The Ex(33)

“So what’s your point about Jack’s interviews?”

“I still had a bad taste in my mouth about how he treated me like a total stranger—after Owen died, when he got out of the hospital, and again after Molly. And I got to admit, I started thinking: Maybe this is all a little too good to be true. It’s like to your face, he’s all honest and thoughtful, with that ‘just be happy’ demeanor. It wouldn’t be the first time that a family produced two sons—one a Boy Scout, the other a loose cannon. Despite all appearances, Jack’s got a dark side there.”

“Jack, dark? You’re forgetting how many years I spent with him.”

“And you’re forgetting how long I’ve been a cop. I saw a glimpse that day in his apartment when his bag spilled open. I’d seen something he didn’t want me to see. I had peeked behind the light, cheerful facade. And my guess is that his dark side is what landed him in a psych ward after Owen died. And now all these years later, with a man like Malcolm Neeley, who knows where the darkness took him?”

I should have realized it was a waste of time to come here. Ross was on the verge of retiring. There was no way he was going to rock the NYPD boat, even if that meant convincing himself that someone as decent as Jack might be guilty.


WHEN I WALKED INTO VESELKA, I spotted Gary Hannigan at the front counter. Even though I was five minutes early, he was already a third of his way through a Reuben sandwich. He wiped his right hand with a wad of tiny paper napkins from a stainless steel holder before a quick shake. “I recognize you from around the courthouse.”

“Same.” Hannigan was the lawyer for the families of the victims killed at Penn Station. By reputation, he was an old school liberal who saw his multimillion-dollar lawsuits as a way to rage against the machine. When I’d called him on my way to police headquarters, he told me that he could give me thirty minutes over lunch—“your treat, of course.”

“You know that’s not a real Reuben, don’t you?” Veselka used dry sausage instead of corned beef or even pastrami.

“Don’t care. It’s delicious.” He moved his briefcase from the seat next to him, and waved at the waitress while I got settled in. I ordered a plate of pierogies without looking at a menu.

“A fellow regular,” Hannigan remarked. I didn’t tell him that my visits to this twenty-four-hour-a-day Ukrainian diner were typically at three in the morning. “Not too many lawyers left who are still fearless about going to trial. I respect that about your partner, Don Ellison. Looks like he gave you the bug. Wouldn’t in a million years have guessed that Jack Harris would ever need a criminal defense lawyer, though. The man’s clean, you know. Squeaky, like Soft Scrub. And not in that creepy way, the way some people are so nice you think they gotta have some bodies in the basement. He’s a good guy.”

There was that word “clean” again. What Hannigan saw as authentic, Ross had seen as a cover. “It was actually Buckley who called,” I said. “I went to college with Jack.”

He smiled at the mention of Jack’s daughter. “That kid’s tongue could cut through diamonds, but she’s all talk. I hope to God the police are wrong about this.”

I noticed that Hannigan didn’t say he was sure the police were wrong. I explained how Jack had first become a suspect, with a primary focus on motive, before asking his impression about just how much anger Jack shouldered against Neeley.

“It’s probably bad karma to speak ill of the dead, but Malcolm Neeley really was one mean son of a bitch.” Hannigan licked a glob of Russian dressing from his thumb. “He was a shitty husband, a cruel and distant father, and had absolutely no empathy for other human beings.”

“Tell me that he kicked puppies on weekends, and I think I’d like to call you to the stand.”

“Look, I’m in a tricky situation here—with those pesky professional ethics and whatnot. We’ve got a mutual client in Jack, so I want to help. But I’ve got clients from a dozen other families, and if I had to guess, you’ll get around to arguing that any one of them might’ve pulled the trigger instead of your guy. To be honest, I can’t see any of them doing something like this, but at the same time, I guess I could see any one of them doing it, if that makes any sense. I mean, it’s an off-the-rails, jacked-up loony thing to do, but people do crazy stuff over far less disgusting people.”

“Disgusting? Sounds like you took this case personally.” The waitress was back with a plate of steaming-hot pierogies.

“I take all my cases personally, Ms. Randall. Let me tell you one story about Malcolm Neeley—just one of many—that kind of sums it up. You know how Todd had an older brother in college when the shooting happened?”

I nodded, remembering a few articles obliquely juxtaposing the idea of two such different boys emerging from the same household.

“His name’s Max. Works for the dad’s hedge fund. Decent enough kid from what I can tell, given the bloodline. Anyway, this is the kind of person Malcolm Neeley was. When I had him in the deposition, he became unleashed and strayed from the talking points his lawyer had fed him. He starts yelling about what a dedicated father he was—how hard he worked to make sure his boys had character, as he called it. When the older son Max was sixteen years old, he wrecked dad’s Jaguar up in Connecticut and didn’t take it seriously enough for Poppa—you know, insurance will fix it, what’s the big deal. So Neeley throws Max in his car, drives him to their housekeeper’s, and bangs on the door. She’s probably wondering—what the hell, you know? And in struts Neeley with young Max in tow. He says, See how other people live? Can you imagine living here? Clean up your act unless you want to end up like this. That was the story he chose to tell about himself, mind you, as one of his better moments.”