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“More like a shit show,” I say.
He laughs.
“Seriously? Sometimes I think that’s all it is. A show.”
“That sounds pretty cynical,” he says.
“And me usually such a cockeyed optimist.”
We both decide to indulge ourselves and order rib-eye steaks. As we eat, I tell him how conflicted I am about Rob Jacobson. Without going too deep into the weeds, I explain how overwhelming the evidence against him is. A palm print of Jacobson’s on the coffee table in the living room. More prints on the stair railing leading down from the second floor. There was hair in one of the upstairs sinks that belongs to Jacobson. And some of Mitch Gates’s blood ended up on a pair of Jacobson’s fancy black On Cloud sneakers the cops confiscated from Jacobson’s bedroom. What we call a “totality of evidence.” He says it was all planted. It would have taken some doing.
But, I explain, it could have been done. Just by somebody who went to all the trouble in the world to make all the trouble in the world for my client.
Ben Kalinsky is a good listener. So I keep going, even after having told myself that the last thing I want to do tonight is talk shop. I tell him how I’m troubled, still, by the disappearance of Nick Morelli, just because of when it happened. And how Gus Hennessy suddenly decided to come forward about the threat he’d heard from Jacobson on the beach, the way Morelli had suddenly remembered seeing Jacobson in a lip lock with Laurel Gates.
“Lip lock?” Ben Kalinsky says.
“What can I tell you? I’m old.”
“You don’t look old to me tonight. You look beautiful.”
“My sister is the beautiful one, remember?”
He says, “Tell anyone else who thinks that to hold my drink.”
He is smiling at me again and leaning forward. I am suddenly worried that I might be blushing.
Blushing, Jane.
Is that still even a thing?
I smile back at him and say, “Down, boy.”
“How about ‘Thanks, Ben’?”
“Thanks, Ben.”
“Now we’re talking.”
He pours us more wine.
“Do you think Jacobson did it?”
“No,” I say.
“For real?”
“Ihaveto think that, even though it rarely matters to people who do what I do for a living. Because the alternative is that I’m working my ass off trying to get an acquittal for someone who murdered an entire family in cold blood.”
“Do you think you’ll ever know for sure?”
“Unfortunately, there’s a very good chance that I won’t.”
“And if you do get him off, you’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life,” he says.
For as long as that is.
“But I’d also have to live with it if he gets convicted and he didn’t do it.”
