Whiskey’s Gone (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 3) (11 page)

Not only did I not like him, but I didn’t trust him. Maybe it was the thinness of his mustache and the snide shadows in his face.

“Did you kill her?” I asked.

He stared at me for two beats. His lips curled into a crooked smile. “Yes. I strangled her and stuffed her in my conference room so a part of her would always be with me. And that’s all I’ve got to say, so let me do my work.”

When I didn’t budge, he added the line about leaving now, you know how villains do in movies.

I decided to stall, so I showed him the sketch of Arthur. “Ever seen this man?”

His face reared away from the screen as if the photo had come to life and socked him one in the face—but I suppose I was doing some wishful thinking. He didn’t say anything for a while, so Trisha Liam came over and stared at the sketch on my screen.

“I might have seen him talking to Whiskey the other day,” he said. “And now I’m finished. You might not have noticed, but without me, this place wouldn’t exist. I’m the one who earns the money.”

“And you’re so modest about it, too,” I said.

Trisha Liam shot me a daggered look.

“Both of you, out.” Finn Trueblood’s color was a dark red.

At the door, Trisha Liam turned back and looked at him, muttering something I couldn’t quite get. She shielded her eyes from the shaft of light bouncing off the glassed-in space next to his office.

“What’s that room, a conservatory?” I asked.

Finn Trueblood

Finn Trueblood’s Monologue

Finn, my father called me. A pisser when he was sober, he was a damn fine lawyer. But he died a pauper in a home for the deflated, this after crawling back to the woman who despised him. And she, after bleeding him dry in court again and again, agreed to take him back. They had a relationship, my parents, full of clauses and caveats. I vowed never to be like them. I vowed to land on the top of the heap, and except for one slip, I was true to my word.

Yes, my mother took the old man back, for a fee of course. Saved him from the streets. But he had the final word: one morning he found her in her bed cold as snow. She’d been dead how long he didn’t know. “Why did she decide to do that to me?” he asked by way of greeting me at the door. Not “Hello, son, your mother’s dead,” not a tear or a hug, nothing like that. There is no such thing as love. There is only self.

Finnegan, my mother called me, her maiden name. It caught on her gums when she said it, a high horsey sound, as though we led a charmed life. A charmed life except when my parents fought, split every other month or so. My mother got custody the first time. No question, because the old man was screwing up and down Wall Street although he denied it, but videos don’t lie. Didn’t matter he breathed in money. At night I can still hear the screaming.

I vowed then never to marry. Why should I? I didn’t need anyone, not that way, not any way. Worked it so they needed me. Except for Gemma.

Gemma took my breath away when we met. I couldn’t keep my eyes from her. What a woman. Five-eight, perfect figure, a classic beauty in every way. Brains, too, and she loved me, I knew she did. I’d do anything for her. One day I woke up and found her dead on the bathroom floor.

After the funeral, the tears, the suffering, it hit me, I’d bastardized myself with that relationship. I’d become a sucker like the rest of them.

My father was a different man in court, his record unblemished. Pure thought, undiluted hate spewing from his mouth. It’s amazing his lips didn’t turn black. My fondest memory was seeing him walk out of court alone, his performance so venomous that not even his partners would acknowledge him. “Who, him? Never met him,” they seemed to say as they scurried like crabs out the door. The claimants wept in the corner or, stunned, sat vacant in the hall, their cheeks stained, their faces etched in grief. Lost. What would they do, they’d had an iron-clad case. Young son murdered by the stupidity of the hospital nurses, killed by neglect or mistake, a tight case, their attorney said. But somehow my father pulled it off.

I met Trisha Liam through the old man. She admired him. Muscled her way into his office one day, interrupting our lunch. She wanted advice on a case, stuck a brief under my nose along with the hospital records, and I helped her plot her defense. We won, of course. The client was happy. That’s how we started.

There was never anything between us. I was married to my work, she to Mitch Liam, a bleeding-heart sucker if there ever was one—a pawn who had to go.

The few acquaintances I have talk of family and tradition, courage, honor, respect. These concepts I have no knowledge of. I don’t believe in them. Connections, yes. Loyalty, yes, up to a point, the point being my head, my body, my interests. It’s why they respect me. It’s why I win in court. It’s why they have loyalty. If it weren’t for yours truly, Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey wouldn’t exist, and Trisha Liam’s the first to say so.

The Purse

“Finn Trueblood has his own conference room?” I asked.

Trisha Liam nodded and opened the door to a glassed-in room, where a huge wrought-iron table took center stage, except of course, for the view. Around it, about a dozen chairs. A converted roof garden, no doubt. The Statue of Liberty glistened in the distance, and the rays of the lowering sun bounced off the windows, jarring my vision.

Trisha Liam flipped the light switch and breathed in. “What’s that on the table?” she asked. “And on the floor?”

I felt an electric jolt at the nape of my neck. As soon as I stepped inside, I saw it: an overturned chair disturbing the order of the room.

We stood in the doorway, Trisha Liam’s hand over her heart, for what seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds as I tried to take in the scene. But I knew one thing: Whiskey had been here. When or why, I didn’t know, but her visit hadn’t been planned and most certainly hadn’t been pleasant. I suspected the pencil-thin mustache next door.

Something glinted on the floor, maybe a piece of plastic, so I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. Then I saw it, a woman’s bag lying open on the table, its contents strewn all over.

I handed Trisha Liam a pair of gloves and snapped on my own. We walked to the center of the room for a closer inspection.

I watched her face harden into prosecutorial mode. With hands on hips, she swiveled to me. “You should have found this sooner.”

I felt my jaw tighten, but said nothing. The blood was pounding in my ears, and I must say, she took me by surprise.

“What kind of a detective are you? You should have gone through each room when I called you!”

I tried to remain calm, reminding myself that Trisha Liam was the client. “If you remember, I wanted to search the building this morning when I arrived, but you said it was a waste of time—your words.”

“Well, you should have contradicted me, pled due diligence.”

Now I had a splitting headache, and my Irish-Italian temper was about to explode, but as luck would have it, Trisha Liam began to cry. Out came the handkerchief, her words of apology. She told me she felt awful, that she’d awakened in the middle of the night with a bad dream. Perhaps it was a premonition, she said, that all was not well with Whiskey.

I’m not good with emotions and wished Lorraine was here to soothe Liam’s troubles. Instead of embracing her, which is what Lorraine would have done, I smiled, stammered my “it’s all right, I understand,” and stepped closer to the table.

Before disturbing anything, I snapped some photos of the room, the purse and its contents. I looked inside the bag, feeling in all its pockets. Empty, except for a few tissues. I put the bag back on the table in the same place we’d found it. Then I picked up the wallet lying underneath the table.

It was dog-eared, thick with pictures, corners of illegible notes, business cards, receipts, coupons, punch tickets. It looked like Whiskey kept everything, even if it was expired or torn. There were no photos in the little plastic holders, but Trisha Liam was gathering bits and pieces from the floor—balled-up tissue and loose pieces of gum. There were several wallet-sized pictures, probably school headshots of Maddie.

Trisha Liam ran her finger over the contents. “No cell phone or driver’s license, but a social security card and voter’s registration.”

We continued looking in the wallet’s bill compartment and found another pile of cards. Nothing interesting except for a torn piece of napkin smeared with lipstick and part of a logo with a green N. There was an expired license with Whiskey’s old address in Cobble Hill, a few cards from merchants on Court Street—two restaurants, a hairstylist, a laundromat, and a bookstore. I made a list of all the information and tried to remember where I’d seen the green N. But I decided that since Whiskey hadn’t been the McDuffys’ tenant for all that long, we needed to visit her old haunts. I didn’t hold out hope for Brandy and her group coming up with anything—the surveillance exercise was more for Brandy’s sake than for mine—but Cookie could help me with a neighborhood canvass. I messaged her my request. I hated to spoil her date with Clancy, but he seemed like a guy who’d go with the flow, just like Denny would. If only he were here.

Time to call Detective First Grade Jane Templeton. With my stomach churning, I punched in her number and left a message, then shot Lorraine a text telling her what we’d found and warning her to expect visitors with badges.

* * *

While Trisha Liam waited for me by the conference room’s glass enclosure, her face lit by the sun sinking into the East River, I walked over to where Jane stood talking to the CSU super, who, glancing my way and rolling her eyes, smiled in my direction.

Everything in the room looked the same with one exception—the location of Whiskey’s bag. When Trisha Liam and I first noticed it, I was sure it had been lying on the table. Now it sat upright on a chair.

“Who moved that bag?” I asked, holding out my iPhone so they could see the picture I’d snapped of the purse lying face down on the table.

Trisha Liam shook her head.

The super shrugged. “My team hasn’t started.”

My heart did its elevator thing. Earlier the lawyer told me one of her staff had checked the building and presumably this room looking for Whiskey before I’d arrived. They’d reported no sightings of the office manager and must not have noticed the room’s disarray. We hadn’t moved off the floor since discovering Whiskey’s bag, and now it seemed someone had been inside the conference room under our noses and rearranged things. I made a mental note to question the staff again, especially the third-floor occupant, Finn Trueblood.

“That’s what happens when you don’t secure the area,” the detective said, crossing her arms and staring at me. “Work goes on, and office personnel move about. Maybe someone walked through here while you were on the phone and knocked it off the table. Besides, as far as we’re concerned, you’re the contaminant in this scene.”

I held my tongue and frowned up at her. She was wearing her usual dark pantsuit and white cotton blouse, the outfit hugging her curves like the paint on a NASCAR racer.

Standing as close to me as she could get, she said, “Why did you take so long to report a missing person?”

Stretching the truth somewhat, I reminded her that Whiskey had been missing only a few hours, and that some of her co-workers shrugged off her absence as a misunderstanding, suggesting that perhaps her boss had forgotten she’d asked for the day off. They were certain she’d be at work tomorrow. “It wasn’t until we discovered her emptied purse and the overturned chair in the third-floor conference room that we became concerned.”

Jane arranged her lips in a lopsided smirk. “That, and Denny wasn’t around to straighten you out. But don’t worry, as soon as he heard about the missing woman, he called.” She smiled.

I swallowed.

She continued. “Matter of fact, I talked to him long before you contacted me.”

The pounding in my head got louder. How did Denny know about Whiskey? Robert, of course. So. Denny couldn’t call or text me because he was roughing it, but he could keep in touch with his father. Or had he heard about Whiskey from that reporter with the voluptuous set, Zizi Carmalucci?

My hands began to sweat. “You’re lying. He’s somewhere in the Maine woods with his buddies, unreachable.”

Gloating like a pig in a blonde wig, she showed me the list of her recent calls. Sure enough, his number was near the top. “What he sees in you, I’ll never know. I should arrest you for obstructing.”

“Go ahead, but I’ll laugh you out of court,” Trisha Liam said. Stretching up and straightening her slacks, she wagged a finger close to Jane Templeton’s chin. “Fina Fitzgibbons is investigating my office manager’s disappearance. She’s a damn good professional with an impeccable track record, which is why I hired her instead of calling you. So I suggest you remember where you are—in a law office—and from time to time, we’ve been known to be litigious. What’s more, I’m not afraid to call your chief and ream your reputation up one side of his mind and down the other.”

Jane’s eyes shifted.

“And another thing,” I said. “Remember who’s missing—a single mom who’s never done anyone any harm. Instead of throwing darts at each other, we need to think of Whiskey Parnell and her child and what they’re going through.”

Jane’s face crimsoned.

But Trisha Liam wasn’t finished. “The way I see it, Fina could use your manpower, and you could use her brains. So start working together and do it fast because I need my office manager.”

I smiled and Jane shrugged, all six feet two of her glaring down at me like a giant statue about to topple. While Trisha Liam’s remarks didn’t seem to faze her too much, her unblinking orbs now softened.

Finally she spoke. “All right, take it from the top and spare me the crap.”

So I did. Snapping the wrist of my latex glove lest she accuse me of traipsing through the evidence, I told her about interviewing everyone at Liam, Trueblood & Wolsey and going through the contents of Whiskey’s desk, hesitating a beat when Jane opened her mouth to speak. Instead, she glanced at Trisha Liam and quickly flattened her lips, doubtless biting back one of her raw remarks.