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Jimmy

ROB JACOBSON STILL REFERS to the Manhattan town house where his father and his father’s teenaged mistress were murdered—back when Rob was a teenager himself, and where, if Paul Harrington is to be believed, Jacobson himself murdered his own father—as his home away from home.

“Is that what guys like you call a fuck pad these days?” Jimmy asks when he stops by Jacobson’s rented house in Amagansett after lunch.

“You can use it if you want,” Jacobson says, “provided you ever get laid again.”

“I’d rather just search it,” Jimmy tells him.

“For what?”

“Something,” Jimmy says, “or anything that might actually convince me you didn’t do it and might help Jane convince a jury. Again.”

“See there,” Jacobson says. “I knew that deep down you really cared.”

“Gonna need a key.”

“Mi casa es su casa,” Jacobson says.

“Just get the fucking key,” Jimmy says.

Jacobson goes upstairs and returns with a key and hands it over.

“Knock yourself out,” he says. “I’ll call and tell my houseguests that you’re going to show up.”

“Don’t tell me,” Jimmy says. “More debutantes?”

“Would you expect anything less?”

“Definitely not anything more,” Jimmy says, and leaves, happy to be away from Jacobson, the way he always is. By now there isn’t a day that goes by when Jimmy Cunniff doesn’t find himself wondering whose side he is really on here.

Other than his own.

Jane, in her heart of hearts, is still holding out hope that Jacobson might be innocent of killing the Carson family, same as she held out hope, even after his acquittal, that he hadn’t murdered the Gateses.

Jimmy wants him to go down.

It would be the first loss of Jane’s career if he does go down, and maybe her last. But it’s different for Jimmy, in his own heart of hearts. If things do play out that way, if the asshole does get convicted, Jimmy will put this one into the win column.

Hundred percent.