twenty-three

It was on the taxicab ride to the hotel in Burbank that I received another text message from George Kaplan.

I had spent my time before this trying again to reach my mother and was equally as unsuccessful as in my previous attempts. I was more resolute than ever that this would be our final day in the Los Angeles area. When the text message signal was sounded by my iPhone I hoped it was Mother and found Kaplan’s name listed instead.

The message read: Bad move.

There was no further explanation.

I had observed that aggressive behavior had been the most productive in dealing with Kaplan. The lesson I’d been taught in early social skills training, that a bully respects those who oppose him, had been difficult to learn but was becoming useful here. The question now was whether a passive-aggressive approach—no response at all—would be more or less effective than a direct assault. I asked Mike for his opinion.

He was carefully evaluating the car in which we were riding and clearly finding it acceptable if not excellent. I had been adamant in speaking to the person at the dispatch station of the taxicab company that the unit driving us must be absolutely impeccable in its cleanliness. This was the manifestation of that request and it was not noticeably dirty. That was as far as one could go in praising the vehicle.

“I think you’re better off not answering,” Mike suggested. “He’s trying to threaten you. You still want something from him. Let him come back with an answer for you about a place and time to exchange your dad for the money and then he can expect a message from you.”

I would have asked Ms. Washburn for her opinion as well but she was not answering my text messages any more than Mother this afternoon. We would be on an airplane heading for New Jersey the next day. Time to answer Mother’s question and successfully complete our excursion was running out.

“I believe you are correct,” I told Mike, trying not to notice the somewhat reckless manner in which the driver was maneuvering his car through the inevitable traffic. He switched lanes without first exhibiting a turn signal. I found myself having to remember to exhale. “We must bargain from a position of strength. We have Kaplan’s packet of counterfeit cash. If he wants it back he will have to give us what we want, which is Reuben Hoenig.”

“You were the one who wanted to go back to that house,” Mike reminded me. “What made you think there was a fake money operation going on in there? Most people would look at the place and assume it was a drug house of some kind.”

“I had noticed the sound of the machinery when Ms. Washburn and I visited the house the first time,” I said. “That itself was not enough to do more than pique my curiosity. I had to think about what would cause that kind of noise and why someone like George Kaplan would have it in the house he owns for business purposes. I had mused about it but come up with very little until I realized Kaplan was too concerned about the forty thousand dollars Ms. Washburn and I had been given.”

The taxicab driver pressed hard on the brake pedal of the vehicle and barely avoiding a rear-end collision with the Sport Utility Vehicle in front of us. I gasped and was about to ask the driver to be more safety conscious when Mike cleared his throat and drew my attention. In retrospect I believe that was an intentional action on Mike’s part to distract me from the tension of the ride.

“Why shouldn’t he be concerned?” Mike asked. “Forty grand is a lot of money. You had it and he wanted it back. I don’t see anything strange about that.”

I had refocused my attention but the fingers on my left hand were wiggling and I was not doing that by design. “Consider the amount,” I said. “George Kaplan probably owns at least three businesses. There is the advertising time scheme, selling the spaces from television and radio stations to private buyers for resale. There is the practice of sending multiple George Kaplans into competing firms to uncover unsavory employment practices or other infractions that can hurt the competitor. I imagine he has monetized that in some way. And now we know he has been using the Jamieson Avenue property, which might be one of many he owns, to manufacture counterfeit cash. My best guess is that he sells it at a fraction of the face value to unscrupulous businesses like drug dealers. There were rumors that such people frequented the house, and when Ms. Washburn and I arrived we were summarily handed a packet without asking for it.”

“What’s that got to do with the amount?” Mike asked.

“Those three enterprises and possible others we have not yet discovered would bring in a great deal of money,” I explained. “They probably earn him millions of dollars a year, and that is a fairly conservative estimate.”

Mike sat back with his hand on his chin. “So the forty grand isn’t that big a deal to him.”

“Exactly. And yet he has been adamant about its return to the point that he has threatened violence to us or to Reuben Hoenig if it is not back in his hands, and under his terms.” The driver changed lanes abruptly again, making me lean to my left sharply, then back to the right. I gasped.

Mike intervened on my behalf, knowing he was probably more adept at handling such situations. “Hey, pal,” he said, “maybe you could take it a little easier. My friend and I don’t need to be there in the next ten seconds, okay?” His tone was friendly and not oppositional as far as I could tell.

The taxicab driver appeared to disagree, however. “I drive how I drive, okay? I don’t tell you how to do your job.”

“Actually, I’m a cab driver in New Jersey,” Mike informed him. “And I’m not telling you how to do your job. I’m asking that you drive a little calmer because you’re worrying my friend.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” said the man behind the steering wheel.

“Look, buddy,” Mike attempted, “I don’t want to get into an argument. There’s an extra ten in it if you slow down and get us there in one piece without a heart attack, okay?”

The taxicab driver made a rude noise and increased the speed of the vehicle.

Mike smiled, which confused me. “How about a twenty?” he asked the man. I thought that was a poor negotiating tactic, rewarding the taxicab driver for being insubordinate and reckless. But it seemed to work because the man slowed the car down although he did not acknowledge the remark.

Mike leaned over to whisper into my ear, which I barely tolerate when not absolutely necessary. The thought of someone else’s mouth so close to my ear is, to say the least, unsettling. But I trusted Mike and understood he had something to say that he felt was crucial.

“You got one of those fake fifties?” he asked.

Ms. Washburn would not be available for another two hours, so once we arrived at the Burbank hotel, Mike and I retired to our respective rooms and I opened my laptop computer to continue some research into the George Kaplan we knew in an attempt to find out more about his background. I believed we would be hearing from him again very soon and thought any information recovered would be useful as a tool against him. I was now thinking of this George Kaplan as my opposition in the attempt to answer Mother’s question.

I knew Ms. Washburn had traced Reuben Hoenig’s path to Reseda, California, through his employment records starting at the Seattle branch of the Rayborn Corporation. She had correctly surmised his transformation into George Kaplan through the payroll records. Mother, I remembered, had noted the name was to be found in North by Northwest, Reuben’s favorite film. (It was probably of note that now he was continually quoting The Maltese Falcon and not the Hitchcock classic, but there was little question Reuben was the man we had come to locate. The change from Hitchcock to John Huston or Dashiell Hammett was not yet explained.)

Since Ms. Washburn had not located any other George Kaplans coming directly from Rayborn in Seattle, it was logical to assume that the scheme to send emissaries to competing companies and repeatedly using that alias had germinated in Southern California after Reuben had arrived and become George.

There was, therefore, no utility in repeating Ms. Washburn’s search of the payroll records. Instead, I traced back the George Kaplans we knew about to the dates of their first using that name and searched for records of men who had been reported as missing around those times in the same geographic areas as the George Kaplans who had perpetrated the scheme.

After thirty-three minutes I had abandoned that approach due to lack of relevant results. There was one man who was reported missing three days before a George Kaplan arrived in Boca Raton, Florida, but he was located a week later in a motel in Tallahassee, Florida, which resulted in no criminal charges but did instigate divorce proceedings filed by the man’s wife. The idea that he was the local George Kaplan was not plausible.

I was about to begin an attempt to hack Social Security records on the current Southern California George Kaplan, something I thought would not be terribly likely to reap useful results, when my iPhone began to ring. I checked the Caller ID and noted the screen read, Home.

Mother.

I picked up the phone and touched the screen to accept the call. “Mother?” I said as soon as the line was clearly open.

“Samuel.” Her voice was not as strong as usual and sounded tired, but it was definitely Mother’s. I looked at the clock on the bedside radio in the hotel room. In New Jersey it was currently 6:07 p.m. Not nearly time for Mother to sound this weary. “How are you?”

“I am fine, Mother.” It seemed odd that she would ask about my health when she was the one who had been mysteriously unavailable for two days. “I have been concerned about you because I could not contact you since I arrived in Los Angeles.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to worry. It was just this problem with my phone, but it’s fixed now.” Somehow her assurances were not soothing my concern. Her voice still sounded distressed in some way. “I just wanted to make sure you had found your father.”

Her agenda was still not the same as my own. “I have met with Reuben Hoenig, or at the very least a man who is going by that name,” I said. “It was a brief conversation but I am intending to meet with him again this afternoon or this evening.”

In fact, I expected to get a location and a time from George Kaplan shortly. He would not have taken kindly to my silence following his last text message.

“A man going by that name?” Mother’s focus appeared to be very narrow. “What do you mean by that?”

“Simply that I have no way of knowing if this man is your husband,” I said. “There are no facts, merely what I have been told.”

“I’ll send you a photograph of him in an email,” Mother offered. “You can look at his face and see if it’s him.”

“Your picture would be at least twenty-seven years old,” I pointed out. “It would hardly be definitive proof.” I had considered taking one of the photographs Mother had in our house before I left but decided against it. I would essentially have to hold it up next to the man’s face and make a determination, and I do not read faces especially well.

“I’m sending it.” This time Mother’s voice sounded sharper and a touch livelier. There was no point in arguing, although her determination did not change the facts of the situation.

“Mother, are you all right?” I asked. She was acting in a way that I did not recognize; her tone was somewhat less forgiving than usual and her attention seemed to limit itself to just one subject.

“Of course I am. Just a little tired. How was he, Samuel?”

I hesitated a moment. Mother did not refer to me in the second person. But when one asks how another person is physically, it is common practice to reciprocate the question. I realized she was asking not about me, but about Reuben Hoenig.

“He appears to be physically sound, but his responses are unusual.”

Mother did not speak for three seconds. “Unusual?”

“Mother, when you knew him did Reuben Hoenig exhibit behaviors that would place him on the autism spectrum?” It had occurred to me but I’d had access to no medical records. I assumed his wife would know.

“Not really,” she answered. “He had his eccentricities like everybody else, but I don’t think your father is on the spectrum. Why? What does ‘unusual responses’ mean?”

I looked around the hotel room, an environment I still found sterile and unfamiliar. I would have gladly paid a great deal of money to sleep in my own bed tonight, but I knew that was not possible. Tomorrow, I promised myself. Definitely tomorrow. Just one more night.

“Samuel?” Mother said.

Her question made me focus my thoughts. “When I spoke to Reuben Hoenig he looked slightly dazed and was quoting heavily from The Maltese Falcon,” I told her.

Mother’s breath came in a light wheeze. It sounded like she was in some pain, but not a debilitating amount, as far as I could tell. “The Maltese Falcon?” she asked. I knew she had heard and understood the reference, so I waited for her to elaborate. “Why was he doing that?”

“I assure you I have no idea,” I said. “Reuben has taken up with the man we know as George Kaplan, who is an unsavory character. It is my guess, based strictly on anecdotal evidence, that Reuben is taking some medication that is affecting his demeanor. Why he has chosen to communicate through that particular work of fiction is a complete mystery to me.”

I had not intended the word mystery to be a pun in the previous sentence. I realize The Maltese Falcon falls into that category at least in terms that bookshops use to shelve their merchandise, but the fact was Reuben’s behavior was puzzling me very severely. I had no explanation for it and that frustrated me.

At that moment I received a text message from the phone of the man we knew as George Kaplan. Even as Mother was preparing to speak I was reading the message: Be at the Jamieson Avenue house in an hour. There was no further explanation.

“Samuel, you have to help your father,” Mother said.

I sighed. I supposed she was right, but it was not my preference.

I told Mother I would call her later, but she suggested she might go to sleep early that night. Given that it was barely evening at home I thought her suggestion was odd. But I disconnected the call and pressed the screen to call Mike.

“We need to find a clean taxicab,” I said.