Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) (4 page)

After Dad died and Granny sort of went away, there was only Aunt Caroline, and at best she was a long subway ride away. Upper East Side facing the park where she lived with a rich guy named Rick. He invested in TV stations, whatever that means. Aunt Caroline took me to Central Park, and we’d walk, and she’d tell me stories about being in college and being with men and which men to watch out for. Most of it was boring. Aunt Caroline was not as good as Dad or Granny, but she was a whole lot better than Pah-tricia. But Caroline’s left me, too. London. Across the pond, that’s what she calls it. Tells me I should visit, but I don’t know. Granny shakes her head, and Pah-tricia says I have to be older.

Aunt Caroline sleeps around. That’s what Granny told me once, and that’s why I love Granny, at least when she’s being herself. But sometimes she lies in bed and hugs her purse and stares at me, and I know she’s far away. “That’s what old people do,” Caroline told me once. But when she’s here, I mean really here, Granny Liam tells me stuff she isn’t supposed to. I can see her eyes getting papery and can hear her throat getting all whispery. “Now don’t tell your mother I said this.” That’s how she starts up, and a chill goes up my arms, and I know I’m going to hear juicy stuff.

Chapter 5

Henry. Early That Morning, Before The Take

Henry leaned against his van. He’d parked it on the other side of Joralemon so he could watch the kids walking to school in a few hours. With luck, the girl would grab a juice from the deli. She’d done that every day for the past two weeks. Sometimes, though, she skipped her little trip to the store. If she didn’t go, they’d have to postpone it. No matter. Either way, he was prepared. He rehearsed the moves in his head, felt his legs twitch in time to the movie in his mind, just like a dancer. Six o’clock, barely light, but he had to be early. As it was, he’d gone around the block twice and hovered in the van, waiting twenty minutes for the right space. Twenty minutes, what was twenty minutes? He’d waited over fourteen years for this moment. In his mind, Stuart lay in his hospital bed. “I love you, Daddy. See you tomorrow.” Henry canted a foot to the side so he could examine the sole of his running shoe. Pretty worn, he’d have to get a new pair soon.

The girl was young with long curls—fiery when the sun hit them just right. Her name was Brandy. He’d watched her. He’d scoped her out, all right, knew all her outfits. Today she wore the black tights with the lime green hooded affair and the clunky braid she sometimes had with those kinky curls sticking out like wayward tendrils. Kids today didn’t need to get all dressed up.

He wondered what his boy would be wearing. He’d been a boy, all boy. Never cared for clothes. His mom had to lay out his outfits for him. Too young, didn’t have a chance, not like this girl. She had everything. But face it, his boy wouldn’t be a boy now, would he? He’d be close to twenty-one. The thought made his forehead sweat. This girl had lived almost twice as long as his son had.

Stuart’s death was his fault. He should have stayed with him. Instead, he let the hospital kill him. It was all his doing—his and the lawyer’s. She had to bear some of the blame. She was so smug in court. He couldn’t believe the jury fell for her argument. He didn’t care about the money, didn’t need the money. With it, he was going to set up a scholarship in Stuart’s name. He remembered watching the lawyer as they waited for the foreman to finish reading the verdict, the moment when Henry’s dreams vanished. Just like the hospital murdered his son, so the lawyer murdered what Stuart’s memory could have meant for others. He’d get her through her daughter. He’d get her, all right.

He’d seen the girl often enough bounding down her stoop, running to Remsen and picking up her friend. He’d timed her walk. Never varied. Her friend might be a problem, though. Then again, probably not—it would all happen so fast.

Heather was the friend’s name. By the time Heather would look around, the space the girl had occupied would be filled by ten other kids. Nature abhors a vacuum. So it had to happen fast and in the right spot. It had to be rehearsed. The timing was key. Hence the importance of the van’s position. And the color. He’d worked on that, too. At first he thought a bronze color would melt into the scenery, but there was something about bronze that made it stand out. So he switched the color in his mind to maroon. No, wouldn’t do, and finally had his friend mix him two car colors. Paid extra for that. Came out almost like army green only a little lighter, a light olive green. Blended in nicely with the color of leaves in spring.

His jaw began to ache, and he realized he’d been clenching his teeth again. Must stay relaxed. Couldn’t afford the mistakes brought about by tension. He stretched his neck, moving his head from side to side. Events today must be free-flowing, timed to perfection.

In the beginning, he thought he’d work alone. Safer that way. He’d heard about deals going sour, one partner grassing on the other, and he didn’t want that to happen. He thought long and hard about involving Ben. He wasn’t worried about giving him the money he’d asked for. Henry had that and more to spare.

Except for that one time, there’d never been cross words between him and Ben. They’d met on one of Henry’s many commutes from Central New Jersey to Manhattan. How many years ago was it? He remembered the first time he’d seen him on the station platform over fourteen years ago. Tall with blond hair sticking up on his crown like straw. It was six months after Stuart’s death, a couple of years before 9/11, when the Hamilton Station first opened and a few hardy souls began trading seven or eight extra driving minutes for a pleasanter ride to Manhattan. Ben, whom he’d glimpsed on an irregular basis at first, soon became a familiar face, offering him a nod, a sympathetic smile, and after a while, they exchanged a few words of greeting.

It must have been on one of those slow summer commutes back from the city—the stop and start kind with the air conditioning on the fritz and the hot green forest staring back at them and the shafts of light illuminating summer dust. That was it, that’s when they’d introduced themselves, and they began talking about this and that. Yes, it was on one of those days when there was even more confusion than usual and the misery of Stuart’s death hurt like an open wound. Their train had just pulled out of New Brunswick when it ground to a halt. Another switch problem, Henry thought. They were in the middle of nowhere when the conductor made the announcement of a train derailment. In the charged air, that’s when he’d told Ben about losing his boy. The words just tumbled from his lips. He didn’t know why, but a weight lifted from him for a while after he talked to Ben that first time.

“In for his normal appointment. They’d found a murmur, that’s all. Next thing I knew, he was dead. Six years old. I left him alone the night before he died. I shouldn’t have. He’d be alive if I hadn’t left him. The casket was so small, a mourner had remarked, it looked like a shoebox.”

“How long ago?” Ben had asked.

“Six months.”

“Sue the bastards.”

Henry remembered the woman sitting behind them. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, but do you know how disgusting you two are? Where’s your regard for others? You both have been yapping the whole time, full pitch. So shut up, already.”

The train started up, juddered to a halt.

“Bitch,” Ben muttered.

“Backing up,” the conductor said, grim as he strode through the aisle, both hands hitting the tops of each seat row.

Henry remembered his clothes smelling like burnt oil. He put his nose near his underarms and sniffed. Slightly sour and they hadn’t even gotten to New Brunswick. “He died six months ago. Ground frozen. It had snowed, and I still see Susan’s shoe prints in the snow. Didn’t feel the cold, she told me. Three months later she was gone. Hasn’t written.” He blinked, remembering.

Ben muttered his condolences. Henry knew the man hadn’t known what to say. A decent sort.

But the memory of Ben and their first conversation faded, and Henry was in a different place. “Playing with the truck I brought you, Stuart? I’ll say good night, then.” He bent and kissed his son’s forehead. He smelled disinfectant.

“Bye, Dad. I love you.”

Chapter 6

Fina. Evening One, Trisha Liam’s Study Revisited

After I said good night to Trisha Liam—for the first time, as it happened—I turned on the ignition and sat in my car while it idled. The driver waiting to take my space went ballistic. But something was gnawing at the fringes of my mind. For one thing, Trisha Liam didn’t want to talk about her husband’s death. For another, I just didn’t have a fix on the Liam family, Brandy included. So to the roar of Mr. Impatient, I got out of my car and rang Trisha Liam’s bell again. She looked like she’d been crying for real.

“I need to ask more questions. I don’t feel like I know your daughter.”

“How could you? I don’t know her.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just need a little more time with the books and the pictures in your study. It’s the way I work.”

“I told you—I don’t have a study, I have a conservatory.” She gestured toward the back of the house.

In her conservatory or study or whatever the hell it was, I headed for the bookshelf. “Tell me about these people.” I held up the black-and-white photo I’d seen earlier in the evening when Trisha was fetching my water. “I recognize you, and that’s Brandy when she was maybe ten. Is that your husband?”

She nodded. “He’s dead.”

“Can you tell me about his death?” I thought she was going to faint any minute, so I suggested we sit.

When we got comfortable, Trisha asked, “What does Mitch’s death have to do with finding Brandy?”

“A lot. You’re a smart lawyer. How do you begin preparing a case?”

“Sometimes maybe you dance around and around the main point.”

We were seated in front of the bay window, and through the haze, I saw lights moving on the East River. I watched them as she talked.

“It happened before I knew it. Sometimes sudden things keep on happening. They happen over and over until you think you’re going mad. But you’re doing it to yourself, of course.”

I nodded, knowing too well what she was talking about. Grief.

Trisha rubbed her forehead. “The change of seasons, for one thing. A year’s turning. Another spring without him, and I wonder how much is left of him sealed underneath the cold ground. I think of him young and grinning and in court, the first time we met. He was defending a member of the Brooklyn mafia, and I was prosecuting. ‘How can you defend a man like that, obviously guilty,’ I asked him over coffee. Mitch stepped right up to the plate. He was like that.”

I nodded, not wanting to interrupt her moment of peace.

“He smiled, and it was such an engaging smile that I forgot to listen to his words about reasonable doubt and the rights of man. I just stared at his bow tie bobbing up and down. And that’s how our friendship started. A cataclysmic meeting of opposites. That was close to twenty years ago.”

Her makeup had worn off by a fresh load of tears making paths down her cheeks. She closed her eyes, and I could see the blue circles of flesh beneath them. The woman was filled with fear and needed a diversion, so I let her speak of another time.

“Yes, we must have met in the summer because he had on a seersucker suit. He’d bought it at Brooks, he told me. He wore a gray pinstripe with a yellow polka-dotted bow tie on a field of blue. Red suspenders. I fell in love with the blue of his eyes. Sometimes gray, sometimes green, but mostly blue. And the ruddiness of his cheeks. He had a thatch of sandy-colored hair that fell over his forehead like the mane of a sorrel.”

Trisha Liam stopped talking, but I wanted to give her another moment or two, so I said nothing. Besides, this kind of panning for gold sometimes resulted in finding a nugget here, a bit there, that all together would help me find Brandy. But when she hadn’t spoken in a while, I asked, “Did he win?”

“Win?” Her smile showed me how ignorant she thought I was. “The jury found his client not guilty, if that’s what you mean by ‘win.’ But all in all, Mitch was successful. I can’t remember all his reasons for doing it, but he told me that he loved to pack the jury with females; he told his clients how to dress and how to look forlorn—setting the scene, he called it. Very important, he said. So he cultivated the not-guilty look and specialized in the Brooklyn mob scene. Minor league thugs. We fought, but only in court. He was always on the other side, you see. That was when I worked for the county prosecutor, before I started my own law firm.”

She stared into nothingness somewhere beyond me as I listened to a speedboat skimming over the water and the bellow of a distant foghorn. I was taking notes, my pen scratching on the paper, but I said nothing—I didn’t want to stop the flow.

In a moment Trisha continued. “Mitch was quite a talker. I’d be exhausted after a day in court, and he’d be ebullient. So much exuberance he had. Always. At dinner, I’d muster up enough strength to ask a question when they’d brought the rolls, and he’d talk throughout a three-course meal. Brandy’s a lot like him. He was beginning to make a name for himself when God pulled the plug. His head did a free-fall into the cottage cheese two years ago, the worst possible time for Brandy to lose her father.”

“His heart?”

She nodded. “He’d been working too hard. Not physical labor—Mitch had the hands of a bishop. No, he was defending a mobster from South Brooklyn, someone with ties to protection on the wharf and God knows what other kind of racketeering. I don’t remember too much about it. But something must have come up—new information he’d gotten or a hunch he had—because in the middle of everything, Mitch recused himself. Said he could no longer defend the man. Wouldn’t say why. Two days later, he was dead. I was so lost.” She hugged her sides.

“Was his death investigated?”

She looked hard at me before she shook her head. “The electrical part of his heart just stopped or shorted out or something, they told me. Perhaps I should have insisted on a more thorough autopsy.”

“I think I would have done.”