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“Sorry,” my sister says again.
Then she shoots an embarrassed smile at the jury. I watch them watch her. They’re clearly on her side. Theylikeher. Of course they do. She’s Brigid.
But do they believe her after she’s just been accused of lying her ass off?
Or do they believe the guy I’m tryingmyass off to defend here?
“You’re my sister, and I believe you,” I say to her. “But who should the jury believe here, you or my client?”
“On whether we were together that night? Me. Totally.”
I make a quick pivot to see Rob Jacobson’s reaction. He gives a couple of quick, exasperated shakes of his head. But manages to keep his mouth shut.
I hesitate, giving myself one last chance not to break the promise to my sister I’m about to break.
About to go where I swore up and down that I wouldn’t.
Everybody lies.
“Brigid, are you in love with Rob Jacobson?”
She hesitates now, just long enough to shoot me a look I’ve been getting from her my whole life, all the way back to the dinner table, when I’d tell my parents something she thought had been a secret between us girls, about boys or school or anything.
She looks down at her hands and then back at me and says, “I love him as a friend.”
“Isn’t it more than that, Brigid? Isn’t that why you’re really here today?”
This jury does like her. And she might be as much of a character witness for my no-character client as he’s going to get.
I have to take this all the way.
“No,” she says in a small voice.
“Isn’t it true that the real reason you have been reluctant to testify up until today isn’t just because the two of you were together that night but thewayyou were together?”
In the next moment I hear the angry scrape of a chair behind me, right before the chair is crashing to the floor behind Rob Jacobson, who is jumping to his feet again.
It turns out Judge Jackson Prentice doesn’t need to gavel him back down this time.
Because Prentice watches now, as everybody else does, as my client, red-faced, mouth opening and closing but no words coming out of it, grabs his chest with his right hand before he pitches forward onto the table in front of him, spins off it, and ends up facedown on the courtroom floor.
I look past him and see Claire Jacobson standing expressionless in front of the courtroom doors, making no move to come to her husband’s aid.
As I do move toward him, Brigid is already out of her chair and brushing past me, slowing down just enough to get close to my ear and say, “I hate you.”
Fifty-Eight
Jimmy
THEY RUSHED JACOBSON TOPeconic Bay Medical Center by ambulance—alone with the EMTs, his wife nowhere to be found—for observation and to make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack.
Apparently, the bastard suffered one five years earlier. So he ended up there, Jane telling Jimmy on the phone that he was going to spend the night. There would, she said, be a cop posted at his door, though for the life of him Jimmy Cunniff can’t understand why.
Where is the guy going?
He doesn’t want to run. Shit, it’s like he’s runningtowardthe spotlight. Jacobsonwantsthis trial. Seems to be almost reveling in the goddamn thing. He’s done everything except hire a skywriter to tell the whole world he didn’t do it, that he’s going to be vindicated in the end. Now today he called Jane’s sister a liar before he did a face-plant in front of God and Judge Jackson Prentice, as if he doesn’t even need her to give him an alibi for the night of the murders.
When Jane gets back home from the hospital, there will be a car from the East Hampton Police out in front of her house, the way there has been since the night Jimmy got shot there. Ahearn actually arranged it. Jimmy was with Jane during a recess when Ahearn told her that he wanted to beat her straight up, be the one to pin her first loss on her, and couldn’t have her up and dying on him.
