Ukulele of Death, page 10
Other people don’t seem to have this problem, but I really can’t walk the streets of Manhattan and do research on my phone at the same time. I’m so old-fashioned. But I could make a list of things I wanted to find out and they contained:
• Find out who Evelyn Bannister actually was;
• Find out if her mother’s name actually was Melinda Cantone, and if so, where the hell she was now;
• Talk to Gus about the possibility of exterminators being on the premises of Evelyn’s building recently;
• Find out if Dr Mansoor had actually bio-engineered Ken and me;
• Find out if Dr Mansoor had recently discovered something about my parents that would endanger Ken and me (he had said it was urgent);
• Figure out what the time difference was to London so I could call Sotheby’s and see what I could find out about the $1.2 million ukulele;
• See if Augustus Bennett had left any traces, and if he was a ukulele freak.
And that was just the highlights. Realizing exactly how much I didn’t know right now was a sobering experience. If I was a person who could walk and chew phones at the same time I might have diverted myself with whatever the latest game app obsessing half of America might be, but I’m not, so I just walked to the precinct and went inside to retrieve my ‘package.’
Mankiewicz was sitting at his desk, but where I had expected to find him absolutely exasperated with Ken, I found my date from the night before in the midst of hysterical laughter, in which my idiot brother was joining him.
‘She really thought the song went, “Down came Lorraine and washed the spider out?”’ Mank clearly thought this was hilarious, and Ken was helping.
The ‘best’ part? They were talking about me, and it was a story from when I was all of four years old.
Families are such a joy. I’m told.
I approached the desk and looked not at Mank but at Ken. ‘Do I have to tell him the story about your prostate cancer?’ I asked him.
Ken’s face fell so dramatically he almost had to pick it up off the floor. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said quietly.
Mank looked concerned and I could tell despite not looking him in the eye. How dare he take Ken’s side when he wanted to date me! ‘Did you have prostate cancer?’ he asked Ken.
‘No,’ my brother mumbled.
Mank looked at me. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What’s funny about that?’
‘Nothing,’ Ken said.
‘Let’s just say that young Ken, without so much as a glance at WebMD, once believed himself to be suffering from prostate cancer,’ I said. ‘But he had misdiagnosed himself.’
‘What did he have?’ Mank said, still looking concerned.
Ken looked at me with pleading eyes. I had to remind myself that he’d vanished without telling me where he’d gone, and had then gone precisely where I’d told him not to go. He had earned this.
‘His first boner,’ I said.
It took a moment to register with Mank, during which time Ken lowered his head and put his hand to his forehead. Then Mank began to laugh and with each shudder of his shoulders endeared himself back into a man I’d date more and more.
‘I was eleven,’ Ken said weakly.
That started off another round of hootin’ and hollerin’ until we were finally laughed out and even Ken had joined in a little, strictly out of the contagious nature of laughter.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I was an idiot.’
‘Watch your tenses,’ I told my brother. ‘There’s still the matter of being arrested at a funeral I specifically told you not to attend.’
Ken stuck out his lower lip. ‘I was right to go.’ He glanced at Mank for fear of saying more than he should.
I ignored him, which is my default move, and looked at Mank. ‘Is he being charged with anything?’
Mank shook his head. ‘The Englewood police just wanted him to go away, and were happy to provide him with a ride to guarantee he’d do so. But I’d like to know exactly why you thought this was a good idea, Ken.’
‘You can find out stuff from people when they’re emotional,’ was the best my brother could do.
Luckily I’d already consulted Mank on the Dr Mansoor problem, so he could fill in the blanks on what it was Ken had been trying to find out at the funeral. I guessed they’d had enough of a chance to chat about the subject before I’d arrived and I didn’t want to give away too much no matter how good a kisser Mankiewicz was. ‘Can I take him off your hands, then?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, but keep him away from Englewood, New Jersey and call me later.’ There was a specific look in Mank’s eyes that I chose not to acknowledge for the time being.
‘OK,’ I said, meaning yes to the first part and I’d decide about the second. I gestured to Ken that he should stand up, which takes a good few seconds with my brother. He gathered himself to full height and already managed to dominate the room. I pointed toward the door. ‘Thanks for babysitting,’ I told Mank.
‘I charge by the hour, normally.’
I chose not to answer and ushered my supposedly contrite brother out of the precinct house.
For reasons I can’t entirely explain I didn’t want to talk to him while we were still out in the street. It wasn’t that I thought the odd passerby was an agent for whatever dark force was monitoring us and probably chasing our parents, but on the other hand how did I know they weren’t?
Ken tried a couple of times to explain himself as we walked but I refused to discuss it, instead talking about what we’d do for dinner that night and anything else I could think of so innocuous no dangerous spy would be the least bit suspicious.
So I was completely pent up and fully loaded once we closed the door to our apartment. ‘What the hell were you doing going to Dr Mansoor’s funeral?’ I screeched at him. ‘Didn’t I tell you that was exactly what you shouldn’t do?’
‘Since when do I have to take orders from you?’ he countered. ‘I thought we were supposed to be equal partners in this business. In fact, if you count the money that went into starting up, you should be taking orders from me.’
We like to ease into our arguments in my family.
And I’ll admit, Ken’s tirade caught me a little off-balance. ‘You’ve never shown any interest in doing investigating on your own before,’ I said. ‘Besides, this wasn’t for the agency. It was about Mom and Dad.’
Ken plopped himself down on the rickety sofa, which I feared for a moment would cause damage to the ceiling of our downstairs neighbors. Not to mention the sofa. ‘Yes it was. Now do you want to hear what I found out, or not?’
If I was going to be the grownup – and I always was – I’d have to be the first to break the mood and speak in a calm, interested voice. ‘OK,’ I said. I sat down on one of the ‘dining’ chairs next to the door table and faced him. ‘What happened at the funeral?’
Believing he’d won that round (which, for the record, he hadn’t), Ken allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Well, I didn’t see our parents, if you were wondering.’ He’s so bad at coy.
‘And how would you know if you did?’ I asked. ‘We haven’t seen a photo of them more recent than thirty years ago.’
His smile flattened out. ‘Anyway, there were some people there who had heard the names Olivia Grey and Brandon Wilder. Specifically, there was a woman there named Eve Kendall who looked about the right age to have known Mom and Dad – and Dr Mansoor – at Rutgers. She said she hadn’t worked with Mom but she knew people who had.’
‘Amazing, Holmes. So what?’
‘Dr Kendall was close friends with Dr Mansoor and I think she might know why he was calling you.’
I felt my mouth curl up on the right side. ‘Based on what? Your best assembled-man’s intuition? Ken, just because someone was at the same university as Mom, and I guess Dr Mansoor, doesn’t mean they’ve been carrying the answer to our origins around with them for decades.’
Ken folded his arms ‘Dr Kendall heard from Dr Mansoor the same day he called you, the day he died.’ He held up his head a little, better for the purpose of looking down his nose at me.
‘How exactly did you broach this subject at the man’s funeral?’ I was dodging the fact that he might actually have some new information, and that I might have to admit that he was right to go crash the memorial.
‘You’re at a funeral of a guy who died very suddenly a few days ago. Asking when the last time was she heard from him made plenty of sense,’ Ken said. He was having a high intelligence day and I was a good few steps behind him.
I don’t know how this had become a competitive event, but now I felt like I had to reestablish my credentials as the brains of the investigation outfit. I put my left hand on the corresponding hip; that would teach him. ‘So what amazing nugget of information about our parents did you get out of your new buddy?’ I asked.
Suddenly the ceiling of our apartment was fascinating to my brother; he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. ‘Well, I didn’t find out that much. As soon as I told her my name she asked how I knew Dr Mansoor and I said I really didn’t, and that’s when she started to talk loudly and the next thing I knew the police were there.’
‘The cops came because you weren’t invited? Can’t anybody go to a funeral if they want? Sounds like this woman is fairly nuts.’ I picked up our pile of takeout menus because Aunt Margie wasn’t coming to cook tonight and I’d decided that I wasn’t either. Ken might have tried but we didn’t have fire insurance. That’s not fair; he can cook when he wants to.
That spot on the ceiling was clearly a source of unending entertainment. Ken wasn’t even blinking. ‘It’s possible that I suggested someone might have killed Dr Mansoor,’ he said.
All of a sudden the choice between takeout barbecue and pizza didn’t seem quite as urgent to me. ‘You said what?’
‘I was trying to stir the pot a little bit. I wanted to see who’d react.’ Now Ken closed his eyes. Maybe whatever was on the ceiling had been too disturbing, but he sure as hell didn’t want to look me in the eye.
‘But you know nobody killed Dr Mansoor. He died in a car crash on West 48th Street.’
‘Yeah, and our parents died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, remember?’ Ken opened his eyes and looked at me with a speck of fury in his eyes.
‘Nobody killed them, either,’ I reminded him.
‘Are we a hundred percent sure of that? We don’t know where they are and we don’t know what they’re doing, if anything. It’s possible they are dead and someone was sending Aunt Margie CARE packages for us to keep the illusion alive. Funny how those ran out the past few years, isn’t it?’
I stared at my brother for an extended moment. ‘You’re one of those nuts who thinks Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, aren’t you?’
Ken waved his right hand to declare the subject irrelevant. ‘Never been proven either way,’ he said. ‘The fact is, Dr Kendall knows more than she’s saying and we don’t know for sure that Dr Mansoor just lost control of his car. Something might have happened. We don’t know anybody in that precinct.’
‘We will soon. Bendix told them who I am and let’s face it, they already had my phone number. I’m surprised I haven’t heard from the cop in charge of the investigation yet.’ Pizza. It’s the easiest thing in the world to order for dinner and it’s cheap. My two favorite things, cheap and easy. Wait. That didn’t come out exactly right. The only problem is that Ken likes pepperoni and I like meatballs. We could get half and half.
‘Car crash. How much are they going to investigate?’ Ken said. ‘We should look into it. I’ll talk to Dr Kendall about it when she comes for dinner.’
Hold on. ‘When who does what?’
Ken smirked. ‘I invited the good doctor here for dinner tomorrow night.’
‘Was that before or after she insisted at the top of her lungs that you be removed from the premises?’ I asked.
‘Amazingly, after. I asked her before but just when the cops were suggesting that I leave with them, Dr Kendall looked at me and said, “See you at dinner tomorrow.” Then she texted to get our address and I gave it to her. You can see for yourself.’
I found myself shaking my head involuntarily. ‘You never cease to amaze me,’ I told Ken.
‘Thank you.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Mom and Dad left us because they were afraid for our safety and, we can imagine, their own. They thought people were watching them and trying to get at their research. We’re their research. And you walk up to a random woman at a funeral that you think might have been made necessary by a murder and give her our home address and your cell number?’
Ken pondered that a moment. ‘Well, when you put it that way …’
We ordered pizza. And I made it all meatballs.
SIXTEEN
I spent much of that night (after Ken went out to meet his ex-roommates for a drink in order to evade my accusatory stares) finding out all I could about Augustus Bennett, which wasn’t much more than I already knew. His business interests had never been made public so there was no record of where his money might be going and no resource that could list his holdings, particularly of stringed instruments, like perhaps Harpo Marx’s favorite harp not to play in Duck Soup.
But I did have something of a lucky break when Robert Van Houten himself decided to call me back. You never know.
‘This is Ms Stein?’ The voice was far too deep to be Ms Stein, and I knew that was probably me, so I assumed the man on the other end had dialed me on purpose.
‘I don’t recognize your number,’ I said. Never say ‘yes’ when someone you don’t know calls. They can record that and use it. ‘Who is this, please?’ It might be a potential client. I had to at least pretend to be polite.
‘This is Robert Van Houten.’
Of course it was. Billionaires call me up every day.
‘Excuse me?’ I was taken by surprise. Yes, I’m embarrassed I couldn’t do better.
‘My name is Robert Van Houten. I have a note here that you called me about a ukulele.’
Right! The ukulele! ‘Yes I did, Mr Van Houten. I was a little surprised that you called me back.’
A chuckle. ‘I get that a lot. Just between us, it’s one of the reasons I call people back.’
‘I guess so.’ It was a placeholder. ‘Mr Van Houten—’
‘Rob.’ Wow this guy was working hard to be approachable.
‘Rob,’ I agreed.
‘And your name is Frances?’
‘Fran,’ I corrected. If I was calling him Rob, after all.
‘Nice to meet you, Fran.’
‘Glad to meet you too. Mr … Rob, I’m told you have an affinity for rare stringed instruments, and I’m looking for one that appears to be fairly unusual. I thought you might be able to give me some idea as to where I should look.’ It’s best not to tell someone right off the top that you’re thinking about them as a possible deadbeat adopted dad (the ‘deadbeat’ part was just because he had all that money, although Evelyn Bannister or whoever she was had done just fine for herself as far as I could tell) and maybe murderer. Tends to make them clam up a tad.
‘A ukulele. Not usually my area, I’m afraid.’ My new buddy was being coy; you could hear it in his voice. ‘But if you give me a few more details I might be able to point you in a direction. I know a few people.’ No chuckle there; he wasn’t trying to be self-deprecating.
I explained to him about Evelyn Bannister’s uke in the same detail I’ve told you, minus the fact that it was possibly auctioned off in London recently, that a case which might have fit it was found in her apartment, and that next to that case had been Evelyn’s dead body. You don’t have to tell a client everything. And he wasn’t even a client.
‘So your client is seeking out this ukulele not because he or she wants it, but because it might lead to an adopted parent?’ There was no hint of anxiety in Van Houten’s voice. He was not worried that the uke might lead to him, or was extremely good at covering that up. He merely wanted to understand the circumstances under which the question was being raised.
‘Essentially,’ I said. Finding Evelyn’s father, whoever he might be, was no longer a priority for her, whoever she might have been. This was more in the area of a murder investigation but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. ‘My client believes the instrument might be in their father’s possession, or used to be, and thinks it would be possible to trace him back if we had an idea of where and when that might have been.’ You have to dance around conversational English a lot when you’re trying to keep your client’s identity, gender and non-living status secret from the person you’re talking to about her missing rare ukulele. In case you ever run into a similar situation.
‘Well, I’m familiar with the general status of that kind of instrument,’ Van Houten said. ‘It’s rare but not that rare, although I have read about something very close to what you describe being auctioned off in London recently for more than a million dollars. Might that be the one you’re seeking?’ Wow, and he could use the internet, too. This guy was going to be quite the catch for someone one of these days. Or maybe already was, for all I knew. He wasn’t that transparent.
‘To be brutally honest, Rob, I don’t actually know. I read about that sale and thought it was a heck of a coincidence, but so far I don’t have any evidence that it’s the one I’m looking to find.’ There was no advantage in lying about this. On the other hand, who was I kidding? That had to be Evelyn’s uke.
‘Well, from what I can tell the buyer was anonymous and it’s pretty much impossible to squeeze any information out of Sotheby’s when they don’t want to tell you.’ Van Houten seemed to find the pursuit of the uke charming. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I can’t give you private phone numbers or email addresses of the people I know who might have some interest in such an instrument. One of them might be the person you’re looking for and might not want to be found, and the others would be mad at me if I leaked their private contact information. But I can call around to a few of them and see what I can find out. How does that sound?’
