Ukulele of Death, page 17
‘Who told me it wasn’t?’ I took one of the next page just in case.
Klinger reached out to grab my phone and I snatched it out of his reach. I put the phone in the hip pocket of my jeans, daring him to reach for it now. Showing some good sense, he didn’t.
‘No more pictures!’ he said. ‘That’s a rule.’
‘OK, OK. Fair enough,’ I said. Then I noticed references to ‘O’ and ‘B’ on the fourth page and memorized them because I didn’t think I could get my phone out fast enough. They read: B to NY LHR-LGA O to NY AF1355 CDG-LHR-ORD-EWR. They were dated just under two weeks earlier, and I figured if I had alphabet soup later I might be able to figure those notes out.
There were no other ‘O’ or ‘B’ references in the document. Which was probably good news for Klinger although he didn’t know it. I’d be out of his (thinning, I noticed) hair shortly.
‘Quid pro quo,’ he said. ‘Why is there an FBI file on Mansoor?’
Fair enough. ‘Because apparently some of his work involved eugenics,’ I told him.
Klinger wrote that down without so much as a raised eyebrow, then looked at me. ‘What’s eugenics?’ he asked.
How to boil this down? ‘The idea of genetically engineering people to be whatever the scientist or the people the scientist is working for believes is superior,’ I said. ‘The Nazis were big into it.’
Klinger wrote NAZIS on the page next to his previous note. I held my breath in the hope that he would not ask me who they were.
‘OK, that’s bad,’ Klinger said.
I agreed and thanked him but did not hold out a hand to shake. Klinger looked at me curiously and his respiration did not increase. ‘I have a totally unrelated question,’ I said just on an impulse.
Immediately he looked suspicious. ‘What?’
‘What could a person hide in a ukulele that would be worth more than a million dollars?’
Klinger squinted at me as if I were very far away, or standing in the direct path of the sun. He spoke in a faraway voice. ‘Not drugs,’ he said. ‘Maybe precious stones or some kind of information stored on a chip. Anything else would be too big or heavy.’
It was, possibly, the first useful piece of information I’d gotten all day.
TWENTY-FOUR
Since I was already uptown I figured it was best to go check in on Gus the super from Evelyn Bannister’s apartment building. I still needed to ask him about the use of strychnine as a pesticide under his watch. I guessed that Det. Miller had already interviewed him but oddly Miller wasn’t sending me regular updates on his pursuit of Evelyn’s killer.
It would be a crosstown walk to get to Evelyn’s building. It was a nice (if hot) day so that wasn’t an issue, but I did find myself looking behind me more often than I normally do, which is to say I was looking back quite a bit and I usually don’t at all. There was, for the record, no sign of a man in a dark trench coat.
Just to be safe I dug my phone out of my hip pocket and FaceTimed Mank. If anyone came up behind me while I had the video running he’d see it happen. And if it was the guy in the dark trench coat there was the slimmest possible chance that Mank would recognize him.
OK, I was grasping at straws. But calling Ken right now wasn’t going to do me any good and Shelly was probably busy US Marshalling, so it made the most sense to check in. Calling Igavda for office information was about as useful as an umbrella stand in the Sahara.
Mank had a puzzled look on his face when he picked up. I could see the walls of his cubicle behind him; he was in the precinct. ‘What’s this all about?’ he asked.
‘I just wanted to check in on this restaurant we’re supposedly going to tonight,’ I lied.
‘What do you mean, “supposedly?” And how come you’re video-calling me when you’re walking out on the street?’
The second one was actually a good question and I couldn’t be too outlandish in my explanation. Aunt Margie always told me it was easier to remember the truth. ‘I wanted to be visible in case the guy in the trench coat is following me again,’ I said.
Mank nodded. That made sense to him. ‘Let me see,’ he said.
I angled the phone to view behind my right shoulder. ‘How’s that?’
‘Nobody there,’ Mank said. ‘I mean, there are people, but none of them looks like they just left the set of a Humphrey Bogart movie.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m heading to Evelyn Bannister’s building to talk to her super.’ Probably more information than Mank needed or cared to have, but I figured if I was thrown into a car and ended up being vivisected it would probably be best if he knew at least what neighborhood I was heading for.
Paranoid? Me? Does it count as paranoia if you’ve actually been abducted in the past twenty-four hours?
‘You think the super killed her?’ Mank asked.
‘No. What possible reason would he have to kill Evelyn? I’m going to ask him if there was rat poison on the premises because that’s a common use of strychnine.’
‘Maybe he asked her out on a date and she said she was “supposedly” going,’ Mank said. ‘People have been killed for less. Or so the homicide guys tell me.’
A woman walking in front of me was trying to negotiate a stroller around an open basement door and finding it difficult with people walking in the other direction. I couldn’t get around her either, so I reached my free hand out and lifted the stroller over the open door without dangling it over the opening. I placed it down on the pavement again just as the woman began to scream at me.
‘What are you doing?’ she yelled. ‘You could have dropped my baby!’
I decided not to tell her she was welcome and passed her, noting that the stroller held a small Yorkshire terrier who didn’t seem the least bit perturbed over his apparent flirtation with death.
Leaving the woman and her dog behind I looked back at my phone. Mank seemed amused. ‘Placing people’s children in jeopardy?’ he asked.
‘It was her dog.’
‘Worse yet. So what about this “supposedly?”’
I didn’t have a coherent answer to that question, now that he’d asked it three times, so I changed the subject. ‘Mank, do you think whoever killed Evelyn was doing it just for the ukulele? I mean, once they knocked her out with the candlestick they could have taken the uke and run. Why bother to inject her with poison?’
‘Why not just keep bashing her over the head if you wanted to kill her?’ he countered.
‘Maybe he’s squeamish.’
‘How do you know it’s a he?’ Mank asked. Touché.
‘They,’ I said. I’m accepting of all gender pronouns.
‘From what I’ve read, why not take the ukulele case?’ he said. ‘Whoever it was just left it sitting there for the cops to find.’
I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Yeah. Why the hell not?’
‘It’s a good question. I wish I’d thought of it.’
I tilted the phone to show Mank behind me again and he assured me my shadow was nowhere to be seen. I worried that I’d done something to offend the man in the dark trench coat, or that he was so easily discouraged that he’d give up after one day.
‘Maybe the ukulele is just a red herring,’ Mank said. ‘Maybe the idea always was to kill Evelyn Bannister, or whoever she was.’
‘You’re paying an awful lot of attention to a case that’s not even in your precinct,’ I noted.
‘I need dinner conversation for my date tonight, which I’m definitely picking you up for at seven thirty.’
I was only a block away from the building at that point so I figured it was safe to hang up on Mank, just to keep him wondering what I’d meant by supposedly. Because the truth was that I didn’t know why I’d said that either.
Evelyn’s building was a tall one, but not especially so by Manhattan standards. It couldn’t be seen from space. There were choices of thirty-two buttons in the elevator but knowing how most such apartment buildings work, I pushed the one for the basement. If the super lived on the premises, which the landlord corporation’s website insisted was the case in all their properties, and that’s almost always where you can find them. Just one way in which the person who actually keeps the building running is treated with the utmost in respect. The meager paycheck was no doubt another one.
A third probably would have been the apartment itself but I never got that far. The basement looked like another floor, albeit a considerably less luxurious one than those assigned to the tenants. There must have been another area of it, probably behind a locked door, where storage and building materials were kept.
There were a number of doors, fewer than on a residential floor because the spaces must each have been larger, but only one marked S-1. In case the super had for some reason forgotten his job after a day of fixing broken toilets and replacing batteries in smoke detectors for people who could easily have done so on their own.
I wondered if Gus ever thought about this stuff when he came back to his underground apartment at night, or if he was just so tired all he wanted was to flop on the couch and watch Real Superintendents of Beverly Hills. Or something.
Considering that he might be out when I got there I had decided against bringing him bagels, which would have gotten moldy and inedible in the basement I had been expecting to find. I’d brought nothing because it was weird, finally, to bring a gift to a man because he was going to answer your questions when it wasn’t really costing him anything but a few minutes. And now, of course, I felt like a cheapskate.
If Gus gave me any useful information, I decided, I’d send him some designer popcorn. Everybody likes popcorn.
There was a doorbell on S-1 so I rang it, assuming that Gus would be upstairs in someone’s apartment, superintending. So I was mildly surprised when the door opened.
I was more surprised when the man standing in the doorway, a large man wearing a blue polo shirt and work pants, was considerably not Gus. His roommate? His son? A visiting relative?
‘Hi,’ I said, looking the man in the eye. ‘My name is Fran Stein.’
It was not at all hard to understand that the man didn’t widen his eyes in recognition of my name. But I waited a moment and got no response at all.
‘I’m looking for Gus,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’
The man’s mouth widened, closed, as if he were tasting something bad. ‘Who’s Gus?’ he asked.
‘The super?’ Suddenly it seemed to be more like a question.
The mouth got wider yet. I worried he might hurt himself. ‘I’m the super,’ he said. ‘My name is Harry.’
Sure he was. Sure he was. Harry. Harry the super who looked nothing like Gus the super, who was there in the apartment being questioned by the cops when I’d called them to look into Evelyn Bannister’s murder. That Gus.
Maybe the trauma had been too much for Gus. ‘Did you just start working here?’ I asked.
‘Lady, I’ve been the super here for seventeen years.’
Well. So much for the designer popcorn.
TWENTY-FIVE
A Taste of Athens was definitely not, by anyone’s definition, a Thai restaurant. Rich Mankiewicz had sheepishly announced that the place we were supposed to have dinner had suffered a kitchen fire and would not open again for at least a month. I didn’t especially care about that but I was not above teasing Mank mercilessly about it as if he had set the place ablaze himself.
I cut into my pastitsio with my fork and tasted it carefully. ‘They make a really unusual mango chicken here,’ I said.
Mank, who knew what he was in for when he asked me out, nodded. ‘You’re hilarious,’ he said.
‘Please. My modesty.’ It was actually really good pastitsio. I tried not to eat like a hungry rhinoceros because I was just ravenous. ‘Mank …’
‘You really can’t just call me Rich?’ he said.
I would have put down my fork to make a point, but pastitsio. ‘Here’s how I see that,’ I said after the interval when there was food in my mouth. ‘Anybody can be a Rich. You’re unique because you’re you, so I call you Mank because I don’t call anybody else Mank.’
‘Bendix calls me Mank,’ he said.
OK, that was worth thinking about. ‘He calls me Gargantua.’
‘The man has an impish sense of humor.’ My date, whose name I was still pondering but it was going to stay Mank, was having spanakopita, which looked good. He seemed to be enjoying it.
‘I’m gonna call you Mank.’
‘Of course you are.’
A guy two tables away with a truly revolting combover was staring at me like I was a freak. I mean, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but he didn’t know that. I immediately checked to see if he had a dark trench coat draped over the back of his chair, but it was a leather bomber jacket the guy probably believed made him look cool. In any event, he was getting on my nerves.
‘Hey,’ Mank said. ‘I’m over here.’
I diverted my attention back to him. ‘Sorry. There’s a man over there ogling me like I was a side of beef and he hadn’t eaten in a month.’
Mank started and quickly stopped himself, not wanting to be obvious in his glance at my admirer. ‘The bald guy?’ he asked.
‘Almost entirely.’
‘He should stop that,’ Mank said.
‘Yeah, but he won’t. I get that sometimes.’ I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Mank could obsess, especially when he thought someone was disrespecting me. He knows I can take care of myself, but he calls whenever a mysterious man in a dark trench coat is following me down the street. And he didn’t even know that I’d been abducted right after that.
Could combover guy be The Voice? That would be so disappointing. He looked less like an evil genius and more like a regional representative of National Nut Products who’d had a couple too many ouzos.
‘You shouldn’t have to put up with it.’ Mank was working himself up. I was really regretting broaching the subject at all, but it had taken my mind off all the things I had failed at over the past few days: Finding Evelyn Bannister’s biological father, stopping her from being murdered, finding out who she really was, figuring out the deal with the $1.2 million ukulele, not being kidnapped, taking Dr Mansoor’s call, finding out why he’d been trying to contact me and what it had to do with my parents, and most recently being able to question Gus because apparently there was no Gus and probably never had been.
Ken had been unusually serious when I told him about the Gus development when I was getting ready to meet Mank. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, watching me try out a number of pairs of earrings. He had a befuddled look on his face, which I could totally understand right now. ‘Why don’t you just put on a pair of earrings and go?’
Perhaps I was overestimating my brother.
‘They have to look right. But this Gus thing is what’s got me going right now.’ The fake emeralds didn’t look any better than the fake sapphires. Hell, it was Mank. I’d known him for more than a year and I’d bet money he wouldn’t be able to say which earrings I’d had on ten minutes after we parted for the night. Maybe even while I was sitting right in front of him.
‘Yeah, that’s a problem,’ Ken agreed. ‘But it puts our old pal Gus, whoever he is, right at the top of our suspect list. So it really simplifies matters. All we have to do is find out who Gus is and we have the killer. Then we can go back to working on paying jobs.’
‘This is a paying job,’ I corrected him. Simple gold hoops. I’d be the only one who cared anyway. Might as well wear the ones I liked best. ‘Evelyn’s check cleared and we kept the money. But that’s the thing that’s bothered me right from the start.’
Ken sat back in my desk chair and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘That we got paid?’
‘No, but you are in fact hilarious. It’s just my amazing ability to control my impulses that’s allowing me to refrain from dissolving into hysterics. No, Ken. The thing that’s bothering me and has since we took Evelyn Bannister’s check is that nobody in this case is who they say they are and we have no clue who we’re talking about. We never had a name for Evelyn’s father and it turns out he might not be her father at all. Then Evelyn wasn’t really Evelyn, but someone who might or might not be Patrice Lancaster. And even Gus the super, who just came in to tell the cops he’d been meaning to fix the pipe under Evelyn’s sink, wasn’t even Gus the super. There never was a Gus the super. The real super is a guy named Harry who thinks I’m a lunatic. And yes, I checked with the company and the super is a man named Harry.’
Strikingly Ken didn’t take the opportunity to be a wiseass. He nodded while I was talking, indicating he was actually thinking. Then he unlaced his fingers and leaned forward, elbows on his thighs.
‘We have to start with Gus, whoever he was,’ he said. ‘He was close by when Evelyn was killed, which we know because he showed up immediately after you and I called the cops. He had access to strychnine in pesticides if he was in the maintenance area at all. He lied about being the super and got out before the cops could check his story. Evelyn, or whoever, was clearly trying to find an older man who she told us was her birth father.’
I stopped on the left earring and looked at him. ‘An older man like Gus,’ I said.
‘Bingo. Maybe he was a rival dealer in weird instruments and she was afraid he’d get to the million-dollar uke before she did. Your friend the US Marshal says there was a theft of a Gibson Poinsettia reported in Portland, Maine. Maybe Patrice was in on it, was about to take it to London to auction it and was worried he was on her trail and would take it from her. Maybe Gus stole it and was Patrice’s supplier. Any way you look at it, our buddy Gus was tied to that ukulele. And for some reason it was worth a whole bunch of money, enough to justify – to him – killing Evelyn for it, lying to the cops and ducking out ASAP.’
When Ken decides to actually apply his brain, he can be something.
‘So what we have to do is figure out who Gus really is and that might lead us to his whereabouts.’
‘Yeah,’ my brother answered. ‘But how do we do that?’ In our business, he’s analysis and I’m strategy. Except those times when it’s the other way around.
