“He’s coming back. Get out of there!” Cookie hissed.
I couldn’t help myself. Even though my forehead was throbbing, my hand slipped farther inside the drawer, rustling papers. I felt something long, and drew it out. It was a checkbook, so I slid it back in. Footsteps getting louder as my fingers groped. Finally I found a small black book and photo underneath some papers. Just in time, I squirreled them into my pocket beside Whiskey’s journal and closed the drawer. As I was returning to my seat, the door opened.
“It’s got to be in your purse,” I said to Cookie, reaching for her bag. She understood, latching onto my excuse like a crab.
“It’s not there, I’ve already looked,” she said, arcing her purse away from me.
“Let me see.” I unsnapped her bag, peered inside, and held it out to her. “Take a better look. It’s right there on top.”
Cookie did that half-laugh of hers, and Seymour Wolsey bought our ruse. I thanked him, reaching for the water before sitting down.
I took a gulp and crunched the cube. “We spoke to a clerk at the BookCourt who’d seen a large man bothering Whiskey. He matched your description.”
“She’s mistaken. And besides, that’s hearsay and flimsy at that.”
I forgot, we were dealing with a snarky legal type. Best not to get into the finer points of the law with him. “And Whiskey’s former neighbor in Cobble Hill described you and Whiskey in heated conversation outside her door.”
“More like a struggle,” Cookie said.
“Where is she? Did you kill her?” I asked.
“What the hell are you talking about?” He set his drink down and deflated like a burst balloon, getting as close to sobriety as I suspected he’d been all day. With a trembling paw, he loosened his tie.
“She and I were an item once, it’s true, and now that I think about it, we did have a tussle outside her apartment which might have been seen by Whiskey’s neighbor.” He swiveled to the bay window, gazing at the darkness outside before turning around to face us once again. “I may have a thing for her. Yes, I still do, I admit it. She is irresistible. Those eyes. The sheer joy of her. But I swear to you, I’d never touch her. You’ve got to believe me. She’s everything I’d ever wanted in a woman—bright, a little flamboyant, full of energy and color.”
I thought I heard noises coming from the other side of the room, perhaps from behind the door on the far wall, and my imagination went into overdrive. I pictured Whiskey tied and gagged and choking for air. But the sounds grew louder, more directional, and I realized they were coming from outside where headlights flashed across the drapes and the laughter of a noisy group, probably on their way to dinner on Court Street, passed underneath the window.
Meanwhile, Seymour was giving us a glimmer of his truth. Slumped in his chair with a fresh drink, he looked like the beached version of Ahab’s white whale. “For a month or two she lit up my life, and I guess she knew it, too.” He took off his tie. “I’d be so good for her and Maddie. They’d have everything. She could afford a larger apartment—a whole townhouse, whatever she wanted. We’d tour Europe, go skiing in the Alps, deep-sea fishing off of Costa Rica. She could afford to send Maddie to St. Ann’s or Packer Collegiate. But something happened. All of a sudden she hated me. I don’t know what I said or did—she wanted nothing more to do with me, told me she couldn’t stand the sight of me, told me to bugger off. Awkward, you know, when we still work in the same office. She does all my typing, or whatever they call it these days, organizes my files. But for two weeks I couldn’t look at her. My world began to crumble, I lost my touch. I couldn’t stand work, so I told Liam I needed a vacation. Went to the Bahamas or one of those ghastly places and wrapped myself around a bottle. When I came back, it was better. She says she can’t stand me. I …”
Seymour Wolsey’s face took on the color of an eggplant. I thought the poor man was going to explode or cry.
“Do you have any idea what’s happened to her?” I asked.
“You’ve got to believe me, I don’t know where the hell she is. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Where were you last night?”
He stared at me. “You’re not saying I’m a suspect?”
I repeated my question. “Give me a step-by-step account of your evening after you left the office.”
Seymour Wolsey shook his head. “I left about five and came home. Yellah was here; she’ll attest for me. Yellah!”
“She’s gone, remember?”
“Creeping Christ, what a misery. I stayed here all evening going over some case notes. I’m a partner, remember. That means I’m married to the goddamned place. I went to bed shortly after the eleven o’clock news. I’m a sound sleeper. I set my alarm for six thirty and was in the office by eight.”
“What about the other men in her life, this Arthur guy a couple of people talked about.”
“She told me about him. A tramp she met in high school. And she was married once, I think. Maybe not married, but … to a house painter, Malcolm.”
I scribbled a note. “Malcolm who?”
Seymour Wolsey shrugged.
“What happened to him?”
“Lives down the street someplace in Cobble Hill. I see his van around once in a while—says Malcolm Paints in big red letters. His number’s on the side of the van. He used to beat her, according to Maddie.”
My heart pounded.
“Kids are prone to exaggeration,” Cookie said. She looked at her feet.
“Not Maddie,” he said.
On the way home, I called Trisha Liam and updated her on our conversation with Seymour Wolsey.
I wasn’t going to tell her about my car, but she’d already heard. The silence on the other end of the line reminded me of lawyers narrowing their eyes and posturing before a jury, but when I told her about Malcolm and asked if Brandy and her group could help us out by looking for his van in Cobble Hill, I was surprised by her response.
“I think this surveillance thing you have Brandy working on is good for her. I’m not sure why … I think it’s giving her a sense of control, a kind of payback. And of course, it’s one more reason to delay doing homework. But I’m warning you to keep a lid on it.”
I told her I agreed and assured her that Brandy and her friends should be working after school for an hour or two at most, that’s all. I described Malcolm’s van. With that she conferenced Brandy into the call.
I could feel hope and pride in Brandy’s response when I explained the job.
“Consider Malcolm found,” Brandy said.
The Fight
As I peered through the front door and down the hall, I could tell someone was in the kitchen because the light was on and the refrigerator door was open and there was a figure peering inside it. Denny. My heart pounded. The closer I got, the more I smelled the rank woodsy stench of him. He had a growth of light brown stubble too, but he looked great to me, and I felt that soft warm glow wrapping around me. I knew I should have been angry. It was time to talk, but my heart did that ratty thing it always does where it beats out of control and I had to calm it before it jumped up the back of my throat and out my nostrils.
He turned and looked at me as I got closer. His eyes were misbegotten—I figured because of his phone call to Jane—and I knew he’d missed me too. He wrapped himself around me, and I barely heard the door to the bedroom snick shut.
“Hungry?” I asked two hours later.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, pulling on his jeans.
“Shower first or you’ll get half the Maine woods in our omelet. That’s what you were going to make, wasn’t it?”
He smiled.
Denny’s the cook in our house. Our first year together, we lived on breakfast. Since then he’s graduated to cooking us meals, nothing elaborate, just the regular meat and potatoes stuff, but I hadn’t done any shopping, and the only thing in the fridge were eggs. Well, that and tutti-frutti ice cream.
While we were washing up, my stomach started d
oing its rolling thing. Something passed between us because I saw Denny’s back stiffen and he dropped the plate of uneaten omelet on the floor. Mr. Baggins must have sensed something brewing because he came up and curled his tail around my leg, then sniffed around the shards of the dish and backed off a bit before he sat looking from me to Denny. I guess he wanted a ringside seat.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.
“I tried, but you weren’t wearing the phone I gave you.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot.” His voice had an edge. “You keep forgetting. I’ve asked you to wear it, but you don’t get it, do you? And you won’t use a gun. In your line of work, you’ve got to have a little protection. At least an extra phone is something. You never know, you might need it, like running into that crazy guy last May, remember? You’d have been dead without it.”
This was ridiculous. “So I forgot to wear it. So big deal. This isn’t about my wearing an extra phone. It’s about trust, Denny, and loyalty. You owed it to me to call me first. Instead, you called Jane.”
“I owed it to the missing woman. I owed it to doing what was right, to procedure, to the Force.”
“And you didn’t think I was doing right? You didn’t think there were extenuating circumstances, like the future of the missing woman’s child? What must you think of me?”
“I called her because Dad—” He stopped. I guess my face sort of scared him.
“I thought so.” I turned away and began cleaning up his mess, our mess, swallowing hard and telling myself not to cry. “You could have tried calling my cell.”
“I tried calling your cell.”
“Liar!”
Denny looked like the ghost of himself, all his heart and guts gone. He said nothing.
“Don’t you get it? You have that stubborn male thing going on. You want me to carry two cell phones. You don’t think about how it might be too much, yet another thing I have to worry about in my life. No, this is about your precious fear.”
He stood there shaking his head, his arms crossed, and I could see the blood draining out of him.
“It’s about losing me because you don’t think I’m strong enough to take care of myself without you. And it’s getting to be such a burden. Well, rip off the blinders, buddy. I do just fine without you. But the real issue is, you should have called me before Jane.”
I paused, trying not to look at his face. I’d gone too far with the burden line, I knew as soon as I stopped talking. I wished I could have taken it back right then, but some evil genie made me stopper my mouth. “Besides, I was just about to call her,” I lied. “So, getting back to my cell. If you were so worried about my safety, why didn’t you call my cell—you know the number. Was it because you were angry I wasn’t carrying that precious extra phone of yours?”
Denny stood in the middle of the room, his body rigid, his arms now at his side, his hands balling into useless fists. He was the color of a rotting tomato in dried grass, and his eyes, kind of watery at the edges, seemed to stare beyond me into an abyss only he could see before he turned and stormed out.
My feet wouldn’t move because I was too busy trying to keep the room from spinning. I listened to his footsteps going upstairs and back down. I heard the front door slam and felt Mr. Baggins knocking his considerable weight against me and twisting himself around my ankles. I picked him up and hugged him tight. I knew one thing, Mr. Baggins would never leave me.
I don’t remember climbing the stairs to the third floor, but I sat in the familiar dank of my study, thinking of nothing, my head whirling, my nose dripping. Into the selfish mopes, my gran would have said.
Mr. Baggins was busy kneading into me with his sharp claws. I was too tired to update Trisha Liam much less do any more reading of Whiskey’s journals. Instead I set the books on my desk and watched the stars and bridge lights blurring and blinking outside my window. Mr. Baggins pushed his fat body deeper into my chair and rested his head against my leg. All innocent concern, he looked up at me. At least he still loved me, and I must admit the old boy comforted me with his deep rhythmic purring while I tried to understand what Denny saw in me and how he could be so sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me—at least, up until tonight.
Guys his age are supposed to be dating different girls, but Denny was happy with just me. Maybe he’s just like his parents, married to the same person for forty-eight years, living in the same house. Contented. My head ached just imagining a life like Lorraine’s and Robert’s. I slammed a fist into my thigh.
Soon the solitude was annoying, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard from Lorraine or Cookie or someone, anyone. At this point I’d settle for another rant from Jane. I was about to call her when my mind focused where it should have been all along—on finding Whiskey. I pictured her in some godforsaken hole, tied up, alone, cold, hungry, or worse, and now was late. The knot in my stomach tightened, and before I knew what was happening, I stood and paced. When that got old, I decided to make a list of the things I needed to do.
I had a lot to consider. First, of course, was finding Arthur. And while I hadn’t ruled out Seymour Wolsey, we needed to locate Malcolm the painter and talk to him. There were other people I had to question more deeply—Finn Trueblood, for one. Why had he been so snarly today? Was the proximity of his office to Whiskey’s discarded purse significant? Come to think of it, he had access anytime he wanted to the conference room where her bag was found. Had he been the one to put it there to begin with, after Trisha Liam had the conference room searched in the morning? Was he the one who moved it after we’d initially spotted it?
There were others in Trisha Liam’s office I didn’t trust. Rhoda, the receptionist, and her boyfriend, Huey. And what, really, was Huey’s connection to Arthur?
I did a simple reconstruct of Whiskey’s movements—what little we knew of them. She’d left the office; she’d gone home and must have been coerced into leaving her child alone in the middle of the night. Why then was her purse in the office? Did whoever force her to leave her child also insist that she stop by the office? But why?
After these questions circled around my brain for a while, I decided to take action and scrounged around for my cell. I found it in its usual place, my back pocket. The screen was off. I tried turning it on. Nothing. I rapped it against the desk. Nothing again, so I plugged it into the wall. Nothing. My tits did their pucker thing, and the image of Denny storming away into the night flickered in my head while I powered up the computer and stared at the monitor. A wicked corner of my mind conjured a picture of Denny and Zizi in a hot embrace.
In a few minutes my phone came to life, showing the red battery icon. I shivered, reminding myself that Denny had been right all along: I’d drained the battery.
I clicked aimlessly in my computer’s browser, trying not to think. When I noticed my phone’s screen was normal again, even though the battery indicator was still in the red zone, I checked voice mail. My heart sank to the pit of my stomach. There were nine messages—four of them from Denny, two from Jane, one from Lorraine, another from Cookie, and one from Brandy.
I’m such a stupid, heartless ass. The blood left my feet. I felt it wash away, replaced by cold clamminess. While I stared at the phone trying not to feel, it began vibrating.
It was Brandy. My phone crackled with her enthusiasm while the battery indicator flashed. She called to tell me they’d found the van.
I praised her, telling her it surprised me they’d already found it.
“This is about life and death,” Brandy said. “Anyways, no big deal. Nothing else going on. Johnny said he knew where it was, so we went over there. Don’t worry, my mom drove us. She’s almost as bad as you. We could help, really we could, if you didn’t put all these chains around us.”
I ignored that last part. I could have told her to think back a few months, but that would have been a disaster. Brandy was healing, I could hear it in her voice, and I agreed with Trisha Liam: this mini surveilla
nce assignment was helping. Still, I gave her a lecture on the care and feeding of criminals, and if her grades slipped because she was spending too much time doing work for me, I’d be the one to blame. I thought that would scare her, but nothing I said seemed to faze her. Her only response was to tell me I’d better watch it because I was beginning to sound like all old people. Swell. She gave me the location of the van and the phone number written on it. “Too easy, we need another assignment.”
How would I ever find enough work for them? I wondered as I stuffed Whiskey’s journals into my pockets and punched in Malcolm’s number.
Malcolm
The man who answered the phone sounded like he’d swallowed a bag of sandpaper.
I told him I needed to talk to him about Whiskey Parnell. I’d heard they’d been married.
He was silent for a long time. “She okay?”
When I told him she was missing, he told me that wasn’t like Whiskey, that she’d never leave her daughter, that maybe she was an unfaithful broad and they didn’t see eye to eye on how she wanted to lead her life, but she’d never disappear. “Don’t get me wrong, if I never see her again, it’ll be too soon.”
Somehow, I didn’t believe him. I told him that he could help in our search, just talking to him face to face would be enough. He said he was about to go out for dinner, but I convinced him to wait for me, and he gave me his address in Cobble Hill.
Ten minutes later I rang the bell of a garden apartment and saw a light go on in the hall. When he came to the door, I showed him my ID. He nodded once and led me inside.
The entryway smelled like Sherwin-Williams. Maybe that’s because there were unopened gallons of paint, empty cans and tarps, rollers and brushes and stir sticks strewn down a long hall. He led me through the mess to his living room, dimly lit and sparsely furnished, but with a fireplace. The couch had stuffing coming out in spots, and one of the chairs was missing a leg. There were no books, but to give him credit, the place was clean—at least I didn’t see dirty dishes or empty glasses around or filled ash trays like you usually see in places where men live. And of course, the walls were pristine. They shone with a coat of magical paint. I ran my hand over them: not a blemish. Crown molding, wainscoting, the works.
Whiskey’s Gone (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 3) Page 13