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

by Susan Russo Anderson

  “Look around,” she said, gesturing toward a door at the end of the hall. “That is my apartment. Upstairs is the home of Sizof Ludomir. I rent to him and his family. Good tenant, he helps me with the lawn and such, ever since my Vladimir died. Go up. Knock. Tell him who you are. Tell him I said so, tell him he should invite you inside. Ask him if I know this Arthur person.”

  “You won’t mind if we look around your apartment?” I asked.

  Mrs. Eisenstadt stared back at me, her skin glistening with a film of sweat, her eyes like coins found in the pocket of a dead KGB agent. “Why would I mind? I have nothing to hide.”

  She led the way through plastic-covered furniture, all roped and tasseled. It choked the living room, along with figurines staring out of filigreed cabinets. One wall was dominated by a group of paintings done on black velvet. A large TV was fixed to the wall above a display of china cups. We followed her on a tour of the rest of the apartment, one fat finger pointing out the window treatments, the furniture, the style, the price.

  When I asked if we could see the basement, her lower lip quivered.

  “Downstairs is furnace and hot water tank, old frames, nothing more, a storeroom for paint. We must keep up the building, you’ve no idea, the cost of upkeep.” Her eyes darted from side to side.

  “You have an illegal basement apartment, don’t you?”

  She shook her head, her arms squeezing her middle.

  “We think Arthur was involved in some sort of shady business, Mrs. Eisenstadt, and he double-crossed someone. They killed him and dumped him in a nearby pit. They wanted his body found. And it was found all right, his body twisted, his face slammed deep into the earth.”

  The woman was perspiring heavily now, rivulets of water coursing down her cheeks. “Please, I could get into trouble.”

  “I know a good lawyer,” Brandy said. “They can’t touch you.”

  The landlady was shaking now. “My husband and I came here from Odessa, and it was lonely for us. When Vladimir died, I had to make a living somehow. I don’t want trouble.” She told us about hiring someone to help her remodel the basement, creating another room she could rent. A friend of a friend recommended Arthur. He was charming; she didn’t see him too often; he kept to himself.

  She stopped talking for a moment and braced herself against a wall. “At first he was good tenant, worked with his hands, this and that, he told me. He had a wife, Flossie. Sweet woman, thin, not much for talking. She’s gone now, I don’t know where. I keep my nose out, even when I heard her crying one morning. Next time I saw her, I noticed something was wrong with her face. But she’s gone. Arthur, I wish I’d never met him.”

  “Do you know where she went? When?”

  Ivanna Eisenstadt shook her head. “Ever since my Vladimir died, I sleep not so good. I began to hear screams in the middle of the night. Once the screams were so bad, I went downstairs. I knocked on the door. Arthur answered. He was into the drinking I could tell, and he told me his wife suffered from nightmares. Next day I saw her taking out the garbage. Her face was swollen, her lips bleeding. How does a man do that to a woman? Better for her she’s gone.”

  Cookie stood next to Clancy and reached for his hand.

  “Two nights ago I heard voices. Middle of the night.”

  “A woman’s voice?”

  “Men. They were arguing. Then I heard shouting and a crash. I was frightened, I tell you, but the shouting stopped.”

  I told Mrs. Eisenstadt everything I knew about Whiskey’s disappearance and Arthur’s involvement with her. I told her about Maddie and how I made a vow to find her mother. I told her we’d like to search Arthur’s apartment while some of us talked to the upstairs tenant.

  “Better call Jane,” Denny whispered to me.

  I shook my head. “After we take a look.”

  I could tell by the set of Denny’s back he wasn’t too pleased, but he must have figured after his phone call to Jane, he was caught. Denny had two pipers to pay, you see, and I felt a momentary twist in my stomach realizing I was one of them, but it didn’t stop me pulling his strings. I passed him a smile and pair of latex gloves and booties.

  While Clancy, Cookie, and Brandy’s crew left to pay a visit to Sizof Ludomir, Denny and I followed Ivanna Eisenstadt to the back of the building where there was a separate entrance to the basement. I watched as she lumbered down the steps and took out a large key. She shot me a look, and her eyes were plaintive, and when she turned to show us the way, I saw defeat in the set of her back.

  I held onto Denny as we walked behind her. My skin was goose bumped and a bubble rose up from my stomach, lodging at the back of my throat. I looked at the time on my iPhone. We’d been searching for Whiskey less than twenty-four hours, but she’d been missing for at least thirty-six. Hope for her was growing dim, and I’d gotten us into the middle of a black hole. I’d lost her trail. As we walked on, Denny worried his lip.

  As soon as the landlady unlocked the door, we walked down two or three steps into Arthur’s apartment. Like my mind, it was dark, a hole in the wall with a kitchenette at one end, a desk and two chairs at the other end, and a pull-out bed stuck into the middle, the few pieces of furniture scratched and nondescript. I smelled blood.

  Shivering, I looked at Denny, who asked me if I really wanted to continue. After I quirked my lips into what I hoped was a smile, I nodded. He shook his head, saying what I knew he would—that we’d better not disturb a crime scene, that we’d better call it in, and he was right, I knew he was. It’s just that I hoped there’d be a clue, something of Whiskey to hang onto, and this was our chance to find it before the crime scene techs disturbed everything.

  I thought I heard feet and turned in the direction of the sound. Then I saw them, armies of roaches running through the debris on the floor. My skin crawled. I felt Arthur’s presence, and someone else’s—not Arthur’s wife, not Whiskey—but an unknown force, larger than life. Dangerous. Evil.

  Denny flipped on his flashlight, and the landlady turned on an overhead lamp. The apartment was a train wreck. It was apparent that Arthur had the messiness of an addicted soul, so I wasn’t sure which mess was made by marauders and which by him. Empty beer cans stood on every surface, some knocked to the floor. There were sheets, blankets, and pillowcases strewn over every surface, an overturned lamp.

  “Flossie’s apron,” the landlady said, holding up a bloody garment. “Every time I see her, she was wearing it.”

  I tried to picture her, bloody, beaten, and my head throbbed for her, a woman abused, I knew, from reading her letter stuck inside one of Whiskey’s journals. I wondered where she was. Perhaps if I could find her, she might know something of Whiskey’s whereabouts.

  Drawers were open or turned upside down, their contents spewed over the floor or on the bed or dumped onto pillows in one corner of the room. Newspapers, in sections or crunched-up pages, were all over the place.

  “We’d better call Jane,” Denny said, more insistent this time.

  I said nothing but continued walking around.

  There was a knock on the door and I jumped. Brandy poked her head in and just as quickly disappeared with what sounded like a gag.

  “No one home upstairs,” she said. She shot her head in again and opened her mouth but made moaning noises as she banged the door shut. I heard Cookie barking orders.

  “Wait in the van for us,” I yelled.

  Inside Arthur’s apartment, Denny was rustling the papers in the top drawer of a beaten-up desk on the far wall while Ivanna Eisenstadt looked on. He motioned for me to come over and pointed to an old-fashioned key. It sat on a pad of Post-it notes, rubber bands, paperclips and wadded-up pieces of paper, glinting in the dim light. I picked it up by its tag in one of my gloved hands and read the word “Goods.”

  Twisting his lips, Denny’s gaze traveled from me to the key as it dangled in the air. Should I take it? Had Denny not been by my side, I would have slipped it into my pocket in a heartbeat even though I knew sear
ching Brooklyn for its lock was an impossible task. Yet I was tempted.

  “Let’s go. Nothing here for us,” I said, and put the key back in the drawer, listening to him exhale.

  I punched in Jane’s number. She answered on the first ring, and I imagined the look on her when I told her we’d found Arthur’s apartment. There was white noise as she took it in. After I gave her the address, I told her I expected the CSU to let me know if there were Whiskey Parnell clues in the mess and listened to her promise to keep me updated.

  I watched the landlady’s face blanched of all color. “What will they do to me, take me to jail? My worst day since I left the Ukraine. I wanted only freedom and now I’m ruined, my children’s names, ruined. My grandchildren.”

  We thanked her and left.

  On the way home, I listed everything I knew—it was just to the right of nothing. Our chief suspect, Arthur, was dead, his apartment, trashed. His wife was missing. His army buddy Berringer was dead and so was his father. I clung to the one thread of hope—the charred body found by the FBI was not Whiskey Parnell, so she was still missing.

  In the middle of the BQE I realized I’d gotten it all wrong. I saw the detritus of a life, an ignominious demise for Arthur, but that was all. He was a dead end, in more ways than one. Somehow, he’d taken, then lost Whiskey Parnell, and my hopes for finding her through him were nil. He was a phony lead, thrown out as bait, but by whom?

  Still, I couldn’t let him go. There had to be a connection between him and the disappearance of Whiskey, but I couldn’t figure it out. He was seen with her on the morning she vanished; we had a record, however blurred and scratched, of him holding a gun to her neck as she withdrew money from the Sovereign Bank. There had to be some other evidence clinging to his dead body.

  We sat in the van, staring down the street, silent as Clancy parked in front of Trisha Liam’s house. We said goodbye to the four teens and thanked them for their help. They’d done the lion’s share, spotting Arthur, finding Zeno. Without them, we wouldn’t have located Arthur’s apartment.

  “So now what?” Brandy asked.

  “There are a few missing pieces to the puzzle,” I said.

  “The whole puzzle’s missing, you mean,” Cookie said.

  The Mob

  After we dropped off Brandy and her friends, we sat on the McDuffys’ back porch, Denny by my side. Robert and Maddie had disappeared into the den to finish their game, although it was a stretch to picture Robert playing chess. Maddie, who believed it was only a matter of time before we found her mother but asked why it was taking so long, said she’d promised to play blindfolded so Robert could win back part of her earnings.

  As we gave Lorraine a brief account of our day, the outdoor light bulb threw its beam onto the apple tree in a backyard full of September leaves. Branches swayed gently while Cookie thumbed through one of Whiskey’s journals I’d given her to read. Clancy and Denny were arguing over the last piece of pizza and finally decided to split it.

  The days were getting shorter, increasing my sense that time was running out. I’d lost my way and didn’t know where to begin, but I was so sure Arthur had Whiskey tied up in his apartment or some other place, I was still focused on him.

  “Arthur must have crossed someone big to wind up in the hole of what was once Sharkey’s,” Lorraine said.

  “According to Whiskey’s journal, he was scheming to sell paint to the city,” Cookie said.

  “No wonder he’s dead.”

  “He’s lucky he wasn’t fed to the pigs,” Clancy said, swallowing the last wedge of pizza. On their way over, he and Cookie stopped at Grimaldi’s and picked up a large pie. It was meant as a late afternoon appetizer, for it was well known in South Brooklyn that nothing could compete with Lorraine’s cooking.

  “Please, Clancy, I’m trying to read.” Cookie flipped a page and smiled up at him whereupon he gave her a cheese and sausage slobber on the lips.

  A new romance. I smiled at Denny, remembering. “But there goes our biggest suspect and Whiskey’s trail is growing cold.”

  There was silence except for the honking of horns in the distance.

  “Does the name Berringer ring any bells?” I asked Lorraine, who’d told me once she’d followed the comings and goings of the Brooklyn mob for close to thirty years. “According to what I read in Whiskey’s journal, Arthur must have been mixed up with them. Someone she called Berringer was his friend.”

  Lorraine disappeared. In a few minutes she returned with her iPad. “He had three sons, as I recall.” She ran her fingers over the iPad’s glass, searching and pinching before peering at something on the screen and beginning to read. “The senior Berringer was a Brighton Beach crook. From an Irish family, an anomaly in the neighborhood, but prominent in Brooklyn politics, a true hotshot. I think he played all sides of all fences—big in real estate, moving and storage, and who knows what else.”

  “Car washers,” Cookie said.

  “Car washers?”

  “You know what I mean. Sharkey’s was a chain. I remember the signs, a clown-like shark with big glasses and top hat, flipping its tail, lights in the form of soapsuds blinking.”

  “They were all over Brooklyn in the sixties,” Lorraine said. “I used to see Sharkey’s advertised on billboards, moving vans, you name it. That’s how Berringer got his start. Turns out, they were a front, like all his other businesses. His sons were involved with him as well. You never saw him alone, always with his boys. What were their names?” she muttered to herself while her fingers flew.

  Then she stopped flipping and sliding, regarding the fading light through the trees in her backyard before returning to her notes. “Here’s something. There were three sons—Stuart, Keegan, and the youngest, Hubert.”

  She passed me her iPad. The screen showed an older guy surrounded by two men and a boy, the photo taken at some banquet in the late nineties with lots of Brooklyn notables in attendance. The caption read, “Harold Berringer with his three sons—Stuart, thirty-two; Keegan, twenty-nine; and Hubert, twelve.”

  “Quite an age difference,” Cookie said.

  “Two different women,” Lorraine said. “After his wife died, he married a waitress from one of the clubs he owned, Flannigan’s.”

  I perked up. “The bar in Dumbo?”

  “Burned down a couple of years ago,” Clancy said.

  “Now that you mention Flannigan’s, I remember the name Berringer,” Denny said. “Rumor was they were bankrolling the distribution of contraband from that bar. In big with the wiseguys.”

  Lorraine nodded. “As I recall, Berringer knew everybody. At one time he owned half of Brighton Beach through several holding companies. Lost a lot of it in the panic of 2008, but the stock market wasn’t what made him wealthy, according to the information I have. It’s rumored he made his money from drugs and other forms of trafficking, getting a slice of the profits who knew how, but he had legitimate money to bankroll part of the operation.”

  I shivered and looked at Cookie.

  Lorraine continued. “He must have earned respect, I shudder to think how. Twenty years ago Sharkey’s was in almost every Brooklyn neighborhood, run by him and his sons, but he kept away from the press, except for something innocent, like a banquet appearance. Two years ago Harold Berringer was found dead in his office, a bullet to the head—what was left of it—and shortly after that, Stuart’s body was found inside the one remaining car wash, one arm around his severed head. They never found the assassin.”

  I felt a shot of fear travel to my forehead as I thought of the charred body found near Whiskey’s smartphone.

  “Probably messed with the Gambino family,” Clancy said. “And the Gambino family has formed a recent alliance with the ’Ndrangheta.”

  “The what?” Cookie asked.

  “Calabrian-based mafia,” Denny and Clancy said in unison.

  “Deadly,” Denny said.

  “In Italy they feed their victims to swine. They say a pig can eat a man in two
hours, bones and all,” Clancy said.

  There was silence after that one, punctuated by Maddie’s triumphant shouts coming from somewhere inside.

  “They’re the purse,” Lorraine said.

  “They? The purse?” I asked.

  “Berringer and his sons. They had respectability, logistics, and money.”

  “Logistics?”

  “Channels,” Lorraine said. “The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta has its fingers in most of the cocaine pies, and now they’re worming their way into heroin from their strongholds in South America. They brew a deadly version of the drug. Theirs is laced with other compounds, and they make alliances with anyone. We know they’re in with the Berringers, or were when the old man was alive.”

  “They’re ingenious in getting the stuff here, smuggling it in the bellies of frozen fish,” Clancy said.

  Frozen fish. Pigs. This was getting out of hand.

  Lorraine nodded, fastening a gray lock behind one ear. “But they never could pin anything on the Berringers. Harold had a spotless record.”

  “A slew of good lawyers, you mean,” Denny said.

  “Mitch Liam?” I asked.

  “Until he recused himself.”

  “Getting back to the Berringers,” I said.

  Lorraine shrugged. “A week after they found Stuart’s body, the last Sharkey’s car wash burned down. Rumor was he had it coming.”

  “What about the other sons, Keegan and Hubert?” I asked.

  Lorraine shook her head and excused herself. Robert must have needed something.

  I phoned Tig and asked him if they’d identified the charred body found near Whiskey’s phone, and told him about my hunch that it could be Keegan Berringer. He told me I was whistling in the dark. I reminded him he owed me big time, and I talked about the slim connection between Whiskey and the Berringers through Arthur McGirdle. He’d heard about Arthur’s dead elbow. When he still demurred, I told him I’d send him a bill for my recent surveilling gigs. Begrudgingly he agreed to do more investigating of the Gravesend body, as they were calling it.