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Jimmy

JIMMY CUNNIFF IS STANDING with Danny Esposito in the living room of the Carson house, listening as Esposito continues to complain about having to drive from East Farmingdale to be here, and for what?

“You’re aware that this is a complete waste of my time, right?” Esposito says. “And I’m gonna admit something to you, even as long as I’ve been at this kind of work: There’s something about this place that gives me the creeps.”

“Poor baby,” Jimmy says.

“Tell me again what we’re doing here, just so I have it clear.”

“We’re here doing our goddamn jobs, hotshot,” Jimmy says.

“Hey, relax,” Esposito says, making a calming gesture with his hands. “I’m as frustrated by this whole thing as you are.”

Jimmy gives him a long look. “No you’re not,” he says quietly, “unless you’ve got a partner with cancer you haven’t mentioned.”

“You’re gonna play that card?” Esposito says. “Seriously?” But he manages a grin. “Because if you are, that’s it, you win.”

Esposito is in the same uniform he almost always wears: bomber jacket, jeans, boots, shades. Still going through life needing a haircut and a shave, even though it’s always just a trim with both.

“Are we looking for anything in particular?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Something everybody else missed.”

“Well, okay then, since you put it like that,” Danny Esposito says. “Finding shit everybody else has missed is one of my specialties. Some might even call it a gift.”

“You really are a cocky bastard, aren’t you?” Jimmy asks.

“Why do you think we get along so well?”

Jimmy turns and sees Esposito giving him another crooked grin, as if to say he’s also going through life knowing shit that nobody else does.

Jimmy has met a lot of young hotshots like him.

But he keeps finding out this one is special, Esposito having just proved it again by discovering Eric Jacobson in Morgan Carson’s yearbook.

Not that he’s going to admit that to him now.

When Jimmy asked Esposito to meet him at the house, he explained that they now had to treat this like a whole new ball game because of the yearbook picture, that Eric Jacobson had to have been stalking the Carson girl, in plain sight, even getting as close as sitting right behind her at a high school football game.

“Doesn’t mean he had anything to do with killing her,” Esposito says.

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t,” Jimmy says. “And doesn’t mean either one of us is going to start believing in coincidence at this late date.”

“Still would be one giant leap for mankind to go from that to him framing his asshole father for murder,” Esposito says.

“We needed to come over here and feel this place,” Jimmy says.

“Now you’re going all touchy-feely on me?”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Jimmy says. “Just being here a few minutes the other day when the Jacobson kid and McKenzie ambushed Jane, got me pissed off all over again about what happened here.”

No grin from Esposito now.

“I hear you,” he says. “And just standing here makes me feel the same way.”

“Stick with me, kid,” Jimmy says. “You’ll learn a lot.”

“Fuck off,” Esposito says, and they both laugh, the sound much too loud in the quiet of the Carson house.

Jimmy says he’ll take the upstairs. But all he finds up here isn’t more anger, it’s the sadness Jane described after being in Morgan Carson’s room.

And for some reason, one he isn’t sure he understands, Jimmy is just as sad in the main bedroom, where they found the mother, Lily, that night.

Lily Carson: who, when she was her daughter’s age, had been Rob Jacobson’s prom date.

Now Jacobson stands accused of murdering her, and Jimmy is goddamn sure he’ll never be as convinced of his innocence as Jane is.

When they meet again downstairs, Esposito says, “You find anything of interest?”

Jimmy shakes his head.

“You want to switch, and you look around down here and I’ll go back up there?”

Jimmy is still shaking his head. “Other people miss shit,” he says. “We don’t.”

“So we done here?”

“Not quite,” Jimmy says. “Let’s take a walk around the property.”

“For the exercise, Batman?”

“Because I still feel like there’s something we’re missing,” Jimmy says.

“Another feeling?”

“Go ahead and kid,” Jimmy says. “But yeah.”

“Those feelings ever wrong?”

“Hardly ever.”

They head outside and separate again, Jimmy going right, Esposito going left.

They’ve both noticed the Ring doorbell camera over the front door and know from the police reports that there are three others on the house, one on the right side, one on the left, one over the back door.

All had been deactivated, they learned from the Garden City cops, on the night of the murders.

“Paranoid much, Hank?” Esposito says.

“And in the end,” Jimmy says, “all the security in the world did him no freaking good.”

“Guns win again,” Esposito says. “Amazing how often it works out that way.”

They are standing in the middle of the back patio.

The lawn that stretches out in front of them looks perfectly manicured, which means someone is attending to it, maybe the bank that now holds the paper on the house and is getting ready to sell it as soon as the trial ends.

Did the killer come through the door here, or the one in front, or even through a window? They’ll probably never know.

Jimmy notices the hummingbird feeder, full of rust now, but still hanging from the sturdy branch of a small tree on the other side of a low brick wall.

He thinks: What is it with women and these damn twitchy birds?

Suddenly, though, he is staring at the feeder, as if he’s being pulled toward it by some kind of weird magnetic force, no birds in sight; Jimmy knows from Jane that they’re supposed to have migrated south for the winter, Jane sounding as sad when she told him this as if Rip the dog had run away.

Jesus Christ, he thinks.

The old altar boy in him has him bowing his head, even though he hasn’t said the Lord’s name out loud.

He walks toward the feeder, until he is right in front of it, now frozen in place, eyes fixed on the feeder.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says softly.

Esposito walks over now. “What?” he asks.

Jimmy reaches over and puts his finger on a small camera set into the top of the feeder, almost invisible against the black paint, as small as the camera he sewed into his Yankee cap.

“This is what,” Jimmy says, pointing.

Esposito leans closer. “I had a girlfriend had one of these,” he says. “You can take pictures of the birds with this thing.”

“Maybe not just birds,” Jimmy Cunniff says.