Hard to Kill Outline

A Message from James Patterson

THIS IS THE REAL SHIT. I’ve never shared one of my outlines before.

Enjoy the outline for HARD TO KILL — you’ll get a glimpse into the development of one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written, Jane “Effing” Smith. It starts with the note I wrote my editor, Denise. Happy reading.

Denise,
Here’s the outline for Book II of Jane Effing Smith.
It’s not on contract but I thought you should take a peek.
I think it’s effing good. 
—Jim

---

 Hard to Kill — Outline

1.) I am sitting at home, trying and failing not to feel sorry for myself, when Jimmy Cunniff tells me we’re going to take a ride. It’s another day of feeling tired and weak and shitty, by the way.

Kind of my thing now.

They say you “practice” law.

Feeling the way I do most days requires no practice at all.

Two hours later Jimmy and I are standing the front of the crowd outside the Nassau County Supreme Court building, in Mineola.

“Here he comes,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

Then Rob Jacobson, my former client, acquitted by little old me in the case of a lifetime, is being led up the steps, hands cuffed in front of him. Another thousand dollar suit on him. His new million-dollar lawyer, Howie (The Horse) Friedlander, next to him, smiling even more widely than Jacobson, because this is the kind of case Howie has been dreaming about his whole career. Forget about the money’s he’s made. This case is his ticket to the big time if he can win it.

And there is Rob Jacobson, the league leader in being accused of triple homicides. I know mob killers who never stood up twice facing charges like that. As soon as I got him out of one he got arrested and indicted for another one. The Carson family of Garden City. Father, mother, daughter. Stabbed to death before somebody burned down their house with them in it.

Gilding the lily, if you ask me.

Just not the late Lily Carson.

She was the mother in Garden City.

This is the day for his arraignment, Nassau County Supreme Court, Mineola. Jacobson’s last trial had been in Riverhead.

Jacobson had been out on bail until he got indicted for the Carson murders. He’s been at Nassau County Correctional, East Meadow, for the past few months.

Jacobson waves to the onlookers and the media crowd as if he’s on a red carpet.

Then he spots Jimmy and me.

“Janie,” he calls out to me. “You shouldn’t have.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have.”

He stops. Howie Friedlander doesn’t notice and keeps going.

“Come on,” Jacobson says. “Admit that you’ve missed me.”

I smile and hold up my wrists, as if I’m in cuffs the way he is.

“Not my thing, Rob.”

He keeps going.

Jimmy says. “Guy’s a psychopath.”

“Only when you can settle him down.”

“You think he might have been set up?”

“On two triple homicide? What are the odds?”

“All he’s done is switched counties,” Jimmy says.

“He’s touring,” I say. “Like the Ice Capades.”

“But do you think he got set up?”

I don’t tell Jimmy. But I think about it all the time.

Like Rob Jacobson had might have somehow gotten out-psychopath-ed.

2.) Once Jacobson has called me out, and before he disappears inside, the media is all over me.

“Do you think he did it, Jane?” somebody calls out from the scrum.

“Gentlemen,” I say, “and ladies. Pay close attention because you will never hear me say this again: No comment.”

“Who are you,” somebody else yells out, “and what have you done with Jane Smith?” “Did you hear what Kevin Ahearn said?” a woman’s voice yells out.

The current D.A. in Nassau County has decided to run for the State Senate. So they have brought in the Suffolk D.A., Ahearn, my opponent in Jacobson’s first murder trial, to prosecute Jacobson a second time.

I know what he said because I’d seen him say it the night before all over Cable America. He told the world that justice delayed in Jacobson’s case was not going to be justice denied, that the case wasn’t just going to be a slam dunk, it was going to be one of those dunks where the dunk shattered the damn backboard.

“Come on, Jane, you must have a comment about that,” the woman reporter says, standing next to her cameraman.

I grin. It was like Jimmy always said about both of us: I was no good and could prove it.

“Kevin is too short to dunk,” I say.

Jimmy and I get back into his car and begin the drive back to East Hampton.

“You miss it?” he says when we’re back on the LIE.

“Not even a little bit,” I lie.

But I do tell him that for a few minutes back at the courthouse, the media around me, I didn’t feel like Cancer Jane, the one on what I call the Stage Four Diet, on my way Out East to see my doctor.

I had, if briefly, felt like Jane Effing Smith again.

3.)  Dr. Sam Wiley isn’t just my doctor. She’s my friend. My latest test results are spread out on the desk in front of her.

A scene that has played out before.

Sam Wiley has come to believe that I’m trying to kill her, even as she’s trying to keep me alive.

I’ve now gone through my first round of chemo. Don’t ask.

“The good news is that your numbers haven’t gotten any worse,” she says.

“We’re going to do good news, bad news,” I say. “Seriously?”

She ignores me. She’s getting better and better at it.

“The bad news is that they haven’t gotten any better, as I’d hoped they’d might.”

“You know what they say about statistics, doc. You torture them long enough, you can make them say whatever you want them to.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Jane. You know what Bill Parcells used to say.”

She is a Giants fan, poor thing, born and raised, permanently in her DNA. I’m Jets.

“You are what your record says you are,” Dr. Sam Wiley tells me.

She says that she trusts our new team: Her, oncologist, immunologist.

“I’ve never been much of a team player.”

“Jane, listen to me,” Sam Wiley says. “There’s still a chance you can beat this, if you will listen to somebody – me – and focus your energy on getting better.”

“How much energy?”

“How about we go with one hundred and ten percent?”

“When I was playing hockey, I always thought that expression was a load of crap.”

“In your case, with your disease, it beats the hell out of the alternative, doesn’t it?”

I tell her that she’s got me there.

“Do you want to live, or not?” she says.

“I want to live.”

I don’t add what I want to, because there’s no point.

On my own terms.

4.) Jimmy has waited for Jane in the car. He promised her she wasn’t going to go through this alone, and he’s kept the promise. She keeps reminding him that she isn’t alone, she has Dr. Ben Kalinsky, the love of her life, and Rip the dog.

Other love of her life.

She and Ben have been exclusive for going on three months now. Jimmy knows it’s a personal best for Hane, at least since her second divorce. But all it really means is that she hasn’t screwed it up.

Yet.

When she is back in the car Jimmy asks how it went.

Jane smiles at him, and in that moment it’s as if the bad shit has washed away, even though they both know it hasn’t. Jimmy has never loved her in that way. Just like a sister. Or the best friend he’s ever had in his life. Or both. Like he’d take a bullet for her, after taking a couple when they’d been repping Rob Jacobson when he was up for Triple Homicide No. 1.

Or he’d take cancer of the neck and head for her, in a heartbeat. Really.

“Same old, same old,” she says. “Live fast, die young, leave cute undies.”

“Not exactly the way we said it when I was growing up,” Jimmy tells her.

“How did it go, really?”

“Sam says I’m getting better.”

He has a feeling she’s lying. She lies a lot, mostly about how she’s feeling. But he lets it go.

He pulls out of the parking lot and gets over to Route 27 and heads east.

No reason in the world for him to notice the car that’s pulled out behind him.

5.) When I get home to my little dream house just over the East Hampton/Amagansett line, Dr. Ben Kalinsky and Rip the dog are waiting for me. Rip, a stray I’d taken in, was supposed to be well past his sell-by date, but has turned out to be as stubborn as I am, if not nearly as ornery.

He doesn’t know that he’s going to be moving in with Ben for a while.

Need to know.

“Where were you all afternoon?” Ben Kalinsky says. “I called you a couple of times.”

I told him about our trip to Mineola.

“Gee,” he says, “that sounds like tons of fun.”

“Made me feel pretty, seeing him in handcuffs again. Does that wound a little weird?”

“Just a little?”

He kisses me while Rip is jumping up on us.

“You look beautiful,” he says.

“Do you lie that way to the owners of the pets you treat?”

He’s a vet, the best one on the South Fork of Eastern Long Island, or maybe anywhere.

“Constantly,” he says.

He says he’s cooking. I tell him I’ll let him. I tell him Sam says I can have one glass of wine tonight. He breaks open a cabernet I’ve been saving. Train Wreck. Still a red to fit my life like a glove.

We sit on the couch, and walk some of the coverage of Jacboson coming out of the courtroom after putting his not-guilty plea into the official record. I finally get up and shut it off and tell Dr. Ben he needs to excuse me.

“Think I might be sick.”

“The wine?” he asks.

“Coming down with something.”

6.) In the morning, Rob Jacobson calls from Nassau County Correctional in East Meadow, and says he needs to see me.

“No,” I say.

Then I tell him I want to amend that. “Fuck no.”

“Come on, Janie, you owe me.”

“No, I don’t.

“What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

“Refer to earlier answer.”

“I just need twenty minutes.”

Acting against my better judgment — something that happens with increasing and almost troubling frequency as I get older — I tell him that I’ll make the drive to East Meadow, and get there when I get there.

I’m glad to be alone in the car. Glad to be alone, period, even if when I get to the jail, and am in another visitors room with Rob Jacobson, it will be the first time we’ve been alone together since I’d shot the guy he called Uncle Joe. Joe Champi.

Right after Champi winged Dr. Ben.

Before Champi died he came clear, mostly about Rob Jacobson being a psychopath, all the way back to when Rob was growing up rich in Manhattan with what Champi called his psychopath friends.

Good times.

After he’d gotten arrested for the murders of the Carsons of Garden City, he told me he didn’t kill those people. I told him I wished I had a Ben Franklin for every time I’d heard that one from him.

When we are seated across the table from each other, Jacobson’s wrists uncuffed – I tell the guard not to worry, I could take Rob in a fair fight if it comes to that – Rob Jacobson reminds me what a good team he thinks we are.

“We were never a team, dumb ass. There was you. And then there was me. And I still don’t know whether you did it.”

“And I’m still telling you that I was set up.”

I brighten. “Tell it to a new judge!”

“We’re still undefeated,” Jacobson says.

“How many times do we need to go over this? There’s no we. There never was.”

“You still got an acquittal.”

“Because I’m the best.”

He smiles.

“I want you to be the best again,” he says.

I can’t help myself.

I laugh.

“Oh, wait,” I say. “You’re serious.”

He grins. “As serious as that heart attack I faked that time in court to get your sister to shut up.”

Brigid. Rob’s former lover. Also a cancer patient. Some families have all the luck.

“The answer is no,” I say.

“You didn’t use the f-word this time. I’ll take that as progress.”

“I wouldn’t.”

I stand.

“But if you actually thought you could talk me into representing you again, tell Howie the Horse I’ve got his defense for him.” I give him Jacobson my biggest and best smile. “Insanity.”

On my way out the door, he calls out, “You’ll be back.”

I can’t help myself again.

I don’t laugh this time.

But without turning around, I give him the finger.

7.) We’re at Jimmy’s bar, corner of Main Street in Sag Harbor, later.

I’m telling him about my meeting with Jacobson.

“You swear you told him no.”

“I told him no.”

“And meant it, right?”

“Absolutely!” I say.

“Oh shit.”

Tonight I’m risking a beer. So far, so good. Like the old Jane. Just different. But at least no throwing up.

“What?” I’m trying to sound innocent.

We’re at the bar. I made him turn off the Yankees and put on the Mets. My team. He asks why and I lower my voice and say, “I do have cancer.”

“You’re playing the cancer card? Over baseball?”

“Girl’s gotta do.”

“Are you actually considering that?”

“I am, can’t lie.”

He snorts. “You lie frequently.”

And then we go all over it. The murder trial. Champi trying to murder Jimmy, and then me. After he murdered Jimmy’s old partner. And the Nassau County district attorney, not that we could ever prove it.

That’s the short list of bad shit Joe Champi did.

Along the way, Jimmy did get shot.

Twice.

“After all that, guess what?” I say. “The murder of the Gates family was never solved to either of our satisfaction, whatever the jury said. And guess what else? They might never solve the murder of the Carsons, even if Champi said that Jacobson did it. Or had it done. Either way.”

“Not our problem.”

“Isn’t it?” I say. “You know what both of us hate?”

“Rob Jacobson?”

“We hate not knowing,” I say. “And we really hate loose ends.”

He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. I watch Francisco Lindor hit a ball into the right field corner and run like the wind all the way to third base.

“Don’t you want to know if Jacobson did it or not?”

“After all this time,” Jimmy says, “you’re telling me that you think Joe Champi lied to us?”

“Why the hell not, Jimmy? Everybody else did.”

Before I leave the bar I ask Jimmy if he can watch Rip for a couple of weeks.

“Where are you going?”

“Long overdue vacation,” I lie.

8.) Beautiful night, South Fork, eastern Long Island. Kind that reminds why you wanted to live here in the first place. September, my favorite month. But I’m about to give away the back end of it, the part I especially love after Labor Day away.

     So I don’t drive straight home from Jimmy’s bar. I keep going past Amagansett and all the way to Montauk.

     I pull up in the parking lot at the Montauk Marine Basin and walk to the end of one of the docks, with just a little daylight left. Fishing boats all around me.

     Where they brought back Nick Morelli’s boat during Rob Jacobson’s trial, just without Nick on it.

     Body never found.

     My star witness until he wasn’t.

     I stand there for a long time, starting out at the water.

     A voice behind me says, “You okay, lady?”

     I turned around. Tall kid, long hair coming out from behind an ancient trucker’s hat.

     I want to say, “Okay relative to what?”

     But I don’t.

     “Fine,” I say.

     “You looking for something?”

     “At,” I say. “Looking at something.”

     “Mind if I ask what?”

     “A loose end,” I say, and turn and walk back to my car.

9.) Jimmy has told me he can’t take Rip, he plans to be spending some time in the city while I’m away.

     “I could find out where you’re going if I wanted,” Jimmy says.

     “I know you could. But I’m asking you not to.”

     “Jane, you have to tell Ben. He probably knows already. He’s not an idiot.”

     “He’s with me, isn’t he?”

     “I don’t want you to worry,” I tell Jimmy.

     “Yeah, good call. That will never happen.”

     My sister Brigid drives me to Kennedy Airport. Her cancer is in remission, the lucky duck. And things are better now between us, after some moments during Rob Jacobson’s trial that turned into actual train wrecks.

     “Does Dr. Wiley know you’re doing this?” Brigid asks before she drops me off.

     This. The same expensive cancer clinic near Geneva where she’d been a patient. It had worked wonders for her, an experimental treatment involving drugs not yet approved in the United States. But considered Over There to be the best treatment money could buy. And I could afford it after what Rob Jacobson had paid me for keeping him away from a life sentence.

     “Sam knows. She approved, actually.”

     “Rob Jacobson says he asked you to represent him again, but that you turned him down.”

     “I actually thought about waiting a couple of hours and calling him and then turning him down again.”

     “He says he’s innocent.”

     “That’s what he always says.”

     “He’s a good person.”

     “Sure he is, sis. And we’re both cancer free.”

     We’re standing on the sidewalk. The guy moving the drop-off cars in and out is giving her the stink eye.

     “If I can beat this, so can you,” Brigid says, and hugs me.

     “I just wanted a ride to the airport, not a pep talk,” I say.

     Then I hug her again, harder this time.

     “Just remember something,” she whispers to me.

     “And what is that?”

     “You’re Jane Smith.”

     She’s still the good girl. Doesn’t even use fake swear words.

10.) Jimmy lied to Jane. He knows exactly where she’s going and why she’s going, he just doesn’t know how long she’ll be away. Or if going all the way to the other side of the world will help any more than the medicine and treatment in the good old US of A.

     When he knows her plane is in the air, he is back at the end of the bar, not having to watch the hated Mets tonight. He is working on his first beer and restless as hell, has been restless since he and Jane were together here last night.

     Talking about what they have talked about off and on for months.

     Loose goddamn ends.

     So many of them that Jimmy’s brain is starting to fill as if it’s got loose change rattling around inside it.

     But there is only one question that trumps all the others, and has even before Jacobson beat the rap:

     Is he a killer?

     Because if he’s not, it means that the real killer, of the Gates family and maybe the Carsons of Garden City, is running around a free man.

     Or woman.

     Did Jacobson kill them all?

     Did he even kill his old man and an ex-girlfriend when he was a teenager?

     He sure acted like he might have.

     Or was it somebody else?

     The questions don’t just make Jimmy Cunniff, ex-NYPD, restless.

     He’d say they’ve been eating away at his soul for months, if he was sure he actually had one. A soul. Jane said he did. But she saw the best in just about everybody except herself.

11.) Jimmy has decided to go back to the beginning, the death of Jacobson’s father and the teenaged girl who they called his mistress, just because it made for a much better story for the tabloids:

     Publisher and Lolita in gruesome murder suicide.

     Jimmy has been working the NYPD contacts he still has, guys who were on the job at the time, and one name that keeps coming up is Edmund McKenzie, a classmate of Jacobson’s. It turns out that young Edmund had also dated the dead girl, Carey Watson, before Rob Jacobson did.

     It makes Edmund McKenzie another loose end.

     McKenzie comes from bigger money than Jacobson did. Hedge fund money. That kind. Has been living off it ever since, as if his primary residence is Page Six of the New York Post. But no matter how much money he’s got, the more Jimmy looks into the life and times of Edmund McKenzie, he comes across as just another rich kid who’d been getting away with things – a rape that got buried when he was in prep school, bar fights, DUI – his whole life.

     So a violent rich kid.

     “A career punk,” is the way one of Jimmy’s old friends in the department, Det. Craig Jackson, describes McKenzie. He and Jimmy are talking about him in the back room at P.J. Clarke’s, the saloon at 55^th and Third that Jimmy is convinced would survived a nuclear attack. Jimmy has laid out everything he’s learned about McKenzie. Jackson has told him everything he can remember about him.

     “The prevailing wisdom at the time, even though nobody could prove it,” Jackson tells Jimmy, “is that McKenzie might have been covering for the Jacobson kid the day Jacobson’s old man and the girl died.”

     Jimmy grins.

     “Unless the Jacobson kid was covering for him. Another way of looking at things.”

     “Always remember,” Jackson says, “that the first cop on the scene that day was Joe Champi, now deceased.”

     “Because Janie shot him before he could shoot her,” Jimmy says.

     “So maybe Champi covered for both of them,” Jackson says.

     Before they leave Clarke’s, Jimmy asks Craig Jackson where he might look for Edmund McKenzie.

     “I’d start with the gutter,” Jackson says, “and then work my way uptown from there.”

12.) Jimmy makes a few calls and finds him at Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle. McKenzie is seated alone at a corner booth. Jimmy seems him looking at his phone as he walks in, then at both entrances. Looking the part of aging frat boy, right up to the hair dyed dark brown.

     There is a highball glass in front of him, full. Either scotch or bourbon with ice.

     Jimmy sits down.

     “I’m waiting for someone,” McKenzie says.

     “I’m a cop.”

     “Can I see a badge?”

     Jimmy smiles at him. “Can I see you empty your pockets first just to make sure you’re not carrying recreational drugs?”

     McKenzie drinks some of his drink.

     “What’s this about?”

     “Rob Jacobson.”

     McKenzie laughs. “Guy’s killer,” he says. “Get it.”

     “You went to high school together.”

     “Yeah, then prep school for a year after we needed to get out of Dodge after his old man got his brains blown out. Man, those were the days. Robbie and I were close until we weren’t.”

     “What happened?”

     “What happened? He let me go down for a rape he committed after I went home one night, is what happened.”

     Jimmy didn’t want to crowd him, at least not yet.

     “Let’s back up. The cops always felt you knew more about what happened that day with his father and Carey than you let on.”

     “The cops didn’t know shit about what happened that day,” McKenzie says.

     He’s more lit than he’d first let on. Not his first drink in front of him.

     “What did they get wrong?”

     McKenzie grins. “Maybe we walked in on his old man and the little hottie in bed that day. Maybe Robbie went and got his old man’s gun and put one in the side of his head and then shot her, adios.” Still grinning. “I’m just speculating here, of course.”

     “She was your girlfriend first. Maybe you knew where the gun was. Maybe you’re the one who shot them and you just want me to think he did them.”

     “Or maybe we both just liked to watch, until one of us got bored.”

     “If that’s the way it went down, why’d you cover for Rob?”

     “He was my friend.” McKenzie finishes his drink. “Like I said, until he basically framed me for rape he knew I didn’t commit.”

     “You ever think about getting even with him for that?” Jimmy asks. “Framing him for something he didn’t do?”

     “Wow,” Edmund McKenzie says. “Wouldn’t that be a hell of a plot twist.”

     A young woman about half McKenzie’s age, if that, is now standing over their table.

     “Tell you one thing about guys like Robbie and me, though,” he says to Jimmy. “Still no convictions. Am I right?”

     He smiles brilliantly as Jimmy.

     “Now beat it,” he says to Jimmy Cunniff.

     Jimmy has a fistful of McKenzie’s shirt before the guy knows what’s happening, pulling him up out of his chair and nearly over the table. The young woman wearing hardly any clothes makes a mouse sound.

     “Hell, Ed,” Jimmy says to McKenzie. “You didn’t need to get up on my account.”

     Their faces are very close.

     “I’ll have your badge,” McKenzie says.

     Jimmy lets him go.

     “Only if you can find it,” he says.

     He nods at the girl.

     “Remember it’s a school night,” he says.

13.) I’m in my fifth day at the Ludwig Clinic. The view outside my window remains spectacular.

     The good news is that I’ve felt a little less sick with because of the regimen of chemo and the immuno drugs they have me on with each passing day.

     A little less tired.

     A little less woozy and daytime-drunk, if you want to know the truth.

     But the bad news – now I’m the one doing good news, bad news, not my doctor – is that I feel as if nausea, in whatever degree, is now my permanent state.

     ‘Till death do us part.

     Not while they have the needle in my arm, for hours at a time. I tell myself I’m going to read, or listen to a book on tape, but find out quite quickly that I am finally lying to myself.

     Not to get too technical or deep into the weeks, but this shit has now gotten real.

     That means a lot more real than it was back at Southampton Hospital, the first time the needle went into my arm.

     The Ludwig Institute is supposed to be worldwide leader in this combination of drugs and chemo, as my sister Brigid had already informed me. They’re supposed to be a couple of steps ahead on decreasing the side effects of the treatment while still maintaining good cure rates.

     That’s the plan, anyway.

     I still feel like shit, every single day. And while I try to be good, I frequently am failing miserably.

     One day, just to mess with the woman I think of as Nurse Ratchet, I pour my apple juice into the cup for my urine sample cup. I am tired of her coming in every day and asking how “we’re” doing.

     There’s no we, lady.

     Just me.

     When Nurse Ratchet comes back into my room, she holds the sample cup up to the light and says, “Well, we look a little cloudy today.”

     “You know, you’re right,” I say.

     I grab the cup back from her and drink it down, to her complete horror, and say, “Maybe we better run it through again.”

     I refuse to tell her, or my doctors, the kind of pain I’m in, every single night. Decreasing side effects, my ass.

     I know I’m a pain in the ass.

     But I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m fighting in a way that would have made my father proud. And my mother, who never complained for a single minute when she was the one dying of cancer.

     Only I refuse to admit I’m dying.

     I’m here, looking at a bunch of Alps, on the other side of the world from Jimmy and Ben and Rip, because I want to live.

     So badly.

     I never let them see me cry, either.

     One day my doctor says, “It’s all right to admit you’re sick, Jane.”

     “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “Did I not check the ‘sick’ box when you checked me in? Am I not throwing up every day around tea time? Would you prefer I do it in your office today instead of back in my luxurious suite?”

     “We are all in this together, Jane,” he says.

     We again.

     It’s in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, when I’m too bone tired to even get out of bed, when I do my crying. I want to reach over and have Ben next to me. I want Rip sleeping next to my bed.

     Then I want to be back with Jimmy in my seat at the corner of the bar and watching baseball.

     I’m not ready, I’ve said to myself a thousand times.

     Not when I might actually be in love, the real thing, for the first time in my life.

     Not when I’m going this good as a lawyer, I tell myself.

     Tonight, when I’ve stopped crying, I feel myself smiling at the ceiling.

     Out loud I say, “Eff cancer.”

14.) Jimmy stays in the city for a couple of days. He’s been calling Jane every day in Switzerland until she tells him she’s considering getting a restraining order.

     “How are you feeling, really?” he says the last time they talk.

     “I’ll get back to you after I throw up,” she says.

     Then hangs up.

     He has come to the city looking to find out even more this time around than he did the first time around on Rob Jacobson, spoiled little rich boy, a mouse who grew up to be a rat. Only now he’s looking into Edmund McKenzie.

     He gets a call from another old friend at the NYPD – none of whom did him much good when he was getting kicked to the curb, as he recalls – and tells him that while it didn’t get much burn at the time, McKenzie had been a POI, person of interest, in another murder investigation ten years ago.

     Mother and daughter, found shot to death on the Upper West Side. Jimmy vaguely remembers it, and not paying much attention to it at the time, it only got a run of about three days on the front page of the New York Post.

     The cop who calls him is Det. John Malloy, who’d briefly been Jimmy’s partner back in the day, before Mickey Dunne.

     “It turned out that McKenzie had a solid alibi,” Malloy says. “Or bought one at the alibi store.”

     “What was the connection to the dead women?”

     “Woman. The mother, April Cosgrove. Maiden name Chen. He went to high school with her.”

     “April Chen,” Jimmy says.

     “Before she became Mrs. Cosgrove. Right.”

     Jimmy gets back to his hotel room, and knows why he remembers that name. April Chen was one of the girls in the beach picture Jimmy had found at Mickey Dunne’s apartment.

     He calls the jail in East Meadow, and leaves a message for Jacobson. An hour later, he gets a call-back.

     “Don’t tell me,” Jacobson says. “Being a big-picture guy, you’ve talked Jane into defending me.”

     “Nah, I’m actually a small-picture guy. Can only see the size of a jail cell. I probably need new glasses.”

     “You’ll both come around.”

     “Sure, go with that,” Jimmy says. “Who’s April Chen?”

     “The late April Chen, you mean?”

     “Her.”

     “I went to high school with her.”

     “She got any connection to your old pal, Edmund McKenzie?”

     “As a matter of fact,” Jacobson says, “he took her to the prom.”

15.) I arrive back on eastern Long Island from Switzerland. My cover story with Ben was that I just wanted to go to places where nobody cared about Rob Jacobson or me. Just be alone. Decompress. Do the Harrod’s sale. Take a train to Edinburg and do all that Mary Queen of Scots stuff. No set itinerary other than flying to Heathrow and flying back from there.

     Telling myself that when I came back I’d find the right moment to tell him about the cancer, I’d have to, wearing wigs now, the hair had finally lost the battle.

     Even knowing that when the right moment finally came along, I was going to need all of my defense-lawyer skills to defend myself, and explain to him why I didn’t tell him sooner.

     After I clear Customs and collect my bags, walk out to get into Sunny’s Limousine, wearing the new black leather jacket I had bought, for a ridiculous amount of money, when I did stop in London on the way home.

     And one of the spectacular new wigs I’d bought along with it.

     If I’m going, I’m going in style.

     Or maybe I should say when.

     Not if.

16. I land early in the afternoon. I call Jimmy. He says he’s on his way back to the city. I tell him to wave if he passes my town car on the LIE, and that I expect him to meet me at his bar.

     He’s there waiting when I get there.

     “Are you still allowed to drink?” Jimmy says after we hug it out.

     “I have a photo ID and everything.”

     We drink beers at the end of the bar. I’d told myself that when I left the clinic I was swearing off crying. But I almost want to cry now, I’m so happy to be home. Home in the U.S. Home on Long Island. Home to Jimmy, and Dr. Ben.

     And Rip, the dog.

     Almost makes me feel normal.

     The old normal.

     The cancer-free one.

     That normal.

     When it’s time to go home, because jet lag has started to kick the crap out of me, Jimmy says he’ll pick me up in the morning and treat me to breakfast at a place of my choosing Estia’s in Sag Harbor. Candy Kitchen. John Papa’s in East.

     “I have to be someplace in the morning,” I say.

     “Where?”

     “Trust me, you won’t approve.”

     “Why am I the one suddenly feeling sick?” Jimmy says.

17.) At eight the next morning I am on way to court in Mineola. It’s because I am now Rob Jacobson’s attorney of record once again. I told him I’d do it before I left Switzerland on the condition that I got to announce, and not him.

     “Please can I?” he said.

     “If I read it, hear it, see it tweeted or Tik Tok-ed or Instagrammed, I’m out,” I’d told him. “And you are completely screwed.”

     “We’ve gone over this. I’m innocent.”

     I hadn’t laughed much in Switzerland. I laughed then.

     “How’s being innocent working out for you, Rob?”

     Jimmy had convinced me to start using Instagram, just in case we wanted to use it to drum up business, if I was ever well enough again to want to get back in the game.

     I wasn’t now.

     But I was about to be back in the game.

     There’s an old AA line about being sick and tired of being sick and tired.

     I’m sick and tired of waiting to die, and feeling as if the treatments I’m getting to keep me alive are killing me.

     I always loved the way Michael Jordan, in the world before social media, had announced that he was coming out of retirement the first time with the Bulls.

     I’m back.

     That was the entire statement. He played the next day in Indianapolis.

     I figured out, all by myself, like a big girl, how to post a picture of Rob Jacobson and me on the courthouse steps in Riverhead after his acquittal.

     Along with it, I was the one writing, “I’m back.”

     By the time I get to Mineola, a huge media crowd is waiting for me.

     Mommy’s home, I think as I walk toward them.

     Rocking the black leather jacket.

     Overnight, Rob has fired Howie the Horse, I’ve contacted the judge, telling them I’m entitled to have the court revisit the subject of bail. That’s why a ten o’clock bail hearing has been set.

     As I’d walked into the courtroom, Kevin Ahearn had looked at me and said, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

     I smiled at him.

     “I’m too much of a lady to tell you which one of us ought to be doing that.”

     When it is my turn to get in front of Judge Harrison Barnwell, a former pro football player, there’s only one way to properly describe what happens then.

     I kill it.

     No notes. Hardly any prep time the night before, I’m too effing tired. But I talk about what an innocent man has already gone through with one trial, I talk about how he’s about to face another one, and it would be cruel to put him back in another cell until the trial date is officially set.

     When I finish Judge Barnwell, dark skin set off nicely by snow white hair, swings his gavel hard and sets bail at five million dollars. It’s a lot. Rob Jacobson is about to stay something until I put my hand on his arm, and discover that my grip is as strong as it ever was.

     “Shut up,” I say. “And pay the man.”

18.) Jacobson, now free on bail, free as you can be wearing an ankle monitor right above the English shoes he’s always bragging about, says he wants a quick conference.

     “Love what you’re doing with your hair,” he says when we’re alone in a conference room. Just the two of us in one of those rooms. Like old times.

     Before I can come up with an even passable lie he says, “I know, Janie. I’ve known for a while.”

     “What a lucky boy.”

     “I guess the Big C really does run in your family.”

     I shake my head. “Why do I even need to pay Jimmy Cunniff  when I’m the one getting paid by someone with your detecting skills.”

     “Gotta ask again, Janie. Did you miss me?”

     “Like monthly cramps.”

     “Oh, one other thing, in case you haven’t talked to her,” he says. “Brigid and I are seeing each other again.”

     “Now, you tell me, you sonofabitch,” I say. “After I get your bail.”

19.) When I’m done doing stand-up for the media, feeling as if I have all my old moves back, I walk down the steps to where I’d parked my car.

     There is a good-looking guy, looking to be about Rob Jacobson’s age, leaning against my car.

     “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he says. “My name is Edmund McKenzie.”

     I brighten, and shake his hand.

     “So nice to meet you, Edmund. I believe you already know my investigator, Jimmy Cunniff. He wanted to smack the shit out of you.”

     McKenzie’s smile holds, as if he hasn’t paid attention to a word I’d said. Maybe he’s the same as Rob Jacobson. He just waits until you’ve stopped talking so he can start.

     Isn’t it rich, I think. Him and Rob. Aren’t they a pair.

     “I just came out to ask you to do me a favor,” McKenzie says. “See that Robby gets sent away this time.”

     Now he doesn’t wait for me to start talking.

     “Oh, I forgot,” he says. “You’re the asshole defending him again.”

     He smiles, like he’s still posing as homecoming king.

     “Have a nice day,” he says. “I’m almost sure we’ll run into each other again.”

     What was that all about? I think as I watch him get into his Porsche.

     As he is about to drive past me, he stops, rolls down the window.

     “Let the games begin,” he says, and drives away, gunning the engine for effect.

     It has the desired effect.

     I think: Wait, he called me an asshole?

20.) Jimmy has finished reading Jane the riot act for taking the case without even running it behind him. She has patiently explained, once he agrees to finally lower his voice, that it is a way of living a life and not some kind of apology.

     “At least you didn’t say your best life,” Jimmy says. “Or that you’re just being you.”

     “You were already angry enough, I chose not to antagonize you further by sounding like an idiot.”

     “More of an idiot, you mean.”

     “I have to do this, Jimmy. And if I’m doing it, you’re doing it.”

     “No i in team, remember.”

     “One in Jane Smith.”

     “Two in Jimmy Cunniff.”

     Then he says, “I’m in if you are, kid.”

     “Thank you.”

     “You only have to do one thing in return.”

     “What’s that?”

     “Come clean with Dr. Ben.”
     “Tonight,” he says. “Out of time, at least on that.”

     He takes his seat at the end of the bar, wanting to make it an early night. He hasn’t admitted it to Jane, but he’s ready to go back to work. But he’s been back to work while she was in Switzerland, even without officially having a client or a case.

     The phone behind the bar rings. Kenny Stanton, his best bartender, answers it.

     “For you,” he says.

     “Who’s calling?”

     “Who’s calling?” Kenny asks.

     Covers the mouthpiece with his hand.

     “He says it’s a friend, you just don’t know it yet.”

     Jimmy motions for him to hand over the phone.

     “Jimmy,” Edmund McKenzie says, “can’t tell you what a thrill it was to meet Jane, having read so much about her. If you talk to her, tell her that even though her hair was a little crooked, if you know what I mean, I’d do her in a heartbeat.”

     “Since you know where I am,” Jimmy says, “why don’t you come over here and say that to my face.”

     “I was just trying to pay her a compliment,” McKenzie says. “Just pass along that when the time comes, the wig won’t be a deal breaker.”

     Jimmy doesn’t say anything.

     “Oh, and Jimmy,” he says. “You ever wonder if a genius, I mean, a real honest-to-shit genius who knew what he was doing could have set Rob Jacobson up?”

     Before Jimmy can answer McKenzie says, “I meant to say, set him up twice.”

     “What are you saying to me?”

     “I’m just saying that sometimes things aren’t what they appear.”

21.) Tonight is the night I tell Ben the truth about my cancer, my prognosis, what I’ve encountered in treatment already, and how it’s probably only going to get worse.

     What I really need to tell him is that without knowing it, he’s placed a bet on the wrong horse.

     Or horse’s ass, as the case may be.

     I try out a couple of the new wigs before he arrives, looking for the one whose color is close enough to what mine used to be and – God willing – will be again.

     I had thought about looking good, but not too good.

     Not trying too hard.

     Screw it.

     I decide I am going to try my ass off to glam myself up. A black dress I bought when I bought the black leather jacket at Harrod’s. Black being my color of choice. Wonder why?

     He brings a salad he put together at home, and two steaks he is going to grill on the back patio. He’s trusting me with some French fries.

     First I tell him we’re going to sit and have a glass of wine.

     He’s brought his own favorite cab, too. Quilt. It’s now one of my favorites, because of Dr. Ben.

     “What shall we drink to?” he says.

     “I’ve got cancer,” I say.

     He smiles. “I’ve heard better toasts, but let’s go with it.”

     “Did you hear me?”

     “I know you have cancer, Jane. I’ve known for a while. I was just waiting for you to tell me when you were ready to tell me.”

     “Who told you? Brigid?”

     “No, it wasn’t your sister. And, no, it doesn’t matter how I know. Just that I do know. And what you need to know is that it doesn’t change anything between us, at least not for me.”

     Then he takes my wine glass and sets it down on the coffee table and sets his own glass down and kisses me.

     Smiles again. Ben Kalinsky’s smile gets me every time. One for every occasion.

     “Let’s eat,” he says. “All this cancer talk sure does make a man hungry.”

     “You really want to eat right now?” I say.

     “I could wait.”

     Then I kiss him and we head for the bedroom.

     As soon as we’re inside, Ben closes the door before Rip the dog can follow us inside. “I thought dogs are man’s best friend?”

     “Not this man,” Ben says. “At least not at this exact moment.”

     “You dog,” I say.”

22.) When we’re in bed, and before I can stop him, he reaches over and removes the wig and gently kisses the top of my head.

     And keeps kissing it.

     “I thought we should get that off the table now,” he says.

     And then neither one of us says anything for quite a long time.

23.) I used to say that I would be willing to fake my own death to get out of doing something I didn’t want to do.

     For the record? I no longer say that.

     But I’m thinking it as Ben and Jimmy and I attend the Friends of the Jermain Library in Sag Harbor the next night. Somehow, against all odds, an old girlfriend of Jimmy’s convinced him to join the board when she was on it. She was no longer his girlfriend. Jimmy was still on the board. This was their big fundraiser for the year, one of the social events of the season in Sag Harbor, the event held at the auditorium at the Pearson School. And as I look around the room, it’s like a Who’s Who from Rob Jacobson’s murder trial.

     Rob is in attendance. So is his wife, but as far away from him as physically possible. If Claire Jacobson takes another step back I’m almost certain she is going to cross over the line and officially be in East Hampton.

     Otis Miller is here with his boyfriend. The same Otis Miller I’d managed to out during the trial. Rob Jacobson’s former friend, and Claire Jacobson’s one-time lover, Gus Hennessy, is over to my right with the woman who is somehow still his wife, the one Jimmy calls What’s-Her-Name.

     “Gus must have lost a bet,” Jimmy says.

     “I feel like I did,” I say.

     “The gang’s all here,” Ben Kalinsky says.

     “The Westies were a nicer gang than this,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

     I look around at all the familiar faces and say, “It’s like a Kardashian family reunion.”

     “At least the Kardashians get paid,” Jimmy says.

     He tells me that Elise Parsons, who outlived her elderly robber-baron husband, is not only the chairwoman for this event, she and Rob Jacobson have been an item, on and off, for years.

     “Was he already married to Claire at the time?” I ask Jimmy.

     “They both were married, the way I remember it.”

     “How did it end?”

     “Badly. But at least nobody shot anybody.”

     Right before we’re about to leave and I’m about to make a clean getaway, Elise Parson spots me. She’s the whole package: Hair, makeup, not a bad body, Botox, enough jewelry to have her own wing at Tiffany. She must have been a knockout back in the day. I just can’t imagine when that day was.

     “Well,” she says to me, “I see the bitch is back. At least back in business.”

     “Nice to see you, too, Elise.”

     “I don’t know how you have the nerve to show up here,” she says. “Or he does.” She points across the room at Rob Jacobson.

     “I’m here with the tour.”

     “You’re going to defend that scumbag again?” she says. “How much of a whore are you?”

     And then she hauls off and slaps me. I was about to tell her she hit like a girl before she tried to do it again. This time I grab her wrist before she gets anywhere near my face.

     I lean close, smiling, squeezing her wrist as hard as I can, keeping my voice as low as possible now that we’ve probably become the cover of tomorrow’s Post if one of the photographers swarming the room had been alert. “Elise, if you try to do that again I your face is going to need more than filler.”

     As I turn to go, here comes her daughter.

     Also named Elise.

     My life is too short to ask why.

     The Gatsby guy was right, though. The rich are different from you and me.

     She is a younger, prettier version of her mother. Who now puts her hand on my shoulder and spins me around.

     “How dare you make a scene, on tonight of all nights?”

     Now I grab her hand, even harder than I’d grabbed her mother, and let go right before I expect to feel some of the small bones in her hand breaking.

     “You ever find yourself in a hockey fight?” I say to Elise Too.

     “A hockey fight? God no.”

     “Want to be in one now?” I say.

     I straighten my dress, and my hair. Then Dr. Ben and I leave.

     “We having any fun yet?” he says on our way out the door.

23.) Ben doesn’t stay the night. Early surgery. I fall into bed when I get home, but he’s nice enough to take Rip for a walk.

     If I wasn’t dying, I swear I’d ask him to marry me.

     Jimmy’s call is what finally wakes me up, a little after seven o’clock.

     “This better be good,” I say, my voice full of sleep.

     “Define good,” he says.

     Then he tells her why he’s calling, where he is.

     “Another mother-daughter act?” I say. “Son of a

bitch!”

     “Not to make too fine a point of things,” Jimmy says. “But one of the vics is the daughter of a bitch.”

     Then Jimmy tells me to meet him at the Parsons house on Georgica Pond.

     “Where is it?”

     “Go to Steven Spielberg’s house and take a left,” Jimmy says.

24.) When I get there, one of the East Hampton cops recognizes me, and lets me under the rope.

     Jimmy is waiting for me in front of the house that Carl Parsons built for his young wife when he was still among us. The cops have let Jimmy through, too. Just about all of them drink at his bar. Priorities.

     “I hope our client has an alibi,” I say to Jimmy, “given his romantic history with mom.”

     “Not just mom.”

     “Oh, shit.”

     “After the big bash, our boy and Elise the elder were seen arguing outside the auditorium.”

     “Here we go again,” I say. “The second trial hasn’t even started yet, and now this.”

     “Janie, there’s more.”

     We walk away from the cops talking on the front porch of a house that reminds me of Tara in Gone With the Wind.

     “There’s more?”

     “About one in the morning, Jacobson is seen getting into a car driven by the daughter when he leaves the bar at the American Hotel.”

     I reach for my phone.

     “I need to talk to him before he does something stupid, even for him.”

     Jimmy takes the phone out of my hand.

     “Janie, there’s even more.”

     My day has turned to shit, and it’s not even eight o’clock.

     “Now that really doesn’t sound good,” I say.

     It isn’t.

     “Jacobson isn’t the only one who needs an alibi.”

     I wait, knowing from experience when Jimmy isn’t finished.

     “They want to talk to you, too.”

     “You’re telling me I’m a suspect?”

     “We both are,” Jimmy Cunniff says. “Because if you are, I am.”

25.) We meet a new cop here. The chief detective on the East Hampton force. New guy. Down from Boston. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. Good-looking. Quiet. Doesn’t look like the other cops. Full of attitude, though. Leather jacket. Jeans. Motorcyle boots. But not to be underestimated, even though Jane doesn’t think he’s as smart as he thinks he is.

     Just because nobody could be as smart as Danny Esposito seems to think he is.

     He walks over to them, grinning.

     Pointing at them.

     “Heard about you,” he says to Jimmy.

     “And you,” he says to Jane, “holy shit, you might be the most famous person I know now.”

     “You have to set the bar higher than me,” she says.

     “Where were you after you left the fundraiser,” he says. “Which means after you wanted to take on what used to be the whole Parsons family.”

     I tell him.

     “What time did your boyfriend leave?” Esposito says.

     “We really gonna do this?” Jane says. “You’re really going to treat me like a suspect?”

     “Honey,” Esposito says. “Everybody in that room is a suspect.”

     Jimmy watches Jane’s face change, and he knows why.

     She smiles at Esposito and says, “You know what I need to do right now, honey?”

     Jimmy’s not sure he’s ever heard “honey” sound that much like a dirty word.

     “I need to place a call to the best lawyer on the planet,” Jane continues.

     She’s still smiling a wicked smile Jimmy knows oh-so-well. ”Oh, wait, Detective Ezkenazi. Never mind. The best lawyer on the planet is me.”

26.) When I’m back in the house, I refocus myself on the facts that we have and the facts that we need for Jacobson’s upcoming trial. For the murders he’s already been charged with in Garden City.

     Phone rings.

     Jimmy.

     “I think I’ve had as much good news as one girl could handle, at least before lunch.”

     “Turn on the television.”

     “Channel?”

     “I’m watching MSNBC.”

     I turn on the set. There, a jungle of microphones in front of him, is Rob Jacobson himself.

     I thought I had time to call him before he actually did something stupid.

     She who hesitates is lost.

     “I was informed today that I am a person of interest in the murders of Elise Parsons and her daughter,” Jacobson is saying. “I just want this on the record….”

     “…..one asked you to go on the record, you jackwagon,” I say to the set.

     “…..that I did not kill those people,” he says. “I have never killed anybody in my life.”

     I point the remote at the set to shut it off.

     “But you are trying to kill your lawyer,” I say, with only Rip the dog to hear me.

27.) Jimmy knows they have time before mounting their latest defense of Rob Jacobson. Jane tells him that for the time being to see what he can come up with on the murder of the two Parsons women, just to ease her mind that they’re not dealing with a potential serial killer in Rob Jacobson.

     Or Edmund McKenzie, another rich creep.

     After they had left the benefit the other night, Jimmy had asked Jane, “Did you happen to see Edmund McKenzie?”

     “No.”

     “I think I did,” Jimmy said in the car.

     “Why was he there?”

     “The sonofabitch is everywhere all of a sudden,” Jimmy said.

     Today Jimmy has spent canvasing the neighborhood where Elise and Elise Parsons lived, door to door, old-school flat-footing, asking if they’d seen anything unusual in the few days before the murders.

     A house just up the block is owned by a feisty, white-haired old woman named Geraldine Healy. Widow. Lives alone. Biggest house on the street, even bigger than the Parsons’.

     “I didn’t see anything,” she tells Jimmy. “But maybe my surveillance cameras did.”

     “You have cameras like that?”

     “Lots,” she says. “Can never take too many precautions on the mean streets of the Hamptons.”

     “You mind if I take a look?”

     “Have at it,” the old lady says. “Wanna drink?”

     Jimmy passes on the drink. Doesn’t stop Mrs. Healy. Jimmy looks at the tapes for a long time.

     Finally he stops.

     Rewinds.

     Two nights before the murder.

     A blue Bentley seems to be cruising the neighborhood. The last time Jimmy saw one like it Rob Jacobson’s wife, Claire, was driving it, having bought one near the end of the trial just to mess with him.

     He checks the plates.

     It’s Claire Jacobson’s car.

     “These aren’t blue bloods out here,” Jimmy says. “They’re crime families.”

     Then he tells her he’s changed his mind, he will have one for the road, just to be sociable.

28.) I tell Jimmy that I’ll be the one to go talk to Claire Jacobson. I’m sure there might be bigger bitches out here. I just haven’t met one so far.

     I imagine little aspiring bitches out there growing up with her poster on their bedroom walls.

     Claire is still a bitch, unapologetically. “Are you lost, Jane?” she says when she opens the door and sees me standing there.

     “We need to talk.”

     As she shows me in she says, “Nice wig.”

     “Nice husband,” I say.

     Somehow things manage to stay on the rails from there. If I didn’t know her better, I’d think that something has her scared.

     “My husband is many things,” she says finally. “I may have mentioned to you once that he has all the qualities of a dog except loyalty. But I’ve decided he could never be a killer.”

     “Have you.”

     “Yes, Jane, I have, as a matter of fact.”

     “Why were you cruising the Parsons house last week?”

     “I suspected that Elise and Rob had resumed their affair, and just wanted to see for myself.”

     “Had they?”

     Claire Jacobson nods.

     “Which Elise?”

     “Funny story,” she says. “Both of them.”

29.) I drive from Rob Jacobson’s old house to his new one, and ask him about his relationships – plural – with the late Elise Parsons and Elise too.

     “It’s true,” he says. Grins. “Buy one, get one free.”

     “Do you have an alibi for the hours before you left the American Hotel and when they died?”

     “You first, Janie.”

     “I do not have an alibi. But nobody thinks I’m a cold-blooded killer. You on the other hand….”

     “Elise the younger drove me home from the hotel. To my home. Not hers. But I had a houseguest, and thought it would be a bit of an over-reach to do her in the car.”

     “And they say chivalry is dead.”

     “I don’t need an alibi. I’m not going to kill two people when I’m about to go on trial for murdering three more that I didn’t kill. You do have to believe me on this one, Janie.”

     “I know, I know. You didn’t kill those people. I know that one the way I know my passcode.”

     I am about to leave when a young woman wearing a St. John’s hoodie and apparently nothing else comes walking from the back of the house, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

     He shrugs. “I like sex.” Nods at the girl. “This is Holly, by the way.”

      “Hi, Holly,” I say. “What’s your major?”

30.) It is only the middle of the afternoon, and I feel as if I’m about to pass out. It happens a lot at this time of day, even if I’m between treatments.

     I tell myself I have enough strength to take Rip for a beach walk, then get into a hot bat, take a nap, and then make a list of what we know about the Parsons’ murders. I know we’re supposed to be mounting our second defense for Rob Jacobson.

     But I feel as if it is too much of a coincidence that another mother and daughter have been murdered, and that all of them are linked to Rob Jacobson. And Jimmy has told me about the death of April Chen and her daughter, and how Edmund McKenzie and Rob double dated with her and Lily Biondi, the future Lily Carson, the night of their prom.

     By now you can’t tell the suspects, and the victims, without a scorecard.

     But I’m just crossing the intersection of Route 27 and Abraham’s Path when my sister calls, and says that she needs to see me right away.

     “Can’t it wait?”

     “No,” she says, “it can’t.”

     “Don’t tell me, it’s a matter of life and death.”

     “Yes,” she says. “As a matter of fact it is.”

     Now that doesn’t sound good.

     It’s worse than that.

31.) “Before you tell me what you want to tell me,” I say, “please tell me that Rob is lying out his ass when he tells me that the two of you are back together.”

     “He’s lying out his ass,” she says.

     “But you didn’t call me about that.”

     She shakes her head, and now she starts to cry.

     She’s not just prettier than me. She’s tougher than me, as many times in our lives when I have accused her of the capital crime of being a girly girl.

     She doesn’t look so tough now, however.

     It can only be one thing.

     “No,” I say.

     “Yes,” she says. “My cancer is back.”

     I shake my head violently from side to side.

     “Nope. Not happening. I already made my deal with God. I said that if She was going to take one of us, She was going to take me.”

     We sit on the couch. I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me.    

     Now we’re both crying.

     “I watched mom waste away because of this, like watching water disappear in a drain,” I say. “I’m not watching it happen to you.”

     “Wait, you think I want to watch it happen to you?” she asks.

     We cry it out a little more.

     “After mom died,” I say, “it was the same as if mom’s cancer killed dad after that.”

     “He thought he could save her.”

     “How about this?” I say. “How about if we save each other?”

     “Unfortunately,” Brigid says. “This is one time you can’t beat up the one who’s picking on me.”

     “Watch me.”

     She says she’s going back to Switzerland.

     “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere,” she says.

     I tell her I’ve never heard that one about the Geneva area.

     Before I stop home to get Rip, I take a quick detour, take a quick ocean walk of my own.

     Just me out there in the late afternoon.

     I need to have another talk with God.

     “Okay, missy,” I say, standing near the water but looking to the sky. “Cut the shit.”

32.) When I get home, I see that Rip the dog isn’t just the one feeling ill, he’s been throwing up in just about every downstairs room in the house.

     I want to scream, but don’t, too many open windows, I don’t want to scare the decent people, after all the shooting that went on here during the first Jacobson trial.

     I call Dr. Ben and ask if I can bring Rip over.

     He tells me he’ll make a house call.

     While I wait for him, I go into the backyard with Rip the dog, and look up at the sky, realizing that I’ve obviously pissed God off, yet again.

     “Okay,” I say, talking to the sky again. “You didn’t let me finish….”

33.) Dr. Ben does indeed make a house call.

     “That dog ate something he shouldn’t have,” he says.

     “Shocker,” I say.

     He gives him a pill.

     “What did you give him?”

     He grins.

     “A miracle drug: Pepcid AC.”

     He tells me he can stay around, just to make sure neither the dog nor I have any kind of relapse. I give him a quick synopsis of my day, and tell him that I need sleep.

     The alone kind.

     He is probably halfway home when I call him in his car.

     “It’s about me telling you I didn’t want you to stay.”

     He waits.

     “You didn’t let me finish,” I say.

34.) Jimmy tells Jane he’s doing a deep dive on the Parsons murders, even though he hates that expression.

     The mother’s romantic past. The daughter’s romantic past. He makes some calls to the local cops, though not to Det. Esposito. He makes some calls to the usual suspects at the NYPD.

     Another old friend – Jimmy really does wish some of these friends had stepped up a little louder when he was losing his badge – from Organized Crime tells Jimmy he remembers the name.

     Elise Parsons.

     “There were two,” Jimmy says.

     The OCC cop, Billy DePetris, laughs. “We all got a kick out of that one.”

     “It was the daughter,” Billy says. “It turns out she used to like to get a seat at some big-ticket underground poker tables. Walk on the wild side for the little princess. Some ballplayers used to play. Some wiseguys. She got busted one time, and her mommy made it go away. But guess who was running the game?”

     “Hit me,” Jimmy says.

     “I see what you did there,” Billy says.

     “So who ran the game?”

     “Remember Artie Shore, blew his brains out last year out on Long Island?”

     Jimmy takes his phone away from his ear and stares at it.

     “You still there, Cunniff?”

     “I remember Artie,” Jimmy says. “Mostly because I was there.”

     “Wait, there’s more.”

     Jimmy waits.

     “You know who else was in the game that time? That guy McKenzie you were calling around about the other day.”

35.) Jimmy calls Jane and tells her about the connection between Artie Shore, which means the Carson case, and Elise Too. He tells her about the additional connection between Artie and Edmund McKenzie.

     “You remember Rube Goldberg?” Jimmy asks Jane.

     “Who did he play for?”

     “He was famous for building these crazy contraptions,” Jimmy says. “It’s like he’s the one who put together this goddamn mystery.”

     “Only one?” Jane says

     Jimmy tries the number he has for McKenzie. Goes straight to voicemail. Decides to head into the city and make a tour of the clubs on McKenzie’s rotation.

     He’s about to get on the LIE in Manorville when Jane calls him back.

     She asks where he is.

     “You can turn around,” she says.

     “Why?”

     “Somebody just shot our guy McKenzie to death in front of the Yale Club.”

     “Any suspects?”

     “Probably just anybody who ever met him,” Jane says.

36.) I never go very long in my day without thinking about cancer. You’ve heard about The Big C.

     When it comes after you, it’s much bigger than that.

     I think about Brigid’s.

     And mine.

     Even our mom’s.

     Who knew at the time that it was like a cancer starter kit?

     Dr. Sam says I am a few months, at least, from another round of chemotherapy. She tells me I’m staying home for it this time. Fine by me. For now, before the chemo does start up again, her treatment of choice is something called neoadjuvant immunotherapy.

     Don’t ask.

     At least it comes in pill form.

     But it makes me even more tired than I already am. When I tell this to Dr. Sam she says, “Gee, here’s a thought: Don’t take on any more murder trials.”

     “Part of the cure,” I say.

     “It’s true about lawyers, isn’t it?” Dr. Sam says.

     “Which part?”

     “That you really do believe your own bullshit.”

37.) Against my better judgment, I have agreed to have dinner with Rob Jacobson at the East Hampton Grill, which he informs me is the sister place to the Palm Beach Grill.

     “Good to know,” I tell him.

     Before I go, I drive over to Jimmy’s bar, not to have a drink, Dr. Sam tells me that I’m idiot for having the few drinks I’ve admitted to her that I’ve had recently.

     I just want to talk.

     “What if Jacobson is telling the truth?”

     Jimmy nearly spits out his beer.

     “Only by accident.”

     “What if somebody set him up, and is still setting him up? He wants us to think it was all Joe Champi. Champi wanted us to think it was Rob who killed the Carsons and burned down the house. The tape I made of him, like his dying declaration, is one of the reasons they did charge him in the end.”

     “I’m listening.”

     “Jimmy,” I say, “what if there’s another Champi out there?”

38.) Jacobson and I get a corner table in the side room, away from the bar. I have a better view of the television over the bar. Mets are playing the Phillies. I’d much rather watch that than listen to him.

     We talk about the Parsons case. And the Carson case. In my head, I’ve started to rhyme them. He explains to me all over again while the night of the Carson murder is another night when he doesn’t have an alibi – “It was a night when I wasn’t getting laid, what are the odds?” – he had no reason to kill anybody.

     “This was a gambling thing, even though you guys moved off that,” Jacobson says. “I think somebody wanted to send a message when Carson got in as deep as he did and didn’t pay.”

     “A message to whom? His dead wife and daughter?”

     “To anybody else doing business with Artie Shore and Bobby Salvatore. Anybody ever talk to Bobby about any of this?”

     “In the wind, as they say on the cop shows.”

     “Maybe you ought to spend less time thinking you’re defending a killer, and go find a very bad guy like Bobby.”

     “You know him?”

     “Let’s say I saw him at our house a couple of times when I was a kid. My father did some business on the side with him, as I recall.”

     “What kind?”

     “Never asked.”

     “Why is that?”

     “I’d discovered girls by then.”

     He orders another drink.

     I join him.

     You only live once.

39.) I know I shouldn’t drink. Not supposed to drink. Have to drink to get through dinner with this guy.

     As we eat – and drink – he goes through the list of what he says are legitimate suspects in the Parsons murders.

     Then he goes through other old boyfriends of Elise Parsons, the mom. Gus Hennessy is one. So was Edmund McKenzie, “God rest his black soul.”

     “And you know that smart-assed cop, Esposito? I understand he used to hook up with the daughter.”

     There are more suspects than that. Including a blast from the past.

     “Remember Nick Morelli, the fisherman who sold me out on Laurel Gates, got up in court and talked about seeing me make out with the kid?”

     “Right before his boat came back without him?”

     “He had a little fling with Elise the daughter last summer. And he wasn’t the boy scout he wanted everybody to think he was, from what I hear.”

     “You should have been a D.A.,” I tell him. “You could have defended yourself and prosecuted yourself at the same time.”

     The wine hits me then.

     I excuse myself.

     And go into the bathroom and throw up.

     As I’m cleaning up, I start to wonder why I felt as if I had to leave Rob Jacobson to do it.

40.) Jimmy is parked out front of Jane’s house when she gets home from dinner. He’s not happy that she’s spending any time with Jacobson.

     “I still think I can get these charges dismissed at trial. But until then, I have to approach this like I’m going the distance.”

     They’re in the house by now.

     “You look like death warmed over, you should pardon the expression.”

     “And you the old writer.”

     “Just telling you what I’m observing.”

     “Thank you for that. You really are such an outstanding detective.”

     Then: “Why are you here, Cunniff? To tuck me in?”

     “There’s something you need to hear.”

     “Am I going to like it?”

     “Not even a little bit.”

41.) Jimmy tells me that an undercover cop from Organized Crime, a cop he trained as a kid named Jose Amaro, had called him a couple of hours ago.

     “Haven’t talked to him in two years,” Jimmy says. “Amaro was in that deep and just came up for air.”

     “Fascinating. What do I need to hear?”

     “Joe Champi had a partner. A paid killer named Anthony Licata whom Champi put away when he was on the way up.”

     “Champi sent him up and then they became partners?”

     “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

     “You think they’ve been working together?”

     “For a long time, Amaro says.”

     “The plot thickens.”

     “Did you just say that?”

     “It’s the drugs talking.”

42.) The next morning Jane drives her sister to the airport.

     They hug each other in front of the Air France terminal.

     “You get better,” I tell her.

     “You first.”

     “And Brigid? When you get there? Don’t feel as if you have to keep a light on in the window for your sis.”

     I cry a lot of the way home.

     For both of us.

43.) A court appearance the next morning with my client. Kevin Ahearn wants Rob’s bail revoked now that he has been officially labeled a person of interest in the murders of the Parsons women.

     I get up then and Jane Smith him.

     I’m a verb sometimes. Google it.

     I show a lot more energy than I actually feel, asking the judge as if I’m asking the whole wide world just how many times my client is going to be persecuted.

     Ahearn’s request is denied.

     The judge is about to adjourn when I stand up.

     “If it pleases the court, your honor.”

     “We’re done here for the day, Ms. Smith.”

     “Your honor,” I say, coming out from behind the table, getting closer to him, playing to an audience of one. “You know why Mr. Ahearn wants Mr. Jacobson in jail now? Because he knows he has no chance to permanently put him away later.”

     Feeling it now, even if in a mostly empty courtroom, no jury yet, no spectators. The judge and Jacobson and the D.A..

     And me.

     I slowly and meticulously go through the state’s case, and how so much of it is built on circumstantial evidence.

     “You want to know Mr. Ahearn’s whole case, your honor? This seems like something my client would have done. Only he didn’t. I move to dismiss.”

     And sit back down.

     “That was quite brilliant, Ms. Smith, I have to admit.”

     I smile shyly, and duck my head.

     He swings his gavel.

     “Motion denied.”

 44.) I tell my client that when we face the media once we’re outside, he is to let me do the talking.

     Of course he does the opposite.

     “You all probably know that our move to dismiss was denied,” he says before anybody even asks a question.

     Shakes his head sadly.

     “I knew I should have gotten a real lawyer once I fired Howie Friedlander.”

     I take my phone out of my purse, and give them all a visual, a moment, that will make just about every news show in the country.

     “Please do,” I say. “Here, use my cell.”

     “We kid because we love,” Jacobson says.

     I look at him like he’s crazy, which he still might turn out to be.

     “Who’s kidding?”

45.) Jimmy decides he needs to get back to New York City after court. He’s driven her over here, but asks if she’d mind taking an Uber back to Amagansett.

     She tells him she’s going with him.

     “You need to rest,” he tells her.

     “You need to drive.”

     These are fights he’s never won. Jane is undefeated with him, too.

     She grins at him.

     “If I fall asleep,” she says, “wake me when we go past Citi Field so I can wave.”

     She’s asleep five minutes after they’re on the LIE. Jimmy occasionally steals a look at her, knowing how much the wigs bother her. Only imagining what’s it’s like to be her right now, even though she’s still tough as anybody he ever fought in the ring. Or out of one.

     For now, she looks peaceful.

     “You cannot die on me,” he says softly.

     She stirs briefly.

     “You say something?”

     “Nothing important.”

46.) They meet Jose Amaro, the former undercover cop, at Home Street Home, lower East Side on Chrystie Street, one of Jimmy’s old cop hangouts. As Jane knows, one of many.

     “I’m surprised Licata is still walking around,” Amaro says. “If he is still walking around, that is. Guy’s a bit of a legend, scumbag-wise.”

     “I thought that was Champi.”

     Amaro: “Champi had some redeeming qualities. He was at least one of us once. It’s not like he went through the academy counting the days until he could go dirty. And he did put Licata away. But when he got out, the two of them got together. They could bust heads and cap people and get paid for it.”

     Jimmy: “What I hear, Janie, it’s the old line where Licata taught Champi everything he knew. Just not everything Licata knew. Another part of the legend is that Licata once dropped a wiseguy he’d worked with once out a window, while Champi watched. And when the guy goes splat Licata turns to Champi and says, ‘Least he stuck the landing.’”

     Jane asks when the last time was that anybody had either seen or heard from Anthony Licata.

     “Funny you should ask,” he says. “A cop friend of mine who went to work in Nassau County swears he saw him drinking in Montauk with Artie Shore a couple of years ago.”

47.) Kevin Ahearn, the prosecutor, is meeting with someone who wants to testify against Rob Jacobson.

     Jacobson’s son, Eric.

     Eric Jacobson is handsome enough to make the young Brad Pitt look homely. Tall and tan and back from looking for the perfect wave across the world. Nowhere to be seen during his father’s first trial. Apparently willing to have gone to the moon to get away from dear old dad.

     “You’ve thought this through?” Ahearn says.

     “I had a lot of time to do that after having been in the air for about six thousand hours getting back here. I want to help you nail his ass.”

     He pauses.

     “Something you were supposed to do the first time around, counselor. Jesus. You blew the layup.”

     Ahearn is already imagining the headlines about the prodigal son returning.

     “You knew the Carsons?”

     Eric: “The daughter.”

     He smiles an inherited cocky smile.

     “You got some time?”

     “All the time in the world.”

     “Let me tell you a story,” Eric Jacobson says.

48.) It is my day to go get another shot that is part of my  immunotherapy protocols. Courtesy of Dr. Sam.

     I’ve started to call her Dr. Doom.

     She’s assured me that immunotherapy will be “gentler” than chemo. I tell her that to use an old expression, having a tit in a ringer would be gentler than chemo.

     But it depends on the day with the shot. Sometimes I feel just as weak and sick after one of them.

     This is one of those days.

     Jimmy calls when I’m back home. I don’t tell him I’ve just returned from Southampton Hospital and feel sicker than Rip had been when he was the sick dog.

     “Meet me at the bar,”  he says.

     The last thing I want to do. I want to see if I can get some food down for a change and then go to bed early and make it through the night keeping food down.

     “Can’t you tell me over the phone.”

     “I’ll just give you the appetizer.”

     Even the thought of food is already making me sick.

     “Eric Jacobson, our boy’s son? It turns out that he made a trip back to see an old girlfriend of his in Garden City.”

     “I don’t suppose her last name was Carson.”

     “Bingo.”

     I tell him I’m on my way.

     Before I end the call, Jimmy tells me there’s somebody he wants me to meet when I get there.

49.) I hate dating myself by referencing old movies. But the guy seated at a corner table with Jimmy when I get to the bar  – in case I never mentioned it, it’s called The Bar, apparently Jimmy didn’t want to confuse the locals that it might be the East End version of Café Boulud – looks like he could have once been the second lead in “Endless Summer.”

     “Jane Smith,” Jimmy says, “meet Bill Wolk. He’s a very bad boy.”

     And the beachcomber dude is a big boy, about 6-4, shoulder length hair that he somehow manages to carry off.

     “Hi,” he says to me. “Suspect in multiple B&E’s in the area, never arrested or convicted. Damn glad to meet you.”

     “I don’t want to go all existential on you,” I say. “But why are you here and why am I here.”

     “I grew up with Eric Jacobson,” he says. “Surfed a little with that boy on the West Coast before he kept going from there.”

     Jimmy: “Tell her the rest.”

     “I might have been a suspect in a break-in at the Parsons house about a year back. It wasn’t me.”

     Jimmy: “Sounds like it never is.”

     “This is all fascinating, Bill, no shit. But I made the trip over from Amagansett to hear that.”

     “Dude.”

     Unclear whether he’s talking to Jimmy or me or both of us.

     “I know where the bodies are buried out here.”

     Jimmy reaches over and shocks Wolk by giving him a good slap across the face.

     “We don’t care where they’re buried, Moon Doggie. We want to know who buried them.”

50.) I’m having lunch with Rob Jacobson. Beautiful day. Outdoor table on Main Street in Sag Harbor. Restaurant called Page.

     I’m managing to choke down a few bites of a small green salad, telling myself I need to eat something, I’ve lost five pounds I can’t afford to lose. Or the five pounds before that.

     He’s about halfway through a cheeseburger, the sight of which is making me feel even sicker, when he leans forward and says, “You’re not going to believe this. But I think I might be falling in love with you.”

     Now I really do feel sick.

     “Fall in love with our waitress. She’s way more age inappropriate for you than I am.”

     “I’m being serious, Jane. You might not want to hear this. But the two of us are more alike than you’d ever admit.”

     I lean forward, cover his hand with mine.

     “Rob? If you ever say that again to me or anybody else, I will burn your house down.”

     “I’m telling you the truth.”

     “That’s what bothers me.”

     “Any smart guy would be in love with you.”

     “How smart?”

51.) Dr. Ben is over for dinner tonight. He brings his world-famous chicken soup.

     I know how good it is from past experience. He’s brought it before when I’m having a bad day.

     “Tasty as ever,” I tell him, “even if it is from the cliché side of the menu.”

     “Eat.”

     While we do, I tell him about Rob Jacobson’s proclamation.

     He grins and slaps the table. “I knew you were two-timing me.”

     I grin. “What can I say? In the end, it was bigger than both of us.”

     “Thanks for telling me.”

     “There’s just one small problem for my client. It’s you who I love.”

     And lean over and kiss him.

     “Who do you love more, me or Rip the dog?”

     “God, you men want everything.”

52.) Jimmy and Jane have another chat with Bill Wolk. It turns out that he was more than just a surfing buddy of Eric Jacobson. They were best friends.

     Wolk says to Jimmy, “Can you still arrest me for anything I tell you?”

     “Sadly, no.”

     “Eric and I used to break into houses together. Not for what we could steal. Just the thrill of doing the stealing.”

     Wolk stopped doing it with Eric because he was afraid that Eric wanted them to get caught, to get back at his father.

     “He despised his father. Is there something worse than despise? Whatever it is, that was what Eric felt for his old man. He made Eric beg for money, and didn’t score much after he did. Had spent his whole life calling him a loser.”

     “Nobody wants to hear sad shit like that.”

     “Not from your father.”

     Then Wolk says, “There’s one more thing you guys need to know.”

53.) Wolk tells us that Nick Morelli is alive.

     “He didn’t go over the side of the boat?” Jimmy asks.

     “He may have gone over. But he sure as shit didn’t die. I ran into him over on the North Fork after he disappeared.”

     He puts air quotes around disappeared. Says that Morelli had grown a beard and dyed his hair blond.

     Wolk: “I said, ‘Dude, you’re not dead.’ And he said, ‘And if you don’t want to be, you won’t tell anything about seeing me.’”

     Jane: “I thought he was a fisherman who had been in love with Laurel Gates.”

     “It’s what he wanted people to think. Did you do much research on him?”

     Jimmy shrugs.

     “Some. He was our witness. I mean, I knew he had gotten into some scrapes when he was a kid. There wasn’t much to check from before he moved out east.”

     Wolk says, “He was someone you definitely did not want to cross. Local legend that way. Maybe because of a second cousin of his. Or maybe an uncle.”

     “Who?” Jimmy asks him.

     “Bobby Salvatore.”

54.) When I’m in the car after Wolk leaves Jimmy’s bar, I see that a text has come in while we’re talking to Wolk. Even as a lawyer, I’m not one of those people who treats their phone like a pacifier.

     So the is an hour old.

     Claire Jacobson.

               “Have a confession to make. A big one.

               But I’ll only talk to you. Come to the house.”

55.) I drive over to the house, breaking several personal records for going east to west on Route 27 in the process.

     The blue Bentley is in the driveway.

     I ring the doorbell.

     No answer.

     Bang on in for a few minutes.

     Still no answer.

     Door is open. I go inside, calling Claire’s name.

     The patio doors leading out to the swimming pool are open.

     I walk out there, the huge back lawn stretching out in the direction of the ocean, which I can hear in the distance.

     Claire Jacobson can’t hear anything.

     She’s in a one-piece black bathing suit, floating face down in her pool.

     Arms are stretched out wide.

     Her head looks as if wants to touch her right shoulder.

     Like her neck was broken before she went into the water.

56.) I dial 911. I’m waiting in front of the house when the police arrive.

     As I’m walking the cops back to the pool, I hear the screech of tires as one of those jeeps with no doors on the sides comes to a stop, scattering gravel everywhere.

     Eric Jacobson jumps out.

     Bad news travels really, really fast in the modern world.

     “Save you all some trouble,” he says. “My father killed my mother.”

57.) I call Rob Jacobson from what used to be his house, and tell him what’s happened.

     “I didn’t kill her.”

     It’s like he’s got it on a continuous loop every time somebody else in his world dies.

     “Your son thinks you did.”

     “My son,” Jacobson says, “is a worthless, sack-of-shit loser.”

     I ask him where he was last night, and this morning.

     “Well, that right there might be a problem.”

     “How big of a problem?”

     “I was at the house last night,” he says. “And there until a few hours ago.” There’s a pause. “Gave her a bump for old times’ sake.”

58.) Back in New York, Jimmy tracks down Joe Champi’s old partner, Harry Jansen, retired now, working as a part-time bartender at a place his brother owns in Long Island City.

     “I could never prove it,” he says, “but I was always pretty sure the kid did kill his father and that girl, and that Champi covered it up for him. And then kept covering shit up for him.”

     Jimmy asks him if he’s got any proof.

     “Just that he told me he saved the kid’s ass, and because of that was going to be on his payroll from then until the end of time.”

     “Might there be proof somewhere?” Jimmy asks.

     “If there is, the only one who might know is the family lawyer.”

     Jimmy goes back over the 59^th Street Bridge – he refuses to call it the Ed Koch bridge, he always hated that “How am I doing?” shit – and goes downtown the extremely white-shoe law offices of an elderly, but still practicing, big-city lawyer named Cooper Lawrence III.

     It is clear that Cooper Lawrence III hates Rob Jacobson as much anybody Jimmy Cunniff has yet encountered.

     “How does Jane stomach representing him?”

     Jimmy: “You did.”

     Cooper Lawrence then asks Jimmy to hand him a dollar.

     “Why?”

     “Just give me a dollar.”

     Jimmy does.

     “Now Jane’s not your only attorney. I am. And everything I tell you is privileged. Which in this case means if it stays that way, I stay alive.”

     Jimmy waits.

     “The reason I know he did it, and that Champi covered it up, is that the kid told me when I questioned him after the murder. Like it was no big deal. Of course I killed the old bastard. Like that. Like he was proud.”

     “You didn’t tell anybody, even as an officer of the court?”

     “That shitwhistle Rob told me that if I ever told anybody, that Joe Champi would kill me.”

     “But Champi’s dead now.”

     “Anthony Licata isn’t. You familiar with his work?”

     Jimmy says, yeah, but only second-hand.

     “You don’t want it to be first-hand knowledge, trust me.”

     Before Jimmy leaves Lawrence says, “Just one thing about Rob confessing to me?”

     Jimmy waits at the door.

     “That kid was always the Babe Ruth of lying.”

59.) Jimmy drives back from the city, having arranged to meet Jane at the bar.

     As he walks in, something makes him look across Main Street.

     He’s sure he sees Nick Morelli over there, with the blond hair and beard Wolk had talked about.

     He starts to run across the street, but has to wait for traffic.

     When he gets over there, Morelli – if it was Morelli – is gone.

60.) When he gets inside, Jane is there waiting for him, a beer in front of her.

     “I thought you were only drinking on special occasions.”

     “This is one.”

     “Which one?”

     “Mets are playing the Braves for first place.”

     “You’re out of luck. Yanks-Red Sox from Fenway. My rivalry beats yours.”

     Jimmy puts on the Yankees. Somebody at the other end of the bar yells out that he wants to watch the Mets. Gets booed. Somehow it makes Jimmy love New York fans as much as he ever did.

     Jane leaves in the seventh inning, saying she’s going home to watch the end of the Mets game in a place – her own home – where Jimmy doesn’t control the remote.

     It is a big night, and not just because of baseball. Huge crowd. Business is better than ever.

     Jimmy wishes he had more time to enjoy it.

     He can’t shake the image of Morelli in his head, wondering where he’s been, wondering why he disappeared in the first place, right after becoming a star witness for Jane.

     He’s glad he carries a gun everywhere he goes these days.

     When he comes out the back door at closing time, the first shot whistles past his head.

     Jimmy looks down Bay Street, has his gun out in a blink, sees the shooter running away from him.

     Big guy.

     He’s fast. Jimmy is still fast enough, even not chasing perps any longer. No warning shot from him now. No “stop or I’ll shoot.”

     This is the street.

     This bastard just tried to kill him, and might have killed him if he were a better shot.

     The shooter wants to get across the street, fast.

     Now he’s the one who has to stop as a car comes speeding up Bay from the east.

     Jimmy sees that there’s no one else on the sidewalk.

     Him and the shooter.

     Jimmy stops, steadies his right hand, and fires off a shot that catches the bastard behind his right shoulder and puts him down.

     When he turns him over, he sees that it’s Eric Jacobson.

     61.) Eric Jacobson and Nick Morelli killed the Gates family, and framed the absolute holy hell out of Eric’s father. Eric wanted revenge against his father. Morelli was also in the despising business with Rob Jacobson because Jacobson stole Laurel Gates from him.

     “What about the Carsons?” Jimmy asks Eric Jacobson the last time he talks to him.

     “I can’t speak for Nick,” Eric says. “But it wasn’t me.”

     He grins at Jimmy.

     “But if my father goes down for it, I’m gonna wish it had been me.”

62.) Brigid comes back from Switzerland. Now she’s the one in a wig. She’s the one who’s lost way too much weight.

     But the treatments are working this time.

     Really working.

     Jane picks her up at Kennedy. A lot of hugging. Hugs of a lifetime before they’re in the car and about to head east.

     “Let’s hope these cures run in the family,” Brigid says.

     “Like my beauty?”

     “Drive the car,” Brigid says.

63.) Jacobson wants to get together with me again. Not together like that. He got the message.

     Lawyer-client, no more love talk.

     The trial is fast approaching, and Jane is desperate to find out who killed the Carsons if he didn’t.

     “Eric says it wasn’t him.”

     “But nobody has found Morelli,” Jacobson says. “Maybe Morelli hated me even more than my own kid.”

     “Who killed your wife?”

     “My opinion? Eric.”

     “He says he didn’t.”

     “Yeah, but remember one thing, Janie. He’s a Jacobson. He comes from a long line of liars.”

     They are having coffee at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton. No more meals with him.

     When they’re getting up to leave, Jane says, “You do want me to save your ass again, right?”

     “Why I hired you.”

     “One condition.”

     “Name it.”

     “Stay away from my sister.”

64.) Bill Wolk is on the run. Jimmy knows he is because Wolk has called from a burner phone to tell him.

     Somebody is after him. He’s worried it’s Nick Morelli, who knows Wolk has been talking to Jane and Jimmy.

     “But it might be somebody else.”

     Jimmy wants to know who.

     “Licata,” he says. “I heard that he might be living the good life all the way out in Montauk, with his girlfriend.”

     “You have any idea who the girlfriend is?”

     “A woman named Mei Lie.”

     He pronounces the last name “Lee,” but spells it out: L-I-E.

     Perfect, I think.

     “Who told you this?”

     “You don’t need to know. I have enough people who want to kill me.”

     Before he hangs up he tells Jimmy there’s something he needs to know about Licata’s girlfriend.

     “She’s a shooter, too. No lie. L-I-E.”

65.) Jimmy does some of his very best detective work, and discovers that Anthony Licata, whose work over the years must have been very well, is living the life, near an area known, appropriately enough, as The Dunes.

     And is living with an Oriental woman whom Jimmy has seen, and followed into town one day, one who has to be Mei Lie.

     Still no eyes on the legend, Licata.

     Jimmy finally decides that it’s time to end this with Licata. He’s going in. Jane says he’s not doing it alone.

     “You’re sick.”

     “Not too sick to shoot.”

     But Licata knows Jimmy has been around. He doesn’t run. He waits. Along with his Annie Oakley girlfriend.

     Jimmy and Jane think the house is deserted the night they do go in.

     It’s not.

     Jimmy goes first. Gently turns the job.

     It’s open.

     The door shatters over his head with the first shot. The only reason Jimmy isn’t hit is because he remembers that when you do try a door, keep your head below the knob.    

     “Run!” he yells to Jane.

     It turns out that she can still run.

     A wild, shooting chase ensues as they run toward the water.

     Jimmy and Jane separate finally.

     Licata and Mei have Jimmy backed up to the water, hands up.

     “Where is she?” Licata says.

     “Ran like the dog that she is.”

     “You two should have left this shit alone, Cunniff.”

     “I was just always a slow learner, Anthony. Just not as dumb a shit as you.”

     Because from behind Licata, and his girlfriend, they hear:

     “Both of you drop your guns, or I will shoot you dead.”

     Without turning Licata says, “Not both of us.”

     “Try me.”

     They do.

     Jane Effing Smith shoots them dead.

66.) Jane, Jimmy, Dr. Ben at Jimmy’s bar.

     “How are you on champagne?” Dr. Ben says to Jane.

     “I’ll risk it if you will, big boy.”

     He orders the best and most expensive Jimmy has.

     Well-done bacon for Rip the dog.

     “What did he do to solve the case?” Jimmy asks.

     “Emotional support animal,” Jane says.

67.) The next days the gods smile on Jane Smith.

     Rob Jacobson fires her, and Jimmy.

     He doesn’t tell her on the phone, he asks her to come over to the house in Amagansett.

     “I’m sorry, Janie,” he says. “But I just don’t think you’re going to have the energy to save my ass again. Big C and all.”

     I smile, and give him the finger one final time, and walk out.

     Another Bentley – not the pale blue one that belonged to Jacobson’s wife – pulls into the driveway.

     Michelle Levy, a hotshot lawyer from Manhattan, younger than Jane and a knockout – even I have to admit that – gets out.

     Michelle knows me.

     “Michelle,” I tell her. “Whatever he’s paying you isn’t enough.”

     Then I get into my own non-Bentley and drive away.

     Happily.

68.) The next afternoon, I’m back from a beach walk with Rip the dog when there is a knock on my door.

     Kevin Ahearn.

     After I invite him in, he tells me he wants to hire me.

     “Oh, shit, Kevin, did you kill somebody?”

     “I want to hire you to sit second chair with me, and act as my investigator, because that way I’m sure we can nail that bastard.”

     I ask him to let me think about it.

     “You’re not worried I might not live long enough to see the end of the trial?”

     “What better reason to live,” Kevin says, “than putting away Rob Jacobson once and for all.”

—James Patterson

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