Same Difference, page 18
Mank shook his head to indicate it didn’t matter. ‘What did Eliza tell you about the murder? Does she know who killed Damien Van Dorn?’
I told him what Eliza had told me, up to a point. That she hadn’t been there when Damien died. That she didn’t know who had killed him, although I left out her suspicions about who it might have been because they seemed to have included everyone. But I did tell him about Jules.
‘The guy they call Julio found us getting ice cream in the Village,’ I said. ‘He told us he didn’t have anything to do with Damien’s murder because it would have been bad for business. He also told us to call him Jules.’
‘Yeah, we know about him,’ Mank said with a wry smile. ‘I believe you threw him to a number of officers outside the ice-cream place.’
‘He was using inappropriate language in front of both the ice cream and some young children,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see an alternative.’
Aunt Margie’s mouth had dropped open. ‘You threw a man at some police officers?’ she said. ‘You disappoint me, Frannie.’
That cut deep. I lowered my eyes. The coffee table looked sad. ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Margie.’
‘Did you at least yell “fore” or something before you threw him?’ Aunt Margie has a wicked sense of humor that still fools me to this day. I lost interest in the coffee table and looked at her for the silly grin and then to Mank.
‘Where is Eliza now?’ he asked.
‘You said you wouldn’t ask me that,’ I reminded him.
‘I said you didn’t have to tell me. I didn’t say I wouldn’t ask.’ Everybody was being a wiseguy today.
‘The plain truth is that I don’t know where she is,’ I said.
‘I’m not here as a cop,’ he repeated.
I stood up because my legs needed stretching. This had the effect of making me look like I was taking Mank in to buy his first suit. ‘I’m not kidding,’ I said. ‘I lost her in the crowd outside New Amsterdam University about two hours ago. I have no idea where she is and I’m worried about her.’
Mank had gotten out of his squat to face me but it was an uphill battle no matter what on his part. He was looking into my neck, which at least was the gentlemanly thing to do. ‘Fran, we’ve got to find that girl,’ he said.
‘OK,’ I answered. ‘Got any ideas?’
TWENTY-SEVEN
We didn’t go anywhere until I had that shower. That was not negotiable.
Because I hadn’t accessed my emails or sent a text, and because I’d charged and set my phone on airplane mode (no contact to a cell tower) before turning it off, Merchant had not materialized at my apartment door. It was a blessing and a curse. I would have liked to have looked him in the face and asked him how it felt to try and track down a nineteen-year-old girl. I doubt Merchant would have taken the point well, however.
Instead, I’d sent Ken (that is, I suggested that he go) to the construction site just to watch. If Eliza showed up he could follow her or at least confirm that she’d made it back inside for the night.
I didn’t want to recruit Mank into my merry band of investigators, but he insisted I would need backup, Aunt Margie was probably not the right choice for that job, and besides he would have followed on his own because he already knew where I was and what I was doing. It was very much a no-other-choice situation.
As it turned out, the NYPD also had the last known address for Eric ‘Julio’ Sanderson, something I had not been able to turn up on my own. I’ll admit it. So we were off to East Harlem to check in on good ol’ Jules and see to his welfare.
Mank, not used to the private investigator lifestyle, had wanted to drive up to 118th Street but I felt that a police car, however unmarked, double-parked in this neighborhood, would have been just a little too obvious to avoid detection. So it was the subway, however less personal the transportation might be. Because this was my operation and I was calling the shots.
‘Can we talk about that morning at the diner?’ he asked around 68th Street.
My face must have betrayed my discomfort with the question. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let me rephrase. Why can’t we talk about that morning at the diner?’
‘It was humiliating and disappointing, just to start,’ I told him, looking up at the ads for slip-and-fall lawyers and weight-loss treatments. ‘Why would I want to talk about that?’
Mank exhaled extravagantly, but it was not for effect; it was genuine. He felt badly about the way he’d acted. ‘I can’t apologize enough,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘That’s true.’ Why hadn’t we reached the 116th Street station yet? ‘You had no idea how you were making me feel.’
I braved a glance at Mank; his face was drawn and pained. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It was a lot to hit me with and I had no way to be prepared. That’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation.’
‘I figure you see me as a freak now.’ I don’t know where that came from. I hadn’t planned on saying it. Amazingly, the other MTA passengers were not paying attention to our heartfelt exchange. I tried to concentrate on what we were going to do when we found Jules and that wasn’t going very well.
‘I see you as someone who I care about and who was hurt by my actions and I am very sorry about that.’
As apologies go, that wasn’t bad at all. I looked at Mank. I don’t cry much and I wasn’t crying now. But it was possible I was blinking a little more than usual. You can’t let your eyes dry up, you know.
‘Do you know a guy named Malcolm X. Mitchell?’ I asked.
Now it was Mank who was blinking a little too much. ‘What? Um … no. Who’s that?’
‘It’s an excellent question.’
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way, but when we reached 116th Street, Mank let me walk off the train ahead of him and we went up the stairs somehow more relaxed than we had walked down. There’s nothing like a nice soothing ride on the New York subway.
People still looked twice at us on the street. For some reason men are supposed to be taller than women, according to society, and that was clearly not the case here. But we were not appearing as a couple; we were on a case and we were working. So they needed to lose their prejudices and calm down (which would have been equally true if we were out on a date).
The building at E. 118th and Second Avenue wasn’t terribly interesting to look at. It was a five-story brick building that had been renovated in a halfhearted fashion. It was clean enough but hardly stylish and the front door had been propped open by someone with a two-liter soda bottle, which was convenient for Mank and me but a serious problem for the people who lived in the building. I removed the bottle after we walked in. Let the person who left it there bring a key next time.
We walked up to the second floor and found the door to Eric/Julio/Jules’s apartment. I saw Mank reach into his pocket for his badge and shook my head; he wasn’t here in an official capacity. For this moment, right now, he was an operative of K&F Stein Investigations. If the subject came up.
‘He won’t know you, will he?’ I asked quietly. Mank shook his head. ‘Then let’s keep it that way.’
Mank put the badge away. But I noticed when he did that the windbreaker he didn’t need in this weather was concealing his service weapon. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. So I knocked.
It took a long moment but the door opened. I thought someone in Jules’s line of work might have a peep hole in the door but he didn’t. Maybe the landlord wouldn’t approve. The toughest people in New York live in fear of their landlords.
Jules took one look and tried to slam the door but I’d already straightened my arm and held it with my palm flat. ‘We’re just here to talk, Jules,’ I said.
‘You are a crazy lady,’ he said. I thought that was unnecessarily harsh. ‘You threw me at cops.’
‘You were using inappropriate language around small children,’ I told him. ‘I really felt that you needed to be taught a lesson. We’re coming in. Are you going to try to make it hard for us? Because I can still lift you.’
He stepped back with a sheepish expression on his face, although to be honest he didn’t look a thing like a sheep. He looked like a guy named Eric. I walked in first and Mank followed me without saying a word. Smart Mank.
The place was a little beyond functional. It appeared to be a two-bedroom apartment with the usual Manhattan tiny kitchen but a decent living area with a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. The furniture was tasteful and clean. The place didn’t need painting. It must have cost a fortune in rent every month. I knew that because my apartment wasn’t nearly as nice and it cost a fortune in rent every month.
It was, without question, not what you’d expect from a guy who had supplied Adderall (and probably other pharmaceuticals) to Damien Van Dorn.
‘Nice place,’ I said. ‘You must have quite the day job.’
Jules was a lot of things, but quick on the uptake was not one of them. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
He clearly wasn’t going to offer us a cold drink or some Adderall so I just plowed right through. ‘OK, how about you tell us the name of the guy you sent to intimidate Damien Van Dorn and we can start with them instead of you.’
You could say this about Jules: he had nerve. Nerve enough to look surprised when I said that. ‘What you talking about?’ On top of everything else I was going to have to give him grammar lessons. This day was getting exhausting and it wasn’t that late yet.
‘If you mean, “What am I talking about,” then I think you’re shortchanging yourself, Eric,’ I said. No reaction to the use of his real name. ‘You sent your men after Damien because he was behind to you for some money. They threatened him and he decided to retaliate by ambushing them in an apartment building in the Bronx. Now I will grant you that as a strategy that leaves a lot to be desired, including a strategy, but those are the facts. So let’s start again. What is the name of the man you sent after Damien, the one who wasn’t you? The one who has a birthmark on his face.’
‘I don’t know nothing about that.’ Jules was sticking with his pose even though it wasn’t the least bit convincing. It’s not hard to defeat people like that but it takes time. I was thinking that my original plan of picking him up and throwing him to the cops might have been the best strategy after all.
‘So you do know something about it?’ I asked. If I was going to play schoolmarm I might as well go the whole way. ‘You employed a double negative.’
‘I don’t employ nobody,’ he said. ‘I’m an entrepreneur.’ That word he could get right. He’d clearly used it frequently.
‘Look, Eric,’ I began.
‘It’s Jules.’
‘OK, sure. Jules. Damien Van Dorn was murdered in the basement in the Bronx or he was murdered somewhere else and brought there. You are clearly the most logical suspect in that murder because you had a grudge.’ I sat down on his expensive sofa to show him I could. ‘Damien owed you money in your drug operation on the New Amsterdam University campus. So the cops are watching you. You want them to stop watching you because they’re making it harder for you to sell pills to college kids. So I’m offering you a way to make things better – for you. Tell us who your musclebound buddy was and we can feed them to the police instead of you. Because you’re not stupid enough to have killed Damien yourself, so surely he did, didn’t he?’
For the record, I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Damien had been hiding out in the basement waiting for his two pursuers to come home so he could confront them. They had no reason to suspect he was waiting there for them. So it was unlikely one of them was the killer. But they had been around and they knew about it, and let’s be real, so did our friend Eric/Jules/Julio.
‘No way,’ he said, betraying the fact that he had indeed sent anyone after Damien. ‘Nobody was supposed to get hurt and everybody knew it. Look, there are people following me now. I see them whenever I walk outside, pretending not to follow me. So no, I didn’t want this. I didn’t tell nobody to kill Damien. We didn’t touch that guy.’
‘Who didn’t touch that guy?’ Mank was impatient with all the dancing around the point and I didn’t blame him. ‘What is his name, Julio?’
‘Don’t call me that!’ Let’s-call-him-Jules’s arms tensed up and he shifted to the balls of his feet as if he were going to lunge forward.
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘What’s so much better about being Jules than being Julio? Your real name is Eric. Why not use that?’
Whatever-his-name-was’s face twitched and he relaxed his posture. He remembered that I could easily toss him around the room and decided to be our friend again. ‘Because who’s afraid of a guy named Eric?’ he said.
‘OK, Jules,’ I said again. ‘You don’t want to give up your men. I respect that. But I need to know who’s putting Eliza’s life in danger. She’s my focus. The cops can find out who killed Damien and I’m OK with that. I need to know, right now, why anybody thinks Eliza had a part in Damien’s death and, more than that, I really need to know where she is at this minute. So tell me that. Where is Eliza?’
‘I thought she was with you,’ he said, and he seemed so confused that I believed him. ‘Last time I saw her she was with you.’
‘Well she’s not with me now. Where would she go?’
Jules made a show of thinking that wasn’t in the least convincing, proving to me that he didn’t think very often because he didn’t know what it looked like. He put his hand to his chin and rubbed it. He must have seen that in a movie. ‘If she’s not with you she must have gone to take care of Rainbow.’
‘Rainbow Zelensky?’ I said. No, like there were fifteen people named Rainbow in this bizarre caper. ‘Why does Rainbow need to be taken care of?’
He stared. ‘You don’t know?’
I think people should never say, ‘You don’t know?’ Because it’s clear you don’t, and it makes you feel like you should know, and if you don’t, you’re either a fool or someone has been keeping something from you. It’s just rude.
‘For the sake of argument, let’s say I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘Rainbow is a cat.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
It took a full forty minutes to sort that one out. This was largely because Eric honestly didn’t know the answers to such questions as: Why was Rainbow’s last name Zelensky? Rainbow was a cat. Whose cat? And whose apartment was that where Eliza had been staying, unless the cat was paying the rent? And the one question I was smart enough not to ask Jules, particularly when Mank was around: Whose gun was Eliza carrying around?
Once we got past the fact that Jules couldn’t answer any of those, we focused on the ones he could speak to, which didn’t actually garner me much in the way of information. ‘Tell me who you sent after Damien,’ I said for the umpteenth time. ‘Eliza’s in danger and I need to know if it’s from them.’ Truth be told, for all I knew Eliza was living on a beach in Bimini and learning how to sport fish, but that wasn’t going to get Jules to tell me what I needed to know.
‘I’m not giving up my boys,’ he said. ‘But if she’s in trouble, it ain’t from me. I didn’t send nobody out after Eliza.’ On the spot I decided to buy Jules grammar lessons for Christmas.
‘But they killed Damien and they know she knew him. Is Laura Rapinoe in trouble too?’ That was Mank asking. He’s much more a cop than I am and it was showing. Jules had undoubtedly been around cops enough that he could spot one, but on the other hand, by now he might believe that everybody talked like that.
‘Who are you, anyway?’ It was, startlingly, the first time Jules had thought to ask.
‘Call me Rich,’ Mankiewicz said, which was both accurate and misleading. But he wasn’t here for the NYPD, I kept reminding myself. He was here for me. ‘I’m one of Fran’s associates.’ On that night, that’s exactly who he was. ‘Now tell me if I need to worry about Eliza and Laura Rapinoe. And I promise, if you tell us who was after Damien to get your money, the cops won’t hear about it from us.’
That was a fairly bold promise to make, considering that if Mank heard it, at least one cop would know. But Jules wasn’t buying under any circumstances. ‘You don’t get names from me,’ he said. ‘I take care of my own.’
‘OK,’ I said, wresting the conversation back from Mank, who was probably itching to yank his detective shield out of his pocket, the last thing I needed. ‘Tell me who you were buying from. You’re not making Adderall and whatever else you were selling on your own. You supplied Damien but you have a supplier yourself. Who is it?’
Jules looked at me with a combination of disbelief and pity. ‘Are you nuts?’ Just as an aside, does anyone ever answer that question in the affirmative? Sure, I’m crazier than a bedbug. Thanks for asking.
‘What, you’re going to tell me you don’t know nothing about pills? You think that on top of your horrendous double negatives that you can pay for this apartment doing … what? Working as a cashier at Target?’ I mean, seriously. If people can’t use language properly, or at least creatively, what hope do we have for world peace?
‘Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jules said.
‘Only half?’
Mank chose this moment to play bad not-a-cop to my good not-a-cop. He pushed Jules up against the well-painted wall, which was impressive, given that Mank was also a good three or four inches shorter than Jules. ‘We have to come away with something that helps,’ he rasped at Jules. ‘You’re not giving us anything that helps. We want to find Eliza and we need to know who killed Damien Van Dorn. So let’s assume you want to hold on to this apartment and all the nice stuff in it. What do you have to offer in exchange for keeping your place nice and neat?’
