“The smoke? The fire captain said it would smell like burned-down-house around here for a few days, a week tops. He didn’t want me to worry about it.”
“Not the smoke,” he said. “The night-blooming jasmine.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. That.”
“Alice, did I ever tell you about the time I set my mother’s closet on fire?”
“You did? How?”
“Well, my mother never let me play with matches. So when I managed to nab a big box from the kitchen, I went and hid behind the dresses in her closet to play with them. I figured she’d never think to look for me there.”
“Did she?”
“She didn’t. I don’t think she missed me. Or the matches. After I lit the fortieth or fiftieth one, a dress caught. I might not have been smart enough to see that coming, but I was smart enough to run like heck when it did. My mother was mopping the kitchen when I found her, and she came running with the bucket. That fire didn’t have a chance against my mother.”
“That doesn’t exactly make me feel better about myself, Mr. Vargas, but it gives me hope for Frank.”
“You’ll like this, too, then,” he said. “I didn’t have friends growing up. Who’d have thought a sensitive fat kid who wore glasses and read all the time wouldn’t get voted Most Popular?”
When we turned back to the house we saw a shaft of light beaming heavenward from Frank’s closet skylight. “I guess we should have turned that light off,” Mr. Vargas said.
“I bet Frank left it on because he’s afraid to sleep in the dark with Mimi gone,” I said. “That, or he’s signaling the mother ship to come pick him up.”
“Frank will be okay, Alice,” Mr. Vargas said. “He’s an odd duck, but brilliant children often are. It may take him a while, but someday he’ll figure out how to live in the world of ordinary mortals.” As we climbed the driveway he added, “Frank’s not the one I’m worried about.”
“So you are worried about Mimi.”
He drilled his hands into his pockets and grimaced. “I suppose I’m not as calm about this as I make myself out to be,” he said. “I’m worried, yes. But I’d worry more if she didn’t have Frank. She’s all he’s got, and she knows it.”
“What about a guardian? Do you think Mimi has chosen one for him?”
“I wondered that myself. So I asked our lawyers to check into it.”
“And?”
“Mimi designated a guardian, yes,” he said. “Pretty soon after Frank was born. But it seems she didn’t get around to discussing it with the guy she picked. And now he doesn’t know what to think. Legally, he’s not bound to do it, since she didn’t ask his permission first.”
“Who? Frank’s father?” I asked. “Do we find out now who he is?”
“No,” he said. “Not Frank’s father. Unequivocally not Frank’s father.”
“Xander?” I asked. “Don’t hold out on me, Mr. Vargas.”
“Not Xander,” he said. “I’m not holding out. I just can’t get my head around it.” He tapped his sternum with his forefinger. “Isaac Vargas,” he said. “Me. She appointed me Frank’s guardian.”
( 24 )
I WAS ASLEEP, dreaming I was shaking a cardboard box next to my ear to figure out what was inside it when I heard Frank say, “Alice, wake up.” Since the Dream House was on fire the last time he spoke those words, that sentence catapulted me out of bed. I wasn’t fully awake and was so completely wrapped in bedclothes that I ended up on the floor of my new boudoir, formerly Frank’s bedroom. The kid stood over me in his Sherlock Holmes cape and deerstalker, rattling the shake flashlight Mr. Vargas had given him. He grabbed me by an eyelid and focused it on my eyeball.
“Frank!” I said. “Cut that out. What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m checking you for brain damage. In case you struck your head when you fell.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I sat up and rubbed my hand across my face. “Is anything on fire?”
“What’s your name, Alice?” Frank asked me.
“Frank, for Pete’s sake.”
“Oh dear. Not good. I’m Frank. Your name is Alice.” He blinded me with the flashlight again. “Your pupils are responsive to light, but your possible head injury may have rendered you unable to remember the paramedics saying that not knowing your own name may signify brain damage. Also, nothing is burning and olfactory hallucinations can indicate compromised brain tissue. George Gershwin imagined he smelled burning rubber for weeks before he died of a brain tumor on July eleven, 1937. We should call an ambulance.”
“We do not need to call an ambulance, Frank. My name is Alice Whitley, okay? I asked if something was on fire because the last time you woke me in the middle of the night, something was. What do you need?”
“I need to look for Xander.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s lost.”
“I wouldn’t waste my energy thinking about Xander. I’d worry about my mother,” I said as I kicked myself free of the sheets and stood up. Xander needed to get lost, if you asked me. He was as guilty of setting the Dream House fire as Frank was. More. What’s worse, every mention of Xander’s name forced me to consider that I might be somewhere on that continuum of guilt. I should have soaked those Roman candles in a bucket of water, cut off the fuses, and driven them halfway to Vegas to bury them in the desert.
“But, Alice, your mother is dead. No amount of thinking on my part will bring her back.”
“Not my mother, Frank. Your mother.”
“Why should I worry about my mother? She’s not lost. Mr. Vargas knows where she is.”
Mr. Vargas knew where Mimi was? That was news to me. By then I was awake enough to realize I’d better zip it about worrying about Mimi if I didn’t want Frank to go rigid on the floor. “I’m going back to sleep, Frank,” I said. “So should you.” I picked up the sheet and coverlet, rearranged the bed, and got in. Once I was back under the covers Frank perched on its edge. “Do you want me to tuck you in, Frank?” I asked.
“That’s all right. I’m not tired. I’ll sit here until you’ve rested enough to talk.”
I sighed. “What do you want to talk about, Frank?”
“Looking for Xander.”
“What makes you think we need to look for Xander?”
“I told you. He’s lost.”
“Xander’s not lost, Frank. He’s probably outside Salt Lake City right now, blowing a wad of cash.” I thought of the three sad, crumpled singles in his wallet that he didn’t even have.
I guess Frank was thinking about that, too, because he said, “Xander doesn’t have a wad of cash to blow. All the money he has is in his wallet, which you’re keeping in your purse. Also his monthly bus pass. He wouldn’t have invested in a monthly bus pass if he meant to leave town before the month was halfway done. He’s not crazy, you know.”
I was so beyond getting mad at the kid for going through my purse again that I stifled a massive yawn. “Can’t this wait until morning, Frank?”
“It could. But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to use this excellent flashlight.” He gave the flashlight the kind of two-fisted, elbow-intensive shake that bartenders at the Algonquin probably used when mixing martinis for Robert Benchley and his crew of jaundiced wits. Then Frank put the flashlight in my hand, pulled his bubble pipe from the pocket of his cape, and extracted a small rolled-up piece of paper from its bowl. He smoothed it on the bedside table, grabbed my hand and directed the flashlight’s beam onto it.
“So,” he asked. “How early is too early to telephone this ‘Sara’?”
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning I sent Frank to the yard to pick a rose for Mr. Vargas to use as a pocket square. While the kid was outdoors I asked Mr. Vargas if he knew where Mimi was.
“Of course not,” Mr. Vargas answered. He put down his knife and fork and wiped his hands on his napkin. “What makes you ask?”
“Because Frank thinks you do,” I said.
“Why would he think
that?”
Before I could let him in on what Frank told me the night before, the kid burst in with the rose and thrust it at Mr. Vargas to smell. I put my hand on the back of the chair to keep Mr. Vargas from tipping over when Frank came at him.
“Lovely,” Mr. Vargas said. “I think I’ve smelled it enough now, thank you, Frank.”
Frank crammed the blossom into Mr. Vargas’s breast pocket and then arranged its tips with a neurosurgeon’s care.
“So Frank,” Mr. Vargas said, “tell me, what’s your favorite thing about school these days?”
“Not going,” Frank said. “I’m on hiatus. Like my mother.”
“I see,” Mr. Vargas said. “Just as well. School isn’t for everybody, you know.”
“I know,” Frank said matter-of-factly, then launched into his spiel about Winston Churchill, Ansel Adams, Noël Coward, and their fellow dropout luminaries. He offered to show Mr. Vargas the list with all the names on it that Mimi kept in her bedside table drawer.
“After Mimi comes back I’d love to see it,” Mr. Vargas said. “A gentleman doesn’t go through a lady’s drawers without permission.”
“Ah.” Frank nodded. “Now I’m wondering if you’re the gentleman Alice always references.”
“He is, Frank,” I said. “Mr. Vargas is the gentleman.”
I SAW NO point in involving Mr. Vargas in our search for Xander since we were only doing it to occupy Frank’s mind and, okay, mine until Mimi was back from her mysterious hiatus. So I was glad when he shut himself away with my notebook after breakfast.
I made the kid wait until 10:00 A.M. to call Sara’s number. Which gave him plenty of time to decide what ensemble would be most appropriate for this type of investigative work, as he lacked the requisite gumshoe trench coat and fedora. The E. F. Hutton suit, or the Clarence Darrow? Overcoat with top hat, or without? His good white tie and tails? I’d started out the morning exhausted and exasperated with Frank, but if trying on clothes kept him calm and happy while his mother was out of pocket, I was willing to play along.
“The Thin Man, I presume,” I said once he settled on a smoking jacket over pajamas, a pencil-thin fake mustache from the set I’d given him for Christmas, and a plastic martini glass. The martini glass was the clincher.
“The ‘thin man’ is the skeleton in the movie The Thin Man, so if I were portraying that character I’d be holding a beer and mop. This,” Frank said, waggling the fingers of his free hand in front of his smoking jacket, “is an homage to Nick Charles, society detective, as portrayed by William Powell, brother of Eleanor Powell.”
“I don’t think they’re actually siblings,” I said.
“Maybe not,” Frank said. “But I like to imagine they are.”
When the time came to phone Sara-whoever-she-was, I brought the portable handset into Frank’s bedroom. While we sat on the bed together, Frank declaimed the numbers while I tapped them in. When I entered the last one and put the receiver to my ear, Frank put an arm around my shoulders and pressed his left ear to my right one.
I hung up. “Frank,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Listening in.”
“Really? Do you think I have nothing in between my ears but air and a piece of string?”
“That’s right. Your brain is fairly dense. Maybe I should listen in on the other handset.”
“Fine.” I handed the receiver to Frank, put the paper with Sara’s number in my pocket, and went into the kitchen to get the other handset. When I came in he had the phone to his ear and was saying into it, “My name is Frank Banning. I’m investigating the disappearance of Xander Devlin. Where were you on the night of February eleventh and the subsequent morning of February twelfth? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
I sat on the bed beside him, took the paper with Sara’s number from my pocket, and punched the numbers into the kitchen handset. When I held it to my ear a woman’s voice said, “Frank, please tell whoever that is that you’re already using the phone.”
I grabbed Frank’s receiver and pressed “end call” on both his and mine. “You memorized Sara’s number, didn’t you?” I asked.
“What a ridiculous question, Alice. Next I imagine you’ll ask me to recite the multiplication tables for you. Please. Pressing ‘redial’ works much faster than inputting all those digits. You should try that when you call her back.”
IT DIDN’T TAKE us long to establish that Sara was Tattoo Girl, the young woman who’d delivered Xander’s box to Frank.
“Did Xander tell you what was inside the box before you delivered it?” Frank asked.
“Your birthday present,” Sara said. “That’s all I know. What was in it?”
“Roman candles.”
“That sounds about like Xander,” Sara said. “Please tell me he had enough sense to come and set those fireworks off for you, Frank.”
“He came,” Frank said. “But I’d set them off already and the Dream House was well on its way to burning to the ground by the time he arrived. Before I could explain what had happened the police hauled him away in handcuffs. We haven’t heard from him since, so we’re worried he feels responsible for destroying his home away from home.”
“He ought to feel responsible,” I said. “Who gives fireworks to a child?”
“Wait a minute,” Sara said. “February twelfth? Did all this happen last week? If you’re thinking of suing Xander for giving Frank fireworks or me for delivering them, you’re wasting your time. He has nothing and neither do I. We don’t even own a car.”
Before I could assure her we had no such intentions, Frank muscled in with, “That’s not true. You have Alec. I don’t know him personally but he looks like a keeper.”
“I have Alec. Yes. He is a keeper. You’re right.” She sounded less hostile after Frank said that.
“Tell me,” Frank said, “was Xander in jail long enough to be fitted for an orange jumpsuit?”
“I pawned my wedding ring as soon as he called so I could bail him out as fast as possible. Xander hates being in jail. Listen, everything you’re saying is news to me. All Xander told me was that he’d punched a cop.”
I was still grappling with wedding ring and so had fallen a couple of paces behind. “Wait,” I said. “Xander’s been in jail before?”
After a longish pause, Sara asked, “Exactly how well do you know Xander?”
“Well enough to know he doesn’t have a driver’s license, doesn’t do birthdays, and that he never graduated from Julliard because he broke his arm in two places during his last year there.”
“He never graduated because he broke his arm? Did he tell you how he broke his arm?”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so.”
“How did he break his arm?” I asked.
“He needs to be the one to tell you that,” she said.
BEFORE WE LEFT the next day for the fancy department store where Sara told us Xander had a gig playing piano, I stopped by my former bedroom to let Mr. Vargas know we were leaving. I didn’t invite him along because I knew Frank would be absolutely against that.
When Mr. Vargas opened the door to my knock he was wearing a rumpled dress shirt with the tail untucked, a pair of suit pants, and socks. The guy’s hair was a mess. I’d never seen him look untidy before. “Did you sleep in your clothes, Mr. Vargas?” I asked.
“I forgot to pack pajamas,” he said. I saw that he had my notebook in his hand and that he’d flagged a number of pages with yellow Post-it notes.
Frank elbowed me aside and said to Mr. Vargas, “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
Mr. Vargas was enough of a student of Frank already to know the kid was incapable of sarcasm. “Thank you, Frank,” he said. “I call this style ‘the Albert Einstein.’”
Frank’s eyes lit up. “If you borrowed one of my mother’s cardigan sweaters and a fake mustache from my collection you could star in a biopic of Albert Einstein,” he said. “May I loan you one of my mother’s cardigan sweaters and one
of my fake mustaches?”
“Sure,” Mr. Vargas said.
“You’ll need shoes,” Frank said. “But no socks. Einstein didn’t wear socks.” He skedaddled off.
When Mr. Vargas sat on the red love seat to pull off his socks, I noticed the imprint of his body on top of my fluffy white comforter. He hadn’t even bothered to get under the covers last night. From the looks of him, I wasn’t sure he’d been to sleep at all.
Mr. Vargas asked, “How does Frank know about Einstein’s socks?”
“His lack of socks, you mean?” I asked. “How does Frank know anything?”
Mr. Vargas rolled his socks into a ball and tucked them into the corner of the suitcase he hadn’t unpacked. He put my notebook away in the desk drawer.
Once Mr. Frank of Bel Air was done with Mr. Vargas, he did kind of look like Albert Einstein. Frank was so pleased by the results that he said, “I think he should come with us on our adventure today, Alice, don’t you?”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said. “But you need to invite him yourself. Be polite. Use his proper name when you ask him. That’s the way gentlemen like Mr. Vargas do it.”
“But I don’t know his name!” Frank screeched, so unexpectedly that both Mr. Vargas and I jumped. He drummed his forehead with the heels of his fists.
“Whoa. Frank. It’s okay. Calm down. I just said his name. It’s Mr. Vargas.”
Just like that, the jovial Mr. Frank of Bel Air was back. “He can use Xander’s bus pass,” he said. “I happen to have it right here in my wallet.” Frank pulled his wallet out to show us. The wallet was oxblood leather, looked older than I was, and had been embossed with the letters JG in gold, which made me suspect it had been Julian’s once. “The difference between Xander’s bus pass and my bus pass is that his is blue and mine is orange because the orange bus pass is for a child and adults are blue. Shall we three go now?”
I wasn’t about to argue about taking the bus or ask how Xander’s bus pass had jumped from my purse into his wallet.
“You there, sir,” Frank said to Mr. Vargas. “Allow me to hold on to this bus pass for you. I don’t want you to lose it as it represents much of Xander’s current net worth.”
Be Frank With Me Page 23