Brooklyn Legacies Page 5

  He claimed not to be lonely or need company but that was, I’d come to realize, not even close to true. I could usually pry open his memory by being there and listening with admiration. The admiration was real. The food I bring helps prime the pump.

  I called, expecting his usual grumbling and ready to ask if he’d like pasta or Chinese tonight.

  “Not tonight, kiddo. Not convenient.”

  “Do you have a sports-watching date with my dad?” They had developed an unlikely friendship that made me uncomfortable. They’d met through me, so I had only myself to blame. “Is it football season already?”

  I could feel him smiling right through the phone. “Do you think he is my only friend?”

  Yes, I did think exactly that. He was not exactly a friendly guy.

  “It’s a surprise that you have any old friends. So can I quick, ask you what you know about Brooklyn Heights history about mid-twentieth-century?”

  “You been reading up on it? Neighborhood papers? I wrote most of those articles.” He sounded insulted. “Covered the whole story of the establishment of the historic district and after. Course I was no more than a kid at the time. The Moses plans, building the promenade, the whole deal. On and off. You know, there were always disagreements. Very politically aroused, those rehabbing brownstoners were then. I believe the current term is ‘woke.’”

  “How the heck did you know that?”

  “You underestimate me.”

  “Did you ever meet Louisa Gibbs? She was an important leader in…”

  “Are you kidding? Yes, I know who she is. I knew her, too, and still do. No one better. You couldn’t miss her, covering that beat! We are having dinner tonight.”

  “No!”

  “We do that a couple times a year. Like I said, I knew her well, back then.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Are you saying, ‘Tell me about the old days, Grandpa?’”

  “You bet.”

  “Yeah, OK. She was a force of nature. Seriously. Lit up a crowd. It was, some of it was, family pride, I guess, but she was clear about what makes a neighborhood and why it mattered to her. Turned out, it mattered to a lot of people.”

  “You liked her!” He didn’t like many people.

  “To tell the truth, I never met anyone like her, then or since. You want to join us for dinner? Can’t talk more now. Got to run.” He chuckled as he was putting the phone down. He had lost a leg to diabetes, and there was no running in his life. It was what he called “cripple humor,” the kind of joke he could make but any other person had better not even try. You’d regret it.

  As to Louisa, I’d call her back as soon as I had a minute to check on her She had sounded shaky, not at all like Louisa the famous activist.

  As it turned out it was almost lunchtime before I had that moment to breathe. The number I called rang and rang, but no one picked up, and no answering machine answered. I thought it was her house phone, but I had another number, too. A cell? She had a cell phone?

  When she answered, and I asked her that, she snapped, “Do you think I live in the Dark Ages?”

  I was glad she could not see my embarrassed face. I very tentatively asked how she was doing.

  “Outraged. That is how I am right now. Those cops insisted I come to the precinct today. I am outside now, waiting for a car to take me there. “

  “Did you reach someone? Dr. Kingston? Or do you at least have your aide—is it Sierra?—with you?”

  “What? Am I a child?” The real Louisa was definitely back. “I can handle a few questions without a babysitter.” She was back and then some.

  I looked at the clock. I had my car, I had some time for lunch, I knew where the precinct was and had a few shortcuts to get over there. I had learned some useful things from my dad, the retired cabbie.

  Big breath. “Would you like me to meet you there? To have another set of eyes and ears?”

  There was a long silence. “If you want to.” Another silence. “Do you doubt I can still manage a few wet-behind-the-ears civil servants on my own? You forget I battled Robert Moses.”

  How did she know the cops were young? Oh, of course. To her, everyone was young. I wondered why she was so belligerent.

  I zipped over to the precinct and found her in the reception area.

  “After they insisted I come here, they are not ready for me. What rudeness!” Her face was set and angry, but her eyes were something else. “And this coffee is vile.”

  “I can’t help that, but I might have a cookie in my purse.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Before I found it, we had a man in plain clothes in front of us. And yeah, he certainly did look like a kid disguised in a suit.

  “Mrs. Gibbs, thank you for coming in. I’m Detective Kahn. I’ll take you back to meet Sergeant Torres.”

  When I stood up, too, he said, ”Your lawyer? Really, you did not need one. You are only here to give us some more information.”

  “She’s not a lawyer, she’s a friend. She is here to help me.”

  “No. We need to have privacy for this. No distractions.”

  She stopped and planted her cane firmly on the worn linoleum. “Then I’m not going anywhere. I am far too old to be subjected to this without some moral support.” She looked as stubborn as she sounded. That is, until he turned away for a moment, and she winked at me. “If I had a health aide with me, you’d let her in, wouldn’t you? Or a service animal?”

  He’d been outgunned. He didn’t say another word, just silently motioned us both to follow him.

  Sergeant Torres was a mature woman, older than me. My immediate impression was that she was tall and attractive and that she dressed drably, gray slacks, plain buttoned business shirt, dark blazer. Blond hair pinned into a tight bun. Was she trying to hide her good looks while on the job?

  Louisa spoke up immediately. “Why on earth did you drag me here? Those threatening letters? You could have come to me. This is not supportive. It feels like I am the one being questioned.”

  The two detectives exchanged looks, and Torres, unruffled, said, “Not at all. We merely find that people have, ah, more complete information when they come here. And did you bring us your letters?”

  She sat completely still for a moment, then reached into her enormous purse and slapped some envelopes down on the desk. “Here. All of them.” She took a deep breath as she kept her hand on the papers. “I have been worried, but I told no one. I am not one to scare easily.” Her expression was fierce, but I saw her hand trembling. She quickly clasped her other hand over it so they both rested on the envelopes. “I have had four letters, unsigned, making threats. It’s not hard to find the motives for that.”

  She slid them across the desk to the sergeant.

  “We will keep them, look at them, and certainly handle them very carefully. We may need them for analysis, depending on what happens. Would you like us to make you copies? Now, tell us again how they came to you. Do you know when?”

  “I found them early in the morning, on the floor of my foyer, put through the mail slot in the door. Someone in the night, but I never saw anyone.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “The last two weeks. I thought the first was some evil prank. Evil but not important. But then there were more. They wish to scare me, I believe.”

  Her voice was firm, but her hand was trembling again. I put mine out to cover it.

  The young officer was recording. The sergeant asked, “Who is the ‘they’?”

  “Oh, please! Aren’t you up on local politics? That builder who is buying up the property around me? Prinzig? Prince is the company name. And the Watchtower gang that is selling it? Yes, I called them a gang. They are tormenting me. They have been for some time.”

  The expression on Sergeant Torres’s face was odd. Though she’d asked the que
stion, she did not seem surprised at the answer. Mostly she appeared unimpressed and watchful. I wondered what she already knew.

  “There is more.” The sergeant spoke very carefully. “We have some additional questions for you.”

  Louisa stared back at her, unflinching, angry.

  “Do you know a Daniel Towns?”

  “Know him? He is behind the legal papers they are throwing at me. He is very anxious for the sale to be settled. We have had a long…”

  I squeezed her hand, hoping she would pick up that I was telling her to stop. She closed her mouth tightly.

  “Well, there is a problem with your accusations. Mr. Towns is getting angry anonymous letters, too.”

  Louisa was stunned into silence. I was too. When we recovered, we started at once.

  “That is not possible.”

  “But who? Why? Towns? I don’t…”

  The officers sat still, watching, as our voices faded.

  “We’d like to know, too, but we can’t answer any of those questions, not yet. We’re working on it, and that’s one reason you are here. We have a handwriting analyst. That is our plan for today, to do some testing regarding the letters to Mr. Towns. Fortunately, she can look over yours, too, and see what we learn.”

  She nodded, and Detective Kahn opened the office door. “We need some official handwriting samples taken from you. It will only require a few minutes. We brought someone in to do that today. Will you give us some samples?”

  Louisa turned white. Her hand under my mine started shaking again.

  “No. I won’t. This is an invasion of my privacy and legally questionable. I did some research.”

  “Louisa?” I responded before I remembered my promise to keep quiet.

  “When I couldn’t sleep last night, worrying about my own letters?” She looked up at me, half-proud, and half—could it be embarrassed? “I used that Google thing to look up how these kind of stupid, horrible letters get investigated. There have been legal challenges to getting samples. So I conclude I don’t have to.”

  The younger cop muttered, “She’d need a good lawyer to get away with that,” but Sergeant Torres took a different approach, squatting down next to Louisa’s chair so they were face-to-face.

  “Mrs. Gibbs, we have no intentions of harming you. You may even need protection yourself. We need to learn all we can. Please believe that. But we have legitimate safety concerns here. We must take them seriously.” She smiled. “As we also will with the letters you brought us today. But first things first. We’ll get this done and it can only be helpful to you.”

  Louisa started to protest, and Torres quickly added, “The process should end here, OK? But it does deserve our time and attention, right?”

  “It’s not because his octopus organization is exerting pressure?”

  Kahn stood up, looking indignant, but Torres said, “Mrs. Gibbs, come on, now. Yes, he is locally prominent, but so what? We’re just trying to do our job here. If anything happened to him, and we had ignored the letters, well, then we’d sure be on the chopping block for that, wouldn’t we?

  “Nothing we’ll do now is definitive. It will go to an expert, we’ll get a report, and it will end there.”

  “Sure. Unless my handwriting matches these nonsense letters. I haven’t even seen them. How do I know they exist?”

  Torres shook her head. “We can’t show them to you. That’s not how a handwriting sample gets done.”

  Louisa looked the least little bit less like a granite statue. “Then let’s get it over with. I have other things to do with my life today.”

  As if by magic, there was a knock on the door. A young woman came in with paper and writing instruments. She looked surprised to see extra people in the small room, but Torres assured her I would be completely quiet, a part of the furniture.

  The young woman spoke to Louisa, softly but with confidence, explaining that she would do some dictating and Louisa was to write down the phrases. There would be directions to change to her other hand, to do it in block printing, and so on, but no help would be offered on spelling or placement on the page. She was to sign each page. She was to sit up straight, feet on the floor.

  The soft words managed to sound very official. I would have been intimidated myself.

  “I haven’t taken dictation since I was a girl in French class,” Louisa grumbled. “French teachers love that. We had to sit up straight then, too. That was back when dinosaurs roamed Brooklyn.” But she listened, and I could see her putting some effort into it.

  Were the phrases from the letters? I passed a note to Torres, who glanced at it and nodded. There were fragmentary accusations of greed and of harboring secrets. They sounded yes, very like things I had heard Louisa say. Many people had heard her say them. That wasn’t good.

  I would have given anything at the moment to see the whole letters.

  By the time they were done, Louisa was rubbing her writing hand and her face was white with exhaustion.

  “I know you are tired, so let’s quickly get some questions answered about these other letters.”

  She asked the obvious questions, again. No post office involvement, no return address, handwritten like the letters to Towns. Always overnight. They were filled with threats disturbing yet vague. Terrible, unspecified things would happen if she did not do the right thing and promptly sell her property. That upped the ante and fit in with what I’d heard from old Mr. Prinzig. They wanted more than her garden.

  The letters went on to say, cruelly, that she was old. That she no longer belonged in her home. That the world was changing and leaving her behind.

  “Who belongs there more than I do, I’d like to know? You tell me that!”

  The officers made no comments at all, but occasionally gave each other a meaningful look. I guessed it was along the lines of “Note this.”

  Finally they asked the obvious one. Did she have any idea who might be harassing her?

  “You are not serious, are you? Who wants me to give up a piece of my property? Or the whole thing, it seems now? It’s obvious! They could sell their building and mine as a package. The buyers would tear my home down.”

  “But!” I had to ask. “It’s landmarked. They could not touch it!”

  “They’d find a way. “ She looked both grim and exhausted. “They would harass and torment an old lady like me.” This time I did not see any sneaky gleam in her eyes when she said “old.” Did she mean it? “As they are doing now. What wouldn’t they stoop to?” She closed her eyes, as if tired, but when she opened them again, she looked hard at the cops.

  “I’m not folding. If I can stand up to them, you can, too!” She began gathering her things. “Now I need to leave. I have an appointment, and it is getting late.”

  She turned down the coffee, walked out of the office, and asked for directions to a restroom on the way. I followed her, my thoughts whirling. One of the detectives called after me, “We’ll be right out. Wait for us, please.”

  Waiting for Louisa, I realized I was missing something. Purse, yes; car keys, no, in my jacket pocket. Jacket was back in the room we’d been in.

  Chapter Six

  I went back and heard Kahn saying, “How much time have we spent on this? Some nutjob acting like a schoolkid with poison-pen letters? Or two of them? And maybe a nutty old woman, too. Like we don’t have any real crime to work on?”

  “Why, Detective, tell me how you really feel.” I could hear a little snicker. “I know, I know. But if we ignore it, and it escalates?”

  “Yeah, our ass is grass. Or the boss’s is.”

  “So we do what we must, at least go through the motions. Anyway, to make our lives complete it does seem like now we have two difficult…”

  “Two nutjobs.”

  “Our analyst glanced at Mrs. Gibbs’s letters and guessed they are not the same handwri
ting. Actually she said it’s not even a guess, but not official until she can look deeper.”

  “Any chance that old broad wrote them all?”

  I held my breath, listening but not believing what I heard.

  “What? That’s crazy.”

  Torres stopped, and I wondered if they were exchanging glances.

  “Okay, even crazier than the fact that there are two sets of letters?”

  “Seriously. Consider this. If she wrote the first ones, and thinks she’s in trouble, would the second ones get her off the hook? I mean, who knows what she might think? And did you think of this? Who even writes letters anymore? Old people! People with no kind of computer. People who don’t know you could use a public computer at a library.”

  “Are you reading detective stories again? Remember about KISS? Keep it simple, stupid? But we’ll have a definitive answer on that later.” Sounds of chairs scraping. “OK. Make sure she’s got a way home. Maybe if you take her, she’d succumb to your charm and tell us more.”

  They both laughed, and I moved fast, back to the waiting area, still without my jacket. Louisa was there, and the detectives were right behind me. They had my jacket, too. We sorted out a ride for Louisa, and I waited, helping her into a cab. She looked tired and moved slowly, but was quite clear about her destination when she spoke to the driver. She was going to a building of medical offices not far from her home. Before I could ask if she needed me to come with her, she poked the driver from the back seat and said, “Make it snappy. I am late,” and he took off.

  Good thing too, as my car would have been left at the precinct house. Maybe I was the one who needed a keeper.

  After seeing her into the car, Torres turned to me. “Who are you? You’re not a relative, and you’re not an employee.”

  When I said “How do you know?” she only smiled. She is a detective after all.

  I explained how I knew Louisa, and threw in, perhaps inappropriately, that getting to know a famous figure from my college years had been an unexpected thrill.

  Something sparked interest in her expression, but all she said was, “So you must know a lot about her?”