Hard to kill, p.15
Hard to Kill, page 15
I point that out to Ben.
“I’m convinced she knows who put her in that pool,” I tell him. “She just won’t say.”
“Whatever her reasons are, they belong to her,” Ben says. “And maybe, just maybe, we can stroll around the tent, mingle with some people I know, and enjoy the horsies.”
“I know enough people,” I tell him, kissing him on the cheek. “I’d rather stick one of the toothpicks from the appetizers in my ear than do this scene.”
He heads in one direction and I head in the other, toward the bar, to order a Bloody Mary, knowing midday champagne will make me feel even sleepier than I already do.
After I’ve collected my drink, I think I see Edmund McKenzie standing where Claire Jacobson had been, but Larry Calabrese, the East Hampton police chief, intercepts me. Maybe McKenzie saw me coming, but he is long gone by the time Larry and I have finished making small talk.
While I wait for Dr. Ben to make his rounds, I make my way outside and toward the closest ring. I don’t know what the time on the clock means, but I know the tall young rider has his horse moving fast by the way his hair flows from underneath his helmet. He gets around the course without knocking down any rails and the crowd cheers.
When I turn back toward the tent, Bobby Salvatore is standing in front of me. I know what he looks like because I have googled him, on multiple recent occasions.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says.
SIXTY-FOUR
HE DOESN’T PARTICULARLY LOOK like a gangster. But I’m not quite sure what that meant any longer, not since internet nerds looking like past presidents of the Science Club came along and started acting as if they ran crime families.
Salvatore is tall, broad, tanned, a lot of wavy gray hair, striking against the royal-blue shirt and pocket square he’s paired with a cream-colored summer suit and the white-rimmed black leather sneakers now accepted as formal wear.
“What if I don’t want to walk anywhere with you?”
“Come on, counselor,” he says. “You had to know we were going to meet sooner or later. It’s just me who picked the time and place.”
“You had no way of knowing I’d be here.”
“You’d be surprised at what I know.” He chuckles. “And what you don’t.”
If there’s a New York accent going on here, he’s either hiding it pretty well or has lost most of it along the way. Maybe just a splash of Brooklyn.
“Come on,” he says. “You’ll be back with your date before you know it.”
We start walking in the general direction of the barn area.
“Sorry to hear what happened to him,” Salvatore adds.
“I’ll bet.”
“You got me all wrong.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
We pass another ring, the riders inside looking like children.
“I got a granddaughter who rides,” he says. “Sport’s not cheap.”
I stop briefly and look up at him. He has the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, the color of night.
“This is how we’re gonna do it, Bobby? Really? Making small talk about horses?”
“Just trying to break the ice.”
“How about we have a conversation instead about all the dead people I’ve encountered who seem to have had some connection to you, all the way back to Hank Carson and your old friend Artie Shore?”
He grins. “What can I tell you? It’s a dangerous world out there.”
We arrive at an empty ring, the jumps already stacked against each other off to the side.
“Let me ask you something?” he says, his voice mild. “What’s it like, knowing you’re going to die?”
You’d be surprised at what I know.
I’m not sure what kind of reaction he expects. But I don’t give him one.
“My father loved boxing, that’s something I’m sure you don’t know,” I say. “And loved old fight films just as much. His favorite was Body and Soul, starring the guy he called the great New York actor John Garfield. Dad let me watch it with him when I was old enough. At the end, maybe you saw it yourself, Garfield doesn’t take a dive and guys like you threaten to kill him.”
He nods. “Guys like me.”
“And you know what the great New York actor John Garfield says? ‘Everybody dies.’”
Salvatore nods again. “But we all want the same thing, whether we got the cancer or not. We’re looking for it to be later rather than sooner. Am I right?”
I hear a voice in the distance, an announcer calling the names of riders and horses to assemble at the Grand Prix ring. I know it’s thoroughbred racing they call the sport of kings. But that’s what it feels like here. Kings and queens.
And me.
And Bobby Salvatore.
“You think you know me, but you really don’t,” he says. “You think you know where I figure in all this, but you don’t.”
“So educate me.”
He smiles. “My education, at I guess what you could call the school of hard knocks, came from a man named Sonny Blum.”
“You still work for Blum? I heard you’d moved on long ago.”
“I did. But before I did, he taught me well.”
“I’ll bet.”
“And one of the things he taught me was to understand where you fit in the grand scheme of things. That no matter how big you think you are, there’s always somebody bigger. Like Sonny, for example.”
I was about to thank him for his crash course in the mob but thought better of it. Our date was going so well.
“What do you really want to tell me?” I ask, even though there’s so much more I want to ask him.
In the next moment, he reaches over with a big hand and gently strokes my cheek. His touch makes my skin crawl. I want to recoil. Or give him a good slap. But I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. And the last thing I want to do at the Hampton Classic, with media everywhere and a cell phone in every hand, is make a scene.
He takes his hand away as quickly as he put it there, then leans down to whisper in my ear.
“It’s not me you’re after,” he says. “No matter how much you want it to be.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Jimmy
JIMMY AND BEN KALINSKY alternate days of driving Jane to Southampton and sitting with her in the hospital, three hours at a time, the chemo drugs this round seeming to knock her down more than they ever have before. It only serves to piss her off more than ever before, since she’s trying to keep working. Still in contact with the two young kids she’s hired for Jacobson’s trial, Estie and Zoe, who are doing their level law-student best to come up with alternative theories about who could have murdered the Carson families. The same game as always on their side of things. My guy didn’t do it but here’s somebody who could have.
These days Jane is feeling so punk she’s even starting to second-guess herself for moving the trial date up, complaining that she’s not going to be ready.
Something else to piss her off.
Jimmy Cunniff would rather wrestle a grizzly than spend a whole lot of time going back and forth on shit like this with cranky Jane.
But he sits there and holds her hand while the drugs are pumped into her. He doesn’t bring a book. He doesn’t make calls or listen to music. He is totally present for her.
“You need to be getting better,” he says.
“When does that happen, doctor?”
Then apologizes almost as quickly as she’s snapped at him.
“You know you don’t ever have to apologize to me.”
Another mistake.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
Jimmy smiles at her and squeezes her hand and says, “Did we get married and I wasn’t informed?”
That gets him a small smile in return. After that she closes her eyes and lets the drugs do their job without further comment. Neither one of them can believe she still has her hair. Minor miracle. But neither one of them talks much about that, for fear of jinxing things with the hair gods.
Jimmy wants to be working today, too. But she needs him here, and so here he is. He can’t find an address for the mysterious Anthony Licata other than the one on Elm Lane. He can’t find Nick Morelli and Dave Wolk. Or Eric Jacobson, who may or may not have tried to off his own mother, even though she won’t admit that or call the cops on him.
He’s got Danny Esposito, his new best friend, looking for any sign of an email presence, or social media presence, or phone records, for Eric Jacobson and Morelli and Wolk. But if they’re in contact with each other by phone, they’re using burners. And have otherwise gone dark online. At the same time, Esposito hasn’t gotten a single credible lead on the murders of Elise Parsons and her daughter, the ones who brought Esposito into Jimmy’s life in the first place.
Jimmy feels like a mouse on one of those spinning wheels. Or a rat in a maze. Either way. Through it all he keeps coming back to some basic questions:
Could Rob Jacobson have killed them all?
And if he didn’t, who did?
Or were Jimmy and Jane looking for one killer and not two?
Jane told him the last thing Bobby Salvatore had said to her at the horse show, playing off her line to him from that old movie.
“Everybody lies,” Salvatore had told her.
Nobody Jimmy had ever encountered could lie the way Rob Jacobson could. Guy lied like Jeter used to play shortstop.
The nurse finally comes in and unhooks Jane. She’s a lovely Jamaican woman named Christine, and Jimmy has already commissioned her as an angel.
“See you tomorrow, Miss Jane,” Christine says.
“If I’m late,” Jane says, sounding like herself, “start without me.”
But the spunk, that brief spark, is there and gone. Jimmy feels as if she’s a little more wobbly than usual as he walks her to the car. At one point she starts to sag and Jimmy steadies her by putting an arm around her. She lets him keep it there until she’s inside the good-as-new Jetta, Jimmy wishing it were as easy for the doctors to do bodywork on Jane.
When they’re heading east, Jimmy asks if she’ll be okay by herself when they get to the house; he’s got some work he needs to do.
“You’re worried I can’t take care of myself?”
“Maybe not today, Janie.”
At times Jimmy has thought they were doing a piss-poor job of taking care of each other. Or anybody. Including Ben Kalinsky, whom Jimmy knows Jane would never let go of.
“Okay,” she says quietly, and puts her head back and seems to fall asleep.
Jimmy shuts off his Bluetooth, not wanting to wake her if there’s an incoming call. Goddamn, she looks pale. And as tired as he’s ever seen her.
They’re stopped at the light in the middle of Bridgehampton when Jimmy hears his phone buzzing. He’s tossed it in the console. But can clearly see the screen.
Esposito
He’ll call him back after he drops Jane off. They’re almost at the house when she finally opens her eyes.
“You’re awake,” Jimmy says.
“Wasn’t sleeping,” she says. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“About how I can’t do this anymore.”
“The chemo? This round is almost over, kid.”
She shakes her head so slowly Jimmy imagines it being as heavy as a bowling ball.
“I mean the case,” she says.
“What are you saying?”
“That I’m done.”
SIXTY-SIX
BEFORE I GET OUT of the car Jimmy says, “If you quit, the terrorists win.”
“Watch me,” I say.
“You’re always telling me that it’s lawyering that makes you feel most alive.”
“Only now I feel as if it might kill me and everybody I care about. Starting with you.”
He starts to open his door. I tell him I don’t need help getting into the house.
“You’re just having a bad day,” Jimmy says.
“They’re all starting to feel like bad days. Ben could have died because of me. Again. You could have died on me. I could have died because of me.”
I come around to his side of the car. He’s got his window down. He tells me he’d never try to talk me out of something I really want to do.
“I’ll have your back until somebody does take me out,” he says. “But I’ll just leave you with this: I’ve always said that you should never make a big decision when you’re drunk or tired. I think we can add being on chemo to that list.”
I walk toward the front door, trying to will myself into looking stronger than I feel. Unlock the door. Disable the alarm. I never used to set it during the day. Now I do. Another reaction to all the bad days I’ve had recently. Jimmy has redone the system yet again, telling me that even the Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t get past it, much less a punk-ass bitch like Eric Jacobson.
When I see Rip the dog standing there waiting for me in the front hall, tail wagging, I can’t help but smile. But when I crouch down to scratch his ears, a wave of dizziness comes over me.
So I lie down on the floor, telling myself I’ll stay there until the feeling passes.
My dog lies down next to me.
“I’ll tell him I’m quitting in the morning,” I say to Rip the dog.
We both go to sleep right where we are. It’s dark out when I finally awaken and find out I slept through Jimmy’s call from Esposito, about the body.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Jimmy
THE SURFBOARD ABOUT THIRTY yards away from the body, the lifeguards long gone, it would have looked like some kind of early-evening surfing accident at Ditch Plains Beach in Montauk if not for the bullet somebody had put in the middle of Dave Wolk’s forehead, center cut.
“This the guy who tried to run you over?” Esposito says.
“One and the same.”
Esposito and Chief Larry Calabrese are sharing the scene, even though it’s technically Calabrese’s jurisdiction. So they’re playing nice, which is why Calabrese waited for Jimmy to arrive before allowing the body to be bagged.
“Big-ass storm blew through here about seven o’clock,” Esposito says. “Everybody on the beach cleared out. A couple of kids in search of big-ass waves found him, freaked, called 911.”
“This was an execution,” Jimmy says.
He thinks about the way his old partner, Mickey Dunne, took one to the forehead in the Bronx, the murder still unsolved, Jimmy still certain Mickey had died at the hands of Joe Champi, Jacobson’s former fixer, the one Jane took out.
How many people connected to this thing are going to die?
Esposito walks Jimmy away as the ME’s people bag the body.
“I gotta ask, just on account of you having history with this guy.”
“I’ve been with Jane all day.” Jimmy doesn’t tell him where or why. “You can ask her. I’d just dropped her off at her house when I got your call.”
“Didn’t think this was your style.”
Jimmy looks out at the water. The waves are still huge.
“Bullet?” Jimmy asks.
Esposito shakes his head. “In the front door, out the back, nowhere to be found. Maybe the ocean swallowed it. No shell casing, either. Small caliber from the looks of the entry wound.”
“You think he was surfing before he got shot?”
Esposito gives a who-knows shake to his head. “Why not? Maybe the surfer dude felt as if he had the best waves out here all to himself. But somebody must have followed him and waited for him to come out of the water, and then got it done.”
Jimmy walks back to where the body was.
“Just the two kids out here after the fact?”
“Still here,” Esposito says, and points to the two of them, sitting on a piece of driftwood, the boy’s arm around the girl.
High school kids. Maybe college. Jimmy has a harder and harder time telling the difference. Esposito tells him that the boy’s name is Jared Willson. The girl is Missy Gomes. Both from Montauk.
Jimmy goes over and introduces himself. They look up at him, seeing him but not seeing him, as if still in a state of mild shock.
“I’m with the cops.”
Technically true.
“All we wanted to do was come look at the waves,” Missy says.
She looks as if she’s been crying and might start up again if Jimmy says the wrong thing.
“Is there anything you can remember, other than what you’ve told the cops already, that might help us figure out who did this?”
They look at each other. “We called 911 right away!” Jared says.
Like he’d earned them a merit badge.
“Nobody else around when you parked your car?”
They look at each other, shake their heads, no.
“Wait,” Missy says. “There was one other thing we maybe forgot to mention, we were both so creeped out when they were asking us questions. There was one other car, but it wasn’t in the lot up top. Leaving as we were coming in.”
“You happen to notice what kind of car?”
They both shake their heads again.
“Just that it looked like it had been in some kind of accident,” Jared Willson says.
Jimmy Cunniff’s voice is low enough that he wonders how they can hear it over the sound of the water.
“Did you by any chance get a look at the driver?”
“It was a woman,” the boy says.
SIXTY-EIGHT
I NO LONGER WANT to represent Rob Jacobson. I have to tell him to his face. It’s the right thing to do. So a little before eight o’clock I walk the couple of miles from my house to his rental. I spent hours last night sleeping on the floor next to Rip the dog, so the walk does my stiff back and neck good.
“Are you alone?” I ask Jacobson when he opens his door.
“Not exactly,” he says.
Anticipating his reaction to my news, I feel myself smiling.
“But I thought you wanted to pledge your heart to me.”
