Page 43

Jimmy

ONE OF THE GIRLS answers the door.

Jimmy can’t help himself. When they’re as young as this one clearly is, he thinks of them as girls. If that makes him feel older than he really is, screw it.

“Rob told me you might show up,” she says after Jimmy introduces himself. “I’m Kellye. With another e at the end.”

“Can’t ever have enough,” Jimmy says.

She steps aside and Jimmy enters the ornate foyer, with its marble floor and what he’s sure are expensive paintings on the walls.

He’s been here before, and is always more impressed with the marble he’s standing on than the art.

He finds himself imagining all over again what the walls of this place, even the ones down here, could say if they could talk, about all the messed-up shit they’ve seen here, all the way back to the days when Rob Jacobson’s old man was the master of the house and head pervert.

Like father, like son.

“How old are you, Kellye with an e ?” Jimmy asks.

She grins. “Rob told me you were his chief investigator, not from the Census Bureau,” she says.

Smart , Jimmy thinks.

It makes him want to like her.

But if she’s got any kind of relationship with Jacobson going, he’ll be able to fight the urge with absolutely no problem.

“How come he’s letting you live here?” Jimmy asks now.

“Other than me being as fun as I am?”

“Define fun.”

“Are you asking if we’re fucking?” Kellye says. “Because we’re not.”

“So then what benefits does he get out of letting you live in his house?”

She shrugs. “Like, he doesn’t have to pay a housekeeper?”

“But there’s somebody else living here, too, am I right?” Jimmy says.

“Paula.”

“Is Paula hooking up with him, either when he sneaks into the city or out there?”

“Every chance they get,” Kellye says.

“Is Paula here right now?”

“If you drove in, you probably passed her on the LIE,” she says. “Today is a booty call day out on eastern Long Island, pretty sure.”

“What does Paula do?”

She grins again. “For Rob, or in general?”

“In general.”

“I think she’s majoring in being famous at NYU,” Kellye says. “Hence doing it with Rob.”

“What about you?”

“I’m an actress.”

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 the original 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.

“ Where did you find it?” Jimmy asks her.

“Where Robby must’ve hid it.”