The Question of the Absentee Father Read online

  I had anticipated this tactic. I reached into my pocket and retrieved a bound packet of cash I had extracted from the money Kaplan’s associate in the Reseda house had given Ms. Washburn and me the day before. “You may have this for the conversation I had with Reuben Hoenig yesterday,” I said. “I believe that is fair compensation. For the rest I must see Mr. Hoenig unmedicated and without a time limit. Is that agreeable?”

  Perhaps forgetting his declaration of a minute before, Kaplan sat on the empty chair at our table. His bushy-browed associate remained standing.

  “No, it’s not agreeable,” he said. “Our deal was you talked to your dad and I got my money. This isn’t all my money.”

  “No, but Samuel didn’t have a whole conversation with his father,” Ms. Washburn pointed out. “You get what you get until that happens, Mr. Kaplan.”

  “Watch your mouth, lady,” Kaplan said. I felt a flash of anger at the way he was treating Ms. Washburn.

  She merely sat back, ignored her bagel, and folded her arms. “What is your real name, anyway?” she asked. “George Kaplan is the name Reuben Hoenig got when he left Seattle. How’d you end up with it?”

  Kaplan made a guttural noise. His associate took his hands out of the pockets of his trousers.

  Mike unfolded his arms.

  “If you wish to negotiate terms, I will make a counteroffer,” I told Kaplan in an effort to defuse the situation. I was angry at Kaplan but did not want to see a violent scene erupt in the small restaurant.

  He turned his attention to me quickly. “What’s your offer?”

  “My goal remains unchanged. I want an unlimited conversation with a completely unimpaired Reuben Hoenig. But since you seem to believe the down payment I have given you is insufficient, I will add what I believe businessmen like yourself call a sweetener.”

  “A sweetener.” Kaplan looked amused. I had expected that. “What do you have in mind? Splenda?”

  I did not recognize the word so I did not respond to it. Perhaps it was a derogatory name Kaplan was calling me to belittle the competition in some way. “No,” I said. “Suppose I don’t go through with my plans to tell the Labor Department about the other George Kaplans.”

  The current George Kaplan did not move a facial muscle for six seconds. When he spoke again, it was in a very low whisper with an edge of coarseness to it. “What did you say?” That was a delaying tactic to give Kaplan time to think. I understood the impulse. He had been surprised with information he was not expecting. It could prove to be damaging to his business and possibly his life, so he was processing and formulating an answer. But even if I did comprehend his hesitancy, I had no reason to indulge it. This was indeed a competition and Kaplan was the opposition.

  “I believe you heard me,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he countered. This, too, was merely a method of stalling; Kaplan could not possibly believe I would accept a claim of ignorance.

  “Yes, you do,” Ms. Washburn said. She is adept at keeping the conversation moving and she clearly understood it was time to increase pressure on Kaplan. “Now, what is it worth to you for us to keep quiet about your operation sending men named George Kaplan around the country and placing them in companies run by your competition?” She was not giving away all the information we had but was making it clear to Kaplan that we were not simply guessing. We had uncovered his scheme and we could, if we wanted to, expose it to the proper authorities.

  I was not certain he had done anything illegal, but the way the color drained from his face indicated to me that it was not an unlikely scenario.

  Kaplan tried to look calm but there was already perspiration soaking his collar. “It’s not worth anything,” he said. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Very well, then,” I said, having finished the last of my Special K. “I will return to my original offer of returning the remainder of the cash your associate gave us in exchange for unfettered access to Reuben Hoenig. And we will consider ourselves free to contact any authorities we please to discuss the way you and Mendoza Communications have done business these past few years.” I wiped my mouth with the paper napkin supplied and placed it on the table.

  I do not signal to servers for the check. I do not wish to interact with strangers when it isn’t necessary and I believe the servers consider such gestures somehow demeaning, only because Ms. Washburn has said she felt that way when waiting tables to work her way through college. But Linda came over and asked if we needed anything else and Ms. Washburn indicated the bill would be appreciated. Linda, an efficient server, produced it immediately and left the table.

  Since this was a business trip I paid for the entire check. Ms. Washburn and Mike the taxicab driver were in Burbank on my behalf and that of Questions Answered. I calculated a 20 percent tip and included it in the cash—not that given to us by Kaplan’s associate—I left on the table. I stood up.

  “What time today may I talk to Reuben Hoenig?” I asked Kaplan, who looked agitated.

  His mouth opened and closed three times while his eyelids fluttered. I wondered if Kaplan was having a seizure of some sort, but Ms. Washburn, who would normally be concerned at such a possibility, looked absolutely calm.

  “You’re playing in awfully dangerous waters,” Kaplan said finally. Since I do not often play anywhere, but particularly not in water, the expression confused me until I realized he was mixing metaphors. I would decipher his syntax later but I understood he was trying to sound an ominous warning.

  “What time?” I repeated. Mike and Ms. Washburn, having stood, began to head toward the door, but I noticed that Mike stayed behind Kaplan’s associate.

  “I’ll call you,” Kaplan said. He walked briskly to the door and left without looking back at the three of us, his bushy-browed associate, startled, struggling to keep up his pace.

  Ms. Washburn, Mike, and I watched them leave. I saw Mike’s shoulders relax as soon as they were outside the restaurant. “Don’t go out until I check,” he said. “I don’t want to walk into something.” Assuming correctly we would respect his authority in such matters, Mike walked cautiously out of the restaurant, leaving Ms. Washburn and me behind waiting for his signal.

  Unexpectedly I felt Ms. Washburn’s hand reaching for mine. I am not fond of being touched when I have not prepared but I did not react. I let her fingers intertwine with my own. The Beatles song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” began to play in my mind.

  “You can’t do that to me again,” she said quietly.

  I struggled to understand her statement. She was the one who had reached for my hand; it had not been my idea. Was she upset at my holding her hand? I needed clarification. “Do what?” I asked.

  “You texted George Kaplan and told him where we were so he would come in while we were eating,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “It was an efficient way to expedite the next step in the process of answering the question,” I said, although I had explained my motivation earlier.

  “I know,” she answered. “But you can’t do something like that without telling me first. Kaplan is a dangerous man. Something bad could have happened.” Her fingers tightened in my hand.

  It had not occurred to me that Ms. Washburn would be upset about my method. It made perfect sense to me to contact Kaplan so I had done it. Taking someone else’s reaction into account was still a skill I needed to develop.

  “I will try not to do that again,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Mike appeared in the front window of Eye Openers and extended his right hand, thumb up. Ms. Washburn and I disentangled our hands and walked outside.

  twenty

  “We should have followed them,” said Mike the taxicab driver.

  Ms. Washburn was driving the blue Kia Soul toward the Neighborhood Council building in Reseda in the hope that we might be able to discover something mo
re about George Kaplan’s neighbors. Perhaps speaking to them—something Ms. Washburn had suggested but which made me nervous—would unearth useful information before Kaplan called my iPhone and gave us the coordinates for the exchange of cash for Reuben Hoenig, which I hoped would be soon. I had given up hope of leaving the Los Angeles area early but was determined to leave the next day without fail.

  “I understand that following Kaplan and his associate might have led us to Reuben Hoenig,” I told Mike, “but the idea that we could have gotten to the Kia Soul, which was two blocks away, and then successfully shadowed their movements without being seen is, at best, unlikely. Kaplan will call.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll have time to plan,” Mike said. “I don’t want this to happen on his terms where he can control the situation.”

  “It has to happen before two o’clock,” Ms. Washburn said, “or I can’t go.”

  That was a surprise. “Why not?” I asked.

  “I have a reservation for the Warner Brothers studio tour at two,” she answered, a hint of rebellion in her voice, I thought. “It’s our last day here and I wanted to see a studio.”

  “But our business might require you to be present at that time,” I protested.

  “Sorry, Samuel. I paid sixty-two bucks for this tour. You’ll have to plan around me.”

  Ms. Washburn was treating this trip almost like a vacation, which was uncharacteristic of her. Apparently a person’s behavior when traveling can be markedly different that that when in a standard business routine. I preferred the routine.

  “Very well,” I sighed. “You may have the afternoon off.”

  “Not that I asked, but thank you, Samuel.”

  She drove silently and carefully and I considered what we had determined toward answering Mother’s question. She had wanted us to discover what Reuben Hoenig’s address or contact information was now that he had settled, it seemed, in Southern California. Frankly, given the heat and humidity of the area, the difficulty in going anywhere without driving a vehicle, and the locals we had spent most of our time confronting, I saw little to recommend this area of the country. Others, I knew, would have disagreed with that opinion. They were wrong.

  So far we had determined that a man calling himself George Kaplan had established himself with Mendoza Communications, an enterprise that apparently bought advertising time from television and radio stations and resold it to people who were encouraged to believe they could do the same and make a profit—something that was probably not true. Subsequent research had indicated the practice was not illegal, although irregular. Most stations, having sold the time, did not care whether it was filled with paid commercials or plug-in public service announcements because they had already been paid. Advertising agencies, which often bought the time for clients, would not be pleased, but there was no legal recourse. The only people really losing money were the “civilians,” as Kaplan had thought Ms. Washburn and me to be, who paid more than market value for time they could not resell.

  But there were other Kaplans, men (presumably) who were sent to other cities to work for companies like Mendoza Communications, infiltrate their ranks, familiarize themselves with the companies’ business practices, and then report irregular actions to government agencies in the hope of making the competing companies insolvent. Again, nothing illegal, with the possible exception of operating under an assumed name when filing government documents. It was not worth the kind of threats and secrecy Kaplan had been employing.

  And then there was the house in Reseda where a casual visitor would be handed a package containing forty thousand dollars in cash. On the surface that was not illegal, but it seemed obvious that some illicit activity was generating the funds being distributed. We had not been able to discover what it might be.

  A thought occurred to me so I retrieved my iPhone from my pocket and began pressing on its touchpad.

  “Did George Kaplan call?” Mike asked.

  I heard his question but was engrossed in the research I was doing. Ms. Washburn said, “I didn’t hear it ring.”

  “Ms. Washburn,” I said, “I am going to input a new destination into the Global Positioning System device. You might want to pull over and stop while it calculates the route.”

  Ms. Washburn did not comment but maneuvered the Kia Soul toward the curb on the right side of the street and stopped. I checked the address on my iPhone screen and made sure I was entering it correctly. After a few moments the device was plotting a route.

  “Where are we going?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “To a place called Studio City,” I said. “Perhaps you will not need to go on your tour after all.”

  “Sixty-two dollars, Samuel,” she reminded me. The Global Positioning System device began to verbally give directions to the address I had inputted. “I’m going either way. I don’t care what the name of this town is. What’s in Studio City?”

  “A place we should have gone to already,” I said. “Number fifteen thirty-two Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I want to see if Mr. Wilson T. Alvarez knows what George Kaplan is doing on his behalf.”

  “Who’s Mr. Wilson T. Alvarez?” Mike asked.

  “The chief executive officer of Mendoza Communications. Number fifteen thirty-two Laurel Canyon Boulevard is the company’s corporate headquarters, according to its website.”

  It took Ms. Washburn twenty-eight minutes to drive to Studio City, which was odd, considering it was only fourteen miles from our previous location. I was learning that traffic in the Los Angeles area, notoriously crowded, was even more seriously congested than I had originally anticipated. Every trip’s travel time needed to be overestimated by about twice the normal expectation. It was an irritant, but it was predictable and could therefore be included in planning, which helped me tolerate it.

  The building housing Mendoza Communications was quite unintimidating. It was a two-story office structure that occupied most of the block and was finished in the same shade of Southwestern adobe that I’d discovered is simulated on many veneers in the Los Angeles area. There was no security at the entrance so we walked in uninterrupted.

  A directory in the lobby indicated no fewer than six businesses housed in the facility, but Mendoza Communications was listed in Suite 204. “Maybe this is just their administrative office,” Ms. Washburn suggested as we mounted the central staircase from the lobby to the upstairs suites.

  “Perhaps, but since the business deals largely, if not exclusively, with a theoretical product, it has no need for warehouse space,” I told her. “I would suppose this is the entire operation.”

  Again there was no obstacle to our entering when we located Suite 204 and turned the doorknob. Mike insisted on walking in first, although there was absolutely no indication of any danger. He takes his responsibilities (assigned or self-imposed) seriously and wanted to best facilitate Ms. Washburn and me doing the best job we could.

  Of course there was no one lying in wait for us and I saw Mike relax his shoulders a bit once he was able to scan the facility. It was an extended bullpen area of perhaps eight work stations with a reception desk at the front. Behind it sat a young African-American woman with a very serious demeanor.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” I said to the woman. “I am Samuel Hoenig, proprietor of Questions Answered. I am here to see Mr. Wilson T. Alvarez.”

  The woman behind the desk did not move for a moment, then blinked. “You have an appointment?” she asked.

  “We do not,” I told her honestly. “We are attempting to answer a question that involves this business and hoped he might be able to enlighten us in a few areas.”

  Ms. Washburn stepped forward and established eye contact with the young woman. “It will really only take a minute,” she said, although I would have estimated a conference time of at least five times that length.

  “What do you want to ask him about?” The young woman, whose na
me was indicated as Taisha Mkombo on a nameplate resting on her desk, directed her question to Ms. Washburn as opposed to me. But she seemed to find Mike the taxicab driver more interesting, and was watching him rather closely. I could not read her expression accurately.

  “We have a question about how Mendoza operates,” Ms. Washburn answered. “We’re not from the police or anything. Nobody’s in any trouble. We just need some information. Can we just see him for a minute?”

  The area behind the reception desk was a blank wall, but the corner to Ms. Mkombo’s left and our right seemed to open to an office. Since the rest of the workspace was devoted to people behind desks, most talking on telephones and wearing headsets, I assumed the sole private office in the facility would be occupied by the chief executive officer. If I spoke loudly enough anything I said would be heard inside that office.

  “He’s really busy today,” Ms. Mkombo said without consulting the computer screen on her desk or a calendar on her blotter. “Why don’t you leave a message and he’ll call you on Monday?” The last sentence was not a question, but Ms. Mkombo’s inflection, one that seemed especially prevalent in this area of the country, indicated that it might be.

  “We will not be in Southern California on Monday,” I answered before Ms. Washburn could reply. “And it is imperative that we see Mr. Alvarez as soon as possible.”

  Ms. Mkombo, who had probably been instructed not to allow unannounced visitors in to see her employer, shook her head and attempted to look sad. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just not possible.”

  I do not always modulate my conversational voice appropriately. I am not really listening to the tone of my own voice because I am always aware of my intention and my meaning and do not have to interpret it as I speak. But in this case, I consciously emphasized certain words and spoke more loudly than I normally would.

  “That is not acceptable!” I shouted. “We must see Mr. Alvarez about George Kaplan immediately. The George Kaplan affair is of vital importance. We cannot wait to find out about George Kaplan!”