Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) (23 page)

Chapter 46

Fina. Morning Three, A Meeting

“Did I tell you Lorraine is now freelancing for me?”

Denny stopped shaving.

“She’s reading briefs, getting into Trisha’s and Mitch’s old cases, searching for suspects.”

“Does Dad know?”

I shrugged, then started to laugh. “Not my problem, now, is it?”

His smile was a little lopsided. “Thanks for warning me.”

After promising I’d keep in touch because he worries about me on his days off, I kissed him goodbye and walked to the car, punching in Tig’s number. “Got anything yet?”

“Nada.”

There was a long pause, which I tried to heighten by wafting as much fear and angst over the ether as I could muster. But Tig and I had worked together for too long, and he was wise to my ways.

“What do you want?”

I told him about Joe Catania, his probable connection to Mitch Liam’s death, and his just-maybe relationship with Brandy Liam’s disappearance, and—

“And you want to talk to him?”

“But I can’t because you won’t tell me where he is?”

“Even if I knew his location—which I don’t—I couldn’t reveal it to you. The guy’s gone into witness protection. No one’s supposed to know where he is, only one or two folks, and any addition to that number would be a breach of security.”

I said nothing.

“Tell me you understand.”

I let the silence linger before I answered. “Of course I do, but you owe me big time. Don’t forget that huge surveillance job I did for you two months ago—three days in a cold room overlooking Prospect Park, tits frozen, no latrine, and the guy who was supposed to relieve me was a no-show. I just thought you might want to seize the opportunity.”

“I still owe you? What have I been feeding you for the past month?”

“You’ve got to admit you’ve been giving me pretty thin gruel on the Brandy Liam disappearance, and you’ve not been exactly forthcoming, either.”

I know my Tig. I knew I’d gotten a toehold into him, but I had to sling it to him fast. “Okay, so maybe this isn’t such a small request, but you know I wouldn’t be asking if a child’s life didn’t depend on my finding out who took her, and finding it out fast. And so far, I have nothing except a vague description of a runner who may or may not have anything to do with her nab, and a wiggling tarpaulin and a van with no tags that’s just disappeared from sight. It has to be somewhere, but we’re not sophisticated enough to find it.”

That last one about the van was a low blow, I’ll admit it.

There was a long, bitter sigh from Tig’s end. “All right, give me ten or fifteen. I’ll make some calls, see what I can find out, and take you to see him. But I know your mouth—no talking unless I give the signal. And you’d better put a scarf around those red curls. Shades on those baby blues wouldn’t hurt either. I’ll text when I’m out in front.”

In half an hour we were cruising down Fourth Avenue in Tig’s big black SUV, red strobes bleeping cars out of our way when we neared stoplights. When the building came into view, ugly and unmistakable, I said, “The Metropolitan Detention Center? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“He’s hidden in plain sight, but in a special wing. I don’t think any of the regular guards know where it is. Got his own bodyguards twenty-four seven.”

“Can he have visitors?”

Tig shrugged. “Family types, you mean? I don’t think so. He’s got watchers, of course.”

“Watchers?”

“You know. Good watchers, bad watchers, watchers up the old highway—surveillance types, electronic watchers. He can’t scratch his balls, can’t click on a mouse but what he doesn’t have a watcher on his tail. Might as well have electrodes growing out of every single hair follicle. The guy’s paranoid and has every right to be crazed.”

“You mean he’s afraid of the Feds?”

“No, I mean he’s afraid of the mob. They’re after him.”

As we walked from the parking lot, Tig went on. “He’s in Brooklyn this month, as luck would have it. They keep moving him to different safe havens around the country. Part of the deal. No schedule, they move him where he says, when he says. And when he’s in the New York area, he wants to be in prison, his choice. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. He could meet his nemesis anywhere. Anytime. And don’t think it hasn’t happened to other guys in the program.”

“In Italy, I guess, they find prisoners poisoned from a laced cappuccino, but not here.”

“Not unusual to find prisoners swinging from the ceiling here. Have you ever wondered why? No, I wouldn’t want to be Joe Catania, not on your life. I’d be jumping off the nearest bridge.”

Tig and I showed IDs and signed in. We had to wait for clearance, which took a good twenty minutes, but finally we were ushered through a maze of doors, heavy bars clanking behind us as we trudged to a room on the lower level. Nothing special, it had a long table, some chairs, two steel doors leading to who knew where.

As we waited for Catania to appear, Tig reminded me to button up while he did the talking, at least at first.

“You mean our usual routine?”

He nodded. “Don’t say anything unless you have to. Let’s see, we want to hear what Catania can tell us about Mitch Liam’s death, since in some obscure way it may have something to do with his daughter’s abduction. That about it?”

“You got it.”

In a while, Joe Catania came into the room, flanked by two bodyguards. As he sat, I heard a whoosh of stale air. It smelled like distilled body odor from a thousand small towns at midnight.

Catania rubbed the cleft of his chin. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The man still had a little smirk left in him, but I could tell he was a beaten soul, a guy running from himself, not sure where he’d been, unsure of his destination except that it was away from wherever he was. In short, he was a fugitive soul. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he knew little else and cared less about it, although he’d probably been hiding out in at least twenty states in the last six months. Tig told me his wife and children had been moved to a city in Northern California to be closer to the wife’s sister. He had about as much chance of seeing them ever again as walking down Court Street during the day.

I recognized him from pictures I’d seen in the
Times
and
Eagle
,
but he’d lost a lot of weight. He was dressed in jeans, gray sweater, a striped shirt grimy at the cuffs. He hadn’t shaved in a while.

“When was the last time you saw your wife and children?” Tig asked.

The man swiped a palm across his eyes but said nothing.

“The reason I ask is, you could be dead, really dead in about five minutes if you weren’t in protection.”

Catania shrugged. “So?” The word came out of his mouth like it was pushed up from some cavern in hell.

“So … nothing really,” Tig said. “But when we have a question or two, like we do now, we want you to give it your special consideration.”

I admired Tig’s technique but couldn’t imitate it. I learned at Brown’s that we must develop our own interrogation style, that it comes from someplace deep inside and is unique, and if we try to mimic others, we’ll fail. Tig was Tig, a combination of Mr. Tough and Mr. Clean.

“What’s your question?” Catania asked.

Tig told him why we were visiting.

“Give me a break.” Catania glanced at me for the first time and shot me a crooked smile.

Face it, I must have looked a sight in shades and scarf, like a charwoman from the 1950s pretending to be a movie star. “We want to know about Mitch Liam. His daughter’s been kidnapped.”

“Mitch who?”

Tig sent me a keep-your-trap-shut look. “You remember him—sandy hair, wry smile, wore a signature suit and bow tie, rain or shine, snow or shit. He was going to defend you against a racketeering charge, couple of years ago.”

Catania sat back and crossed his arms. “Ratted on me.”

“Not ratted. Reneged.”

He leaned forward. “Ratted on me. Went back on his word. Said he’d defend me, and then he didn’t. Excused himself, isn’t that what they say?”

“Maybe he found out that your hands weren’t as clean as you made out they were.”

“So?”

“What about the charge? Were you guilty?”

He shrugged. “Following orders.”

Tig looked at me. It was my turn to come up with something, and I knew hearts and flowers wasn’t going to do it. I straightened my sunglasses. “Mitch recused himself from the case, and that afternoon he was dead. Gone in half a heartbeat, like this.” I snapped my fingers. “One minute here, the next minute not. He heard tick but not tock.”

I could see shock in the shadowy part of his face. Catania ran a finger back and forth through the stubble beneath his nose as if he were sawing off his mouth. “Might happen to me too, that’s what you’re saying. Like I don’t know it? You want to scare me. You want me to swallow your line, don’t you? Might take my kid? You’ll have to do better than that. Why don’t you just ask me?” He looked around the room, up to the ceiling, under the table, underneath the chairs. The man was spooked.

“What happened to his girl?” Tig asked.

“How should I know? Don’t know nothin’ about his family. Been in protection.”

Tig and I were silent, maybe five minutes.

“Want to know about two years ago, I can tell you that.” Catania did the sawing-off thing again with his finger. “Don’t know anything about his daughter, but back then there were lots of guys gunning for Mitch—wiseguys. Mitch had lost a bunch of cases before mine. They thought he was in league with the Feds. Called him a two-faced rat. Throwing them deliberate, they said, beginning to know too much. Taking himself off my case was the last straw.” He spun his eyes around the room and rested them on the door.

“So what happened?” Tig asked, his voice low.

“Word on the street is Mitch Liam died for his sins.”

“How?”

“How should I know? They got rid of him.”

“You know how.”

Catania shrugged. “Mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for us to answer, but got out a pack of Camels and some matches and one of those portable ashtrays. It was the flat, coated kind, silver over cardboard. He folded it into shape and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“Heard they found this guy, see, a weird bastard—a nurse or medical technician, one of those. Promised a no fuss, no muss deal. So they hired him, and the guy stuck Mitch with a needle full of something, and that was it.”

“His name?”

He blew smoke over his shoulder. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Might be baloney, but why would they make it up?”

“Can you tell us what this needle man looks like?”

Catania shook his head, squashed the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray, and lit another.

“If he stuck Mitch, he could do it again,” Tig said.

Catania crossed his legs and hunched into himself, the fingernail of his forefinger tapping against a front tooth. He straightened. “Okay. Saw him once in the boss’s office. Thin. Average height. Light hair.” He puffed and let the smoke out slow, watching it curl toward the ceiling. “Bald spot on the crown of his head, airy fairy type. Can’t figure what hole they dug him out of.”

“And now someone’s taken his little girl,” I said. “You have a little girl, don’t you, Joe? Think how hard it must be on the mother. She loses her husband, and two years later, she loses her daughter.”

“She’s a bitch, Liam’s wife.”

“How do you know? You’ve never met her, have you?” I asked.

“You pick stuff up. Like, I think I heard about the kid. News travels.” He pinched tobacco bits off his tongue. “Don’t expect me to feel for Mitch’s old lady. And anyhow, what’s this needle guy have to do with his kid?”

“Maybe nothing. But nothing is all we got. And if bad things happened to Mitch and then they happen to Liam’s daughter? They might be connected.”

“Mob wouldn’t have anything to do with a nab like that. Too risky. Got easier ways of making money.”

“But maybe the needle guy is freelancing for someone else. Maybe he’s on another job, involved in Brandy’s abduction,” Tig said. “Picture it. A teenager with a mouth like the Grand Canyon and lungs the size of garbage cans. One second she’s in front of school and then, zap, she’s not. Nabbed. No screams, no nothing. How did it happen so fast if she wasn’t drugged on the spot?”

Catania crushed his cigarette, looked at his empty pack, and wadded it up. “You got nothing, and you’re fishing. You want more? I’ll give you more. The boss picked up this guy in Jersey someplace. Hear tell he was fired for giving patients the wrong meds or too much of it—how should I know? So the guy needs a job, he puts the word out, and decides to freelance. Clever. Mean. Strikes and leaves no trace. Deadly type, a snake if there ever was one. That’s all I got on him. The boss’ll use him again if he has to, but not a lot. Wants to save him for someone bigger this time. Now I’ve told you enough, and that’s it.” Joe Catania made a slicing motion across his neck.

The meeting was over, and I knew it.

“You believe him?” Tig asked as we walked toward his car. “About Needle Man?”

“Yes,” I said, surprising myself. “But maybe it’s because it’s so tempting to think there’s a connection, however tenuous, between Mitch’s death and Brandy’s disappearance, something sinister going on when we have next to nothing.”

“Don’t say that.”

We walked on.

“Can I take this scarf off? It’s hot as hell.”

“And blow your cover?” Tig shook his head. “Not supposed to bring you here, you know that.”

“There’s got to be something here, some truth that’s niggling at us. I feel it.”

“Don’t run away with yourself. There doesn’t have to be a connection, but there could be.”

“Jane’s team canvassed the Packer Collegiate neighborhood. So did Cookie. We found one woman who saw a wedge of something, that’s it. Do you have any other sources in the neighborhood?”

Tig shook his head. “No one credible. Just a homeless guy with Tourette’s who feeds us information from time to time.”

I told Tig I thought I knew who he meant. “I saw him boxing with himself in the early morning hours yesterday near where I found Brandy’s slipper. I didn’t think he’d have any information, so I didn’t stop to question him. How stupid am I?” I made a note to talk to him.