Same Difference, page 6
I didn’t text Mank to let him know I’d be calling, like I might have back in the day, which was only a couple of months ago. It was one of the few times in my adult life that I sort of wished I could drink (I probably could, for the record, but I worry about the effect it might have on my body, although it doesn’t seem to bother Ken at all), but instead I had the milk and cookie and then hit the ‘Mank’ button.
And I’m ashamed to say I noticed I was holding my breath. What was I, in seventh grade?
‘Fran.’ So he remembered my name. Was that good or bad?
‘Hello, Mank,’ I said. ‘I think I have something that can help with the Damien Van Dorn case.’ I was talking too fast, but I wanted him to know immediately that this was a business call.
He did seem to be a little taken aback. He took a long moment. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We can do that. What have you got?’
‘Four bags of pills that were in the pocket of a pair of jeans in Damien’s apartment.’
Mank cleared his throat. ‘Pills? What kind of pills?’
‘That’s what I’m calling to ask you. For all I know they’re aspirin.’
It was getting a little easier. We were talking about a case. We’d done that once or twice before and it had been smooth and in its own way successful. I knew the protocols for this type of conversation. I didn’t need to think about him kissing me and then walking out of a diner holding a fork. Had he brought back the fork later? If not, would that be considered shoplifting? Dinerlifting?
Maybe my mind was wandering a bit. The pills, Fran. Think about the pills.
‘You took pills out of his jeans? Where were they, in the closet?’ Mank was pushing me a little and I couldn’t tell if it was real or light teasing like we used to do. I was hoping it was the former. I didn’t need to banter. I needed to get information and then get off the phone.
Tonight might be a good time to take up drinking after all.
‘No, they were in a pile of laundry in the hallway. I get the impression your guys didn’t do a wildly thorough job of looking through Damien’s place. Did you go yourself?’
That wasn’t banter and I wanted him to know. I stood up and started walking around my bedroom, which (given the length of my legs and the amount of space in the room) didn’t take very long. But I pace when I’m not entirely comfortable, and guess what.
‘The uniformed officers who took the first assignment went and reported there wasn’t anything especially interesting there,’ Mank said. ‘I didn’t see a reason to override their initial judgment.’
‘Well, you might want to talk to them because there were four bags of pills in a pair of pants they must have walked by three or four times and they didn’t notice. Now. Can you have them analyzed and tell me what they contain?’ I looked out my window and got the usual view of the building across the alley. There was only one tenant uninhibited enough to leave his curtains open and I knew for certain that I didn’t want to look in that direction.
‘Yes and no,’ Mank answered.
‘What do you mean? Can’t the cops figure out what some pills might be? Do I have to go to the nearest CVS and ask the pharmacist?’ There weren’t more than three apartments with lights on and that was hard to explain; it wasn’t that late.
‘Yes, I can have the pills analyzed and no, I won’t tell you what they contain.’ A new reason to be mad at Mankiewicz! Who knew such a thing was possible?
‘Why not?’ It seemed a reasonable question.
‘Because I’m a police officer and you, as far as I can remember, are not anymore. It’s not my job to provide you with information, especially when you don’t have a client looking for Damien Van Dorn and therefore no reason to be interested in those pills.’
Wow. ‘Are you kidding me? Is this because of what I’ (and yes, here I dropped to a whisper) ‘told you?’
It took so long for him to answer that I actually glanced toward the window of the guy with no curtains. Then I glanced away.
‘No, it’s not about that,’ he said. ‘If you’re willing to have a conversation about that, then we can get back to talking about the case as if we don’t hate each other. Is that a possibility?’
The only appropriate course of action there was not to answer him at all. ‘If you’re not going to tell me what’s in the pills, I don’t see any reason to give them to you for analysis,’ I said. ‘You didn’t find them, I did.’
Mank was no longer interested in having a discussion about my secret; his voiced hardened to the temper of steel. ‘If you’re interested in being cited as an accessory to distribution of narcotics, that would be the way to go for sure,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Watch me.’
I closed my own curtains, because who knew who was looking out the window on the other side of the alley. ‘Detective Mankiewicz,’ I said. ‘You have absolutely no evidence that I’m in possession of anything illegal.’
‘You told me there are pills.’
‘I told you they could be aspirin. In fact, I think that’s what they are.’ I walked back to the bed and sat down next to my laptop. A quick search of images showed me what aspirin looked like. These were in no way aspirin.
Mank spoke very slowly and with a very even tone, a man in desperate need to harness his emotions, which were no doubt conflicting. Good. ‘If you are going to require me to get a search warrant of your apartment to find those pills, I don’t think you’ll be pleased with the results of that search,’ he said.
Wow, again. ‘You really want to go there?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t. But you know perfectly well that I can’t give a civilian information like that.’
‘Why not?’
That seemed to stump him. ‘Why not?’
‘Yeah. Why can’t you tell a private investigator about the results of police testing? Is there a regulation against it?’ I’d actually heard something on this subject when I was studying criminal justice. I’d forgotten most of the classroom lectures because they had nothing to do with being a cop (which was what I thought I wanted) but I did recall this.
Mank remembered it too, and he wasn’t happy about it. ‘No,’ he said.
‘So then this is all about your little macho cop world not wanting to share with someone who isn’t on the payroll, right? Or is it because I’m a woman?’ Technically, I was a woman. I really didn’t want to think about how I’d react if he challenged that.
Luckily he did not. ‘Bring in the pills, Fran.’ He exhaled. ‘I’ll let you see the test results after they come back.’
I knew that trick. ‘Immediately after they come back,’ I corrected. ‘Not sometime in the future after the case is solved and Eliza Hennessey is still missing.’
‘Within a day,’ Mank offered. ‘That good enough?’
‘I’ll bring the pills by the precinct in the morning,’ I said, and hung up.
I believe as I was pushing the button to end the call, I heard Mank say, ‘Fran, let’s …’ But I could be wrong.
NINE
I’d barely been on the Eliza Hennessey case for two days and I was already frustrated. It was hard to sleep that night. So I got up ridiculously early and dropped the pills off (in a manila envelope) for Mank before he would come in so we wouldn’t have to play out that scene. Then I looked for Laura Rapinoe.
Granted, that was grasping at straws, but when you don’t have much to grasp at and straws are available, you take the straws.
Never mind where I got her course schedule from, except to say that it definitely was not from my good pal at the registrar’s office. The truth of the matter is Ken, when I rousted him out of bed at ‘the crack of freakin’ dawn’ did the magic on his computer, gave me the information, and then went back to bed before I headed out for the precinct.
Laura had a full schedule, being an undergraduate, and it happened that on this day she had a first-period class, which meant I could find her outside one of the New Amsterdam University buildings at 8:20 a.m., just ten minutes before the session would begin. She noticed me and I could tell it took a second for her to remember where she’d seen me before. Then it seemed like she looked around for a convenient escape route, found plenty of them and decided against that strategy.
‘I told you everything I know,’ she said as soon as I was within earshot. Of course, my earshot is longer than that of most other people, but Laura didn’t know that.
‘Did you?’ I said. ‘Did you tell me Damien’s last name was Van Dorn?’
She pulled her sweater a little tighter around her shoulders, and it wasn’t even chilly that morning. ‘I didn’t know it,’ she said. ‘I told you I didn’t know him very well.’
‘No? You weren’t one of the people he was dealing pills to?’
It was a long shot, I will grant you. In fact, it bordered on being cruel, but Laura was my only hope of finding Damien and Damien was my only hope of finding Eliza. Desperation brings a certain resolve that you don’t have under other circumstances. I remembered the look in Brian Hennessey’s eyes, the expression that suggested he might have driven his daughter out of his life just for the crime of being herself, and I had to press on.
Laura’s face lost some color but her eyes did not betray fear; she was angry. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
I took a step toward her and she backed away a little. I’m sort of used to that because people aren’t ready for a woman my size and they think I’m scary. Me. Imagine.
‘I think you do,’ I said. ‘I think you were buying from Damien and maybe you even introduced him to Eliza and now you’re worried but you’re even more worried that you’ve put yourself in a position that could be seen as criminal so you’re denying knowing anything. But there’s just enough humanity in you, enough compassion for Eliza, who maybe even became a real friend, that you want to help me find her. So come on, Laura, help me find her and our discussion doesn’t have to go any farther than us.’
She wasn’t an unintelligent girl; she knew I was (more or less) sizing up the situation accurately. ‘I don’t do drugs,’ she said. Maybe she thought I was recording the conversation to play for the cops. For the record, I was not. The cops and I weren’t talking that morning.
‘Maybe you don’t,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe you just knew about this guy who had a supply and you hooked up a few friends. Maybe Damien gave you a finder’s fee.’
‘I never—’
‘The fact is, I don’t care about any of that,’ I went on. ‘I only care about finding Eliza Hennessey, so if you know anything about where she is, or where Damien is right now, the smart thing is to tell me and then the police never hear your name and your parents never get a phone call from you asking for bail money and the name of the family attorney, who probably specializes in real estate transactions or probate.’
Laura walked to some concrete steps that led to the building and sat down. I followed to make sure she couldn’t make a break for it. As soon as she was seated, her head went down into her hands and she started to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said between sobs. ‘I’m so sorry.’
That gave me an opening. ‘Sorry about what, Laura? What did you do?’
‘It’s not what I did. It’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t let anyone know about Damien because I was scared.’
I didn’t like the sound of that. Any time your name is preceded by ‘about,’ it’s a decent bet something happened to you that would not be classified as wonderful. ‘What didn’t you tell anyone about Damien?’ I asked.
Another minute or so of crying exclusively. I didn’t see any point in saying something like, ‘Don’t cry,’ or ‘There, there,’ because the person is going to cry harder when you say that (and for the record, where? Where?) So I let Laura cry it out and finally she seemed to get a better handle on her emotions, which seemed to be genuine. She really was sorry for something and she still seemed frightened. Very frightened.
‘About a guy coming for him,’ Laura said. ‘These two guys were following him around for days and he was scared. One of them was named Julio, but he wasn’t there all the time. Damien said they thought he had a lot of money or something and he didn’t. Then he disappeared.’
‘And so did Eliza,’ I said, mostly to myself.
‘Yeah.’ The word didn’t tell me much, but the tone suggested maybe Laura and Eliza weren’t such close friends after all. Laura sounded a little angry.
‘What’s the matter with Eliza?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ That was an avenue to be explored, but not this minute. There were more immediate issues to contend with.
‘Who were the guys following Damien?’ I asked. ‘Did he mention any other names? Did you see them?’
She shook her head and lowered it into her hands again. It would have been hard for a normal person to hear her with all the traffic noise and people walking by, but Laura didn’t seem to take notice of that and I, in case you were still wondering, am not a normal person. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever met a normal person, either.
‘He never said any names,’ she answered into the concrete by her feet. ‘I don’t even know if he knew their names, except Julio, and I’m not even sure about that. It might have been Julie, or Jules, or something.’ Laura lifted her head and looked at me. ‘But I saw them once.’
It had been so long since I’d had an actual clue that it took me a moment to recognize one. ‘What did they look like?’ I said.
Laura squinted, as if trying to see the men from far away. ‘One of them was maybe thirty, no mustache or beard but he shaved his head. Big, you know, like you.’ Laura was thinking too hard to try to be tactful, and it’s not like I don’t know I’m tall. ‘The other guy was a white dude, skinny like Damien, tall. Had a – what do you call it when they only have a beard around their mouth?’
Most people would call that a goatee. They’d be wrong. ‘It’s a Van Dyke,’ I said.
Laura waved a hand idly in dismissal. ‘No, it’s not that, but anyway that’s what he has. And there’s a birthmark or a mole or something right next to his eye. Dark.’
The eye or the birthmark? ‘Which eye?’ I asked.
‘Uh …’ She put her hand to her temple. ‘Right eye.’
‘OK.’ I sat down next to her so she wouldn’t keep thinking about how big I was, trying to establish myself as a friendly, unthreatening presence, which in my case isn’t as easy as you might think. ‘You’re doing very well. But is that all you didn’t tell anyone about Damien? Do you have an idea of where he might have been going when he vanished?’
Suddenly her shoes seemed to have become considerably more interesting to Laura; she almost dropped her head between her knees to look at them. She sniffled a few times again. The last thing I needed was for my star witness at the moment to dissolve into tears again. I patted her on the shoulder but she didn’t look up.
‘You don’t have to feel bad anymore,’ I said. ‘You can tell me what you’ve been holding back and I can help. I’m not the police.’
‘OK.’ It was almost a whisper. ‘OK. Damien said he was going to get rid of those guys. He said they thought they could get to him but he was going to get there first and they couldn’t come after him anymore.’
‘Where?’ I asked. Maybe I sounded a little bit too intense; Laura flinched a little. I softened my voice some. ‘Where were they going to meet?’
‘They weren’t going to meet,’ she said, still looking at me a little warily. ‘Damien was going for them and he knew where they lived.’ OK, that sounded ominous.
‘Where did they live?’ Already I was making arguments in my head to get Ken to accompany me on this trip. I’m big and tough but my brother looks like the Incredible Hulk’s less green sidekick.
‘This building in the Bronx near the Stadium.’ Everybody in New York calls Yankee Stadium ‘the Stadium.’ And we have two baseball teams in town. ‘I don’t know the address, but it has pictures of Yankees on it.’
‘I don’t suppose you have an apartment number.’ Because that would be far too helpful to ask for.
‘No. Damien said he was going to camp out in the basement so nobody would see him outside and he could look out the basement window until the guys came back. He had it all planned out.’ It’s a little frightening the people who can actually get into college. Because that was among the stupidest plans I’d ever heard.
I stood up. ‘Thanks, Laura. You’ve done the right thing.’
She stayed right where she was but she looked up at me. ‘It’s because he didn’t come back. I’m really scared because he didn’t come back.’
‘Are you and Damien a couple?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘What’s a couple?’
It was a good question.
TEN
‘All of the buildings around here have pictures of Yankees on them,’ Ken said.
That wasn’t literally true, but many of the structures near Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx did bear images of past baseball, um, greats, I guess? I don’t know a lot about baseball. When I was in high school everyone wanted me to go out for the basketball team. I took up martial arts instead. It has proved considerably more useful as I go about the investigation business.
I could recognize the likeness of Babe Ruth because that’s pretty much ingrained in the American psyche from birth. I recognized a couple of the other names, and there were numerous pictures of Aaron Judge, a contemporary player I could relate to because he was taller than pretty much all the others, to the point that I occasionally wondered if Mom and Dad had perhaps plied their trade one more time, something Aunt Margie assured me had not happened.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘but a lot of them aren’t apartment buildings. Most of them are bars and souvenir stores. Let’s look over there.’ I pointed.
