Cookie was going on. “One of the women remembered Whiskey, ‘the mother with the bald little kid.’ I didn’t want to question her too much in front of the others—you know how it is, I didn’t want to start a panic—but I said you’d probably want to talk to her. By this time, Clancy and I decided to split up. He took the other side of the street, and I took Whiskey’s old apartment building. I began pounding on doors. ‘Has she done something wrong?’ one of the women asked. So I told them, no, I wasn’t sure, but she might have come into some money, you know the drill we do when we’re trying to locate someone. She seemed like she wanted to talk. She said Whiskey lived across the hall and had her hands full with an old flame.”
“An old flame?”
“Her words.”
Cookie handed me the woman’s address and cell phone number. I called and made an appointment for us to meet her in half an hour. She lived two doors down from Whiskey’s old apartment.
I looked at my reflection raking the BookCourt’s window and blurring over the display, wondering why Denny would ever want to date the likes of me, let alone shack up with me. He’d asked me numerous times to marry him. My toes did their frozen waxed beans thing. But inside, the line at the cash register had disappeared, so we entered.
It smelled of paper and ink and the electricity of finding great books.
The clerk in back of BookCourt’s counter was an older woman. She had that sweet granny look, rimless glasses and strands of chestnut hair wafting around an angelic face. She remembered Whiskey after I showed her my ID and Whiskey’s photo.
“A single mom with the sweetest little girl?”
“Maddie,” I said.
“That’s right. I’m looking for her, actually,” she said, pushing up her glasses. “So give me your card and please, please let me know when you’ve found her.”
I dug into my bag and handed her my card.
“She used to read to the kids on Saturday mornings. Got a great voice and the children loved to listen. Matter of fact, it got so crowded in here, it was hard to move and we had to stop serving cookies and milk. One day she came in and apologized. Said she was getting too busy. She’d found a job on Wall Street, and her free time was eaten up, what with the extra demands and longer commute. We have a lot of readers, but she was special. Kids were spellbound whenever she read to them. We were sorry to lose her.”
“Do you remember if there was ever anyone else with them, a man with reddish brown hair, harmless enough but a bit unsteady on his feet?”
The woman thought for a moment before she shook her head. “Sometimes an older man came to pick them up.”
“Her father?”
The woman cracked a smile. “Old enough, but more like a sugar daddy.” She blushed and stared at the countertop. “I shouldn’t have said that. How do I know? But definitely not Whiskey’s father.”
You know the drill, I asked her to describe him and her description sounded a lot like Seymour Wolsey, who seemed to know a lot more about Whiskey Parnell than a named partner ought to know about a paralegal. I made a jot in my invisible notebook and told myself to get in touch with Trisha Liam and interview Seymour a little more aggressively. Put the screws to him, in other words.
As we left, she reminded us to have Whiskey call her.
Outside, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I smelled oversweet perfume, so I knew who it was before I turned around. Zizi Carmalucci, Denny’s old flame. You’ve seen her type before—raven hair, ruby lips, perfect everything in one package. She stood in front of the bookstore with a reporter’s notebook and pen.
“What do you know about Lorraine’s missing tenant?” she asked.
I shot Cookie a look and played it cool.
“What are you talking about?” Cookie asked.
Zizi folded her arms and looked at me. “She’s Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey’s office manager. I know she didn’t show for work this morning and Trisha Liam hired you to find her. What have you found out?”
Cookie tugged my elbow. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“You know I write for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle? When they saw my credentials, they hired me on the spot and made me their assistant chief investigative journalist. And now this story’s going to make my reputation. How’s the daughter holding up?”
“Where did you get this information?” I asked, but shouldn’t have wasted my breath: Robert again. Or Denny. Denny? No, it couldn’t have been Denny, could it?
“I can’t reveal my sources.”
Cookie pulled out her mirror and checked her lipstick. “We’ve got a meeting, remember?”
“Listen, I just started last week. Can’t you help me out? I need a big story, one I can get my hooks into, show them the depth I’m famous for. Do the BookCourt folks know anything about her?”
We shook our heads in unison.
“I didn’t think so. I’ve already asked them—they know me, they would have said. Been up and down this block. One of the bartenders at Cody’s said he’d seen him in there a couple of times.”
“Who?”
“The prime suspect. I showed them his picture.”
“You have a photo of the prime suspect?” I asked.
“Arthur McGirdle’s his name, by the way. Bartender said he’s in there a lot.”
“Let’s see the picture,” Cookie said. Her arms were crossed and she muscled closer to Zizi.
Wouldn’t you know, Zizi changed the subject. “Don’t you see, this story was made for me. People will be sucked in. I’ve got to be the one to break it. Why would she leave her kid? How long has she been missing? Who called you? I need a picture of the kid holding a teddy bear or something, and you can help me get it. Listen, Fina, I know I’m being a little pushy here, but anything you can help me out with, I’d sure appreciate it. I mean, for everything we’ve been through.”
I shrugged and said I had no leads at this time, but as soon as I heard anything, I’d let her know.
“And by the way, you might want to check on your car. It’s that BMW, right?” she asked, pointing down Court Street. “Looks kind of funny, like there might be something wrong with the alignment or whatever they call it.”
Zizi had a quaint way of diverting my attention.
“Now we’re really late,” Cookie said, pulling me toward Baltic and Whiskey’s old neighborhood.
As we crossed the street, I called Lorraine, my source for all things real, and asked her when she’d last talked with Denny.
She hesitated a beat too long. “I guess it was the last time we had dinner together. When was that, two weeks ago? But I have news.” She segued into Jane and her team, telling me they’d arrived a while ago and were swarming through Whiskey’s apartment. “Wouldn’t you know, we’d just started dinner when there was a banging on the door. You should have heard Robbie.”
Poor Lorraine. I heard the sound of tramping feet on the other end of the ether and apologized, saying I’d given Jane explicit orders not to start until after the dinner hour.
“I’d better get up there and check on them. Maddie and Robbie will be all right while I’m gone—she’s showing him how to eat with one hand in his lap.”
The Phone Call
As we walked on Baltic Street, my cell vibrated. Thinking it might be from the woman we were supposed to be meeting, I forgot to look at the caller until it was too late. Blocked in big letters sat in the center of my screen.
The guy on the other end cleared his throat.
I motioned to Cookie. She pressed her head close to the speaker so we could both listen.
“Who is this?” I asked.
The voice was a deep growl. “Leave Mitch Liam’s death alone. Now.”
“Bugger off, you creepy little turd!” Cookie said.
“Shut up and listen!”
“Who is this?” I asked again.
“If you don’t care what happens to you or your friend Lorraine, at least you should care about the kid.”
“What are you talking a
bout?”
“Check your wheels. Worse stuff’s gonna happen if you don’t lay off.”
“Where is Whiskey Parnell?” I asked.
But the caller didn’t reply. He hung up.
Cookie and I stood still. I heard her rapid breathing, watched as she bowed her head and crossed her arms over her chest, like a nun praying. My heart was pounding, the street was lopsided, and I fought to catch my breath.
“Your car,” she said. “We’ve got to see what he’s talking about.”
I called and told Whiskey’s old neighbor we’d be a few minutes late. We retraced our steps, walking quickly toward Court Street where I’d parked. A million thoughts shot through my head, like who was this lowlife and how did he get my number. How was he connected to Mitch Liam’s death? Did Mitch’s death have anything to do with Whiskey’s disappearance? Was Maddie next? Lorraine? Earlier today she told me she’d uncovered dirt about some seedy types connected to the lawyer’s death.
I remembered what my gran told me, about coming to this country and being cold and lost and feeling so foreign; about meeting up with thugs in dark alleys, shadowy types who did what the don told them to do. They ruled with guns and threats. They demanded protection money. “Above all,” she said, “you must remain strong in the face of their evil and pray and never, ever give in. Fight them with everything you’ve got.”
“Is that your car?” Cookie asked, pointing. “With the rear end sticking up? And there’s a crowd around it.”
Slashed Tires
The back end of my car was sticking up because someone had removed the front tires. But the back tires weren’t in great shape either—they’d been slashed and bulged out on the street like rubber pancakes. I asked the guys crowding around it what they’d seen. They stood there murmuring to one another and shuffling their feet. Wouldn’t you know, “Nobody knew nothin’, nobody seen nothin’” on a major Brooklyn thoroughfare in the early evening. I looked long and hard at my BMW, cursing it. Mom’s Chevy Beretta would never have let me down.
Come to that, where were the cops when I needed them? Where was Denny when I needed him? My stomach did its elevator thing, depositing an undigested piece of nasty something in the back of my throat.
You might say I was a fool, but what these creeps did to my car made me more determined than ever to find out who killed Mitch Liam. I knew why he died, or at least I thought I did—Mitch Liam had recused himself from defending a thug, and that made the mob mad. I also thought I knew who killed him, an assassin I’d encountered on another case. But I didn’t know who had hired him.
And forget evidence: I doubted we’d ever get anything hard and fast, just hearsay and circumstance. But that would be enough for Trisha Liam. “Convince me my husband’s death was murder—that’s all I ask—and I’ll squash the bastards like bugs on a wall.” A crack lawyer, she’d figure out a way, of that I had no doubt. And after what they did to my car, I looked forward to watching her ream the mob and wring them out to dry. Or at least put a small dent in their operation.
While Cookie and I waited for NYPD’s finest, I thought of Mitch Liam’s death, pictured his head landing in the cottage cheese while he ate lunch at his desk two years ago. Mitch Liam—Trisha’s husband, Brandy’s beloved dad. I’d had Lorraine working on the case because of her legal expertise after many years at Smith, Jarvis & O’Leary and her knowledge of the Brooklyn mob. She’d been gathering evidence, and I’m guessing here, she probably asked too many questions. This latest trick convinced me that we were onto something; that Mitch hadn’t died of a sudden electric short to his heart or whatever it is the ME claimed at the time. I vowed to get on the case just as soon as I’d found Whiskey, or what was left of her. I shuddered. And something else was gnawing at me: I became more and more convinced that Whiskey’s disappearance was somehow connected, however tenuously, to Mitch Liam’s death.
We were in Cobble Hill, one of Brooklyn’s leafier sections. Who would think my tires would be slashed in this neighborhood? I looked around, lifting my eyes and willing myself to hold still until the tears dried up. Down a side street was one of those pocket parks. I saw shadows moving, maybe the usual huddle—men mostly and an older woman sitting by herself with a buggy I knew didn’t hold a child. It was getting dark, but I thought I saw a group of people talking and pointing my way. As I stared at them, they dispersed.
In a few minutes, Jane called. She was out of breath and not too happy with what she’d heard about my car. She asked her usual battery of questions ending up with who I thought was behind the tire slashing.
I said I had no idea, but she wasn’t buying it.
“Could this be related to Whiskey Parnell’s disappearance?” she asked.
“Do you believe in coincidence?” I wasn’t going to tell her about Trisha Liam hiring me to investigate her husband’s death. Jane was the type of person who needed simplicity and right now I needed to focus on finding Whiskey. So I told her about the phone call I’d gotten from the thug. She was silent for a time before she told me she wanted the lab to take a look at my car.
That was like sending my BMW into a black hole—just what I needed. It’s a good thing I kept Mom’s ’92 Chevy Beretta, the one with the big rust spot in the floor near the brake. It smokes a ton of oil and the engine has close to 198,000 miles, but once in a while I still get a whiff of her perfume and I feel her by my side.
After I filled out the report and watched my car being towed away, Cookie and I walked back to Baltic Street. Too much was happening, so I’d wait until later to tell Lorraine about the thug’s phone call and my car.
“Are you going to tell Denny?” Cookie asked.
Denny. Right now he was a sore spot. Although … was I going to take Jane’s word for it that he’d called her? I shrugged. “Let’s interview this woman, and then I’ll leave you to Clancy.”
Interviewing Rina
“Bad time?” I asked, after Rina Rosanova, a petite woman with a dreadlock updo, answered the buzzer and welcomed us into her fourth-floor apartment. I noticed that the hallway was lined with artwork as she asked us to make ourselves comfortable in the living room.
“There’s no good time,” she said. “But Cookie here told me about Whiskey’s disappearance, and I want to help.”
As I sat on the couch, I heard a loud squeal. I’d landed on a child’s stuffed pig. Cookie’s eyebrows shot up.
Toys and books were scattered around, and I could smell something warm and inviting coming from the kitchen. The windows were steamed, and kids were running around like it was Coney Island. I could hear their laughter and shouts coming from someplace in the back of the apartment, which is probably why Rina looked like a woman straddling a fence.
A yowl from the back brought her to her feet. She asked us to make ourselves comfortable, she’d just be a minute. I watched her run toward the kitchen, then out a few minutes later holding a toddler and wiping his face with a washcloth as she shuttled him down the hall toward the bedrooms in the back. She disappeared into one of them, and I heard her talking in low tones. A hush settled over the place.
When she returned, I asked, “So how do you know Whiskey?”
She told us they’d met in the park. They’d go there after school and on Saturdays, and they hit it off from the start. “She has this wonderful voice with a sort of burr in it.” She said there were a bunch of them who got together. “I guess we think alike or have the same stuff going on.”
Last time Rina had seen her, Whiskey was having a rough time of it, she told us, and not just because of Maddie’s alopecia. “She was going through a thing, I know that. All alone, with no husband, not that she didn’t have her pick.” She stopped talking for a second and moved her eyes from side to side. “That was part of her problem. Too many men. She must be explosive in bed.”
“That’s what I’m interested in—the men in her life.”
Rina stood up, her dreads listing to one side. “Sorry, I’m not much of a hostess.” She loo
ked at her watch. “Can’t I get you something to drink—a soda, coffee, water?”
We shook our heads. “We can come back. I know you’re rushed.”
“No, Jerry won’t be home for at least an hour, and the kids are already fed. Really, it doesn’t get better than this.”
I peered through the front windows at a blurred view of Baltic Street. Early evening traffic was building, and I could almost smell the exhaust from the cars idling while their drivers tried to find parking.
You see, Rina and her life—that’s what scares me. I mean, all the kids running around and swallowing you whole. I looked at this poor woman, spots of food all over her. At least they were colorful—bright green blobs, red and yellow. I must admit I was staring at her, the rich color of her skin like a cup of java light, her unusual outfit, leotards with colorful spots and a leopard-skin top and the biggest pink loopy earrings I’d ever seen.
She must have picked up on my scrutiny because she said, “Don’t mind me. I’m a painter.”
So that explained all the spots on her outfit and the paintings in the living room and hallway. Abstracts, I guess you’d call them. But the color and the lines, the angle, the movement, their story drew me in. Great expression.
“Your work?”
She nodded.
I was surprised her husband let her paint. “You have a studio?”
“I belong to a cooperative. We rent a floor in a building on Atlantic, and I have the corner room. At least I have the window. It’s not like my last studio in Dumbo, where I had a large space with north light and a view of the bridges—well, I could see a slice of them, at least. But when we moved here, the commute got to be too much.” She looked down at herself, brushing at some of the spots with paint-splattered hands. Then she thought better of it because she reared up, passing fingers through some of her dreads. “And, sorry, what you see is what you get.”
Whiskey’s Gone (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 3) Page 11