Three

THREE

"YOU'RE BEING WAY TOO quiet," Jimmy says as we're getting off the Northern State and onto the Long Island Expressway.

"I'm thinking."

"You generally do most of your thinking out loud, you don't mind me saying."

"What if it was Morelli I just saw?" I ask. "And if he's been in hiding, why did he make a point of making sure I saw him ?"

Nick Morelli had once dated Laurel Gates, the teenage daughter of Mitch and Kathy Gates, all three of whom Jacobson had been charged with murdering. He'd testified about seeing Jacobson making out with Laurel Gates across the street from the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett the summer she died.

The day after Morelli testified, he'd disappeared.

Body never found.

Jimmy says it's still an open case with the East Hampton Police. Being Jimmy, he checks from time to time, but they keep telling him there has been no evidence—credit card or bank statements or sightings—that Morelli is still walking among us.

"There was a time when we thought Jacobson might have had Morelli killed, remember?" I say to Jimmy. "Just because Morelli wasn't going to do our guy much good alive."

"Stop me if you've heard this one before," Jimmy says. "But our guy said he didn't do that, either."

We drive in silence for a few miles before Jimmy suddenly bangs his hands hard on the steering wheel. Saying something I know he's wanted to say since we left Mineola.

"You can't really want to defend him on this Carson thing."

I smile because I can't keep myself from smiling. Because he's got me and we both know he's got me, the only thing left is to slap the cuffs on me.

"You're right, Cunniff. I can't tell you that."

"Shit," he says. "I was afraid of that."

We make the turn at Exit 70, getting on Route 111, the connector road that will put us on 27 all the way to my house in Amagansett.

"I knew I shouldn't have taken you there," Jimmy says. "I should've known that being that close to the action would be like some kind of drug."

"Yeah," I say. "That's what I need these days. More drugs."

"Poor choice of words."

"But I can't lie to you, Cunniff. For a few minutes there in front of that courthouse, I actually felt like my old self again. Like I'm still the woman you refer to as Jane Effing Smith."

I don't tell Jimmy Cunniff the whole truth and nothing but, that there on those steps, I felt so alive I forgot I was dying.

That I didn't have effing cancer.