Whiskey’s Gone (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 3) (24 page)

He stopped, stroked his name tag, staring into the distance as if calling back the years. “Berringer’s old man owned a car wash called Sharkey’s someplace around here, near Ocean Parkway, I think. Arthur worked there for a time, but Arthur was a drifter. In and out, now you see him, now you don’t. Anyways, Berringer owned a lot more than that, though. Met with an untimely end.”

“Who met with an untimely end?”

“The both of them. Two, three years ago. Father and son, within a month of each other. Old man found at his desk, bullet down his gullet, a real mess. His wife maintained it wasn’t suicide, but you know women. My wife read me their obit, ‘What did I tell you, Zeno, they were trouble, the both of them, I was right from the beginning.’ That’s what she said, so you see when I tell you, I pay attention when she talks. Son’s body found three or four weeks later in the car wash, his dead ass peeking out from between two of the brushes.”

I looked over at Cookie, remembering something I’d read in Whiskey’s journal about a guy named Berringer.

“You need to sit down,” she said.

At least I think that’s what she said. The words from Whiskey’s journals were flying around my brain. I was beginning to put it all together and Cookie knows me, she knows how I get sometimes. Anyway, all I knew at this point was I needed to think. The words, Ocean Parkway and Arthur figured prominently in my thoughts, along with Berringer’s name.

Sharkey's Car Wash

“Let’s find a coffee shop, somewhere she can sit for a while,” Denny said.

So we rounded up Brandy’s group and together we walked along Surf Avenue until we found a diner. Before we sat down, I asked the hostess if she knew where we could find a car wash called Sharkey’s.

She looked at me like I’d gone round the moon.

“Al, you ever heard of a Sharkey’s car wash?” she yelled into the restaurant.

“Near the elevated on Brighton Beach Avenue, but I think it’s closed.”

“Moved to Mermaid Avenue a long time ago,” someone else shouted. “Made too much noise for the neighbors or something.”

That started a heated discussion in the kitchen, and a man wearing a chef’s hat emerged. “Not on Mermaid, Sharkey’s moved to one of those side streets near Ocean Parkway, but whatever, it was torn down a while ago. Fire or something.”

“Do you know who owned it?”

They shook their heads.

My stomach started its churning. Denny’s good at sensing my mood, so he threw an arm around my shoulder. I thanked the man. “Got to go.”

“But we haven’t eaten!” Clancy protested.

“You’ve had three dogs and enough Coke to drown a rat,” Cookie said. “You can wait.”

Clancy grinned and kissed her. So much for Cookie’s fears.

“I got to take a leak,” Johnny said.

More delay, but it gave me time to think. I turned to Denny. “Do you know anything about selling paint to the city? Whiskey mentioned it in her diary. It was one of Arthur’s schemes.” I got out the journal and showed him the page.

He shook his head. “Hard to sell to the city. Got to be bonded and insured. Besides, there’s not much money in it. Or there shouldn’t be, unless there’s some kind of scam going on.”

“Got to know somebody,” Clancy said. “Oldest trick in the books. Goes back to Boss Tweed.”

“You mean, phony invoicing and keeping two sets of books?” I asked.

Denny shrugged. “We don’t want to go there.”

I crossed my arms. “Unless it takes us to Whiskey.” A cold wind swept through my heart remembering Heights Federal and the scam Mom was caught up in before she died.

“Gotta pee,” another one of Brandy’s friends said.

After more delay, we got in the van and headed into the usual traffic.

“What are we looking for?”

“A car wash,” Brandy said. “Dumb, if you ask me.”

Cookie turned around and faced Brandy’s kids. “When Fina’s like this, it’s best to follow her lead.”

There was a hush in the back as I explained what I’d discovered from reading Whiskey’s journal.

“Mom was right,” Heather said. “She told me to keep a journal.”

“What for?” someone asked.

“Be quiet.”

I told them about Brighton Beach, where Whiskey had grown up, pointing out Abraham Lincoln on Ocean Parkway, where she went to high school. I told them about Arthur’s friend Berringer, probably the same guy whose father owned a car wash in Brighton Beach, both of them now dead, according to Zeno. While I talked, we rode up and down the side streets surrounding the Q line’s Ocean Parkway stop, looking for whatever remained of Sharkey’s.

“In one journal, Whiskey wrote about one of Arthur’s schemes. Seems Arthur and his friend Berringer—the one whose father owned a car wash—had a warehouse together.”

“What does Sharkey’s look like?” Heather asked.

“Boring, if you ask me. It’s almost noon, and we’ve wasted the whole day and I haven’t started my homework.” That from one of Brandy’s friends.

“We spotted Arthur again, didn’t we?” Brandy asked.

“But then he disappeared.”

“So what’s new?” Heather asked.

Lots of elbowing and moving going on in the back. Whispering I didn’t get.

“Shut up, Kit.”

She was twirling a braid around a finger, her head cocked to one side.

“Your last name Rosanova?”

“How did you know?”

“Met your mom last night. She’s worried about Whiskey and her child, so I’m glad you’re here.”

Silence.

On the second or third time around, we found a plywood fence surrounding what looked like the remains of a fairly large building.

Clancy said we’d never find parking, so he squeezed into the hydrant space near a boarded-up corner on Brighton Beach Avenue, sticking a Police Official Business sign on his windshield.

I swiveled to the backseats and said, “We follow leads, no matter how far out they seem. Sometimes it’s a blind alley. Other times we reach out and grab and come away with nothing. But it’s not a waste. We’re going to find Whiskey, hold onto that thought. And I’ve got a hunch.”

“That boarded-up hole in the street is a hunch?” someone asked.

We left our jackets in the car, stumbled out, and walked across the street to a place partially boarded up with plywood. The sun glinted off shards of glass as we peered down a large hole filled with debris and a slew of seagulls, too many to count, squawking and nipping at all kinds of paper, flying away, circling overhead.

“There’s part of a sign or something,” Brandy said. “I see an A, a K, and an E. Could be “Sharkey’s.”

“Or not.”

I let them talk. This was what remained of Sharkey’s all right. I felt it in my bones, and the surrounding smell along with some of the charred remains told me there’d been a fire. Just then, there was a voice behind me.

“Told my wife this place was interesting. So much life here, I told her, but she didn’t believe me. Said I was wasting my time staring into a pit.”

You could tell the guy had shrunk two sizes by the way his coat fit—it was dragging on the ground. And he wore a ski cap hitched on top of two red ears. He looked up at me, squinting with rheumy eyes through thick glasses. “Yessir, come here every day.”

“Do you know the owner?” I asked, pointing to what was left of the car wash.

“Berringer. Heavy into real estate, anything that makes the green stuff.”

“And where can I find Berringer?”

He shook his head. “Around here somewhere. Look in the phone book.”

I texted Lorraine and asked her to get background on the Berringer family, including an address. But as I looked at the man, a warm feeling went through me—we’d discovered the neighborhood mouth.

When Clancy asked what had happened, the neighbor guy told us there’d been a big fire. “Middle of the night I woke up, smelled something burning, and watched shadows dancing on the walls. Our bedroom looks out onto the street, you see, and there were fire engines and water and flames. I thought it was the bad one himself come to fetch us both. Get dressed, Greta, I says, but my wife, she’s smarter than me. She doesn’t visit an abandoned hole for amusement. Instead, she stays inside and reads all day long and tells me what I’ve missed. Says I should read something about water and elephants. She says I’d relate.”

The way he went on, his mouth going up and down with a slight drool to it and hardly stopping at the end of sentences, you’d think he was related to Zeno.

“How long ago was the fire?” Denny asked.

He shrugged and I watched as the hem of his coat lifted off the cement. “Last year sometime. Or maybe it was the year before. We didn’t mind, because we’d sold the car. Let’s see, that was a while ago, wasn’t it? It was before Sandy.”

The man was having a time problem, but I concentrated on what he was saying. You never know what crumbs you might pick up. From the edge of my vision, I glimpsed Brandy’s group getting restless. Brandy had hoisted herself onto the sides of her shoes straining to see into the pit. Next to her, Johnny was pointing to something.

“Sharkey’s was convenient, you know, but the neighbors without cars had been trying to get rid of the place for a long time. Don’t blame them. Shouldn’t have been in a residential area. To get a permit, they must have paid someone off.”

While he was going on about what he’d had for breakfast and what we should be eating and the location of the best restaurants—that in response to one of Clancy’s questions—I turned my attention to Brandy’s group. They were staring into the hole, but something was wrong, I could tell, because Brandy was bending deeper into the pit and waving.

After we said goodbye to the neighbor, we walked over to an opening in the plywood, where Heather stood pointing to something in the pit about fifty feet from where we stood. I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Brandy, asking to borrow my binoculars. She said Johnny found something weird inside the hole and climbed down for a better look.

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

As I handed Brandy the binoculars, I yelled for Johnny to get back up and fast.

“He thinks he sees an elbow sticking out of the dirt, but knowing Johnny, it’s just his imagination,” she said.

“I see part of an arm,” Kit said. “And it’s wearing a shirt like Arthur’s.”

I felt a sharp pain in my forehead. If anything happened to Brandy or to her friends, I’d never forgive myself.

I waved and yelled some more. Finally Johnny obeyed.

“I fought a seagull for this,” he said, as he scrambled up the pit. He held up a bent card, kelly green on one side. “It was in the dirt next to the elbow.”

I rounded up Brandy and her friends and told them that crime scenes were sacred, out of bounds and never should be touched.

“Not that she follows what she says,” Cookie said.

Denny nodded. “But you could have been hurt, so don’t ever do that again.”

“Or my mom will sue,” Brandy said.

I recognized what was in Johnny’s hand, a Brooklyn Public Library card. I took it from him and read the faded and smudged signature. It was scrawled by someone who didn’t use cursive all that much, but I was able to make out the name, Arthur McGirdle. I swallowed, and Denny, who stood next to me the whole time I was talking to the kids, put a protective arm around my shoulders. Peering down, he asked, “Does this Arthur guy wear a flannel shirt?”

I looked through the binoculars, focusing on the form sticking out from beneath the pile of rubble. From the elbow, I traveled from side to side, spotting the back, the shoulders, the neck and head at right angles to the body. It was Arthur, a broken Arthur. Poor Arthur. My stomach traveled to my mouth as I pulled out my iPhone and began taking pictures.

Before I could move my eyes from the corpse, Cookie’s phone chimed.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said into the speaker. “I met you once and you’re calling me? How did you get this number? Anyway, I’m studying for a test, got to go,” she added, crossing her fingers, and hung up. She told me the call was from Zizi. “They got a tip at the
Eagle
to look for a body in a pit near Mermaid Avenue.”

I turned to Denny. “Why so fast? Arthur’s body’s not yet cold?”

“My guess is whoever killed him was a hired gun,” Clancy said, putting his arm around Cookie. “He wanted his boss to know about it as soon as it happened, so what better way than to call the press and have them announce it?”

“Clancy’s trying for the organized crime unit,” Cookie said, smiling up at him.

They were hugging again while Brandy’s group gaped at them. And such a romantic spot, too. I shooed a gull away and crossed my arms, squinting up into Denny’s face.

“Don’t look at me, I’ve barely seen Zizi since last week.”

I said nothing.

“She’s after me all the time, but not because of my sexy body. She thinks I’m going to give her tips. All she cares about is her job, you know that, or at least you should. And no, I don’t call Zizi Carmalucci, not now, not ever, even though she’s been begging me and my dad—”

“All I know is Zizi is well connected. God and everyone is feeding her information,” I said. My skin prickled, my head pounded. I had a group of kids who were like loose cannons, and my prime suspect lay in a pit in Brighton Beach. How was I ever going to find Whiskey? My mind flashed to Maddie. Her mother was probably lying in the morgue, a charred mess, her teeth being poked and prodded, and what little bit of father she had was lying in a Coney Island pit.

As luck would have it, my phone vibrated. It was Jane Templeton.

“So when were you going to tell me your suspect is lying in a pit?”

“I’m standing here with my mouth open, staring at what looks like an elbow in the middle of a crumbling foundation on Mermaid Avenue, my stomach churning, trying to place the limb, thinking it might even belong to Arthur McGirdle. But I can’t be sure, not without climbing down into the hole and traipsing through the crime scene, so I hesitated, but I was just about to call you.”

Suddenly I realized it must have been Jane feeding Zizi and vice versa. They had a hotline to each other, and Denny didn’t have anything to do with it. I gulped, looking at him and wondering how I could have doubted him—I’m such a loser. So I had to ask her. “Does your slippery mole have a smile like the wedge of a lemon and the biggest set you’d ever want to see?”