Free The Gun Runner's Daughter by Neil Gordon Page A

was going to prosecute, he’d accepted, he’d accepted.
    And not until he found himself looking at Alley Rosenthal on the porch of the Up Island General Store did Dee Dennis finally admit that it was too late to pretend that it would all go away.
    When he could, under the disapproving stare of his aunt, he thanked the Wrights and left their house. For a time he was in the dark of his car. Then he felt a moment of cold rain on his face.
And then, at last, he was standing at the open door of the Ritz, disregarding the doorman’s request for a one-dollar cover, making out, over the crowd, the figure of Allison Rosenthal, alone
at the bar, watching her face, as he had so recently been watching his face, through the shelves of bottles in the mirror.
    And what was the right thing to do now? Poised before a decision that could well be irreversible, David Treat Dennis asked himself, what would his father tell him to do? But then, his father
wouldn’t be in this position, would he? Real frustration was in Dee’s stomach now, and beyond it, a big-winged, swooping, real fear.
    But what was fear? Everyone he knew, Dee reminded himself, everyone he knew in his little world, was afraid, from his aunt Mary to the Scottish horse-girl he had just left at the
Wrights’.
    There was no choice, so why be afraid?
    That’s what Dee thought as he entered the Ritz.
    “Life,” Joseph Brodsky once said, “is a game with many rules but no referee.”
    Small wonder, he went on, that so many people cheat.

CHAPTER 4

    Labor Day Weekend, 1994.
Oak Bluffs.
    1.
    At the Oyster Bar, through the picture window, Allison was able to see Martha in black stretch pants and a sleeveless silk shirt, standing with a group of perhaps seven people.
Seen in silence from the fogged street, her animation seemed a performance, and as such, Allison could see, it was entirely carrying her audience.
    Changing her focus, she checked her translucent reflection in the window of the restaurant. Her sleeveless Donna Karan T-shirt was nearly indistinguishable, in this light, from the tan skin of
her neck and shoulders. Her hair was up, a serpentine frame; her lips red, her eyes green.
    This was the first evening she had been out in two weeks, and Martha had had to argue hard to get her to do it. But she did not know any of the people Martha was talking to, so she entered the
dry warmth of the room, filled with people, loud with conversation, beyond which sounded Tony Bennett and k. d. lang through four large speakers.
    Martha introduced her as Alley, no more, no less. Someone gave her a champagne flute, a black guy in Ralph Lauren, who then asked her what she did. For a moment she was unable to answer, unused
to the sensations of the restaurant after her solitary weeks. Then she answered that she was in law school at NYU. No need to lie, so far.
    The black guy worked for Kennedy, someone else for Knopf. Someone else wrote for Conan O’Brien, someone else was at Miramax. None were paying their own way on the island. Each was intent
on establishing that the dry spell was over. Allison drank champagne, ate a plate of oysters, drank more champagne.
    The restaurant’s tables were filling now, a late-season crowd, homeowners on-island for the last week, cleaning up after renters, closing up summer houses. She kept her back to the room as
it filled and Martha, consciously or not, helped shield her, often standing close enough that Allison could feel the heat of her darkly tanned skin on her own. Like that, it was over the curve of
Martha’s bare shoulder that she saw the short man enter and cross to the bar. And for a moment—far too early, she thought with regret—her evening faltered.
    He wore, now, khakis, black shoes, an ironed white shirt, and a jean jacket; perfect island evening wear, Allison noticed—only tourists came out at night in either very casual or very good
clothes. And indeed, this man seemed at his ease as he stepped in, a curious and friendly