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There is no laptop anywhere in the apartment. If there was one, Champi took it for sure.
No cell phone.
No landline.
There is a small desk against the same wall as the treadmill. Some bills on top of it, including his most recent Amex bill. A couple of notebooks, new, in the middle drawer. Nothing written in them. If there’d been one with notes on Joe Champi, Champi surely took that, too. Or took it off Mickey Dunne after he shot him.
Yeah,Jimmy thinks.Just like a mob hit.By the gangster Joe Champi had become. Or maybe always had been, even when he was on the job, before and after he apparently faked his own death.
All of a sudden, just like that, the realization of what’s happened takes all the air out of Jimmy Cunniff at once. He walks over and sits down in Mickey’s recliner, facing the big flat-screen on the wall.
He’s gone.
The guy who was so much more than a brother, and not just in blue. The guy he stood up for at his weddings. Chased women with when Mickey was between marriages, and sometimes during. Went to Yankees games with. Got shit-faced with, constantly. Laughed with and even cried with sometimes, at that time of the night when even tough guys, with enough of a load on, get too weepy.
Gone.
He’d been here yesterday and then got some kind of lead on Champi and texted Jimmy. Then he went off and found Joe Champi or Champi found him.
Nothing else made sense.
Jimmy gets up and takes a couple of steps to the coffee table, uncaps the Jameson and raises the bottle.
“To you, partner.”
He drinks.
First of the day, Mickey always said, was the best one.
Just not today.
Jimmy goes back into the bedroom. Just a couple of framed pictures on the wall, small ones. Mickey was never one for decorating. One of Mickey with a woman Jimmy doesn’t recognize, outside the new Yankee Stadium, in front of theBABE RUTH PLAZAsign. One, much older, of Jimmy and Mickey on the beach at Rockaway, from some long-lost summer when they were both a lot skinnier, and had a lot more hair.
But looking happy as hell, both of them, as if they were going to live forever.
Next to the pictures are a couple of commendations, framed.
Jimmy goes back through the drawers of the nightstand. A bottle of Xanax in the top one. Mickey must have needed more than Jameson to sleep sometimes. An old Dunhill lighter, engraved, that Jimmy had given Mickey for his first marriage. Or maybe his second. When Mickey was still a smoker.
“Gimme something, Mick,” Jimmy says out loud. “Gimmeanything.”
His voice echoes in the empty bedroom.
Mickey’s bedroom.
Maybe from here Jimmy can go to the precinct, ask if he can go through Mickey’s desk, if somebody would do him a solid there. Somebody who went back far enough to know what Jimmy and Mickey had meant to each other.
Jimmy goes back to the desk. There is a Con Ed bill, past due, underneath the Amex. A cable bill. Also past due. Jimmy smiles again and thinks:Late paying bills to the end. He’d always suspected that Mickey Dunne had a credit rating you could fit inside a shot glass.
Just to make sure he’s not missing anything, Jimmy takes the drawers out of the nightstand and tosses them onto the bed.
The false bottom slides halfway out of the middle one.
Jimmy slides it all the way out.
There is an envelope.
A photograph inside.
