Ukulele of Death, page 15
‘You didn’t see him at all?’ Mank asked. ‘I told you that and all of a sudden you vanished.’
OK, how much was I going to lie? Telling him the truth would open up a whole police investigation into my abduction and the best-case outcome to that would be the cops finding The Voice and arresting him, at which point he’d drop the bomb of my odd existence and the National Enquirer would be at my door in minutes. Not to mention whoever The Voice was affiliated with, because I figured he wasn’t acting alone. Mom and Dad had warned Aunt Margie about possible government affiliations or other groups looking for them and us. I didn’t think it was just one guy with an odd technology fetish.
‘I didn’t vanish,’ I said. ‘I lost my cell phone signal and I was working on a case so I wasn’t answering the phone, no matter how cryptic a message you were leaving. I called you as soon as I got back.’ And had a long talk with Aunt Margie and ate seven Oreos and called Ken, who’d told me they were after him too, and by the way he hadn’t mentioned that before.
‘You need to be on your guard,’ Mank said. ‘Do you want me to get a cruiser to pass by your building a little more often?’
It was a kind offer, but a mostly ineffectual one. ‘What are they going to see?’ I asked. ‘It’s an apartment building.’
‘I’d feel better.’
He was such a sweet guy but I felt that my ability to pin a sympathetic lab tech to a wall using just one foot was evidence (that Mank didn’t have) that I could rescue myself when necessary. ‘I promise I’ll be watching and I’ll call you if I see the guy in the dark trench coat, OK?’ I said.
‘OK.’ He didn’t sound happy. Men like to protect women, whether we ask them to or not. It’s kind of a weird compulsion. But then, most women aren’t quite as strong as I am. But I’d have to plug in soon if I wanted to stay that way.
I promised him we could keep our dinner date for the next night and got off the phone. Ken would be home any minute and that was going to be a conversation that would take some time, and restraint on my part to keep from bashing my brother with the nearest heavy object.
I looked over at Aunt Margie. ‘You know you’re the best ever, right?’ I said. She was the absolute tonic for my day, which had been a doozy and wasn’t close to over yet.
She walked over and put one arm around me. ‘I’m in the top ten,’ she said.
And that’s when Robert Van Houten decided to call me.
‘You lied to me, Fran,’ he said by way of a greeting. I miss the days when you didn’t know who was calling you and people said hello. I’m an old-fashioned girl. Meaning I was fashioned by people who were a lot older now. ‘You said you were looking for a client’s father and in fact you were looking for your client’s murderer.’
Wow. He was good.
‘You can pretty much find out anything, can’t you, Rob?’ I said. ‘Yes. I was hired to find my client’s birth father but she was murdered, I think because of the instrument I asked you about. And since I can’t do what she asked me to do, or at least I can’t give her the information she requested, and I’ve already cashed her advance check, I feel an obligation to bring her killer to justice in her name. Should I have mentioned that when we spoke the last time?’
People with power or money are rarely spoken to with anything but deference. Some of them are glad about that, but others are happier when they’re treated like normal humans and called on their attempts to act imperious. I was about to find out which kind Robert Van Houten might be.
He laughed a little. ‘You really are a person of character, Fran. I admire you continuing on even though your client can’t pay you. So suppose I hire you to investigate the death of the woman you knew as Evelyn Bannister.’
‘I’m already doing that,’ I told him. ‘I appreciate the offer, but my client paid me and I’m doing at least some of what she asked me to do. But you can help, which is why I assume you were calling to begin with.’
Van Houten chuckled again. ‘You’re right about that, but I’m not sure how much help I can be just yet. I’ve made a few phone calls and emailed a bit about the Gibson Poinsettia.’
‘I’ll bet you found out it’s a somewhat rare but not terribly expensive vintage ukulele and nobody knows why someone would pay $1.2 million for it, assuming it’s that uke. How am I doing so far?’
His voice no longer had the edge of amusement. ‘I’m afraid that was the information I could gather. At the beginning. But then I got in touch with a friend who – strictly by chance – was actually present at the auction in London.’
OK, that knocked some of the snark out of me. But just some. ‘Your friend saw the sale happen?’ I asked. ‘I was told the transaction was conducted on the phone.’
‘That’s so twentieth century,’ Van Houten said. ‘It’s all done via text message and email now. But yes, my friend was there when it happened. He said the room was audibly stunned by the bidding, which kept going skyward until one of the two anonymous bidders dropped out. And as you know, that was at the price you’ve already quoted. A million two.’
‘You’re not going to tell me who your friend is, are you?’ I asked.
‘No. Suffice it to say I trust his word.’
That didn’t tell me much more than I already knew, which led me to believe Van Houten was building toward something. He came across as the kind of man who would want to maximize the dramatic effect so he would be even more universally admired. ‘Was he there to bid on the ukulele?’ I said.
‘No,’ Van Houten answered. ‘He was looking into another instrument, a violin, which I believe he ended up buying for considerably more than the Gibson.’ OK, so the guy had rich friends. He was all kinds of wealthy and those people tend to hang out together. Nobody else can afford the restaurants they go to. ‘But he paid special attention to the lot we’re discussing because the bidding was so unpredictably high.’
‘The agent for the buyer was a person named Patrice Lancaster,’ I told Van Houten. ‘Does that name sound familiar? Did your friend mention it?’
He took a moment to think about it. ‘I don’t recognize the name, and of course I didn’t ask my friend about it because we hadn’t spoken about her yet. But there was, as there always is, a certified expert on hand to attest to the authenticity of the instrument.’
‘Langley Comstock,’ I said.
Van Houten sounded disappointed. ‘Yes. And apparently no one in the UK thought to check on someone with such an outlandish alias.’
‘Was it an alias?’ I asked. Ken had thought otherwise.
I looked over at Aunt Margie, who was doing her very best to avoid looking like she was trying to hear my conversation. I had no issue with her hearing it but didn’t think Van Houten would want me to put the phone on speaker. I gestured for her to sit next to me on the sofa but she gave her head a little shake and put up her hands to indicate she didn’t want to. Even with her hands Aunt Margie was a lousy liar.
‘I wondered about that,’ he answered. ‘The fact is, Langley Comstock is registered in the UK, and in five states in America including New York and California, as an expert in vintage stringed instruments. Has been for fourteen years and has authenticated as many as six hundred purchases. There have been no complaints lodged against him and he is in good standing in every jurisdiction where his certification is recognized.’
That seemed … unlikely. ‘But is that his real name?’
Van Houten took a moment. ‘I mean, I didn’t think so, but I don’t have any evidence that he’s ever been called anything else. You know, this isn’t my full-time job.’ I think he thought he was being folksy and self-deprecating there but it didn’t really land.
‘I appreciate everything you’ve done, Rob,’ I said.
‘Wait, don’t hang up,’ he said quickly, as if that had been what I was planning to do. ‘I left the best for last.’
Now I gestured vehemently for Aunt Margie to get closer so she could hear the call, and seeing the way I looked she didn’t hesitate. I held out the phone a bit to make it easier for her to eavesdrop.
‘I’m all ears,’ I said, not mentioning that at the moment there were four listening to him.
‘It’s about the buyer of the ukulele,’ Van Houten began.
‘I thought you said Sotheby’s wouldn’t give out that kind of information under any circumstances,’ I, well, interrupted.
‘And they didn’t.’ The air of amusement had crept back into my billionaire buddy’s voice. He was going to drop a bomb and he enjoyed being the bombardier. ‘But my friend who was there got to talking to another bidder who dropped out very early. And that person – no, I’m not going to say who – knew something about the uke and something about the people likely to be obsessed enough to overspend broadly on such an item.’
‘Do we trust this person’s information?’ I asked.
‘I think we do. I have asked them about things in the past and the answers I’ve gotten have always checked out to the letter. Always.’
Aunt Margie leaned in a little; her left ear is stronger than her right. All those years of radio through headphones.
‘So what questions got answered this time?’ I asked Van Houten.
‘First, I was told a little something about the ukulele itself. Part – and only a very small part – of the reason its price escalated so much was that it was briefly owned by George Harrison, who toward the end of his life became very fond of ukes.’
Interesting, but hardly an earthquake. ‘And that’s only a small part of what made it so valuable,’ I said. ‘What other factors went into that?’
‘My source didn’t know about that,’ Van Houten answered. ‘There were some rumors that Bob Dylan had it for a while, but once a Beatle was involved I’m not sure Dylan was going to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the price. What’s more interesting is that my source believed there was only one person in the community of collectors who would be that hell bent on obtaining such an instrument, someone who actually beat out a bidder like Augustus Bennett.’
Bennett! ‘He was the other high bidder?’ I asked.
‘The man himself. Well, not himself, of course. He bid through a reputable agent, Eduardo Cabrini of Rome. But Bennett didn’t get the uke.’
OK, it was time to drop the straight line so Van Houten could have his moment. ‘Who did?’ I said.
‘The name probably won’t mean much to you,’ Van Houten said, sounding a little sheepish. ‘But what’s interesting about it is that I spent the better part of a day researching it and found absolutely nothing. No mentions anywhere ever. And that simply doesn’t happen.’
No, I was sure it didn’t. It’s easy enough to Google a name and you very rarely come up with no hits at all. A man with Van Houten’s resources would be able to do a hell of a lot more than that.
‘What’s the name?’ I reached for a pad Aunt Margie keeps on a side table for grocery lists and a pen I had in the pocket of my jeans.
There was the sound of rustling pages. Van Houten must have kept notes on paper, too. ‘It’s Brandon Wilder,’ he said.
I almost dropped my phone. Aunt Margie looked like she’d literally seen a ghost. ‘Brad,’ she said aloud.
Brandon Wilder.
My father.
TWENTY-TWO
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Ken said.
Aunt Margie and I had moved upstairs to my apartment after I’d gotten off the phone with Robert Van Houten, who was pleased that I was dumbfounded by his information but stumped as to why an obscure name would have such an effect on me. I’d said it was because I wasn’t sure what to do with that information, which was the understatement of the millennium.
Until, of course, my brother arrived home and wanted to talk about the call with Van Houten rather than my recent abduction and his admission that he’d had a similar experience. We had, to put it mildly, different agendas.
‘Of course it doesn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘But that’s not the point. It’s not the headline right now. At this moment, I’m still shaking from having been kidnapped and threatened by some maniac with a strange knowledge of us and I’m wondering why you haven’t told me before that someone’s been after you too. Did they take you prisoner like me? Want to experiment on you?’
Ken spread out his hands, palms down and kept flexing his elbows like he was trying to push something to the floor. ‘I can’t do that now,’ he said. ‘I need to know what your pal the gazillionaire meant when he said Dad was the guy who bought Evelyn Bannister’s ukulele. Then, I promise you, we can talk about the other thing.’
The other thing. My brother was so shaken by the evil scientist and his operation that he needed to process before he could even talk about it. Fine. We could do it his way but then we’d do it my way and there would be no postponing that.
‘OK,’ I said. I looked over at Aunt Margie, who was behind Ken and therefore not in his line of sight. She nodded; I was doing the right thing. Aunt Margie tends to referee when Ken and I are having, you know, sibling discussions. ‘Let’s start with that. You’re right that Dad’s name showing up in connection with the uke doesn’t make sense.’
‘Somebody killed Evelyn Bannister, maybe in connection to that ukulele,’ Ken said, pacing our living-room floor, which was dusty and unwashed at the moment. Who had time for cleaning? I’d been busy being abducted, but hey, we weren’t talking about that yet. And was I upset? Nah. ‘It was just after the auction and there was an empty ukulele case next to Evelyn’s body. There isn’t any way on this planet that our father could have been even remotely involved in that.’
‘And yet it would be the world’s biggest coincidence if his name just showed up in the middle of this investigation about Evelyn Bannister that had nothing to do with him, right?’ I asked. It was a wordy question but I think they were all necessary to the point.
‘Yes.’ Ken countered with one syllable. I wasn’t letting him get away with that so I sat and watched him pace. Aunt Margie didn’t offer anything but she did pick up a piece of knitting from her canvas bag and started in on a row. Aunt Margie had lately taken up knitting and it was never a calming thought to think of what she might be trying to create.
After looking at my blank face (intentional) for about ten seconds my brother broke under the pressure. ‘You’re right. Coincidences like that can’t be trusted.’
‘There’s a third possibility,’ I said without having detailed the first two. ‘Dad’s name could be a signal to us.’
Ken, who had been searching the screen on his phone for something I couldn’t possibly identify, looked up. ‘A signal?’
But Aunt Margie got it right away. ‘You mean someone associated with that auction was trying to get your attention and then Evelyn Bannister was murdered?’ She shook a little, like a literal chill was going up her spine.
I nodded. ‘Let’s say Evelyn Bannister was a red herring, or at least was intended to be. Someone with knowledge of our existence, Ken, wanted us to know they were aware of us. They sent Evelyn to hire us so we’d be aware of her and of the ukulele. The auction happened just about then and just to be sure they used Dad’s name as the winning bidder.’
‘Wouldn’t Sotheby’s be suspicious of someone using a false name?’ Aunt Margie asked. Then before we could answer I saw the gears in her head spinning. ‘Someone with that kind of money could get really great false documentation.’
Ken stuck out his lips a little in an expression of disbelief. ‘There are so many holes in that theory it could double as a piece of Swiss cheese,’ he said. ‘First of all, there is no one who has any knowledge of us.’
‘Dr Mansoor would disagree, if he were here,’ I pointed out.
‘He knew Mom and Dad. He didn’t necessarily know anything about us or how we came to be. He just tried to get in touch, maybe just to reminisce the way Eve Kendall did.’ Ken didn’t want to believe the idea about Dad’s name being a signal. He had a couple of decent points, but so did I.
‘We don’t know what he knew or didn’t know,’ Aunt Margie piped up. ‘We never got to find out.’
‘I need to see the items taken out of his car,’ I said, largely to myself. ‘If Kendall is right, he’d have written stuff down that could actually help us and maybe give us an idea where our parents are right now.’
Ken put his phone in his pocket; whatever he’d been looking for either hadn’t been about our conversation (which was unlikely) or hadn’t panned out (likely). ‘Put that aside,’ he said. ‘Let’s say Dr Mansoor did know something. OK. He didn’t do anything about it, or if he did, we don’t know what. Forget Dr Mansoor. Why send a signal through the auction of a weird ukulele? There are so many easier ways to get our attention. Why bother with all that? Set up Evelyn Bannister, whoever she was, to be a client so we’d know about the sale, so we’d find out the name of the winning bidder? What were the odds? If you didn’t know a crazy billionaire who likes to buy things for no reason we never would have known our father’s name was even mentioned. Plus, it’s possible that there’s more than one Brandon Wilder in the world. It’s not that unusual a name. It’s not even Dad’s real name, as far as we know.’
OK, so he had more than a couple of decent points. ‘It’s too big a coincidence,’ I said again. ‘And two people died around the sale of that uke, both of whom were attached in one way or another to us. That’s unsettling, and we’d be idiots if we didn’t get a lot more careful while all this is going on.’
Aunt Margie nodded. Ken just looked resigned to an idea he didn’t care for. Being extra-vigilant puts a damper on his love life. Or so he thinks.
‘OK, given that you were taken on the street I think you’re right about that. We do have to be more careful. Especially you, Frannie.’ He smiled a little bit at that last part.
