He cocked his head and sort of smirked. “Seven. Don’t be late. Mom’s doing a roast with all the sides.”
I blew him a kiss and braced myself.
Detective Jane Templeton
Detective Jane Templeton was a brick wall puffing out air and blocking my way. She slid her phone into her breast pocket, stood smirking in four inch heels and wearing an Armani pantsuit that accentuated her curves, hugging them smooth and tight. She might have put on a few pounds since the last time I saw her, but if so, the weight had gone right to her boobs. I could see the faint bulge of standard issue underneath her jacket. A white blouse with pleated collar lent her a few soft lines, but to me she looked like one of Cinderella’s mean sisters in spikes.
“You again? What did you mess with this time?”
My stomach took a dive, but I swallowed, vowing not to get sucked into this woman’s head problem, whatever it was.
“Who’s been assigned to the case, do you know, because I need to talk …” My words were swallowed by the grin on her face showing a set of teeth that reminded me of jail bars, so I changed tack. “I’ll be glad to give you my statement now and any other help you’d like.”
“If what you mean by help is mucking up my crime scene, I’ll do without it.”
I grabbed a set of latex gloves from my pocket. Snapping the fingers, I felt the blood boil my cheeks and had to talk to myself real fast. It’s not like me to hold back, but I told myself to cool it for Denny’s sake, not that I wouldn’t want to yank her down by that dirty blonde mop of hers. I pictured her, a giant beauty queen slammed to the ground by me, a five-foot-four-and-a-fraction curly redhead, one sandal-clad foot resting on the top of her torso in triumph while she begged for mercy as her crew looked on. Oh, and don’t think I couldn’t either, even though she’s six feet two or more and weighs close to, what, two hundred pounds of solid muscle.
“What’s it going to take to get you out of my way—arresting you for tampering with the evidence? You destroyed the scene.”
“Not really. I was minding my own business when I saw this bundle on the sidewalk practically in front of my brownstone. In case you hadn’t noticed, I run a business right here. It’s in a high traffic area, and I can’t have clients stepping around foreign objects. So when I saw this … blob, I needed to determine what it was—garbage, laundry, or a person—and if the latter, was she bleeding, breathing, and could I identify her. Called 911 as soon as I knew she was stone cold, then texted Denny.” That stopped her.
“You have a point. Tell me what you touched this time.”
“First, I wore gloves, and second, I snapped some photos before I touched anything.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Let me see what you got,” she said, grabbing my phone and swiping through the pics. “Send them to me.”
She gave me her number and I did. By now her videographer had taped the scene, and the crew, who had been waiting for the high sign from Jane, got to work lifting prints and gathering trace.
I suggested we go inside where we’d have some privacy. While she went to grab her partner, I fetched Cookie, warning her to let me do most of the talking.
When we’d walked down the few steps into Lucy’s, I went over to Minnie, my office manager. I apologized for the commotion, telling her we wouldn’t take long and asking her to please speak up if we made too much noise. I gave her the eye and motioned to Jane, saying, “Things can get loud.”
And before we get too far into this story, there’s something about me you should know: sometimes I feel like I’m pulled in different directions. You know, stressed. Four years ago when the recession hit and my cleaning business took a dive, I got a job at Brown’s Detective Agency, a large firm with offices in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. I’d do the grunt work wherever they needed me, sometimes in their Manhattan office, other times in Fort Lee or in Stamford. I specialized in finding skips. When the commuting got too much for me last year, I got my own PI licenses in all three states, figuring on using my snoop talents and striking out for myself. But truth to tell, I haven’t done much with them. Denny encourages me—even Cookie does—telling me I’m a natural, but there’s something in me that’s reluctant to go solo. Just my luck I’d get a lot of men looking to nab their cheating wives and that’s not what I want to do. And by the way, I’ll never give up my cleaning service now that’s it’s bounced back a little and so many hard-working women depend on me for their income.
Out of nowhere Mr. Baggins, Mom’s cat and Lucy’s mascot appeared. He had a way of popping up out of nowhere, like he did the first time one spring day nine years ago, sitting in the garden like Alice’s cheshire cat and smiling up at Mom. Now he was smiling up at me, rubbing against my jeans and Cookie’s legs and just about every other surface he could manage. Except, of course, for Jane and her partner. He blinked up at the detectives, his neck stretched, his cheeks puffed out like he was part frog, his grey plush body on red alert. Then he slinked back over to me, his stomach almost touching the ground, stealing a backward glance at Jane as he ran and doing his Hold Me purr. I scooped him up and started to walk toward the front, but he jumped out of my arms and made a beeline for my chair.
The four of us gathered around the receptionist’s desk, me with a window view so I could watch the crime scene, and Jane in the captain’s chair. I saw her glance up at my licenses hanging on the opposite wall. When she did a double take, I expected a snide remark, and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.
“So you’re a cleaner or an investigator?” She flashed her teeth at me again.
“Both,” I said, surprising myself. “But they’re similar, wouldn’t you say?”
The room was stuffy so I turned on a couple of fans. Cookie and I wrote out our statements and I began answering their questions. While I was talking, Cookie nodded or looked down at her fingernails. Mr. Baggins made himself comfortable on three-quarters of my chair, surreptitiously taking up more and more of the surface and kneading his thick paws into my back. Somewhere, a siren wailed.
As if they hadn’t read one word of our statements, they asked me about the position of the corpse, the approximate time we’d found it, and what I’d moved or touched. Jane referred to the photos I’d sent her of the body in situ as I was talking. Her partner asked a bunch of questions, most of them repetitive or irrelevant, having me describe again the where, when, and how, the amount of foot traffic at the time we discovered the dead woman, whether we’d seen anyone acting suspicious.
“I called 9-1-1 as soon as I could.” I emphasized that I’d used latex gloves and mentioned the sapphire ring, making sure Jane’s partner wrote it into his notes, but forgot to mention I thought I’d recognized the victim. Cookie confirmed she’d seen the ring, too, and to her credit, answered all questions thrown at her with a yes or a no. They asked more unnecessary questions, Jane looking bored toward the end and thrumming her fingers on the arm of her chair until I asked if she’d found any ID on the corpse, reminding her that we hadn’t.
She tossed her wavy mane, saying she’d already alerted Missing Persons and they were on it. “These cases in the Heights, something’ll turn up quick.”
Picking up the drift, I said, “Funny. I haven’t seen the press around, have you?” My radar was alive to any giveaways that might fly across Jane’s face and I thought I saw a momentary uplift hover for a brief second around one corner of her mouth.
“As I say, I expect to hear something any minute,” she said. “A body found on Henry Street on a slow news day? They’ll be on it, trust me. And the staff at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle seem to know stuff before it happens.”
By this time I was on one small edge of the seat and Mr. Baggins was sprawled. Truth to tell, Jane didn’t look worried at all. Matter of fact, she looked a little too smug to me. A minute ago, I’d seen one of the techs wearing orange goggles and shining his magic lantern around the victim’s neck.
“I snapped some photos of the face and right
hand, but I suppose you wouldn’t want smart phone stuff since you’ve got the latest equipment and probably were able to lift fingerprints.”
She tried to stifle a smile, folding in her lower lip. “Got lucky.”
Which meant they’d have a name of the perp in a couple of days or less if he was in AFIS. Not soon enough, though. Considering she’d be assigned to investigate a few other major crimes, to say nothing of the pressure on her to gather forensics, I thought I’d have a slight advantage in the time department.
“Who doesn’t wear gloves these days?” I asked, making small talk now that she’d simmered down and hoping she’d spill more info if I could just keep her talking. “It’s clear the woman was murdered.”
Jane’s smile was brief. “You know better than to say that, but obviously we’re treating it as a homicide,” she said, talking to me as if I was in grade school. She flicked her eyes up at my licenses again and looked at me like I’d fallen off the dark side of the moon.
With that, Mr. Baggins stretched, sashayed from the back of my seat, plunked his considerable rear end onto my lap, and stared at Jane. He does this thing when he’s assessing a new situation—opens his mouth up a slit and flicks the tip of his tongue out a couple of times while his eyes bore into you, and that’s what he was doing to Jane.
She couldn’t help herself. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
Mr. B flicked his tongue again but otherwise was cat still and I could see his whiskers stirring in the fan’s breeze.
“I wouldn’t talk to that cat if I were you,” Jane’s partner said, brushing crumbs off his tie. “Liable to take a bite out of your thigh.”
“Who, Mr. Baggins?” Cookie asked. “He wouldn’t hurt a mouse, would you, Mr. B?”
His squat little body made a graceful arc into Cookie’s lap.
“He knows you,” Jane said to Cookie.
“We go way back, don’t we, boy,” Cookie said and nuzzled him.
“Should have the coroner’s report tomorrow morning,” Jane said.
I made a note to call my sources at the morgue.
“But one more thing,” Jane said, reverting to type. “This is my investigation. You might be a PI trying to make a name for yourself, but if I think for one moment you’ve been messing about and withholding information—”
“Not my style,” I assured her, getting up to go, my nostrils sucking in air. Keep calm, I told myself, motioning to Cookie. Mr. B hissed at Jane, jumped from Cookie’s lap, and disappeared under the front desk.
As Jane and her partner stood up to leave, she got in a parting shot, and it was a good one. “Coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
I froze. “Meaning?”
“The spot must be a draw for dead bodies. It’s like the sidewalk was just sitting there, waiting for another one.”
“I don’t do well with innuendoes. Spell it out.”
But she walked past me flicking her blonde locks as if my question was a breath of air pushing her out the door.
How did she know about my mother? Denny, of course. I leaned against the grill for a few minutes, looking up at the hot blue sky before shutting my eyes and sinking into myself. Door to shell now closing, get out fast or step inside.
Some kind of major force was drawing me into this. Maybe the image of the dead woman’s face shining bright in my memory. In my head I flashed to the corpse that used to be my mother, her body lying in almost the exact spot, now outlined in fresh paint, the old lines so faint they’d almost disappeared, but bright in my mind. I pinched my arm. Focus, I told myself, Jane’s snotty remark sealing it. I had to get involved. I had to find the truth for the sake of the dead and the living. Who was I kidding? For the sake of my sanity.
Jane returned. “Might as well send all the photos you’ve got,” she said.
I shot her another text attaching the pics of the dead woman’s face and hand, then called my friend at the Eagle.
“Thanks, Fina, but someone else phoned it in a second ago. Sending someone over.”
“Who called you?”
“Can’t divulge sources, you know that, even the tall blonde ones.”
Pushed by an Unseen Force
Back inside Lucy’s, I blinked at the quiet. It was business as usual, a world untouched by death. Mr. Baggins was in the middle of the floor staring up at me, an accusatory air about his muzzle. He gives great guilt. It occurred to me I hadn’t given him his treat, so I reached into a drawer of the spare desk—what are spare desks for, anyway—and fetched him a couple of Feline Greenies. He rubbed my hand, gobbled them up, and disappeared.
Minnie was about to leave for the day, so I filled her in on what the meeting was about, a dead woman on the sidewalk. Hard to believe that Minnie had no clue about the turmoil outside, but hot damn, the woman was focused.
After she took in my news, I asked her if she’d noticed anything unusual that morning or early afternoon. Shaking her black curls, she said she’d been the only one in the office all day. Lucy’s isn’t a small business, it’s a tiny business, and Minnie is the only full-timer.
She was wearing her orange print dress and heels, one of her only two outfits. In Brooklyn we build small closets.
“Good job I brought my lunch with me,” she said. “Course I get hungry around ten when I bag it, knowing food is inches away and all, I wish I didn’t obsess so on food but I do, giving myself a bite early on and vowing to wait for an hour and without realizing I gobble the whole thing down two minutes later. Course you don’t have that problem. Look at you, a hundred if you’re a pound!”
She took off her half-glasses, patted her stomach, and continued. “As it turns out, lucky I did, because right after I’d swallowed the last bite, the owner of Caputo’s Bakery called and for once praised our cleaning last night. He invited me over for cannoli, but I told him I was the only one here. So guess what, he had one of his guys deliver, two cannoli and a steaming latté!”
“He was the only visitor?”
She nodded.
“So you answered the door and opened the grill for him?”
“Course.”
“Do you remember the time?”
Minnie is nothing if not exact. “I glanced at the clock before I unlocked the grill. Eleven fifteen.”
“And you saw nothing else? How did the street seem?”
She cocked her head. “Only a flash, you understand. I saw the usual double parkers.”
It’s hard to find parking in the Heights. Cars are cheek to jowl with rarely room for delivery trucks, so they tend to double park or hug the No Parking Here To Corner zone. I asked her to describe the trucks she saw when she answered the door.
She canted her eyes to the side and thought for a sec, shaking her head. “It was so quick. I smiled at the delivery guy, think I glanced beyond the grill, you know, taking in the trees and that creepy guy who always sits on the stoop across the street.”
“You mean the owner?” I asked.
She shrugged and thought a bit. “I saw a maroon van illegally parked on the corner. Maybe it was maroon. For sure it was old and beat up. Yes, and I saw the mail truck or something in back of the van. That’s all I remember seeing, that and green leaves and blue sky. A few clouds. No, come to think of it, only the blue sky, no clouds, a wild cornflower blue. The kind that shouts spring.”
Spare me, I thought but smiled. I brought out my little black book, and jotted down what she’d said about time of day and the color of the van. “Thanks, Minnie. And this was?”
“Eleven fifteen, like I said.” She gave me a curious look.
I just wanted to be sure. “If you think of anything else, let me know.”
She beamed. While she cleaned up her desk and put on her coat, she told me about getting another call from someone who owned three buildings on John Street. He wanted estimates for cleaning twice a week.
“Here’s his name and number.” She handed me a pad with the information.
I thanked her for all her help, told her to c
all me if she remembered anything else, and was about to say goodbye when I remembered something.
“Minnie, this is a terrible imposition I know, but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind taking a look at some pictures of the dead woman’s face. They’re not pretty, and I wouldn’t ask, except we’re trying to find out who she is, and I wondered if you’d recognize her.”
“No problem at all. I understand.”
Gritting her teeth, she looked at the photos, but I could have kicked myself again for showing them to her. On top of it, I was probably making her late for her bus by asking her to look at some pretty awful pictures of someone she had only a slim chance of knowing. Minnie was a business associate, not really a friend. We probably wouldn’t say two words to each other if we hadn’t worked together. I shouldn’t have asked her.
She looked quickly at the photo and turned away.
“No. No, I can’t say as I’ve ever seen her. I don’t know anyone in the neighborhood, I just work here. I’d recognize the tenants in the building if you pointed them out to me and I’d say to myself, oh, yes, I’ve seen her at the mailbox, or I’ve seen her running up the stoop. And of course I know the super, but no, not this woman. Sorry.”
“I’m the one who owes you an apology, Minnie. That was a lousy thing for me to do. But I’m desperate.”
“Why don’t you get your friend Cookie to draw a likeness?”
“Great idea.” I hugged her. As an afterthought, I begged her to call me if she needed a filler for this evening, hoping that someone would call in sick so I’d have to work instead of sitting all evening with Denny’s folks.
After Minnie left, I located the super who was next door fixing the furnace, showed him my pictures and asked him if he recognized the woman, asked him if he’d seen anything fishy outside this morning, but he hadn’t. Little wonder, no one had, really. Hiding a body in broad daylight didn’t seem to be such a bad idea.
Too Quiet In Brooklyn (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 1) Page 2
