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“This sounds like your crusade, not mine.”
“Come on, think of the fun,” Gregg McCall says. “While you’re trying to get your guy off here, you can help me put somebody else away.”
I know all about McCall by now. He’s more than just a kick-ass prosecutor. He’s also tough and honest. Didn’t even go to Columbia on an athletic scholarship. Earned himself one for academics. Could have gone to a big basketball school. His parents were set on him being Ivy League. Worked his way to pay for the rest of college. The opposite of the golden boy I’m currently representing, all in all.
“I know we’re supposed to be on opposing sides,” McCall says. “But if I can make an exception…”
I finish his thought. “So can I.”
“I’m asking you to help me do something we should have done at the time. Find the truth.”
“You ought to know that my client just now asked me if I thought he was telling the truth. I told him that I wasn’t interested in the truth.” I shrug. “But I lied.”
“If you agree to do this, we’ll kind of be strange bedfellows.”
“You wish,” I say.
Actually,Iwish.
“I know asking you to take on something extra right now is crazy,” he says.
“Kind of my thing.”
Three
ON MY WAY HOME,I call Jimmy Cunniff at the tavern. He used to get drunk there in summers when he’d get a couple of days off and need to get out of the city, day-trip to the beach and party at night. Now he owns the business, but not the building, though his landlord is not just an old friend but also someone, in Jimmy’s words, who’s not rent-gouging scum.
A Hamptons rarity, if you must know.
Jimmy’s not just an ex-cop, having been booted out of the NYPD for what he will maintain until Jesus comes back was a righteous shooting, and killing, of a drug dealer named Angel Reyes. He’s also a former Golden Gloves boxer and, back in the day, someone who had short stories published in long-gone literary magazines. The beer people should have put Jimmy out there as the most interesting man in the world.
He’s also my best friend.
I tell him about Gregg McCall’s visit, and his offer, and him telling me we can name our own price, within reason, because Grandma is paying.
“You think we can handle two at once?” Jimmy asks.
“We’ve done it before.”
“Not like with these two,” he says, and I know he’s right about that.
“Two triple homicides,” Jimmy Cunniff says. “But not twice the fun.”
“Who knows, maybe solving one will show us how to solve the other. Maybe we’ll even slog our way to the truth. Look at it that way.”
“I don’t know why you even had to ask if I was on board,” Jimmy says. “You knew I’d be in as soon as you were. And you were in as soon as McCall asked you to be.”
“Kind of.”
“Stop here and we’ll celebrate,” he says.
I tell Jimmy I’ll take a rain check. I have to go straight home; I need to train.
“Wait, you’re still fixed on doing that crazy biathlon, even now?”
“I just informed Mr. McCall that crazy is kind of my thing,” I say.
“Mine, too.”
