He picked up on the first ring. “We lifted one set of prints from the passenger side, nothing from the driver’s side. The AFIS report just came back. Got a record from way back when. Guy’s name is Ben Small. Last known address in Hamilton, New Jersey.”
My heart started hammering. “Where’s that? Never mind, I’ll look it up. Occupation?”
“Listed as an ER social worker, Hamilton Hospital. In February 1998, he was asked to leave. No other known employer.”
“Send me his address.”
“Save yourself. We’ve already checked. It’s an empty lot.”
I told him to send the address anyway and reminded him that Phillipa’s landlady, who’d met Ben Small, saw him buzzing the housekeeper’s bell shortly before she died, her last known visitor.
Tig sent me a long slow whistle, said it was the first he’d heard about the landlady’s statement, and vowed he’d email me all the info he had on Ben Small.
After I ended the call, I looked up at the sky, trying to calm myself, when I heard a familiar voice. Cookie waved, a little breathless, from the other side of the street and dodged cars to cross over to me.
“Clancy saw me running down Court, picked me up, and gave me this.” She held up a receipt. “DSNY found the hat. It’s in the lab now.”
Cheers from everyone when we told them the news.
“When should we hear?” I asked Cookie as we sat down.
“Momentarily, Clancy told me, if they’re able to lift a good set. But then they’ll have to run it through AFIS, and that could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days.”
“Unless I shove a poker up their rear,” Jane said.
After I told Jane about my conversation with Tig and the Feds finding Ben Small’s prints, she got up, punching numbers into her phone. I could see her pacing outside, head down, feet splayed, finger gesturing in the air.
Denny rested his arm on my shoulder. “Jane’s upset. She was misinformed about not finding prints in the van, and all the good stuff is coming from you. This morning you collected a lot of information. You and Tig had a nice talk with Catania, who gave you food for thought. Then you found the van. And we found Phillipa’s body.”
“Phillipa’s body?” Cookie asked.
“She doesn’t know yet,” I said and whispered the news to her.
Cookie shook her head, then signed herself. “There was something so bruised about that woman.”
“What are you talking about?” Lorraine asked.
Perfect, I’d forgotten to bring Lorraine up to speed. I told her about finding Phillipa’s body and about talking to Joe Catania and what he’d said about an assassin the mob hired to get rid of Mitch Liam.
While I breathed, Denny took up the thread, giving his mother a brief rundown on Gladys Delucca. He told her about the landlady’s description of Phillipa’s early morning visitor, that she’d met him before and remembered his name. “We’ve notified law enforcement, but the landlady’s not the most credible witness.”
Denny continued. “Anyway, now the lab has to sift through all the stuff, and it’s a waiting game.”
In other words, I should cool my jets.
Chapter 51
Brandy. In Chains
This is so boring. I’m starved. One crap piece of pizza and that’s it. I don’t hear a sound outside except for a horse. Did you hear it?
At least the runner opened a window for me. I heard him arguing with the mean one outside my door a few minutes ago, or maybe it was in a dream.
This tape sucks. This life sucks. “I’m going to go ballistic if I don’t talk or scream!”
Footsteps, hear them?
“Hey, you in there, shut up or I’ll finish you.”
I’m not going to answer him. I don’t care what he does. I don’t care about anything anymore. What’s the use in pretending? Life sucks, Dad. I can’t keep this up much longer.
Chapter 52
Fina. Afternoon Three, Lunch
“So what else do we know?” Jane asked as she returned to the table, her face a humiliated shade of red.
Part of me felt sorry for her—she’d just gotten the FBI screw—so I squirmed a little as I read Tig’s message, softening my voice as best I could. “I’ve just gotten information about Ben Small from my FBI contact.” I looked at Jane, waiting for the blow up. Why was I so proud of breaking news?
“Nothing I don’t know. I gave it to them first,” she said.
I drank the last of my water. “How did you get it?”
“I opened Phillipa’s purse.”
It was a pathetic lie. We were scrambling to be first in everything, and I was at the head of the line, my hands dirty with evidence tampering, unable to let her have a moment. Some malevolent devil must have stuck me with his horns before I was born. A still, small part of me felt sorry for Jane. Why should I be getting all the good stuff from the FBI before she did?
“Where did you find her purse?” I could feel everyone’s silent stares, their heads swiveling from me to her like spectators at a ping-pong match.
“In her apartment.”
“And where is it now?”
Jane’s smile was crooked. “In her apartment, of course. But I found Ben Small’s address stuck in her purse and copied it down.”
Why would Ben Small’s address be in Phillipa’s purse? It didn’t make sense. “His occupation, too?”
She stared at me, sweat beading above her upper lip.
“And you accuse me of tampering?” My stomach was churning. Was it because of her embarrassment or my triumph? I reached into my pocket and held up the address book.
“Yes, I do!” I thought she was going to throw her fork at me. Instead, she grabbed Phillipa’s book from my fist and began riffling through the pages.
“Where are your gloves?” I asked.
“Screw the gloves.”
We gathered around the book. There weren’t many entries, and I felt a stab somewhere near my heart. It was grief and something else. Guilt. But guilt and grief get mixed up inside me sometimes—they’re from the same brown paper bag, as my gran used to say.
I felt sorry for Phillipa—sorry because we were disregarding her privacy, sorry because she hadn’t many friends judging from the few scribbles we found, sorry because she was such an innocent, even after her corruption. Like most single moms, every breath she took was for her child. She’d tried so hard, and she never had a chance. And here I was, in the face of her holiness, traipsing through her freedom.
Jane hit upon the Henry entry. “Call that number,” she told Willoughby, who punched it into his phone.
After I heard the chimes and a “no longer in service” message, I called my Verizon contact’s number as the waiter brought Willoughby another bottle of wine.
“The number’s unlisted,” my guy said, “and I can’t give you more information than that because I want to keep my job.”
I told him I understood, even though it had to do with the Brandy Liam investigation, and her life hung from a thread. He had given me plenty in the past, but the screws must have tightened since the last time we talked because my attempts to give him guilt did nothing. We said goodbye.
Cookie dug out a mirror and stared at her lips before she spoke. “I saw Phillipa bump into the runner, I know I did, even though she denied it, so I think he plays a major role in the kidnapping.” She looked at Jane. “When you canvassed the neighborhood with the sketch, did anyone recognize him?”
“Lots of people were sure they’d seen him, but no one knew his name or where he lived. We knocked on doors throughout the Heights, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and half of Carroll Gardens. We’ve gotten nothing except for accounts from the usual kooks who think they’ve seen everyone.”
“What about the runners on the Promenade?” I asked.
Jane bit her lip. “I assume my team questioned them, but I didn’t include it on the list.” She began texting and in a few seconds got an answer. “They’ve checked, but the Promen
ade’s a never-ending population stream. Unless we station live bodies to ask every minute—”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Willoughby said.
“I’ve already got two men watching Trisha Liam’s home.”
We were quiet, picking at the antipasti.
“Well, I don’t know,” Denny said. “All runners look alike, don’t they, especially the ones on the Promenade. I thought you were looking for some solid leads from landlords and supers.”
“We are. We’re not finished with Carroll Gardens. Lots of those folks rent out their top floors or back rooms. And if he lives alone, he might have rented from one of them.”
Jane’s team had saved the best for last, the heart of South Brooklyn, a throwback to the 1950s, filled with dead ends and mafia hangouts, a warren of surprises.
“He must live alone,” Willoughby said.
“Try to tame your mouth, will you?” Jane said.
“What about the hat?” I asked. “I think you should take a picture of it, and schlep it to all the Sherwin-Williams stores in the area.”
“Waste of time,” Willoughby said.
“Maybe not. Maybe there’s a number on a tag, something hidden inside that would identify the store it came from,” I said.
Jane looked at me and smiled as she punched her phone again. She spoke to her team and asked them to get photos of the hat. “I know you’re stretched, but …” She held the phone out while whoever was on the other end did a rant. “Right. Inside and out. Get the front, back, inside tag, and if you see any numbers, snap them and send them to everyone’s cell. Then do another canvass.” She listened. “You heard me. Check all the paint stores in the area first.”
The waiters delivered our food. They cleared our empty platters and placed each pizza on its own stand. I watched the pies as they steamed like incense, breathing it in, filling my senses even though I was stuffed with calamari. I knew better than to wish for it, but I hoped their innocent smells would cleanse us.
My phone vibrated with a text from Tig. After I read it, I looked at Jane. “When are you off the clock? The FBI found the VIN. The van’s registered to a woman, Susan Gruber. Tig’s just sent me her phone number and her address in Central New Jersey. Denny and I could use your company.”
Denny squirmed. “I can’t go with you tonight, remember?”
“Totally right, how could I have forgotten your commitment to Zizi Carmalucci and her gorgeous set?”
Lorraine’s face reddened, but she had the grace to take a slice of vegetarian.
I turned to Jane. “So it’s down to you and me. Pick you up at five?”
She nodded, looking not at me but at the table.
I heard Jane’s chair scrape the floor and watched her face turn the color of a tomato and cheese pizza as once again she excused herself.
“Pretty soon smoke will be coming from her ears,” Willoughby said.
“I don’t blame her. She should have heard about the VIN twenty minutes before I did.”
Lorraine heaped cheese on her pizza and helped herself to a chunk of crusty Italian bread. Maybe that’s the way older Irish women from Carroll Gardens like their pizza, with a bread chaser.
As I watched her eat, something about Tig’s message gnawed at me. Susan Gruber’s phone number looked familiar. Slowly I lifted Phillipa’s address book from my pocket, keeping it underneath my napkin, safe from prying eyes. I thumbed to the H section and read Henry’s number. It was the same one Tig had given me for Susan Gruber. We ate in silence until Jane returned.
“I was wondering why the ransom was only two and a half million,” Lorraine mused in between forkfuls of pizza. I stared at her for a second, not because of what she’d said, but because I’d never seen anyone eat pizza with a knife and fork.
“Sounds like a huge amount to me,” Cookie said. “That kind of money will never flow into or out of my hands.”
Lorraine shook her head. “As far as ransoms go, it’s small. A few years ago, the average ransom paid to Somali pirates was seventeen million.”
Denny gaped at his mother.
“Don’t kidnappers do an asset search to figure out just how much the traffic will bear?” Willoughby asked.
“And how would they do that?” Cookie asked.
“Anyone can find out a person’s net worth, at least get a ballpark,” Lorraine said. “Take Trisha Liam. She owns a townhouse on the Promenade; she’s a named partner in a boutique Manhattan law firm; she rides in a limo to and from work; she sends her child to a private school. Her net worth has to be way up there, but I’m getting off track.”
Jane nodded, her eyes glued to Lorraine.
“I think the amount of this ransom is significant to the kidnapper in a way I haven’t quite figured out.” Lorraine paused to cut her pizza. “And I’m not sure whether the kidnapper was hurt by Mitch or by Trisha Liam, but I suspect the latter.”
“We know that much,” Willoughby said.
“We do?” Jane asked.
Willoughby seemed to think. “Maybe not. But there are two of them, remember? A Swiss national and this Ben Small guy.”
“Ben Small is careless,” Lorraine said. “He left his fingerprints in the van. That tells me he’s not the mastermind—he’s a hired hand with access to drugs.”
“How do you know?” Willoughby asked.
Jane rolled her eyes.
“Here’s my problem. I looked at the wrongful death cases filed against Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey clients. All the claimants were asking for well over seventeen million in damages, but of course, I had access to recent data only. The firm’s digitized files go back five years, that’s all.”
Willoughby swiped crumbs from his tie. “But they never get what they ask for.”
“That’s not the point I was trying to make,” Lorraine said.
Jane did a double eye roll and took her fourth piece of pizza. “I think I like the Margherita the best.”
“You would,” Willoughby said.
Jane shot him a daggered look. “Back to Lorraine’s point.”
Lorraine put down her knife and fork. “I think the kidnapper may have been hurt by Trisha Liam or someone else in her law firm, whoever was the trial lawyer defending a doctor or a hospital in a wrongful death. I think he’s far more emotionally involved in this case than a mob hit man would be. Just a feeling I have, nothing more.”
“But there could be a mob connection,” I said.
“Of course. Ben Small,” Lorraine said.
I watched Jane’s face for an eruption, but there was none. Apparently she was willing to entertain whatever Lorraine offered.
“We don’t have the official results of her death yet, but chances are good that Phillipa was stuck with a needle, just like we can assume Mitch Liam was. And that doesn’t bode well for Brandy.”
We were quiet for a few moments, forgetting our food.
“I need to see older cases,” Lorraine said, “but I think the amount of the ransom mirrors a settlement figure.”
“If they settled, wouldn’t they have closure?” Willoughby asked.
“I’m thinking of cases where a settlement was rejected, and the claimant lost the ensuing trial.”
I thought Jane was going to kiss Lorraine. “I have authority to retain your services on the spot for far more than Fina can ever pay you.”
Lorraine smiled. “Not interested, but thank you.” She turned to me. “I need to dig into Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey’s cases, the sooner the better. Can you arrange it?”
I made a note to call Trisha and turned to Jane. “Did your team find out anything more about Brite?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know. Sloppy operation. I think they’re going out of business soon.”
“We stopped using Brite,” Lorraine said. “They charged us for deliveries we never ordered, and when we questioned them, they never could show us records proving otherwise.”
“Their messengers are old, too,” Cookie said.
“Aging
workforce in every field,” Willoughby said, snapping his fingers again for the waiter.
“You’re disgusting.” Jane folded her napkin beside her plate.
“How do you know their messengers are old?” I asked Cookie. But before she could reply, I knew the answer. “You saw him.”
Jane sat up. “You saw the delivery of the ransom note?”
“Sort of. Don’t look at me like that. It all happened so fast. At the same time Phillipa was racing out of the house toward the Promenade, a guy was delivering something to Trisha Liam’s townhouse. Matter of fact, they talked to each other, Phillipa and the messenger. Or at least I remember the guy must have said something to her, because she pointed in the direction of the stoop.”
“Describe him.”
Cookie shrugged. “He had a messenger bag slung over his shoulder.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know. Tallish. Thin. Blondish hair. Maybe. He looked like a monk after a meal.”
“A monk?”
“He had a bald spot on the back of his head like a tonsure.”
“A monk after a meal?” I asked.
Cookie flipped through her notes. “He was rolling a toothpick around in his mouth.”
My heart rose to my throat. Something about that messenger. I looked at Jane and swallowed.
“Don’t even think of going there.”
Of course, I ignored her. “Can you give us a quick sketch?”
Cookie hesitated, looking into the distance. In a minute, she pulled out her notebook, drew the messenger’s likeness, and handed it to me.
Chapter 53
Fina. Afternoon Three, The Van Owner
The sun hung midway between the horizon and the top of the world as Jane and I drove westward. Any minute it would morph into a low-hanging orange ball. After a breakneck hurtle down the turnpike and east toward New Jersey’s shore, we’d made it to someplace in the center of the state, the township of Upper Freehold, heading in the direction of Susan Gruber’s last known address. I held it a fifty-fifty chance she’d be there, since she’d moved around quite a bit in the last few years, from New Jersey to Manhattan to Connecticut and back to New Jersey.
Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) Page 22