12 months to live, p.20
12 Months to Live, page 20
“Not as hard as it’s been on Rob, of course.”
His first name. Nice touch. As if she’s actually on his side. And mine.
“Of course.”
“At least the children and I are able to live our normal lives,” she says.
“I think any husband or wife in this room can empathize with that.”
I ask her if she ever heard her husband express any animosity toward Mitch Gates.
“Never. I know what Gus Hennessy has testified to, that argument he says he heard on the beach. But Rob still disputes that the argument ever occurred. The truth is, I never heard him mention Mr. Gates, or his family. They were in their world, we were in ours.”
And what rarefied air it is.
Yours, Claire.
Not theirs.
“But then,” I continue, “those two worlds collided, at least in the view of the state, on the night of the murders, correct?”
“Obviously, yes,” she says.
I look at her admiringly, the role she’s playing of supportive and caring wife. She really does look sensational. The whole package. Clothes. Hair. Makeup. Jewelry. Her entire regal bearing.
“Now, you told police that you weren’t aware what time your husband came home the night of the murders. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“When originally interviewed, you told the police that you’d been at a meeting of the East Hampton Historical Society.”
“I’m a board member,” she says.
“And you further informed the police that when you returned home, your husband was still out.”
“Yes.”
I am leaning against my table, my tone relaxed and conversational. Jimmy has said in those moments I’m trying to sound like the solicitous solicitor. Almost as if Claire Jacobson and I are gal pals.
“You told police that when you did arrive back home, straight from the meeting, you took a sleeping pill and were then, in your words, ‘completely zonked.’ Correct?”
I’m smiling again. Good neighbor Jane.
“I’m not proud of the fact that I occasionally need to medicate to get a good night’s sleep,” she says. Then adds, “Now more than ever.”
“Completely understood.”
I pause just slightly. “I don’t need to remind you, do I, that you’re still under oath?” I ask.
“Of course not.”
“But again, you told police that you came straight home from the Historical Society meeting, which ended at eleven o’clock, according to the minutes.”
I see a little something in the cat eyes. Not fear, exactly. Wariness. I’d asked her downstairs how quickly she could produce the prenup she’d signed with her husband. She’d said no way in hell.
But I didn’t need it.
At least not in the way she thought, the language in it about how a murder conviction would cause the “moral turpitude” clause to kick in.
And enable her to walk away with everything.
“Yes,” she says. “I came straight home.”
“But you didn’t come straight home, did you, Mrs. Jacobson?” I ask.
Now she pauses.
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
She clears her throat. As if she’s the one who needs a good drink of water.
Shifts just slightly in her seat.
“Isn’t it true, Mrs. Jacobson, that your husband might very well have been asleep in the guest room in which he’s been sleeping for some time when you arrived home that night, and before you completely zonked out?”
She stares at me now, knowing I have walked her into a trap. And what might be a perjury trap depending on what she says next.
But before she can answer, I say, “Isn’t it true, Mrs. Jacobson, that you neglected to mention to police that while you did return home after the Historical Society meeting that night, you made a side trip to Montauk, and Gurney’s Inn, one of the deluxe oceanfront suites, to meet Gus Hennessy?”
Best hotel in the Hamptons. By a lot. Jimmy checked. Those suites have spectacular views of the Atlantic.
“How dare you!” she says.
She turns to Judge Prentice. But he’s not going to save her.
“Do I even have to dignify an insulting question like that?”
“I’m afraid you do,” he says.
She turns to stare at me again. Then at her husband. Then back at me.
“At this time,” Claire Jacobson says, “I’d like to invoke my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer.”
Well, I think, I didn’t see that coming.
“But Mrs. Jacobson, why would you need to protect yourself from self-incrimination on something that is hardly a crime?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” Rob Jacobson says from behind me. “Why don’t you tell everybody what you’re afraid of?”
“Order in the court!” Judge Jackson Prentice shouts.
But that ship has sailed.
Eighty
Jimmy
IT VARIES FROM DAY to day what time the judge has them break for lunch in Riverhead. So Jimmy doesn’t know if Jane has already seen the text he sent her before he started to head back east.
But he sent it anyway: call when u can.
She’ll know it’s important. He never wastes her time the way she never wastes his. Part of their deal, from the beginning.
What Jimmy Cunniff also doesn’t know yet is just how important it is that their client in Riverhead, on trial for killing three people, has a connection to three other people who were previously murdered up-island.
It’s not a recent connection between Rob Jacobson and Lily Biondi Carson; it’s one from at least twenty-five years ago. But they’re still connected, and not just because they had their picture taken at the beach one day a long time ago but because Jacobson took her to the prom at Dalton when he was a senior and Lily Biondi was a sophomore.
What are the odds?
Jimmy keeps wondering what the odds are on that, and on Jacobson walking right out of one case and into another this way. What he doesn’t know, and what he wants to talk out with Jane because he can’t do that with Mickey Dunne, is what it all might mean.
If it means anything.
For some reason Mickey hid the picture of Rob Jacobson from around the time in his life when his father shot his girlfriend and himself, on the day when Joe Champi magically appeared at the Jacobsons’ town house. And established that connection.
Jimmy is thinking about all of this, head spinning, as he makes his way up the FDR and over the RFK Bridge, on his way to the Long Island Expressway, when he gets the call about the East Hampton cops finding the Palmer kid’s Subaru in Montauk, at the bottom of the Shadmoor cliffs.
Eighty-One
Jimmy
THE CLIFFS IN SHADMOOR STATE PARK, Jimmy knows full well, are among the most spectacular landmarks in Montauk, and maybe Jimmy’s favorite, even if he’s never considered himself much of a nature lover. You live out here long enough and the water is the water, from no matter how many different angles you look at it. But this walk along the cliffs is different, stretching from the town beach all the way to an area called Ditch Plains, the cliffs part of a long line of coastal bluffs that runs all the way out to Montauk Point, the only bluffs like them from here to the Caribbean.
It doesn’t take long for Jimmy to determine the view is much better from up here, and up high, than where they found Pat Palmer’s car on the rocky sand at the water’s edge.
There are police boats in the water, Jimmy can see, bobbing in the waves, being thrown around more than a little by the wind.
“But we don’t know if the kid was in the car when it crash-landed,” Jimmy says to the chief, Larry Calabrese.
“What are you saying?” Calabrese asks. “He got the car rolling and then jumped out instead of trading it in?”
Jimmy notices a pinch of tobacco under Larry Calabrese’s lip. The chief turns and spits, with the wind, fortunately.
“It now appears that we got two witnesses who have ended up in the water, and apparently not by choice,” Calabrese says.
“Technically,” Jimmy says, “it’s only one actual witness, because the Palmer kid did a runner before they got a chance to swear him in.”
“Why’d the kid run?”
“He got a call right before he was about to testify that our client raped the Gates girl and then talk about all the payouts to keep everybody quiet.”
“Then Jacobson killed them anyway?” Calabrese says. “How does that work?”
“The thought has occurred.”
They both go back to staring out at the boats in the water—big waves today, wind from the east now becoming a gale. Truly one of the most beautiful places in the whole country, Jimmy thinks.
Unless you look down.
“You know about the rape part and the payoff how?” Calabrese asks.
“Palmer told me after he jumped me one night outside my joint.”
“Interesting way you’ve got of getting a guy to open up.”
Jimmy says, “Before Palmer bolted from the courthouse that day, somebody heard him on the phone saying that none of this shit was worth dying over.”
“Empty boat for Nick Morelli. Empty car today,” Calabrese says. “The boat and car owned by two guys talking very bad shit against the defendant. Now they’re both gone and who benefits? Your client does.”
“Another thought that has occurred.”
They turn and start walking back to where they’ve both left their cars.
“Let me ask you something,” Jimmy says. “How many people do you have to kill to be considered a serial killer?”
Chief Larry Calabrese spits again.
“Three or more,” he says.
Eighty-Two
“THINK OUR CLIENT WILL BE the one trying to plead the Fifth?” I ask Jimmy.
“Don’t worry, he’ll talk to us,” Jimmy says. “Matter of fact, we might not be able to shut him up.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“The guard, Tommy Murray, drinks at my bar. As soon as he drops off Mr. Wonderful, he’s going to take a walk.” Jimmy grins. “Give us our privacy.”
It had been Jimmy’s idea to wait to talk to Jacobson at the jail, saying that jumpsuits and cuffs always take the swag right out of prisoners, no matter how hot shit they think they are.
Rob Jacobson still tries his best to act like he’s in charge of the room when he sits down, not even noticing that Tommy, the guard, has quietly disappeared.
“I’ll talk to you,” Jacobson says to me, “but not this asshole.”
He nods at Jimmy.
“Mr. Cunniff and I said everything we needed to say to each other at the hospital,” he says. “So he goes, or I head off to my fashionably late dinner reservation in the mess hall.”
I watch as Jimmy casually reaches across the table and grabs the front of Jacobson’s jumpsuit and jerks him forward before Jacobson even knows it’s happening.
“Hey,” Rob Jacobson yells. “Hey!” He manages to turn his head and yell, “Guard!”
Only now does he become aware that the guard is gone.
“I felt we could speak more openly this way,” Jimmy says. “Get in touch with our feelings.”
“Let go of me,” Jacobson says.
Jimmy jerks him a bit closer, their faces very close now. “Only if you promise to be nice.”
“When you let go of me.”
Jimmy shoves him back.
“Does this guy work for you, or is it the other way around?” Jacobson asks me.
“Boy,” I say, “how many times have I asked myself that question?”
Jacobson manages to smooth out the front of his jumpsuit with his cuffed hands. “Does this have something to do with what my wife did today?” he says to us.
Jimmy doesn’t answer him, just takes the photograph out of the inside pocket of his blazer and places it on the table in front of Jacobson. “Explain,” Jimmy says.
“My Speedo?” Jacobson says. “It was the style back then.”
I look at him, fascinated. Even here, even now with Jimmy Cunniff up in his face this way, Jacobson can’t help himself from being himself.
Jimmy pokes Lily Carson’s face with an index finger.
“You know Jane and me are looking into Lily Carson’s death,” Jimmy asks. “How is it that you never mentioned you knew Lily Carson when you were both kids?”
“Because the fact that I took a picture with her twenty-five years ago, or whatever, does absolutely nothing for me now—that’s why.”
“You didn’t just take a picture with her at the beach one time,” Jimmy says. “You took her to the prom.”
Jacobson smiles. Still trying to be the cocky bastard he’s always been.
“Cunniff, do you have any idea how many girls I had when I was in high school? Including more than one the night of that prom to which you’re referring?”
Jimmy gets up and walks around the table, and now he sits next to Jacobson.
“Rob,” he says, still in the soft voice, “my old partner has just been shot to death, point-blank range, in the Bronx. It is my strongly held belief that Joe Champi, an old acquaintance of yours, is the one who did the shooting. Nod if you’re following.”
Jacobson does. They are very close to each other.
“And when I went to my old partner’s apartment this morning,” Jimmy continues, “I discovered he had hidden this picture of you and Lily Carson and two other girls. So now I am here asking you why in the world my ex-partner thought a picture of this was worth hiding, most likely from your old friend Joe Champi.”
“Joe is dead,” Jacobson says.
“He was at Mickey Dunne’s apartment this morning.”
“Somebody might have been there. But I’m telling you it wasn’t Champi.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because I had it done,” Jacobson says.
“You expect us to believe you had Joe Champi killed,” I say.
“Said the client to the lawyer,” Jacobson says.
“Let’s say you did, despite the history you have with the guy,” Jimmy says. “Why did you?”
“Because he had something on me, something I thought I’d settled with him a long time ago,” Jacobson says. “But he came back wanting more, even after he faked his own goddamn death, and told me that if I didn’t pay, he was going to take it to the DA.” Jacobson shrugs. “And you can understand how in my present circumstances I couldn’t have done that.”
Still just the three of us in the room.
I say, “What did he have on you?”
“Things got out of hand one night with one of those girls I told you I had,” Jacobson says. “And then she died.”
Eighty-Three
I’M DRINKING MONTAUK SUMMER ALE at Jimmy’s bar. He’s sipping on Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, from the one bottle he keeps, seventy-five dollars a glass for the customers who know he has it behind the bar and are willing to pay for it.
“He wouldn’t even admit whether it was him who killed the girl he told us about or Champi,” Jimmy says.
“After bragging about how his uncle Joe had been making problems go away since he was in college.”
“Makes you wonder exactly how many problems there were. Or how man dead girls.”
“Until even Champi couldn’t make a triple homicide go away.”
It’s a slow night here. Ball games on both sets, at each end of the bar. Maybe three tables full.
Before they left the jail, Jimmy asked Jacobson who he thought had killed Mickey Dunne if Joe Champi hadn’t.
“Not my problem,” Jacobson said.
“I thought I might have to pull you off him at that point.”
“You would’ve had to if Tommy hadn’t come back,” Jimmy says.
I finish my beer. Jimmy finishes his drink. Jimmy walks me out to the parking lot behind the bar. I ask him if he really believes Joe Champi is gone.
“Jacobson acted pretty proud of the fact that he’d taken him out,” Jimmy says. “After Uncle Joe had become his problem.”
“Even though it was supposed to look like a suicide.”
Jimmy leans against the hood of my car.
“But if all this is true, then we might have ourselves a new problem.”
“Such as?”
“Maybe Champi had a partner.”
Eighty-Four
Jimmy
MICKEY WOULD ALWAYS SAY, every single time they thought they had a case rolled up, “Anything?”
Meaning, was anything still bothering Jimmy?
Maybe saying that it had been too easy. Or that they were still missing something.
That maybe they had the wrong guy.
That they hadn’t finished the job.
On the drive home after he says good night to Jane, Jimmy keeps asking himself the same question about what Jacobson told them tonight, about Jacobson’s history with Champi, pretty much since Jacobson’s old man had taken himself out:
What is still bothering him?
A lot, is what.
Say Champi is dead, this time for real. That can only mean there has to be a second hitter out there, unless Nick Morelli and Pat Palmer made themselves disappear, and Jacobson, even from jail, has somebody new making problems go away.
Jimmy had been so sure that it was Champi after Gregg McCall got gone without a trace. But what if there is somebody else?
I need another drink, Jimmy thinks, with Mickey Dunne sitting next to me, listening while I talk things through, and seeing if he thinks I missed anything.
Jimmy doesn’t want to turn around and go back to the bar. But he doesn’t need to, either, because he’s brought the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle; it’s sitting right there on the seat next to him.
He doesn’t know if any bottle of bourbon should be worth so much.
“But I am,” he says as he pulls into his driveway.
The bullet hits him before he’s all the way out of the car.
Eighty-Five
I AM SITTING IN the living room with Rip the dog, who, to be fair, seems to be in better shape than I am these days.
