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“Now, you stop me if you’ve heard this one from me before. Set up by whom? And with your DNA and fingerprints sprinkled around that house like pixie dust?”
“That’s for you to find out,” he says. “One of the reasons I hired you is because I was told you’re as good a detective as you are a lawyer. You and your guy.”
Jimmy Cunniff. Ex-NYPD, the way I’m ex-NYPD, even if I only lasted a grand total of eight months as a street cop, before lasting barely longer than that as a licensed private investigator. It was why I’d served as my own investigator for the first few years after I’d gotten my law degree. Then I’d hired Jimmy, and finally started delegating, almost as a last resort.
“Not to put too fine a point on things,” I say to him, “we’re not just good. We happen to be the best. Whichiswhy you hired both of us.”
“And why I’m counting on you to find the real killers eventually. So people will know I’m innocent.”
I lean forward and smile at him.
“Rob? Do me a favor and never talk about the real killers ever again.”
“I’m not O.J.,” he says.
“Well, yeah, he only killed two people.”
I see his face change now. See something in his eyes that I don’t much like. But then I don’t much like him. Something else I run into a lot.
He slowly regains his composure. And the rich-guy certainty that this is all some kind of big mistake. “Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”
“Yours.”
“So despite how much you like giving me a hard time, you do believe I’m telling you the truth.”
“Who said anything about the truth?” I ask.
Two
GREGG McCALL, NASSAU COUNTYdistrict attorney, is waiting for me outside the courthouse.
Rob Jacobson has been taken back to the jail and I’m finally on my way back to my little saltbox house in Amagansett, east of East Hampton, maybe twenty miles from Montauk and land’s end.
A tourist one night wandered into the tavern Jimmy Cunniff owns down at the end of Main Street in Sag Harbor, where Jimmy says it’s been, in one form or another, practically since the town was a whaling port. The visitor asked what came after Montauk. He was talking to the bartender, but I happened to be on the stool next to his.
“Portugal,” I said.
But now the trip home is going to have to wait because of McCall, six foot eight, former Columbia basketball player, divorced, handsome, extremely eligible by all accounts. And an honest-to-God public servant. I’ve always had kind of a thing for him, even when he was still married, and even though my sport at Boston College was ice hockey. Even with his decided size advantage, I figure we could make a mixed relationship like that work, with counseling.
McCall has made the drive out here from his home in Garden City, which even on a weekday can feel like a trip to Kansas if you’re heading east on the Long Island Expressway.
“Are you here to give me free legal advice?” I ask. “Because I’ll take whatever you got at this point, McCall.”
He smiles. It only makes him better looking.
Down, girl.
“I want to hire you,” he says.
“Oh, no.” I smile back at him. “Didyoushoot somebody?”
He sits down on the courthouse steps and motions for me to join him. Just the two of us out here. Tomorrow will be different. That’s when the circus comes to town.
“I want to hire you and Jimmy, even though I can’t officially say that I’m hiring you,” he says. “And even though I’m aware that you’re kind of busy right now.”
“I’d only be too busy if I had a life,” I say.
“You don’t have one? You’re great at what you do. And if I can make another observation without getting MeToo’ed, you happen to be great looking.”
