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Morelli gets up, walks over to Brigid, and gently lays his gun against her cheek. She seems to shrink inside herself but is too frightened to lean away from him.
He slowly moves the gun up and down, as if he’s using it to caress her.
“Then the next one to go is her,” he says. “And then maybe all the other people you care about after her. And that dog of yours. For the last time, stop bothering people you shouldn’t be bothering, about shit that happened a long time ago and has nothing to do with you.”
“Why not just kill me?” I ask. “Joe Champi was ready to.”
“Champi was out of control. If you hadn’t shot him, I would have had to.”
“But you won’t shoot me.”
“My boss says no, as long as you finally get the message,” he says. “He says he owes a guy a favor. And for the time being, you’re still the favor.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Your father.”
I hear the sharp intake of breath from Brigid. Or maybe it was my own.
“What did you just say?”
“All I’m going to say.”
Morelli backs toward the door, the gun still in his hand, all the way out of my sister’s house, gently closing the door in front of him.
I think about going after him, getting my gun out and firing a couple of shots in the air just to scare the hell out of him tonight the way he scared Brigid. But I don’t. My sister has been through enough. We both have.
I try to put my arm around her. But she leans away from me now, as if I’m the one she doesn’t want touching her.
“You’re going to do exactly what he asked you to do,” she says. “You’re going to defend Rob and then you’re going to let God sort out the rest of it.”
“What about what he just said about Dad?”
My fragile sister, my beautiful fragile sister, looks at me.
“Dad’s dead,” she says. “How about working on keeping us alive?”
ONE HUNDRED ONE
BRIGID AGREES TO COME back to my house and spend the night. I give her my room and take the fold-out bed from the sofa in my office.
In the morning I meet Jimmy at Jack’s in Sag Harbor. Jimmy orders a regular coffee. After sleeping only a couple of hours, at most, waiting across the rest of the night to hear my alarm triggered, I’ve ordered an espresso-and-coffee mix called Mad Max.
“Can you see any possible connection between your father and any of these scum buckets?” Jimmy asks.
“He was a Marine. He was a bartender my whole life until he dropped dead in the bar one day. He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen with a lot of kids who could have gone either way. He met a lot of people in his life, on both sides of the line, is what I’m saying.”
“Now somebody in this thing of ours owes him a favor, from way back.”
“At least according to Morelli.”
“Your sister wants you to walk away, which means she wants both of us to walk away.”
“And that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” I say. “It’s time for us to stop chasing our tails and focus on the trial and let God sort out the rest of it.”
I see Jimmy staring across the street as a couple of uniformed cops from the Sag Harbor station wave at him before they get into their cruiser and head up Division Street. By now I’m convinced that Jimmy Cunniff knows the name and rank of every cop on the South Fork, and what they like to order at his bar.
He turns and looks back at me.
