AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We clink glasses and drink.
I’ve never been a bourbon girl but have to admit it goes down easy. A little too easy. And I’m driving.
“I’m not bullshitting,” Jimmy says. “I never heard you better than you were today.”
“All I’ve got to show for it now is waiting for the jury to come back.”
“Not your best quality.”
“Wow, you picked up on that?”
“To impatience,” Jimmy says.
He drinks. I sip.
“They always teach you to save your best fighting for the end of the round,” Jimmy says to me now. “That’s what the judges remember the best, and that’s what you did today, kid.”
Jimmy picks up his glass again but then puts it right back down.
“You have to tell him,” Jimmy says. “Ben.”
“I know who you meant.”
“Janie, you’re in love with the guy. You just told him you’re in love with him. But he needs to know the rest of the story. For Chrissakes, you’re starting treatment in a few days. He has the right to know before that. You think you can keep something like that from him?”
We sit there in silence for the next couple of minutes. He asks if I want more bourbon. I tell him I’m good.
Ten minutes later the call comes in.
Just not the one from the courthouse telling us the jury is back.
And not for me.
One Hundred Eight
Jimmy
JIMMY STEPS OUTSIDE TOtake the call, from Detective Aaron McGrath, an old friend from the 111th Precinct, Queens, New York, telling him that Paul Biondi has been found dead in his garage.
Apparent suicide. Doors closed. Motor running. Adios.
Father of Lily Biondi Carson, whom he says Rob Jacobson raped when she was in high school. Paul Biondi: a man Jimmy questioned a few days before, because while the jury is about to come back on Jacobson’s murder trial, it is very much still out on the shooting deaths of the Carsons of Garden City.
“Tell me again what the note said,” Jimmy says.
“‘The pain was just finally too much,’” McGrath says.
“He signed it.”
“Yes.”
“His handwriting?”
“Yes.”
“So they find the guy in the garage,” Jimmy says. “With the motor running.”
“Cleaning woman,” McGrath tells Jimmy. “She’d gotten jammed that day, showed up late in the afternoon. Yolanda Marquez. Smells the gas when she gets to the kitchen, which is attached to the garage. Freaks when she finds him in there, behind the wheel. Dead as fuck. Calls 911.”
