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“No phone.”
“His was NYPD issue, right?”
That actually gets a smile out of Jimmy Cunniff.
“Mickey always insisted on using his own,” Jimmy tells her. “He never wanted the bosses to know who he was talking to. Or where he was at any particular time. Just because it was generally somewhere they didn’t want him to be.”
He tells Jane then that he may be in the city for a couple of days, that he is making it his goddamn mission to find out where Mickey Dunne was on the last day and night of his life. To find anything Mickey might have left behind for Jimmy to find, before everything went sideways for him. Because something had to have gone sideways, and got him killed. If Mickey Dunne thought he was in real trouble with Joe Champi, he would have called Jimmy after the text. On account of them always having each other’s backs, long after they officially stopped working together.
“You don’t think there’s any possibility that this might be OCC related?”
Organized Crime Control.
“No, Jane, I do not.Okay?”
He put some snap into it.
Jimmy gets up from the table. “How’s the judge going to take Brigid taking a flyer?” he asks her.
“How do you think?”
“What about you? You didn’t seem to be taking it too good at lunch.”
“I was angry more at myself than at her,” Jane says. “For being more worried about our goddamn case than I was about my own sister.”
As Jane is walking Jimmy to his car, she waves to the East Hampton cop sitting behind the wheel of his own car, halfway up the block, as always. The guy blinks his lights.
“We still don’t know where the Palmer kid is,” Jane says to Jimmy.
“He’ll turn up.”
He does the next morning.
Seventy-One
WE ARE IN THEchambers of Judge Jackson Prentice III. Him. Kevin Ahearn. Me. We’re all here because Kevin Ahearn has announced that he wants to call Pat Palmer as a witness. In the middle of my case.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Ahearn in front of the judge. “Did the defense rest without somebody telling me?” Then I slap my forehead. “Oh, wait, that couldn’t possibly have happened because Iamthe defense.”
“Ms. Smith happens to be right about this, Mr. Ahearn,” Judge Prentice says. “If you want to call this young man, you’re going to have to wait until the defense does rest.”
Ahearn has to have known better. But it’s as if he had to try. “If I had been aware of the information Mr. Palmer has, information that is essential to the state’s case, I would already have called him. But he just came forward.”
“I am going to restate the obvious,” Prentice says. “You’re still not allowed to bring forward a rebuttal witness until the defense does rest.”
It turns out that the reason Jimmy wasn’t able to locate Pat Palmer was because he was with the district attorney for most of the day, telling the story Ahearn says the jury needs to hear.
Palmer is currently down the hall in an empty jury room while we’re all thrashing this out. Rob Jacobson is in a separate room of his own.
“You can’t let that guy violate an NDA,” my client said to me before being escorted out of the room.
Jacobson was gripping my forearm, much too hard. I looked down at his hand, then back up at him. “Let go of me and let me go do my job.”
“I’m trying to help you do that,” Jacobson said.
I looked him in the eyes. “Rob? You hardlyeverhelp me.”
I got close to his ear before he stood up.
