He notices Sassoon’s glass is empty, too.
“Is it time for me to take out Smith and Cunniff, Mr. Blum?” Robby asks. “I assume that was one of the reasons you wanted to see me tonight. You’ve already told me I’ll have to get that done at one point or another.”
Blum nods. “It’s time,” he says, then points to Sassoon’s own empty glass. “One more for the road?”
“Why not?” Robby Sassoon says.
The old man takes a long time getting out of his chair, shuffles across the room, takes Sassoon’s glass out of his hand as he heads for the bar behind him.
“You really are good at what you do,” Sonny says.
“Well, thank you, sir.”
“Too good,” Blum says, before he takes the gun out of his pocket and blows the back of Robby Sassoon’s head off, the sound like a cannon going off in his den, able to back up quickly enough that the blood doesn’t get on him, not that he would care much either way.
He watches Sassoon slump to the side, hit man who just got hit, almost like poetic justice, blood pouring out of the head wound, what’s left of him slowly sliding out of the chair and onto the floor.
Sonny Blum looks down at the body. It’s time for a new rug in here, anyway.
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN
JIMMY AND BEN AND Danny Esposito and I are celebrating the next night at Jimmy’s bar. Thomas McGoey is there, too, along with Norma Banks, who already might be the most overserved person in the place.
I have even allowed myself a second glass of wine.
McGoey is the last to get here, having just arrived from the courthouse, the charges against Rob Jacobson having been officially dropped a few hours ago, not just because of the video from the bird feeder, but because of what turned out to be the late Edmund McKenzie’s rambling deathbed confession, recorded from the floor of the house in Water Mill, on Danny Esposito’s phone, before McKenzie was DOA at Southampton Hospital.
Judge Horton was persuaded. So was Katherine Welsh.
Just like that, it was over. I didn’t make the trip to Mineola, mostly because I don’t want to be part of another photo op with Rob Jacobson for as long as I live.
Even if I somehow manage to live.
“Who’s going to represent Eric?” I ask McGoey. “Rob mention anything to you about that?”
McGoey doesn’t answer right away, somehow managing to look everywhere in Jimmy’s bar except at me.
“Don’t you tell me this, McGoey,” I say. “Donottell me this. Or you may be out of this bar.”
“I haven’t officially told him yes,” McGoey says.
“If you didn’t say no, you know you’ve already decided to do it.”
“His dad is going to pay my fee,” McGoey says. “The full boat.”
“Now you’ve really got to be shitting me,” I say. “After he and McKenzie tried to set him up for murdertwice?”
“Rob says he feels guilty that his own son could hate him even more than Rob hated his own father,” McGoey says.
McKenzie told Jimmy and Danny Esposito a lot before he died. Jimmy says it was clear even to McKenzie that the ambulance probably wasn’t going to get to him in time, as much as both Jimmy and Esposito tried to stop the bleeding, not wanting to lose him.
Once Eric Jacobson was on his way to the Southampton police station, McKenzie confessed that he and Eric had been planning the Carson murders for a long time. Eric had somehow found out Rob Jacobson was doing yet another mother-daughter act, this time with Rob’s old prom date; Eric knew the act very well because there had been multiple occasions when Rob Jacobson had taken girls away from his own son.
Jimmy asked McKenzie which one of them knew enough about DNA to arrange the frame-up. Jimmy forgot that McKenzie had once told him what a science whiz he was before he dropped out of Princeton.
I could have been on one of those CSI shows.
Eric had been the one who helped harvest his father’s DNA. It had taken time, and a lot of secret visits to the house in Sagaponack. But he’d managed.
