Ukulele of Death, page 7
I was getting stronger, but I still felt like sleeping. ‘What?’ I sort of, well, moaned.
‘He said you had to get back to him within two days?’ I looked at her. Aunt Margie’s brows were down so low I was afraid her nose would have to get out of their way.
‘He said forty-eight hours, yes.’ It was what I’d been thinking about, but I didn’t get why Aunt Margie was so obviously concerned. ‘Why? Does that make sense to you?’
‘Only under very specific and unlikely circumstances,’ she said, not looking at me. She seemed to be talking almost completely to herself.
‘Such as what?’
‘Such as … maybe your parents are in town. Right now.’
TEN
Normally it would have been hard to sleep after a statement like that, but I was run down enough that sleep was the only thing I could do. Aunt Margie saw my face, told me not to worry (ha!) and left, quietly closing the door behind her. Like the sound of the door closing was the real obstacle here.
I fell asleep in record time for me, I’m sure. I don’t actually remember anything after Aunt Margie dropped her bombshell and left the room. That is, I don’t remember anything until two the next morning, when I was wide awake for no discernible reason. I panicked slightly when I realized I was lying on my left side, but the charging plug was no longer attached. Its meter, I could see, read one hundred percent. Aunt Margie must have snuck back in to disconnect me while I was sleeping, like she used to when I was too little to handle the apparatus myself.
It was impossible to stop rehashing the combined torments of the Evelyn Bannister case and what had happened to Dr Mansoor. So I did that for about twenty minutes before remembering that I’d intended to ask Mankiewicz about the good doctor’s (I assumed he was a good doctor) demise. It was the middle of the night so I didn’t expect that he’d be sitting by his phone, so I sent Mankiewicz a text message designed to reach him when he awoke.
So it was something of a surprise when my phone buzzed seconds later with a response from Mank: Why do you need to know?
I figured a good way to evade the question was by asking one of my own: What are you doing up at this hour?
What are you?
That was a question I’d pondered about myself almost all my life, but I didn’t think Mank meant it that way. I asked you first, I sent back, largely because at two thirty in the morning my brain believes itself to still be in a nine-year-old.
Can I call you?
It did seem quicker and more direct. I turned off the ringer on my phone so Ken wouldn’t hear the ring (he can hear through multiple walls, even when he’s asleep but better when he’s concentrating) and told Mank it was OK to call. Yes, I could have just called him, but he’d asked.
The phone rang in a moment and I immediately answered it, keeping my voice very low. ‘Am I catching you in the middle of a case?’ I asked. I knew why I was awake at this ungodly hour but I would gladly have bet everything I owned it wasn’t the same reason Mankiewicz had.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I’m doing some research on something and it wouldn’t let me sleep. I have tomorrow off anyway, so it doesn’t matter how late I stay up.’
‘How come you have tomorrow off?’
‘Even cops have to take two days a week. Mine’s tomorrow. Or later today, if you want to get technical. What’s your excuse?’
‘A client of mine got herself killed today,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ That was approaching true. It was true-adjacent.
‘Killed? Like a homicide?’ Cops are always cops. They’re never just some guy. I could practically hear Mankiewicz’s ears prick up.
‘Yeah. You probably saw the alert. She got hit over the head with a blunt instrument in her apartment.’
Mank took a moment, no doubt looking up the NYPD post on the subject. ‘Evelyn Bannister?’ he asked shortly.
‘That’s the one.’
‘The brass candlestick.’ Mank was reading. Great. I’d come looking for a line on Dr Mansoor, preferably just to leave a message and have him call me back the next day, and now he was reliving one of the worst moments of my career, which had started not terribly long ago. Did I have more wonderful memories like Evelyn Bannister’s bloody head on the rug coming in the future?
You think a lot of weird thoughts at two thirty in the morning.
‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t interested in rehashing the scene of the crime, having hashed it quite thoroughly the previous afternoon with Detective Miller.
‘It says here you and your brother discovered the body.’ And yet, here was Mankiewicz determined to replay every last unpleasant detail. ‘Are you OK?’
See? Just when you’re starting to give up on Mank he decides to be a really sweet guy and that just screws things up. ‘I’m OK,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t a close friend or anything. I just met her a couple of days ago.’
‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘It’s bothering you or you wouldn’t be up at this time of the morning.’
‘You’re lying too,’ I shot back. ‘Research doesn’t get you to stay up this late. You’re probably still planning this dinner you and I are supposed to be going on.’
‘Supposed to be?’
I decided to give up the mutual teasing and return to my original reason for texting Mankiewicz. ‘I wanted to ask you a favor.’
‘Wait. I’m still trying to figure out what “supposed to be” means. Are we having dinner or not?’
‘Yes, we’re having dinner. As friends.’
‘If it’s as friends you can pay for yourself. What’s the favor?’
‘You heard why Bendix called me in, right?’ Unplugged now, I could move about the room freely if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I lay in my bed and actually even closed my eyes. I wasn’t tired, but not seeing things helped me focus. Does that make sense?
‘Something about a doctor who died in a car accident.’ Mankiewicz sounded a little puzzled.
‘Well, Bendix probably heard the message and didn’t understand what he heard, because it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the way he died, but in his voicemail Dr Mansoor told me he had been a friend of my parents.’ Yes. Keeping my eyes closed was definitely the way to go here.
‘I thought your parents were dead,’ Mankiewicz said. Cops are so tactful.
‘They are. He said he had been a friend of theirs.’ I had to be careful about what story I told Mank because he was a cop, after all, and if I lied too blatantly he’d know it. The last thing I wanted on this was a suspicious cop. Why had I called him, again? ‘But I don’t know much about them because I was really little when they died. And now Dr Mansoor got into a car crash and died right after he called me to try and connect.’
There was a pause. Mankiewicz wasn’t trying to determine if I was telling him a tale or not, though; I could see his face in my head and he was thinking his cop thoughts. ‘You think there’s some connection? That your parents were murdered?’
That would be far too much. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it’s just a coincidence. After all, it’s decades apart. But it’s so tantalizing to have been that close to more information on my parents and then not get it. I’d like to know more about Mansoor and Google isn’t going to be enough. Can you do a little digging for me?’
‘I’m not the detective on the case. It’s not even my precinct. Bendix is the one who took the call. Why not ask him?’
This time I allowed the pause to happen. ‘Seriously?’ I said after a moment.
‘OK, I withdraw the question. But it’s early in the morning and you felt like you had to text me tonight instead of waiting for our date – yeah, I called it a date – tomorrow evening. What’s so urgent?’ Mank was a good cop. He knew how to think in a way that can lead to information, and what he wanted to know now was more about me than I’d allowed him before. I think I’ve made my reasons for that fairly clear.
‘It’s not urgent,’ I sort of lied. The strategy here was that if I could get some decent information from Mank, maybe I could dissuade my crazy brother from attending a memorial service for poor Dr Mansoor, whose family needed anything but the Incredible Hulk hanging out at his funeral and asking them questions. Granted, I had no idea if Mansoor was even from the area, if his funeral would be in Houston or Zagreb rather than New York, or if Mankiewicz could find out anything that I couldn’t myself, but it was worth the effort. I guessed. ‘It’s just that having heard about someone who knew them and wanted to tell me something kind of stirred it up in me.’ That was at least largely true.
Mankiewicz, from the sound of his sigh, wasn’t entirely buying it, but he wanted to go out on a date with me and therefore some concessions would have to be made. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘First of all, where is Dr Mansoor from? Could he have worked with my parents somewhere nearby? What’s his background? Was he a medical doctor or some kind of research scientist? Had he been traveling recently, and if so, to where?’ I’d given this some thought before calling Mank.
‘What difference does that make?’ he asked. ‘Who cares if he was traveling? Your parents have been gone for thirty years.’ He had no idea.
‘Yes, but he chose to get in touch with me today. Yesterday. Whenever. That might mean he’d come across some new information and wanted to tell me about it. If he’d been out of the country, or even just out of state, that might lead me to other people who could tell me what it was he wanted to pass along.’ OK, so it was a stretch, but not that much of one.
Mank exhaled again. ‘Is that it?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want a DNA sample, too?’
I gave it some thought; DNA might show if Mansoor had been created like Ken and me, which was after all a really unlikely possibility. ‘No, I think that’ll do it. But I will need to know how old he was and where he was born.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Mankiewicz was definitely trying to decide how badly he wanted to kiss me, and it must have been pretty bad because he didn’t ask any follow-ups. ‘You realize that Google would get you most of this, but I’ll look into it without telling Bendix and I’ll let you know what I found out when I see you for dinner. Now if you don’t mind I need to get some sleep. I have a date tonight.’
I did not contradict him.
ELEVEN
‘We don’t have a client,’ I reminded my brother.
‘We had a client,’ he corrected me. I mean, it wasn’t relevant, but it was true. ‘She gave us a retainer and now she’s dead. I think it’s incumbent upon us to find out who killed her, don’t you? Wasn’t that what you were saying? What made you change your mind?’
We were sitting in our office, me at my desk and Ken on the client chair, which was big enough for him and cushier than the more utilitarian piece of furniture I was sitting on. I was trying to get some files cleaned up from previous cases and he was … bothering me.
‘Incumbent upon?’ I asked. ‘What classy woman you’re dating or hoping to date is making you upgrade your vocabulary?’
‘What makes you think … OK. I’ve been talking a little to an English professor from NYU and so I’m trying to up my game a little bit. Is that a bad thing? And don’t change the subject. Evelyn Bannister asked us to find her dad. She ended up dead. We didn’t find her dad and we don’t know who killed her. I think we owe it to her to do at least one of those things.’
‘This case is giving me bad feelings,’ I said. ‘Nothing adds up right.’
The sun was still just reveling in its ascent over Manhattan, glad to be out for the morning but nowhere near peaking yet and in no hurry to do so. In other words, it was nine in the morning. Usually you can’t get Ken out of bed that early without a cold bucket of water, but he’d decided to come to the office and annoy me while I tried to run the agency and make him money. That meant he had an agenda, and as long as it didn’t include seeing Dr Mansoor’s remains committed to the earth, I was willing to listen.
‘OK, I get it,’ I told him. ‘I feel like we failed Evelyn Bannister too. But I don’t see the merits of doing something that she’ll never know we did. It’s to make ourselves feel better, not to try and make it right for Evelyn. Evelyn’s dead.’
‘That wasn’t what you said before.’
‘That was yesterday. I was a whole different person.’
Ken’s eyes were half-closed as he was no doubt ruing his decision to get up at the same time as the rest of America. It gave him the air of someone who really didn’t care when I knew that he did. Probably not the image he was trying to project. My brother is a number of wonderful things, but he is not subtle. Ever.
‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked. ‘Forget the whole thing and move on to paying jobs?’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’ The Forsyth account was not going to bill itself, after all. I’d have left this work for Igavda, but she had the disadvantage of not speaking really good English, so her invoices tended to have misspellings and incorrect addresses, which was not the kind of thing a going enterprise should permit. In addition she was not at the office yet. Ken lets her come in at ten. Ken sometimes thinks with an organ other than his brain.
‘Very amusing. I’m suggesting that we either keep trying to find Evelyn’s dad, whoever he is, or figure out who killed her.’
He was being serious and I always realize that too late. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s look at it logically. The police are already investigating Evelyn’s murder and they have access to more information and resources than we do. So if we’re going to do anything else – and I’m still not sure it’s a great idea – we should concentrate on identifying and locating her father.’
Ken smiled. He loves it on those rare occasions when I agree with him, or at least when he thinks I do. He stood up to pace because he thinks it makes him look thoughtful. I should be nicer when I talk about my brother, but it’s so much fun to not.
‘So what do we know so far?’ he asked. Now, that was largely because he had barely been paying attention when we were working on Evelyn’s case until now. She wasn’t his type and he figured I had it well in hand. It turned out I didn’t, since Evelyn was dead, but I was still ahead of Ken in the information department.
‘Have you looked at her file?’ I asked my brother. I already knew the answer to that question but I wanted him to understand what a mistake he’d made in trying to prove he was as much an investigator as I am. Siblings. Never get between them.
Ken didn’t make eye contact, a sure sign. ‘I saw her client intake form,’ he said. I knew what that meant: He’s seen it, when it was sitting on my desk, but he hadn’t read it. ‘What else should I know?’
I resisted the urge to gloat. ‘You should know that Evelyn’s adoptive parents, the Bannisters, don’t really know anything about who her dad might have been. Her birth mother, Melinda Cantone, knows but won’t say because that was the father’s wish. He is from Nashua, New Hampshire but made his money here in New York and collects stringed instruments for reasons I can’t begin to explain. That’s the bare bones. The rest is in her file.’ I pointed at my computer screen in case Ken had forgotten where client files could be found.
‘You’re really getting after me today,’ he said. He sounded so much like the twelve-year-old version of himself that … actually, that made me want to get on his case some more. But I didn’t.
‘I know. Maybe a little more than I should, but you need to start taking this agency thing a little more seriously. I feel like I’ve been doing most of the work and you come along in case somebody needs beating up.’ OK, so that was a little harsh but not entirely inaccurate.
Ken actually looked surprised. ‘Is that what you think?’ He stopped pacing. He wasn’t thinking about how he looked. This was serious.
‘I don’t know if it’s what I think, but it’s how I feel. Prove me wrong.’ I sat back in my swivel chair and looked at him, trying not to seem confrontational. I wondered if Aunt Margie would say I was succeeding in that or not.
‘I’ve done some digging on our parents virtually every day for at least two years,’ Ken said.
‘That’s personal, not agency related. I know you want to find out about Mom and Dad. I’m pretty sure I want the same thing. But that’s got nothing to do with our business, the way we can afford to pay the rent and the electric bill so we can plug into the wall. What are you doing for that?’
My brother seemed to have something caught between his teeth. His lips moved back and forth and his cheeks bulged out a little here and there. It took some seconds before he answered, ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not being asked to do anything but stand behind you and look intimidating.’
‘So it’s my fault you’re not contributing?’ I swear, it slipped out before I could think about what I was saying.
Ken stared at me for a moment, then turned and walked out of the office. I called after him a couple of times, but he wasn’t about to come back in and let me apologize. So I texted him I’m sorry and waited for him to walk back through the door.
He didn’t.
I worried about Ken for the rest of the day, which probably would have made him happy, I decided. So I was nervous while I sent invoices. I was nervous while I checked on active cases and found little that was urgent. I was nervous while I went down to the pizza place and got three slices for lunch. Usually I get four.
I’m a big person.
After a while being nervous just got tiresome and besides, I had to get nervous later about the date with Mankiewicz. So I decided to put the jitters aside for the time being and concentrate on Evelyn Bannister’s father.
Yes, I know that’s what Ken wanted me to do. I’m not saying he didn’t make any sense at all.
Putting my thoughts about my absent, petulant, stubborn, annoying brother aside, I started looking seriously into what had already been determined about the as-yet-unnamed birth father of Evelyn Bannister. The file I’d compiled – with virtually no help from Ken, but I wasn’t thinking about that now – had the most rudimentary information possible. I still had no idea who this man was, why he’d decided to stay anonymous from his daughter (although that’s not terribly unusual, even after decades) or what, if any, connection his shadowy presence might have had in Evelyn Bannister’s murder.
