Ukulele of Death, page 4
‘I almost beat up two kids in the music store today,’ I blurted out.
Ken, who was drinking a soda, very nearly sprayed it over his keyboard. ‘What?’ he laughed. ‘You went after a couple of children?’
‘No. I mean kids, like late teens, early twenties. They were being snarky about Beethoven, so I levitated them a few inches off the floor.’ I mimed the move so he would know what I was talking about.
Ken put his head back and roared. And when I say ‘roared’ … My brother has a big voice. When he could control himself again, he looked at me beaming. ‘You’re a pistol, Frannie.’
‘They were making fun of the violin,’ I defended myself.
He stood up and walked over to where I was sitting, looked down at me. ‘You weren’t that mad about the violin. What’s the problem?’
I frowned. This wasn’t something I was really prepared to discuss, but Ken is really good at never giving me a break. ‘It’s the Evelyn Bannister thing,’ I told him honestly. ‘I took it on because I understand how it feels to want some information about the people who … made you …’
‘I’m aware,’ Ken cut me off. ‘That’s why you take most of the cases we do. So what’s different about this one?’
My head felt heavy; I started to rotate it around on my neck to loosen up the tension I hadn’t been aware I had. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Usually we have more to go on. And there’s something else.’
I didn’t go on, so Ken stared at me. He’s not happy to feed me the straight lines. And his stare is intense. He never so much as moves a facial muscle.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you. I got a weird vibe off of Evelyn. I felt like maybe she didn’t really want to find her father.’
Ken shrugged. ‘We both thought that. She was lying. We’ve had clients lie to us before.’
‘This was different. I got the sense that she might have a purpose. I thought maybe she was angry at her father and wanted to find him so she could …’
He waited again, then rolled his eyes. ‘So she could what? Kill him?’
I never got the chance to answer. I stopped rolling my head, although that still felt good, and looked into his eyes. But my phone started ringing in my pocket, and I pulled it out, still looking Ken in the face.
‘Mrs Fran?’ It was Igavda, the Romanian woman Ken had hired to be our office’s receptionist. The fact that Igavda spoke at best broken English had not struck him as a problem. She was six feet tall, which took some of the heat off me, and as Ken put it, ‘built like a brick gulag,’ which had been qualification enough for him. I had foolishly put him in charge of the task on a day I was in Washington DC looking through some adoption records from 1957.
‘It’s just “Fran,” Igavda.’ We’d had this conversation roughly fourteen million times before, but I persevered, assuming that someday I would get the only full-time employee of K&F Stein Investigations besides the two partners to call me by my first name. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Called the police.’
Ken had turned away to walk back to the laptop on our ‘table,’ but I snapped my fingers to get his attention, and he turned to look at me. ‘The police!’ I said. ‘Why did you call the police?’
Igavda was not breathing heavily or shouting, but I could hear the edge in her voice. ‘No, not call police. Called police.’ Oh, of course. How silly of me.
‘What happened, Igavda?’
Ken, who would normally be amused by this type of conversation, looked concerned. He considered himself Igavda’s protector in America. She was convinced that some secret police organization from her home country was after her for reasons she’d never been able to communicate, and had impressed upon my brother her damsel-in-distress qualities. The fact that she was strong enough to take out a bull ox with one punch belied the act, but Ken lived in the hope that someday Igavda would impress something more than her damsel-in-distress qualities on him, and he always rose to the bait when she sounded worried.
‘Give me the phone,’ he said, but I didn’t.
Igavda answered me, ‘Called police, few minutes ago. You go to station for questions.’
OK, maybe I had a handle on this. ‘So you didn’t call the police? The police called our office?’ I asked.
‘Da,’ Igavda said. ‘Called police. Sergeant Bendix.’ Inwardly, I groaned just a little. I knew Sergeant Bendix, and he didn’t like me much.
‘Why do they want me to come to the station?’ I said.
‘Is dead.’
‘Sergeant Bendix is dead?’ One could hope. OK, that was mean; I didn’t want Bendix to die. But his extended leave of absence for, say, hemorrhoid surgery wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen.
‘No, not Sergeant,’ Igavda said. ‘Sergeant call. Somebody dead. Go to station.’
‘Who’s dead?’
‘Go to station.’
That was the most I was going to get from her. I tossed the phone to Ken, who luckily has good reflexes. He put the phone to his ear and purred into it as if he were trying to soothe a puppy through a thunderstorm. ‘It’s OK, Igavda,’ he cooed. ‘I’ll be right there. Don’t be afraid.’
I didn’t hear what Igavda said, but she obviously imparted the information that she was in no need of rescue at the moment.
I reached for my jacket and headed for the door. After getting my phone back from my brother, who looked disappointed.
Sergeant Emil Bendix was a cop from another time. There were moments when I thought that was a literal statement, like Bendix had discovered a time-travel device and brought himself here from the 1940s. He talked like someone from a Warner Brothers tough-guy movie sent to give Edward G. Robinson a hard time before he or Robinson ended up dying in a bloodless hail of bullets. It was killing him – Bendix – that the NYPD no longer allowed smoking in precinct houses. I’m sure he thought a cheap cigar would have cemented his image and solved the vast majority of his problems.
‘I didn’t tell your “receptionist” that anybody had been murdered,’ he was telling me now, drinking a cup of Starbucks coffee – which I could guess he’d insisted be ‘just coffee, none of that fancy stuff’ when he was ordering it – instead of the famous tepid police department industrial strength brews of the past, which had come on hot plates or through a Mr Coffee device. The poor guy probably even missed that stuff. ‘I told her that I’d found out someone was dead. I would have told her who, if you’d had the brains to hire an American for the job. Should I call ICE, Gargantua?’ Bendix likes to remind me that I’m taller than most women he knows. OK, all the women he knows. Assuming he knows women.
‘You don’t have to call Immigration on my receptionist,’ I told him. ‘She has perfectly legal papers and she’s studying for her citizenship exam.’ That was mostly true; actually Ken was studying for Igavda’s exam, with the hope that she’d let him come over at night to help her ‘cram.’ I love my brother, but he can be a real pig sometimes.
‘I’ll bet,’ was all Bendix could give back. The man was a wit worthy of comparison to, say, Tarzan. No, that’s not fair. Tarzan’s probably a riot if you speak Elephant.
‘So who’s dead?’ I asked.
He consulted a clipboard he’d left on his desk, which was in the bullpen of the precinct, not exactly the most private area on the planet. ‘Dr Aziz Mansoor,’ he read. ‘By his driver’s license, fifty-seven years old, five foot ten, with brown eyes.’ Bendix looked up from the file and lifted an eyebrow in a fashion I’m sure he considered wry. ‘Imagine that.’
‘And he wasn’t murdered,’ I said, ignoring his racial biases and trying to get back on topic.
‘Nope. Drove his Infiniti G37 sedan smack into a tree on West 48th Street.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Bendix commiserated. ‘I didn’t know they had trees up there, either.’
‘I was wondering why you have the case,’ I said in an effort not to respond to anything Bendix said directly. ‘That’s the 18th Precinct. This is the 13th. How’d you get it?’
‘They called down to me asking about you,’ he said, barely hiding the grin from what I was now sure would be unpleasant tidings he’d be pleased to deliver.
‘Me?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know Dr Mansoor. He’s not a client, I’m not his patient and he’s not a friend. The guy had a car accident and he died. That’s too bad. But what does this have to do with me?’
‘That’s the interesting thing,’ Bendix answered. ‘Dr Mansoor appears to have known you.’ The grin was almost ear-to-ear now.
‘How do you figure?’ In order to get the moment to end, sometimes you have to perform idiotic rituals to accelerate its arrival.
‘He had three of your business cards in his car. Wallet, glove compartment, front seat. How do you explain that, Gargantua?’
‘I don’t. Anybody can take a business card. Maybe the doctor was thinking of calling me. I can’t account for every business card I give out, or somebody gives out for me. Why’d you call me down here, Sergeant?’
‘I’ll tell you why.’ Bendix’s desk was right next to that of Detective Richard Mankiewicz, and the diminutive cop gave me a wink as he took his seat, then made a face behind Bendix’s back. When I laughed, caught off guard, Bendix turned to look, but Mankiewicz immediately turned toward his computer. Bendix, nonplussed, looked back toward me. ‘The midtown cops went over his cell phone, which amazingly was still in one piece after the crash, and the last call he made was to you.’
OK, that was odd, but hardly amazing. ‘So he called my office,’ I told Bendix, who still looked like he had swallowed a canary. ‘I’ll call Igavda and find out whether he said anything important.’ It was a car crash; why were the cops treating it like a homicide?
Bendix shook his head. ‘Not your office phone. Your cell phone.’
Instinctively, I pulled my phone out of my purse. Sure enough, the call I’d ignored when I was at the music store was there, and it was from a number the phone didn’t recognize from my contacts. I showed it to Bendix. ‘Is this his number?’ I asked.
He checked it against the file on his clipboard. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘That’s our good doctor. So he calls you, and he’s dead maybe an hour, hour and a half later.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Sergeant?’ I asked.
Bendix ignored the question. ‘Did you speak to Dr Mansoor?’ he asked.
I felt my eyes narrow. ‘No. You want me to see if he left me a voicemail?’
‘Please,’ Bendix said, overemphasizing the word. I sat down on the edge of his desk, and saw Mankiewicz watching me from his desk. Mank had asked me out more than once, I’d declined for a number of reasons (not the least of which was that I thought dating a cop would be a distraction for me and a possible conflict of interest for him), and now the attention was a little overripe. Mankiewicz, who’s about five foot eight, would look bizarre next to me. There would be laughter. It would be embarrassing for both of us. The rough part was that Mank was a nice guy, really.
I punched up my voicemail and put in the password. The computer-generated voice at the other end informed me that I had only one new message, and I pushed the button that would play it back. I looked at Bendix, who made a rotating motion with his hand to indicate I should open the phone up to speaker so he could hear the message. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse.
‘This is Dr Aziz Mansoor,’ said a fairly deep and unaccented voice over definite background noise that could have been traffic from inside a car or just walking down Seventh Avenue. ‘It is very important that I speak to you within the next forty-eight hours.’ He left a phone number and there was silence but for the background noise.
I was about to turn off the voicemail when the doctor added, ‘This is a personal matter. I was a close friend of your parents, and I think they might be trying to contact me.’
SEVEN
I tap-danced around the message, telling Bendix the standard story, that my parents had been killed in a car crash when I was very young, and implying therefore that the doctor must have been either mistaken or crazy. Surely there were other Frances Steins (my legal name actually is Fran, but I tell people otherwise because they tend to believe that more easily) in the world. He looked skeptical, but he always looks skeptical, so that might not have been important.
After about fifteen minutes, he had ascertained that he wasn’t going to get much more than that out of me, and waved me away like a pesky housefly on a summer day. I picked up my bag and headed for the stairs, but Mankiewicz intercepted me at the stairwell door. I smiled at him, because he really is a nice guy, but I had to look down to smile so he could see that I thought so.
‘What’s going on, Mank?’ I asked. ‘Some reason you need a private detective?’ Maybe I could keep this on a professional level.
‘Heard about this new Thai place on Bleecker,’ he said. OK, so maybe I couldn’t keep it on a professional level. ‘I’m not working Saturday night. Why don’t we go check it out?’
I looked down at him, staring up at me without a hint of irony. ‘I really don’t think it’s a great idea, Mank,’ I said as gently as I could.
‘You don’t like Thai?’ Not a glimmer. ‘Because there’s an Italian place I’ve been to a couple of times …’
‘I’m fine with Thai,’ I said.
Before I could continue that the cuisine wasn’t the problem, Mankiewicz blazed on. ‘Great! Should I pick you up at your office or your apartment?’
I looked around at the cops in the squad room, some of whom were looking at us. Bendix wasn’t one of them, thank goodness, but a couple had amused expressions on their faces. ‘Come with me,’ I said, and opened the door. He appeared puzzled, but followed me through the door and into the stairwell.
‘What’s the problem, Fran?’ he asked me as soon as the door was closed. ‘You don’t like to date cops?’
‘I’m about six inches taller than you,’ I estimated. ‘You’re currently staring directly into my neck.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ Mankiewicz replied, and I noticed he was staring a little bit lower than my neck.
‘Hey. I’m up here.’ He adjusted his gaze toward my face, still smiling. ‘Mank. You’re a nice guy. Really. I like you. But …’
‘You’re a heightist,’ he said. ‘You discriminate on the basis of height.’ And he looked me right in the face, daring me to contradict him.
So I did. ‘I’m not a … heightist,’ I argued. ‘It’s natural for a girl to want to look a guy in the eyes when she’s dating him.’
‘You can sit down a lot. The restaurant has chairs, I’m pretty sure.’
‘You’re impossible,’ I told him.
‘No, you’re impossible. I’m not even improbable. Come on, Fran. You like me; you said so. Guess what? I like you, too. What’s wrong with two people who like each other going out to have dinner together?’
‘You’re going to want to kiss me,’ I warned him. ‘I can tell.’
‘I’ll stand on a box. What do you say?’
The fact is I’m not terribly skilled in matters of dating. Being the tallest girl – and usually the tallest person – in every classroom I ever entered was a real obstacle for most guys. And the fact that there was an electrical outlet just under my left armpit had made me, let’s say, a little leery about going too far with a guy. I hadn’t had a lot of practice in the romance area. It’s not that I can’t, you understand. Our parents made sure everything works. But I’m, let’s say, reluctant.
‘I say, you’re buying dinner, and if people stare at us …’
‘It’ll be because they envy me,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven thirty. How’s that?’
‘You’re a lunatic,’ I told him as he opened the door.
‘So you’re going out on a date with a lunatic,’ he answered. ‘Saturday. I’ll wear something that makes me look taller.’
‘Stilts?’ But he was already through the door and back into the squad room. I started walking back downstairs, shaking my head. This whole day hadn’t gone the way I’d planned it. I did notice, however, that I was smiling when I hit the street.
‘A date!’ Aunt Margie crowed. ‘That’s wonderful, Frannie! I was starting to give up hope!’ Aunt Margie and Tact have met, but they’ve never really gotten serious about each other.
She makes dinner for Ken and me once a week, usually on Tuesday. This week it was on Thursday, just so Aunt Margie could say that it wasn’t a set thing every time. She likes to pretend that we have a choice in the matter.
Ken, sitting at the kitchen table inhaling spaghetti (one of the few dinner things Aunt Margie can actually cook to an edible state, although she’s great at breakfast), waved his hand until he could chew and swallow. There would be no talking with his mouth full at Aunt Margie’s table. ‘The date isn’t the interesting part.’
‘Thanks a heap,’ I answered.
‘No, this dead doctor and his message – that’s what I’m trying to figure out,’ Ken said.
Aunt Margie looked … not dour, but certainly concerned. ‘I don’t see how what he said is possible,’ she told us. ‘If your parents were going to get in touch with anybody, it would be me.’ She looked up from her dinner and saw our expressions. ‘Well, after you two, of course,’ she added. ‘I think this guy was lying, or mistaken.’
‘We’ll never know,’ I said. ‘He’s dead. I saw the pictures of his car, and it’s amazing that even his cell phone managed to survive. I wonder if he had it in his pocket, or somewhere it could bounce around without breaking.’
Ken stood up to begin pacing. He’s always said he can’t think sitting down. I always tell him that’s because after he stands, the blood flow to his brain is normalized. You can’t expect to think when you’re sitting on it like that.
I’m funny.
‘We need to find out more about Dr Mansoor,’ Ken said. ‘I’m going to run some searches on him. We need to talk to his family, his friends, see if anyone else knew about this connection to our parents.’
