Too Quiet in Brooklyn (9 page)

I nodded.

She riffled through the folder, took out a page, opened the small printer underneath the desk, and made a copy. “These are names and addresses of members, their calendar and agenda for the year. It may give you something to go on. And while I’m on the subject, the senior minister and her friends should be notified, once I … identify the body, so I’ve made a copy for myself.” She shivered.

Where was Barbara’s uncertainty, her overwhelming sorrow? Again I marveled at her ability to cope. If I’d lost my son and my mother on the same day, I’d be churning in grief, either numb or screaming my bloody head off about now, useless, and into my third or fourth hissy fit, wondering what the police were doing about my child and why they hadn’t found him yet. At least that’s what I liked to think I’d be like. And as I recalled, after my mother’s death, I was angry one minute, numb the next, and wondering if the police had suspects, overwhelmed for months when their conclusion was a possible suicide. But I knew I wasn’t seeing the normal Barbara; I was seeing a Barbara battered by sudden loss. Still, a petty thought crept around my brain. I had to remember that from what I could see, Barbara Simon stood to inherit a lot.

I stuffed everything into my bag, struggled to sling it over my shoulder. “I’ll have lots of questions. Mind if I call you when I do?”

“Anytime. I won’t be getting much sleep. You have my cell and I’ll text you my home phone number. I hope you’re familiar with the Macintosh?”

“My drug of choice.” I patted the bag. “But I do windows, too.”

“Good.”

I reminded her that we hadn’t found her mother’s purse yet. “Is there a place in the house where she keeps it, like by the side of her bed or on a certain chair in the dining room or in the kitchen?”

She thought a minute and told me she’d often seen it behind the overstuffed chair in the living room or near her desk, depending on where she was at the time. If it were in one of those places, we’d have seen it. A sign was flashing inside my head, “Find purse, find purse.”

Walking to the far wall, she said, “There’s a roof garden you ought to see. My mother spent lots of time there on nice days. Out this door.” Barbara opened it and flipped the switch, illuminating a string of small Christmas lights surrounding the garden. It looked like the set of an Italian wedding. While I walked around, she made that call to her friend. Her face took on a glow.

In one corner was a gas grill and in the middle were lawn tables and chairs, deep and comfortable looking. I could have stayed out there all evening. Adjacent to the chair next to me was a plate with crumbs and a few pieces of Oreos and a half a glass of milk.

Pocketing her phone, she said, “It’s not like my mother to leave Charlie’s snack lying about.” She worried her lips and stomped her foot, folding her arms. “Oh, God, I can’t stand it!” She slumped into the nearest chair.

A sudden shift. Was it acting? Probably not, but whatever it was, I let her have her moment.

In a while I said softly, “C’mon Barbara, we’ve got a job to do. Let’s finish it.” The sky was a rich indigo by now. I looked up and searched for stars. Too early, but I saw a newborn, twinkling down at us.

Barbara nodded slowly and rose. I followed her down the stairs and detoured back into the living room, peeping behind the overstuffed chair and shaking my head before following her to another door off the mudroom.

As we entered the garage, I found the switch and flipped it on. From what I could see, it was like the rest of the house, neat as a pin, the cement floor painted a shiny gray, the walls and cabinets white. Somebody who knows her whites like my gran would be able to tell you if it was Antique White or Linen White. Not me.

Nothing seemed amiss. Well, almost nothing. I opened the cabinet doors. Empty and spotless. Odd, I thought. She must need lubricating oil for the garage door at least. And the house had two gardens, so where were the tools?

Mary Ward Simon’s car, a black Mercedes with New York State vanity license plates, MWS38CP, took up most of the space. I touched the hood—stone cold—hadn’t been used in a long while.

It felt cramped in here. Still, I’d love to have a garage like this, a luxury in Brooklyn Heights. Matter of fact, the whole house was. In the nineteenth century it was a carriage house, refurbished sometime after the war for gracious living. Now they were scarce as hen’s teeth, and I’d do almost anything for one, other than kill or rape or other bad stuff I could think of and wanted to do to some people. I stood still and breathed, trying to smell horses and thinking that things were not always what they seemed.

I tried the car door. It opened. Digging into the front pocket of my jacket, I glommed onto a flashlight and shone it on the floor, back up to the steering column looking for keys, scrunched up good so I could look on the seats, underneath them, in the glove compartment, all around the perimeter and underneath the car itself. No purse. Nothing except for a few blades of grass, but I wasn’t with the lab. They’d find plenty, I was hoping, and I sure the heck didn’t move anything. Jane’s snarl swam into my mind.

I popped the lock to the trunk, looked inside, and found nothing, not with my naked eye at least—no dust, no paper scraps, no nothing.

Barbara opened the back door on the passenger side and gasped. My heart reared up, almost hitting the roof of my mouth.

“Look,” she said, pointing with her arm, her whole body rigid.

In the back was a child’s seat, a woman’s sweater lying on the floor and a torn piece of glossy kelly green paper, thick.

“From the cover of Charlie’s book, I know it.” Barbara reached out to grab it.

“Don’t touch it. Let’s leave everything. Crime scene techs has sophisticated ways of lifting prints. Let’s let them find it. But would Charlie tear the cover off a book like that?”

She shook her head back and forth several times. It looked like she was holding her breath because her face became flushed. “He loves his books. Takes good care of them. And this one’s special. He’d never tear the cover or the pages of this one.”

“He’s too young to read, I guess.”

She nodded. “He’s beginning to sound out letters. They teach them in pre-school.”

“So we know there was a struggle, or at least a change of plans,” I said, taking out my phone and snapping a few pictures. A little too dark, but I could lighten them in iPhoto.

Barbara cupped her forehead. She was still for a moment and I could almost see her grief, a thick field of smog wrapping her like a cloak, enveloping the air around her, and drowning out everything else. It was deep, honest. I felt like a rat for doubting her.

While there was still some light, I told her I wanted to explore the back yard, trying for the most gentle sound to my voice, and found a side door leading to the garden.

Outside the evening was beginning to cool and the back of the house was fenced and lovely, that time of year before mosquitos. It was a shade garden and small like most outdoor patches in the Heights. This one was neat and trim, with a miniature blue spruce in one corner, good spacing in between the plants, a potted blue oat grass, and some higher grasses I didn’t know the names of. In the middle was a small patch of grass, thick and newly mown, a Japanese maple on the other side, a few ferns, some alum root, lamb’s ear and a clump of lavender edging the beds. In the far corner, half hidden by the spruce, was a small tool shed where Mary Ward Simon must have kept the garden supplies. It was locked and Barbara said she didn’t have the key with her, so I made a note to return and get into that shed. I bent down to take a deep breath, but still smelled that faint odor of cordite. There were stones around the borders, a slate patio close to the house with a round glass-top table and chairs. It looked unused.

“She didn’t sit out here much,” Barbara said.

“Did your mother garden, too?”

“Only the roof garden.”

“So she must hire gardeners for this?”

She nodded. “But she has trouble keeping them.”

Someone had turned on a porch light across the way and a piece of metal on the ground glinted its presence. I walked over to the far end of the beds. I smelled the evening and newly mown grass and got a whiff of cordite again or maybe it was gasoline, I couldn’t tell which—the two seemed to go together. I saw that someone had been cultivating and pulling weeds and shone my flashlight on some garden tools and evidence of work. I walked over examining the edging. Not a good job, not at all. There were dead weeds in a barrow, garden implements with the dirt encrusted on them, pansies mixed in with dandelion weeds. “Whoever does her yard doesn’t know what he’s doing.” I crouched down smelling the pungent order of dying dandelions. Barbara was crying again and a big red flag was in my head. I remembered the boozy-breathed man this afternoon with bits of mown grass on his shoes. I thought of the sweater and the torn piece of book cover on the floor of the car and felt my skin prickle.

“Trust me, that’s not the way I’d go through the house if we had enough time.”

Barbara nodded and the doorbell rang. “Police!” someone yelled, as if I didn’t know.

At the moment, I still had a million questions to ask Barbara, but I sat with her in her mother’s living room, speaking in low tones and giving her a rundown of what I thought law enforcement had done so far and what to expect them to do here. When Denny saw me, he dropped his jaws and I got up and walked over to him.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“That’s Cookie’s line, you can’t have it.”

He wasn’t amused.

“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you later.”

“You weren’t watching where you were going?”

“Not exactly.” I cocked my head in Barbara’s direction, pulled him closer and whispered, “Charlie’s mother.”

“Oh my God.”

We walked over to Barbara and I introduced her to Denny and to Jane Templeton.

“Denny and I are lovers, Jane and I are not.”

Barbara started crying and laughing at the same time while they expressed their condolences and gave me sharp looks.

Afterward the tall detective took me aside and poured out a little of her venom. “You again? Let me guess, you’ve been traipsing all over this crime scene, you and the daughter, am I right?”

I hung my head and switched tunes. “Hold on. Who’s the only one feeding you information for all your huge AFIS and expensive forensic labs and help from the FBI and every single whoop-de-do law enforcement agency giving you a big fat squat nothing—no missing persons, no names, no nothing?”

In response to my hissy, she raised her voice good this time and that turned out to be a mistake. “This is a crime scene, missy, and you have no business here, none at all. I want you out of here, you and your raccoon eye, while I question the family, you hear me?”

“Excuse me,” Barbara said, coming over to where we stood. “I’m the family, all that’s left of it, and I’ve hired Ms. Fitzgibbons as my private investigator. I’m in corporate law, but many of my friends are criminal lawyers and if I understand the law correctly, my PI stays. I want her to have full access to this investigation, and that means all related documents and all crime sites. And if I don’t get my way, I know who to call. I’m the one who wanted to go through the house and she’s the one who’s wearing gloves and told me not to touch things, so she’s been helping you, but apparently you don’t know it. Furthermore, as a representative of the family, I expect all of you to respect my grief and refrain from raising your voices. And I expect full cooperation between all agencies. As a private citizen, Fina Fitzgibbons does enforce the law. Do I make myself clear?”

There was silence as I stared into Jane’s face, almost daring her to breathe fire, but she didn’t. Instead she stood there, looking a little deflated but impossible to read. She and her partner glanced at each other and I saw one corner of his mouth do a slight uptick.

She turned to me. “Good work. And I appreciate the information. What happened to your eye?”

I had to hand it to her. Jane’s about-face was smooth, a momentary flutter of her lids, but that was it.

Barbara said, “Here’s the front door key,” taking it off a key ring she’d gotten from somewhere while I was talking to Jane “and here’s the one to the shed.”

Jane rocked back and forth on splayed feet and looked at Barbara. “Someone from the FBI will be here within the hour to interview you about your son. We’ll want to hold a press conference soon, but right now we need you to identify your mother. Is there anyone else, a husband or close friend who could accompany you?”

She shook her head.

“Give me your keys, I’ll get your car while we’re gone,” I told her, and walked with her and Jane out to the front.

“Where is my mother’s body?”

“Twenty-six street?” I asked.

Jane nodded and answered Barbara’s question.

I might not know much about Barbara Simon, not yet, but I had to hand it to her. The upshot of it was Detective First Grade Jane Templeton, the darling of NYPD’s Bureau of Detectives, specifically the 84th precinct, seemed to shrink before my eyes. I turned and walked back into the yard, hoping to unlock the shed but already members of Jane’s team were swarming all over the garden, so I went to retrieve Barbara’s car.

When she returned from the morgue, I watched Jane park in back of the police van and waved to Cookie who was schmoozing with the onlookers, some of whom were the press, I assumed.

* * *

That evening, a press conference was broadcast from the steps of the courthouse. It was brief and impromptu, packed with equipment and reporters from local, network, and cable news. Photographers jockeyed to get the best pictures of all the brass in front of the mics. I waved to my friend at the
Eagle
. Flanked by FBI agents and NYPD officers, the commissioner announced a joint investigation into the murder of Mary Ward Simon and the abduction of her four-year-old grandson from a home in Brooklyn Heights. A murmur went up from the crowd when the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office spoke. Lights flashed and camcorders hummed. The NYPD bureau chief of detectives introduced Jane Templeton, who, together with her team, was working closely with the FBI. I thought I saw a slight pursing of Jane’s lips, but otherwise she showed little emotion as she spoke. She gave the approximate time and apparent cause of Mary Ward Simon’s death and asked for the public’s assistance in the swift return of Charlie, requesting anyone with any information to call a hot line set up by the FBI. Charlie’s photo was shown.