12 months to live, p.16
12 Months to Live, page 16
“Because I needed Brigid to stop talking.”
“Right after the part where you had just called her a liar,” I say.
“Pretty convincing with that, too, if I do say so myself.”
He jerks his chin at the cart carrying what looks like cranberry juice in a plastic cup, along with a pitcher of ice water. He can’t reach it because he’s attached to a heart monitor he’s just informed me he doesn’t need.
“Would you mind pushing the cart a little closer? I’m thirsty.”
“I’m not your nurse. Or your waitress.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like I’m joking, Rob? You’re the one who continues to act as if being on trial for your goddamn life, the one you used to have, anyway, is some kind of joke.”
“That’s because you’re going to make those charges go away.”
“Am I?”
He actually winks at me. “Just keep being your best self.”
“Sure. Go with that.”
“So you know. Brigid was telling the truth.” He smiles. “Being a good friend to the end.”
He gives me a quick thumbs-up.
“Still lawyer-client privilege, right?”
“To the end.”
“Just checking.”
“Cut the shit,” I say, “and tell me why you needed her to stop talking.”
“Because I couldn’t have her testify, under oath, that we were having an affair.”
I’d been right. And about that, my sister had been lying all along.
Just not under oath.
At least not yet.
“How long?”
“The affair?”
“No, Rob, your membership at Maidstone. Of course the affair.”
“How far back do you want to go?”
He’s actually enjoying this.
Even here, even now.
I want to get out of my chair and give him a good smack. Not the first time I’ve had the urge. Surprised in the moment that my own heart rate isn’t making his monitor jump.
When I have my breathing back under control, I say, “Whatever the two of you were doing that night, she was still providing you with an alibi.”
“I know that. But I couldn’t let her testify that I was doing her.”
Now I am out of my chair before I even realize it, standing over him, nearly knocking down the little drink tray, my face close to his. And whatever he sees on my face in the moment, he tries to move as far as he can to the other side of the bed.
But I grab his free arm to hold him in place.
“You want to be a pig,” I say quietly, “be one after I leave. And don’t ever be one again when you’re discussing my sister. Are we clear?”
“Yes. Now let go of me.”
I let go of his arm and sit back down.
“Now tell me why you couldn’t have her admit to the affair.”
“Because of the prenup.”
Sixty-Two
Jimmy
THE PUNCH, EVEN THROWN with his left hand, sends another hot current of pain all the way to his wounded shoulder.
But the punch connects, rocking the guy back, and the one Jimmy follows it with, another beauty, more of a short uppercut, causes a grunt of pain and puts the guy on his back now.
Just not for long.
He gets himself up, shaking his head. His bell rung now. They’re both up. Still nobody else around at this end of Bay Street, for the feature bout of the night.
“Who are you?” Jimmy yells.
The guy doesn’t answer. He’s bigger than Jimmy, by about a head, maybe a little more. Big enough to be Champi, if it’s him—Jimmy has seen pictures of Champi from the old days, towering above other cops.
Jimmy’s right arm is hanging at his side, useless, still hurting like a bastard.
The guy, breathing hard, says, “You had this beating coming for a long time.”
Then he’s stepping in behind what turns out to be a wild right hand. No sucker punch this time. Jimmy snaps his head back and steps inside the guy’s right hand and hits him with another left, this time to the body, like he’s trying to drive it all the way through him.
It doubles the guy over.
If it is Champi, Jimmy thinks, why the hell doesn’t he just shoot me if there’s nobody around?
As he tries to come back at Jimmy again, Jimmy gives himself enough room, the slide step he learned in the Times Square club, moving away enough to throw another uppercut, this one connecting with the guy’s chin.
It doesn’t put him down but might as well have. Jimmy knows the look: the guy is done, his arms hanging now, head down.
Jimmy is tired and hurting and pissed off about being jumped this way. He’s not an old cop now, he’s an old fighter, and he wants to finish this guy, whoever he is, put him down, and out.
Jimmy steps in and pulls the mask off.
Not Joe Champi.
Sixty-Three
“THIS WAS ALL ABOUT a prenup? You have got to be kidding me.”
Jacobson nods, as if somehow it’s the most obvious thing in the world to him, as natural as screwing around on his wife in the first place.
“It’s why I didn’t want Brigid to testify. She thinks she’s helping me. She thinks she’s doing the right thing. For her, maybe. Not for me.”
I just let him go. As always, he loves the sound of his own voice.
“If Claire can prove infidelity, it voids the prenup. And then the laws of the good old state of New York kick in. And you know what that means? Those laws kick me right in the balls.”
“She gets half.”
He snorts. “As she folds that prenup into a paper airplane.”
“Rob. Help me out here. How the fuck do you plan on using the half that you’ll get to keep when you’re spending the rest of your life as a guest of the goddamn state?”
He smiles.
“Because I’ve got you, Jane,” he says. “Because maybe now you’ll start believing me when I tell you that Claire is the one with the motive here, if she can pin this on me. She wants me in prison. It’s not enough for her to get the money. She wants it all.”
I look at the heart monitor for some reason and wonder idly how he’d do with a lie detector.
“You want to know the truth?”
“It would be a nice change of pace, you have to admit.”
“I really always have believed she’s behind this.”
I say, “You’ve made that clear on more than one occasion.”
“Think about it. You’ve said it yourself, even before you knew about the prenup. She gets rid of me, she replaces me with my pal Gus. Gus basically gets my business. Like a merger and goddamn acquisition. They win. I lose.”
Then he says, “She called a little while ago, by the way. Claire.”
“To check in on you?”
“To tell me she’s leaving.”
“And going where?”
“The way she described it, it’s someplace where this trial can’t find her.”
He waggles a finger at me, and smiles.
“But I don’t need her.”
“Because you have me.”
“Bingo.”
I lean back in my chair now, put my head back, close my eyes. Wondering just how quickly I can get to Jimmy Cunniff’s bar.
“Everything today was about a prenup,” I say, really talking to myself.
“I couldn’t let Brigid say what she was about to say.”
I know he’s still going to be in that bed when I open my eyes back up.
Unfortunately he is.
“There’s a line I hear all the time in sports. When they say it’s not about the money, it’s always about the money. I don’t care how much my wife hates me,” he says. “She’s not walking off into the sunset with mine.”
“Just curious again, Rob. What do you think is going to happen when the trial resumes and Brigid is back on the stand?”
Biggest smile yet. All those amazing white teeth. His closer smile.
“Then she really is going to lie for me,” Rob Jacobson says. “Like a champion.”
“And you know this…how?”
“I spoke to her a little while ago. She’s seeing the whole picture a lot better now.”
“Really. And what picture is that?”
“There’s an experimental treatment for her type of cancer at this cutting-edge clinic in Switzerland. There’s no way she and her husband can afford it. But I can.”
I stare at him, wondering all over again what my sister possibly could have seen in him, all the way back to college. What she still sees in him. And why she is protecting him, even now.
“You’re bribing her with her cancer?”
“That’s your interpretation. Mine is that I am offering much-needed, and potentially lifesaving, financial support to a dear friend.”
“By buying her silence.”
“I should have thought of this before she ever sat down in that chair and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but,” he says. “She gets something, I get something. You learn that in business. Always leave something on the table, so you don’t look like a complete pig after the deal is done.”
“But that’s exactly what you are. And who you are.”
He shrugs. “I am who I am.”
“One last question, at least for now. What haven’t you lied about to me?”
“Killing those people. That’s always been the truth. And the truth is supposed to set you free, right?”
“The truth might not be able to set you free, Rob. But I can.”
I stand up. My hand is on the doorknob when I hear him laugh from the bed.
“You know what you and I have, Jane? A marriage even worse than my real one.”
“How do you figure?”
“Can’t live with you, can’t kill you.”
I turn to look at him. He’s not smiling now.
“Yet,” he says.
Sixty-Four
Jimmy
IT’S A KID, the area around his right eye starting to color, blood coming out of his nose. He can’t be much more than a teenager. But then everybody is starting to look younger and younger to Jimmy Cunniff.
He is sitting on the street now, beaten. Jimmy sits down across from him. When the kid’s head starts to drop, chin to chest, Jimmy grabs his long blond hair and jerks it back up.
“I need a name.”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
“The next punch breaks your nose,” Jimmy says.
“Do it,” the kid says. “Do. It.”
Then he says, “Pat Palmer.”
A car rolls past them without stopping, heading back toward Main Street. Jimmy can feel his phone buzzing in his pocket. Jane, probably.
“I loved her!” the kid says.
“Loved who?”
“Laurel Gates,” Palmer says.
“She was your girlfriend.”
“She was my girlfriend.”
He looks as if he might cry.
Jimmy looks down at his left hand, sees it already starting to swell. The one he used to break all the time when he was still fighting. The one that threw the best punches he ever threw but ended up being the reason he quit.
“So you decided to come after one of the people trying to save the guy you think killed her and her whole family.”
“Don’t think,” Palmer says. “Know. The way everybody around here except you and the lawyer bitch knows. He did it, and now you and the lawyer have whored yourselves out trying to prove that he didn’t.”
Nothing to say to that. Nothing that is going to change his mind, now or ever.
Palmer leans forward a little. Jimmy is ready if he tries to throw another punch. But he doesn’t.
“He didn’t just kill her. Way before that, he’d already raped her. You didn’t know that, did you, smart guy?”
Jimmy reaches over and backhands him across the face.
“What the hell was that for?” Palmer says.
“For not being the guy I was hoping you’d be,” Jimmy says, before standing up and then helping the kid to his feet.
“Why didn’t Laurel tell anybody what he did to her?”
“Because Laurel told me he made them all sign that piece of paper,” Palmer says, “and then he paid them off.”
Sixty-Five
Jimmy
JIMMY HAS CALLED AHEAD and gotten a heads-up on when they’re going to process Rob Jacobson out of the hospital. It’s earlier than Jimmy thought it would be. Maybe the asshat forgot to pay for late checkout like he would at a Ritz.
Yeah, Jimmy thinks, the rich are different from you and me.
It always makes him want to laugh, just because that’s the only part of the line everybody remembers from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
Jimmy, though, can quote the rest of it about the rich, how they possess and enjoy early. How they are soft where we are hard, and cynical where the rest of us are trustful.
Jacobson is still in his bed and surprised when Jimmy walks into the room.
“What do you want?” he says.
Jimmy doesn’t answer him, just grabs the chair next to the bed, turns it around, tips it back, and leans it underneath the doorknob. He’s only doing this for show. He knows the chair bracing the door won’t keep the cop outside from getting inside if he wants to, not for ten seconds.
But Jimmy knows that Jacobson, the rich guy, is soft. And he wants to remind him Jimmy Cunniff isn’t.
Now Jimmy sits down on the bed. Jacobson is already fumbling for the Call button. Jimmy gets his hand on it first and puts it out of reach.
“Hey,” Jacobson says. “Hey.” Then he says, “I could yell, you know.”
Jimmy leans closer to him, smiling. “Yeah. But you won’t.”
Now Jacobson gives a little roll to his shoulders, straightens a little in the bed, like he thinks he can still take control of the meeting. Like he’s still in charge. Something in this moment they both know is bullshit.
“What the hell do you want? First your boss shows up here to jam me up. Now you. I’m starting to think it’s safer in prison.”
“Shut up and listen,” Jimmy says, and Jacobson does while Jimmy tells him about Pat Palmer jumping him and what he told Jimmy after he did, about Laurel Gates and the rest of it. “Did you rape that girl like he said?” Jimmy says when he finishes.
“He’s lying.”
Jimmy smiles at him again. What he thinks of as his best cop smile. Mickey Dunne always said it reminded him more of one of those fright masks people wear on Halloween.
“Amazing, when you think of it, everybody lying except you,” Jimmy says to him now. “And you the only one locked up for a triple homicide.”
“I keep trying to tell you. I didn’t do the Gates family, even though somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look like I did.”
“Tell it to Jane. She’s more trusting than me, even with a dirtbag like you.”
This time when he smiles at Jacobson he reaches over and grabs a fistful of his hospital gown, hard enough to snap Jacobson’s head back.
“Did you…rape that girl?”
Jimmy leans forward so that their faces are very close now.
“Did you?”
“For the last time…no!” Jacobson says. “Now let me go.”
Jimmy does. Reluctantly. He feels the urge to get in a couple of punches on him the way he did with the kid.
“Why would the kid lie?”
Jacobson says, “Ask him.”
Jimmy knows that Jane probably won’t be happy when she finds out he came here without telling her, or before telling her about the Palmer kid. But even she has to know by now that Jimmy isn’t much for chain of command.
Even with her.
“I think the one lying is you. Not the kid. There’s a stink that comes off liars.” Jimmy acts as if he’s sniffing the air. “You just can’t smell it because it’s coming off you.”
“Think whatever the hell you want about me,” Jacobson says. “And then you explain it to Jane when I fire both of your asses.”
“You’re not going to do that. Especially not this deep into the game.”
“You think Jane is my only shot to beat this thing?”
“Maybe your only shot.”
Jimmy leans close again and enjoys watching the rich boy flinch.
“But she can’t save your sorry ass if you continue to keep shit from her,” Jimmy says. “And from me.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, at least not yet today.”
Jimmy stands now, walks over to the door, grabs the chair, brings it back to the bed.
“One last question, for now. Did you pay them to keep them quiet?”
“Pay who?”
“The Gateses.”
“Yes,” Jacobson says.
Sixty-Six
MY SISTER ISN’T RETURNING my calls the morning after I’ve met with my son-of-a-bitch client in the hospital.
It’s the way I think of him now, the words all running together, nothing I can do to stop them:
Mysonofabitchclient.
I know it’s who he is and all he ever will be, whether he ends up getting found guilty or I can get him acquitted, whether he ends up a guest of the state of New York forever or eventually walks out of the Suffolk County Court a free man.
It’s my sister I want to talk to this morning. Only she won’t return my calls, or texts. There are several possible reasons for this, I’m aware. She’s turned off her phone. Or she’s at a doctor’s appointment. Or she’s at the gym. It’s a fact that her body is more toned now than it ever was, even if she’s lost as much weight as she has.
And there is, of course, one other possible reason why she’s not returning my calls: she has the phone on, sees who keeps calling, and is simply ignoring me.
She’s always graded high on that, too, when she’s in the mood. Or in a mood.
But we really do need to talk, whether she’s in the mood for that or not. She and Rob Jacobson have already provided me with enough surprises in the past few days. I can’t afford to have any more once I get her back in the court.
