Same Difference, page 3
There wasn’t a chance that New Amsterdam University listed their current student body by height, or any other attribute, including name. As my ‘friend’ at the registrar’s office had been sure to point out on more than one occasion, they had a right to privacy. I agreed with that, but would have preferred the college make exceptions for private investigators. You’d be amazed at how many businesses and institutions do not.
Ken put his phone in his pants pocket and walked over to my desk. ‘There’s something going on with Mom and Dad,’ he said.
That was a pretty dramatic declaration in our family. My parents left when we were children and we’d barely heard from them since. For years packages of cash would show up addressed to Aunt Margie, which we assumed were from our parents but bore no return address. Some months before now my mother and I had emailed back and forth a few times but she’d stopped replying to me about six weeks earlier. She’d also advised me not to tell Ken about our correspondence because she guessed – correctly, I believed – that he would both overreact and find it impossible to keep such a secret. I had followed her advice.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. Sometimes you just have to move the conversation along.
‘I got a phone call on my cell from a guy who says he works for the WHO,’ Ken said, referring (I guessed) to the World Health Organization and not the classic rock band. ‘He works in Amsterdam and says that two scientists who sound a lot like our parents have been working there for a few months.’
Immediately my stomach tightened up. ‘How did he know to call you?’ I asked. ‘Nobody knows we’re connected to Olivia and Brad.’ Those were the names by which Aunt Margie always referred to Mom and Dad.
‘He said he’d gotten it off cell phone records, which sounds fishy to me,’ Ken answered. ‘They haven’t called us. I’m not sure I believe anything this guy said to me. But if any of it’s true, and even if it’s not, we need to do better in finding our parents because they could be in trouble.’
Everything, and I mean everything, we’d heard about our parents had suggested that someone, possibly from the government but maybe not, had been on their trail for decades. My mother, in our brief email reconnection, had told me that the reason they’d left was out of fear for our safety, not theirs. So what Ken was saying, particularly given his new contact’s sketchy explanation, was not out of the question at all.
‘Did you get his number?’
Ken looked sheepish. ‘It came across as “unknown caller,” and he hung up on me when I asked for it. Is there some way you can get your boyfriend in the NYPD to do a search on my phone?’
OK, so now you know: I’m a coward. I hadn’t told Ken about my breakup, if that’s what it was, with Mank. I hadn’t told him I was going to out both of us to the cop either, and now I was regretting virtually everything I had done – and some things I hadn’t – that day. Denial isn’t a comfortable state in which to live. The taxes are high.
‘I haven’t heard from Mank for a while,’ I said. ‘I guess we broke up.’
Ken is no fool. (Most of what I tell you about him is exaggeration and sibling ribbing.) He narrowed his eyes and ran his tongue over his lower lip. ‘What happened?’ His voice wasn’t sympathetic; it was (justifiably, but he didn’t know it yet) suspicious.
‘I guess he just thought I was too weird,’ I said. That was the truth, if not the whole truth. So help me God. ‘He sort of ghosted me.’
Ken regarded me for a moment. He might not be a deep thinker but he has unerring instincts. ‘Do we need to have a talk?’ he asked.
‘Not yet.’
He nodded about halfway. ‘You let me know as soon as we do,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime, what do we do about the WHO?’
That was a good question. ‘I’ll talk to a friend who has contacts in the federal government, but I’m not sure she can help,’ I said. ‘The WHO isn’t part of any country, so even her friends might not have an in.’
‘Get on the phone,’ Ken said. ‘I’m going to try to call back just by clicking on the call in my recents, but I guarantee you whoever it is won’t answer.’ He turned and walked back to his desk.
I knew that Shelly Kroft was a US Marshal and probably had absolutely no connection to the WHO, but I hadn’t spoken with her for a while and she always makes me feel better. But I put my call to her on my priority list right below trying to find Eliza Hennessey for that very reason: Shelly probably couldn’t help.
When you have no information about someone except their first name and their academic affiliation, the best solution used to be that you could search for them on Facebook. That is no longer the case unless the person involved is over the age of forty. Now the best places to look are Instagram and TikTok.
I tried Instagram first because TikTok, frankly, annoys the hell out of me. If I needed a sixteen-year-old to explain Kierkegaard to me while making up dance moves, that would be my first stop. For something slightly more substantive, Instagram was the best first stop.
The thing is, not everyone who opens an Instagram account, even the ones who are currently in college, list their academic affiliation. So I could spend the next three days scrolling through everyone on the app named Damien or I could find another way to track down this redheaded giraffe.
I started by weeding out the Damiens who clearly weren’t the one I was seeking based on their profile pictures. That eliminated a lot of them in a hurry because very few had red hair. Unfortunately, the profile photos were generally very small and with the right kind of lighting you couldn’t tell what color hair the man (they were all men as far as I could tell) had, if any. There was also very rarely a way to gauge the subject’s height because selfies – and most of them were clearly selfies – tend to focus on the close-up shot.
Then age became a determining factor. I knew Damien was an undergraduate. Of course anyone of any age can enroll in a college so I couldn’t say for a fact that ‘my’ Damien was a young man in his twenties, but you have to start somewhere. So I started somewhere by deleting from my list anyone with any gray hair or crow’s feet. That brought the overall list down to about fifty Damiens.
It would have been awfully accommodating if Damien had chosen to photograph himself in a New Amsterdam University sweatshirt, but no such luck among this crowd. I did my best to enlarge the profile pictures, to find any fragment of personal information (‘Lizzo fan!’) that might place a Damien as my (or more accurately, Eliza’s) Damien.
In short, I spent two hours not finding Damien. By the end I had three finalists, only one of whom I could definitively state had red hair, and he looked to be in his thirties. If Damien was on Instagram, he wasn’t making himself especially accessible.
TikTok, because it tends to give me a headache, would have to wait at least until tomorrow.
It’s not terribly unusual to begin a search for someone with very little to go on. But what I had now would barely qualify as ‘very little.’ I needed to clear my head.
I sent an email to the last address I had for my mother, making certain that Ken wasn’t looking over my shoulder, that just read: ‘Is this address still good?’ It probably wouldn’t be answered and might have been pointless, but after all, sometimes a girl needs her mother, even if that person participated more in growing material that made up the girl. It’s a complex process that I have never understood. But Mom and Dad pulled it off and now every agency and the odd maniac (almost all maniacs are odd) were looking for them.
I had to remind myself they were searching for Ken and me as well. We needed to stay vigilant about our security.
The phone on my desk rang, which virtually never happens. I do the bulk of my business and most of my personal calls on my cell, and any office calls that come through because of the website or business cards go through Igavda, which is not as good a system as you might think. Igavda tends to talk like the Transylvanian woman in werewolf movies, so it’s a crapshoot as to whether you get the call that’s meant for you or not.
Because it’s so rare an event, the ringing desk phone startled me and I stared at it for a moment. Then I saw that the Caller ID was showing the number for the nearest police precinct and realized who the caller must be. And I supposed this was as good a time as any to hear what I could only assume would be a touching apology.
I picked up the receiver but refused to sound the least bit welcoming or familiar. ‘K&F Stein Investigations,’ I said.
‘Hello, Fran,’ Mank said. I was torn between my irritation with him for being, you know, a jerk when I had bared my soul to him, and relief that the call wasn’t coming from Emil Bendix, the other detective who knew me fairly well at the cop shop. Bendix, while never having dated me and then ghosted me at the very first sign of my not being a standard human, made up for that by being misogynistic, crude and insulting, so even under the current circumstances it was better to have heard from Mank.
‘Detective Mankiewicz,’ I replied. I saw no point in letting him off easy.
There was something of a pause. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I called your office before and was hoping you’d get back to me.’
‘Yeah. Did you lose my cell number?’ Ken was off his phone and staring at something on his screen, or just using it to get a better reflection of Igavda. I wasn’t in a very man-friendly mood at the moment.
‘Actually, my old phone got thrown into the East River and I’ve had trouble putting my contacts back together,’ Mankiewicz said. ‘It was on a case.’
It was probably the next genetically perfect superbeing he’d dumped, I thought. ‘Of course.’
‘Seriously, Fran. I was chasing this guy and he pushed me into the river. My phone was in the pocket.’
And his contacts were in the cloud, but why continue the argument about his phone? ‘What can I do for you, Detective? And more to the point, why should I do it?’
‘I’ve been talking to some people in the registrar’s office at New Amsterdam University,’ he said. ‘I’m told you’re looking for a student named Damien.’
I’ve been through some stuff so it takes a lot to completely stun me. But the idea that Mank was calling me about Damien when the two of them couldn’t possibly have anything to do with each other left me without a response. I didn’t stare at the telephone receiver because I wasn’t in a movie, but I started to understand why actors thought that might be a believable response.
‘Damien,’ I managed to squeak through.
‘Yeah. I’m looking for him myself and would like to know what you have.’
FOUR
‘Damien Van Dorn.’
The interior of the 13th Precinct was just as municipal and depressing as I remembered it. Of course, I’d been here only weeks before, but that was in a different time, when I was thinking of Rich Mankiewicz as a sweet guy who might actually have boyfriend potential. Now I was standing at his desk (he’d offered a chair and I’d refused because when I’m standing and he’s sitting I’m easily a foot and a half taller than Mank) after he’d insisted we needed to talk in person. About Damien, who, as it turned out, had a last name.
‘A redhead named Van Dorn?’ I said. I was being professional. I was being so professional it was practically unprofessional. There would be no extracurricular conversation during this consultation, and you can quote me.
‘Why not?’ Mank said. It was, in retrospect, a good question. Anybody can have red hair. ‘What’s interesting, last name or not, is that he is six-foot-nine and skinny.’
I didn’t find Damien’s statistics that interesting, but Mank is five-foot-eight and, in my view, has a height fixation.
But hey. I was being professional.
‘Does that help us find him?’ I asked. This was, at least technically, a strategy session, although as a New York City police detective, I’m sure Mankiewicz thought he was interviewing a witness who might be able to give him information that he, all by himself, could use to solve the … wait. Why was this a case for the cops?
‘No, but it’ll help him stand out in a crowd.’ I used to think this guy was amusing.
‘Why are you looking for Damien?’ You might as well be direct when you don’t care if the guy is going to kiss you ever again. Although he was a good kisser.
‘He’s been reported as a missing person by his parents,’ Mank said. ‘And when we checked with the registrar’s office at New Amsterdam University, they said a very tall woman with a private investigator’s license had been in looking for someone else. The clerk working the window said she heard another student suggest to the very tall woman that she look for Damien.’
I felt my lips straighten out into a horizontal line. ‘So you think I’m the only tall female investigator in Manhattan?’ I said. Professionally.
He did his sardonic face. Even when I liked him, it wasn’t one of my favorites. ‘You were looking for Damien, weren’t you?’
‘Well yeah, but …’
Mank stood up and looked at me in the neck. It was the best he could do. ‘Come on, Fran. I’m looking for this guy and so are you. Did his parents hire you to find him before they filed a report?’
I folded my arms across my chest and, to his credit, Mank didn’t look down to see why. He was craning his neck to make eye contact. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Damien’s parents didn’t hire me, or I probably would have known his last name, don’t you think?’
Mankiewicz literally took a step back. For him it was like trying to take in a whole skyscraper in one glance. ‘Can we try to be a little more … civil to each other?’ he said quietly. ‘I’d like to have a talk with you about … you know. But not here and not now.’
‘That ship has sailed,’ I told him. ‘You had your chance to talk about you know with me and you passed. So the subject is closed. Let’s keep it businesslike, OK?’
He took a second and nodded with an air of conviction. ‘OK. So tell me who hired you to find Damien if it wasn’t his parents.’
My feet were starting to hurt so I took the chair. I could be just as intimidating sitting down, I figured. ‘Nobody hired me to find Damien Van Dorn,’ I said. ‘I thought he might be a source of information in a case I’m working, but I haven’t found him yet. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.’
Sergeant Emil Bendix, perhaps the last of a dying breed of awful 1990s New York detectives, ambled over and stood between me and Mank, who had resumed his seat behind his desk. Bendix sat on the side of the desk, which was not something anyone in the room, least of all Mank or I, wanted to see.
‘So, Gargantua.’ Bendix looked at me with what he thought was avuncular humor but was really sexist, misogynistic crap. ‘Haven’t seen you around for a while. You and your boyfriend here have a fight?’ Bendix had the unerring ability to find the thing he shouldn’t talk about and dive right in.
‘We’re talking about work, Meal,’ Mankiewicz said. The cops in the precinct call Bendix ‘Meal’ because he’s never skipped one, but he thinks they’re being fraternal. ‘You wouldn’t understand that. How about you go over to your station and do whatever it is you do?’
Bendix scowled a bit, but he has resting scowl face so it was hard to tell if he’d actually heard what Mankiewicz had said. ‘I’m working a case,’ he said defensively. ‘This guy – you’ll love this, Gargantua – shot another guy right in the—’
‘I’m sure it’s hilarious, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘But my name is Fran and I’m an investigator who’s here to talk about a case with the detective here. So could you give us a little space so I can get out of here as soon as possible?’
Bendix stopped leaning on the desk and shook his head. ‘You two aren’t any fun anymore,’ he said as he walked away.
‘We never were,’ I called after him.
Mank winced a little. ‘What case?’ he asked.
‘What case, what?’
‘What case are you working on that you want Damien Van Dorn to help you with?’
Oh yeah, Damien. And Eliza. That was the mission, wasn’t it? I wanted to withhold the information from Mankiewicz but realized that was strictly out of spite. If the NYPD could help me find Eliza, I wouldn’t turn down the assistance.
So I told him about Eliza, how she was missing and how she seemed in some way to be connected to Damien Van Dorn. But how I’d just barely gotten started on the case and didn’t have a strong lead to follow on either of the missing young people. Mank – and I’ll say a lot of things about him but he was not coldhearted or inconsiderate (except after you told him you were a science experiment) – listened with no judgment on his face.
‘Can you put me in touch with Eliza’s father?’ he asked.
Some people think that investigators and clients have a non-disclosure arrangement like that between a lawyer and a client. We don’t. But I don’t like to give away client information without permission. ‘I’ll ask him if it’s all right,’ I said. ‘But he told me he filed a report with the police and that you guys weren’t doing anything about it because Eliza is a trans woman.’
Mank bristled. It’s something to see, if no one has ever bristled in your presence. ‘You know that’s not the case,’ he said.
‘I would know that wasn’t the case if you were the detective assigned to Eliza,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of cops who probably wouldn’t look as hard for Eliza as another missing woman.’ I gave Bendix a quick glance and I thought Mank noticed where I was looking. ‘They probably still have uniformed officers on it, not detectives, and I’m not sure the NYPD is as progressive an organization as you’d like to believe.’
