Too Quiet in Brooklyn (8 page)

He swiped at his face with his sleeve. “You’re kidding. Better now than it’s ever been since they hired more men.” He looked at her. “And women. And the crime rate’s down. I don’t think pressure’s it. Something else is bothering you.”

“Funny, I must have missed the meeting where they made you Queen Shrink.”

They were silent, the car unmoving.

Jane worried her lip. Damn. He wasn’t her bat boy. “So what do you think it is?”

“No, no. You’re right,” he said, brushing crumbs off his sleeve. “Shouldn’t have said anything. How the hell would I know what’s going on with you, anyway. Sorry I mentioned it.”

“Oh, what the hell.” Jane flipped on her lights and yelped the siren a couple of times. The motorist ahead of them looked in his rear view mirror, his car fixed to the spot. He must have seen that it was a woman driving. Just her luck. Surrounded by the buzzards. Other cars got out of their way, but not Mr. Belligerent. She got on the horn, flicking it a couple of times before she growled, “Move it, buddy and fast or you’ll be obstructing.”

“Now you’re spilling your shit all over the road, Templeton. Grow up.”

That did it. Jane worried the car ahead, almost touching the guy’s rear bumper before he folded. When he did, she sped the rest of the way, pulling into a spot opposite precinct headquarters, jerking and stopping and rocking as much as she could.

Willoughby unfolded his big frame and catapulted out of the car, slamming the door shut and brushing himself off. “Not the pressure, that’s not it,” he said as they walked across the street. “It’s the raccoon with the red curls. You’re so afraid someone’s going to show you up, you got her tits in your sight.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hell I don’t!”

What was wrong with him, anyway? She wasn’t about to tell him if he couldn’t figure it out. Not now. Too much work right now. And this was going to be a high profile case, she could feel it coming. A high class woman found strangled on the sidewalk of a leafy street in historic Brooklyn Heights. Jesus H. The Eagle was going to have a field day. It would make the neighborhood section of the
Times
for sure. She’d have to brief the precinct captain as soon as she got to the office. And the chief would call, that’s for sure, he’d be all over her this afternoon, asking her this, telling her that, reminding her how important to her career and to the bureau this case was. Her head was pulsating.

She bit her lip. “The cold case I got last week when Cooper died?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Ever heard of Heights Federal Bank?”

He shook his head and opened the door, making way for her to enter. “Oh, right, I remember now, the bank on Montague that folded a couple of years ago?”

She hated it when he did that—said he didn’t know anything about something, when in fact he knew all about it.

“Can of financial worms crawling all over that one, I remember,” Willoughby said.

She wasn’t about to let him hold the door for her. No sir. So she stopped. “Fina’s mother was up to her eyeballs in it. Carmela Fitzgibbons. Well-liked. Respected. Some kind of executive vice-president. Course they’re all VPs if they work long enough at a bank, but she really was one, she was up there—you know, nose bleed territory. The bank got involved in some shady deals at the height of the real estate market Cooper told me, allowed them or instigated them, whatever. Auditors all over the place. I’ve got to read up on their findings, and I’ll need toothpicks for my lids on that one. I don’t understand the whole thing, not yet at any rate, but I’m going to have to.”

“I want in on that one. I’d like to talk to Carmela, and I studied accounting before switching to criminal justice.”

Well float my boat. Jane smiled her special smile. “Willoughby, you got a deal. The financials are all yours. You can give me one-sentence briefings from time to time, but no detail, please. Only you can’t talk to Carmela. She’s dead. Her body was found on the sidewalk in front of their brownstone, wrists slashed to make like it was a suicide. Only it stank to high heaven—no hesitation marks, no note, no blood. Perp never found. And wouldn’t you know, insurance called it a possible suicide.”

“They would. Funny suicide if you ask me. Find a body like that outside? In the bathtub, sure, but outside?”

“It was never solved.”

“How old?” he asked.

“Her body was found October 1, 2006. Fina was in high school. Father long gone.”

“Poor kid. No wonder she’s so …”

“So what? Finish your sentence. ‘No wonder she’s so snotty’?”

“I was thinking more like intense. No wonder she’s so intense. The body of her mother found in the same spot as the woman was today?”

Jane looked at Willoughby and at the door. He was still holding it open. “Almost. If she’d just be half-way decent, I’d sympathize, but she comes across like a Russian tank. Gotta get there before everybody else. Rolling, rolling, rolls right over you.”

Her phone buzzed. So let him wait a little bit longer with the door and all. She read the text, read it again and felt her tits tighten.

“Holy Be-F’in’ J”

“What?”

“Fina’s got the vic’s ID. Lived in the mews behind Henry.”

Willoughby rolled his eyes. “So she’s real Heights.”

“As opposed to?”

“Yuppie Heights.”

“That’s not the worst. The four-year-old grandson’s missing.” Jane told him about Charlie and felt her skin prickle. “Ready or not, get the team together. My office in five minutes. Got to call the chief first. You can brief the captain. After that, we’ve got time for a two-minute team huddle, that’s it, before we roll. I want to hear what the lab’s got.”

“Probably nothing yet.”

“So stick a wick up their ass, then you and me gotta get over to College Place.”

“But Sally’s cooked my favorite—lasagna with meat balls and sausage, steamed onions in olive oil and pecorino. And no comments. Gonna get laid afterward, I can feel it stirring already.”

She shook her head. “Feds going to be breathing down our backsides something fierce, and I need you in on this one.”

He was still holding the door for her, his mouth open.

Oh, what the hell. She entered, looking down at the bald spot on top of his head and straightening her jacket, her head down like a charging bull. Feet splayed, she made for her office.

College Place

Barbara’s eyes locked onto mine. I saw tears of desperation.

“Will you help me? Please say yes. It’s not that I don’t trust the police, but I know how it is. One crew begins this case and there are two more deaths the next day, four or five more by the end of the week—to say nothing about the cases they were working on before my mother’s death. I’m afraid they’ll get sidetracked up one street and down the next. I want to find my boy. I want to find him now. I hope whoever took him is after money, oh God, I hope that’s what it’s about. And whoever killed my mother, I want him put in jail. I want him to rot there forever.”

She was a junior partner in a downtown law firm, successful because she made gutsy decisions grounded on what she believed. She never doubted her instincts, she told me, and her gut screamed at her to hire me.

“I’ll pay you anything.” She began weeping again. Suddenly she sat. “All alone. My father’s dead. Now my mother’s … dead. Husband is God knows where. My boy is all I have. Please find him. Say you will. Please.”

“Of course I’ll help and we’ll find him.”

I felt so sorry for her. She was steeped in pain and there was nothing I could do or say to lift it from her. I honestly don’t know how she was managing to function. She’d gotten the double whammy—her mother’s murder and a missing son. Her whole world had crumbled in one day—no, in one minute—and I was the one who had given her the bad news. If it had been me, I’d have been a mess, screaming, biting, and kicking the messenger.

I stood in the living room of her mother’s home, texting Cookie with what I’d discovered and asking her to give me a call while Barbara wrote a check and gave it to me. Pretty efficient for a woman who’s just lost her mother and son. In a second, my phone buzzed.

It was Cookie. I told her that I’d found the dead woman’s daughter and had broken the news to her. “Barbara’s little boy is missing. Seems he was staying with his gran today. We’ve got to find him.”

That elicited shrieks from Cookie and a bunch of questions, mostly about the child so I told her what I knew about Charlie. I gave her Mary Ward Simon’s address and asked her to troll around the neighborhood to see what she could find out. “You know the drill, anyone see anything this morning, no matter if it seems unimportant. Take down the particulars—their name, number, time of day.”

The call gave Barbara a few minutes to herself, exactly what she didn’t need right now. I told her that the lead investigator will want her to identify her mother and asked if there was anyone who could go with her to the morgue.

She blew her nose, shook her head. “Like I said, I’m it.”

“If you change your mind, let me know. Would you like to make a call to a close friend, a college roommate, a cousin, someone you’re close to?”

She nodded. “I’ll call him later.”

There was very little time. I expected Jane to march through the door any minute, so I continued. “When the police arrive, there’ll be a lot of them, detectives whose job it is to work a crime scene—that’s what your mother’s home is right now. Trust me, I know the personalities involved, and at first it’s going to be overwhelming. There won’t be any privacy, nowhere to sit nowhere to think, no peace. So before they get here, I want to go through the house with you, unless you’d rather sit here and wait for them.”

“No, no, please no.”

“We’ll start at the top, go down to the garage and basement and outside,” I said, snapping on latex gloves.

I discovered a lot about Mary Ward Simon’s life going through her house with her daughter, but nothing about her death, not directly, that is. There was nothing out of place, and believe me, I know a clean house when I see it. Nothing obsessive, mind, just immaculate.

The formal dining room, complete with crystal chandelier, held table and six chairs, not my taste but polished to a high luster. The living room had pillows on the sofas and chairs, no notes like I was hoping to find—like, “gone to the grocers” or “be back in a couple of hours” or “help, I’m being strangled”—not a dust ball anywhere. Not a dirty dish or an empty coffee cup in the kitchen. The stainless steel sink and appliances shone. Food in the refrigerator and freezer was arranged, like with like, in some cases into subcategories and in alphabetical order. No garbage underneath the sink or in waste baskets, nothing to suggest any of the rooms had been used since the last cleaning except for one shelf in the library, a small den off the living room filled with children’s books. Three or four were lying flat. One was upside-down. The shelf looked messy by comparison with the rest of the house.

Barbara stared at the bookshelf, wiping her eyes. “It’s gone.”

“What?” I asked as I picked up the receiver, popped in the three magic digits. In a second I retrieved Mary Ward Simon’s home phone number and scribbled it in my book.

“Charlie’s favorite book, The Giving Tree.”

She leaned against the case, an arm over her eyes, rocking slightly back and forth.

“Not much time,” I said, taking a breath. Better right now to keep her moving, give her work to do, but I liked Charlie already. Any child whose favorite book was
The Giving Tree
was my kind of kid.

As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Don’t think that we’re forgetting about Charlie, not for one second. Charlie’s disappearance is directly related to your mother’s death, I’ll bet my house on it. The way to find Charlie is to find your mother’s killer. The closer we are to catching him, the closer we are to finding your boy.” I might have made a leap there, but I didn’t think so. The chances of two simultaneous catastrophic events happening to one person was slim indeed.

That brought a response I was unprepared for, Barbara hugged me. “I’m so glad I found you.”

“Let’s get Charlie back first, then you can thank me. Right now we’ve got to find you more tissues.”

My head felt light, perhaps a reaction to the stuffiness of the house, or maybe the bruise to my eye. She crossed the landing into the master suite and came out with the box of tissues.

I glanced inside the bathroom. It was spotless. “Wonder what service cleans your mother’s house.”

“She does it all herself. She doesn’t want anyone …” She stopped. “Didn’t want anyone touching her things. She was a CPA. When I was young, she worked for one of those big firms in Manhattan. Specialized in forensic accounting and had a heavy schedule, but after she retired, she still got a lot of work, too much she told me last week, but she couldn’t resist it when old clients would ask for her. Even when Dad was alive and she worked seventy, eighty hours a week, she still managed to do her own cleaning and cooking. Her gym, I guess.”

“Did she have a cell phone?”

Barbara nodded. “Probably in her purse.”

While Barbara talked, I looked into all the cabinet drawers. Everything neat, cosmetics and one bottle of perfume, Chanel No. 5, displayed on the counter, no dust, no stray hairs, not even on the brush. The only medicine, other than a tube of bacitracin, a box of Spider Man adhesive bandages, and a child’s liquid aspirin, was a generic medicine taken for high blood pressure.

In the bedroom, I said, “I’d love to go through the documents in that desk, but the police should be here any minute. Is there something you know about, an address book, a diary, files, something that would tell me about her?”

Barbara opened the desk. It was antique chestnut, I think, and in beautiful condition. Lots of cubby holes. She must have known all about her mother’s affairs. Barbara didn’t hesitate, but reached into the middle drawer and handed me three items, a MacBook Pro, a check book, and a folder with a picture of the Plymouth Church on the cover.

“My mother was the chairperson of the women’s ministry at her church. I don’t know that much about what they do, but it’s charity of some sort. When I was growing up and my father was alive, we lived closer to the church, but as a young adult, I opted out, a source of disagreement between my mother and me, I can tell you. It all seems so petty now.”