The Gate House   ::   Demille Nelson

In that category were these photos of their mother whose nakedness revealed a lotmore about her head than about her body. Susan was, and I’m sure still is, a bit nutty. But to be honest, I didn’t mind that at all, and that wasn’t the source of our marital problems. Our problem, obviously, was Susan’s affair with the Mafia don next door. And then to complicate things further, she shot and killed him. Three shots. One in the groin. Ouch .

I gathered the photos and turned in my chair toward the fireplace. We all have trouble parting with things like this, but I can tell you, as a lawyer and as a man, no good can come of saving anything you wouldn’t want your family or your enemies to see. Or your next significant other, for that matter.

I stared into the fire and watched the flames dancing against the soot-blackened brick, but I held on to the photos.

So, she shot her lover, Frank “the Bishop” Bellarosa, capo di tutti capi , boss of all bosses, and got away with it – legally, at least – due to some circumstances that the Justice Department found mitigating and extenuating.

Fact is, the Justice Department took a dive on the case because they’d made the mistake of allowing Mrs. Sutter unobstructed access to don Bellarosa, who was under house arrest in his villa down the road, and who was also singing his black heart out to them, and thus needed to be kept happy with another man’s wife.

I’m still a little pissed off at the whole thing, as you might guess, but basically I’m over it.

Meanwhile, I needed to decide if this trip was a death vigil, or perhaps something more permanent. I had kept up with my CLE – continuing legal education – and I was still a member of the New York State Bar, so I hadn’t burned all my bridges, and theoretically I was employable here. In my last life, I had been a partner in my father’s old firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, still located at 23 Wall Street, a historic building that was once bombed by Anarchists at the turn of the last century, which seems almost quaint in light of 9/11.

For the last seven years in London, I’d worked for the aforementioned British law firm, and I was their American tax guy who explained that screwing the Internal Revenue Service was an American tradition. This was payback for me because the IRS had screwed up my life, while my wife was screwing the Mafia don. These two seemingly disparate problems were actually related, as I had found out the hard way.

I guess I’d hit a patch of rough road back then, a little adversity in an otherwise charmed and privileged life.