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Anybody, Jimmy thinks sometimes.
Jane keeps telling him, when the subject comes up, that she doesn’t need a man. Been there, done that, she says. Jimmy thinks she’s wrong. Not to complete her or any of that antiquated bullshit. Just to have something in her life other than her work and a dying dog.
He knows enough not to bring up what happened in court yesterday. Nothing to say. They got clipped, and now they move on, like always. She’ll find a way today to dig herself out of the hole. Jimmy has seen her do it plenty of times before on her way to the winner’s circle.
But they did get clipped, no two ways about that.
They drink coffee and eat donuts and he tells her what he’s learned about Joe Champi, ex-cop, everything Mickey Dunne told him at McSorley’s.
Champi had been on his way out of the NYPD, at their request, at about the same time Jimmy and Mickey were still in uniform and first hitting the streets. Mickey says now he remembers hearing about him at the time. Jimmy does not. Joe Champi: Great cop. First in Vice, finally undercover. Until he went bad. Always with a reputation, all the way along, of operating well outside the margins.
Once he was out of the department, he graduated to doing body work, as a fixer and a cleaner—and hitter, or so legend had it—for some powerful people in the city. The real estate guy who reimagined Fifth Avenue. One of the guys who used to own the Islanders. The guy, dead now, who used to run one of the biggest limo companies in town. Big stuff and small. Whatever you needed.
“Sounds like a player,” Jane says.
“Except he didn’t play nice, even before he got with our friend Bobby Salvatore and ended up being one of your persons of interest in about half a dozen disappearances.”
“Like Gregg McCall’s.”
“Bingo.”
“What finally happened to him?”
“What happened is that he shocked the shit out of everybody by taking himself out. He goes to McSorley’s one night, before they find his car later near the Verrazano Bridge on the Staten Island side. Buys drinks all around, tells everybody they’re not going to see him again, he’s through being a dirtbag, only one way to make things right. Leaves a note on the dashboard. Good-bye. His phone is on the front seat. Becomes a missing person, presumed dead. Eyewitnesses talk about what they heard at McSorley’s. Note in his own hand.”
Jane looks at her watch. “I need to get to court. I assume you’re going to tell me why I should care about the dead dirtbag.”
“Three reasons,” Jimmy says. “One is that it’s the way I would have set it up if I wanted everybody to think I took myself out. Two is that he happens to fit the profile of the dirtbag I’m looking for to a T.”
“What’s behind door number three?”
“Turns out there’s one other person Champi did some work for once that I didn’t mention yet.”
Fifty
I’M SITTING IN THEattorney room waiting for my client to be delivered, fifteen minutes before court, still thinking about Ben Kalinsky.
Why didn’t I tell him last night?
It was a dream opportunity. Not just to tell him but to finally get him into bed, something I knew wasn’t going to be much of a challenge at this point, certainly not for me.
I did neither.
We just talked, into the night.
I made up something about being torn up that I might be defending a guilty man. It’s the truth. But not what I wanted to tell him, about cancer.
I hear the door open now. Rob Jacobson comes walking in. New day, another new suit for him. I’m wishing again I had his wardrobe budget. It occurs to me, also not for the first time, that an accused murderer dresses better than I do.
A lot better.
And his clothes fit him a lot better.
He sits down across the table from me.
“Good job yesterday, Jane, no kidding,” he says. “Getting a gay guy to come out in open court. Wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
He’s still pissed and has a right to be. But I’m not in the mood. And tell him so.
