AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So now he asks that one.
“Why did you hide it?”
No matter how many times he looks at the photograph, nothing changes. It’s her. The younger version of her. The spitting image of her daughter. He goes back to his phone now and finds the picture of the Carsons thatNewsdayran on its front page the day after the murders, a picture to break your goddamn heart, the Carsons posing in front of their Christmas tree.
The mother looking like an older sister to the daughter she would have later. Same red hair, though Jimmy figures the mother was needing help to keep it colored that way by the time that particular photo was taken.
I got so fixed on the husband’s gambling, and all the bad guys he got hooked up with,Jimmy thinks,I never looked at the wife.
Schmuck,he hears Mickey saying to him.
Champi has done everything possible, at least so far, to run Jimmy and Jane off the Carson case, starting with making Gregg McCall disappear. Coming for Jane at the house. And torching Jimmy’s bar—Jimmy knew it was him behind that, because it was way too late in Jimmy’s life to start believing in coincidence.
Now Mickey Dunne was dead in the Bronx.
Was it because Mickey had found out there was a prior relationship between Rob Jacobson and Lily Carson?
Had he come here today wanting to see what kind of proof Mickey had?
Rob Jacobson tied to another triple homicide?
What thehell?Jimmy thinks.
There’s no reason to rush back to Long Island. Jane is in court, and will be in court for the rest of the day. So he sits himself back down in Mickey’s recliner and imagines himself being a flatfoot again, just not knocking on doors but making his way across social media.
Jacobson and Lily Carson. The former Lily Biondi.
Jacobson suddenly a nexus that Jimmy wasn’t looking for, not for one minute, between the murder of the Carson family and the murder of the Gates family in the Hamptons.
But how much of a nexus?
An hour later Jimmy still hasn’t left the apartment. He is back to sitting at Mickey’s desk, hoping it will make him smarter, wandering around the internet, banging around from Google to Bing to DuckDuckGo, looking anywhere and everywhere for some further connection between Jacobson and Lily Biondi. Or Jacobson and Hank Carson. There is more to read on Jacobson, even before the murders, because of the way his old man died and how the tabloids went batshit crazy with that at the time. Hardly anything on Hank Carson because of the way he and his family died.
Jimmy remembers the days when to do this kind of work he ended up at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, going through microfilm of the New York papers, as far back as he needed to go.
He was about to give up when another old picture popped up on his screen.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Jimmy says.
Seventy-Eight
KNOWING MY CLIENT ISalready in his seat at our table, I am still in the ladies’ room at five minutes before court will finally be called back into session. My throat is even more raw than usual today, so I polish off one of the two bottles of water I keep in my bag. Then I run a brush through my hair. Quickly apply some makeup under my eyes and then blush to my cheeks.
Not enough time for an extreme makeover.
I stare in the mirror and at my face and see how tired I still look.
Do I just look tired to everybody else?
When will I start to look sick?
When will they know?
No time to worry about that now.
“Showtime,” I say, patting my cheeks again.
Still my go-to move, even when I feel the way I feel right now.
