Whiskey’s Gone (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 3)

by Susan Russo Anderson

  I could understand why his voice sounded the way it did, especially when he lit a new cigarette from a glowing stub. “Never married, but we were an item. Not all that long. I don’t know what I can say about her.” He took a drag. “We met in a butcher shop on Amity.”

  I must have given him a look because he said, “Strange, I know. I asked her if she’d like a drink, and she said of course, so I guess you could say we really met in a bar on Court Street.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer at first, but lowered his head. When he looked at me again, his eyes were wet.

  I bled for the guy.

  He said his name was Malcolm Giro. As a boy his parents had moved from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, which explained his slight accent—you know, the way they say over as if it were ow-ver. Some graying at the temples, but other than that, his hair was black and cut in a crew. He was trim and wore an ironed shirt open at the collar. He had to be about thirty-five or a little bit over.

  I let him take his time and kept my mouth shut.

  “She seemed to know everyone in the place. But that was Whiskey, attracted a crowd wherever she went, like she knew everyone. Connected, I guess you’d say. Good-looking woman with a voice like a can of silky paint, all sexy, you know how they draw a crowd. Me, I fell head over heels, felt reborn. I begged her to move in with me. At first she would have none of it, but I told her I could give her stability, told her I owned the building, several more. Not to brag, but it’s true.”

  He’d finished his cig and reached for the pack. There was one lamp in the room, and in the light from it, smoke curled around the lampshade like the ghost of a snake. Without realizing it, I flapped a hand in front of my face. He apologized and stowed the cigarettes.

  “I’m not made of money, have to watch expenses, keep myself busy doing my own repairs and picking up paint jobs here and there.”

  He stopped talking, and I said nothing, not wanting to stop the flow.

  After a few moments, he continued. “Whiskey refused, said she needed her own space. Conned me into painting her apartment.”

  “You met Maddie.”

  He looked at the floor and I cursed my big mouth.

  “I won Whiskey through Maddie, not that I had to pretend. Maddie is one swell kid. Finally Whiskey relented and she and Maddie moved in. My lucky day, I thought. Those were the good times.”

  He stopped again.

  “But the good times didn’t last.” He took out another cigarette and stuck it into his mouth. “Don’t worry, I won’t light it.”

  I said nothing, noticing the paint spots all over his clothes and shoes, just like Rina Rosanova. When the silence hung around too long and he started shuffling his feet like what was I doing here and wasn’t it time for me to leave, I had to say something. “Speaking of lucky days, this isn’t one of mine,” I said, trying to make small talk. But just being in his apartment, a place I knew Whiskey had inhabited if only for a brief time, I was beginning to get a feel for her. No wonder men flocked to her like money to bankers. Maybe one of them, Arthur, became manic over her and killed her. Into the silence I said, “I keep meeting painters with spots all over them.”

  He looked at me like I’d gone round the twist, as my gran would say, but didn’t reply. I told him about meeting Rina and he nodded, said she was Whiskey’s neighbor for a while, but Rina was a different kind of painter. He said he respected her because she didn’t get all uppity like most artists did. He told me he didn’t have time for them. “Paint is paint. Slap it on walls or cover canvas, paint is paint. Gotta love it. I make a better living than most. Most of the money I get from rents goes into expenses. But I know how to handle a brush and make a living. More than I can say for the kind Whiskey calls ‘real painters.’” His face was twisted.

  “So you don’t like artists?”

  “Not the way Whiskey does … or did. Probably let go of him, too.” He spat out a piece of tobacco. “I rented to an artist once. Proved my undoing.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “Whiskey fell for artists. Used to hang out in Flannigan’s Bar with them. This was a while back. It burned down a few years ago. Rumor was they weren’t making it. Never liked the place. Full of shady types. And”—he made quote marks in the air—“real painters. Artistes, if you get my drift.”

  I remembered Flannigan’s, a chichi bar in Dumbo. Denny told me there was trouble there at least every night. Narcotics Division had been watching it and knew they were peddling lots of stuff—dope, uppers, downers, all arounders—and there were links to organized crime.

  “The bar on Water Street?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Whiskey begged me to take her. She’d heard a lot of artists hung out there. So I did—once—and that was enough for me. Super slicks so self-impressed, all high on something. They have their studios close by, those that can afford one. Whiskey said she wanted to go there and meet real painters, or at least that’s what she told me, like I was a pretend painter or something. Told me to change my clothes because real painters didn’t wear white.”

  He looked down at his hands and I swear they trembled. “I knew she was trying to make me into someone I wasn’t.”

  I gave him the moment. It stretched into two or three, silence filling the apartment.

  “But we went. There was one guy, called himself an artist. Had snake-like hair. He invited us to his studio, all the while looking daggers at me, like how dumb was I, tagging along. And Whiskey fell for him, I could tell, the way her eyes hung all over him. That was a night I’d like to forget.”

  “She left with him?”

  Malcolm didn’t move for a while, just stared down at his nicotine-stained fingers like they were a key to something he’d never understand. “Said he needed an apartment and did I know where he could rent one. Whiskey looked at me with her pleading eyes. Sucker that I am, I rented out my top-floor studio to him.”

  I wished Lorraine was here. She’d know what to do, probably go over to him and hug him and tell him how swell he was, but older women can do that. I heard distant traffic.

  “I don’t have it, not next to him, that’s what Whiskey seemed to be telling me, like she could barely stand to be in the same room with me.”

  Again he stopped talking. The room seemed to hold Whiskey’s shade. It hovered over us, stirring the air, ashamed.

  “If she’d given me a chance, if she’d just given me a chance, I’d have been great for Maddie.”

  I stopped scribbling in my notebook and looked at him and nodded.

  “It’s not too late. Tell her it’s not too late. I don’t care where she’s been, what she’s done, I’ll take her back. Just ask the kid, she’ll remember me. Malcolm the painter, Maddie calls me. Used to take her to the park and swing her and buy her ice cream. When she got tired, I’d lift her up and if some of the others taunted her, you know how mean kids can be sometimes, calling her names I guess because of her head and all, she’d wrap her arms around me and cry. I’d be a great dad for her. I asked her one time, ‘Is it better to be like you with your shiny head, something that makes you stand out, or to be like me, lost in a sea of disregards?’”

  He stopped talking and looked at his apartment as if he were seeing it for the first time. “This place isn’t so bad. Some people would kill for it. I know it doesn’t look like much.”

  “I’ve never seen walls so perfect,” I said, and I meant it. I told him they were works of art.

  “But it’s just not the way Whiskey sees her life.”

  “Tell me more about the painter Whiskey met in Flannigan’s.”

  He nodded. “That night he invited us to his studio, mostly to put the make on Whiskey, but I think he wanted to show me he could pay the rent. Said the management company found out he lived in his studio and they were going to evict him. Whiskey had the hots for him, I could tell. I was so …”

  I thought the guy was going to cry, but he pulled himself together.

  “
I didn’t think much of his work, but who am I to judge? It looked like he squeezed paint out of a tube and smeared it around the canvas. Floor was filled with it, all different colors. You couldn’t tell where the walls stopped and the canvas began. Did abstracts, you know. Oh, he might fool certain people. You see them walking in clumps down the streets of Dumbo on Sunday afternoons in October. Rich as Croesus with catalogues in their hands. Expectant, knowing, like they were going to discover the next Jasper Johns or whoever and make a million. But Whiskey’s artist guy, his canvases, there was something commercial about them, I’ll give him that. Had an eye for color, I’ll give him that, and a sense of composition, although one canvas looked like another, his works were stamped out of a cookie cutter. I looked around his studio, mostly empty. Said he was preparing for a show and they’d just been picked up. Represented by one of those uptown galleries. The more he talked, the more Whiskey’s eyes shone. So he was my tenant for a while, but after he and Whiskey had their fling …”

  Malcolm Giro hugged his sides, and I gave him time. Slowly, as if by a miracle, a thin wash of something akin to triumph, or maybe it was redemption, spread over his face. Like spackle, it filled in all the creases and gullies. “I kicked him out.”

  I grinned.

  His smile broadened. “This was a while ago. I don’t know whether he still keeps his studio in Brooklyn.”

  I waited while he looked in a weathered address book he pulled from a desk. I sniffed tobacco and paint and bit my lip, watching as he tore off a piece of newsprint and scribbled down a name and address. “Star Newcomb, that’s the guy.” Malcolm wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  I gave him my card and told him if he thought of anything else to please give me a call. He nodded. Walking me down the hall to the door, Malcolm seemed almost reborn.

  Dumbo

  After meeting with Malcolm, I felt the strength of Whiskey’s presence. I sat on the stoop, trying to conjure more of her presence. Not having anything better to do except interview a navel-gazing artist, I searched Whiskey’s journals.

  A Sunday in November

  Most of the time I’m good at forgetting, but not on Sunday evenings. Tonight I can see Malcolm standing next to me on the day we met, both of us watching the butcher grind my chops. I smell cold and sawdust and meat. I feel his presence. Turns out, he owned the shop, started by his father and run by his brother. See, Malcolm’s father made the big money and owned several apartments, but let me tell you, the buildings were like thieves. The upkeep was a killer for Malcolm because he wouldn’t raise the rents, which explains why he was a painter and handyman and always working. Not a charmed life as far as I was concerned, not at all. No dancing, no romance, but I was so young.

  For a time we lived together in the garden apartment next door to a playground. In the beginning things were swell. I had a shorter commute to work, and it was great for Maddie because of all the kids and because Malcolm took to her, he really did. Perfect, until my dalliance with Star.

  It was just a small fling with an upstairs tenant. All right, maybe Star was a hunk and maybe I was attracted to him and I shouldn’t have been. Maybe I should have stopped it before it began, because all along I knew Star wasn’t for me. For one, he hardly looked at Maddie, not like Malcolm, who loved Maddie with a father’s clean love. But Malcolm changed after my slip—which by the way was so not worth it. Turns out, Star was a one-man universe, deep into himself. I caught him once in his studio staring into the mirror, turning to the side and flexing his butt out like a girl.

  After Star, I felt Malcolm’s idea of us slipping away, him ignoring me like I wasn’t there, even though we were sleeping in the same bed. We became misaligned planets. I finally got the message and moved. Oh, God, if I could take it back, the hurt I’ve caused. If Star could have remained just a smile.

  A Monday in November

  Maddie, I called her from the moment they put her in my arms. Maddie, I love to write the name. She has a saucy mouth now and then, and no hair. It fell out in one week when she was two, clumps of it. I remember seeing it on the rug, thinking it was the cat’s. But no, it was all over her crib. I thought it was because she’d just learned to read, way too early if you ask me, and her brains were giving off too much heat. But they told me, no, something about follicles and the immune system—fancy speak for they didn’t know. One woman, a well-meaning but misguided granny, told me to hide the pictures of her with hair. I did. Burned them. They said she wouldn’t feel bad until she got older, but they didn’t know the Maddie who told me one day, “Oh, well, it’s not like the sky’s falling.” That from a toddler of two. No thanks to me, Maddie is my gift, I tell you. Maddie is my everything.

  * * *

  I texted for an Uber, asking the driver to drop me off underneath the overpasses, and a few minutes later, I was walking down Water Street, the sounds of Dumbo pricking my ears and giving me a mini vacation. I love this area of Brooklyn with its old cobbles and smell of the river and the scent of long-ago spices. It has an energy hard to describe. My favorite history teacher told us it was an old wharf area and had buildings dating back to the eighteenth century.

  But I couldn’t stand around smelling the water, I had fish to fry, so I gave Lorraine a call to see if she’d heard anything and to tell her I was following up on some leads. She hesitated before answering. I squeezed the phone because I know Lorraine and her pauses, but she resisted asking about Denny. Instead, she said Maddie and Robert were playing Scrabble. She followed with, “Have you heard from Denny?” I thought I heard fear in her voice.

  “He got home early but had to leave.” I’m such a liar, but Lorraine bought it or maybe she didn’t but was too polite to say anything. I imagined her biting her lip and felt her knowledge boring through me. Right now, however, I could sense she was more worried about Whiskey than Denny—weren’t we all. She didn’t have to say it, no one had seen Whiskey. I told Lorraine I’d check in later with her and was about to hang up when she told me she’d heard about my car.

  I went numb. Who was updating Lorraine? I hadn’t told her about my slashed tires, I figured she had enough to worry about.

  “That blonde detective told me. You weren’t going to say anything, were you?” Lorraine’s voice seemed faraway, like she was in a tunnel, but maybe it was me.

  “You have enough on your plate,” I managed.

  “But I might have information that would shed some light,” she said in a low voice.

  Her gentle rebuke hit me in the gut.

  “It’s all my fault,” she went on, and I could feel her regret. “I should have mentioned I was getting into juicy territory with the Mitch Liam investigation. I found out who arranged for his murder, at least I think I did—some low-life thug connected to one of Brooklyn’s organized crime family. But then Whiskey went missing and … I guess I forgot to mention it.”

  She told me about the visit she’d made to Joe Catania—not the actor, but the new identity of the man in witness protection whom I’d visited in conjunction with another case a couple of months ago. “How did you pull that off?”

  “Long story, friend of a friend, you know how it goes. I’ve been following the Brooklyn mob since before you were born. Anyway, this Catania fellow gave me a name, or I should say his mother did. She’s an old friend from Star of the Sea’s Altar and Rosary Society, and she knows where all the bodies are buried, and I do mean buried. But now I’ve said too much.”

  Leave it to Lorraine and the good old girls’ network.

  “So you know who ordered Mitch Liam’s death?” I asked.

  “I’m getting very close.”

  The stone in my throat grew, and I found it hard to breathe. In the distance I could hear Maddie and Robert arguing, their voices getting louder.

  “Got to go,” she said. “We’ll talk another time, but be careful.”

  “Have you told Jane?” I asked.

  “No specifics, just that we’re investigating a death for a client and it’s get
ting interesting. I don’t know enough yet to divulge names, and giving her details would jeopardize my source, and anyway we need to tell Trisha Liam first. Jane seemed interested, though.”

  I’ll bet. I made a note to call Trisha Liam with the information. She’d be happy to learn her retainer was beginning to pay off. I could hear Robert whining in the background about something Lorraine wasn’t doing, like fixing him dessert or getting him coffee, one of those. How Lorraine stood him was beyond me.

  “Sorry, got to go, Robbie needs me.”

  “Robert can’t spoon ice cream into a bowl?”

  Lorraine laughed. “I think Jane’s going to arrange for surveillance.”

  Right. This was a win-win for Jane. Have me followed, and maybe the endowed detective would hit two birds with the same stone—pay lip service to my protection while picking up information on Whiskey’s case because of my heavy lifting.

  I pocketed my phone, ignoring something flashing on the screen, while trying to turn off the image in my head of shadowy figures in dark doorways. I made a mental note to check our locks at home. Shouts from some kids in the park and the cars rolling over the bridges beat a rhythm in my blood.

  The Piano Man

  The address Malcolm gave me on Jay Street turned out to be a light industrial building not unlike its Dumbo neighbors. It took up one square block, a squat hulk obstructing the water view. The door was locked. Ringing the bell did nothing, so I had to wait until a couple came along. Offering a smile, I followed them inside.