“Because you’re sick, you mean?”
“Because I owe it to my client,” I say. I pause then and say, “Because even dead I’m a better lawyer than McGoey is.”
Rip is waiting for me when I’ve unlocked my front door and deactivated the alarm.
“Oh, you think I don’t know what that face means?” I say to him. “So you think I look like shit, too.”
He just stands there, tail wagging, until he comes over to me and rubs up against my leg and lets me scratch him behind his ears. It’s as if he knows how truly lousy I feel at the moment, in addition to how lousy I must look, my rescue dog rescuing me all over again.
“You try living on death row,” I tell him, “and see how you like it.”
He barks suddenly.
“Oh, wait,” I say. “You already did that.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Jimmy
JIMMY GETS A CALL from a former criminal informant of his, a weasel he hasn’t heard from in years and, until tonight, one Jimmy thinks might be dead by now, just going off the laws of probability for snitches like him.
But it turns out he’s still among the living, still going by just one name, Blue.
“Remember me?” Blue asks.
“How’d you get this number?” Jimmy asks him back.
“That’s how you greet a long-lost friend?”
“Lost, maybe. Never a friend.”
“But still a giver,” Blue says. “So do you want to know what really happened to Bobby Salvatore or not?”
Salvatore was a longtime bookie for Sonny Blum, and someone who kept wandering in and out of the Rob Jacobson case until somebody blew up his boat.
“How’d you know that I’m interested in Salvatore at all?” Jimmy asks.
“Because,” Blue says, “even if my hearing isn’t what it used to be, I do still manage to hear things now and then.”
“So what have you heard and what is it going to cost me?”
“This one is on the house,” Blue says. There’s a brief hesitation at his end before he adds, “until maybe I need to call in a favor down the road.”
Then he gives Jimmy what he has and who he has, whichis why the next afternoon Jimmy Cunniff is at Café Luxembourg, 70th and Amsterdam, always one of his favorite lunch spots in Manhattan, seated across a table from a slick young guy named Jeb Bernstein.
According to Blue, Bernstein has taken over Salvatore’s book, despite the fact that Bernstein has been denying that fact up and down since he and Jimmysatdown.
“If you’re not with Sonny,” Jimmy says, “and not in the dirtbag line of succession due to Bobby’s untimely passing, then please explain something to me, kid: Why are you here?”
There is a brief flicker of amusement in Bernstein’s eyes, as if they’re both in on the same joke. But Jimmy sees wariness in the eyes, too. He knows this look, having sat just like this across from a lot of smart guys deciding how much they want to tell him, or maybe just how much they think he’ll believe.
“Why am I here?” Bernstein says, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “Boy, who hasn’t asked themselves an existential question like that at some point in their lives?”
“That an answer?”
“That a serious question, Jimmy?”
Bernstein doesn’t look like someone who belongs in Bobby Salvatore’s former line of work. He frankly looks like what he’s told Jimmy he is, a former MBA from NYU who went to work in the National Football League office not long after getting his master’s. Spent a few years after that working at the sports book at Caesars in Las Vegas. Then a year at Bally’s Atlantic City.
