Seventy-One

SEVENTY-ONE

ON MONDAY MORNING JIMMY is driving me to the courthouse in Mineola for my meeting with Judge Kane. I've told him he doesn't have to do it, that I'm perfectly capable of making the trip on my own. He won't hear of it, says he looked it up in the wingman's manual, and it's one of his responsibilities, no getting around it.

We're talking, not for the first time since I got back from the city, about what I saw in front of my ex-husband's restaurant on Friday night.

"I can understand why you thought you were seeing dead people when you saw a guy who has to be Licata," Jimmy says. "Mickey Dunne used to say there were look-a-likes and reminds-me-ofs. From the pictures I've seen of Licata and Champi, they fall into the second category. Same height, same build, same coloring. Same slouch. Even their Rangers caps. If I didn't know better, I swear I might think the two tough guys were a couple. Like one of those old couples where they start looking like each other the longer they stay together."

"It wasn't long ago that somebody wanted us to think Champi was texting from the other side," I tell Jimmy. "For a second I thought he'd made his way all the way back to the Upper East Side."

I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. "I'd ask my ex about it, but he won't return my calls or my texts."

"Isn't that the one about the more things change the more they stay the same?"

"Oui."

"Dick Kelley mentioned that the tag team of Licata and Champi did some work for restaurant owners along the way," Jimmy says. "So what kinds of problems could old Marty have had that might have brought Licata and Champi into his life?"

"I'll ask him if he ever gets back to me."

So maybe Martin was doing business with Anthony Licata, which meant he could have done business with Joe Champi, too.

Jimmy and I spend a lot of the ride to Mineola speculating if Licata might have been responsible for things we assumed Champi had done, including the disappearance of Gregg McCall, the Nassau DA who hired us to look into the murder of the Carson family in the first place. And maybe drugging Jimmy at McCall's house.

"Could your ex have had money problems you didn't know about?" Jimmy asks.

"Didn't everybody in the restaurant business during COVID?"

"Maybe he found a bad guy to partner up with the way your new friend Allen Reese did with his real estate business."

"Sometimes I get the idea everybody, us included, is in the same repertory company."

We pull up in front of the courthouse. Jimmy says he's going for coffee but will be sitting right here when I come out. I mention that the parking space we're in is reserved for official vehicles.

"What's your point?" he asks.

I get out of the car, leather bag over my shoulder, and head up the same courthouse steps where Jimmy and I stood the day I really decided to take back Rob Jacobson as a client. Feeling the same thrill I've always felt walking up courthouse steps, every single time.

Only now I'm about to do something that in my entire career I've never done once:

Quit.

If Judge Kane goes along with me, in a few minutes I'll walk back down these steps and just walk away.

But as I go through the double doors, I'm suddenly remembering.

"You know when you stop fighting?" my father asked me.

A boy had insulted me at school that day. I might have been twelve. The boy had told me I was more boy than girl, and I'd let him get away with it.

"You stop fighting when you're dead?" I asked, not for the first time.

Dad smiled and shook his head. "Do the time, kid. Even after you're dead, you still gotta be willing to go a few more rounds."

The next day, I waited for that boy after school, told him I needed to show him something, and then gave him a bloody nose. It got me suspended for a week. My father always used to say that winning meant being the last one in the room.

Just not this time.

Sorry, Pop.

I know I'm doing the right thing, for me and Dr. Ben and even Jimmy. Being the last one in the room is no longer worth it, because it's no longer cost-effective, and not just for me.

This time in a courthouse may be the last time, who knows?

Judge Kane's assistant tells me she's inside her chambers waiting for me.

Get it over with.

I'm only in there five minutes. Perhaps not even that. Then I'm passing the assistant's desk again, and on my way down the hall and back through the doors and down the steps to Jimmy's car.

When I'm inside he says, "It go okay?"

"Couldn't have gone any better."

"So, you're out?"

I laugh.

"Oh, hell no," I tell him.