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JUDGE HORTON CANCELS COURT for the day.

Danny Esposito tells me on the phone that he’s called ahead to Chief Carlos Quintero to tell him that Katherine Welsh and I are both on our way to Water Mill, and that the district attorney from Nassau County has requested that until we arrive Quintero not remove anything in Paul Harrington’s home.

Including Paul Harrington.

“Carlos told me it’s his crime scene,” Esposito tells me. “I told him that Judge Horton might not see it that way.”

“You really think Harrington killed himself?” I ask Esposito.

“He left a note,” Esposito says.

“Handwritten?”

“Short and sweet,” Esposito says. “Carlos says it’s the same scrawl as from a grocery list they found on the kitchen table where they found him.”

“He wrote out a grocery list before he shot himself in the head?” I ask.

Danny Esposito says, “Maybe he didn’t want to go on an empty stomach.”

Katherine Welsh and I, even traveling in our own cars, arrive only a few minutes apart in front of Harrington’s house, parking up the block from the emergency and police vehicles, one of them driven by the Nassau County Police Department detective Welsh dispatched to Water Mill to escort Harrington to the courthouse.

“You didn’t trust Harrington to drive himself?” I ask her as we walk toward the house together.

“I know you think he was hot to tell his story,” she says.

“But the closer we got to him actually doing that, the more I started to worry about him. Even though he’s an ex-cop, he asked what would happen if he changed his mind and didn’t show.

I told him we’d issue a warrant and arrest him all over again. ”

“You really are a hard-ass,” I say.

“All that time in the gym,” she says.

Danny Esposito tells us he’s volunteered to pitch in and canvass the neighborhood.

So he heads across the street as Welsh and I are handed gloves and blue crime-scene booties by one of Carlos Quintero’s guys stationed outside the house.

I’m struck by the fact that the color of the booties seems to match Katherine Welsh’s dress almost perfectly, as if somehow the universe is accessorizing just for her.

Paul Harrington is slumped in a chair at his kitchen table.

He’s wearing a robe and pajamas and slippers and what I recognize as an NYU T-shirt.

There is a mass of dried blood on the right side of his face, caked around the bullet hole there.

His eyes are closed. Blood has dripped down on his robe, and there are spots of it on the floor, near what I recognize instantly as a Glock 19, the service weapon I saw on Harrington at Jimmy’s bar.

I stare at him and imagine this as part of the trail of blood that has been following me around since I first decided to represent Rob Jacobson.

Carlos Quintero shows us the note on the butcher-block table.

Just two words.

Judgement day

By now Jimmy Cunniff is inside the house, and has taken his place next to me.

“Judgement with an e ,” he says. “Isn’t that the way the English spell it?”

He never ceases to amaze me with things he knows that I’d never think he knew.

“Or it can be spelled that way in a legal context,” Welsh says.

She turns to Carlos Quintero and says, “You believe it’s a match? The handwriting?”

He walks her over to the table where the grocery list is.

“My wife calls it cop cursive,” Quintero says. “We’ll have to have it analyzed by an expert, of course. But to the naked eye, yeah.”

Welsh looks at me. “Do you think he suddenly got guilty enough about all the things you say he’s done and did this to himself?”

“Pardon my French, Katherine, but fuck no,” I say. “I do, however, think somebody may have staged this whole thing to make it look like he did.”

“A guy who thought he was above the law suddenly handing himself a death sentence?” Jimmy says. “Somebody might be trying to sell that here. But, sorry, I ain’t buying.”

“He wasn’t the type to commit suicide,” I say.

“There’s a type?” Welsh asks.

“Ones who think the Grim Reaper will never find them,” I say. “And would never punch their own ticket in a million years.”

Jimmy moves closer to the body, staring down at it.

“Or not,” he says.