That gets a laugh out of me. I reach for his bottle and take a sip of his Montauk Summer Ale.

  “Hey,” he says.

  I tell him not to worry, I’m not contagious.

  “It really would make me feel better if I could watch the Mets.”

  “You’re playing the sick card over a ball game?” But he reluctantly points the remote at the set and switches to the Mets.

  “So we’re doing this with Jacobson,” Jimmy says. “I’ll be a sonofabitch.”

  “We’re both doing it.”

  “You know and I know that Jacobson sent Joe Champi to kill you, whether he’ll ever admit that or not. Then we get to the fact how you’re the one who keeps telling me that you want Jacobson to be innocent of killing the entire damn Gates family because you don’t want to die thinking you got an acquittal for a guilty man.”

  He realizes instantly that he had just put “dying” into play.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

  “I know.”

  “But you just said to me the other day that you still don’t know about this guy. Jacobson.”

  “That I do know.”

  “So explain to me, in a way I can understand, why we’re going back to work for him.”

  “I can’t.”

  He grins. “Jesus, Janie,” he says. “You really are sick. In the head.”

  I look at him, my own face serious now. “And please don’t tell me again that life’s too short to waste on Rob Jacobson.”

  “Even if I want to?”

  “Even if.”

  He asks me if I want something to drink. I tell him that I’m going to head home.

  “You really ready for this?”

  “You mean another trial?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  He’s talking about the trip I am taking to Switzerland in the morning, to the same cancer clinic outside of Geneva where my sister, Brigid, was treated. Targeted immunotherapy was on the table. Enhanced chemotherapy. Perhaps some experimental meds not yet FDA-approved. If I respond favorably to their treatment program, I’m only there two weeks. If I don’t, then we see.

  My sister and me. Both with cancer, if different kinds. I know. Some families have all the luck. My mother died of it, too. At least Brigid’s is in remission for the time being.

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” I tell Jimmy. “Mostly because I have nothing to lose.”

  In a soft voice, my tough-guy partner says, “I do.”

  He walks me out the back door to my car.

  We hug for a long time.

  “This has to work,” I whisper to him.

  “I’ll mention that to God at Sunday Mass this week,” he whispers back.

  That gets me to pull back.

  “Wait. You’re going to church again?”

  “Desperate times.”

  “Would you mind asking Her something for me?” I ask.

  “You got it.”

  “Ask Her in a nice way if She could please stop screwing with me.”

  TEN

  IT’S BEEN A LONG day for me, much more activity than I’m used to, at least lately. Tomorrow is going to be much, much longer.

  But I’m not ready to go home yet.

  It’s the beautiful twilight time on the South Fork of eastern Long Island. What I think of as my own personal magic hour. It’s the kind of night, and light, that reminds me why I wanted to live out here full time, a hundred miles from the big, bad city, twenty miles from land’s end in Montauk.

  It’s September, my favorite month of the year, even though I’m about to give the best part of it away with both hands.

  I go past the turn to my house, keep going to Indian Wells Beach, park my car. No other cars in the lot. Just the way I like it. My own private beach, free of charge.

  I get out and take off my sneakers and walk down toward the water, wanting to feel the sand underneath my feet.

  There are a lot of beaches in this part of the world that I love. But I love this one the most, maybe because it’s so close to my house.

  Out here I rarely feel the urge to think out loud. Almost like I want the ocean to do my thinking for me.

  I walk and I think, mostly about tomorrow, heading east toward Atlantic Beach, the next one up.

  Just me and an ocean perfectly lit as if by a moon shining down on a movie set.

  Built for the movie of my so-called life.

  I keep walking, taking it all in, beach and water and moon and sky. There’s a point, every single day, when I think the same thing:

  This can’t be happening to me when I’m going this good.

  I’ve just won the biggest case of my career. I’m in love with Dr. Ben Kalinsky. Really in love, for the first time in my life. I told myself I felt the same before both of my marriages. I realize now I was only kidding myself, as if wishing could have made it so, both times.

  I suddenly feel myself smiling, thinking about all the days and nights when I had Rip on this beach with me, walking and running and then walking a little more, watching him get stronger, if not a whole lot faster.

  Like he refused to die.

  Now it was going to be my turn, a long way from home.

  Before I, the only person on this beach tonight, head for the parking lot, I suddenly stop and then I am shouting at the ocean, or maybe God Herself, about just how goddamned much I want to live.

  Then I get back into my car and drive past the turn for my house one more time and keep going to the Springs.

  I park my car in the driveway and ring the doorbell, remembering the first time I made a trip like this, to this same house.

  When Dr. Ben Kalinsky opens the door, I say, “There are some things I need to tell you.”

  ELEVEN

  WE SPEND THE NIGHT at Ben’s. When we’re in bed he tells me that he’s known about my cancer all along.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I ask.

  “Because you were the one who needed to say something.”

  “Have I mentioned lately how much I love you?”

  He leans over and kisses my hair.

  “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

  In the morning he follows me back to my house so he can pick up Rip the dog. Ben offers for about the tenth time to drive me to the airport. I tell him that Brigid has insisted. I’d finally told her about my cancer the night before, having waited as long as I could, aware that she had cancer problems of her own.

  When we’re saying good-bye on my porch, he says, “Remember: You’re not allowed to fall for some mysterious stranger with an accent.”

  “What if it’s a hunky male nurse feeding me good meds?”

  “Well, that’s different,” Dr. Ben says.

  “Get out of here before I start crying.”

  “Because you’re already missing me?”

  “Missing Rip,” I say.

  I’m packed and ready to go when Brigid pulls up an hour or so later, after which we begin the two-hour ride to JFK.

  Brigid could afford Switzerland because Rob Jacobson, her college friend from Duke and former lover, paid for it. And said he was willing to do it again if he had to. I can afford the Meier Clinic because of what Jacobson paid me for getting him acquitted. I’d called him by now at Nassau County Correctional in East Meadow to tell him that I was taking his case, but that he is sworn to secrecy until I get back.

  Brigid and I are about ten minutes out from Kennedy when she says, “Rob is so pleased that you’ve agreed to represent him again.”

  “So much for swearing him to secrecy,” I say.

  “He says we’re all family.”

  “The hell we are.”

  She’s wearing her glasses. Hands at nine and three on the steering wheel. Even her driving posture is perfect.

  “He’s still my friend, Jane.”

  I angle myself to face her, so she can glimpse my smile. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “You’re the one going back to work for him.”

  Still smiling I say, “I worry sometimes that it’s spread to my brain.”

  “He says he’s innocent.”

  “Got it,” I say. “And I’m just heading off to Switzerland because I had a sudden urge to look at a bunch of Alps.”

  Brigid finally pulls the car up in front of the United terminal. I get my carry-on from the back of her SUV. Since I don’t expect to do much socializing, or having the need to dress up in Switzerland, I’m traveling light.

  After we’ve finished our hugging and kissing, Brigid says, “I want you to remember one thing while you’re away.”

  “Not to lose my passport?”

  “Just remember that you’re Jane Fucking Smith, and you do not lose.”

  Not even “effing.”

  And her the good girl.

  TWELVE

  Jimmy

  AN HOUR AND A half later, Jimmy is in the back room at P. J. Clarke’s, a New York joint where they shot a lot of the movie The Lost Weekend. Jimmy thinks the place should long have been awarded landmark status where it’s still sitting—or maybe squatting—at the corner of 55th and Third.

  Detective Craig Jackson, the best friend Jimmy has left at the NYPD now that his old partner Mickey Dunne is dead, is waiting for him.

  They’re here because Jimmy really was way ahead of Jane on Rob Jacobson and the weird connection there is between the two of them, whether she wants to admit it’s there or not. Like some hold the guy had on her even before the hook was in her all over again, even though there had been a time during the first trial when she actually slapped the shit out of him.

  Jimmy has decided to go all the way back to the beginning with the mutt, which means the day when Jacobson’s old man did shoot a teenage girl named Carey Watson before shooting himself.

  Or so the police report said at the time.

  Only now Jimmy is doing what all good cops do when they don’t feel they’ve satisfactorily buttoned up a case. He is starting all over again. The back-to-square-one rule of detecting. He is doing it in Clarke’s with Craig Jackson. Jackson, he knows, is here out of friendship, on his own time, because he believes in the brotherhood the way Jimmy does, even if Jimmy is no longer officially part of it.

  Looks-wise he has always reminded Jimmy of another Jackson, Samuel L., even before Samuel L. really hit it big and seemed to be in every other movie and even more television commercials.

  “I ordered for you,” Jackson says to Jimmy.

  There are two beers on the table.

  “What if I want something stronger than beer?”

  “Then go ahead and order it, cowboy. Just means more beer for me if you do.”

  They get right to it. Jackson doesn’t like small talk any more than Jimmy does. He told Jimmy one time, when they were both still on the job, that if Jimmy wanted to know how his wife and kids were doing, wait for the Christmas card.

  Jackson taps a finger on the folder between them on the table.

  “This is the original file on the Lolita shit,” he says, “which you might remember is what they called it at the time. I copied it for you, along with generously adding the notes I’ve made about what I’ve found out since you got me interested.”

  He drinks some beer.

  “It turns out there was another kid there that day,” Jackson says. “At Jacobson’s town house.”

  “Wait,” Jimmy says. “I never heard about that.”

  “You weren’t supposed to.” Jackson nods. “Was in the original file, but then it wasn’t. Kid named Edmund McKenzie. Apparently left long before all the shooting started. I had to do some digging, but it looks to me as if McKenzie, who had a rich daddy of his own, managed to get himself whited out of the story at the time. Or white-boyed out. Now this may come as a shock to you, Cunniff, but I’m thinking that money might have changed hands to make it happen.”

  “I’m shocked,” Jimmy says. “Shocked, I tell ya.”

  “The kid was a classmate and asshole buddy of young Rob. Along with being somebody who’d dated the Watson girl same as our Robbie did, before Jacobson’s daddy, that old perv, decided he wanted a taste.”

  “But you say the McKenzie kid left the party early?”

  Jackson smiles brilliantly now, teeth very white against very dark skin.

  “The original version, which I eventually found, being the kick-ass detective that I am, is that he did. But McKenzie’s daddy is even richer than Jacobson’s was.” He shrugs. “Feel free to connect the dots.”

  “They ever question the kid?”

  Jackson shakes his head. “Just his daddy.”

  “What the fuck.”

  “Beautifully said.”

  Jackson holds up a finger. “Gets better. There’s something else in play, just not sure where. There was always a rumor that McKenzie’s old man, big hedge fund guy now, Thomas McKenzie’s his name, was connected when he was starting to build his fortune.”

  “Connected to who?”

  “Sonny Blum.”

  “The Jewish Godfather? No shit.”

  “No one has ever been able to nail it down. But a story went around at the time that maybe Edmund McKenzie’s old man had friends in low places to help him clean up any and all of his kid’s messes.”

  “Like Joe Champi cleaned up for Rob Jacobson.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Jimmy waves the waiter over and orders a Jack Daniels. “You’ve been busy, Action Jackson.”

  “Fuckin’ ay.”

  Jackson says it’s all in his notes, but he’d rather tell the rest of it. A few years later, he tells Jimmy, there was a beach party at McKenzie’s father’s house in Southampton. Everybody there young and rich and drunk and stoned and stupid.

  “Sounds like a real slice,” Jimmy says.

  “Long story short?” Jackson says. “McKenzie gets accused of rape when the party’s over. Then his daddy makes that go away. But after the girl gets paid off, which is what I’m sure happened, our friend Edmund started telling anybody who will listen that it was Rob Jacobson who raped the girl, and that he, McKenzie, had gotten set up. And was going to get even someday.”

  “Rape kit?”

  Jackson smiles again. “Somehow it managed to magically disappear.”

  “Seems like there was a lot of that going around.”

  “Ya think?”

  “You’re telling me that McKenzie might have had a fixer in the department, too?” Jimmy asks.

  “Or maybe Sonny Blum did, if he still had his hooks into McKenzie’s old man.”

  “They didn’t used to call it Fun City for nothing,” Jimmy says to Craig Jackson.

  THIRTEEN

  Jimmy

  CRAIG JACKSON WALKS OUTSIDE to 55th Street, saying he was going to make some calls to see if Edmund McKenzie might be in town and making his usual round of clubs.

  While Jimmy waits for him to come back, he looks around and remembers the days when a little guy named Frankie Ribondo ran the back room like a small country; when some nights you had to wait for the men’s room, with its old stand-up urinals, because two of Sinatra’s guys were posted outside while he was inside.

  It takes less than ten minutes for Jackson to announce he has managed to locate Edmund McKenzie, reminding Jimmy for the second time tonight what a world-class detective he is.

  “Swear to God, a reporter from Page Six who I help out sometimes tracks him on her phone, so she’s got a better sense of where the stupid might break out on a given night. It hasn’t yet tonight, but McKenzie is currently pregaming at Bemelmans.”

  The Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle.

  Jane took Jimmy there a couple of times when they were celebrating big wins in court, back when Jane still thought she would keep winning forever, maybe at everything except staying married.

  In the cab uptown Jimmy finds a couple of pictures of Mc-Kenzie on his phone, from Page Six, appropriately enough. And spots him right away at a small corner table facing the piano, checking his phone, highball glass in front of him, full.

  McKenzie gives Jimmy a bored look when Jimmy sits down across from him. Calmly puts his phone down before taking a big pull on his drink.

  “I’m saving that seat for my date.”

  “Good to know. But what you need to know is that I’m a cop and there are matters we need to discuss.”

  “Care to show me your badge?”

  “Care to empty your pockets?”

  McKenzie’s eyes widen, in mock fear. “Oh no. Am I about to be arrested for possession, officer? What year do you think this is?”

  McKenzie takes another sip of his drink. “So, what’s got you all worked up? My old parking tickets?”

  “I’m taking another look at the day your buddy Rob’s old man died and took that kid Carey Watson with him,” Jimmy says. “And what I’m wondering is if you were really gone from the town house before the shooting started.”

  “Who says I was there?”

  “I say.”

  “And all this time later, you’re here because of that shit?” McKenzie said. “You lose a bet?”

  The piano player has just eased into “Stardust.” Jimmy idly wonders how many times he’s played it in bars like this, with hardly anybody really listening, or caring.

  “You should be talking to your client, tough guy. Hear the guy’s a real killer.”

  “My client?” Jimmy grins. “So you know who I am. Tough guy.”

  “I’ve got cable and everything.”

  “I’m told you and Rob were close once.”

  “Were being the operative word. You want to know how close we are now? Fuck him, that’s how close.”

  “What happened to a beautiful friendship?”

  McKenzie checks his phone again. “Long story.”

  Jimmy leans forward, grinning at him. “Actually, Eddie, I just now learned the story. Or at least the good parts about how he got you in a frame for a rape you say he committed. Do I have that right?”

  “As rain.” He drinks. “What other interesting things have you heard about me?”

  “That you were going to get him back even if it took the rest of your life.”

  McKenzie brightens. “Like framing him for a triple homicide, or even two? Well, wouldn’t that be a dream? Listen, I was actually kind of a hot-shit science whiz when I was still at Princeton. But that was before I went back to my two real majors: drinking and girls.”