“I can’t believe she’s gone. This morning I looked on my calendar. ‘Call Mary’ was written in today’s square.” She teared up and paused a moment. “I relied so much on her, and through the years we’d become real friends.”
We sat in the parlor of Mrs. Daligan’s brownstone with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers, a view overlooking the promenade and Manhattan’s skyline, the green lady in the near distance, the tugs bossing garbage scows across the river. “How long had you known Mrs. Simon?”
“Mary? We go way back, way back. Let’s see, my husband and I moved here in 1966, newlyweds, and shortly after that the Simons moved next door. I’d say we weren’t even here a year—yes, must have been, because Lyndon Johnson was still president. I can remember the protests we used to have on the promenade, looking right out that window. I used to be so scared sometimes.”
This was all ancient history to me, but the neighbor, Mrs. Phoebe Daligan, got a misty-eyed, dazed look and left me just a little, so I let her talk when she was around and made allowances for her when she departed ever so slightly. I knew she’d return. Pencil thin, she wore a bright red cardigan sweater and a white silk blouse underneath. Pearls. Navy blue slacks. Probably lined. Dark red penny loafers, blue and red argyles, and a diamond on her ring finger that didn’t quit. Make-up perfect by seven in the morning. You know the look—Anglican, Mom called it. How can you tell, I asked her once, and she’d just smile, and say something like, wait until you’re my age, you’ll be able to tell whether a computer is Republican or Democrat.
But I took it slow and kept my mouth shut, remembering that the woman learned a few hours ago of her friend’s death. More than a neighborhood friend, I think, more like a dear friend. They’d been through a lot together, the antiwar years, husbands in the military about the same time, came back from Vietnam silent and vague and in need of therapy or maybe detox, but worked it off instead. They grew into their businesses about the same time, watched their children get schooled and marry, stood by each other during the desolated loss of their husbands to sudden coronaries, somehow grew up themselves, and of course held the horror of 9/11 together. She probably could see the twin towers collapsing out her picture window. But Phoebe Daligan wore her grief well, her lifted complexion giving little away. I could tell she’d been crying, though, the loss beginning to show below the eyes, the thin, blue-gray pallor a giveaway.
“We chaired the Women’s Christian Ministry of Care. She was the chair last year and I’m it this year and I needed her advice about one of my fund-raising ideas. Now I’ll not get it.”
She stopped talking, but I didn’t say anything, just nodded.
“Not that she was the fund-raising type. Shy, with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a finely tuned, well-organized mind. She cooked dinner like she crunched numbers, she used to say.”
“You can tell by the way she kept her house,” I said, making small talk and wishing I hadn’t interrupted because there was a lull, because the woman’s well ran dry or her spirit flitted away again, at least for a moment or two. She looked around the room with appraising eyes, saw a crystal bowl out of place and adjusted it.
“Nothing out of order in her house, just like yours. Not a mote of dust. A place for everything,” I said, repeating myself but hoping to stoke the fire.
“And yet she was human. Fell to pieces when her husband died a few years ago. She took to drinking too much. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Mary Ward Simon, a lush? Course I think I was the only one who knew. She hid it well.”
I nodded, scribbling, keeping my head down.
“But you don’t blame her, not with that daughter. She told me after Mel died her world of perfect upper middle-class family, of carefully contrived numbers, of spotless rooms artfully decorated in simple but pleasing tones—her words, mind—her world tumbled into the slime of landfills.”
I wondered if she’d seen the transformation of the Fresh Kills landfill, but I kept my mouth shut and let her continue.
“And her daughter didn’t help. No love for her mother, none at all. Had a mind of her own, even as a baby. Those were the desolate years for her—her words—the late nineties. Little wonder. We didn’t see much of her after Mel died, we were a couple and she wasn’t, and you know how that is.”
I didn’t have a clue, but I nodded, all sympathetic, keeping my jaws clamped and letting the fires of her memory stoke themselves. I’d struck a little piece of gold, about the drinking, I mean. It was a chink in the dead woman’s armor. It made her human. Well, at least more like me. Not so much the drinking, but the flaw. I scribbled what Phoebe Daligan had said, my writing hand beginning to cramp. One of these days I’ll get a digital recorder, but they’re so off-putting, so inhuman, I just haven’t done it. Besides, I think my brain doesn’t function without a pen.
“She said she came home from Mel’s funeral and wrapped herself around a bottle of scotch and stayed there for a year. Working at the time, too. I don’t know how she pulled herself out of it, but I’ve learned a thing or two about grief, not that I understand it, mind, or like it. I hate it, it’s a foul, disgusting monster that takes, takes, takes. But it has its masks. I found that out a couple of years after Mary did when my husband died and I had to get more involved in the church. You see, I don’t have children and I’ve never worked, never had to, and now I’ve lost a true friend. I put too much of myself into that friendship and damned if she didn’t leave me.”
She pulled out a hankie and blew her nose and a blob of booger stuck on her face, smack dab on her right cheek, so I lowered my head, flipping through pages like I was lost in my notes and let the blood rush to my face.
Finally I felt for the woman sitting opposite me. “You might want to use some more tissues,” I said. “Can I get a box of them for you?”
She must have felt the foreign body on her face because she looked stricken and her handkerchief found it, scrubbing at her booger-spotted face as if she were polishing silver, her cheeks and forehead almost as red as her sweater, but the tears began to flow.
“Sometimes I’m so lonely. Sometimes … I’m so frightened. … I follow Mary, you see. That’s the way it’s always been. Her husband got drafted, then mine did. She became pregnant, then I did, though nothing came of it. Mel died, then my husband. Now she’s dead.”
Nothing I could say to that, except how sorry I felt for her, and I was, but I knew from bitter experience that the more you say sorry to a griever, the more phony it sounds. Prose holds little comfort, poetry does, if it’s not the rhyming kind. But, listen to me, as if I’m the expert when I don’t know squat. So I looked at the runners on the promenade while she walked out of the room. Damn if I wasn’t an unfeeling bitch. In a few minutes she returned, apologizing, her face back on, but I could feel her sinuses throbbing.
“I’m such a bad hostess, I haven’t even offered you coffee. Please have something, won’t you? I have those cups filled with coffee grounds—no muss, no fuss, a new brand, too, made in Brooklyn somewhere.”
I declined, telling her how sweet she was for offering, and asking, “What kind of work did Mrs. Simon do?” As if I didn’t know.
“Something with numbers. Numbers and audits. She worked most of her adult life. She worked for one of the huge companies. After she retired, she told me they started calling her again. Commanded a good fee, too. Mary said numbers for her were like weeding in the garden.”
I waited, hoping there was more.
“The last time I talked to her she spoke about an audit that had been going on for years. On and off, she said. And now she’d been put back on. The state or the feds or someone big wanted her involved. And she’d discovered something about … I think it was a bank, not the whole thing, but a special section of the bank or a division or something. She said, and I remember her saying it, ‘This is the payoff for me, the culmination of a job suddenly stopped’—that’s what she said—something about, ‘Finally my work is rewarding. I’d suspected it for years,
thought I’d never know the end of the story, and now I’d gotten the request to get in there and dig around,’ I remember her saying it just that way, too.”
“You mean like that old guy in the Bible, what’s his name.”
“Simeon. Exactly. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’”
I knew it. She had to be Anglican or Catholic or Methodist, one of those. “When did you have this conversation, Mrs. Daligan?”
“Phoebe, please. Recently. Last week, I think it was. Yes, because I’d called and asked if she’d like to go to dinner, and she said she’d love to, but couldn’t. And she told me why, she was working on this project.”
“Did she tell you the name of the bank?”
“She did, but … I just can’t seem to remember it. I can see it on Montague. It’s not there anymore, but it had an eagle or something over the door, floor to ceiling windows, red brick, quite lovely, one of those historic buildings. A local bank, that’s for sure, but I remember they used to advertise. Isn’t that funny, I can see it, but can’t think of the name. They made the building into co-ops, I think.”
“Heights Federal Bank,” I said, feeling grim.
“That’s it. Thank you. Mary said this one will be really fulfilling because she was pulled off the audit some years back. Why, she didn’t know. And she said they hurt a lot of people and let all the good execs go.”
My heart did one of those somersault leaps, the kind that plunge way down into the stomach and fly up into the nostrils.
“Mary said lots of people had lost their homes because of that bank. She said they gave loans to people who never should have qualified. As I say, I don’t know that much about the business world, nothing about banking, but I’d never heard her talk like that. Mary was always polite, had a genteel view of the world. But she said that one man in particular, an officer at Heights Federal, he was responsible for signing off on most of the suspect loans—her words, again—a Mr. … who was it—keep me talking, I’ll think of his name in a minute—some big shot in the borough. She said he made millions out of the bad loans, taking bribes, charging more than he should have, and cooking the books. He disappeared one day soon after the bank closed. Oh, God, why can’t I think of his name? I hate it when my mind goes blank. Anyway, Mary told me that a lot of people lost their jobs, they’re still out of work, but he just walked away from it—no story about him, no reporter on his tail, no nothing. Came out smelling like a rose, she said. Got into horse breeding in the country or something. But then they always do, don’t they?”
“Who?” I asked as if I didn’t know. My hands were sweaty and my voice sounded like it did when I was six.
“The big guys. They hire some smart PR person and come out sounding squeaky clean. But not this time, because someone tipped the Feds, that’s what Mary said, and that’s why the audit. She said he wouldn’t get away with it, not this time.”
A Surprise Visit
As I came out of Phoebe’s house, I saw Denny and Cookie sitting in the jeep and asked Cookie if she wouldn’t mind switching to the front so I could spread out my stuff on the backseat, pig that I am.
Denny waited for me to get situated before pulling out. They shrugged when I told them I wanted to surprise Barbara before we started out for New Jersey.
I summarized what I’d learned from Phoebe Daligan.
Denny’s back straightened, like all his bones were at attention, but he was cool. “I’ll talk to Willoughby when we get home,” he said. “We’ll want to interview her, too. Maybe by that time, she’ll have remembered the guy’s name, although I think I know who she’s talking about. Connors. He was the president of Heights Federal.”
He’d just said the name I hadn’t heard since Mom was fired. Winston Connors. A made-up name if she ever heard one, she’d said about a dozen times. My feet got cold and I felt myself tiptoeing into myself. I heard the door to my heart clanging shut, but the picture of Charlie flashed by, along with the desultory scenes between me and Denny last night.
Denny broke the mood. “Eight o’clock already. We won’t get to New Jersey much before ten.”
I shrugged. Cookie got her mirror out, and I got to thinking about Barbara.
I told them about why I didn’t trust her—the smooth way she handled the news of her mother’s death and her little boy’s abduction. Except for a few rants and tissues, she was holding up just fine.
“How did you expect her to act?” Denny asked.
Good question. I couldn’t answer it. As a little bribe, we stopped at the Brooklyn Heights Deli for coffee and donuts and my mind did a spin forward, imagining them sipping their coffee and crinkling wax paper in the jeep while they waited for me. I’d better start focusing on the real, and quick, so I tried to answer Denny’s question. “But no one’s told her anything about her son and we’re as far from finding him as earth is from Mars. It’s just that I’ve got this big question mark about her in my head and I think if I can get her talking, I might be able to take a peek at her boyfriend.”
“Whatever,” Denny said.
At Barbara’s door, I waited for someone to answer my ring and pressed the bell again. I didn’t think she’d be going to work this morning. Banged on the knocker and heard footsteps approaching.
Barbara herself answered. I thought at first it was an older sister or cousin. She was so not like herself that I didn’t recognize her. Dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, bags under her eyes. Hair straggly. No makeup and yellow skin except for the dark circles below the eyes. She was in bad shape.
“I should have called. I’m so sorry. I was on my way to New Jersey and thought I’d stop by to see how you were holding up.”
Barbara shook her head and got a startled-deer look in her eyes. “Why New Jersey?”
“We got a lead. I can’t talk about it, but between the police and the FBI, we’re on it. And I think we found the spot where your mother was murdered. I’m hoping the police will be able to pull more than one set of fingerprints. We should have something solid very soon that’ll lead us to Charlie. Did Jane talk to you about holding another press conference later on today?”
She nodded, her arms crossed, barely comprehending what I was saying.
“Is there anything I can do?”
Again she shook her head and I saw a shadow moving behind her. A large man, handsome, stood in back of Barbara, his hands on her shoulders.
“If you’re from the press, get lost,” the guy said.
Barbara’s voice was detached, like it was coming from a long way away. “She’s my PI, keeping me informed.”
I flashed my license and apologized once again as I studied his features, blond hair, red beard, green eyes. Tall—six-five at least. I knew I’d seen him around, but where? I blinked. I remembered I was delusional at times, and maybe this was one of those moments.
“Oh, and one more thing that’s been bothering me. Do you know who recommended the two handymen to your mother?”
Another startled look. It took her too long to answer. “No, no. Why would I know that… she never told me. We never talked about them.”
I knew she was lying. She was dancing.
“She’s had a rough night, Red Beard said. And we haven’t had breakfast yet, so if you’ll excuse us. …”
No point in pushing it. I’d gotten what I wanted.
On The Way
Walking to the jeep, I slapped my forehead and looked at my watch, remembering my appointment with Lucy’s potential new client for this morning. I could hear the groans from Denny and Cookie, but I put on my saddest face and explained my dilemma. When we got to John Street, the address I remembered turned out to be nonexistent, unless you count the fenced area of rubble. Shaking my head, I made a note to double check with Minnie.
“Strange, I talked to him yesterday afternoon,” I said, “shortly after we’d found the body. He called Minnie yesterday morning, wanting a quote for cleaning his buildings.”
I looked at my “Recents�
� list and hit the number again. It rang once before he answered. I apologized to Mr. Blake for being late and told him I must have written down the wrong address. He gave me the correct one and said he’d meet me on the landing, third floor. I rolled my eyes, told him I’d be up in a second.
Denny and Cookie both looked at me and I heard Denny talking low to Cookie.
Mr. Blake was nice, told me what the work involved. Turned out the job wasn’t on John Street after all, but on Court, cleaning three office buildings, six floors each. He told me his expectations, gave me the square footage, and I quoted him a fair price for three buildings, five nights a week. He wanted the work to begin next week. I told him we’d send a contract to him and said we could start just as soon as we got the signed original and a crew. We shook hands and I told him I was looking forward to doing a cracking good job for him, keep his office sparkling and his employees happy. I bounded down the stairs, thinking Lucy’s might just make a tidy profit this year and got the pits in my stomach when I thought about Mom and how she scrambled for money the last year of her life. Damn, too little too late.
I got back to the jeep and called Minnie and told her the good news. I could tell she was excited. “He needs to sign a contract, but it looks good. We could be starting as early as next week.”
I stared down the street and across the East River at the smog beginning to roll in from wherever, spreading its clammy self all over Manhattan’s skyline. I looked hard at the skyscrapers, Wall Street muscling into the old Dutch seaport, the spires of a few clipper ships like toothpicks in the middle distance. Gulls cried and I crawled deep into my head. Things were all right in the cleaning department, and I prayed things were all right with Charlie. I tried not to think about what could be, and resolved to focus on getting him back to his mother and not to make any more mistakes.
Too Quiet In Brooklyn (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 1) Page 14