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JIMMY NEVER CAME RIGHT OUTand asked Mickey Dunne, in all the years they knew each other, how Mickey always managed to live as well as he did, even the way he’d gotten tagged in his divorces.
One time when he was about to get tagged again—Jimmy can’t remember whether it was by the second or third ex-wife—Mickey said, “I ought to write a book about being married.”
“Like a how-to manual?” Jimmy said.
“How-not-to.”
Jimmy laughs now, thinking about that one, having gone through the morning not knowing whether to laugh or cry thinking about him.
Somehow, despite the divorces, Mickeyhadalways managed to live well. Did that mean he’d had some side action going, even on the job? Some side income? Probably. Did that mean he’d taken payoffs from some of the bad guys he was working along the way? Without having any proof, other than the rent Mickey was always paying, and the alimony, Jimmy suspected that he probably had, because the financials couldn’t possibly line up otherwise. Mickey always ate at the best restaurants, and they all couldn’t have been comping him. He drove a Mercedes for a while, and then a sporty BMW convertible that he’d bought used. He was enough of a cop character that he always had a regular table at Elaine’s, when Elaine’s was still around, and the place to be seen. He was Mickey. A force of nature.
Until now.
Champi,the text had said.
Mickey had been trying to track down Joe Champi for his old partner, do his old partner one last solid, and it had gotten him dead.
Can Jimmy prove that it was Champi who took out Mickey Dunne? He cannot.
Yet.
Yet.
Jimmy gets off the FDR and makes his way down to the Village, the narrow streets down there even more narrow now that so many of the restaurants are keeping the outdoor tables they started using during COVID as a way of staying in business. Jimmy has spent most of the ride calling in favors all over the place, in the city and back in the Hamptons, trying to locate Claire Jacobson. No luck yet, but he’s always been an optimistic bastard.
Mickey’s latest—and last—apartment is in the West Village, on Perry Street. Another ancient building that’s been gutted inside and turned into a high-end downtown address, a short walk from one of Jimmy’s favorite restaurants down here, Extra Virgin, and not just because of the name. It was their go-to when he’d come in from Sag Harbor to have dinner with Mickey. Just not lately. They kept saying they needed to get together more often. Next week or next month and now never.
Jimmy tells the super that Mickey is dead, flashing his counterfeit NYPD badge, Jimmy talking quickly, telling the guy that he and Mickey had been partners, and he’s here on official business, working the murder, and he needs to get inside the apartment.
Jimmy shoots him a fifty then, smiling again as he hands the guy the money and watches it disappear, knowing it’s exactly what Mickey Dunne would have done, Mickey having always tipped people, all over town, like he was a Rockefeller.
But Mickey hadn’t called it tipping.
He’d always called it “whip-out” and told Jimmy that it was the real coin of the realm in New York City, what made the world of the city go round.
As Eduardo unlocks the door, he says to Jimmy, “I was waiting to tell you that I already know about Mr. Mickey.”
“Some cops beat me here?”
“Just one.”
Jimmy knows without knowing.
“Big guy?”
“Yes,” Eduardo says. “How do you know?”
“I know all kinds of interesting things,” Jimmy says.
Seventy-Four
NOON AT DR. SAM WYLIE’Soffice. She wants to talk about the new oncologist she says I need to see, right now, and one she assures me I’ll like. I ask her what’s wrong with the old oncologist she suggested, and she says she found a better one, so sue her.
“What is this, Tinder for cancer specialists?”
“Please don’t make this any harder on yourself,” she says. Sighs. “Or on me.”
“I hate oncologists.”
