IF I HADN’T gotten Jake Rosen fully engaged with the story I’d just told him, Tony Marcus’s presence certainly did.
I was briefly concerned that Rosen’s response would be to go for his gun. But he did not. He just stared at Tony, shaking his head, almost in wonder.
“You’re with her?” he said. “You’ve got to be fucking shitting me.”
Rosen nodded at Tony.
“Where’s your boys?” he said.
“Didn’t need them tonight,” Tony said. “Got this girl right here.”
Tony stood a few steps inside the room. He had left his topcoat behind in the kitchen. He wore a navy suit with rather wide pinstripes, a spread collar, a thick-knotted bloodred tie, and a pocket handkerchief in the same color.
“You and me both know that a lot of what she’s saying is true,” Tony said. “What I didn’t know until tonight, and Sunny laid it all out for me as nice as she did, was who killed Lisa over there in The Fens, at a place you used yourself from time to time when you wanted to get your ashes hauled.”
Rosen stood. “How about I just get out of here now?” he said.
“How about you sit the fuck down?” Tony Marcus said.
If Rosen had been running Tony, he wasn’t now. But as I was well aware by now, Tony’s relationships were always transactional, at best.
“You kill her, Jake?” Tony said. “Like you killed that young girl the other week?”
“She OD’d!” Rosen yelled.
“This is me you’re talking to,” Tony said. “That girl was the one freaked out Lisa once and for all.”
“I’m a cop, for chrissakes,” Rosen said.
“Did you kill Lisa?” Tony said.
“No, for fuck’s sake!”
“Did you kill her and want me to think Jabari did it?”
“His number was on her phone!” Rosen said.
The balloon had finally gone up.
“What phone?” I said.
Rosen looked at me, then back at Tony. Opened and closed his mouth again.
“The phone I took off her body and have stashed in my house?” I said. “The one only I knew about until I told Tony about it tonight?”
“You told me about it,” Rosen said to Tony.
“Hell I did,” he said.
“Then why’d you try to shoot Jabari after that?” Rosen said.
“Because at the time I didn’t think it could be nobody except him,” Tony said. “Now I got all this new information at my disposal.”
Rosen’s gun was out in a blink, and he was up and off the couch, so he had both Tony and me in front of him.
“Pick a lane, Tony,” he said. “Me or her.”
Tony smiled again.
“Picked one already,” he said.
Then it was Ty Bop coming through the kitchen door, his gun pointed at Jake Rosen.
“How many times I got to tell people that pimps lie?” Tony Marcus said.