Jane shot him eye daggers. “What, you mean having the foresight to stop the elevator on a lower floor, holding the doors open until he did a quick change? Just because you couldn’t do it …”
Lorraine did one of her all-healing laughs.
Jane continued. “Now masquerading as Abe, the sweet and trustworthy Goncourt, he rides up to Phyllida’s hospital room, where he hands her the bouquet and knocks her over the head.”
I put down my fork. “So at that point, Liese Goncourt wasn’t happy with Rip, I expect.”
“Precisely. He hadn’t done the deed,” Jane said, watching the waiter bone her trout. “When Liese learns from your visit that Phyllida is still alive, she sends him back that night dressed in a wig and her old coat, and a syringe loaded with potassium chloride, and finally he is successful: the beginning of Phyllida’s end.”
I watched Lorraine tear up.
“Did he confess to doing the deed?” someone asked.
Jane nodded. “Besides, Officer Deems picked him from the lineup as the visitor he’d seen that night—his eyes and the mole on his left cheek gave him away. ‘Without a doubt, this is the one,’ he told us.”
I could tell by Willoughby’s puzzled mug he wasn’t getting it.
“Why The Mysterious Affair at Styles?” Lorraine asked.
“Beats me. Maybe Liese wanted to get rid of the book?”
I shook my head. “In the end, Liese Goncourt wanted to be caught.”
“Deep down, most do,” my father said.
“So next day when we paid her a visit, Liese lied to us about not knowing where her coat was,” I said.
“They both did,” Jane said.
“Who? What coat?” Willoughby asked.
“Where have you been?” Jane asked. “Remember our visit to Liese Goncourt? We showed her stills of the mysterious redhead in a black coat visiting the comatose Phyllida?”
He nodded slowly, a glazed-over look in his eyes.
Jane looked at the ceiling. “Both of them, Rip-as-Ameline and Liese Goncourt, both of them told us she’d given the coat to charity.”
“Oh, that coat.”
Denny shot me a look.
“There never was an Ameline, was there?” I asked. “Except when either Rip or Liese Goncourt needed a disguise,” reminding them I’d seen Liese Goncourt playing the part of the sleeping Ameline in the Princeton guesthouse.
“Once upon a time there was an Ameline,” Paddy said. He told us she’d disappeared shortly after he began tracking the Goncourts a few years ago. “They never found her body.”
“Maybe we ought to scour the woods in Northern New Jersey. Seems like that’s Liese Goncourt’s favorite dumping ground.”
My father opened his mouth to say something. Despite myself, I smiled at him, just the whisper of a lift to my mouth, but words of thanks got stuck in my throat.
“So who was disguised as Ameline when we paid Liese Goncourt a visit?” Jane asked.
Tig dug into his key lime pie. “Must have been Rip.”
“For sure it was Rip,” said the know-it-all detective.
I couldn’t disagree. “He doubled as Ameline and himself, Kirsten’s assistant, and also played the parts of Abe, and later, Liese Goncourt in order to gain access to Phyllida’s hospital room.”
“And he played the part of Kirsten when he picked up Kat that Friday afternoon,” Lorraine said while Robert stole a piece of her vanilla lard cake.
Paddy nodded, adding that Rip was Liese’s youngest son.
“She must have been in her sixties when she had him if she was born in a concentration camp at the end of World War II,” Cookie said, rolling her eyes. “I buy about ten percent of what came out of that old broad’s mouth.”
We laughed at that. “Adopted,” Tig said.
“Was Liese Goncourt ever married?” I asked.
Paddy shrugged.
“We don’t know where she was born, but she emigrated to Canada from France,” Tig said. “Liese Goncourt was a young woman at the time. Her mother ran the operation until she died, when Liese took it over.”
We were silent for a time.
She couldn’t help it. Jane morphed into evil woman. “Aren’t you going to acknowledge what your father did? You would have been dead meat without him.”
“You mean plant fertilizer.” Willoughby poured himself another glass of brandy.
“She invited me to this shindig, didn’t she? That’s thanks enough,” Paddy said and looked at his bowl of ice cream.
“It’s time,” Lorraine said, looking at Jane. Both of them stood, raising their glasses. Although the words might have been choking the blonde detective, I had to hand it to her. She looked at me and said, “Although Paddy saved you, without your dogged—and I do mean dogged—persistence, we wouldn’t have solved this case.”
“What Jane means,” Lorraine said, “without you, we wouldn’t have Phyllida’s murderer behind bars.”
Even the waiters cheered.
“You didn’t earn a dime for this job, but here’s a token,” Lorraine said, handing me a photo.
I looked at it and my heart leapt. It was a picture of my grandmother’s piano.
“It’s been restored to its rightful corner in Lucy’s.”
I couldn’t help it, my mind took a powder for a second, picturing the piano, the parlor, hearing my grandmother’s crashing chords. Tears started. “Where did you find it?”
“In a store on Atlantic Avenue. Remember the piano man?”
It was a reference to someone who’d helped me out on an earlier case. I nodded. Lorraine told me she’d found the serial number etched inside the bench I’d had in Lucy’s living room, and the piano man tracked down the grand, an old Pleyel. Apparently it had been stashed in some back corner, too rickety to sell.
Denny whispered to me. “Are you going to give Paddy a job? Face it, you could use the help. Aren’t you even going to thank him?”
“For what? For giving the parrot a home?”
He smiled. “Too soon, I guess.”
Fina Fitzgibbons, twenty-something private investigator (protagonist)
Carmela Fitzgibbons, Fina’s mother, deceased
Padric Fitzgibbons, aka Paddy, Fina’s father
Fina’s gran, unnamed and deceased
Denny McDuffy, her boyfriend, NYPD patrolman
Lorraine McDuffy, Denny’s mother
Robert McDuffy, Denny’s father
Jane Templeton, NYPD detective
Willoughby, Jane’s partner, an NYPD detective
Cookie, Fina’s lifelong friend and sidekick
Clancy, Cookie’s partner, NYPD patrolman
Mr. Baggins, Fina’s cat
Minnie, office manager at Lucy’s
Tig Able, FBI agent and Fina’s friend
Phyllida Oxley, Lorraine’s friend
Trisha Liam, Phyllida’s lawyer
Terris Oxley, Phyllida’s husband, deceased
Norris Oxley, Phyllida’s son, deceased
Henriette Oxley, née Goncourt, Norris’s wife, deceased
Kat Oxley, the deceased Oxleys’ fifteen-year-old daughter; Phyllida’s granddaughter
Charlotte, her friend
Liese Goncourt, Henriette’s mother
Ameline, her housekeeper
Rooster, Ameline’s parrot
Abe Goncourt, Liese’s oldest son
Kirsten Goncourt, Abe’s wife
Rip, her assistant
Garth Goncourt, Liese’s youngest son
Zizi Carmalucci, reporter; Denny’s erstwhile girlfriend
Billy, Brandy, Babcock Mercer, Ms. Samuels, Mrs. Boddington, mentioned as Kat’s friends and teachers at school
Places
Brooklyn General, fictitious hospital where Phyllida Oxley is taken
Elaine’s, fictitious soda shop where Kat and her friends hang out
Packer Collegiate, Fina’s & Cookie’s K thru 12, Brooklyn Heights
Brooklyn Friends School, Kat�
�s and Charlotte’s K thru 12, downtown Brooklyn
Vinegar Hill, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where Fina and Denny live
Victorian Flatbush, aka Beverly Square, Liese Goncourt’s neighborhood
Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where Fina grew up; location of Lucy’s; location of Trisha Liam’s law firm
The Promenade, Brooklyn Heights overlook
Cobble Hill, a neighborhood in Brooklyn
Carroll Gardens, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where Phyllida Oxley and Denny’s parents live
Dumbo, aka DUMBO, “Down Under the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses” a light industrial and loft neighborhood in Brooklyn fronting the East River, close to the Fulton Ferry Landing. Charlotte and her parents live here.
84th Precinct, Gold Street, downtown Brooklyn
Lucy’s Cleaning Service, Fina’s fictional cleaning establishment in Brooklyn Heights
Vinegar Hill House, a restaurant in Vinegar Hill
Teresa’s, a coffee shop in Brooklyn Heights
Fina Fitzgibbons Detective Agency, Fina’s fictional agency; shares space with Lucy’s
Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey, Trisha Liam’s fictitious law firm in Brooklyn Heights
Smith, Jasper & O’Leary, fictional Court Street law firm where Lorraine was a paralegal for twenty-five years
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, local paper
The Brooklyn Drop (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 4) Page 25