Same Difference, page 9
A fairly painstaking scan of the graduating class found no student named Rainbow, but Brian had suggested that person might have been someone Eliza met at New Amsterdam. I still had Laura Rapinoe’s phone number and I used it, trying not to picture the wince on her face when she saw who was calling.
Give Laura credit – she answered. ‘I don’t know where Eliza is,’ she said. ‘Did you find Damien?’
Dammit. She didn’t know. ‘I’ll talk to you about that in a minute,’ I promised, hoping that I was going to be called away by … something. ‘Right now I need to know if you know of somebody there at New Amsterdam named Rainbow.’
Laura wasn’t pleased that I hadn’t answered the Damien question. She took a moment. ‘Tell me about Damien now,’ she said.
‘In a minute. What about Rainbow? I’m taking it from your response that you know who that is.’
Laura exhaled audibly, the universal sign for exasperation. ‘Fine. Rainbow Zelensky. I’ve never met her but I’m told she’s popular in a certain crowd; they say she’s cute. People used to hang out at her apartment in Queens. I didn’t go. Now tell me about Damien.’
‘How do I find Rainbow? Dorm? Apartment? Phone number?’
‘I never met her; I just heard about her. Now tell me about Damien.’
She deserved to have the information, but I didn’t want to give it to her because, frankly, I wanted someone else to do it. There didn’t appear to be a choice, though. So I took a breath and said, ‘OK. I really wish I didn’t have to say this.’
And Laura cried.
THIRTEEN
It’s a reflection of how much I didn’t want to deal with Rich Mankiewicz that when I went to the precinct I made Ken come with me.
This was clearly a risky move. If Mank made any reference to the differences Ken and I have, my cover would be blown, my brother would know I’d told someone else about us and in all probability he’d look harder than ever for our parents so he could tell our mother on me. But I didn’t have time to play out that scene with him before I went to pump my previously favorite detective on information about the pills I’d dropped off for analysis, the dead body in the Bronx and the possible whereabouts of Rainbow Zelensky.
While we walked to the precinct, which is only a couple of blocks from our building, I filled Ken in on what Brian Hennessey and Laura Rapinoe had told me. He didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about Malcolm X. Mitchell, allegedly of the World Health Organization.
‘I hit call on his call and got a very general voicemail message,’ he said, completely without my asking. ‘So I pretended I was naïve and said I hoped I hadn’t hung up on him by mistake and could he call me back.’
‘So how many times has he called you back so far?’ I asked.
Ken pouted. Until you’ve seen a six-foot-eight man pout, you haven’t really explored the entire panoply of experiences life can offer. ‘He could be at lunch.’
Anyone who’s been to lunch in the past twenty years could easily deflate that comment, but I needed my brother to be my backup so I let it go. ‘Did the voicemail message say anything about being with the WHO?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Bingo.’
‘I don’t think it was ever a serious consideration that he was,’ Ken answered, wanting to get his little sister to respect him again. Like that was going to happen. ‘I want to get him to call me so I can find out more, like where he might have heard about Mom and Dad.’
‘You haven’t seen anything even remotely like them online?’ I asked. Ken knows corners of the internet that Al Gore hasn’t thought of yet.
He shook his head. ‘I think this was another attempt to shake us loose and get us to make a mistake. Like we could email our parents or something and they could tap in.’ Ken shook his head again at the idea that one of us could just choose to get in touch with Mom or Dad.
There was a lot I wasn’t saying in this conversation. Luckily we had reached the station so we could begin another conversation in which I wouldn’t want to say much. It was turning out to be a theme day.
Mankiewicz was predictably at his desk, his face serious and searching the screen on his computer. I used to think he looked kind of cute that way. Now, I told myself, he was posing. (He wasn’t, but you know how it is.) I couldn’t see the screen as we approached and Mank pretended not to notice the two oversized people heading in his direction.
Bendix, however, thought Ken and I represented a ripe opportunity for hilarity. Or two. ‘Gargantua,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘You bring your bodyguard with you today?’ There are misogynists and then there’s Bendix, the beta test for misogyny. They’d worked out the bugs before they’d perfected the app.
‘You’ve met my brother, haven’t you, Bendix?’ I asked. ‘He has burps that are stronger than you.’
Ken obliged, which was not what I’d had in mind. ‘Nice work,’ I said quietly to him as I passed Bendix and walked to the side of Mankiewicz’s desk.
Mank had obviously noticed the rising level of comedy in the room and looked very up to see Ken and me standing in front of him. ‘Ken and Fran,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe the honor?’
‘You know what,’ I answered. ‘What’s the report on those pills I left for you? Fentanyl?’ This might not be so difficult after all. I was just letting my natural anger overshadow the hurt.
I’ll admit it: one of the reasons I’d insisted Ken come along was that Mank wouldn’t try to talk to me on a personal level and I wouldn’t have to confront both how I felt about it and how I found myself acting about it, which was against my usual demeanor. So a guy had stopped dating me; did that have to mean I was going to behave like a high school sophomore whenever we met? So far, it did.
Mankiewicz nodded with a resigned look on his face. This was something he had to do, not something he wanted to do. ‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘Your friend appears to have been dealing Adderall to his friends. Very popular on campus, for those times you need to cram for finals, and all the other times.’
That made some sense, but I wasn’t sure it made a great deal of difference. ‘Enough to get killed over?’ I asked.
Mank didn’t pretend he hadn’t gotten the report on Damien’s murder. ‘Yeah, thanks for getting in touch with me about that. I saw you both listed as being at the scene.’
‘I figured you’d hear about it soon enough. Now you can close your file on Damien, but I’m still looking for Eliza Hennessey, and maybe the pills can lead me somewhere. Was he selling enough drugs to make him worth killing?’
Mankiewicz did the tired-cop thing with his eyes but I wasn’t buying it. ‘What’s enough? If he was just selling to friends, probably not; he wouldn’t have necessarily been intruding on someone else’s territory. If he wanted to control the whole college campus, then you might be looking at another story.’
I wasn’t interested in the story; I wanted names. ‘Who would be threatened if someone was selling pills on the New Amsterdam University campus?’
The right corner of Mank’s mouth curled, and not in an attractive or amused way. ‘I don’t know every drug dealer in the city, Fran, and certainly not all the way up there.’
Stupid municipal functionary.
‘When I was in the basement with Damien’s body, I saw Detective Brooker pick something up with a pair of tweezers and put it into an evidence bag,’ I told Mankiewicz. ‘Is there any mention in his report about what that might have been?’
Mank put his hands down on his desk, palms flat. ‘Can we talk for a minute in private?’ he asked. He looked at Ken.
Ken, without changing his facial expression in any other way, raised an eyebrow.
I dropped my arms, which had been folded across my chest, to my sides. ‘Really? You want to have a private conversation when I just asked you about a police report that must be public information by now?’
‘If it’s public information, you can look it up. Please?’ He glanced at my brother, as if it were Ken’s decision to make.
‘Oh, fine!’ I said, because if we were going to act like teenagers I might as well go the whole way. I walked to the door and headed for a stairwell where Mankiewicz and I had held private discussions before. And yes, they were just discussions. Get your mind out of the gutter.
He followed me and we both looked to make sure there were indeed no other people on the stairs at this moment, a fair bet given that the building had an elevator. People don’t like to walk up stairs when they don’t have to.
‘OK, what?’ I said. It’s a great way to begin a cordial conversation with the guy I could only now refer to as my ex.
His voice changed from the detective who had been in the precinct bullpen to something resembling an ASMR artist pretending to give you a facial on YouTube. ‘Fran, I want to clear the air. I want to apologize for the way I acted when we talked in the diner.’
I’d heard this tactic before. Not from him or anyone else I’d ever dated (since to be honest I’d never actually dated anyone else) but I’d heard it used on other people. I wasn’t ready to fall for it. ‘You mean when you recoiled at finding out who I really am and then shoplifted a fork?’ I said.
‘I brought the fork back later. Look, what you told me wasn’t in the realm of normal revelation. First I thought you were joking and then I thought you were crazy and then some things just sort of added up in my mind and I believed you, and that was hard to absorb. It wasn’t just that you have a family history of illness or that you’ve decided you don’t ever want to own a dog.’ Mank looked sheepish, so I guessed he meant a sheepdog. Who’d ever said anything about a dog? ‘It was something I’d never heard before.’
‘It was something nobody had ever heard before. I was demonstrating how much I trusted you with information I’d sworn never to give to anyone, and I think you can imagine how well I reacted when you fled the building at warp speed.’
He leaned back against the ancient plaster wall of the stairwell, leaning his lower torso out to avoid the metal banister. ‘I know. I reacted emotionally and I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking about how you must have felt. It was just a reflexive thing because I didn’t know how to react.’ Mank is a good few inches shorter than I am and I did appreciate him craning his neck to make eye contact. ‘But as soon as I could think straight, I did try to see it from your point of view, and I did everything wrong that I could do. So I want you to know that I’m very sorry and I hope you can forgive me, but I understand if you can’t.’
For a moment I almost reverted. This was more like the guy I’d been dating and thought could be trusted with my secret. ‘You haven’t told anyone else?’ I said.
‘Of course not.’
I made sure we were looking each other in the eye. ‘Because you respect my privacy or because you were embarrassed to be dating a woman with a USB port under her left arm?’ I asked.
He smiled a bent smile. ‘The first one.’
‘You’re doing better,’ I told him.
‘I’m glad to hear it. Can we go back to being friends?’
Friends. ‘Was that what we were?’
Mank must have felt the flood waters rising around him because he straightened up off the wall and put his hands in his pants pockets. ‘It was when we started,’ he said.
Now, that wasn’t even accurate. The best you could have said was that we were friendly colleagues, given that I was a private detective and he was a cop. Then we were immediately dating, and trust me, that was different. I have never once kissed Emil Bendix for three hours in a row. Although ‘friendly colleagues’ would be a stretch with Bendix.
‘What do you want to happen?’ I said. I didn’t offer choices because I wanted to hear which ones he’d come up with on his own.
‘I’d like to work back toward where we were and maybe some more,’ he said. ‘But I know you were hurt and I’m not sure if that’s what you want right now.’
Good answer, Mank.
I nodded once, as if we’d just concluded a business deal. ‘OK. So why don’t we start by you telling me what was in Brooker’s report about the evidence he found on the basement floor?’ I pushed the door open and walked through. I made certain not to be looking at Mank’s face, because I honestly didn’t want to know how he had reacted to my changing gears so abruptly.
Audibly, he betrayed nothing. No gasp, no cough, no change in tone. Mank was a good detective because he observed but didn’t betray his own thoughts except when he wanted to. I admired the way he was acting now.
‘There was nothing in the report about significant evidence being found on the floor of the basement,’ Mank said. So he had read the report, even if the body was found in a precinct more than ten miles away. ‘Brooker made a note of a small tuft of hair that he bagged next to the victim’s head but it turned out not to be significant. It was his own hair.’
We were almost back to Mank’s desk. ‘Damien’s or Brooker’s?’ I asked.
Now Mankiewicz did betray a feeling, just by turning and giving me a look that indicated he hadn’t thought my remark was humorous. (It hadn’t been intended as such.) ‘The victim’s,’ he said.
‘How did his hair get on the floor?’ I asked.
Mank sat down behind his desk, where Ken was still standing, almost at attention, and watching. Only I would have recognized the amusement in his eyes. ‘What?’ Mank said.
‘Damien was strangled with an extension cord,’ I reminded him. ‘What part of that process would have caused a small tuft of hair to fall off his head?’
Richard Mankiewicz was a classy enough man not to put his feet up on his desk to show me how relaxed he was. ‘I honestly have no idea,’ he said. ‘What difference does it make?’
Something here was wrong and I couldn’t figure out what it might be. ‘Are you guys even trying to find out who killed Damien Van Dorn?’ I said. ‘That’s a major inconsistency and you have no suspects that I’m aware of, so why don’t you want to know about the only piece of physical evidence you have besides the body and the murder weapon?’
Mank looked like he’d been personally insulted, which I suppose he had, but indirectly. Ken continued to look lightly amused. I have no idea what I looked like because I was looking at them.
‘Fran, in the past day I have had to call Van Dorn’s mother and tell her what happened to her son. I’ve had to explain to her that we don’t know yet who might have killed her son but that he might have been selling illegal drugs to people on campus, a little fact she obviously had no knowledge of before. And I’ve been given a really effective dressing down by my captain, who thinks I loafed on the missing person case to the point that the missing person got killed. So yeah, I’m trying to find out who killed Damien Van Dorn, and if you think I’m not, my guess is that you’re not paying attention.’
It was the most I’d ever heard Mank say without interruption, and it had the reverse effect I think he was intending. I was becoming convinced that something about this investigation – maybe even involving Mank – was wrong, perhaps intentionally so. Why would the NYPD not want to find out who had killed Damien?
‘I’m sorry to have given you that impression,’ I said. I sounded meek even to myself. Was I back to caring what Mank thought about me?
He shook his head and became more like the man I’d known again. ‘It’s OK. It’s just been a day, and it’s still early.’
I said goodbye, Mank made some comment about talking later, I didn’t respond to that, and then Ken and I left.
Once we were back out on the sidewalk, my brother looked over at me and said, ‘Good thing you brought me along.’
FOURTEEN
Just because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I sent an email to the last address I had for my mother and then sat there for twenty minutes waiting for a response I was certain wouldn’t come. I hate being stuck on a case.
Eliza had not posted on any social media site since before she had vanished. That would be too easy, I suppose.
Rainbow Zelensky was, according to Instagram, living in New York City (but had not posted a picture of herself, which I thought was odd), so that meant I had only to eliminate 8.468 million people to find her. The job was practically done before I began. Laura Rapinoe was pretty much dried up as a source of information and was probably mourning Damien full-time, so there was no point in calling her again. I felt awful for having broken the news to her and angry that no one else had ahead of me.
Ken and his mastery of online interconnectivity had not yet broken New Amsterdam University’s student records other than the most basic ones, so we had no lead on Rainbow. But then, even with more than 8.4 million people living here, how many Rainbows could have been living in New York City?
Instagram seemed like it knew Rainbow better than anyone else I could reach, so I left a message for her on her Instagram page. She didn’t answer any faster than my mother.
With no other brilliant ideas, and with Ken still trying to track down Malcolm X. Mitchell, I headed back to the campus of New Amsterdam University and went to the office of records and transcripts. Sometimes stat heads are the best people to ask. Especially when you can’t think of anyone else.
On the subway getting there, though, I was thinking about Eliza. I had no idea if she’d left her father’s apartment because she felt stifled there, or worse, or if Damien’s pill business went deeper and she was somehow caught up in it. I felt like Rainbow Zelensky might be the key to it all. The trick was going to be finding Rainbow.
It’s possible that my ruminating on all that was the reason I didn’t notice the man in the WHO t-shirt sooner.
