Seventy-Five Jimmy

SEVENTY-FIVE

Jimmy

"YOU'RE NOT GOING TO let this go, are you?" Jane asks when Jimmy drops her off at her house.

"Have you ever known me to let things go?"

Jimmy heads back to his bar after that to make some calls. One of them is to Dick Kelley. Before they left Dorrian's, Kelley mentioned in passing how ten years ago Paul Harrington retired to eastern Long Island. Everybody thought he'd hang around for a deputy inspector job, maybe even at the 24th. But Harrington put in his papers and walked away. Jimmy asks Kelley now if he can find out where Harrington lives.

Kelley calls back in less than five minutes. "Where are you right now?"

Jimmy tells him.

"Well, my friend, you're in luck, because it turns out the Lieu lives over in a town called Water Mill, which even I know is pretty close to you. You want me to find an exact address?"

"I'll find it," Jimmy says. "Sonofabitch, I knew I had to catch a break sooner or later."

He finally comes up with an address on Cobb Road for retired lieutenant Paul Harrington, and a phone number. When Harrington answers the phone, first ring, Jimmy tells him who he is and what he wants to talk about. Harrington says come ahead.

It is, as Jimmy discovers when Harrington shows him in, a very nice house.

"My Sharon had family money she never told me about until she got that headache and never got better," Harrington says, as if answering a question Jimmy hasn't asked. "When she passed, I found out just how much family money. As soon as the check cleared, I found this place and moved out here. I felt like I'd earned it, even if it was my girl's money and not mine."

"Bet your ass you earned it," Jimmy says. "You were a great cop."

"Still am. Don't you feel the same way?"

Jimmy grins. "Until they cover me in dirt."

"Could've waited a little longer to retire, beefed up the pension. But it's like I heard some old baseball manager said when he finally called it quits. It had reached the point where the wins stopped making up for the losses."

They make their way out to the backyard, where Jimmy can see some pretty amazing gardens.

"I could never afford a place like this now," Harrington says. "I could barely afford it at the time. But if I was going to live it out alone, I decided I'd live it out in style." There's a catch in his throat. "I was just supposed to do that with my best girl."

He still has a lot of white hair. About Jimmy's height, maybe a little taller, though he's a little stooped now. Ruddy face. Drinker's nose. Bright blue eyes. Young eyes. Big hands that look arthritic to Jimmy, some of the fingers zigging when they should be zagging.

Jimmy still has the feeling he had when he was just starting out and first ran into Harrington on a case, right after Harrington had been elevated to commander of the detectives at the 24th:

Legend.

Now here they were, breathing the same air, Harrington treating him like they were still members of the same club.

There are a couple of chairs set at a table in the middle of the lawn. They go sit in them. Jimmy goes into more detail about Licata and Champi and why he's still getting after it even though Champi is gone.

"It was me who put Internal Affairs on Licata, when I had him in the 24th," Harrington says. "Before he left the building, I made the prick hand his gun and badge to me. To the end he's telling me I had him all wrong. Still calling me Lieu like we were buddies. Champi must've seen the handwriting on the wall and got his own ass out while the getting was good. Before the two of them began their exciting careers in the private sector."

"Could Champi have staged that crime scene with Jacobson's old man?"

Harrington runs through his white hair a hand gnarled like an old baseball catcher's right hand. "Who better than a detective, especially one who learned the ropes from me? But as hard as we looked—as hard as I looked—there just wasn't enough to believe any other doer than the old man."

Harrington offers Jimmy a beer. Jimmy says no thanks. Harrington walks slowly back up the hill to the house, comes back with a can of Corona.

He sits down, takes a sip of beer, and suddenly slams the can down on the table, beer spilling out of the top.

"I fucking hate those bastards," he says. "I fucking hate dirty cops and they were as dirty as I ever encountered."

His face is red, and his chest is heaving.

"That badge is supposed to mean something," he says, lowering his voice now.

"I know," Jimmy says, keeping his own voice low, not wanting to set him off again.

It's back to being quiet out here, even as close to the road as the house is. Jimmy wonders if maybe it gets too quiet for retired lieutenant Paul Harrington, his wife gone, after having spent his whole adult life in the barrel.

"I think Licata or Champi shot my old partner," Jimmy says. "And if it was one of them, I can't let that go and still live with myself."

"Mickey Dunne," Harrington says. "Your partner. I heard what happened to him. Crying shame."

Jimmy nods. "And one or both of them made Gregg McCall, that Nassau DA, disappear without a trace along the way. Something else my gut tells me."

"It ever wrong, your gut?"

"Rarely."

Harrington drinks more beer.

"Promise me something," he says now to Jimmy. "If it was Licata, and you do finally put him down, call me when you've finally got him by the balls."

Jimmy salutes. "Yes, sir," he says.

"That badge is supposed to mean something," Harrington says. "And he used it like a goddamn credit card."