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I don’t know the last piece for sure. I didn’t stay until dawn’s early light. More something I intuited.
“It should be a new show,” Jacobson says. “The Horny Housewives of the East End of Long Island.”
Claire Jacobson turns back to him now. “There’s nothing going on between us.”
“Really? Jane here says there is. And she’s an officer of the court.”
“Fuck Jane,” Claire Jacobson says.
“Well put.”
“And even if there was something going on between us, which there isn’t,” Claire continues, “it’s a little late for you to try to take the high ground on marital infidelity, isn’t it, sweetheart? Somewhat like getting religion a little late in the church service?”
Before he can come back at her, she says, “Interesting, isn’t it, that you’re so quick to believe your lawyer and not your wife.”
“She’s not as expensive as you are, for one thing.”
He turns back to me. “You couldn’t give me a heads-up on this?”
“I didn’t know I’d get the reaction out of you in court that I did,” I say. “But it was worth taking a shot.”
Rob Jacobson hadn’t waited to call his wife a bitch here in the attorney room. He’d done it in open court. Shocked. Angry. Even acting embarrassed. He really had checked all the boxes I could have ever hoped he would before Judge Jackson Prentice III cleared the room and called for a recess.
“For the last time,” Claire says, “there is absolutely nothing going on between Gus and me. It is a fever dream of your lawyer’s. Maybe she gets off on it.”
“Well, to be clear, it doesn’t even take that much these days, Claire,” I say. “But what I’m trying to do here is get your husband off.”
“By dragging me through the mud.”
“Mudwrestling,sounds like to me,” Jacobson says. “Down and dirty.”
Claire Jacobson, exasperated, says, “Gus had had too much to drink, as usual. It was late. He slept in Eric’s room.”
Their absent son, the surfer boy.
Rob Jacobson has calmed down considerably, I see.
“You’re lying,” he says evenly. “You know I can always tell when you’re lying, Claire.”
“I wish I could say the same about you, dear.”
I am seated. They have both remained standing, on opposite sides of the long conference table. I know court will shortly be back in session. Prentice called for only a fifteen-minute recess.
“So you know, I willneverallow you to call me as a witness,” Claire Jacobson says to me now. “I know there are rules about spousal privilege.”
“So there are. Most of the time it’s a beautiful thing.”
“You didn’t need to do this,” she says. “To Gus or to me.”
“Actually, I did. Because your friend Gus is the one who didn’t have to share his own fever dream about an argument on the beach that your husband disputes and Mitch Gates can’t.”
“So what do you think you’ve accomplished today with your hateful innuendo?” she says. “Bottom line.”
“The jury now sees one of Ahearn’s star witnesses as somebody who doesn’t just get richer in business but maybe gets the girl, too, if your husband ends up locked up for the rest of his life.”
There is a rap on the door. The clerk pokes his head in and says we’re about to resume.
“So you’re saying it’s not just me who’s lying but Gus, too?”
