Hard to kill, p.16
Hard to Kill, page 16
He shrugs, turns his hands palms-up. His eyes are puffy, either with sleep or from drinking, because I know for a fact he’s been hitting the bottle hard.
“If you can’t be with the one you love…”
“Love everybody you can get to stay still long enough?” I’m already moving past him as I add, “May I come in?”
I don’t want to know who he’s sleeping with in the upstairs bedroom and don’t much care.
He shows me out to the back patio. There’s a coffee mug on the table. He asks if I’d like a cup.
“I won’t be staying that long,” I say, “but we need to have this conversation in person.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.”
We take seats across from each other at the table. Over the past several months, I have spent more hours in this man’s presence, in court and in jail and in this house and in the much bigger house he still owns in Sagaponack, than I care to count.
“You need to find a new lawyer,” I say.
His eyes don’t look nearly as sleepy now. But he collects himself quickly, the way he did the day I gave him a good slap.
“I’m a little too tired and a little too hungover for jokes,” he says, and sips some coffee, trying to act casual.
“It’s no joke. I’m quitting. For good this time.”
He stares at me, eyes even bigger and more alert than before.
“You’re serious.”
Jacobson is shaking his head now, and not just to get rid of the cobwebs.
“I understand this is probably a shock,” I say. “You can go back to Howie the Horse.”
“Howie’s not a horse. He’s a jockey.”
“Or I can make some recommendations.”
“You’ll be wasting your time. I don’t want another lawyer. I want you.”
“I hear you,” I say. “I thought that I was still Bring It On Jane. But I’m not. And I can’t.” I sigh. “So I’m out.”
He’s still shaking his head. “No,” he says. “No… no… no.”
“It’s not just one thing,” I continue, knowing I’m giving him more information than he needs, or really deserves. “It’s my treatments and the trial and putting people I care about in danger.”
He reaches underneath the print edition of the Wall Street Journal next to his coffee mug and comes up with a thin silver flask. He pours some of whatever’s in it into the mug. Takes a big gulp now.
“This is because of what I told you at lunch about falling in love with you, isn’t it? You’re just throwing it back in my face.”
“What? No, Rob. It might shock you, but this isn’t about you. It’s about me. I’ve always told my clients that I’d be willing to fight to the death for them. Well, not anymore.”
He snaps then, just like that, pounding his hand down on the table, veins popping in his neck, spilling some of his coffee. Shouting. “It will make me look guilty if you quit!”
“That’s not true,” I say quietly, trying to dial things down. “And if you want to tell people that you fired me, I’ll back your story.”
“Nobody will believe me,” he says.
“You’re the one always telling me that you could sell an oil slick if you had to.”
He leans across the table now, trying to get himself under control. Hands clasped in front of him. He even manages a thin smile.
Suddenly he’s negotiating with me. It seems to help him get his bearings.
“You want more money?” he says. “Done.”
“Rob,” I say. “It’s not about money.” Now I’m the one shaking my head, eyes closed. “You’re not listening to me. This is about my life, not yours.”
“And you just now arrived at that conclusion?”
He pounds the table again, less forcefully than before.
Voice rising again.
“This isn’t fair!”
Like he’s a little boy not getting his way.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am.”
“No,” he says, “you’re not.”
We stare at each other, clearly having reached an impasse. But something has changed in his eyes. A look appears in them that I’ve seen before, one that’s made me think, and more than once, that he could have done it. A weird light in them, the clearing before the storm.
I need to end this.
“I’ve made up my mind.”
“Unmake it.”
“You’re making this harder than it needs to be.”
He barks out an unpleasant-sounding laugh. “Wait. I’m the one making things harder than they need to be?”
I stand up. “I’ll call you later and explain the process to you, with the judge and the court and all that.”
But as I come around the table, he’s standing, too, and grabbing me by the arm.
I look at him, then down at his hand before calmly removing it.
“Don’t,” I say quietly.
He’s still between me and the patio doors. The odd light still in his eyes somehow darkening the color of his pupils.
“Nobody walks away from me,” he says before finally getting out of my way.
SIXTY-NINE
Jimmy
JIMMY NEEDS INFORMATION, AND in a hurry, about Anthony Licata, ex-partner to Joe Champi. Letting the game come to him has never been his strength so he goes to the city to work his friends in the department and their friends.
He can now connect Licata, wherever the hell he is, to the late Dave Wolk. Whose lady friend might have turned her gun on him. Or she was really Licata’s lady friend, the one who slapped Jimmy that night when they had him tied up at his house.
Everything connected.
But how?
Jimmy meets Detective Craig Jackson and Dick Kelley, a retired detective older than both of them, at Dorrian’s Red Hand. The Second Avenue bar became famous back in the 1980s when a kid named Robert Chambers left with a girl named Jennifer Levin, who ended up dead a couple of hours later in Central Park. Dick Kelley was one of the cops who caught the case of the Preppy Killer, as Chambers quickly became known. Craig Jackson said it was Kelley who picked the East Side bar, still popular with kids, as tonight’s meeting point. Maybe Dorrian’s reminded him of his glory days.
A cop’s cop, everybody always said about Detective Dick Kelley. He was tall, thin, completely bald, one of those guys who’d probably looked old when he was young.
Kelley orders a tequila. So does Craig Jackson. Jimmy knows from his own bar that more people than ever are drinking tequila. And knows why. Calories for a jigger of tequila are about the same as a light beer, low sugar, no carbohydrates. Drinkers can make a lifestyle choice and still look cool. Win, win. And still get just as shit-faced in the end.
Jimmy orders a nonalcoholic beer. He doesn’t want to make the hundred-mile drive home any harder.
They make small talk about Chambers, who pled guilty to manslaughter, served fifteen years, then went back in for an even longer bit on drug trafficking, the moron.
“Tell me about Anthony Licata,” Jimmy says finally.
“You know that he and Champi finally partnered up over there on your dark side, right?” Kelley says. “Turned themselves into freaking legends, just not in a good way. A problem got in your way, they removed it, for a price.”
Kelley drinks some tequila. He says he walked here from his apartment on 81st and Second.
“Licata and Champi figured out something even before they left the cops and became what you would call entrepreneurial,” he continues. “Rich guys in the big city like having bad guys as body men, or fixers, or muscle, or whatever. Gives them that dark-side thrill. No one’s sure who started it, but before long they were together. Somehow Champi got with your client’s old man before the old man shot up his house that day. With him gone, it was like the kid inherited him.”
“When Champi and Licata were both still with the department?” Jimmy asks.
“Just Champi,” Kelley says. “Paul Harrington, commander of the detectives at the 24th, had already booted Licata’s ass out of the precinct and out of the department by then.”
“Did the kid really kill his father and the girl?”
“It looked like a murder-suicide, the story had a boldface name, the whole thing was instant tabloid gold. Lieutenant Harrington ran point because the case was so high-profile, and he was as good as it gets. He could never find anything to make them doubt the kid’s version of how it went down.”
Champi put in his papers not long after that, according to Dick Kelley. Then Champi and Licata just kept expanding their client list, and their grift, managing to stay a step ahead of their old friends in the NYPD. Team owners, ballplayers trying to stay off Weinstein Island, when that first became a thing. A former network president who got a teenager pregnant. Construction guys. Restaurant guys and real estate guys. Publishing big shots like Rob Jacobson’s father.
“All under the radar, I’m assuming,” Jimmy says.
Kelley nods. “They just kept finding more high rollers who loved feeling like they were in a Scorcese movie. They were still closing cases. Just in a different way from when they’d been carrying a badge.”
“And neither one of them ever got made for any of it?” Jimmy asks.
“Want to know the truth?” Dick Kelley says. “It took your lawyer lady to take Joe Champi down, probably while Licata just kept laughing his way all the way to some Caymans bank account. Probably didn’t even stop long enough to toss dirt on his partner’s coffin. Because his own gravy train just kept rolling along.”
“So whatever Champi was into, Licata was into?” Jimmy asks.
“We called them brothers from other mothers,” Kelley says. “They even looked a little bit alike, the bastards. I saw them one time at a hockey game, both in their Rangers hats. Almost looked like twins.”
Jimmy’s ribs are starting to ache. He thinks about just one Scotch for medicinal purposes but lets the thought pass right through him. The LIE was no place for even a slight buzz.
“We always heard that there was a third partner,” Kelley adds, “but nobody could ever nail that down.”
“Any other sugar daddies you might have forgotten to mention?” Jimmy asks him.
“Didn’t forget,” Kelley says. “Just been saving the best for last. Turns out I got a call right before I showed up here, from an old friend of mine from the 20th, which used to be my shop. He gave up a name I’d never heard but thought might ring a bell with you.”
Jimmy waits.
Kelley is still smiling, like he’s about to draw to an inside straight.
“You ever hear of an old Yalie hedge-fund guy named Thomas McKenzie?”
SEVENTY
I DECIDE TO GET away for the weekend.
Alone.
It means leaving Rip the dog with Dr. Ben and heading for the city, and my apartment on Christopher Street, for the first time in months.
Despite Rob Jacobson’s objections, on Monday I’m going to formally petition Judge Kane to allow me to step away from my client and the case.
I’m aware that it’s far from a sure thing that the request will be granted, so soon after she granted my motion to have the trial date moved up.
I’ll worry about that on Monday and try to turn off my brain on what Jimmy has told me about Anthony Licata and Joe Champi, and how Licata might have been even better at hiding in plain sight than Champi.
“For the next couple of days,” I tell Jimmy, “I’m going to see if I remember how to show a girl—this one—a good time.”
I am treating my trip to the city like a well-earned vacation, the accommodations being an apartment I love, in a neighborhood I love, in a city I still love, even though I no longer spend enough time there.
I drive in on Friday morning, park the car at my old garage up the block, let myself into the apartment, let in some fresh air.
Then I turn off my phone and take the subway uptown to 50th and Eighth, the stop next to the Winter Garden Theater, make my way to Central Park from there. I wander the park aimlessly and happily after that, trying not to get clipped by runaway bicycles. When I get hungry at lunchtime, I walk up to Gray’s Papaya on 72nd and Broadway, thrilled that it’s still there, and order what is still one of the best hot dogs in town.
Maybe the entire planet.
Ralph Nader, that old priss, once called hot dogs America’s most dangerous missile.
What’s one more going to do, kill me?
I’ve always loved walking the city, from the time I was renting my first elevator-car of an apartment in Murray Hill, its one redeeming characteristic being a view out the living room window of the Empire State Building. That was back when I thought, we all thought, we hit the big city not just walking but running: thinking we were all going to live forever, at least until the planes hit our buildings and everything changed.
I have no interest in shopping Columbus Avenue, but then I never really did. So now I go over to the American Museum of Natural History and spend an hour there. Then over to Lincoln Center to stand in front of the fountains, then back over to the park and down to 59th Street before I start to fade, at long last.
When I’ve taken the subway back downtown to the apartment, I turn on my phone and see several missed calls from Rob Jacobson and some all-caps texts telling me to call him. But no messages from Jimmy, which means no fires we need to put out, at least not today.
I take a shower, pour myself a small white wine, put on a nice dress, one that doesn’t hang quite right because of lost weight but I can still carry it off, and take a cab to Sistina, one of my favorite Italian restaurants, in the space it moved into on 81st several years ago.
Henry, the maître d’, remembers me, and asks if I’m waiting for someone.
“Mr. Right.”
“Still?” he says, formally kissing my hand.
We both laugh before I tell him I’ll be happily dining alone.
I decide to enjoy the beautiful evening and walk off the pasta primavera before heading home. No one waiting for me. No one knowing exactly where I am. I feel like I can breathe again. Like the city has taken me back in, told me all is forgiven.
Then I do have one more destination, as much as I hate to admit that to myself.
I make my way over to Third Avenue, the block where the Red Blazer, one of the places where my father had tended bar, once stood.
Right across the street from Elian, the second restaurant my ex-husband had recently opened. I wasn’t sure how he could afford that. Maybe he’d found the money for it under his bed.
I know he’s there, because they told me so when I first called Café Martin.
Ten o’clock by now, the East Side night just beginning to rise up and even roar.
There I am, standing across the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him through the window the way I used to stand across the street from Café Martin after we broke up.
I spent the whole day feeling as if I’d been drawn back into the past, my past, and now here I am.
Not even knowing why I’m here.
Ashamed that I am.
But here.
Stay or go?
If I make my way across the street and walk into Elian, what will I say to Martin when he sees me? What he said to me after his dinner at Allen Reese’s, that I just happen to be in the neighborhood?
Or maybe this: “Buy a girl a drink, for old time’s sake?”
Then what?
Play it all the way out, Jane.
Then what?
What do you want to happen with him, as much as you tell yourself you love Ben Kalinsky? And as much as Martin Elian hurt you.
I came to the city to be alone.
Only I ended up here.
Only I could manage to screw up a perfect day with an ending like this.
“Good job, Jane, no shit,” I say out loud, feeling once more like a ridiculous teenager.
“What did you say, ma’am?”
A young woman whose dress is too tight and too small, probably about to take the big town by storm, has stopped on the sidewalk.
Long enough to ma’am me.
“Just talking to myself,” I say.
“Cute dress,” she says, and then swings her impossibly tight butt up Third Avenue.
I’m about to come to my senses and put myself in a cab when a black SUV pulls up in front of Elian.
Less than a minute later, my ex-husband comes walking out of his restaurant, accompanied by a dead man.
SEVENTY-ONE
ON MONDAY MORNING JIMMY is driving me to the courthouse in Mineola for my meeting with Judge Kane. I’ve told him he doesn’t have to do it, that I’m perfectly capable of making the trip on my own. He won’t hear of it, says he looked it up in the wingman’s manual, and it’s one of his responsibilities, no getting around it.
We’re talking, not for the first time since I got back from the city, about what I saw in front of my ex-husband’s restaurant on Friday night.
“I can understand why you thought you were seeing dead people when you saw a guy who has to be Licata,” Jimmy says. “Mickey Dunne used to say there were look-a-likes and reminds-me-ofs. From the pictures I’ve seen of Licata and Champi, they fall into the second category. Same height, same build, same coloring. Same slouch. Even their Rangers caps. If I didn’t know better, I swear I might think the two tough guys were a couple. Like one of those old couples where they start looking like each other the longer they stay together.”
“It wasn’t long ago that somebody wanted us to think Champi was texting from the other side,” I tell Jimmy. “For a second I thought he’d made his way all the way back to the Upper East Side.”
I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. “I’d ask my ex about it, but he won’t return my calls or my texts.”
“Isn’t that the one about the more things change the more they stay the same?”
“Oui.”
“Dick Kelley mentioned that the tag team of Licata and Champi did some work for restaurant owners along the way,” Jimmy says. “So what kinds of problems could old Marty have had that might have brought Licata and Champi into his life?”
