Hard to kill, p.8
Hard to Kill, page 8
He counts more than a dozen people dead. Six before they took Jacobson’s case and seven since. He used to think the total was even higher, until Jane said she was sure she’d seen Nick Morelli outside the courthouse in Mineola that day, and where the fuck has he disappeared to since?
Truth be told, dead bodies seemed to follow Jacobson all the way back to high school, and his father and that girl.
You really did need a scorecard.
He tried to go back to the beginning with Jacobson and his old man. Now Jimmy tells Jane he’s going another way, working back from the most recent murders. The latest mother and daughter. No search engines today. In the morning he drives over to North Haven and starts knocking on doors the way he used to. The fifth door, across Noyac Road from the end of the Parsonses’ driveway, police tape still across the gate, is answered by a small, sassy white-haired woman not more than five feet tall who introduces herself as Geraldine Nason.
“Cop, right?”
“Ex.”
She nods. “You still look like one.”
“I keep trying to wash it off.”
“The real cops, not that you weren’t a real one, probably have been looking to talk to me. But I’ve been up the island visiting my daughter and the bum she married. Just got back a couple of hours ago. So, it turns out you beat them to it, you lucky boy.”
“Why lucky?”
“Because of my security cameras, that’s why.”
“You have some?”
“Lots.” She winks at him. “Can’t be too careful on the mean streets of the Hamptons.”
“Would you mind if I take a look at what you’ve got?”
“Be my guest.”
And shows him in.
She says she’s got a son who has an audiovisual store over in Bridgehampton. He set up the system for her because she’s eighty and lives alone. Geraldine Nason walks him through the first floor of her house, finally taking him into a small room off the kitchen featuring six different screens. She tells him her son has the same setup she has, looking at the same video feeds of her property. He sees something he doesn’t like, the cops are there in less than ten minutes.
There’s a high view of the street, looking directly across at the Parsonses’ house, a low view, angles from both sides of the old woman’s house, and from the back, facing south.
“My son says this stuff automatically gets erased every week.”
It’s all right, Jimmy tells her, the Parsonses were murdered four days ago.
Jimmy works off the laptop in the studio after she gives him the password, the system synced up with the cameras. He starts looking at the video from three days before the murders, focusing on the two cameras facing the Parsonses’ house.
It’s the night before the murders, and night of, when things get interesting.
The same car cruising the neighborhood both nights.
A blue Bentley.
Jimmy is pretty sure he knows the car. Just to make completely sure, he calls his friend Detective Craig Jackson in the city and asks him to run the plates.
Jackson calls back within five minutes.
The Bentley belongs to Claire Jacobson.
Rob Jacobson’s wife.
Hardly any degrees of separation there, Jimmy thinks.
Hardly any at all.
THIRTY-TWO
THE BLUE BENTLEY IS in the driveway when I arrive at the Jacobson home in Sagaponack.
When Claire Jacobson opens the door and sees it’s me, she says, “If I had to make it clearer that I have nothing to say to you I’d have to hire one of those skywriters you see over the beach on the weekends.”
She then starts to close the door in my face.
I stop it with my foot. I’m wearing sneakers, but I’m not going to let her see the sting of applying that force. Claire Jacobson has been annoying me for a long time, getting up in my face with the skill of a prosecutor practically every chance she got during her husband’s first trial. And I’ve done my level best to annoy her right back.
“This won’t take long,” I tell her. “But there are things we need to discuss.”
I’m holding the door open with my hand now.
“Is this about Rob?”
“It’s about you.”
“What about me?” she says. “We have nothing in common except that we dislike each other.”
She doesn’t try to close the door again. Like I’m some old-time traveling salesman, I take that as progress.
“What I’m here to discuss is you cruising Elise Parsons’s neighborhood a couple of the nights before she died, and me thinking you’d rather talk about it with me than the police.”
Then Rob Jacobson’s wife, who I had always seen as the ice-queen bitch of the world, surprises me.
She opens the door wide.
It’s as if a switch has been thrown.
“I apologize for being rude,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here, because there’s something I need to discuss with you. Please come in.”
Please?
I feel the urge to ask her if she has lost a bet.
The living room is as spectacular as I remember it. I take a seat on one of the couches. She’s across from me on another one, a truly magnificent antique mahogany coffee table between us.
“Why were you over in North Haven, Claire?”
I don’t know how I expect her to respond, by acting defensive, or simply denying it without knowing what proof I have. But she surprises me a second time. She suddenly and quite unexpectedly appears to be on the verge of tears.
“I’d heard they’d started up again before he turned himself in,” she says, “and I just couldn’t take that. I don’t know why they were the ones to push me over the edge. But they were. And I just wanted to see if I could find out for myself.”
“You mean find out if he’d hooked up with Elise?”
“Or Ellie. Or, knowing them and their weird tastes and knowing my husband’s, perhaps both of them at the same time.”
She smiles weakly at me. At least no tears for now. I’m not sure how I’d deal with that. I’m having enough trouble processing the fact that she’s acting like a human being in front of me, really for the first time.
“Kind of Rob’s thing, mothers and daughters,” she says, not sounding judgmental, just profoundly weary. Or just sad. “I wanted to see for myself, even if it made me feel like a stalker.”
“But he’s not allowed to leave the rented house without his ankle bracelet.”
“Knowing my husband, I thought that where there was a will, there was a way.”
And in this moment, I picture myself in the old days, night after night outside Café Martin around closing time, looking for the chance to see who my ex-husband might be leaving with on a particular evening. When I was the one who felt like a stalker. And a little bit crazy.
A sigh comes out of Claire now, loud and genuine. Like more sadness coming out of her. “I finally got back in the car, realizing how truly pathetic I must look.”
Been there, I think.
Done that.
A single tear appears on one cheek now. Just the one. She brushes it away, as if it’s one more embarrassment, even beyond the story she’s telling.
Definitely a human being.
One I almost find myself wanting to like.
“I still love him,” she says in a soft voice. Whether she’s talking to herself or to me doesn’t seem to matter in the moment. “I’m not sure I know him anymore.” She shakes her head, her eyes fixed on some point behind me, maybe some of the amazing artwork on the wall. “But I still love him. Can you understand that? Or do you just want to laugh at me?”
“Actually, I can understand it. And have absolutely no desire to laugh at you.”
“He’s not a killer,” she says, eyes fixed on me again. “Rob is a lot of things. A lot of quite unattractive things sometimes, as you know. But he’s not a killer.”
“You haven’t always acted as if you believed that, Claire.”
“But, in my heart, I think I always did, no matter how angry I was during the first trial. At him and at you.”
I’ve assumed all along from her behavior that she couldn’t wait to divorce him and walk away with pretty much everything she wanted.
Not feeling so sure about that now.
Because here Claire Jacobson is, in the house they once shared, defending him.
Telling me how much she still loves him.
“There’s something else,” she says. “Something that you need to know.”
I try to soften my own voice, as if trying to make sure the two of us are at perfect pitch.
“What’s that, Claire?”
She hesitates, but not for very long.
“Somebody just tried to kill him.”
THIRTY-THREE
ON THE BEACH LAST night, somebody fired shots at Rob Jacobson. The house he’s renting on Hedges Lane in Amagansett is less than a half mile from the beach. You can hear the water from his back patio even though you can’t see it.
Claire told me what Rob had told her about the gunshots.
Now my client and I are doing a face-to-face and I’m about to get the full story directly from him. Rob Jacobson is trying to act cool, trying not to break character in the part he plays for me. But I can see that he’s rattled.
Two brand-new human beings this morning, same marriage.
What are the odds?
“I didn’t get much sleep.” He forces a smile. “But not for the usual reasons.”
He sips some coffee. He offers me some. I pass. I’m wired enough at this point.
“You sure you want to hear this?”
“As much as I might occasionally want to kill you myself, I’m not letting somebody else do it on my watch,” I say. “And I haven’t lost a client yet.”
“I didn’t tell you what happened because I didn’t want you to worry about me,” he says.
“Just tell me what happened last night and we’ll worry together.”
I had gotten him permission to do a route I knew they could track on GPS: drive into town for dinner with the ankle bracelet on and walk down to the beach afterward. But he didn’t want to eat. He wanted to drink and didn’t want to drink alone.
He says he had a few too many at the Main Street Tavern, but wasn’t drunk enough to forget this was no time in his life to get picked up for a DUI. He walked the short distance to his house and was still so buzzed that he continued walking down to Indian Wells Beach to see if the ocean air could help sober him up before bed.
He did sober up then. But not because of the air. When he drunkenly kicked off his loafers, he did a full face-plant into the sand.
“Luck of the Irish whiskey, I guess. Because that exact same moment was when I heard the shot. Pretty sure I then heard the bullet maybe bang off one of the parking signs.”
He’s not the cool Rob now, the one who wants you to think he’s the only one who gets the joke. By now I know what a good liar he can be. But I don’t think he’s lying now. He’s reliving what happened to him. And how close he came.
“Could you tell where the shot came from?”
“Behind, I’m pretty sure. From the parking lot. Like I said: I sobered up pretty quick and rolled to my right and then I’m tearing ass into the dunes. It’s a cloudy night, no moon or stars. You can barely see the ocean. I hear another shot. That one misses, too. I’m not the sprinter I was in high school, but I’ve done a lot of beach running in my life and I can still get it in gear when I have to. I must have been faster than whoever it was shooting at my ass. The shooting stops. But I don’t stop until I get all the way to Maidstone.”
“You walked all the way home from the country club?”
He shakes his head. And grins. For a moment this is the Rob I know, if not love.
“I called a friend and she came and got me and we came back here.”
“Not worried that the shooter might come looking for you here?”
“You don’t want to know this, Janie. But I’ve still got a gun.”
He’s right. I don’t want to know that.
“You didn’t consider phoning the police instead?”
“Don’t feel as if I’m a white life that matters to them these days.”
“Will you please be serious for once in your life, Rob? Because this actually happens to be life-and-death shit we’re discussing.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I mean it.”
“By the way? I don’t suppose the friend you phoned was my sister.”
He frowns. “Not exactly.”
“Don’t tell me you two crazy kids have broken up again.”
“See, that’s the thing, Janie. We might not have ever really gotten back together.”
I stare at him, knowing I shouldn’t be remotely surprised.
“So you lied to me about that.”
He puts out his hands. “What can I tell you? It’s like with women. Sometimes I can’t stop myself.”
“How do I know you’re not lying about being shot at?”
I have slapped him in the past. He reacts as if I’ve just done it again.
“I’m not lying, goddamnit! Somebody tried to shoot me in my goddamn back!”
I’ll never be sure when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth. Still not sure, in my heart, whether he’s capable of murder. But the same way I suddenly found myself caring about his wife, I also care about him.
And I’m scared right along with him.
“Any theories about who would want to take some shots at you? Or hire somebody to take them?”
“It would take too long to list all the people I’ve screwed in my life. Or screwed over. Or both.”
“You need to be careful, Rob,” I tell him. “Whoever came for you once might come again.”
“See, Janie, you do care about me.”
Slipping back into character, as if he can only stay serious—or act scared—for so long.
“Believe me on something,” I tell him. “I’m as surprised about that as you are.”
Before I head home, I drive up to Indian Wells and check the EMERGENCY VEHICLES sign in front of the fence between the parking lot and the start of the beach. There’s no sign of a bullet hole anywhere on it, or on either of the other two parking signs.
As I pull into my own driveway, I see Brigid sitting on my front porch.
Before I can even apologize about believing Rob Jacobson when he told me they were back together, she says, “My cancer is back.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Jimmy
DANNY ESPOSITO, THE STATE cop who annoyed Jane in almost record time at the murder scene, takes a seat next to Jimmy at his bar.
“I feel as if maybe we got off on the wrong foot,” Esposito says.
“No wonder you made detective as fast as you did.”
Esposito tells Kenny the bartender that he’ll have what Jimmy is having. Kenny walks over with a Montauk Ale for Esposito and places it in front of him.
“Cheers,” Esposito says, raising his glass.
Jimmy leaves his glass where it is.
“What do you want?” Jimmy asks. “You can buy a beer anywhere between your headquarters and here.”
“I think there’s a chance here that we can help each other out on the Parsons thing. You know the lay of the land out here a hell of a lot better than I do.”
“True,” Jimmy says. “So we’ve established I have something you want. The problem is that you have nothing I want.”
“You sure about that?”
He’s out of his hip-cop look tonight. Black sweater. Jeans. The chin stubble looks exactly the same, but Esposito appears to have checked at least some of his attitude at the door. Maybe all. It occurs to Jimmy it might be one more pose because he does want something.
“My partner took an almost instant dislike to you,” Jimmy tells him.
“Gotta admit,” he says, grinning, “it’ll only get worse once she gets to know me better.”
Behind them is a big round table filled with cops, East Hampton cops tonight. But then there are almost always cops in here, from East or the Sag Harbor station just up the block. It was always one of Jimmy’s goals, turning this into the East End version of one of his old NYPD bars in the city. Even when some of the local cops were royally pissed at Jimmy during the first Jacobson trial, they kept coming in, as much as they wanted Jacobson to get his ticket punched for murdering the Gates family.
Esposito turns and gives the cops a thumbs-up.
“Listen, we both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have something you at least think I might want,” Jimmy says. “If it’s any good, I might buy you that beer in front of you.”
“Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?”
“Absolutely.”
Esposito moves his chair closer and leans in. “It’s about the dead woman’s husband.”
“Ah,” Jimmy says. “Mr. Carl Parsons himself. Richer than shit, which means he fit right in out here. What about him?”
“Carl liked to gamble, as it turns out. Like maybe it was the only thing that got his motor running at the end.”
“And I’m sure it was legal, him being a pillar of the community and all.”
“No, sir, it was not.”
Esposito is now wearing a truly world-class shit-eating grin.
“Seriously, it probably was the only fun the old bastard was getting at the end, because from what I gather he sure wasn’t getting any from Elise. She was too busy screwing her way all the way to Montauk and back. But if it was on television, and just about every game is these days including cricket, old Carl had some action going. You should see his old-man cave at the house, which Elise looks to have left in place as some kind of shrine, maybe to remember the only room in the house where Gramps was happy. Six flat screens. I wanted to freaking move in myself.”
“You gonna get to where you’re going while your beer is still cold?”
“I drove all the way out here. Let me tell it my way.”
