“Not locked!” she yelled at Willoughby’s banging on her door. Hadn’t he learned about tapping lightly? She sighed as he opened the door with his head since his hands were full of hot dogs and cola, a bag of potato chips swaying between his teeth.
“You useless piece of crap. Not even eleven, we’ve just gotten up from a full breakfast and then some at Teresa’s, and look at you, you’re a bottomless pit. I hate to think of what would happen one day if your plumbing clogged. It’d create the largest sinkhole in Brooklyn beneath your apartment building.”
Willoughby opened the chips and stuffed a wad of them into his maw. “Got the team trolling through the Packer neighborhood.”
“And?”
“As you say, it’s early days yet.”
“That might be, but once again Fina and her crew are feeding us information.”
“So? Luck, blind luck.”
“And forget the Feds. They’re scratching their balls and going over their list of rules and regulations. Got nothing from them yet. Nothing. I called them, told them to go through whatever surveillance stuff they’ve amassed in the last three months and look for a greenish van. We need the tags. You told them that, right?”
Why did she bother with him? Willoughby gazed at her like a deer caught in her headlights and bit into his second hot dog, squirting mustard onto her desk. He swiped at it with a flimsy napkin and succeeded in spreading the spill.
“If you drop another crumb, I swear to … Holy Bee-F’in’ J, you’ve done it again. Clean it up now, I mean right now. There’s a mop in the janitor’s closet.”
He didn’t move. “You have to calm down, you know that? You’re like this every time you work with Fina. Face it, she’s good at what she does. She was born with, I don’t know, a sixth sense or something. You know the chief loves you, so relax. After all, this is your fourth case in three days. Fina has one, and she wants to make a name for herself. What do you care? Let her do the work. It’s not like she’s got red tape binding her hands.”
He was right. She knew it, but she hated the smell of hot dog seeping into her room at eleven in the morning.
“Seriously, Willoughby, we got nothing on this except some New Jersey bugs and a suspicious-looking olive green van, which, according to an eye witness, was being stuffed with a wiggling tarpaulin. And it’s what, close to twenty-eight hours since a child has been abducted. I tried to make light of it, but that woman who saw the moving lump of whatever, she saw the nab.”
He nodded.
“You get her statement?”
He nodded. “Joralemon, across the street from the school.”
Jane sighed. “The chief wants something by one. He doesn’t want a press conference until this evening. We can’t involve the mother—she’s such a cold fish, it’ll turn off the public.”
“But we don’t even have a chewable bite.”
“I think we do. The chewable bite is that an olive green van was involved in the nab.”
“Better go easy on the information we release.”
“Don’t worry, we are.” Jane watched her phone dance across her desk for a second before she answered the call. Fina again. “She saw something? Where? How? Never mind, we’ll meet you there.”
Jane’s toes started to curl. “Cookie saw something at the Liam house.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“Surveillance, you idiot, what we should have been doing. Now she’s on the Promenade with DSNY personnel and Patrol Officer Clancy, looking in the garbage for some sort of a hat. Once again, it’s Fina’s team feeding us stuff from our own turf. We’ve been canvassing since last night, and we’ve turned up zero.”
“Except for the olive green van.”
“With no tags!” God, she shouldn’t have yelled that last part. “Let’s get over there.”
Chapter 25
Brandy. In Chains
Maybe this is all a dream. What do you think, Dad?
No one’s talking to me, not even you. Got to get out of here before the nasty one does something else bad. He went ballistic when he saw I’d pulled the tape from my eyes. He shook me good, but I thought of you, and pretty soon, the nice one came and grabbed him and threw him out, but not before he put new tape over my eyes.
I know the nasty one’s been waiting to strike. He’ll find a way to get to me, I know he will. I can feel him looking for one now. Can’t depend on the nice one—he’s a wimp.
Pulling at the new tape hurts. I feel something dripping down my face. Blood? Wait, it’s sweat. I can see you screwing up your face. If you were here, you’d call me a drama queen. But I’ve got to get away before the bad one gets me. I must be still, fool the buzzards.
Buzzards was one of Dad’s favorite words. I asked him once if he was talking about the bird kind of buzzard. He said, No, buzzard is the polite form of bastard, just like shucks is polite for shit. I asked him what about fuck, what’s polite for fuck, because I want to use the polite word. He closed his eyes and shook his head. I want to use the word now. I want to say a long, snaky string of them, and I know Mom doesn’t want me to say the word, so I won’t.
Dad’s not smiling. He’s not answering me. He hasn’t answered me in a long time. He can’t, not where he is. He just decided to go away one day. Like that, he left me.
I heard Pah-tricia, Mom, talk about his face falling into the cottage cheese as if his leaving us was a game, something he decided. She said it once talking to Granny on the phone. After she said it—about his head in the cottage cheese—there was a long pause during which I heard Granny’s scratchy voice coming through the wires. Mom apologized before she slammed down the phone. Then she put her head in her hands and cried. She cried harder than she did at the funeral. Granny Liam can do that to her. So I know Mom cares. Not as much as me, I don’t think. I ache sometimes, I miss him so bad. And sometimes I can’t breathe. Why did you have to go and die, you buzzard?
I’m going to pull the tape some more, what’s to lose? But I’d better wait until it’s quiet again. The car is coming back. I hear the door slam. I hear voices. They’re arguing.
Chapter 26
Fina. Morning Two, Phillipa
I rang Trisha Liam’s bell a few minutes past seven, and a tall woman in her late thirties answered the door, a balled-up paper towel in one hand. Her cheeks were the color of strawberries.
“Trisha told me you’d want to talk to me.” She introduced herself as Phillipa Olinski, the Liams’ housekeeper. “I thought for sure they’d find Brandy by now.” She looked at my ID and made a swift pass at the ground with her eyes before giving me and Cookie a tentative smile.
As she led us through the hall and into the kitchen, I remembered a present my gran gave me one year for Christmas, an illustrated O. Henry. Don’t hike up your lips at me, but I loved that book, loved listening to my gran reading it to me, struggling to pronounce some of the words in her thick accent. The story had something to do with love and giving. I won’t tell you what happened, but the woman in the picture book had beautiful hair, a golden chestnut color, and she wore it long and pushed up in a loose bun. On some of the pages, tendrils floated all around her as she gestured with her body, stretching and bending it into different poses. Gran said the drawings were made that way so you got the feeling of movement. Della—that was the character’s name—became my imaginary friend. She was always in motion, crying or flopping face down onto her bed and sobbing. Well, Trisha Liam’s housekeeper, Phillipa, seemed just like Della to me. She looked like her, totally. She even wore one of those old-fashioned costumes, a loose blouse, a long skirt with a striped apron, and her whole body seemed to tremble as she twisted it one way and then the other.
“I thought for sure Brandy would be back by now,” she said again and craned her neck to look out the window as if expecting her sudden appearance.
We sat in a little sunroom off the kitchen. The breakfast room, Phillipa called it. It served to catch pools of light and throw them against the china
displayed on one wall. Sunbeams were bouncing all over the place, including the silver comb in Phillipa’s thick hair. I thought of Della.
“Do you think Brandy ran away?” I asked.
Phillipa blew her nose. “I don’t know what to think,” she said, her voice muffled by the wad of paper towel. “Forgive me. Would you like some coffee? We have one of those single-cup makers. It’s no trouble.”
I nodded. “A small one. Black.”
“Nothing for me,” Cookie said. “I’ve had three already.”
While Phillipa was brewing the java, I heard sounds coming from the other room and imagined Trisha in her conservatory preparing for her day in court. I should have gone in there to say hello, but somehow she seemed like a no-nonsense type, so instead I watched Phillipa moving about the kitchen. She was a natural.
“What do you usually do in the mornings?” I asked when she returned with the coffee. I put the mug up to my nose and let the steam and the smell of the beans play around my face. Cookie got out her notebook and began writing.
“Not much. I’m not the cook, if that’s what you’re asking. Trisha doesn’t have one. When I arrive, though, I go upstairs, knock on Brandy’s door, make sure she’s dressed and ready for school. She’s an independent girl, doesn’t like to be helped, not any more at least. And she’s a real talker, but not in the morning. You’ve got to give people their space, even kids. I ask her what she’d like me to fix her for lunch.”
“She takes it to school?” Cookie asked, looking at me.
“Part of it. She’s a fussy eater. I swear, she drinks more juice than she eats. Brandy’s favorite lunch is peanut butter and raspberry jam spread on saltines with an extra-large soda. And those sweet pickles.”
Cookie shuddered.
“Sometimes I throw in a bag of chips.”
I think I must have made a face because Phillipa smiled. Well, smile is too strong a word for what she did with her mouth. She hitched up one side of it.
“I know. Weird taste but she’s little Miss Consistency, just like her mom. That’s Brandy’s lunch almost every day that I can remember. Sometimes she buys herself a scoop of ice cream in the cafeteria, or pudding. Making her lunch is the extent of my kitchen duties, except to keep it clean, of course. Sometimes the house is so silent. Ghosts, you know, and there’s nothing to do. So I clean each and every room, and the house is deceptively large, believe it. You can sit and watch TV for just so long, but when I’m through cleaning, I start all over again.”
“Can’t you leave for a while, do some shopping or walk in the Promenade or something?”
She shook her head. “Trisha wants someone here at all times.”
“And you answer the phone and get the mail?”
She pressed another wad of paper towel to her face. “No. Trisha doesn’t want me answering the phone. If she’s here working in the conservatory, she’ll pick it up if she feels like it. Otherwise it goes to voicemail.”
“So you didn’t get a call yesterday morning from the school?”
The housekeeper looked at both of us like we’d just told her the sky had fallen. “No-o. At least I don’t recall the phone ringing. Well, it might have done. Like I said, I don’t do phones. When Trisha’s here, she picks up. She left the house late yesterday, about nine, so there might have been a call, but I wouldn’t remember it. Not my place, you see.”
She gave me a pleading look. Something insistent, repetitive, about Phillipa in a fragile sort of way.
“Usually she leaves earlier, but sometimes she works from home, especially if she’s going to be in court that morning. Court doesn’t usually start until later, ten or ten thirty. I think Trisha works most of the time, even in her sleep.” Phillipa’s smile was uncomfortable.
“How do Brandy and her mom get along?” Cookie asked.
Phillipa hugged herself and shot her eyes toward the conservatory, where I could hear Trisha moving about.
“That’s a difficult question. Like most mothers and thirteen-year-old daughters, I guess, they have their good days and their … bad days. Brandy was closer to her father. They had a warm, loving relationship.”
“Can you be specific?”
She smiled. “Sometimes I’d get here, and they’d be running around the house, Mitch still in his pajamas and robe, shaving cream slathered over his face, a razor in his hand, chasing after Brandy, who’d taken his towel. That kind of relationship. Trisha was never part of it. He took her to the park every good day. Sometimes he’d come home for lunch, and they’d eat together. He’d be reading the paper to her, and she’d be chewing her saltines and listening—grown-up articles about war or graft and corruption, adult news, you know—and she’d listen as if she understood everything.”
I smiled, envying Brandy having a dad like that. I thought of my dad. I think, actually, I was scared of him, but I know I didn’t like him, and even though my stomach churned more often and life just got a lot scarier, especially money-wise, I was relieved when he left. Yes, I think I was relieved, the bastard.
“I never heard them fight. Not like …” She jerked her head in the direction of the conservatory. After a slight pause, she lowered her voice. “And when he died, well, let’s just say I think there’s a part of Brandy that blames her mother for his death. After all, she’s a kid, she has to blame someone. When she’s older, perhaps, she’ll be able to blame her dad for leaving.”
“But he didn’t leave, did he? He died.”
“Same thing, to a child.”
There was a pause, and I sipped my coffee—cold, by now.
“Can I bring you another?”
I shook my head. “Do you have children, Phillipa?”
“A son. Freddy.” She didn’t elaborate.
Cookie stopped writing. “Do you have a picture of him?”
She nodded and blew her nose. Stumbling out of her chair, she ranged around the kitchen, opened a corner cupboard, and drew out her bag. When she sat, she held a small photo in her hand.
“Forgive me, I had trouble sleeping last night. This is my son, Freddy.”
She handed the picture to me. I saw a boy of maybe eight or nine. He smiled at me from his wheelchair. “Sweet boy. How old?”
“Eleven.”
I passed the photo to Cookie, who looked at Freddy, then at Phillipa.
“He’s got your forehead. So good looking. You must be proud of him.”
She nodded and put Freddy back in her wallet. “When he was born, I didn’t think he’d make it, and it took me a long time, I’m not proud of it, but it took me a long time to accept him and then to love him.”
There was a fresh crop of tears. Phillipa rooted around trying to find a dry patch in the wadded-up mess of blowers in her hand and wound up replenishing her supply of paper towels.
“And now, I don’t know what I’d do without him. It scares me sometimes when I think of losing my job. What would I do? What would happen to Freddy?”
“But you’ve got a fine job and a great employer who depends on you.”
“Nothing is forever,” Cookie said.
My foot found hers and pressed down. “Is Freddy’s father at all helpful?”
“Freddy has no father.” She said it with such finality that I felt the clang of her prison door slam shut, leaving me standing in a vacant hall.
Cookie shot a glance my way.
“Do you have family, a mother or sister who can help?”
The housekeeper shook her head. “Only child. My father’s dead. My mother lives in Kansas City, but she doesn’t know about Freddy. Well, she knows about him, but doesn’t want to know about him. She doesn’t care, never did. When I told her I was pregnant, she asked about my husband. I told her I didn’t have one, that I didn’t plan to marry. I felt another door slam in my face. It was the last time we spoke.”
“Don’t you think your mom would like to meet her grandson?”
Phillipa’s eyes darted over the ceiling, and I watched her try to stem the tide of
tears. “I thought for sure they’d find Brandy by now. She’s just a child, really.” She patted her forehead with paper towel.
I couldn’t help comparing Phillipa’s reaction and demeanor, just short of feral, with Trisha’s relative calm.
“How long have you been working here?”
“Since before Brandy was born.”
“And Freddy, is he the same age?”
“Younger.”
I knew these one-word answers. I hated them. Sometimes silence made them blossom into a flow of words, but not with Phillipa. Somehow I had to get her into a good interviewing mode. So far, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Phillipa was grieving, all right, but was it for Brandy? Why was she so … tattered, that was the word. Her spirit was in shreds.
“And Trisha, did she give you time off after Freddy was born? What kind of a boss is she?”
Phillipa shrugged and reached for words. The silence stretched until finally she continued. “You know, Trisha can be difficult to understand at times. She never asked me about the pregnancy until a few months before Freddy was born—Brandy was two—and Trisha asked me to sit down. She told me she’d hired a nanny for Brandy, just to help out. ‘Obviously you’ll need a few weeks off to arrange things.’ Those were her words. ‘I don’t want the child here. Call me when you’ve made all the arrangements for his care. I assume you’re a single mother.’ That was the extent of her discussion.”
There was a long pause. I watched Cookie’s face redden, but the silence became a sort of hollowness, really, that seemed to take over. It flowed out of the room, eating everything in its wake, except for the faint pendulum swing of a grandfather clock coming from somewhere in the house.
Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) Page 11