Ukulele of Death, page 18
‘Well, we have to make a couple of assumptions and then test them,’ I said. ‘First, it’s a pretty decent bet his name isn’t really Gus.’
‘That’s a pretty decent bet with anybody,’ Ken pointed out. ‘How many people do you know named Gus?’
I ignored that because I’m a grownup. ‘And we have to assume that he’s tied somehow to the ukulele, which is the only thing we know Evelyn was definitely interested in.’
‘I’ll check into Patrice Lancaster and see if she might be Evelyn Bannister,’ Ken said. He couldn’t add to my plan so he was going to steer the conversation toward an area in which he could be useful. But I wasn’t done yet.
‘So if it’s a man whose name isn’t Gus and who’s interested …’ I’m sure my eyes went dreamy and my face became blank. I was putting two and two together and for the first time in this case it was coming up four.
‘What?’ Ken said. It was a logical response to my suddenly becoming a pod person before his eyes.
‘There’s a guy who likes to collect rare stringed instruments. He can get obsessed with them when he’s in pursuit. And nobody’s seen him in at least five years.’ It had all just come together in my head.
‘Who is this guy?’ Ken asked, still staring at me funny because of the faraway look in my eyes.
‘His name is Augustus Bennett,’ I answered.
Ken looked impressed.
Sitting here now with Mank at A Taste of Athens I was feeling like a failure. Ken was trying to dig up stuff I hadn’t already found about Augustus Bennett and I was thinking of myself as a useless part of the K&F Stein Investigations team. All I could do was ask other people (like cops and marshals) for help and then assign the difficult computer work to my brother. When I went out to investigate I generally found that the person I was asking about wasn’t who I thought they were, or I got taken off the street and almost subjected to unexplained medical experiments.
The one thing I definitely wasn’t going to do, I decided on the spot, was ask Mank to help me with the case. Or any case. Ever. If we were out on a date, we were out on a date. Terrifying though that was to me, I was going to commit to the concept.
‘That guy is staring at you,’ Mank said. ‘You want me to do something about it?’
Men. ‘No, I don’t want you to do something about it,’ I said, perhaps with a little more testiness in my voice than was warranted. Or perhaps not. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m pretty big and strong and I have no trouble defending myself. If it gets to a point where he’s actually bothering me I can definitely handle it on my own.’
Mank nodded with a sheepish smile on his face. ‘It just seems so un-chivalrous,’ he said.
‘Chivalry is overrated.’
‘OK. Now. What about this murder case? You went to see Klinger uptown?’
I took another bit of the very good pastitsio, at least half of which was going to come home with me. Even people who were constructed from a set of Lego need to watch their diets. ‘I don’t want to talk about the case,’ I said.
Mank looked concerned. ‘Going that bad?’
‘Well, yes, but that’s not the reason. If we’re going to be doing … this … I don’t want to think of you as a resource. You’re Mank. You’re the guy I do … this … with.’
He laughed. ‘And with a level of enthusiasm that would normally inspire me to go home, write a journal entry and have a cry.’
I studied him, thinking of Mank crying over me at night. ‘Would you really do that?’ I asked.
‘No!’
But we didn’t get past that. The guy with the combover, who clearly did not observe the same social boundaries as normal humans, reeled his way toward our table. He’d clearly had more than one drink tonight and it had, to the disadvantage of everyone in the restaurant, emboldened him.
‘You’re real big,’ he slurred. He had to walk right past Mank to get to me, and had not so much as glanced at him. But I saw when Mank’s hand tightened into a fist and when the other hand patted the pocket in which he must have been carrying his gun. This was a situation that would have to be defused quickly in order to avoid a really unfortunate resolution.
‘Yes I am,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ Treating it as the advantage that height can be throws them off sometimes.
But only sometimes. ‘And in all the fun places, too,’ the guy said.
‘Just keep walking, buddy,’ Mank said. ‘I’m NYPD.’ Neither of his hands relaxed.
‘I was talking to the lady,’ the drunk said. ‘I didn’t break no laws.’ That was technically true, if ungrammatical.
‘Back. Off,’ Mank said with a little more force.
Without delivering another lecture on my ability to handle my own problems, I stood up and faced the combover guy. Sort of. He was four inches shorter than I am.
‘Wow,’ combover guy said, staring at me not in the eyes.
‘Sir, my friend and I are having a quiet dinner. So please have a nice night and move on, OK?’ I gestured in the direction of the door in what I thought was a subtle but unmistakable fashion.
‘You’re really something,’ the guy said. He was clearly a graduate of the Sorbonne. Such eloquence.
Then he reached up with his left hand and was about to place it in the area where he’d been staring. And that’s where the line gets crossed.
Before Mank could say or do anything I hit the combover guy with a left cross and he went down in a heap on the floor. He didn’t move after that.
The maître d’, whom I guessed also owned A Taste of Athens, rushed over immediately. ‘What did this man say?’ he said, kneeling down to check on combover guy, who was breathing but not feeling at all well.
‘Not so much what he said as what he was doing,’ I answered. ‘Sorry for the trouble.’
Mank just sat there looking stunned. But he did take his hand off the gun, which I supposed was a move in the right direction.
‘We will call the police,’ the maître d’ said.
Mank coughed and then stood up. ‘I’m a police officer,’ he said.
The maître d’ looked him up and down. ‘You are?’
‘Yeah.’
The guy I hit was starting to return to what I can only refer to as his senses because there’s no other word for it. ‘Somebody musta hit me,’ he said. Stone cold sober now.
‘I did,’ I told him.
The maître d’ helped him to his feet and he stood, a trifle unsteadily, leaning on our table for support. Mank looked like he wanted a crack at the man himself. But he wasn’t going to get that. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ the maître d’ asked my latest assailant.
‘What? Ambulance? No! I got hit by a girl!’ With that he turned and walked out through the front door, saying, ‘The stuffed grape leaves weren’t that good, either.’
‘My apologies,’ the maître d’ said. To Mank and me. ‘Sometimes I think we should cut off some people when they’re drinking. Please. Ouzo is on the house.’ And he walked away before acknowledging the contradiction or determining whether Mank and I were people who should be cut off when they’re drinking.
I sat back down at the table and took what I swore to myself would be the last bite of pastitsio for the night. But Mank stood there, looking at the maître d’, then at the floor where combover guy had fallen. Then at me.
He took a deep breath and sat down. ‘This is going to take some getting used to,’ he said.
TWENTY-SIX
‘So let’s sum up,’ I said.
Immediately Ken rolled his eyes. His voice came out in a whine. ‘Do we have to?’ I thought back to when Aunt Margie would make him do his geography homework in fourth grade.
‘Yes. It’s my way of making sure I’m not missing anything.’ I sat down at my desk and got out a legal pad and a blue Uni-ball micro roller (that’s a pen) so I could make a list.
‘It’s not my way,’ Ken protested. ‘Why do I have to be here?’ He was already at his desk, with its view of the reception area and Igavda. Ken had designed the layout of our offices so that would be the case.
‘Because you have ideas that I won’t have and you contribute useful things to the conversation.’ I wasn’t just flattering Ken to get him to stay, although that would have been enough. I needed him there for exactly those reasons. ‘So shut up.’
‘Don’t see how I can contribute useful things if I shut up,’ he mumbled, knowing full well I could hear him.
I overlooked his remark because it wasn’t going to lead to anything productive. Today I was all about productivity. ‘So Evelyn Bannister—’
Ken cut me off. ‘I believe we can now say for certain her real name was Caroline Seberg,’ he said.
That was news to me. I stopped writing the heading Things We Know on the left side of the legal pad and looked at him. ‘Huh?’ I grunted.
‘Last night when you were out on your date I did some looking into the woman who told us she was Evelyn Bannister,’ he explained. ‘She had used a lot of names in her lifetime, and there were plenty of fake Social Security numbers for her, but only one birth certificate for any of the identities. And that was—’
‘Caroline Seberg.’ At least I had followed him that far.
He pointed at his nose to indicate I was correct. ‘She was born in Evanston, Illinois on August sixteenth thirty-eight years ago. Had two perfectly intact parents, Jack Seberg and Hazel Francisco Seberg, for the first twenty-six years of her life. Then her mother died of breast cancer and her father died six months later of mental illness which brought on suicide.’
‘Hazel?’ I said.
‘Nice being sensitive, Sis.’
‘When did she start being other people?’ I asked.
Ken tilted his head back and forth a couple of times. ‘That’s not entirely clear. She made a couple of slightly questionable real-estate deals under the name Penny Wilkerson ten years ago. But she might have been arrested as Carol Grande a year before that.’
‘Arrested for what?’ This was getting interesting. I had written only Wow! in the margin of my pad.
‘Soliciting, actually. She got online and said the wrong things to an undercover cop. The conviction was eventually expunged after she did some community service and left Evanston.’
‘When did the real-estate scam turn into weird auctioneering?’ I asked. When Ken had actual information that he’d managed to dig up himself he loved showing it off and I’d learned to let him strut a little bit because he usually unearthed some really useful data. Which appeared to be the case today.
Ken was not referring to notes, which drove me nuts. He can remember things for inhumanly long periods of time and doesn’t need any references. I write down lists of things I need to do in the next ten minutes.
‘About two years ago,’ he said. ‘The first reference to Patrice Lancaster was then, on February twenty-seventh in Chicago. That seemed to be the name she used for the auction agent scam.’
‘Was it a scam?’ I said. ‘I mean, you can be a legitimate auction agent.’
‘Yes, I can. And you could. But Patrice … or Caroline, as it turns out? She never really did anything the way it is supposed to be done. In her case, she would dig up stolen property in pawnshops to begin with and then auction them off as rare objects. It was very small time until last December nineteenth when she moved up into the big leagues.’
‘A forged harpsichord signed by Mozart?’ I suggested.
He half-grinned, not wanting to give me the satisfaction. ‘You’re actually not that far off. She found a guitar she said had been handmade by Les Paul, which turned out to be just another Les Paul guitar manufactured by Gibson. It was a good guitar but the overwhelming odds are that Les himself never once held it in his hands. It’s possible he and the guitar were never even in the same state at the same time.’ Igavda must have stretched at her desk because Ken’s attention was suddenly diverted in her direction.
‘Did she get found out?’ I asked, bringing him back into the conversation.
‘Huh? Yeah, but not until it was far too late. She had already convinced the buyer of the Gibson Poinsettia that she was the right agent to make a bid for him.’ Ken kept glancing over but Igavda, who was used to not doing much at her desk, had stopped squirming in what was, for my brother, an interesting fashion.
‘Why did Sotheby’s let her in if she had been found out representing a bogus Les Paul?’ I asked.
‘Because she was representing the bidder, not the object. The ukulele was brought to the auction by a company here in New York that never once tried to represent it as anything but what it was, a somewhat interesting curio.’ He leaned back in his chair to get one more look at a woman he saw pretty much every day.
‘And the bidder Caroline/Carol/Penny/Evelyn/Patrice was representing was using our father’s name?’
‘Well, the records aren’t public but according to your pal Daddy Warbucks, yeah.’
Then something occurred to me in a flash. ‘Hey. If … Caroline knew she already had the ukulele or that she was going to represent a buyer at auction, how come she hired us to find it?’
Ken stopped looking for Igavda, which is his chief occupation when he’s in the office. (To be fair, Igavda seems to enjoy the attention but it’s highly inappropriate coming from her boss, and Ken has never harassed her or asked her on a date because I told him we’d have to fire one of them if that happened and I was leaning towards him.) He frowned; he hates not having the answer to the question. He wants to show off how smart he is.
‘You said maybe the people behind this were sending us a signal by sending Caroline and using Dad’s name, or one of his names,’ Ken said. ‘What do you think they were trying to tell us? Because I’m guessing coming to the agency and telling a story about an adoptive father she never had wasn’t Caroline’s idea.’
‘Neither was getting conked on the head and poisoned,’ I noted.
‘Fair enough. But what about it? What was this mysterious person, or these mysterious people, trying to tell us?’
That was a really good question. I got up from my desk and went to the small refrigerator I’d installed in the corner where the water cooler used to be. We were paying for the water every month and I was the only one drinking it so I got rid of it. Turned out Ken wanted a place to keep energy drinks and Igavda preferred green tea. This is what comes from polling the staff.
I reached in and pulled out a bottle of water. I took a long swig to mask the fact that I didn’t really have an answer ready. OK, so I like looking like the smartest kid in class too. We do share DNA, after all. I’m pretty sure.
23 and Me would probably shut down its site if I sent in a saliva sample. I’m just saying.
‘Well, let’s think about that,’ I said once my vocal cords were sufficiently moistened. ‘They wanted to send us a message. We have to assume they wanted it to be a clear message. So what do you take from that?’
‘How come I have to be the one to guess?’ Ken asked.
‘Because I asked the question. If I asked it and then answered myself I’d have to run for office and neither one of us wants that.’
He nodded to one side acknowledging my point. ‘What I get from the message mostly is, we know about you.’
It’s not that I hadn’t been thinking that myself. I took another sip of water and walked to my desk to get comfort from my computer screen. It was showing the day’s headlines, so that didn’t work out great. ‘That’s a distinct possibility,’ I answered. ‘But I’m not sure it makes sense. If whoever this is had found out about us, I mean really found out about us like The Voice seemed to have, what’s the advantage in telling us that? Aren’t they giving up the element of surprise in whatever strange purpose they might have with us?’
Ken reached into his desk and pulled out a Kit Kat bar, which he began to unwrap. Everyone has their own office comfort food. Mine’s water. ‘Maybe it’s the bat signal,’ he said. ‘Maybe whoever this is wants our help and thought that was the way to contact us.’
‘Instead of phones and email?’ I said.
‘They want to be untraceable,’ Ken suggested. ‘They want our help but they don’t want anybody else to be able to find them.’
‘Then we can’t find them, either.’ This game wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Suppose the people trying to get in touch with us were our parents,’ Ken said. ‘They’re in some kind of trouble and they need our help.’
I really hated that scenario for any number of reasons. But I also didn’t think it held water. ‘Well, without longitude and latitude I don’t see how Mom and Dad would expect us to be able to find them,’ I told Ken. ‘Wait a minute. We’ve gotten off on this whole tangent because you found out who Evelyn Bannister really is. I thought I asked you to find out about Augustus Bennett.’
Ken eats Kit Kats by just biting into them. Everyone else on planet Earth breaks each row off and eats it separately. My brother just unwraps the thing and chomps away at it. Truly, there are days when I despair for him.
He compounded matters by speaking while he was still chewing the Kit Kat, an offense that should be punishable by at least six years in a maximum-security prison. ‘What makes you think I didn’t?’
‘I’m sorry, that was so disgusting I couldn’t focus on what you said.’
Ken scowled and swallowed his candy. ‘I said, “what makes you think I didn’t,” because I have actually found out a few things about Gus Bennett.’
‘I’m told he prefers August,’ I said.
‘He most likely murdered a client of ours,’ Ken pointed out. ‘I don’t think his preferences should be a great concern to us.’ He turned his attention to his laptop, which he prefers to a desktop computer with two monitors like I have on my desk. To each his own, even if his own can be proven by science to be completely wrong. ‘Anyway,’ my brother continued, ‘the one thing we know for sure is that his name really is Augustus Bennett.’
‘Refreshing,’ I said and drank some more water. You can’t talk and drink water at the same time, another advantage over the Kit Kat. But he was making me really want some chocolate now.
