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TWELVE

Jimmy

AN HOUR AND A half later, Jimmy is in the back room at P. J. Clarke’s, a New York joint where they shot a lot of the movie The Lost Weekend. Jimmy thinks the place should long have been awarded landmark status where it’s still sitting—or maybe squatting—at the corner of 55th and Third.

Detective Craig Jackson, the best friend Jimmy has left at the NYPD now that his old partner Mickey Dunne is dead, is waiting for him.

They’re here because Jimmy really was way ahead of Jane on Rob Jacobson and the weird connection there is between the two of them, whether she wants to admit it’s there or not. Like some hold the guy had on her even before the hook was in her all over again, even though there had been a time during the first trial when she actually slapped the shit out of him.

Jimmy has decided to go all the way back to the beginning with the mutt, which means the day when Jacobson’s old man did shoot a teenage girl named Carey Watson before shooting himself.

Or so the police report said at the time.

Only now Jimmy is doing what all good cops do when they don’t feel they’ve satisfactorily buttoned up a case. He is starting all over again. The back-to-square-one rule of detecting. He is doing it in Clarke’s with Craig Jackson. Jackson, he knows, is here out of friendship, on his own time, because he believes in the brotherhood the way Jimmy does, even if Jimmy is no longer officially part of it.

Looks-wise he has always reminded Jimmy of another Jackson, Samuel L., even before Samuel L. really hit it big and seemed to be in every other movie and even more television commercials.

“I ordered for you,” Jackson says to Jimmy.

There are two beers on the table.

“What if I want something stronger than beer?”

“Then go ahead and order it, cowboy. Just means more beer for me if you do.”

They get right to it. Jackson doesn’t like small talk any more than Jimmy does. He told Jimmy one time, when they were both still on the job, that if Jimmy wanted to know how his wife and kids were doing, wait for the Christmas card.

Jackson taps a finger on the folder between them on the table.

“This is the original file on the Lolita shit,” he says, “which you might remember is what they called it at the time. I copied it for you, along with generously adding the notes I’ve made about what I’ve found out since you got me interested.”

He drinks some beer.

“It turns out there was another kid there that day,” Jackson says. “At Jacobson’s town house.”

“Wait,” Jimmy says. “I never heard about that.”

“You weren’t supposed to.” Jackson nods. “Was in the original file, but then it wasn’t. Kid named Edmund McKenzie. Apparently left long before all the shooting started. I had to do some digging, but it looks to me as if McKenzie, who had a rich daddy of his own, managed to get himself whited out of the story at the time. Or white-boyed out. Now this may come as a shock to you, Cunniff, but I’m thinking that money might have changed hands to make it happen.”

“I’m shocked,” Jimmy says. “Shocked, I tell ya.”

“The kid was a classmate and asshole buddy of young Rob. Along with being somebody who’d dated the Watson girl same as our Robbie did, before Jacobson’s daddy, that old perv, decided he wanted a taste.”

“But you say the McKenzie kid left the party early?”

Jackson smiles brilliantly now, teeth very white against very dark skin.

“The original version, which I eventually found, being the kick-ass detective that I am, is that he did. But McKenzie’s daddy is even richer than Jacobson’s was.” He shrugs. “Feel free to connect the dots.”

“They ever question the kid?”

Jackson shakes his head. “Just his daddy.”

“What the fuck.”

“Beautifully said.”

Jackson holds up a finger. “Gets better. There’s something else in play, just not sure where. There was always a rumor that McKenzie’s old man, big hedge fund guy now, Thomas McKenzie’s his name, was connected when he was starting to build his fortune.”

“Connected to who?”

“Sonny Blum.”

“The Jewish Godfather? No shit.”

“No one has ever been able to nail it down. But a story went around at the time that maybe Edmund McKenzie’s old man had friends in low places to help him clean up any and all of his kid’s messes.”

“Like Joe Champi cleaned up for Rob Jacobson.”

“Uh huh.”

Jimmy waves the waiter over and orders a Jack Daniels. “You’ve been busy, Action Jackson.”

“Fuckin’ ay.”

Jackson says it’s all in his notes, but he’d rather tell the rest of it. A few years later, he tells Jimmy, there was a beach party at McKenzie’s father’s house in Southampton. Everybody there young and rich and drunk and stoned and stupid.

“Sounds like a real slice,” Jimmy says.

“Long story short?” Jackson says. “McKenzie gets accused of rape when the party’s over. Then his daddy makes that go away. But after the girl gets paid off, which is what I’m sure happened, our friend Edmund started telling anybody who will listen that it was Rob Jacobson who raped the girl, and that he, McKenzie, had gotten set up. And was going to get even someday.”

“Rape kit?”

Jackson smiles again. “Somehow it managed to magically disappear.”

“Seems like there was a lot of that going around.”

“Ya think?”

“You’re telling me that McKenzie might have had a fixer in the department, too?” Jimmy asks.

“Or maybe Sonny Blum did, if he still had his hooks into McKenzie’s old man.”

“They didn’t used to call it Fun City for nothing,” Jimmy says to Craig Jackson.