Too Quiet in Brooklyn (28 page)

Jane looked at us and spoke softly. “The surveillance team heard shots.”

“Where?” someone asked.

“Barbara’s house,” Jane said. “The parlor.”

“Coming, Cookie?” Denny asked, checking his Glock. He shoved it back in his pancake holster and handed me a vest.

Long Before It Happens

Funny how you know something long before it happens. We dropped Cookie off, because she didn’t have to see it. The way I figured it, I knew we were going to find devastation. It crept closer like a wounded animal stalking us as we crossed Atlantic, and my stomach started talking to me. I knew it. I watched Denny’s jaw clench. It was going to be epic. I could feel it, looking into the patrolman’s eyes guarding Barbara’s front door. I knew it was going to be dire by the way he handed us suits and gloves and slip-ons. I could smell my own fear as we put them on.

“Building’s safe. We’ve got it surrounded,” the patrolman told Jane. “CSU hasn’t arrived. Should be here any minute.”

We stepped past the crime scene tape and opened the door. I smelled cordite walking down the hall and I almost lost it.

Jane turned to me. “You okay?”

I nodded, but the white specks were swimming in my eyes again.

There was a new smell when we opened the parlor door, sharp and coppery. I looked up at the domed ceiling, trying to avoid the agony ahead, and stared at all the plaster curlicues ringing an old-fashioned chandelier, looked deep into the crown molding and fancy painted walls and plush furniture. Everything matched, everything spotless except for the two bodies on the floor and pool of blood soaking into rug. I took one look and had to excuse myself and got sick all over the shrubberies in the front.

I didn’t want to get too close, not yet. And something drew me upstairs. Denny followed. I counted thirty-seven steps up to the second-floor bedrooms, walked through the landing to the front bedroom, another designer’s showcase, and into the master bath. I opened the cabinet and saw what I should have seen from the giddy-up—pill bottles, all five shelves loaded with them. It was a pharmacy.

I retraced my steps. The bed was made, no clothes hanging off of furniture. An American Girl doll sat on the overstuffed chair. On the desk, underneath an empty bottle of oxycontin marked “No Refills,” was a folded note.

“Couldn’t stand it. No more of this.” It was signed by Barbara.

I should have known. I could have stopped her. I could have prevented this. The blood pounded in my ears and I bit my lip so bad I tasted blood. Better than tears. If Denny hugged me hard enough, the pictures and the smell would go away, I knew they would. If he hugged me hard enough, the bad dream would burst and I’d wake up. But I pressed my fingernails into my palms and told him we’d better go downstairs.

I told Jane about the note. “I touched it. I had to read it, but I put it back.

“What do you mean, you touched it?” the old Jane asked.

“I had my gloves on. If I’d have seen the tags earlier, I could have stopped this,” I told her.

“What are you talking about?”

I pointed to the dead man. “That’ll be Ken Connors, Winston’s youngest son. CSU will want to check the black Mercedes parked on the street. I saw it as we pulled up. Look for the New Jersey tags. Cookie saw him getting into it this morning, remember, and took down the plates. Feds saw it today parked on Blue Eagle’s drive.”

There was silence.

“Who’s going to call the next of kin?” I asked.

“That’s my job,” Jane said.

“The only emergency contacts I have for her are her ex-husband and her mother.”

“State has the same,” Jane said. She stepped out into the hall, but was back in less than a minute. “I left a message for Frank Alvarez to call me.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Who was the shooter?”

“It looks like Barbara killed Ken Connors, then shot herself, but of course that doesn’t go anywhere,” she said. “Not until the coroner gives me the official cause and manner.” Despite her best intentions, Jane was having a Jane Moment. She’d been working up to it. She was entitled.

“I’m glad Charlie’s too young to understand,” Denny said.

“Some day he’ll have to be told,” Willoughby said. “And I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her.”

“You’d better check Ken’s ID, just to make sure I’m right about the man’s identity,” I said.

“We can’t touch the bodies,” Jane said. “Bad enough moving the other stuff.”

I went to the closet in the entryway. “Let’s hope his coat has a wallet in it.”

There were small snow suits and a woman’s coat. No men’s stuff. We all looked around and I spotted a briefcase near the so-called love sofa. Sure enough, there was a wallet inside, along with keys and papers.

Jane grabbed them. “Emergency contact on the reverse side of the license has the name of next of kin, his father, and a phone number with a New Jersey area code,” she said.

I looked at Jane, the pounding in my chest now subsiding. I could do this, I told myself. “At least now the color of his hair matches his beard.”

She dialed the number and held the phone out so we could hear the busy signal, then she contacted her counterpart in the FBI and told him what had happened, giving him the name and number on the back of Ken Connors’ driver’s license. She put the speaker on and held the phone out again so we could hear the guy’s rant. She should have called him the moment they discovered the body, how did she expect cooperation from them when she herself wasn’t cooperative, blah, blah, blah.

With that, Jane switched off the speaker. Putting the phone to her ear she began to talk, low and sweet at first, but gathering force the way a train gathers speed. Pretty soon she was like forty tons of steel roaring down a mountain. “You speak of cooperation? You need to attend a class or hire someone who knows how to communicate, someone to spoon feed you the subtleties of relating to others since you know squat. Squat. Why is it my contacts tell me you planned to go out to the Connors farm this afternoon at three and you have yet to inform me of your visit or tell me the results? Why is it my contacts are feeding me information about Blue Eagle farm, how many people inside, how many horses, how many help, the tags on the cars in the driveway, the number of flowers in the goddam beds? Why is it you don’t give but you expect to get? I’m tired of pulling information out of you, and when I give you a call moments after I get the call from my surveillance crew saying they heard a shot, you give me a lecture?”

With that she clicked off her phone. “They’re going out to inform Winston Connors of his son’s death. That’ll give them something to do. I hope they surprise him in bed with his mistress. One hundred and one, one hundred and two …”

Denny was concerned about me, I could tell. He wasn’t talking much, just staying by my side.

As we stood there, the crime scene unit started filing in the door and Jane took the super aside and talked to her, telling her we hadn’t contacted the family yet, so no names should be given to the press.

The super rolled her eyes. “I’m surprised the jackals aren’t here yet. They usually shadow the van. Soon as we leave, they know something’s up.”

“It’s Saturday night,” Willoughby said.

“Makes no difference—they’re blood hounds.”

That reminded me. I texted Cookie. She called me two seconds later and I told her a bare bones of what had happened. Into the hollow space that followed, I suggested that if she wanted to pay her contacts back, this would be good time to do it, especially the night guy on the
Eagle
who’d kept both of us informed.

“Let’s get the hell out of here. I could use a drink,” Jane said.

Sunday

Sunday Morning Update

Jane called on Sunday morning and I put her on speaker so Denny could hear. She said they didn’t have definitive information on the autopsy yet. Toxicology reports hadn’t come back from the lab and probably wouldn’t for a couple of weeks at least, but they’d done a workup on both bodies. Ken Connors died of a 9mm gunshot wound to the head, shot by the same gun that killed Barbara Simon, a Sig Sauer P229 DAK and since that wound was self-inflicted, it was assumed she murdered Ken Connors.

She’d heard from her FBI counterpart in New Jersey. “Seems Winston Connors is a broken man. They took him into custody a few hours after they told him about his son.”

“When’s the arraignment? I want to be there,” I said.

It sounded like Jane was consulting her notes. “I know he gave me the date, but I can’t find it. The preliminary might already have been. In federal courts he’s not allowed to plead in the initial …”

“Where are they holding him?”

“I didn’t ask,” she said, “but it’s got to be the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Not exactly a palace.”

“The charge?”

“Three counts of murder in the first degree, kidnapping in the first degree, and over three-hundred counts of fraud.”

I could tell something was welling up inside me, something big, but it hadn’t surfaced yet and I didn’t say anything.

Jane had more. “I hear he’s singing like a canary in a cage. He lost his wife and his favorite son in one day. At first he blamed Mary Ward Simon’s death on her daughter, saying Barbara had contracted the Blue Eagle Corporation but after more probing, he admitted to masterminding the whole thing, and I mean everything, going way back to Heights Federal—the fraudulent loans, the setup of your mother as a scapegoat, her murder, his son’s affair with Barbara Simon, everything. He had to get rid of Mary Ward Simon the same as he had to get rid of your mother.”

Winston Connors could cry and confess all he wanted, but you know what? I didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.

“Three counts of murder?” Denny asked.

Jane said, “Mary Ward Simon, Detective Burton Cooper, and Carmela Fitzgibbons.”

I heard my mother’s name. I didn’t say anything but I just locked my soul in cold storage and threw away the key.

Denny knew something was wrong because he grabbed the phone from me and turned the speaker off. I heard him say, “Jane, she’s about to pass out. I don’t know … something you just said, I think. Give me a second, here, I’ll text you when she’s … oops, here she is.”

I snatched back the phone and hit the speaker icon. “I’m fine now,” I lied, tears streaming down my face. I wiped them away and slammed a fist into my thigh and told myself to grow up. Mom didn’t have to get that job at Heights Federal. As far as I was concerned, I’d rather we’d starved. What seemed like heaven at the time was the beginning of the end. Funny how good years can really be bad years in disguise.

I should have felt better when I heard that Connors was charged with the death of my mother. Someone said revenge was sweet, but not for me. Give me back my mother, that’s what I wanted.

Jane continued. “We’re still working on Detective Cooper’s death. We didn’t think to question it at the time since Cooper had a heart condition. Now we think one of Connors’ men, probably James Arrowsmith, stuck him with a needle loaded with digoxin, but it’ll be hard to prove.”

“And Ralph?” Denny asked.

“We still haven’t caught him, but no worries, we will. The newspapers are full of Winston Connors and Heights Federal.
The New York Times
is going to run it as their headline story tomorrow, and the
Eagle’s
streaming it all over the net. They got the exclusive for at least an hour. Cable news is full of it, so Ralph is bound to get the message. He’s got to come up for air sometime. We’ve taken the guards off you guys, but we’re keeping them on Charlie and Marie.”

Waiting For The Woman

Ralph made the bed and sat on it, trying to count his money, but gave up. He had plenty of time to do the job, it wasn’t three days yet, but his brother and sister kept fading away and he missed Charlie. He took a shower and found some clean clothes in the closet, brown pants and a black shirt. The shirt was too fancy for him. Ralph didn’t like buttons, but he couldn’t find any T-shirts. He sat down because the room was spinning a little and asked his sister to button the shirt, but she shook her head. “You already know your buttons, do it yourself,” her voice said. The clothes were Arrow’s, so the pants were too wide and weren’t long enough, but they’d do just fine. After he scooped the money off the bed, he put it into a pocket. He found a belt in the closet, but it didn’t have enough holes.

“So tie it,” his brother’s voice whispered. Ralph did, and it worked fine. The boots were Arrow’s too. They were a little small, but he could walk in them if he curled his toes. He needed some tennis shoes, that was it, tennis shoes like he used to wear in the Bronx when he climbed trees and ran up walls. He missed running the walls.

He opened the refrigerator and found some hamburger meat in a drawer, but he didn’t like the way it smelled, so he put it back and found another beer and put the empty bottles and pizza box in the trash can underneath the sink. He looked around to make sure everything was neat, took a towel from the kitchen and cleaned the counters and the bathroom. He dusted all the table tops and put the towel in with his dirty clothes.

On the way out, he locked the door and threw his old clothes and the towel into the incinerator. Arrow’s voice reminded him where it was, right around the corner from the laundry room where you needed coins. It was easier to wear the clothes for a week or so and get new ones and throw the old ones out—that’s why the incinerator is near the laundry room, Arrow said.

Ralph climbed the stairs to the bridge and walked across. The sun hit him in the back and his leg was a little stiff and his feet were cramped, but he felt good except when he thought about Charlie. “Don’t think about him,” his sister whispered.

“I’d like to see a middle-priced tennis shoe, not too cheap and not too expensive.” That’s what his sister taught him, and that’s what he asked for at the first store he saw with shoes in the window. The man nodded like he’d heard that all the time.

“What size?”

Ralph stared at him. “Tell him, real big,” Arrow whispered, “because you got big boaters.” Arrow laughed and disappeared. Ralph smiled.

“Take your boot off and stand on this,” the man said and fiddled with the sides and looked up at Ralph. “We don’t have too much of a selection in eleven and a half, but I’ll bring out what we got.”