Jimmy nods. “Aren’t you all,” he says, and proceeds to ask her if she has any problem with him searching her room along with every other one in the place. She tells him she’s got nothing to hide and is on her way to an audition for a TV commercial.
“Looking to bundle your car insurance?” she says in a perky way, but Jimmy is already on his way up the steps.
When he gets to the top of the ornate staircase, he turns and looks down at her.
“Does it bother you that he might have killed those people?” Jimmy asks.
“I’ve got an even better question,” she says back to him. “Does it bother you?”
Jimmy methodically goes room to room, starting on the top floor. At least Jimmy feels like a cop today.
Focus on that,he tells himself.
There are rooms here that look as if they belong in a museum, but he knew that before showing up today. Five bedrooms in all, so many bathrooms he’s lost count. The smallest bedroom, on the third floor, must have been the maid’s quarters at some point. There is a small home theater on the second floor.
But no family pictures on any of the walls, on any of the floors. Not a single one. Maybe Jacobson had them taken down at some point. Or maybe they were never here at all. All Jimmy knows about Jacobson’s mother is that she died young. Cancer, he thinks he read somewhere when he and Jane first took the case. But no pictures of her, no pictures of her husband, no pictures of their son, as a baby or young man or anywhere in between.
The second-floor study is where the bodies of Robinson Jacobson and the girl—Carey Watson—were found, on the floor in front of the huge antique desk. But the drawers of the desk are all empty, as if they had been cleaned out, maybe years ago.
Jimmy takes out his phone and takes some pictures of the room, anyway, just to have a visual later of where the story really started for Rob Jacobson, whether or not he did his old man and whether or not his buddy Edmund McKenzie, another son of a rich man, another mutt, helped him.
Jimmy stands in the middle of the room and looks around and wonders if living here ever gives these two girls the creeps.
By now he has spent a couple of hours in the town house and marked it a total waste of time. He’ll tell Jane all about it on the ride home, maybe after making a quick stop at theoriginal P. J. Clarke’s for a cheeseburger, something else that will surely bring back memories, and good ones, of his cop days, back when he was trying to put bad guys away, not save their sorry asses.
He lets himself out, locks the door behind him, does stop at Clarke’s for a burger and a beer, and is walking to where he parked his car on East 55th Street, the lights of the city on all around him, when he reaches for his phone and realizes he must have left it on Robinson Jacobson’s desk.
Pissed at himself, he drives back over to the West Side, finds a spot at a hydrant in front of the building, and impatiently fumbles with the key for a minute, cursing, before he gets it to work and lets himself in.
Kellye is standing in the middle of the foyer, pointing a gun at him as he steps inside.
“Hey,” Jimmy says, putting his hands up.“Hey.”
She points the barrel at the marble floor when she sees who it is.
“You could have rung the bell,” she says.
“I was in a hurry,” he says. “And I do have a key.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she says.
Jimmy is the one pointing now, at the gun.
“Where did you get that thing?”
“I found it,” she says.
“Wheredid you find it?” Jimmy asks her.
“Where Robby must’ve hid it.”
FORTY-FOUR
Jimmy
THEY ARE SEATED AT a corner table at Jimmy’s bar late, the place still fairly crowded on a Friday night. Jimmy called the meeting on his way back from the city.
His whole life Jimmy Cunniff has never called it Manhattan or thought of it that way. Always the city. If you grew up in the outer boroughs like he did, you were always going to the city. Or coming back from it. Even if all you ever wanted, even as a kid, was the NYPD, the city was the goal.
