The Brooklyn Drop (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 4) Read online

  We were silent, while thoughts swam in my head like fireflies on a June evening. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling, only that my stomach was churning and my armpits were sweating. Okay, I felt like some invisible giant had just scooped out my heart. Neither of us, it seemed, knew where to begin.

  Barely looking at me, Lorraine held out a book. “Do you recognize it?”

  I nodded. It was Liese Goncourt’s copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

  “I found it by Phyllida’s bedside, close to a yellow rose lying beside it on the table, withering now, like Phyllida.”

  “And like the book and flower Abe Goncourt brought to his mother. Is the patient still Phyllida?” I asked, for want of something better to say. Why I asked, I don’t know, except I thought the body that lay on the hospital bed rhythmically taking in air, a spot of color on her cheeks, wasn’t really Phyllida.

  Lorraine did look at me then. Long and hard.

  “And how does Liese Goncourt have the nerve to tell the guard she was part of Phyllida’s family?” I asked.

  “She never considered Phyllida part of her family. She used to call her ‘that woman.’ But that’s beside the point: I thought they weren’t supposed to let anyone into Phyllida’s room.”

  I bit my lip. “Those were the orders, according to Jane, but I can see where the guard might have been confused.”

  Lorraine pulled back a strand of hair and canted her head to one side. “Not confused, that’s the wrong word. No, I don’t think that was it. Liese Goncourt can be charming when she wants to be, and after all, if Kat had been in the room earlier, and Liese told him she was family, I can see how he’d make an exception.”

  Words weren’t coming easily for either of us. Matter of fact, there were grand canyons in our conversation, gullies that stuck in my craw like rocks. The picture of Denny standing on the stoop, watching me leave, seared my head followed by the flash of sun on Dad’s Ray-Bans as he left. Was I too much like my father? Incapable of love. I thought of what Mom would say to Lorraine. “You know, Denny and I—”

  She held up a palm. “Enough said for now. The pain is too raw.” She looked at me, folding her hands and trying to smile. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I don’t mean about you and Denny, I mean about Phyllida. She has a living will. She told me over and over—we have lots of discussions about death at our age, you know, had them even when we were your age—she’s told me over and over she never wanted to be hooked up to a machine. ‘Do not resuscitate,’ she said it many times. ‘Promise me you won’t.’ And of course I did, because I feel the same. I can see her now, both of us sitting in some café or in a museum, her eyes boring into mine, waiting while I vowed not to. What would happen if she did recover but part of her, a large part of her, was diminished? How would Kat cope?”

  I waited while tears ran down her cheeks. I should have held her, but I’m so devoid of compassion. I smoothed my coat while the words got stuck and Lorraine gave in to her grief.

  In a while, she dried her eyes. “She prayed for a sudden death, you know. So do I. Quicker. Cleaner.”

  “Hard on the ones you leave behind,” I said.

  She looked at me, and a weird shadow crossed her face. I can’t explain it, but I felt so all alone, even though she was sitting beside me, as supportive as she could be. “Whatever happens, we’ll still work together, won’t we?”

  She smiled then and hugged me. “Try to stop me.”

  And suddenly the pieces fell together, and I knew what we had to do. I told Lorraine that Cookie had seen someone looking like Garth unlocking a massage parlor in Brooklyn, a place we’d been hired to watch, and I told her what the cops suspected, that the parlor was connected to wiseguys.

  “Trafficking?”

  I nodded. “And Liese Goncourt is mixed up in all of it, I know she is. I’ll bet that’s how she makes her money.”

  Lorraine said nothing for a while. I could tell she was mulling over the truth of my words. “I think Liese Goncourt is capable of many things. Of hatred. Of bending the rules to suit her needs. She is self-involved, although she can be so charming at times. But I find it hard to believe she is involved in human trafficking.”

  She was silent for a time. I knew she didn’t agree with me about the Goncourt woman, but her disagreement was so gentle, I accepted it.

  In a few moments, Lorraine stared at me. “Mark me, that woman will try to get Kat, I know she will.”

  “And the motive isn’t her strong love of family.”

  “Her possessiveness, perhaps,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “She wants the money that comes with guardianship.”

  “She seems like she has plenty of money. Always has had that aura about her.”

  “So maybe she wants Kat for other things,” I said.

  And to my surprise, Lorraine knew what I meant. “Her own granddaughter? That’s an ugly accusation.”

  My cheeks burned at the rebuke, but I wasn’t going to back down. Denny would have trusted my hunch, and remembering what had happened between him and me, the unbridgeable gap, my eyes burned. “Worse than being a murderer?”

  “Perhaps Garth has a part-time janitorial job.”

  My eyes stared out the window, taking in the moonless sky. “There’s something sinister about that woman, beyond being capable of murder.”

  “One step at a time,” she said. “We’ll need NYPD resources.”

  “Cookie needs to spend more time watching La Belle Hélène.”

  “And we need to stop Liese from demanding guardianship. I’ll call Trisha Liam.”

  An Empty Room

  It was so late it was early when we left the hospital, so late, in fact, I did something stupid after I dropped Lorraine off and forgot where I lived. In a sleep-deprived fog, I started on my usual trek from Carroll Gardens to Vinegar Hill, even parking in front of the house Denny and I shared, or used to share. I opened the car door and smelled the sweet sour of the neighborhood, looked up at the light in the bedroom window, thinking Denny was waiting up for me, before I realized my mistake. I no longer lived with him, I told myself over and over while my heart stopped and I waited for it to resume beating.

  Back to Lucy’s and my original life without him. I sped away while an invisible hand scooped out my innards. My tears flowed all the way to the Heights. I was a sodden mess. At that hour, I made good time, but parking was another matter, and I had to circle around before I found a place on Joralemon a few blocks away from Lucy’s just big enough to squeeze into as long as my left front tire sat on the curb.

  I got out and locked the car, feeling empty and holding my head when a car with some kids passed by. One smart guy rolled down his window and told me to cheer up, spring was just around the corner. I was too tired to give him the finger.

  As I trudged up the hill, a stray cat, its mouth full of rodent, ran past me. Trying to avoid it, I almost tripped, careening toward the street and nearly colliding with a passing car that appeared out of nowhere. It was too dark to see whether the driver was a man or a woman, but I thought I’d seen it earlier in the evening. I ran in back of a tree, my head like a pounding drum, watching the vehicle slow down for a bit. After creeping to the corner, maybe searching for me, the driver gunned the gas, disappearing too fast for me to get his plates. But I did catch something of them, enough to realize they were strange tags. Only numbers, no letters. Dealer plates, Denny had called them. I was sure of it, it was the same car I’d seen earlier that evening in Vinegar Hill. Were the Goncourts trying to scare me? I’ll admit it, I felt alone and spooked. I don’t carry, and although muggings were rare in this neighborhood, a fear spiked up my spine, electrifying my curls, and I ran all the way home.

  Mr. Baggins met me at the door, his tongue going in and out, his head cocked. I picked him up and carried him up the stairs, sweating and sobbing into his fur while he purred and licked my hand. At l
east someone loved me. I got all the way upstairs to my room before I realized I hadn’t eaten and, worse, neither had poor Mr. B.

  “Come on, guy, let’s go down and see if there’s anything in the refrigerator.”

  By that time Mr. B. was taking up most of the bed and disinclined to move, so I went down to the kitchen by myself, in search of something quick to fix. The stairs creaked in places I hadn’t remembered, so I was almost trembling when I got to the kitchen and flipped the switch, which lit up for all of two seconds before I was in total darkness. Must have been a bulb, and of course, I had nothing, no flashlight, no candle.

  I stayed put until I got my bearings, the surrounding blackness turning to dark gray. I almost fell over a chair, but made it to the refrigerator, gleaming white on the far wall, and opened the door, thinking the room would light up, but the refrigerator was dark. No motor sound.

  I realized I’d tripped some kind of major switch or whatever you call them. This had happened before but never at three in the morning, and I’m not the handiest person in the world. Somehow I made it back upstairs and into my room, searched my bag for a flashlight and hustled back to the basement, where I found the circuit breaker box, flipped the switch and walked up and around to Lucy’s, checking the computers. I told myself to get an electrician in the next day to check the wiring before remembering that I’d had the building rewired two years ago. For the second time that evening, my curls kinked, wondering if there was an intruder inside.

  Holding my flashlight as if it were a weapon, I walked from room to room, turning on the lights, checking to make sure all the windows were locked, looking behind the furniture to make sure I was alone. After fixing Mr. Baggins a bowl of dry food and climbing the stairs to my room, I was a sweating mess, no longer hungry but exhausted and gulping for air.

  I’d just closed the door when I heard a noise on the street, something heavy being thrown, running, shouting. “And if I ever see you here again …” I heard. I froze. Whose voice? I knew it wasn’t Denny’s, but I couldn’t place it. I hurried to the window and looked out. Two shapes were arguing several yards from my stoop. Too dark to see them clearly, they were little more than dark shadows, but they were locked together, their shoulders in an angry embrace until one pulled apart and hit the other, who managed to break free and start running. When he passed the corner streetlight, the jacket he wore gave him away. It was Garth Goncourt, at least it looked exactly like him. Why was he in this neighborhood and who had chased him away?

  I don’t know how long I sat on the sill, looking out at the frozen quiet below, too tired to sleep, too disturbed to move until finally I shivered with the cold and could no longer keep my head from bobbing back and forth. I stumbled into bed, shrugging off one shoe, then the other, and rolled onto the mattress, clothes, jacket, hat and all. I fell into a fitful sleep for a few hours, at one point throwing my arm over the mass that lay next to me, snuggling closer, trying to gather in Denny’s warmth until I realized it wasn’t Denny at all but the ever faithful, nonjudgmental Mr. Baggins. But truth be told, I wondered why exactly I lay there, bereft. What was the reason I’d left him? Something to do with … my father, that was it. I sat up and stared at the street below, unable to sleep.

  A Hoax

  Next morning, I picked up Lorraine. We barely spoke on the way to Victorian Flatbush, but I figured she was worried about Phyllida, so I let her have her thoughts. As we parked, I noticed an unmarked car squeezing into the nearest space. Jane got out and slammed the door, and a few minutes later, she and Willoughby met us in front of the Goncourt home. She told me she’d brought stills of Liese Goncourt entering Phyllida’s hospital room ten minutes before the nurse discovered the syringe filled with potassium chloride. “Depending on what she says, we’ll take her in for questioning, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “But?” I asked.

  “We go easy.”

  I said nothing.

  Lorraine greeted Ameline, who answered the bell, and asked after Rooster.

  Ameline smiled. “Saucy as ever. Eating his fruit and flying from room to room.”

  She told the maid we had some questions for Liese. Ameline stood on the stoop, gazing at Jane and Willoughby, so Lorraine introduced them as NYPD detectives.

  The maid stepped back. “Oh no. Like the old days.”

  “Not at all, Ameline,” Lorraine said. “We need some questions answered, nothing more.”

  We sat in the music room, watching Rooster fly to the baby grand and walk on the keys before returning to his java tree.

  In a few minutes, Ameline came in with cups and saucers, a steaming silver carafe, and slices of walnut cake. As she poured, Willoughby helped himself to a slice. Apologizing, she said it was early for Liese and we’d have to wait a bit more. Then she departed, leaving the tray on the table. Willoughby grabbed more cake.

  “Pig,” Jane muttered.

  “Maybe with food, but I’m not like her.” Willoughby jerked his thumb my way. “She takes men and when she’s done with them, leaves them high and dry and hurting.”

  I concentrated on breathing.

  To her credit, Jane reminded her partner it was none of his business. She turned to me. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do the talking.”

  “When have I ever tried to dominate?” I asked, glad for the diversion.

  “This has to be handled delicately. Your bluntness could ruin it.”

  “What’s to ruin?” I asked. “The woman needs to be taken in for questioning.”

  Rooster squawked and flapped his wings and circled above our heads, making such a racket that Ameline came back into the room, scolding the bird, sticking out her arm and telling him she was waiting. He obeyed, and she put him back in his cage, all the while talking to him. “Close the door?”

  “No door,” Rooster said.

  “Then behave.”

  Just then I heard footsteps, Liese Goncourt’s arrival. Today she wore a long black jersey. No jewelry except for the diamond ring. Willoughby stopped mid chew and rose as she entered and introduced herself to the two detectives.

  “Why are you here?”

  “There was an attempt on Phyllida Oxley’s life last night,” Jane said, “and you were seen in her room shortly before she began coding. A nurse found an insulin syringe filled with potassium chloride inserted into her IV.”

  Liese Goncourt’s expression gave nothing away, no surprise, no compassion, no anger. “You are mistaken. I was at home last night.”

  Jane showed her the stills made from the security video. Each photo bore the date and time stamped at the bottom along with the location. One picture showed the back of a woman looking very much like Liese Goncourt speaking to someone behind the front desk. Another showed her in the elevator, holding a book and flowers in her hand, her face hidden by the large brim of a hat. The last several photos showed what appeared to be the same woman in Phyllida’s hospital room. Those were in color and showed a woman with red hair wearing a long black coat standing by Phyllida’s bedside, again, her back to the camera. In one shot, she was seen placing a book on the patient’s bedside table.

  Her voice was practiced. “This is a hoax. I can prove I never left this house. Ameline, get in here!”

  The maid appeared.

  “I should insist on my lawyer being present, but I have nothing to hide.” She turned to Ameline. “Tell these people where I was last night.”

  “Home, of course. You went to five o’clock mass and were back by six fifteen. I served you dinner, a pork chop and mashed potatoes along with a salad. You drank some wine, read a book until ten, and retired.”

  Liese Goncourt passed the photos to her maid. “Who is this woman?”

  She took her time shuffling through the pile, shaking her head while she examined each one, bending to the window. “Pity there are no photographs showing the woman’s face, but this is not Liese Goncourt.” She held a photo closer. “That looks like your old coat, the one we gave to Goodwill
some time ago.”

  Liese Goncourt wrested the picture from Ameline’s hand, took it to the light and studied it. “Yes, of course, it’s my old coat, I can tell. There are not two like it. I bought it in Paris—when were we there, Ameline, five or six years ago?—not couturier quality, in case you’re wondering, but bespoke, from Le Bon Marché. These pictures are not clear enough to show it, but the sleeves and hem were beginning to fray, so I gave it away. When did Goodwill take it, do you remember?”

  Ameline shook her head.

  “Look around if you don’t believe me. Look in all the closets. I’m not stupid, I know you should have a warrant, but I have nothing to hide.”

  But Jane wasn’t listening, she was talking into her cell. When she finished, she announced the arrival of Officer Deems, the patrolman who’d guarded Phyllida’s room yesterday. He’d be able to identify the visitor.

  I looked at Liese Goncourt, who stood tall, calm, not an ounce of fear.

  The front doorbell rang. I held my breath. In a few minutes, Ameline returned, followed by the patrolman I’d seen last night outside Phyllida’s room.

  Jane pointed to Liese Goncourt. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  The officer gazed at her a good two minutes before he shook his head.

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded. “Not the same woman I saw enter the patient’s room last night. Similar build, height, hair, but not the same woman. I’m sure of it. She stopped to talk to me, you see. When I said she couldn’t go in, she said she was family. She knew about the girl.”

  “The girl?”

  “She said, ‘If they let the girl in to see Phyllida, why wouldn’t they let me in?’”

  “So I told her to be brief.”