Too Quiet in Brooklyn (17 page)

Sometimes the boss sounded like thunder and Ralph could tell Charlie didn’t like the boss, so he went over and stood next to Marie. I heard her talking to him, nice and tender. She said that after his bath they’d go to the store and buy him clothes. Ralph heard her say that.

“Don’t take that kid anywhere, Marie. What’s wrong with you? The kid stays here and keep him the hell away from this office.”

“He needs clothes, Winston.”

The boss looked at Marie, but didn’t say anything, just stared at her until she said, “Whatever you say.”

He looked at Ralph, but talked to Marie. “You keep him until Ralph returns, right Ralph?”

Marie spoke soft to Charlie. She said he could ride the pony while he waited for his mom. She’d be coming for him soon. Charlie didn’t say anything, but he nodded once. She held out her hand, and Charlie took it. He didn’t look at Ralph. Charlie and Marie walked out of the room.

* * *

“Haven’t you left yet?” the boss asked when Ralph came back into his office.

Ralph told the boss he came back to say goodnight to Charlie.

Ralph told the boss he wanted Charlie back, and the boss said he was like a broken record.

“Been through this earlier.” The boss told him he could have Charlie just as soon as he finished the job, couldn’t do the job with Charlie hanging around, now, could he? The Feds would cut off his balls. Besides, Ralph does good when he does one thing at a time, he knew. Sometimes life is hard, that’s what Arrow told him, that’s what Arrow would have said if he was here and he must have gotten it from the boss because that’s what the boss told him, about how life was hard. He asked how soon Ralph could do the job and Ralph told him three, four days was all.

“Why so long?”

And Ralph told him he’d have to stalk her first, get her spooked, that was the way to do it. Arrow told him that. Get her spooked, not too crazy or she’ll go for cover, Arrow’s words and Arrow was smart about that. And he explained to the boss just the way Arrow said.

“That’s fine. Then come back here, don’t call me. No phones. And no blood. Got that?”

And Ralph told the boss not to worry, he didn’t use phones and he’d do her like he did the lamp. No blood.

Then the boss called for Harry.

The boss looked down at the newspaper spread out on his desk and turned the pages, licking his finger after each page turn while he waited for Harry, and when Harry came in, he waved his hand at Ralph like he was through talking to him, like he was a table in the room. It made Ralph mad, he could have squeezed the boss just like he did to Arrow, but Ralph wanted Charlie back and he thought of how kind Marie was and how she had smiled at him.

“Ralph needs fresh clothes, he smells like a diaper.”

“Gave him fresh clothes already,” Harry said. “And the key to the apartment and some cash, five thousand, just like you said. Told him to take a goddam shower so no one smells him coming down the block.”

“And make sure he’s driving a clean car, one the Feds can’t trace.”

Harry nodded a couple of times. “Better take the Audi then.”

Ralph said he’d do the job and come back for Charlie.

Friday

Phoebe Daligan

Early the next day, before we set out for New Jersey, I rang Mrs. Daligan’s bell. Let the tall curvy detective interview Hector Pool. Maybe he’d give her solid information like a license plate number or be able to identify Arrowsmith as one of the handymen he’d seen on College Place. But I needed to wrap my mind around Mary Ward Simon, the person, and for that, I needed to talk to her friends.

I remember my grandmother telling me that murder doesn’t happen all at once. That’s what her mother told her, the ancestor with my surname. It’s slow to start, begins way back in a person’s history, maybe in grade school or high school and smolders all that time before it pounces, doing a hot ugly burn. And I wanted to get to know the woman, her past, her reactions, so I’d be motivated in my bones to focus on finding her killer. That’s why I saved talking to Phoebe Daligan for myself. Because Phoebe Daligan was Mary Ward Simon’s friend, a friend from back in the day.

“I can’t believe she’s gone. This morning I looked on my calendar. ‘Call Mary’ was written in today’s square.” She teared up and paused a moment. “I relied so much on her, and through the years we’d become real friends.”

We sat in the parlor of Mrs. Daligan’s brownstone with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers, a view overlooking the promenade and Manhattan’s skyline, the green lady in the near distance, the tugs bossing garbage scows across the river. “How long had you known Mrs. Simon?”

“Mary? We go way back, way back. Let’s see, my husband and I moved here in 1966, newlyweds, and shortly after that the Simons moved next door. I’d say we weren’t even here a year—yes, must have been, because Lyndon Johnson was still president. I can remember the protests we used to have on the promenade, looking right out that window. I used to be so scared sometimes.”

This was all ancient history to me, but the neighbor, Mrs. Phoebe Daligan, got a misty-eyed, dazed look and left me just a little, so I let her talk when she was around and made allowances for her when she departed ever so slightly. I knew she’d return. Pencil thin, she wore a bright red cardigan sweater and a white silk blouse underneath. Pearls. Navy blue slacks. Probably lined. Dark red penny loafers, blue and red argyles, and a diamond on her ring finger that didn’t quit. Make-up perfect by seven in the morning. You know the look—Anglican, Mom called it. How can you tell, I asked her once, and she’d just smile, and say something like, wait until you’re my age, you’ll be able to tell whether a computer is Republican or Democrat.

But I took it slow and kept my mouth shut, remembering that the woman learned a few hours ago of her friend’s death. More than a neighborhood friend, I think, more like a dear friend. They’d been through a lot together, the antiwar years, husbands in the military about the same time, came back from Vietnam silent and vague and in need of therapy or maybe detox, but worked it off instead. They grew into their businesses about the same time, watched their children get schooled and marry, stood by each other during the desolated loss of their husbands to sudden coronaries, somehow grew up themselves, and of course held the horror of 9/11 together. She probably could see the twin towers collapsing out her picture window. But Phoebe Daligan wore her grief well, her lifted complexion giving little away. I could tell she’d been crying, though, the loss beginning to show below the eyes, the thin, blue-gray pallor a giveaway.

“We chaired the Women’s Christian Ministry of Care. She was the chair last year and I’m it this year and I needed her advice about one of my fund-raising ideas. Now I’ll not get it.”

She stopped talking, but I didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“Not that she was the fund-raising type. Shy, with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a finely tuned, well-organized mind. She cooked dinner like she crunched numbers, she used to say.”

“You can tell by the way she kept her house,” I said, making small talk and wishing I hadn’t interrupted because there was a lull, because the woman’s well ran dry or her spirit flitted away again, at least for a moment or two. She looked around the room with appraising eyes, saw a crystal bowl out of place and adjusted it.

“Nothing out of order in her house, just like yours. Not a mote of dust. A place for everything,” I said, repeating myself but hoping to stoke the fire.

“And yet she was human. Fell to pieces when her husband died a few years ago. She took to drinking too much. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Mary Ward Simon, a lush? Course I think I was the only one who knew. She hid it well.”

I nodded, scribbling, keeping my head down.

“But you don’t blame her, not with that daughter. She told me after Mel died her world of perfect upper middle-class family, of carefully contrived numbers, of spotless rooms artfully decorated in simple but pleasing tones—her words, mind—her world tumbled into the slime of landfills.”

I wondered if she’d seen the transformation of the Fresh Kills landfill, but I kept my mouth shut and let her continue.

“And her daughter didn’t help. No love for her mother, none at all. Had a mind of her own, even as a baby. Those were the desolate years for her—her words—the late nineties. Little wonder. We didn’t see much of her after Mel died, we were a couple and she wasn’t, and you know how that is.”

I didn’t have a clue, but I nodded, all sympathetic, keeping my jaws clamped and letting the fires of her memory stoke themselves. I’d struck a little piece of gold, about the drinking, I mean. It was a chink in the dead woman’s armor. It made her human. Well, at least more like me. Not so much the drinking, but the flaw. I scribbled what Phoebe Daligan had said, my writing hand beginning to cramp. One of these days I’ll get a digital recorder, but they’re so off-putting, so inhuman, I just haven’t done it. Besides, I think my brain doesn’t function without a pen.

“She said she came home from Mel’s funeral and wrapped herself around a bottle of scotch and stayed there for a year. Working at the time, too. I don’t know how she pulled herself out of it, but I’ve learned a thing or two about grief, not that I understand it, mind, or like it. I hate it, it’s a foul, disgusting monster that takes, takes, takes. But it has its masks. I found that out a couple of years after Mary did when my husband died and I had to get more involved in the church. You see, I don’t have children and I’ve never worked, never had to, and now I’ve lost a true friend. I put too much of myself into that friendship and damned if she didn’t leave me.”

She pulled out a hankie and blew her nose and a blob of booger stuck on her face, smack dab on her right cheek, so I lowered my head, flipping through pages like I was lost in my notes and let the blood rush to my face.

Finally I felt for the woman sitting opposite me. “You might want to use some more tissues,” I said. “Can I get a box of them for you?”

She must have felt the foreign body on her face because she looked stricken and her handkerchief found it, scrubbing at her booger-spotted face as if she were polishing silver, her cheeks and forehead almost as red as her sweater, but the tears began to flow.

“Sometimes I’m so lonely. Sometimes … I’m so frightened. … I follow Mary, you see. That’s the way it’s always been. Her husband got drafted, then mine did. She became pregnant, then I did, though nothing came of it. Mel died, then my husband. Now she’s dead.”

Nothing I could say to that, except how sorry I felt for her, and I was, but I knew from bitter experience that the more you say sorry to a griever, the more phony it sounds. Prose holds little comfort, poetry does, if it’s not the rhyming kind. But, listen to me, as if I’m the expert when I don’t know squat. So I looked at the runners on the promenade while she walked out of the room. Damn if I wasn’t an unfeeling bitch. In a few minutes she returned, apologizing, her face back on, but I could feel her sinuses throbbing.

“I’m such a bad hostess, I haven’t even offered you coffee. Please have something, won’t you? I have those cups filled with coffee grounds—no muss, no fuss, a new brand, too, made in Brooklyn somewhere.”

I declined, telling her how sweet she was for offering, and asking, “What kind of work did Mrs. Simon do?” As if I didn’t know.

“Something with numbers. Numbers and audits. She worked most of her adult life. She worked for one of the huge companies. After she retired, she told me they started calling her again. Commanded a good fee, too. Mary said numbers for her were like weeding in the garden.”

I waited, hoping there was more.

“The last time I talked to her she spoke about an audit that had been going on for years. On and off, she said. And now she’d been put back on. The state or the feds or someone big wanted her involved. And she’d discovered something about … I think it was a bank, not the whole thing, but a special section of the bank or a division or something. She said, and I remember her saying it, ‘This is the payoff for me, the culmination of a job suddenly stopped’—that’s what she said—something about, ‘Finally my work is rewarding. I’d suspected it for years, thought I’d never know the end of the story, and now I’d gotten the request to get in there and dig around,’ I remember her saying it just that way, too.”

“You mean like that old guy in the Bible, what’s his name.”

“Simeon. Exactly. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’”

I knew it. She had to be Anglican or Catholic or Methodist, one of those. “When did you have this conversation, Mrs. Daligan?”

“Phoebe, please. Recently. Last week, I think it was. Yes, because I’d called and asked if she’d like to go to dinner, and she said she’d love to, but couldn’t. And she told me why, she was working on this project.”

“Did she tell you the name of the bank?”

“She did, but … I just can’t seem to remember it. I can see it on Montague. It’s not there anymore, but it had an eagle or something over the door, floor to ceiling windows, red brick, quite lovely, one of those historic buildings. A local bank, that’s for sure, but I remember they used to advertise. Isn’t that funny, I can see it, but can’t think of the name. They made the building into co-ops, I think.”

“Heights Federal Bank,” I said, feeling grim.

“That’s it. Thank you. Mary said this one will be really fulfilling because she was pulled off the audit some years back. Why, she didn’t know. And she said they hurt a lot of people and let all the good execs go.”

My heart did one of those somersault leaps, the kind that plunge way down into the stomach and fly up into the nostrils.

“Mary said lots of people had lost their homes because of that bank. She said they gave loans to people who never should have qualified. As I say, I don’t know that much about the business world, nothing about banking, but I’d never heard her talk like that. Mary was always polite, had a genteel view of the world. But she said that one man in particular, an officer at Heights Federal, he was responsible for signing off on most of the suspect loans—her words, again—a Mr. … who was it—keep me talking, I’ll think of his name in a minute—some big shot in the borough. She said he made millions out of the bad loans, taking bribes, charging more than he should have, and cooking the books. He disappeared one day soon after the bank closed. Oh, God, why can’t I think of his name? I hate it when my mind goes blank. Anyway, Mary told me that a lot of people lost their jobs, they’re still out of work, but he just walked away from it—no story about him, no reporter on his tail, no nothing. Came out smelling like a rose, she said. Got into horse breeding in the country or something. But then they always do, don’t they?”