so I turned away before I said something I'd regret.

I dropped my clothes on the bathroom floor and stepped into the shower. Oh, that felt good. The three best things in life are steak, showers, and sex. I let the water cascade over my tired body.

By tomorrow morning, this story would be spread all over the newspapers. The Daily News, New York's premier chronicle of the Mafia, would headline it, and so would the Post. USA Today would give it some play, and the Wall Street Journal, while not seeing any real news value to the story per se, would report it. My fear there was that they would decide that the story was not Frank Bellarosa, but John Sutter of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds. In fact, they might massacre me. Woe is me.

And by tomorrow morning, anyone in Lattingtown, Locust Valley, or the other Gold Coast communities who had missed the story in the above-mentioned newspapers, or missed it on the radio, or somehow missed it on New York's dozen or so TV news shows, could read it in the local Long Island newspaper, Newsday, with special emphasis on the local boy, John Sutter. I saw the headline: GOLD COAST TWIT IN DEEP SHIT. Well, maybe not in those words. But Newsday was a left-of-centre sort of publication in a heavily Republican county, and they delighted in being antagonistic toward the nearly extinct gentry. They would have fun with this one.

I tried to imagine how this would sit with my partners, my staff, and my two secretaries when they discovered that Mr Sutter had expanded the scope of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds into criminal law. As the water flowed over my head, I had this mental image of my mother and father flipping through the International Herald Tribune, somewhere in darkest Europe, looking for depressing stories of famine and political repression, and stumbling upon an odd little article about Mr Frank Bellarosa, Mafia gang leader in New York. Mother would say, "Isn't that the fellow who lives next to our son, what's-his-name?" And Father would reply, "Yes, I believe… well, look, here is a mention of John Sutter. That must be our John." And Mother would say, "It must be. Did I tell you about that darling little cafe I saw yesterday in Montmartre?" Of course my friends at The Creek would be somewhat more interested. I pictured Lester, Martin Vandermeer, Randall Potter, Allen DePauw, and a few others sitting around the lounge, nodding knowingly, or perhaps shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, or doing whatever they thought everyone else thought was appropriate, and Lester would say, "If only John had had more strength of character. I feel sorry for Susan and the kids."

Jim and Sally Roosevelt, though, were real friends, and nonjudgemental people. I could count on them to tell me straight out what they thought and felt about me. Therefore, I would avoid them for about a month.

Then there were my relatives, my aunts and uncles such as Cornelia and Arthur, and my too many cousins, and their spouses, and the whole crew of silly people I had to associate with because of things like Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Well, Thanksgiving was three months away, I didn't know about any upcoming weddings, and no one seemed about to croak (though after today I wouldn't be surprised if Aunt Cornelia did). And if they all snubbed me, I wouldn't care one whit, but they were more likely to pester me for details of my secret life as a Mafia mouthpiece.

And of course, there were Carolyn and Edward. I was glad I'd tipped them off about this, so when they heard it from other sources, they could say, "Yes, we know all about that. We support our father in whatever he does." What great kids. Anyway, I guessed that Carolyn would be outwardly cool, but inwardly worried. That girl keeps everything in. Edward would start a scrapbook. But I'm not concerned about the judgement of children, my own included. As for my sister, Emily, she had passed through her own midlife rejection of upper-middle-class values and had already reached the other side. I knew she would be there waiting for me when I arrived at my destination, and bless her, she wouldn't want to know anything about my journey, only that I'd made it. Ethel Allard. Now there was a tough call. If I had to put major money on that, I would say she was secretly pleased that another blue blood had been exposed as morally corrupt. Especially me, since she could never find a chink in my shining armour. I mean, I never beat my wife (except at her own suggestion), I didn't owe money to tradesmen, didn't use the gatehouse to screw women, I went to church, hardly ever got drunk, and I treated her reasonably well. "But," she would ask, "what good have you done lately, Mr John Sutter?" Not much, Ethel. Oh, well.

I'm only glad that George isn't alive to see this, for surely it would have killed him. And if it didn't, he would have annoyed me with his superior and disapproving attitude, and I would have killed him myself. But, you know, there's a bright spot even in a pile of horse manure. For instance, the Reverend Mr Hunnings would be secretly and sneeringly happy that I was shown up for what I was: a gangster groupie who probably dealt drugs to support his alcohol habit. And I liked the idea that he was probably happy. I was happy that he was happy. I couldn't wait to get to church next Sunday to put my envelope in the collection plate with a thousand dollars in it. Then there were the women; Sally Grace Roosevelt, for one, who had found Susan's description of don Bellarosa so interesting. And there was Beryl Carlisle, who I was sure now would peel off her damp pants the moment I walked into the room. And there were women like the delicious Terri, who would take me a little more seriously after this.

Ah, we're getting a little closer to the crux of this matter, you say. Perhaps.

Let's discuss Charlotte and William Stanhope for one half-second: Fuck them. Now on to Susan. No, I can't blame her for what happened, for my being at that moment in the Plaza Hotel with a mobster, an accused murderer, and a man who had about two hundred people looking to kill him. I couldn't blame her for my decision to be Bellarosa's attorney. And I couldn't blame her for the unwanted press attention she and I were both now getting and would continue to get until perfect strangers knew all about us. No, I couldn't blame her. But you do see that it was mostly her fault.

I mean, no, not her fault, but sort of her responsibility. In a very small nutshell, it was like this: Susan thought Frank Bellarosa was interesting and, perhaps by inference, more of a man than her own husband. Her husband, who truly cares what his wife thinks of him, did not like that. Her husband is a jealous man. And her husband thinks he is every inch the man that Frank Bellarosa is. More of a man in many ways. But it doesn't do a bit of good to say such a thing.