Ukulele of Death, page 20
Ken’s face closed. He folded his arms and looked like a four-year-old who was about to threaten me with holding his breath until he turned blue. He took several breaths, at normal speed, in and out. Then he looked at me with fire in his eyes.
‘We need to find Mom,’ he said.
It took us a while to plan. I gave Air France a call to verify that our mother had not in fact died the day before she was supposed to fly to New York and after the usual rounds of being told they didn’t give out that information, they gave out that information. She had indeed flown in to Newark Liberty International Airport eleven days earlier. She had not – and this really took some passive aggression to find out – booked a return flight. At least not on Air France.
I’d already resolved not to ask Mank for professional help, but was this really a professional matter? I didn’t know whether I cared, but the fact was I’d already suggested to him that Olivia Grey was a person of interest to me, and asked if the FBI had opened a file on her. Asking him about her again would require a very plausible cover story and I wasn’t sure I had one.
Nope, it was time to put on my detective shoes (they’re really sneakers because who can detect things in heels?) and start doing the job all those classes and all the adoption cases had trained me to do. Find a missing mother? Hah! I did it all the time.
Yeah, this was different. I just couldn’t think about that right now.
Ken had tracked down Eve Kendall via text and discovered she was at, of all places, JFK Airport waiting for her flight home. He headed out to take the train and meet her there. What she knew about my mother (and more to the point, people my mother would know and possibly contact if she were in New York) wasn’t a terribly promising lead, but it was a lead.
I went to a familiar place, the New York City Health Department at 168th Street. The Health Department keeps a registry of adoption records.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Adoption records? As Aunt Margie had explained it when we were old enough to understand, Mom and Dad needed to have some record of responsibility for us so we could go to school and participate generally in the city’s society. They had known someone who was good at forging really convincing records like birth certificates and the like. But because there would be no record of Ken or me being born in a hospital, you know, anywhere, and because even births that take place at home have to be reported and confirmed (to make sure that no one is stealing babies), the birth certificates would list Mom and Dad as witnesses, not parents.
Adoption records would be beyond their friend’s capacity to duplicate. So they went through the process of adopting us officially. And so here I was at the Health Department looking for those records.
Surely you’re wondering at this point: Hadn’t I ever gone in and requested these documents before? Good question! Yes, I had. It had taken the better part of a year to get just the rudimentary adoption records, and copies of those at best. For anything more detailed, our adoptive parents would have to sign a waiver form. And they weren’t going to show up to do that anytime soon.
The ‘biological parents’ listed on the birth certificates were just other aliases Mom and Dad had used in the past. Again, unlikely we could get waivers from them. They’d have to exist first.
But maybe I could get some additional names, people who had vouched for the character of Brandon Wilder and Olivia Grey when they were trying to become the legal guardians of us two unfortunate foundlings. Because there’s nothing that makes you think more like you’re living in a Dickens novel than trying to unearth adoption records for anyone.
I’d been here a number of times, to the point that Clarice behind the main counter knows me by sight. Clarice has heard all the Silence of the Lambs jokes and I wasn’t in the mood, so I got right to the matter at hand.
‘I’m looking for adoption records and long-form birth certificates for me and my brother,’ I told her.
Clarice’s eyebrows rose a little. She probably wouldn’t react for the normal patron of the place but she has seen me looking for everybody else’s adoption records before and might not have been working at the DoH when I was searching for our birth certificates. ‘You?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t know you were adopted.’
‘It’s not a disease, Clarice.’ I was in a lousy mood. My father was dead.
She sniffed. ‘Never thought it was. You got the request form?’
‘Of course.’ Now I wanted to apologize for being snippy and didn’t know how to do it. I handed over the filled-in form from a pile we have in the office. I’d filled in the relevant information and paid the fee with my phone. Clarice glanced at the form, nodded, and went into the back office to search.
‘Long form? You running for president?’
‘Not today, Clarice, OK?’ She got back to the task at hand.
Most of the records are on the servers in the department’s computer systems, but Clarice likes paper. She can scan it and send it to your phone but she wants to see it herself before she does and she doesn’t trust pixels. ‘Give me a paper form and I know it’s real,’ she’s said to me on more than one occasion. There is no arguing with her.
When she returned she was holding a file that she did not offer me. ‘I checked them,’ she said. ‘I can call them up and email them to you.’
‘I’d appreciate it. Can I see the real ones first?’ Maybe get on her good side by professing a shared belief in an antiquated method of data storage.
Clarice hesitated for a moment. She’s not supposed to let anyone see the originals for fear of damage. But then she slid the file through the Plexiglas partition for me to examine.
The adoption forms were familiar from the first time I’d searched for them, when the red tape was considerably more dense than it is now, perhaps due to better digitization of the records. But they held more information. When you simply ask for the birth certificates and adoption records, some information might be redacted if the birth parents are not willing to release their identities to the child. In this case, nobody had been worried about being found out by Ken and me, but my parents didn’t want their names to appear on official forms when they were assuming certain government agencies might be suspicious of them.
On the long form, which Clarice had handed me now, Ken and I were still named (and it’s not ‘Kenneth’ or ‘Frances;’ it’s Ken and Fran) and our vital statistics (ten pounds, six ounces if you must know) recorded. Although I’m pretty sure the length and weight numbers were fabricated because we were, you know, sort of assembled (they don’t have assembly certificates) and even so would be larger than an average baby.
I didn’t have to ask Clarice where to look for what I was hoping to find, and sure enough it was there. The adoptions had been witnessed and notarized.
The notary public listed had a name I didn’t recognize but I would take note of it when Clarice emailed me the form. He was Richard DeCentis and he had probably just stood there and watched while Mom and Dad signed the papers, which is all he was required to do.
But the witnesses, whose names I had not seen listed before, were of more interest. One, of course, was Aunt Margie, or as the form had her listed, Margaret Lucille O’Sullivan. (I hadn’t known about the Lucille before and was certain to tease her about it at some point but not today.)
The other witness was Eve Kendall.
I looked over at Clarice. ‘I’m really sorry I snapped at you,’ I said. ‘My father just died.’
‘Oh, honey,’ she answered. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t want you to think I was mad at you.’
She shook her head. ‘You were the most polite customer I’ve had all day.’
TWENTY-NINE
Don’t let Kendall get on that plane.
OK, so maybe it was melodramatic but I texted my brother because I wasn’t sure if Dr Eve Kendall was standing near enough to him to hear my voice. What was important was that she didn’t leave until we got some answers.
I was already in a cab headed to JFK, which would only take maybe an hour in this traffic. If a tornado hit the airport and all flights were delayed I had a 50/50 shot at getting there in time.
Thank goodness Ken was actually looking at his phone. Why? he sent back.
She’s lying. She knew Mom and Dad. She witnessed our adoption papers.
Ken’s a strong, confident guy but he doesn’t deal extremely well with pressure. I could picture him breaking into sweat and hear him starting to stammer as he spoke to Kendall. Get Aunt Margie was what he texted back.
I guessed this qualified as an emergency. Aunt Margie wouldn’t answer her phone if she was on the air or about to go on. I asked the driver to turn on her station and her voice didn’t come through. So I called her cell.
‘What’s wrong?’ She began with that. Aunt Margie knew if I called during a shift it wasn’t just to chat.
‘A lot of things, but I’ll tell you when I see you. Right now I need to know about Eve Kendall. You were right. You have seen her before.’
‘I knew it!’ There was a pause. ‘When?’
‘She was the other witness on Ken’s and my adoption papers.’
‘Oh shit!’ That was unusually graphic for Aunt Margie. ‘I knew I’d seen her before!’
I had no time, except that all the cars in the tri-state area appeared to believe I could spend a long weekend in this taxi. ‘So she was lying about not knowing my parents well?’ I asked, just to clarify.
‘Hell, yes! She was the one they were grooming to help with the project after you guys.’ Of course. She was the … wait. What?
‘What project after us? Were they planning on making more people?’ So Ken and I weren’t enough for these ungrateful jerks? What kind of parents were they, anyway?
The cab driver turned his head just a bit. I lowered the volume of my voice.
‘No!’ Aunt Margie said. ‘They had you guys and they loved you. But they were continuing your mom’s work on healing and thought they might have actually found the pathway to a cure for cancer.’
OK, so they were the best parents ever and apparently amazing scientists as well. Hang on. A cure for what? ‘They could cure cancer?’ I said. This time the cab driver noticeably flinched. I was doing this very badly.
I could practically hear Aunt Margie smile and shake her head at my impulsive conclusion. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘They said it was a possible pathway to a cure and could take years, maybe decades.’
‘It’s been decades,’ I whispered. ‘And Kendall is lying about what she knew. Do you think she’s been in touch with them all this time?’
‘How would I know?’ she answered. ‘I haven’t heard from your folks in years. But Kendall was definitely in on it right before they left. Listen. I’ve got a news spot in forty-five seconds. Tell me what’s wrong.’ You can’t fool Aunt Margie and she’s never going to be distracted by a shiny object.
‘It’s something, I admit, but this isn’t the time and not on the phone. When you get home, OK?’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Neither do I. Go read the news.’
She didn’t have time to argue and I knew it, so Aunt Margie had to concede the point and disconnect the call. There was no guarantee she wouldn’t call back demanding more information in three minutes but I couldn’t worry about that just now.
I texted Ken. If Kendall gives you a hard time tell her we know about the cancer cure.
Ken is not unflappable. You can flap him pretty easily if you know which buttons to push. But he’s generally good at dealing with situations (even if he’s not calm about it), so I didn’t get a questioning text. Instead it was: Don’t come to the airport. I’m putting Kendall in a cab. Meet us at the apartment.
Have you ever told a New York cab driver you want to turn around and go in the other direction? They don’t take kindly to it. This one mumbled things under his breath that he thought I couldn’t hear, and they would have made me uncomfortable if I hadn’t known for a fact I could pick him up and toss him across three lanes of traffic if provoked. There are advantages to being me.
As most disgruntled cabbies do, he growled a little more and then made the necessary U-turn and we were on our way back to my apartment. Along the way I decided I needed to get back to Mank because we’d left it in kind of a weird place and now my head was filled with all sorts of oddness. Mank is nothing if not steady. Steadiness seemed like a really valuable commodity right now.
I called instead of texting. Before I could even say hello, he was talking a mile a minute. ‘I heard back from Detective Miller on your ukulele murder,’ he said.
What? Murder? Oh yeah, Evelyn/Patrice/Caroline. That seemed like it had been weeks ago. That, and I hadn’t been nearly vigilant enough about not being followed on the street today. Instinctively I looked out through the back window of the cab. There were cars behind us because, traffic. None of them seemed to be driving in a particularly suspicious manner.
‘Why did Miller call you?’ I asked Mank. ‘You’re not working that case.’
‘He wanted to know about you and Bendix must have told him we knew each other,’ he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Does Miller like me for the murder?’
‘No. But he said you’d been back to the building looking for the super they questioned that day and so was he. He wanted to know how reliable you are.’
So he called my not-quite-boyfriend? I was insulted. ‘Why didn’t he call me?’
‘Am I his mother? I have no idea. If it was me, I would have called you. But the real piece of news here is that he thinks he found the ukulele.’
Whoa! Miller had found the Gibson? ‘Where?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know about where, but they don’t have it in their possession yet and he wants to talk to you about it, apparently.’
‘I gave him my business card.’ This Miller guy was really starting to piss me off and I wasn’t even talking to him.
‘Once again, I’m not the one who told him to call me instead of you,’ Mank pointed out. ‘But if I were you I’d give him a call. And Fran …’
There was something in his tone. ‘Yeah?’
‘We need to talk.’ The four most deadly words in relationship history. And I hadn’t even wanted to date the guy. So why did my stomach contract when he said them?
‘Do we?’
A pause. ‘Yes. Because there’s something you’re not telling me and I think I need to know what it is.’
There was so much I wasn’t telling him I could write an encyclopedia on the subject. ‘Not today, Mank, OK? I mean, yes we should talk and I’ll tell you what you want to know, but not today. I am having the day of all days.’ I mean, I wasn’t going to really tell him, but he wouldn’t know what to ask and I could ad lib.
Steadiness returned to his voice. ‘OK, not today. But maybe tomorrow. I know a place.’
‘Thai?’
‘No, you can dress casually.’
Understandably, I think, I hung up.
I got out of the cab right in front of Mank’s precinct, which was a problem if he wanted to talk but a quick walk to my apartment. It was an incredibly hot summer day. I know from experience that the platform for the Lexington Avenue line at Grand Central Terminal is without question the most humid spot on Earth. So even without air conditioning but with open windows, the cab was decidedly better.
It isn’t a long walk from the cop shop to my front door. This is Manhattan. If there’s a square foot of space and nobody’s making money from it, something has gone horribly wrong. But it was enough of a trip that I noticed the two men, coming from either direction, who seemed to be waiting for me to reach them.
They weren’t wearing dark trench coats. Maybe that guy wasn’t my only problem. I put my hand in the pocket of my jeans. I carried a Mace spray on my key ring that I had never used.
My initial plan was to walk by the men while paying special attention to their hands. The last time someone had (successfully) tried to abduct me I’d been injected with a sedative and woke up in restraints. And I felt just a little nauseated at the memory. That wasn’t going to happen again. I’d just walk by them and get inside.
But Plan A wasn’t going to get a chance to be implemented. The two men met right in front of the entrance and looked at me. I thought of asking if I could help them but then I realized I really didn’t want to help them. I felt their purpose was likely something I’d be better off not participating in.
‘Ms Stein?’ The man on my left was speaking so I looked at the man to my right. Magicians like to work with misdirection, making the audience look in one direction when the work is being done in the other. I figured that’s what they were doing, and as it turned out I was right.
The man on the right was just pulling a syringe out of his jacket pocket. Concealing it was the only reason to be wearing a jacket on a day this hot.
I didn’t care if this guy wanted to inoculate me against every disease on the planet (you never know on the streets of New York) but he wasn’t going to do it now. I reached out and grabbed his right wrist, the one holding the syringe, which had just cleared his pocket.
‘Ow,’ the guy said in a very conversational tone.
I twisted his wrist a little. A little for me, not for him. I heard something crack and he shouted out as he dropped the syringe. It was plastic so it didn’t shatter but I made sure to step on it as I pivoted, still holding the guy’s arm. I pulled him off his feet and tossed him directly into the other man, who had just realized something was amiss with their plans. While I did that I swept the non-syringe guy’s legs with my left and he sat back, hard, on the pavement.
His friend (or colleague; maybe they didn’t like each other) didn’t fare quite so well. I saw to it that he paid for his attempt by landing on his face on the pavement in front of my building. The people walking by stopped for a moment to look and one thought about taking video on her iPhone but realized the fun stuff was over and she’d just be watching a guy bleed on the sidewalk. She moved on as well.
Syringe Guy was stunned, to say the least. He wasn’t talking or opening his eyes, but he was breathing. I figured he’d be out for a few minutes. It’s not like in the movies where someone is knocked unconscious and stays that way for hours without a mark on them.
