The Gate House Read Online Free PDF Page A

would think is handsome. Like his father, his features were a little heavy—the women would say sensual—with full lips and dark liquidy eyes. His complexion, also like his father’s, was olive—his mother, Anna, was very fair—and his well-coiffed hair, like Frank’s, was dark and wavy, but probably longer than Pop would have liked. No doubt Anthony—also like his father—did well with the ladies.
    He was dressed more casually than his father had dressed. Frank always wore a sports jacket with dress slacks and custom-made shirts. All in bad taste, of course, but at least you knew that don Bellarosa dressed for his image. In the city, he wore custom-made silk suits, and his nickname in the tabloids had been “Dandy Don,” before it became “Dead Don.”
    “So, when she dies, then you leave?”
    “Probably.” Anthony was wearing scrotum-tight jeans, an awful Hawaiian shirt that looked like a gag gift, and black running shoes. He also wore a black windbreaker, maybe because it was a chilly night, or maybe because it hid his gun. The dress code in America had certainly gone to hell in my absence.
    He said, “But you don’t know where you’re going. So maybe you’ll stay.”
    “Maybe.” Anthony’s accent, like his father’s, was not pure low-class, but I heard the streets of Brooklyn in his voice. Anthony had spent, I guess, about six years at La Salle Military Academy, a Catholic prep school on Long Island, whose alumni included some famous men, and some infamous men, such as don Bellarosa. No one would mistake the Bellarosa prep school accents for St. Paul’s, where I went, but the six years at boarding school had softened Anthony’s “dese, dose, and dems.”
    “So, you and the old lady are, like, friends?”
    I was getting a little annoyed at these personal questions, but as a lawyer I know questions are more revealing than answers. I replied, “Yes, we’re old friends.” In fact, as I said, she hated me, but here, in this old vanished world of gentry and servants, of ancient family ties and family retainers, of class structure and noblesse oblige, it didn’t matter much at the end of the day who was master and who was servant, or who liked or disliked whom; we were all bound together by a common history and, I suppose, a profound nostalgia for a time that, like Ethel herself, was dying but not yet quite dead. I wondered if I should explain all this to Anthony Bellarosa, but I wouldn’t know where to begin.
    “So, you’re taking care of the place for her?”
    “Correct.”
    Anthony nodded toward the opening to the dining room, and apropos of the stacks of paper, said, “Looks like you got a lot of work there.” He smiled and asked, “Is that the old lady’s will?”
    In fact, I had found her will, so I said, “Right.”
    “She got millions?”
    I didn’t reply.
    “She leave you anything?”
    “Yes, a lot of work.”
    He laughed.
    As I said, I am Ethel’s attorney for her estate, such as it is, and her worldly possessions are to pass to her only child, the aforementioned Elizabeth. Ethel’s will, which I drew up, left me nothing, which I know is exactly what Ethel wanted for me.
    “Mr. Sutter? What were you doing in London?”
    He was rocking in the chair, and I leaned toward him and inquired, “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
    “Oh . . . just making conversation.”
    “Okay, then let me ask you a few conversational questions. How did you know that Mrs. Allard was dying?”
    “Somebody told me.”
    “And how did you know I was living in London, and that I was back?”
    “I hear things.”
    “Could you be more specific, Mr. Bellarosa?”
    “Anthony. Call me Anthony.”
    That seemed to be as specific as he was going to get.
    I looked at his face in the dim light. Anthony had been about seventeen or eighteen—a junior or senior at La Salle—when my wife murdered his father. So, he was not yet thirty, but I could see in his eyes and his manner that unlike most