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

by Susan Russo Anderson

  The lobby smelled of wood, linseed oil, and plaster dust. According to the roster, Star Newcomb occupied space on the top floor. Soon I was juddering up the freight elevator, wondering if the contraption would make it all the way. At this hour I didn’t expect to find the artist in his studio, but I thought I’d be busy tomorrow, so I needed to try. And you never know, I might surprise him and find Whiskey tied to a chair while a madman painted her likeness. Besides, if I kept moving, I wouldn’t have to think about Denny. “Denny,” I said aloud, as I stepped off onto Star Newcomb’s floor and watched the doors slide shut. My heart did its lurching thing again, this time getting stuck in my throat.

  As I walked down the hall, looking at the numbers over the doors, I found it hard to breathe and had to stop next to two large windows. Reaching up for the sill, I felt like Alice in the shrinking scene. I stood on tiptoe to catch the view of Manhattan across the East River with the lady in the distance. It was calming, magnificent, the sky behind her, black with only a few pinpricks of light, the horizon over New Jersey shimmering red and gold with the last rays of the sun.

  I turned into another passage, my footfalls echoing around me. It was long and smelled of plaster and some sort of fixing agent. Anyway, if I were a junky I could get high on its whiffs. After all, I reminded myself, I was inside a commercial building. It had different sounds and smells, high ceilings, painted concrete walls and ungiving tile over cement floors, steel-reinforced glass for window panes. I stopped and listened. Of all things, I heard piano music coming from a studio a few feet away. The door was ajar, so I peeked inside.

  At my intrusion, a small man sporting a goatee and wearing a beret looked up but didn’t stop his playing. I listened, the music soft, elegiac, matching my mood at the end of a fruitless day. I was miles from figuring out what had happened to Whiskey, and with Denny storming out of my life, my world at the moment was bleak.

  I stepped inside. Scattered between two massive skylights, a few incandescents were suspended from the ceiling, one slightly to the left of the man’s head, illuminating him like a baby spot. Floor-to-ceiling windows took up one wall, and the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges arched their spans into the night sky. Pianos were all over the place, uprights and grands, stained wood, mostly, but a few painted; some falling apart, others listing to one side or leaning into each other. Benches and stools and chairs were scattered around. Soundboards braced themselves against the far wall. And dust covered everything, even the cobwebs. He met my nod with a smile and a wink, so I stepped inside.

  “My gran used to play the piano.”

  His fingers hesitated for a second before resuming their soft playing.

  “You’re a pianist?” I asked.

  “I stumble through.” He introduced himself as Shlomo Morgenthau, the piano man. “Like a tailor mends an old suit, I’ll fix your grandmother’s piano, no matter the shape, the size, the degradation. It will make beautiful music again.”

  I gulped down a lump, listened as a train rumbled its way across the Manhattan Bridge. “I sold it.”

  He lifted his shoulders. “You’re young.”

  I pushed down a new wave of sadness, mesmerized by the notes.

  “I was born to the piano, you know, like my father and his father before him. But the war changed all that.”

  He didn’t stop his playing, but kept up the banter. I watched the reflection of his hands on the piano’s fall board. That’s when I noticed a tattoo of some sort on his right forearm. “Yes, I repair pianos, and I play for my own amusement.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “My amusement?”

  “No, the music you’re playing.”

  “I play the same piece every night for my wife. Chopin, one of his nocturnes, Number 1 in B-Flat Minor, Opus 9. Gentler than most composers. For instance, Brahms.”

  “I know. Gran used to play him when she felt like crashing the chords.”

  “I only play Brahms when I want to understand the chaos of the world.”

  I looked around expecting to see an old woman seated on a rickety stool listening to the music.

  He smiled. “You won’t see her, but my Elsa’s here.”

  I knew better than to make a remark, so I asked him to excuse my interruption, but I wondered if he knew the artist Star Newcomb.

  His eyes shot downward and he rested his hands on his knees. Leaning toward the keys as if he could protect them, he said, “I don’t know him, not really. Who can know such a man as that? But turn right at the end of this hall and walk all the way down. His studio’s the last one. I don’t expect you’ll find him. Most evenings, he’s not there.”

  I flashed him my ID, told him I was investigating the disappearance of a woman and Star Newcomb might know something about her. “Her name is Whiskey Parnell.”

  He tried to hide the look on his face. “Star Newcomb has many women friends.”

  I described her and turned on my iPhone screen, which kept flickering while I showed him the picture of Whiskey. He stared at it a few minutes. “I might have seen her, but I couldn’t be certain. My memory, you know.”

  I didn’t think so.

  “At my age, all the young begin to look alike. Except for the music, that I remember, and the last look Elsa gave me, turning back to me the night they dragged her away.”

  He shut his eyes for a while and I had the decency to remain motionless.

  In a few moments, he shrugged and reached for the image on my phone. “If I’d seen this woman recently, I hope I could tell you. Something about her hair is familiar. If she were standing before me, perhaps …” But he squeezed his eyes shut and moved his head back and forth rapidly, as if he could shake off the memory—which one, I wasn’t sure.

  I showed him the sketch of Arthur. This time he shook his head right away.

  I thanked him, gave him my card, and asked him to call me if he remembered seeing the woman or thought of anything else he should tell me. “Her family is frightened.”

  After turning the corner, I found the door to a studio at the end of a long hall. Star Newcomb was printed in big letters on a metal door, a large gold star centered above, like the ones you see over prima donnas’ dressing rooms. For some reason, my heart started racing. Was it the implacableness of the steel door, the place, the hopelessness of my search? I rang the bell and waited.

  No answer. I knocked. Pounded. I kicked the door, jamming my toes. I wished Denny were here. I tried to slow my breathing and felt Whiskey’s journal in my pocket. I still had a lot of words to read, so leaning against the wall, I opened the book, skimming for Star’s name, and began.

  A Tuesday in July

  Some looks are impossible to unravel.

  The first day I saw Star Newcomb I knew I was in trouble. I shouldn’t have listened to my heart. The look on his face, though, that’s what got me. His eyes were like Ma’s eyes, his gaze so engulfing it made me a goner. I’d do anything for him. At that moment I didn’t care a snit for anyone else or the mess I’d be getting myself into. At that moment, I abandoned everyone—Malcolm, my own sanity, even Maddie.

  We met frequently in the hallway of Malcolm’s building, never taking our eyes off each other. That was it for a while, but no matter, I felt his presence on the back of my neck, in the air I breathed. A tingle started low down that first day and made its way upwards into my heart. I’m such a sucker. I swear he knew it too. When I’d return from work, he must have been watching the subway stop, which wasn’t far away. I’d walk down Court and turn into Pacific, and he’d be waiting outside, sitting on the stoop, cigarette smoke curling around his head like he’d just emerged from a pit in middle earth. His eyes reminded me of Ma’s hunger. I pictured her waiting for the bus, seconds before the truck hit her. It was like Star Newcomb’s eyes bore into me but didn’t know what he was seeing—his own demise, I figured. Never mine, I never thought it would come to that.

  I didn’t know it at first, but Star Newcomb was another Arthur in disguise. No
, I got that wrong: Arthur was a burden, intrusive, nothing I couldn’t deal with. But Star was worse than Ma and Arthur rolled into one.

  “I want to paint you,” he said to me that first morning when Malcolm thought I was visiting my pregnant cousin. I should have pegged him by the look in his eyes. Haunted. Obsessed.

  “You’re sick,” I said and walked out.

  Star Newcomb

  I’d had enough of Whiskey’s journal for a while, so I closed the book and sat, letting her words swill around in my head. Her form was coalescing into someone I was beginning to understand. Someone with a reason for guilt. Someone human like me.

  I wondered who had taken her, trying to convince myself it was Arthur. Yet something niggled in the back of my brain. I promised myself to try to keep an open mind. Could Seymour Wolsey have abducted her? Malcolm? He pined for her, that was a sure thing, and with all his apartment buildings, he had access to plenty of places where he could stash her. What about Star Newcomb?

  I was leaving a note for the artist when I heard faint scratching noises and felt my heart do its tide-rushing-in imitation. The skittering could have been the blood flowing through my ears, but I didn’t think so. Then I heard a clank inside the elevator shaft in the distance. I waited, still in the hallway darkness, listening to the metallic sound of the cage opening and closing, hearing the whoosh of the doors. I heard whistling, footsteps approaching. Pretty soon I saw the outline of a man. As the form got closer, I had to give it to him, he was a hunk. Dark curly hair, tall, muscular, in tight-fitting jeans and a cornflower blue work shirt. He stopped, smiled, waved.

  “Hello, little girl. Lost?”

  He didn’t know it yet, but this was not a good way to start out with me. “Star Newcomb?”

  “Brilliant! Got it in one.”

  By this time he was not only close to me but invading my space.

  “God, you’re beautiful. Ever do any modeling? Stay with me tonight and I’ll paint you in the morning. I’ll make you famous.”

  I held up my ID.

  He raised his arms in mock surrender. “Now what’ve I done?”

  “I have some questions about Whiskey Parnell if you don’t mind.”

  To give him credit, he didn’t hesitate. “Shoot, little lady. What brand of whiskey did you say?” He winked as he stood barring the door to his studio, arms crossed, a wet curl dangling over his forehead. Way too much product and seriously full of himself.

  I gritted my teeth, trying not to hate him. “Whiskey Parnell. Surely you remember her?”

  He wasn’t about to give in, but something flickered across his face. “Never heard of her.”

  “Not only are you a chauvinist but you’re a lousy liar.

  He rolled his eyes. “All right, I might remember the name. What’s she done this time?”

  I told him what I knew about Whiskey’s past and his involvement with her and Malcolm Giro. I said she was missing, and I’d been hired to find her.

  “Afraid I can’t help you.” He gnawed on a fingernail. “Whiskey was a long time ago. A one-night stand is all. Maybe two. Don’t get me wrong. I could see from the start that Malcolm was all wrong for her. She was luscious, electric, and he was boring. I’ll admit it: she wanted me, and I always find that enticing. We could have had something juicy, but she skipped town on me, although now that I think on it, she did me a favor. The kid and I didn’t get along.”

  He stopped while I stood there, taking my time to consider him more closely.

  In the space of three or four seconds, he chewed on a few fingers, his eyes darting back and forth. “I liked her well enough, met her in a bar, as a matter of fact, but in the end”—his arms gestured an empty expanse—“it was just a fling, we didn’t hit it off all that much. Too impressed with herself.”

  He stopped talking and stared at his reflection in the windowpane. In less than a minute, he’d managed two different spins on his affair with Whiskey Parnell, and I wasn’t buying either version.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret, little girl, I’ve got my career and reputation to think about. She didn’t fit in—she wasn’t what you’d call ‘star quality,’ you might say.” He bit his thumbnail and beamed.

  I almost vomited.

  “No pun intended.” He hesitated, waiting for more of a response from me, but I gave him nothing. The trouble with Star—he had a mouth.

  “Besides, I don’t have time for relationships. I’ve got a show to prepare. Thornton Galleries, in case you’re not into the art scene, and you don’t strike me as … as a patron. It’s currently the hottest gallery in Chelsea. You know where that is, don’t you, little lady, or are you a true-blue Brooklynite?”

  I bit my lip, two milliseconds away from batting him hard on the place where he lived.

  “I’m preparing for a show. Got to deliver two paintings a month or I’m out of a gallery; that’s the way it goes in my world. So if you’ll excuse me … or better yet, come inside, and I’ll show you my drawings.”

  When I said nothing, I watched his face go from cocky to wary. A tic close to his right eye came alive.

  “Oh, wait, you think I know something about Whiskey’s current escapade, don’t you? So I’m a suspect?”

  “We’re all suspects.”

  At that, he reared his head and laughed.

  I must admit, I did sound a bit canned. I watched his biceps flex as he took a couple of steps backward and fisted his hands by his side.

  “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions if you don’t mind. And if you don’t comply, that’s a shame because later, after we find her and she’s been beaten or worse, and we discover you knew something about her disappearance, just the slightest bit of information or worse—where she was all along and didn’t tell us—you’ll be in big trouble. It would be a major difficulty, a real shame for your reputation. Gallery owners don’t like painters who give them trouble. Art patrons might complain and want a refund.”

  He said nothing, but drew a finger across his lips, which by now were pressed tightly together.

  “I’ve been asked to investigate her disappearance and I will, believe me, and that means I’m investigating you, too, front and rear, side to side, and I don’t leave anything to chance.”

  His face quivered, like a horse.

  I said nothing.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Like I say, Whiskey was a fling—one night, maybe two, that’s all—and I haven’t seen her in, Jesus, years.”

  I smelled something rotten in his eyes. While I stared him down, his emotions turned from inscrutable into a fear so palpable I could smell it.

  “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

  He backed away, my words hitting him like bullets, and I shook a finger at his rock-solid chest. “I think you know something.”

  He shoved a fingernail into his mouth and began chewing again, and his eyes darted. “All right. You better come in.” He unlocked the door and motioned for me to enter.

  The space was a cavern of a studio. As I peered into the darkness, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I saw what looked like garbage strewn all over the floor.

  “Sorry about the mess. My cleaning service quit last week.”

  Usually I’d jump at the chance to sell Lucy’s, but I hesitated. I wasn’t so sure I wanted Star Newcomb as a client. Still, business was business, and that thought overcame my reluctance. I asked for his phone number, saying I might know a good cleaning service looking for new clients. He hesitated a couple of seconds, but decided in favor of handing it over, and I keyed it into my cell.

  “Let me show you around. Not every day you get to visit the studio of a master.”

  He led the way, his hand on my elbow until I twisted free and slammed the side of my hand into his forearm. I felt the jerk of his alarm, but to his credit, he stopped and faced me.

  “Sorry. I guess my normal advances won’t work with someone like you.”

  Despite the fact that I hate his type, I felt a spark o
f interest. So I did a stupid thing—I smiled.

  His studio smelled of varnish and linseed oil, rotten food, and paint. I had to step over debris on the floor—paper towels, rags, old newsprint, balled-up drawings, candy wrappers—while I followed him into the interior, a huge space with five easels. One wall held storage for his large canvases. A few distant planets twinkled down on us from two large glassed-in affairs in the ceiling.

  Star turned on overhead lights, which he explained were halogen or tungsten, expensive, he said, but he needed the light to be true. “This isn’t my best work, but you’ll get an idea if you go through my paintings in the drying racks.” He strode over to the two-by-four shelves lining one wall, and pulled out several large canvases, canting them against the braces. I had to step back, he told me, to get a proper view. From a distance, I must admit there was something arresting about his work, especially his portraits. There was one in particular that caught my eye, the portrait of a man. I’m no judge of art, but there was something about the guy’s eyes, something about the painting that drew me in.

  “I’m trying something new,” he said, “mixing abstract statements with portraits. Thornton suggested it, just to show the patrons I could draw. But I need more models. Arresting faces, like yours or … Whiskey had something mesmerizing about her, but too bad she was Whiskey.” An involuntary shudder went through him.

  I thought about that, but said nothing, picking up a small painting, slashes of color. There was something about his abstract work that told me so much more about Star Newcomb. Maybe it was the design. Or the fury of it. The work had to come from the mind of someone obsessed. I mean, why would someone spend hours with an easel and the smell of chemicals and paint? I walked over to another painting on one of the easels, careful not to step on whatever was scattered on the floor, but I couldn’t help it, my shoes crunched the debris.

  “Step back from the painting and watch it turn.”