The Hamptons Lawyer

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three

•••

ONE

JIMMY CUNNIFF AND I are inside the shooting range at the Maidstone Gun Club a little after seven in the morning. For a change, we’re shooting at targets and not at people. Even better, the targets aren’t shooting back.

As ex‑NYPD cops, Jimmy and I have long competed at shooting ranges. With rare exceptions, we’ve been better shots than the bad guys we’ve encountered along the way.

Jimmy still feels the need to remind me that he thinks he’s better than I am. I now feel almost obligated to remind him that in my humble opinion, nobody’s better than I am.

“We’re still just talking about guns here, right?” he asks.

“Among other things,” I say.

I smile sweetly at my partner. And he’s not that kind of partner, not now and not ever. I’m a criminal defense attorney, he’s my investigator and indispensable right‑hand man, in addition to being the best friend I’ve ever had, or maybe anybody has ever had.

Like me, he’s also a survivor. At least for now.

It wasn’t so terribly long ago that we both survived a late‑night shootout that turned the Walking Dunes of Montauk, out near land’s end on eastern Long Island, into the OK Corral. One of the shooters somehow managed to get away. The other wasn’t quite as lucky.

Jimmy and I aren’t here at Maidstone Gun getting ready for the next time. Neither one of us wants a next time, even though way too many people have been shooting — at both of us — since I began defending a local real estate guy named Rob Jacobson accused of committing his first triple homicide.

Yeah, that’s right. His first.

Of two.

If that sounds like some kind of record, it probably is. People keep telling me I sure can pick ’em. But then no one has ever confused my line of work, or Jimmy’s, with church.

The gun club is in Wainscott, about twenty minutes west of where I live. The place has been shuttered for a couple of years because of a beef with the town fathers, mostly from neighbors who got tired of the soundtrack of their lives sounding way too much like an action movie. Now the rifle range and the clubhouse, with its covered porch and big‑game trophies inside, looks like some kind of deserted movie set.

Of course Jimmy, who seems to know practically everybody in this part of Long Island, still has a key and the code that got us through the electronic gate on Northwest Harbor Road and past the sign that actually reads: ABSOLUTELY NO ARMOR‑PIERCING AMMUNITION. Words to live by, as far as we’re concerned.

But I do dearly hate to lose, almost as much as I hate Jimmy’s Yankees, being a Mets girl and all. I hate to lose at anything, one of the reasons why they call me Jane Effing Smith.

One of many.

As we get ready to begin today’s competition, I am singing the old Aerosmith song “Janie’s Got a Gun.”

“Janie’s got a gun, her whole world’s come undone…”

“Well, maybe not her whole world,” Jimmy adds. “Just this little corner of it.”

“You continue to forget something, Cunniff,” I say. “I never lose.”

“Well, not on the big things.”

“You mean like cancer?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“To be determined,” I tell him.

“Shut up and shoot,” he says.

“Is that your way of telling me to stop singing?”

“Not unless you want me to shoot myself,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

We’re each using a state‑of‑the‑art gun, a Sig Sauer P320 XCompact. And because this is part of an ongoing competition between two ex‑NYPD cops, we’re using a clock. Cops use clocks. Ours beeps when we start the timer, telling Jimmy or me it’s time to draw our weapon, in what would theoretically be a shootout on the street. Or in an alley. Or even on the Walking Dunes of Montauk.

The clock doesn’t stop until after the last shot has been fired.

Jimmy has already set up a rack with a half‑dozen steel target plates — six inches in diameter, three‑eighths of an inch thick — that he’s spray‑painted black to more easily determine the location of the hit. The steel is sturdy enough to occasionally withstand a bullet strike without tipping over.

When I leave a target standing, Jimmy usually tells me I shoot like a girl.

“Yeah,” I say. “Calamity Jane.”

It was what my father the ex‑Marine used to call me when he started taking me to the range. I’d say it was right after I stopped playing with dolls. But the only way I would have ever played with dolls is if there had been an Officer Barbie. And probably not even then.

As the leadoff shooter, I step back ten yards from the plates — it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the proper distance to test accuracy with even a fancy handgun — and wait for Jimmy to start the clock.

In civilian shooting competitions, missed shots are awarded zero points. Cops who miss lose points, then get smack‑talked all the way to the parking lot. Or back to the squad room in the old days.

“When cops miss what they’re aiming at,” Jimmy says as he sets the timer, “they might hit grandma by mistake.”

“Or maybe, say, a client?” I ask him, grinning.

“Don’t give me any ideas about that bottom‑feeder we’re defending,” he says, then asks if I’m ready.

I take a big deep breath, let the air out slowly, trying to get my adrenaline under control.

“Armed and ready.”

“At least you didn’t give me that cheesy line about being born ready.”

“No effing way,” I say.

I hear the beep and raise the P320 and start firing away. Six for six.

They all go down.

But even after the last one is down, I want to keep going, reload until I’m out of ammunition and my hand can no longer squeeze the trigger.

I want everything in my life to be this easy. Aim and fire.

I want to stop feeling the way I’ve felt for the past eight months, that I’m the one with the target on my back.

•••

TWO

JIMMY MATCHES ME WHEN it’s his turn, shot for shot, six for six. We’re just getting started. I finally edge ahead of him in the fifth round when he misses the last target.

“Oops,” I say. “Down goes grandma.” “She had a good life,” Jimmy says.

He’s smiling. So am I.

“You can’t even beat a cancer patient,” I say. “Sad.”

That wipes the smile off his face, but then this particular subject always does.

“You know I don’t like playing that game,” he says. “Trust me,” I say. “Neither do I.”

Truth is, I had already been having a day, and it isn’t even eight o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I get so sick between rounds of chemo that I’m up most of the night. Sometime around four, I drop off to sleep for a couple of hours, only to be awakened by my alarm at six.

Never mind that I almost called Jimmy to cancel. I arrived at the range, trying to act more energetic than the creature that inspired my mother’s childhood nickname for me: Hummingbird. He worries enough about me already, telling me every chance he gets that I’m going to get better, and that even if I die, it will be over his own dead body.

He stops re-racking the targets and gives me a long look, as if he’s getting ready to interview a perp. “Tell me something straight, even if you are a lawyer,” he says, as if reading my mind, something he does with annoying frequency. “You sure you got another trial in you?”

“No doubt.”

“No bull is what I was hoping for,” he says.

“You should know better than anyone that the code never changes with me,” I say. “Live to work, work to live.”

I don’t add, or die trying. Frankly, I don’t like playing that game, either.

He wins a round, the sixth, when I finally miss. But I come back and beat him one last time, because we both know I’m not leaving on a loss.

“Rematch?” Jimmy asks.

“As much as I would like to beat your butt all the livelong day, I’ve got to get to the courthouse to meet with my new jury consultant, remember?”

Across an undefeated career in court, I’ve hardly ever used jury consultants. Certainly not for Rob Jacobson’s first trial, where he was acquitted.

Now he’s about to stand trial in Nassau County, next one over from Suffolk. Different county, but same charge: the shooting deaths of an entire family — father, teenage daughter, and her mother, whom Jacobson had known back in high school.

This time around, the evidence against him is even worse. Katherine Welsh, the new Nassau County district attorney, is leading the prosecution. Just two days ago, on the eve of jury selection, we were informed of a piece of evidence that had magically, like a baby being left on the estimable Ms. Welsh’s doorstep, shown up at her office: a time‑stamped photograph of our client leaving the victims’ house the night of the murders.

I pleaded with Judge Michael Horton for a continuance, to allow me and Jimmy time to investigate; bless his heart, he gave us two weeks. That same day, I broke down and hired a jury consultant. Just being realistic, this might turn out to be the last big case of my career and to win it, I was going to need all the help I could get.

“So you’re still going to meet with Queen Elizabeth?” Jimmy says.

It’s what he’s taken to calling the consultant, a woman named Norma Banks. Norma admits to being eighty‑three, but I think she’s dropped a few years the way people drop excess pounds.

“Come on, I know she’s old,” I tell Jimmy. “But she’s not dead.”

“Yet,” he says. “I was you, I’d drive fast to Mineola, just to be on the safe side.”

•••

THREE

IT’S A HIKE TO the courthouse, just under eighty miles. I once mentioned to Jimmy that a trip across Long Island should be measured not in miles, but dog years.

“Don’t ever say that in front of Rip,” Jimmy said, “on account of how far he is past his sell‑by date.”

Rip is my dog. I really did think he was a goner when I took him in as a stray and named him “R.I.P.” Now, because of tender loving care from the man of my dreams — Dr. Ben Kalinsky, who happens to be the top veterinarian on the South Fork — Rip shows signs of outliving us all.

It’s actually kind of funny. Eight months after being told I had a year to live, starting another round of chemo so soon before the start of my next trial, gallows humor has pretty much become my default position.

I promised Norma Banks I would meet her at the Supreme Court building, Nassau County, at eleven o’clock, traffic on the Long Island Expressway and Northern State permitting. She’s taking the Long Island Rail Road from New York Penn Station. Her apartment in the West Village is not far from mine, though when she moved in Nixon was president. Or maybe FDR.

The SiriusXM channel devoted to Billy Joel, a good Long Island boy, is now back by popular demand, but I switch to Doctor Radio, where I keep hoping to hear news of a cure for my cancer, neck and head.

The dream of scooping my oncologist isn’t feeling so realistic today, so I tune out the doctors and go back to rock ’n’ roll. As shitty as I feel, I’m ready to put this last round of chemo in the rearview mirror, as if I were recovering from a bad breakup, or a midlife crisis. I need my focus to be squarely on the upcoming trial.

Judge Michael Horton — I keep wanting to call him Jordan, because he reminds me of Michael Jordan, and is almost as tall, having been a shooting guard in college himself — knows what I’m dealing with, no reason to keep it a secret from him.

He hasn’t told the media that my “situation” was another factor in his decision to delay the trial. And District Attorney Katherine Welsh didn’t contest the continuance, to her credit. I’m more than happy to accept their help on this particular matter. Just not their sympathy, theirs or anybody else’s.

It’s worth mentioning that Katherine, who’s both Harvard undergrad and Law, is younger than I am, taller, prettier, and, as far as I know, healthy as a horse.

That bitch.

Only now jury selection is staring me in the face, even as I’m pulling out of a brutal round of chemo — something else I think should be measured in dog years, mostly because it makes me sick as one.

Am I going to be ready to start picking a jury? Armed and ready.

I’m getting off the Northern State and onto the Meadowbrook when I do decide to tune in to Doctor Radio. Somehow, though, I hit the wrong button and land on a talk show.
And immediately wish I hadn’t.

Before I can switch away from it, I hear the voice of someone who’s clearly the host saying, “Rob Jacobson, can that really be you on our caller line?”

Please  don’t  be  him.

But the next voice I hear does belong to my client. Shit shit shit. On a stick.

“The man, the legend,” Jacobson says. “Accept no substitutes, Paul.”

“Thanks for reaching out,” the host says. “So what’s on your mind today?”

“Obviously nothing  is on his freaking mind,” I say out loud in the car.

Then I’m pounding my left hand on the horn, causing the car next to me to swerve and nearly sideswipe me.

“Well,” Jacobson says, “we could talk about the homeless crisis in New York City, or if this is finally the year for the Knicks, but I thought you might want to talk about my upcoming trial.”

Behind the wheel, I am shaking my head and still talking to myself.

“I know you can’t hear me, Rob,” I say. “But you really are a raging fucking asshole.”

For the next ten minutes, ten minutes that seem to last longer than both my marriages combined, my client proceeds to do something I specifically ordered him not to do:
Talk about the trial.

Not to the media, not to the members of his family still speaking to him, not to any friends he might have left, not to any of his many girls on the side. Not even to the DoorDash guy bringing him his food in the house he’s been renting a couple of miles from mine in Amagansett, while he’s under house arrest.

Yet here he is, talking to Paul, whoever the hell Paul is.

Proclaiming his innocence. Telling the listening audience that there’s even less of a case against him this time than there was the last time, when in fact the opposite is true. Even saying “Bring it on” when he references Katherine Welsh, the woman who is trying to put him away for life.

“I am so anxious to get my day in court,” he says, “I wish it were today.”

He pauses, then adds, “What can I tell you, Paul? The witch hunt against me continues. If I didn’t know any better, I’d start to think I was a politician.”

Somehow my client saves the best for last, after reminding the host that he’s once again being defended by the great Jane Smith, whom he calls “The Hamptons Lawyer” and describes as the “undefeated heavyweight champion of the world.”

“And let me make it clear that I’m not really talking about her weight,” he says. I hear him chuckle. But then he’s always cracking himself up, even when under indictment. “If you happen to be listening, Janie,” he says. “Love you, babe.”

Babe.

I’m banging on the horn again then. This time the driver of the car next to me, a guy, turns and gives me the finger.

I give it right back.

He’ll never know it isn’t directed at him, or that when I scream out “Asshole!” this time, that isn’t directed at him, either.

I drive faster.