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

by Susan Russo Anderson

  “Wish I could go with you tomorrow, but I can’t ask for the day. There’s a demonstration near the bridge. They need all hands.”

  And they’d probably be in riot gear. Another topic for us to disagree on. For months we’d avoided discussing police brutality, how I thought the cops were being too rough, especially with black men, and Denny, of course, stood up for all his colleagues in blue, no matter where in the world.

  “I want you to know how much I’ve thought about what’s happening in this country with how the press sees law enforcement,” he said. “And I’ve come to realize it’s not all black and white, but you’re too quick to defend the criminal.”

  “And you’re too quick to call them criminals. We are all innocent.”

  “Some of us more than others?” he asked.

  “All innocent under the law until proven guilty. The manhandling by the police, I see it on TV—”

  “You’re not there. You see what they want you to see. No one knows, not for sure. And those of us who don’t have a chance? The police who’ve been gunned down?”

  I could feel my blood coming to the boil, so I breathed in, trying hard to listen to his words, but they jumbled in my head, forming a cloud. I was about to get out of the Jeep, but he held onto my shoulder. “Did you hear what I just said, Fina? We’ve got to be able to disagree. We’ve got to discuss, not walk away. Otherwise, how can I learn from you? I’m trying to hear the truth from you. And you’ve got to respect my truth.”

  I fought for air and sat while my breathing slowed.

  “We can’t agree on everything,” he said. “Truth is somewhere—”

  “Don’t say ‘in the middle.’”

  “I wasn’t going to. Truth is the result of a long, soul-searching, honest dialectic.”

  “Now you sound like your mother.” I crossed my arms.

  “And what’s so wrong with that?” He smiled.

  My turn to smile. I bent over and this time gave him a proper kiss on the cheek. “See you Monday morning for breakfast?”

  A Missing Link

  “I couldn’t sleep last night,” Lorraine said when she called and woke me the next morning at six.

  As she talked, I stared out the window, looking for the icicle before I remembered I wasn’t in my own bed. I mean, not in the bed Denny and I had shared so successfully. Or had we? Frost bit into the windowpane and coated my heart. I realized as she spoke that Denny had inherited his inflections from his mother and remembered he and I had talked on our way to Bensonhurst and back and all the way to and from Princeton. I mean, really talking, not that we agreed on much. Except to disagree. A shrink told him to say “onions” if he couldn’t think of anything else. “You’re human; the words will come,” the guy had told him. Granted, the subjects we chose weren’t too pleasant, my father and Brahms and the protests, but in the end, we agreed to disagree, and to meet again. The talking was swell, but I had little hope it was a direct path back to where we’d been. More like a slow stroll.

  I picked up on what Lorraine was saying. “That poor child, wherever she is. First her parents die, then her grandmother, now she’s taken. We’ve got to find her. I kept thinking there was something we weren’t getting.”

  She could say that again.

  “So I tossed and turned. Robbie was disgusted because I was disturbing his sleep. Then it hit me.”

  She said she wanted to use the computer at Lucy’s because the network was faster. We agreed to meet for breakfast at Teresa’s before I met Jane so she could tell me more about her brainwave.

  Teresa’s was popping when we arrived, but I saw an empty table in the back. In addition to coffee, please, and quick, we ordered breakfast: toast and bacon for Lorraine, blueberry pancakes for me.

  I stared out the back window, trying to resuscitate my mojo, so we didn’t talk much until our food arrived and we were working on our second cup of coffee.

  “We haven’t gone back far enough,” Lorraine began, biting into a piece of toast.

  “Say again?”

  “Phyllida wasn’t the first victim,” she said. “I started thinking about the sudden death of Terris, and then a few years later, the unusual plane crash that took the lives of Henriette and Norris Oxley.”

  “So Liese Goncourt’s not behind the killing?” I asked.

  It took Lorraine a long time to answer. She looked down at her empty plate and fingered a few crumbs. “I didn’t say that, but something she said the day of our visit seemed strange. You know what I’m talking about?”

  I shook my head.

  “We were looking at a family album and I wondered why there were no pictures of her daughter.”

  “Now it’s coming back, something about she, the mother, missed Henriette so much she couldn’t bear looking at her photos and Garth removed them. But is that so strange? I remember my gran after my mother died—she was unconsolable, paced back and forth, cried almost every hour after Mom’s death. I’m not sure what took her life, her grief or the cancer.”

  “Each grief is different, I know that,” Lorraine said, “but Liese Goncourt’s affliction is something other than grief. She and I go way back. I’ve known her for many years; I knew her when Henriette was alive. I understand the death of a child is overwhelming, but Liese’s whole demeanor changed after Henriette’s death. It was as if she became another person. The other day, she made a point of saying she couldn’t believe her daughter was on the plane, remember? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but she became agitated, like someone unable to face reality.”

  “I remember now.” I took out my notes and, after flipping through the pages, found it, and read aloud:

  I cannot talk about her. Who would have thought? I cannot believe she was on the plane, too. She hated flying. Hated it.

  “Read it again.”

  I did.

  “It’s the ‘who would have thought’ part that strikes me as odd.”

  “You’re saying they, the Goncourts, planned the crash to get rid of Norris Oxley.”

  “He was the aviator, not Henriette. She hated flying, especially in Norris’s plane, Phyllida told me. I’m saying we should look into the crash.”

  I was silent for a moment. “If that’s true, Liese Goncourt killed her own daughter.”

  Lorraine’s hand flew to her heart. “I know. I must be wrong.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Who benefited from the Oxley deaths—first Terris, and after him, Norris?” Lorraine asked as we walked back to Lucy’s.

  “The Goncourts.”

  At the door, she said, “I need to do lots of digging, so I’ll be spending most of the day here.”

  “But this digging into something that happened ten years ago, how will it help us find Kat now?” I asked.

  “The more we understand the past, the more we comprehend the present.”

  I thought about that and asked her to keep me posted, then started telling her about our trip to Princeton yesterday, but she held up her hand. “Denny called me this morning and filled me in.”

  “Must have been early.”

  “He said he couldn’t come for breakfast like he usually does on Saturday. Funny how I can disturb Robbie by turning too often in the bed, but an early call from his son makes his face light up.”

  Jane and Fina

  I drove the short distance from Lucy’s to the 84th Precinct to meet with Jane. Her request. But my thoughts were on Denny and the Big Talk, which was what being with him yesterday was shaping up to be in my head. While it wasn’t exactly heaven between him and me, yesterday had been the start of something. I felt it, a sort of phoenix rising from the ashes. He and I might wind up dating other people, but I didn’t think so. We were talking, just like we had when we’d first met when yards of words melted into hours, days, weeks. On and on, far into the night we’d talk. Then something happened; for whatever reason, the stream of words we shared had dried up. I bought into the notion that couples didn’t need to talk, so wor
ds were abandoned. The drought began, and it became harder to talk about the things that mattered. The rift between us grew, becoming filled with unspoken words, which turned into resentment. But last night, words flowed again like a river full of stars, bright and sparkly. Others, words describing half-realized feelings and our differences, felt sludgy, like a riverbed. Words, words—could they mend our wounds like Lorraine claimed they could? I didn’t know, but after he’d let me off at Lucy’s townhouse last night, I’d had an uninterrupted sleep for the first time in a week. Not only that, I was looking forward to continuing the conversation.

  I locked my BMW and knocked on Jane’s office door. Trying to collect my thoughts, I stared at her, seeing through her, still pondering the nature of relationships, which I decided were nothing more than one long conversation. Say goodbye to a friend in mid sentence, see that friend ten years later, and take up the sentence as if it were there all along in the mouth, the continuation of a thread waiting to be spoken. Not for the first time, I wondered what had happened to dampen Mom’s dialogue with Dad.

  The light from Jane’s Gold Street window fell onto a cluttered desk filled with stacks of paper, books, a gun holster, empty food containers and coffee cups.

  “You secured the car last night?”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  “When will you hear from the lab?”

  No response. Maybe it was too early to expect sound bites from her?

  “Need coffee?”

  She shook her head. “Way too soon to hear.” She turned on her computer, her eyes avoiding mine. It had been a long night for both of us, and bags bloomed beneath her drooping lids.

  “Chances are good the coat and wig don’t belong to Liese Goncourt. Preliminary test results show negative for her DNA, which as you know, we already have.”

  “Go on,” I said, smiling. I had it all figured, but I wanted to hear more, trying to figure out what was making her so ornery, I mean, more than usual.

  “For starters, what would Liese Goncourt’s coat be doing in her daughter-in-law’s car? You told me they hated each other.”

  I continued to smile, saying nothing. Besides, I was going on two or three hours of sleep myself, and anyway what did I have to be so smug about? I didn’t have a clue where Kat was; my relationship with Denny, although on the mend, was still a shipwreck, but if there was anything I could glom onto, it was that I was the one feeding Jane information.

  “Want to know what I think?”

  She was too busy putting on her holster to reply.

  That didn’t stop me, and I’d had a long time to figure this out. As Denny and I talked our way back from Princeton, agreeing, disagreeing, arguing in low, thoughtful tones, part of my mind was figuring out the meaning of the coat and wig, bringing it to a boil. I woke up this morning knowing one true thing about the Goncourt Affair, as I was beginning to call it. “No matching DNA on the coat because you got the wrong DNA for Liese Goncourt. Whoever gave you her DNA sample knew she wasn’t dead, so he fed you with phony stuff. Garth isn’t dead, either.”

  She laughed.

  “Whoever killed Phyllida Oxley wore that wig and coat, dressing and acting like Liese Goncourt the night he stuck Phyllida’s IV line with a deadly load of potassium chloride. And that coat once belonged to Liese Goncourt.”

  I told her about my call with Kirsten, repeating almost word for word what she’d said over the phone. I covered meeting Rip, the tour of the house, seeing the sleeping Ameline, and the supposed whereabouts of the car.

  “But no Kat: she’s been missing eighteen hours, and the chief has my keister in a sling, said he expects more from a first grade than what I’ve been delivering,” Jane said.

  I swallowed, feeling like the schmuck I was for trying to hoard the glory.

  She asked again about the significance of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and I shrugged, telling her how Abe Goncourt had surprised his mother with the book he thought she’d been searching for, “that and a yellow rose.” I remembered his expression as Liese Goncourt tossed his gift aside, crushing the yellow rose he’d brought, how he’d sucked in his lower lip so that it disappeared, how his cheeks flushed, how a smile had lit Kirsten’s face, the wife who enjoyed her husband’s suffering, and how the book later turned up by Phyllida’s hospital bedside as she lay dying.

  “You’re into details, aren’t you?” Jane asked. “Just the wrong ones.”

  I opened my mouth to object, but she continued.

  “I’ve sent the book to the lab.”

  “Not the wrong details. The book means Phyllida’s killer had to have access to Liese Goncourt’s house.”

  “So now you think it was Abe Goncourt?”

  I shook my head. “My gut tells me he’s not a killer. My gut tells me he’s clueless when it comes to the conspiracy to kill all the Oxley heirs.”

  She flinched when I said that last part. But I went on, telling Jane the cloaked man had to be the same person whom the night nurse caught close to Phyllida’s room after visiting hours, the one who hit the patient, causing internal bleeding, the same person who destroyed the freight elevator’s camera, the same guy who disguised himself as Kirsten Goncourt and picked up Kat. “And the field of suspects is so narrow it’s no wider than a blade of grass. Unless, of course, the he is a she and Kirsten Goncourt is the one doing all the killing. Not impossible.”

  A sleep-deprived Jane Templeton, all the venom sucked out of her, didn’t agree, but neither did she disagree. Instead, she stared at her monitor.

  “Any updates on the whereabouts of Liese and her son Garth?”

  She shook her head in slow motion.

  “They’re alive. They’ll show up,” I said.

  “Dream on.”

  She was silent for a couple of minutes until she began making sense. “If you’ve got extrasensory perception, how come you can’t find Kat?”

  “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

  While Jane stared at her screen, I wrapped my head around the whereabouts of Liese and Garth. Live people didn’t just disappear, I knew that much. Someone, a neighbor, an acquaintance from way back, someone was bound to spot them, especially Liese Goncourt. She was a recognizable figure in the community with her fingers in a lot of pies. I knew a team of investigators, many from the insurance company, were looking for Liese’s and Garth’s bodies. I pictured men in vests churning through the ash with canine sniffers. Then it hit me, just to satisfy Jane, I suggested putting an ad in the Eagle. Zizi could write a great article: “Have you seen this woman?”

  “Do we have a photo of her?”

  I’d snapped one of Liese Goncourt when she and Lorraine were sitting on the couch looking at a photo album, so after I found it, I sent it to Jane’s phone.

  Jane punched in a number and began talking to someone at the Eagle who promised to run the story online in a few minutes.

  “Grasping at straws, but it won’t hurt,” Jane said. “Maybe we could use some coffee. We’ll stop on the way.”

  “Now you’re the one talking in riddles.”

  “FBI’s taken over the Kat Oxley disappearance. It’s the abduction of a minor. And they’ve closed La Belle Hélène.” Jane bowed her head. “You were right about the Goncourts. Their footprints are all over the place.”

  I tried not to gloat.

  There was silence for a minute until Jane continued. “So you and I are going to interview Kirsten and Abe.”

  “He’s out of town,” I said.

  “My eye. And another thing, chief called Princeton to tell them we’ll be investigating on their turf. We have carte blanche.”

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  As Jane sped toward Tillary Street, I asked what she’d learned from talking to Charlotte’s parents.

  According to what Jane told me, Charlotte saw Kat getting into the car when the two teens were walking home from Brooklyn Friends. They’d been discussing what to wear to Phyllida’s wake. Kat said ‘Granny wouldn’t car
e what we wore, she’d be happy to see us.’

  Jane paused in her narrative and asked if I was taking notes so she wouldn’t have to repeat herself.

  “Tell me about what Charlotte had to say about the car.” We were held up at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge by gawker traffic. I could see people on the walkway, carrying posters.

  “Demonstration against police brutality,” Jane said.

  “That’s why Denny couldn’t take the day off. They need all hands.”

  We were both silent, staring straight ahead.

  After a few moments, she said, “Anyway, Charlotte described the car as an old convertible, dark green, no headrests, an antique with a bullet for a nose.”

  “The Studebaker we found last night in La Belle Hélène’s garage.”

  Jane made a face.

  “Can’t we agree on something?” I asked.

  “All right, last night you discovered the Studebaker in La Belle Hélène’s garage; it’s now in our lab; it belongs to Kirsten Goncourt. Happy?”

  I nodded.

  Jane went on. “According to what Kirsten’s assistant told you, the car was in Wheeler’s for a tune-up, but when my team called Wheeler’s, they said it had never been delivered. However, that still doesn’t explain why it showed up in La Belle Hélène’s garage.”

  “Don’t you watch old movies?” I asked. “Kidnappers always switch vehicles; it’s standard practice. Anyhow, maybe Kirsten was afraid to drive it all the way to Princeton—cars would be whizzing past that antique on the turnpike.”

  “Makes sense,” Jane said. “But almost certainly it was the car driven by Kat’s abductors.”

  So I guess it was okay for Jane to think abduction, but not me. Whatever, at least we were making progress.

  “Did Charlotte see or talk to Kat’s aunt?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. “They forgot to ask.”

  “Let me get this straight. Who interviewed Charlotte and her parents?”

  There was another long pause.