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Ninety-Two
Jimmy
DR. WILLIAMS TELLS JIMMYhe has to take it easy for a couple of days. Jimmy promises him that he will. Dr. Williams tells him that if he wants to exercise while the wound is fully healing, he can walk around his neighborhood, upping the distance every day as he sees fit.
Jimmy promises him he’ll do that, too.
It reminds Jimmy of the old days, when one of his superiors would call him in and tell him to back off a particular suspect or perp or case. Jimmy would nod them and yes-sir them to death, and then ignore all of it.
“If you somehow see me out and about for the next few days,” Jimmy tells the doctor, “I give you permission to shoot me again.”
Dr. Williams, a nice enough guy, seems to buy it.
But Jimmy is out and about the next morning, in his car, on his way to Little Neck, Queens, to the address on Knollwood Avenue, where Lily Carson’s father, Paul Biondi, lives.
The night before, he searched the internet like a demon and made some calls and found out that Biondi had owned a service station and repair shop in Little Neck before retiring a few years earlier. And that he had raised Lily by himself after the girl’s mother ran off to Santa Fe to find herself and never came back.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Jimmy says when Biondi opens the door.
“My experience always was that you decline to talk to a cop, you look guilty,” Biondi says.
“I’m an ex-cop.”
“Wouldn’t make me look any less guilty if I’d told you to buzz off.”
He is short and wide but solid-looking, big hands and muscled forearms, the left one featuring a Marine Corps insignia. White hair buzzed into a crew cut. Eyes the color of coal. He looks nothing like his daughter.
There is, Jimmy notices, some faint scar tissue around the eyes.
“You box?”
“How’d you know?”
Jimmy taps a finger next to his right eye. “Dead giveaway.”
Biondi says, “Golden Gloves until I quit.” He shrugs. “You either got a good left hand or you don’t. I didn’t. They can teach you a lot. Not that.”
He asks Jimmy if he wants coffee or water or something. Jimmy says he’s fine, he doesn’t want to take up too much of his time.
“Tell me about Rob Jacobson,” Jimmy says.
“Tell you what?”
“It’s like I told you on the phone, Mr. Biondi, I’m just looking for anything that might help me find out what really happened to your daughter and her family,” Jimmy says.
“What’s Jacobson got to do with any of that?” Biondi asks. “He’s on trial for the other thing out east.”
“I discovered a connection between him and Lily,” Jimmy says. “And once I did, I found out he took her to a prom.”
Biondi’s big hands are on his knees. He clenches them now and blows some air out through his nose.
“You want to know what I really know about that son of a bitch?” Biondi says. “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
Ninety-Three
MY SISTER IS BACKon the stand the next morning.
The night before, she asked to finish her testimony, saying she “misremembered” some things the first time around.
