Ukulele of Death, page 12
‘Looking for her ukulele,’ I said.
Bendix curled his mouth up like a kitten taking a nap. ‘You know, I don’t have to help you out on this.’
‘I’m serious. Evelyn Bannister came to my office and asked me to find a ukulele because she thought it could be a link to her birth father, whom she had never met. I think she really wanted to find it because for some reason I can’t figure out yet it’s really valuable and she wanted the money. I think she found it, or something that looked like it, and somebody killed her for it.’
‘That’s the nuttiest story I’ve ever heard,’ Bendix said. ‘And I used to work in the Village.’
I shrugged. ‘So it has to be true, right? Why would I make up something like that? Anyway, if Miller can’t figure out who she was and nobody saw anything, what are they working on? Did I hear you say they thought they had a suspect?’ Better to refocus his attention on his call to Miller before he decided the story about the uke was too stupid to believe and clammed up.
‘They don’t have a suspect in custody,’ he said, forgetting to be offended (and apparently forgetting that he heard about the Gibson Poinsettia from Miller; Bendix has the attention span of a flea). ‘But they’re looking for a guy who was seen outside her apartment right before you two got there. Short, gray hair.’
‘What about the theft of the ukulele?’ I asked. The case had been on the floor open and empty. Clearly something had been taken out of it.
‘No prints on the case but they did find a couple on the dresser behind it and they’re thinking those could be from the guy outside the apartment. Should find out soon if they get a match.’
Of course, there was someone else who had touched that dresser, someone whose prints would be in the system because he’d been fingerprinted when he applied for a private investigator license.
My brother.
EIGHTEEN
‘I didn’t know your parents well,’ said Dr Eve Kendall.
We were seated around the door table, which I’d disguised with a tablecloth I’d found in a closet that was probably meant to be a flat bed sheet but I wasn’t in a position to be picky. I’d ‘roasted’ a chicken, in the sense that I’d bought a roast chicken at Trader Joe’s and dressed it up nicely in the center of the table, and had ‘cooked’ risotto in much the same way. Trader Joe was doing himself up proudly tonight.
Aunt Margie, who is as much a cook as she’s actually our aunt, certainly didn’t notice the difference and besides, her attention was riveted on Dr Kendall, whom she had told us she had never met before. Kendall turned out to be an attractive woman in her early sixties, serious without being pompous and intelligent (as the Ph.D. might indicate) but not stuffy. The bottle of red wine (yes, red wine with chicken and leave me alone because it had a picture of a bird on the label) had helped to loosen up the mood nicely. For my family. Kendall had been drinking water exclusively, to the point that I wondered if she was a recovering alcoholic. I was drinking water because I didn’t want to find out if I was an alcoholic.
I’d had the requisite argument with Ken when I’d gotten home from the precinct house and told him that Det. Miller had probably found his fingerprints at a crime scene. Ken had said that since the cops obviously knew we were there (we had called in the emergency) that didn’t mean a thing and could I please just concentrate on our guest for the evening, who at that point hadn’t arrived yet?
There are days when everything just flows beautifully and there’s no sense of stress at all. This had not been one of those days.
‘But you did know Dr Mansoor,’ Aunt Margie said. ‘Do you know why he was in New York and why he might have contacted Frannie?’ Aunt Margie has never really understood that I’ll let her and Ken call me ‘Frannie’ but no one else can do that. Or she simply doesn’t care, which is another completely plausible explanation.
‘I knew Aziz.’ Kendall’s face got a little dreamy, the way a face will when remembering a dear friend, but not a lover. Her respiration did not increase and she appeared relaxed. ‘He was a very fine man and had decided to live here in New York after he left the employ of a small town in Minnesota, where he was working in the medical examiner’s office. Aziz was a medical doctor but he liked being a pathologist because he didn’t have great social skills and didn’t like to see live patients.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘You clearly liked him a lot so he couldn’t have been too antisocial. He had friends, like Ken saw at his funeral.’
Both Ken and Kendall (which would have been a great name for a vaudeville act) looked a little uncomfortable at the mention of Dr Mansoor’s funeral. But Kendall managed to shake it off quicker because I’d asked her a question. ‘Aziz liked people too much, maybe. He never wanted to tell them bad news,’ she said. ‘If the prognosis wasn’t favorable he preferred to have someone else deliver it.’
That immediately sparked a thought. ‘If he would rather not deliver bad news, then when he called me he must have had good news, right?’ I asked Kendall.
‘I’m just guessing but that sounds right. I mean, all doctors have to tell patients and families something they don’t want to hear every once in a while, and Aziz wasn’t pathological about it, if you don’t mind the pun.’ It took me a moment to remember that Dr Mansoor was a pathologist. ‘He’d do it if he had to, but he did his best to avoid that part of the job when he could. My guess is either that he had news he thought you’d want to hear, or it was so sensitive and private that he couldn’t trust the information with anyone else.’
Trader Joe had supplied a coconut cream pie along with the rest of dinner so I started to clear the table but to my shock Ken stood up and said he would handle that. I let him; I’m not crazy.
Aunt Margie looked a little skeptical of Kendall the whole evening and I couldn’t get her aside to ask why so I filed that away in my head for later. Right now, masking that edge of suspicion, she asked Kendall what she remembered about our parents.
The doctor took a sip of water and thought. ‘I never really knew them well, you know,’ she said. ‘It was such a long time ago and they didn’t stay in New Brunswick very long after you and your brother were born, Fran.’
Whoa! ‘You remember when we were born?’ There was a word I didn’t use very often in relation to Ken or myself.
Kendall tilted her head to the right in a sort of gesture. ‘I remember hearing about it. I knew Olivia and Brandon wanted to have children and then I heard they had the two of you. I hadn’t been in touch in a little while, and after that they left for New York and we didn’t see them much at all.’ She paused and I saw part of why Aunt Margie might be on alert: The look of sadness Kendall adopted was not convincing. ‘I was so sorry to hear about the accident.’
‘Thank you.’ I put an air of I don’t want to talk about that into my tone. Because I didn’t. I wanted to sound interested but not like I was grilling our guest. ‘What were they working on when you met them?’ I asked. That doesn’t sound like grilling, right?
‘Oh, that was very secret. I never really knew. I think it had something to do with speeding up recovery times, but that was your mom. Your dad didn’t work at Rutgers like she did.’ Not like I didn’t already know that, but it was best to let Kendall think she was enlightening me. Loosen her up. It’d be even better if she’d drink some of the wine and not just the water on the table.
‘He was a medical doctor.’ Ken walked back into the room and sat down hard (as always) on the dining chair. We had to get extra sturdy ones just for him. I’ve learned to sit more demurely. Big doesn’t have to be clumsy. Ken wasn’t clumsy so much as he didn’t care about furniture. ‘Was he working out of a private practice?’ Again, my brother was asking a question to which we already knew the answer. I don’t know if he was testing Kendall or just thought he’d get information in that direction. But I still wanted to know more about Dr Mansoor and why he’d called. And I had reached the conclusion shortly after we started talking that Kendall couldn’t answer that last – and most crucial – part.
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Kendall looked thoughtful and that one appeared to be a sincere look. ‘He was in practice with some other doctors and he had privileges at Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick when I knew them. But I heard most of this from Aziz.’
Perfect. There was a way back into the topic I most wanted to explore. ‘When did you last hear from Dr Mansoor?’ I asked.
Kendall let out a long breath. Her friend was gone and I was making her remember it. I could consider it retribution for bringing up the death of our parents, but then I remembered they weren’t dead as far as we knew.
‘Aziz called me the day before his death,’ she answered after a moment. ‘We spoke for a couple of minutes about getting together for dinner sometime this week. In fact I think it was supposed to have been tonight.’ She brushed away what appeared to be a real tear.
‘Did he mention me or anything about my parents?’ I asked. I might as well get to the point.
Kendall shook her head and sniffed just a little. ‘No. I’m sorry. Before I met Ken at Aziz’s funeral I hadn’t spoken to anyone about your parents for years. I apologize if that sounds callous. People just drift apart over the years.’
‘Not at all. I understand. I just thought I’d ask. Dr Mansoor left me a message the day of his accident and he said he thought our parents were trying to contact him.’ I had to use the cover story. ‘Did he believe in communication with the dead?’
Kendall looked puzzled and mildly surprised. ‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘Aziz was not a spiritualist. I can’t imagine what that meant.’
I looked disappointed because I was, just not in the way I was trying to sell to Kendall. ‘I thought if he’d discovered something interesting he might have told you.’
‘I’m afraid not. But you’re wrong about one thing. I don’t think for a moment that what happened to Aziz was an accident.’ Kendall’s face took on a determined expression.
How should I ask this? No matter; Ken jumped right in. ‘You think he committed suicide?’ he asked.
‘No. I believe Aziz was murdered.’
Well, that quieted the room for a while. Five seconds? Ten seconds? An hour and a half? Hard to know.
Ken caught his breath first. His eyebrows met in the middle (which isn’t a good look even for him) and he said, ‘Why do you think that, Eve?’ Ken had decided because he met Kendall first – at a funeral where she asked for him to be removed – they were now friends.
‘I knew Aziz. There’s no way he fell asleep behind the wheel. That man was caffeinated beyond comprehension. I guarantee you they found a container of energy drink in that car.’ Kendall looked past Ken like she was seeing the wreckage of Dr Mansoor’s Infinity and couldn’t take her eyes away. ‘And he didn’t just lose control of the car unless someone did something to it or there was something wrong with the steering. Aziz was meticulous in everything he did. More than that, he was a defensive driver. I’ve ridden with him and he was without question the most careful man behind the wheel I have ever seen.’
‘Still, things happen that you can’t plan for,’ I suggested. Kendall was sounding a little like a person who didn’t want to believe what had happened and was creating an alternate reality that would make it weirdly easier to accept. In other words, the typical concoctor or a conspiracy theory.
She nodded, coming back to our dining ‘table.’ ‘That’s true. But here’s something you should know, Fran. Aziz wrote everything down. Everything. If he knew something about your parents that he thought he should tell you, I can pretty much tell you without question that it was in his car.’
‘Probably burned up,’ Ken, ever tactful, said.
‘Maybe,’ Kendall agreed. ‘But maybe not. I said Aziz was meticulous and had a small streak of paranoia. He carried a fireproof box with him in every vehicle he ever owned. If he had notes on something important, they’d be in that box.’
Even Aunt Margie looked impressed by that. Her eyes were wider than usual and her right hand was not exactly pointing in Kendall’s direction, but was resting in a way, with the index finger extended and pulsing up and down, that indicated she was trying to figure something out. I’d seen it a thousand times. Aunt Margie had decided she’d met Eve Kendall before and was sifting through her memories (which she did not keep on paper in a fireproof box) to recall exactly where.
Aunt Margie was doing her thinking, but I had another thought, and that was: I need to see the inventory from that car.
NINETEEN
‘I think I’ve got something,’ Ken said.
Under normal circumstances I would have made a hilarious crack instructing him not to get too close to me so I wouldn’t catch it, but I had asked my brother, who has better hacking skills than I do, to try and get a handle on who Evelyn Bannister might really have been. Now he was saying there could be a lead, so devastating him with professional-level humor seemed unwise. For now.
‘You know who she is?’ I said. I leaned over his shoulder. I was standing behind Ken in his bedroom (which was disgusting but his) as he sat on his bed and flailed away at his laptop computer.
‘No, I don’t know who she was,’ he answered. ‘But I might have a line on how to find out how to find out.’ No, that’s not a typo; it’s how my brother communicates.
‘Speak to me in Human,’ I said. We exchanged a look that took our relationship to humans into question. But we both knew we weren’t some other species.
Ken turned back toward the computer and I couldn’t see his eyes but I was willing to bet he was rolling them at what a complete and utter failure his sister is with technology, despite being made partially of technology. We live in ironic times.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I found some of Evelyn’s past addresses, so she’d been using the name for at least two years. She moved around a lot. Look here.’ As most tech-savvy people do, Ken thinks that he needs to point at things on the screen to get the rest of us Luddites to understand. I dutifully moved my face in the direction he indicated. ‘This is a list of properties on which the name Evelyn Bannister was used when signing a lease. It goes back two years and then nothing. So you have to figure she’d been changing names for a while and had really good fake IDs.’
‘There are four apartments listed there,’ I pointed out because I’m pretty sure Ken can’t count (that’s a joke, Ken). ‘How did she keep getting out of the leases in each one when she left?’
Ken held up his index finger like a philosophy professor whose student just correctly identified a theory of Kierkegaard’s. ‘She didn’t. That’s the thing. She just kept paying rent at each one until the lease ran out.’
This offended my sensibilities as a New York apartment-dweller in ways that I don’t think I can adequately describe. But I tried to rehabilitate my opinion of Evelyn: ‘So she sublet every time?’ I asked.
Ken shook his head. ‘Nope. The places stayed empty and she never even contacted the landlord until it came time to not renew the rental agreement.’
‘I’m starting to hate Evelyn Bannister,’ I said.
‘I totally get that, but it was your idea to keep investigating her murder. Now, there had to be a reason she kept moving from place to place every few months. I mean, we’re pretty sure the government or somebody is hot on our trail and yet we’ve lived here all our lives and nobody’s found us.’
Nobody until you let your pal Dr Kendall visit, I thought, but what was the point in saying that now? Besides, I didn’t really think Kendall was part of the rumored conspiracy tracking down Ken and me roughly since we first started taking in air. But I didn’t know for sure, did I?
Once Kendall had left after dinner (without having had any coconut cream pie because nobody seemed to be in the mood) Aunt Margie had confirmed for me what I’d suspected from the look on her face. ‘I’ve seen that woman before,’ she said. ‘A long time ago. Something with your parents. But I can’t place her exactly.’
‘You seem worried about it,’ I said. I was washing the dishes by hand. This was not because we have such precious china but because we don’t own a dishwasher. It’s an old building.
‘I’m not worried.’ Aunt Margie wouldn’t admit to being worried if the house was on fire. ‘But I get the feeling wherever I saw your Dr Kendall before, it wasn’t good.’
‘She’s not my Dr Kendall. She’s Ken’s Dr Kendall.’
‘Whoever’s. Be careful when she’s around. And when she’s not around. Just be careful, Frannie. If I remember anything else I’ll tell you. Now hand me that glass.’
‘I just washed that glass.’
‘That’s what you think.’
So the mysterious (sort of) Dr Kendall was now on my list of things to be concerned about, which had been growing by leaps and bounds every day since ‘Evelyn Bannister’ asked me to find her a uke. Which reminded me that I wanted to go visit Gus the super in Evelyn’s building. Maybe bring him a bottle of something to show what a nice person I was. How do you know what a superintendent drinks? What if he was a recovering alcoholic and I nudged him over the edge? Nothing’s simple.
I did need to find out about Dr Mansoor’s car, though. Very next thing on my to-do list. After Ken showed me what marvelous information he’d uncovered, which seemed to be getting less marvelous every minute.
‘So Evelyn moved a bunch of times in the past two years and used a number of identities,’ I said. I was mostly thinking out loud but Ken was welcome to join in if he didn’t have something especially bro-ey to say. ‘It’s possible she thought someone was after her, but maybe we’re overlooking other possibilities. Why else would a woman want to be someone new a few times a year?’
‘Maybe to keep attracting younger guys.’ Bro-ey. Like that.
‘Maybe she was in a cutthroat business where it’s better to be anonymous,’ I suggested. Again, I was talking to myself because I was clearly the more mature audience. In fact, now I was hoping Ken wouldn’t respond at all. Attracting younger guys. You should see how I’m rolling my eyes right now. ‘Like maybe …’
