Ukulele of Death, page 16
I folded my arms for the express purpose of looking at him disapprovingly. ‘Really. And when I told you about that, you said, “They got you too?” Now’s when you tell me exactly what that meant.’
Ken nodded his head like a guy who just accepted the challenge in a bar fight. ‘OK. All right. You want to talk about that. Right.’ Aunt Margie and I waited and he didn’t say anything else.
‘And?’ Aunt Margie prompted.
‘Yeah. Yeah. So about a week ago a guy tried to hustle me into a van,’ Ken said. Then he looked away.
‘How does that information add up to you being embarrassed?’ I asked. ‘And what do you mean, he tried to hustle you into a van? This unnamed man tried to talk you into getting into his van? Did he offer you candy or tell you there was a puppy inside?’
Ken stopped looking away long enough to give me the stink eye. ‘Cute, Frannie.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m saying I was out about a block from the office and there was a black van parked on the street in an illegal space. I was walking by, not really even noticing it. Then this guy moved out of his way to hip check me in the direction of the van. But I guess he didn’t know how strong I am because he just sort of bounced off.’
‘Was he wearing a dark trench coat?’ I asked.
Ken stared at me. ‘You think I remember what he was wearing?’
Aunt Margie, always a careful listener, wrinkled her brow. ‘So you bumped into a man in the street and you think it was an attempt at abduction?’ she asked.
‘No, there’s more to it than that.’ Now my brother seemed to think we were in some way attacking his manhood. He might be artificial, but he’s a man for sure. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a nice way. ‘When he saw he couldn’t shove me into the van he tried to block me in the street and said he needed some help moving something out of the back.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I kept walking. I’m a New Yorker.’ Ken also thinks being from New York means that he always has to be rude; he takes that as a badge of honor. It’s not true, of course, but Ken still has a decent amount of maturing to do. I decided not to challenge him on his manners just now.
‘And then what?’
‘What do you mean, “and then what?”’
He can be a little slow on the uptake, but Ken’s not dense. ‘What did you do after that?’ I asked.
‘I went to get a sub sandwich.’
Then it hit me. Because otherwise I would have hit Ken. ‘That’s exactly what happened to me, except they put a bag over my head instead of trying to hip me into the car.’
‘What did they look like?’ Ken asked.
‘I didn’t see the person who shoved me into the car,’ I told him. ‘They put a bag over my head.’
‘And no one on the street yelled or anything?’ Ken sounded appalled.
‘They were New Yorkers.’
‘What about the man your friend the cop saw?’ Aunt Margie asked.
Ken looked confused so I told him about the man in the dark trench coat.
‘Frannie,’ my brother said, ‘this is serious. Somebody knows about us and they want something from us. If the guy was following you and Mankiewicz could see him … where was this?’
‘Right in front of the precinct,’ I said. ‘Where’s a cop when you need one?’
‘That’s in our neighborhood,’ Aunt Margie said with a catch in her voice. ‘If they were following you that soon after you walked out the door they might know where you live.’ She started knitting faster. Whatever it was she was making might be finished in another hour. The only thing I could tell you for sure was that it was green.
We sat there silently for close to a full minute. Then I stood up and felt a little lightheaded. ‘I’ve got to charge,’ I said.
Nobody stopped me with an encouraging thought so I went into my bedroom and plugged myself into the wall.
TWENTY-THREE
I was not familiar with the 18th Precinct. I had never been there before and didn’t even have the cache of saying that Mankiewicz or (heaven forbid) Bendix had sent me. I was a private investigator walking in with questions, and the one thing you can say about that situation is that cops really don’t like it unless the PI is an ex-cop, in which case they slap him on the back and still don’t tell him anything.
The cop in question on this day, after I’d recharged myself, had dinner and slept nine hours without talking about our predicament to Aunt Margie or Ken, was Sgt. Hank Klinger. It was a serious effort not to make M*A*S*H jokes, but I managed it. I loved that show when I was a teenager. People stuck in a bad situation being wiseasses. What was there not to like?
Klinger – the one in front of me – was a guy in his late thirties or early forties whose respiration and heart rate had increased when he’d gotten his first look at me. It’s something I notice but try not to resent. They don’t try to make their respiration and heart rates jump. He did, to his credit, keep his gaze on my face and that was an improvement over the norm.
‘It was a car crash,’ he said once I’d explained my reason for being there. ‘It’s not mysterious. He drove too fast and lost control, rammed into a tree. It happens.’
OK, so Klinger wasn’t the most sensitive of people. That too is not terribly unusual in police officers; they see a lot of stuff that citizens do to each other and it’s rarely pleasant. You need to grow a hard shell to survive.
‘I understand that,’ I said, although I harbored at least some suspicions about the crash that had killed Dr Mansoor. ‘But I’m curious about what might have been found in the car. Do you have an inventory?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Klinger replied. Then he sat down behind his desk, which was a welcome conglomeration of papers, staplers (three), paper clips, a phone and various and sundry other items I couldn’t see because all that stuff was obscuring them. ‘But I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why I should share it with you.’ He didn’t smile when he said it. He wasn’t being smug or cute. He wasn’t trying to impress me. Even his respiration had returned to normal. He gestured to a guest chair in front of his desk but I remained standing.
‘You should share it with me because it can be very helpful to me in a case I’m working,’ I said. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call true in the legal sense but it was in the emotional sense. I had decided as soon as Ken and I opened the agency that trying to find out about our parents would be treated like any case. I’d deal strictly with facts and not let any emotional baggage influence my decisions. ‘You should share it with me because I might be able to help you score some points with it and clear your paperwork. And mostly you should share it with me because it’s a matter of public record and I am a member of the public you serve.’
You’d think a speech that eloquent and forceful would have dented Klinger’s armor, but he didn’t even look impressed. He refrained from putting his feet up on his desk, which I appreciated in retrospect, but the arms folded across his chest were not a sign he wanted to collaborate.
‘The incident report is a matter of public record,’ he said without so much as a blink. ‘The inventory of items recovered from the car – and believe me there weren’t many given the damage that vehicle had sustained – is not. Now suppose you tell me why you’re so hot to get your hands on that list and then maybe I’ll decide that I’ll be a nice guy and help you out.’
I sat down.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘The man who was killed in that crash was a friend of my parents. They died in a similar incident when I was only three. He left a voicemail for me that day saying he had information about them and I never got a chance to talk to him. I’m hoping there might be something retrieved from that car that might give me a hint about what he meant. Is that too much to ask?’ I let there be a slight tremor in my voice but avoided letting a tear fall from my eye strictly because I didn’t think Klinger was the kind of guy on whom that would work especially well. I can do it when I want to.
Klinger smiled. With some people that would mean they were enjoying your pain but it didn’t seem that way with him. The crooked grin still had an element of victory in it, though. ‘See?’ he said. ‘You can do so much better when you just tell the truth. That was the truth, wasn’t it?’
‘Every word.’ Except most of them.
‘Let me find the file.’ I thought Klinger was going to start typing away on his keyboard, but apparently he was one of the odd breed of humans still hanging on fiercely to the concept of paper documents because he started picking up manila folders from his desk, glancing at them and then tossing them aside. He had a filing system like Ken’s. Mine was a little more organized. Igavda had learned from Ken. My office was a place of chaos if I didn’t go in often enough. ‘Ah! Here we go!’
He pulled out a completely nondescript file and instead of handing it to me (as I would have wanted but didn’t expect) he leafed through it, actually licking the pad of his index finger to do so. I fingered the vial of hand sanitizer in the pocket of my jeans but left it there.
Klinger reached into the file and pulled out a single sheet of paper, clearly a printout of the form that the cops on the scene of the accident had filled out. It was unlikely a plainclothes detective had been dispatched given that Dr Mansoor had clearly died in a car accident. There is a collision investigation squad that looks into every fatal crash, but when it’s a one-vehicle incident like Dr Mansoor’s, the investigation is into how it happened and not necessarily if someone else was involved.
‘This is the list of items found in the car, at least the ones we could identify,’ Klinger said. ‘See if there’s anything that can help you.’
What could have helped me would have been seeing the rest of the documents in that file but that didn’t seem likely so when Klinger extended the single sheet of paper toward me I took it and smiled at him like he was doing everything he could for me. You can lie in smiles, too.
The form was standard and had been filled out by an Officer Patel whose first name was in such a scrawl that I couldn’t possibly make it out. That wouldn’t much matter unless I had to talk to the officer and there was more than one Patel working at the precinct.
At first glance it didn’t look like there was anything of interest listed on the sheet and I was prepared to pout, hand it back to Klinger, and shuffle off into the night (it was mid-morning) with a storm cloud over my head. There was a bottle of spring water found in the back seat, split open and empty. There was a comb, a cloth handkerchief (Dr Mansoor was old school), two canvas shopping bags from Gristedes, the iPhone discovered lodged under the rear seat that had probably saved it, and a dog training pad. Apparently the doctor had a dog who did not treat car upholstery well. The dog had not been in the car at the time of the crash.
Just before I was going to give up, though, I saw a separate list in another section of the form, this of items discovered in the car’s trunk. Of course there was a spare tire (donut) and jack, a tire iron, and a pair of jumper cables. There was Mansoor’s medical kit in case of emergencies. There was a sweater, gray wool.
And there was a metal lock box, just as Dr Kendall had predicted, containing a second cell phone. A Samsung.
It would probably have been a mistake to look too excited when I asked Klinger about that, but I was encouraged. A second phone could mean that was the work one, the phone issued by a company, agency, or hospital (Mansoor had been working at New York Presbyterian Hospital part-time) and not the one on which he would have been saving personal contacts. He had called me from the iPhone. So maybe there was little chance Dr Mansoor had kept his notes, if there were any, on his second phone. But maybe he had. I didn’t have access to either device at the moment and needed to concoct a decent argument that Klinger should let me have both to look at.
‘Not terribly interesting, is it?’ I said, trying to sound dejected. Best to give him the impression I was going to give up; he could go on with his day and feel like a hero for showing me the one measly form.
‘They usually aren’t,’ he answered, reaching for the form. I’d pretty much memorized it so I handed it back without protest. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’
I stood and picked up my purse, the large one I carried for business. I couldn’t store a laptop in it, but my phone does almost everything I need when I’m not in the office or at home. ‘Well, thanks for the look.’
Klinger nodded and made a show of reaching for another file on his desk, indicating he was getting on with his important work and not the whims of some silly, if unusually tall, woman.
Then I went full Columbo on him and turned just as I was about to walk out. ‘Just one thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know if he had any notes on either of his cell phones?’
‘Notes?’
I assumed he wanted an explanation and not a definition of the word. ‘Notes. Like things about what he was working on, appointments he had, that sort of thing.’
Klinger’s eyes narrowed. ‘You think he was getting ready to meet with your dead parents? Because it’s possible he’s having lunch with them as we speak.’
I put a hand on my hip to show some irritation. Because I was, you know, irritated. Talking about my dead parents – who quite probably were not dead – like that? Rude. ‘He called me,’ I said with an edge. ‘Maybe there’s some indication of what he wanted to talk to me about.’
‘I’m not going to show you the dead doctor’s phones,’ Klinger said. ‘There could be personal stuff on there and that’s unethical.’
‘Have you looked at them?’ I turned back toward him. It wasn’t meant to be a threatening move but sometimes I intimidate people by being me. Klinger backed up in his chair an inch or so. It wasn’t much of a move but I could see it, which was probably not what he had in mind.
‘Of course I did,’ he answered. ‘It’s my job.’
‘Did you take notes?’ I took a step forward to see what would happen, but this time Klinger was ready for it and nothing happened. You can’t win them all.
‘Yeah, but I’m not showing you those, either.’
I put both hands on my hips. It made me look like I was pretending to be Superman, which was only partially the effect I was hoping to have. ‘So I’m guessing you can tell me if my name was mentioned.’
Klinger exhaled dramatically. I considered nominating him for a Tony Award but remembered a Broadway theater needed at least five hundred seats to qualify and the precinct couldn’t have held more than seventy-five. ‘Stein, I never so much as heard your name before the dispatcher called and let me know you wanted to come in and ask me questions about a dead doctor’s telephones.’
The hip thing wasn’t working so I folded my arms to look more authoritative. ‘Dr Mansoor had an FBI file,’ I said.
Klinger blinked. Twice. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Let me see the notes on Dr Mansoor’s phones and I’ll tell you.’
He pursed his lips, which didn’t do very much for his face. ‘You’re bluffing.’
Fully charged, I was feeling strong and my mind was operating at its fullest potential, which is either a good or bad thing depending on your estimation. I go back and forth on that one. ‘I’m not bluffing. I don’t know the whole story and I haven’t seen the file but I know it exists and I know why. If you’d like me to tell you that, you can show me the phones or the notes you took on them.’
Klinger gave that some thought; you could tell by his eyebrows, which met in the middle, dropped, and then returned to their respective corners to prepare for the next round. He dropped his hands on his desk like they were just too heavy to hold up anymore. ‘I’m not letting you touch the phones,’ he said.
‘The notes, then.’
He nodded with a frown. I made a mental note to send his ego a sympathy card when I got home. Klinger rifled through the file on Dr Mansoor’s crash again and came up with a copy he’d made of handwritten notes. I was impressed because I didn’t think anyone wrote in cursive anymore. It was even legible.
After reading the notes over and determining, I guessed, that they didn’t contain anything leading to the overthrow of the government, he handed me the pages. It was a considerably more substantial document than the accounting of items from the car had been and it took me a couple of minutes to scan through it.
Most of what he’d written wasn’t relevant to my situation. There were lists of appointments that he wasn’t going to keep and some reports about cases he’d consulted on with the patients’ names replaced by numbers. Dr Mansoor had been very scrupulous about keeping his records private. His grocery list, however, had been very searchable and included such items as red leaf lettuce, bananas, and whipped cream. It was eclectic, or he was planning on making one weird salad.
In the middle of the second page, however, were notes regarding people he identified only as ‘B & O.’ At first I thought he was referring to the railroad in Monopoly, but as I read I realized Dr Mansoor had been talking about Brad and Olivia.
My parents.
Aunt Margie referred to my mother only as ‘Livvie,’ so it didn’t immediately occur to me she was the ‘O’ being discussed here. And it became fairly clear in a short period of time that Dr Mansoor had been just a little obsessed with Mom.
O develops KXD3, one note read. Most amazing discovery since Radium. Should have Nobel. O says it doesn’t matter.
Says? That’s the present tense. Was Dr Mansoor in touch with my mother at the time he’d died?
B is in Paris, another note said. Coming Sunday. Find space. Only 48 hours.
Dr Mansoor’s message on my voicemail had suggested I had forty-eight hours to contact him about my parents, and he’d died less than three hours later. Had he found them a place to stay for those two days? Was he being tracked? Were they?
Before Klinger could object I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the page. ‘Hey!’ he yelped. ‘Who told you it was OK to take pictures?’
