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“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 seethatcoming.
“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 DAYto 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 establishedthatconnection.
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.
