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“I have,” he says. He stares at the jury now. “I hate guns.”
I let that settle. I don’t believe for a second that my client cares about gun violence or global warming or saving the whales, but even I have to admit how sincere he sounds.
Jimmy Cunniff told me earlier in the trial nobody fakes sincerity better than Rob Jacobson does.
“Let’s fast-forward now to the night of the gun violence against the Gates family,” I say. “Mr. Jacobson, you’re aware that my sister, Brigid, has previously testified that the two of you spent the night of the murders together.”
Now Jacobson offers the jury a sheepish grin.
“Most of it with me passed out, I’m embarrassed to say,” he says. “We were talking, and drinking. And talking. And drinking. Until finally we were just drinking. Me, mostly.” He shrugs, almost helplessly. “Brigid was being the awesome friend she always has been. I was being a drunk.”
I watch as a few of the jurors nod in recognition.
“But you are also aware that a neighbor of the Gates family, Otis Miller, has testified that he saw you speeding away from the Gateses’ house earlier that evening,” I say. “Isn’t that correct?”
“It’s correct that he says he saw me,” Jacobson says. “But I wasn’t speeding. I was simply driving away.”
“But you were there that night?”
“Yes. That’s never been in dispute.”
Not in dispute. But until now, only Otis Miller has put Jacobson at the house that night.
“And why were you there?”
“I was invited,” he says. “We didn’t know each other very well, but our daughters had become tennis friends.”
“Who invited you?”
“Mitch Gates did.”
“Could you please tell the jurywhyhe invited you?”
Jacobson again turns to face the jurors. “He needed money.”
A murmur runs through the courtroom now.
“A lot of money,” Jacobson adds.
“And he was asking for it from the father of one of his daughter’s tennis friends?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Could you please tell us what itwaslike, Mr. Jacobson?”
“I owed his wife a favor.Shewasmyold friend.”
The old friend who was the other girl in the picture Mickey Dunne left behind, as my client had informed me the night before.
“She saved my life once,” Rob Jacobson says.
One Hundred Two
Jimmy
HE’S LYING HIS ASS OFF,Jimmy knows.
Doesn’t think he’s lying.Knows.
