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Down, girl.
“I keep trying to have one. A life. But somehow it never seems to take.” I don’t even pause before asking, “Are you going to now tell me what you want to hire me for even though you can’t technically hire me, or should we order Uber Eats?”
“You get right to it, don’t you?” McCall asks.
“Unless this is a billable hour. In which case, take as much time as you need.”
He crosses amazingly long legs out in front of him. I notice he’s wearing scuffed old loafers. Somehow they make me like him even more. I’ve never gotten the sense that he’s trying too hard, even when I’ve watched him killing it a few times on Court TV.
“Remember the three people who got shot in Garden City?” he asks. “Six months before Jacobson is accused of wiping out the Gates family.”
“I do. Brutal.”
Three senseless deaths that time, too. The Carson family. Father, mother, daughter, a sophomore cheerleader at Garden City High. I don’t know why I remember the cheerleader piece. But it’s stayed with me. A robbery gone wrong. Gone bad and gone tragically wrong.
“Well, you probably also know that the father’s mother never let it go until she finally passed,” he says, “even though there was never an arrest or even a suspect worth a shit.”
“I remember Grandma,” I say. “There was a time when she was on TV so much I kept waiting for her to start selling steak knives.”
McCall grins. “Well, it turns out Grandma was right.”
“She kept saying it wasn’t random, that her son’s family had been targeted, even though she wouldn’t come out and say why. She finally told me why but said that if I went public with it, she’d sue me all the way back to the Ivy League.”
“But you’re going to tell me.”
“Her son gambled. Frequently and badly, as it turns out.”
“And not with DraftKings, I take it.”
“With Bobby Salvatore, who is still running the biggest book in this part of the world.”
“Jimmy’s mentioned him a few times in the past. Bad man, right?”
“Very.”
“And you guys missed this?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“But upstanding district attorneys like yourself aren’t allowed to hire people like Jimmy and me to run side investigations.”
“We’re not. But I promised Grandma,” he says. “And there’s an exception I believe would cover it.”
“The case was never closed, I take it.”
“But we’d gotten nothing new in all this time until a guy in another investigation dropped Salvatore’s name on us.”
“And here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“I don’t mean to be coarse, McCall, but I gotta ask: who pays?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
“I’m a worrier.”
“Grandma liked to plan ahead,” he says. “She was ready to go when we found out about the Salvatore connection. When I took it to her, she said, ‘I told you so,’ and wrote a check. She told me that she was willing to pay whatever it took to find out who took her family.”
