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Everything connected.
But how?
Jimmy meets Detective Craig Jackson and Dick Kelley, a retired detective older than both of them, at Dorrian’s Red Hand. The Second Avenue bar became famous back in the 1980s when a kid named Robert Chambers left with a girl named Jennifer Levin, who ended up dead a couple of hours later in Central Park. Dick Kelley was one of the cops who caught the case of the Preppy Killer, as Chambers quickly became known. Craig Jackson said it was Kelley who picked the East Side bar, still popular with kids, as tonight’s meeting point. Maybe Dorrian’s reminded him of his glory days.
A cop’s cop, everybody always said about Detective Dick Kelley. He was tall, thin, completely bald, one of those guys who’d probably looked old when he was young.
Kelley orders a tequila. So does Craig Jackson. Jimmy knows from his own bar that more people than ever are drinking tequila. And knows why. Calories for a jigger of tequila are about the same as a light beer, low sugar, no carbohydrates. Drinkers can make a lifestyle choice and still look cool. Win, win. And still get just as shit-faced in the end.
Jimmy orders a nonalcoholic beer. He doesn’t want to make the hundred-mile drive home any harder.
They make small talk about Chambers, who pled guilty to manslaughter, served fifteen years, then went back in for an even longer bit on drug trafficking, the moron.
“Tell me about Anthony Licata,” Jimmy says finally.
“You know that he and Champi finally partnered up over there on your dark side, right?” Kelley says. “Turned themselves into freaking legends, just not in a good way. A problem got inyourway, they removed it, for a price.”
Kelley drinks some tequila. He says he walked here from his apartment on 81st and Second.
“Licata and Champi figured out something even before they left the cops and became what you would call entrepreneurial,” he continues. “Rich guys in the big citylikehaving bad guys as body men, or fixers, or muscle, or whatever. Gives them that dark-side thrill. No one’s sure who started it, but before long they were together. Somehow Champi got with your client’s old man before the old man shot up his house that day. With him gone, it was like the kid inherited him.”
“When Champi and Licata were both still with the department?” Jimmy asks.
“Just Champi,” Kelley says. “Paul Harrington, commander ofthe detectives at the 24th, had already booted Licata’s ass out of the precinct and out of the department by then.”
“Did the kid really kill his father and the girl?”
“It looked like a murder-suicide, the story had a boldface name, the whole thing was instant tabloid gold. Lieutenant Harrington ran point because the case was so high-profile, and he was as good as it gets. He could never find anything to make them doubt the kid’s version of how it went down.”
Champi put in his papers not long after that, according to Dick Kelley. Then Champi and Licata just kept expanding their client list, and their grift, managing to stay a step ahead of their old friends in the NYPD. Team owners, ballplayers trying to stay off Weinstein Island, when that first became a thing. A former network president who got a teenager pregnant. Construction guys. Restaurant guys and real estate guys. Publishing big shots like Rob Jacobson’s father.
“All under the radar, I’m assuming,” Jimmy says.
Kelley nods. “They just kept finding more high rollers who loved feeling like they were in a Scorcese movie. They were still closing cases. Just in a different way from when they’d been carrying a badge.”
“And neither one of them ever got made for any of it?” Jimmy asks.
“Want to know the truth?” Dick Kelley says. “It took your lawyer lady to take Joe Champi down, probably while Licata just kept laughing his way all the way to some Caymans bank account. Probably didn’t even stop long enough to toss dirt on his partner’s coffin. Because his own gravy train just kept rolling along.”
“So whatever Champi was into, Licata was into?” Jimmy asks.
“We called them brothers from other mothers,” Kelley says. “They even looked a little bit alike, the bastards. I saw them onetime at a hockey game, both in their Rangers hats. Almost looked like twins.”
Jimmy’s ribs are starting to ache. He thinks about just one Scotch for medicinal purposes but lets the thought pass right through him. The LIE was no place for even a slight buzz.
“We always heard that there was a third partner,” Kelley adds, “but nobody could ever nail that down.”
“Any other sugar daddies you might have forgotten to mention?” Jimmy asks him.
“Didn’t forget,” Kelley says. “Just been saving the best for last. Turns out I got a call right before I showed up here, from an old friend of mine from the 20th, which used to be my shop. He gave up a name I’d never heard but thought might ring a bell with you.”
Jimmy waits.
Kelley is still smiling, like he’s about to draw to an inside straight.
“You ever hear of an old Yalie hedge-fund guy named Thomas McKenzie?”
SEVENTY
