Page 72

SEVENTY-TWO

Jimmy

JANE SAYS SHE’LL UBER home, where she plans to tell Rob Jacobson to his face that she hasn’t quit the case after all. Three or so hours later Jimmy is back in the city, all the way downtown, one of the highest floors underneath the observation deck at One World Trade. The building is in the same footprint where the Twin Towers had been before the planes hit, and where the offices of River View, Thomas McKenzie’s hedge fund, are now located, McKenzie having made a big show out of moving back down there.

Jimmy hasn’t spent much time in this neighborhood since the planes hit the buildings, too many memories down here, too many people he knew lost that day. With all that, he is knocked out by the kind of panoramic view he remembers from the Twin Towers, just through the windows in McKenzie’s waiting area.

There it all is, the same view, even though downtown Manhattan will never be the same, from the Brooklyn Bridge to New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Jersey, and some of the skyline of Lower Manhattan and, Jimmy is sure, heaven if you knew precisely where to look.

Jimmy has fake-badged his way this far but now runs into McKenzie’s assistant, an ice-sculpture with long blond hair and black-framed glasses whose nameplate reads TYLER . No Ms. before her last name. No Mrs. No Miss.

Just TYLER .

“Is that your first name or last?” Jimmy asks.

“It’s irrelevant, Detective Cunniff,” she says. “Because unless you’re here to arrest me, this is the end of the line for you.”

“Just trying to make conversation.”

“Which now, sadly, is ending,” she says, shuffling some papers in front of her and trying to look busy, bored, both.

“You’re right,” Jimmy says. “My conversation with you is ending. But before I go, you need to go inside and tell your boss that I’m here to talk about Anthony Licata, and everything they’ve always meant to each other. Or I can just talk about it with a friend I have at Page Six.”

She considers that for a moment. The gossip page of the Post can still sound like the bogeyman to the rich and powerful. Or their assistants. When they aren’t reaching for a mention like a junkie reaching for a crack pipe.

Tyler, Miss or Ms. or Mrs., gets up, gives a rap on the door, enters the inner sanctum, and is back in two shakes of a cat’s ass, as Mickey Dunne used to say.

“He’ll see you,” she says. Icily. But then Jimmy expected no less, her being the one who acted like the cat’s ass.

“This has got to sting,” Jimmy says as he passes her.

McKenzie comes around his desk to greet him. Another short rich guy. Jimmy has met a lot of them, from Mayor Bloomberg on down. Or up. No jacket, white shirt, tie knot as big as Jimmy’s fist, gray hair buzzed down nearly to his scalp. Small wire-rimmed glasses. He bears little resemblance to his son. But looks a lot trimmer and a lot fitter.

He doesn’t shake Jimmy’s hand. Fist bumps him instead. One of those. Like the COVID protocols are still in place. Or maybe he’s a germophobe.

“What about Anthony Licata?” McKenzie snaps, not wasting any time. “All that name does is get you in the door.”

“I was actually surprised to hear that name associated with you,” Jimmy says. “But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since word has it that you used to be besties with a scumbag like Sonny Blum.”

McKenzie waves his hand dismissively. “Urban legend,” he says. “And total bullshit.”

“So, you got hooked up with a cheap goon like Licata instead?”

McKenzie smiles thinly. “Who said he was cheap?”

He gestures to the one chair next to him, walks around a desk the size of a pool table to his own. Somehow the view behind him is even better than the one outside, if that’s even possible. McKenzie’s money has bought him a view like this, but he somehow bought Anthony Licata on the way up here.

“Mr. Licata and I parted ways some time ago,” Thomas Mc-Kenzie says. “He chose to cash out on what he called his 401(k) with me.”

“Not what I hear.”

“I frankly don’t give a shit what you hear,” McKenzie says.

“Sure, you do.” Jimmy smiles. “Because here we are across the desk from each other, chopping things up like we’re boys.”

“What exactly do you want to hear from me ?” McKenzie says. “I have an important call I have to be on in about fifteen minutes.”

“Are there any other kind of calls for you?”

McKenzie makes a sound as if Jimmy has just hit him with a body blow.

“Did Licata come to you originally, or did you go to him?”

“You really don’t know?”

“More like I’m filling in some blanks.”

“I had a friend, from my world, who had availed himself of Anthony’s services for a rather delicate situation. When I found myself in a not dissimilar situation, my friend made the recommendation. Sort of like a headhunter in the realm of shit happening.”

“And what kind of delicate situation was it, exactly?”

McKenzie’s face reddens, just like that. “My son couldn’t keep it in his pants, that’s what the situation was!” McKenzie is spitting out the words. “And he sure as fuck didn’t ever seem to understand the word ‘no’ as far as I could ever tell.”

“He says he didn’t rape that girl,” Jimmy says. “That Rob Jacobson set him up.”

“It no longer matters whether he did rape her or didn’t,” Mc-Kenzie says. “It eventually went away for everybody involved, once Licata and his friend Joe Champi realized they were essentially pulling on the same rope.”

McKenzie leans forward over his desk. “You spoke of Page Six to my assistant. Well, I was going to be good and goddamned if my name was going to be in bold type next to my son’s while I was trying to build this fund. So I did what I had to do.”

“Robinson Jacobson was the friend who recommended Licata to you?”

McKenzie nods. “Not that their association did Robinson any good in the end, when he was the one who couldn’t keep his in his pants.”

Jimmy watches what looks like a private plane banking toward Jersey, probably coming in for a landing at Teterboro. McKenzie probably keeps his own plane there.

“Did Licata ever mention what he thought might have happened the day Robinson Jacobson Jr. and that young girl died?”

“He didn’t offer an opinion and I didn’t ask for one,” McKenzie says. “He had his own problems with a son who couldn’t keep it in his pants. And maybe in the end, I didn’t want to know what I didn’t want to know about my own son.”

“You happen to know where I might find your son these days?” Jimmy asks.

Thomas McKenzie stands and offers Jimmy a smile that looks like two razor blades pressed together.

“The gutter is always a good place to start.”