As I had expected, a man in his late forties with a seriously receding hairline and a dark mustache emerged from the office behind Ms. Mkombo. He was walking quickly and stopped short of wiping his balding dome with a handkerchief, but looked tense nonetheless.
“Who is shouting?” he asked, despite being able to see me clearly. He did not stare at Ms. Washburn or Mike because it was obvious I was the one shouting the name he’d prefer not to hear at such a high volume.
“I am,” I said. It was true, however unnecessary. “Are you Wilson T. Alvarez?”
“Yes. And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop making a scene in my place of business.”
I had heard the term “making a scene” many times before, particularly when I was a child. I have never completely accepted its accuracy, as some theatrical scenes can be very quiet and gentle depending on the subject matter. But I have learned to simply assume the common usage and move on.
“I would be happy to speak much more quietly and privately if we can move to your office, Mr. Alvarez,” I told him. “I believe you have some idea of what my concern might be based on your reaction to the name George Kaplan.” I did not emphasize the sensitive name that time, seeing no advantage in doing so.
“I tried to tell them you were busy,” Ms. Mkombo said to her superior.
He waved his hand to declare her concern irrelevant. “We’ll talk inside. Make sure we’re not disturbed.” Then he gestured with the same hand toward his office door, apparently instructing Mike, Ms. Washburn, and me to follow him inside.
We did so and found a rather cramped, sparsely decorated space with the same fluorescent lighting as the rest of the office and two chairs in front of the indistinct desk behind which Mr. Alvarez positioned himself.
I stopped, unsure of what to do. Surely Ms. Washburn should have one of the “guest” chairs, but would it be rude or presumptuous of me to take the other? Would it be insulting for me to offer it to Mike? This kind of interaction is especially difficult for people like me after we have had some social skills training. If I had never met Dr. Mancuso, I would have sat down and never given the matter a thought.
Mike solved the problem by closing the office door behind him at Mr. Alvarez’s suggestion and then leaning against the wall in the corner, folding his arms and leaving the extra chair for my use. We exchanged nods and I sat down gratefully. Another in an unending series of difficult human interactions successfully navigated.
“Now,” Mr. Alvarez said when we had settled into his office. “What can I do for you nice people?”
I found that a rather bizarre thing to say. Mr. Alvarez had not known any of us long enough to have an impression of our characters. And I had made quite a show of demanding to know about George Kaplan, so asking why we had come to see him was redundant. I wondered if Mr. Alvarez was suffering from some sort of short-term memory disorder.
“We are here to ask about George Kaplan,” I reminded him.
He nodded as if reminded of an obscure fact that had been mentioned weeks before. “Of course. And what is it you want to know?”
“We have been doing some research into a question asked by a client of our firm,” I said. The fact that the client was my mother, and that she was still not answering her cellular phone or the landline in the house we shared, seemed unnecessary for this conversation. “In doing so, we have run into George Kaplan, or at least one George Kaplan. We are confused as to the type of business he is conducting and why you have asked him to conduct it.”
Mr. Alvarez immediately held up both hands, palms out. “Whoa,” he said. That is a command for a horse to stop running or walking, so its use in this context was incorrect. “George Kaplan does not work for Mendoza Communications.”
That stunned me and apparently had the same effect on Ms. Washburn because she did not respond immediately either. Mike the taxicab driver is a man who prefers to observe and analyze rather than participate in interviews, so his reaction might simply have been a choice to wait and see what would happen.
“He doesn’t?” Ms. Washburn said after a moment. “But I saw payroll records indicating that he did work for you. In fact, it appeared that George Kaplan had begun work in the Reseda office of Mendoza Communications a few years ago.”
“We have no Reseda office,” Mr. Alvarez responded. “We had one and closed it years ago. This is now our only location in Southern California.”
I was still trying to work my mind through the ideas Mr. Alvarez was offering. “Does Kaplan work for Rayborn Communications?” I asked.
“No. I work for Rayborn. They own Mendoza Communications, bought the company over ten years ago. George Kaplan came down from Seattle a few years back and worked here for about a year, then he left and started his own business. We are actually sort of in competition with him now.” Mr. Alvarez leaned back in his desk chair, exhibiting the posture of a very relaxed man.
“Did Kaplan get fired?” Ms. Washburn asked. It was an excellent question.
Mr. Alvarez shook his head. “He wanted to go off and start his own thing, I’m told. I didn’t work with him so I don’t really know firsthand what happened, but I’ve never heard that it was contentious or anything.”
“So the business of Mendoza Communications is to purchase advertising time and then resell it through third parties at a profit?” I asked. We had speculated that was the case but had never fully confirmed the facts.
“No, that’s what Kaplan is doing over in Reseda,” Mr. Alvarez answered. “We act basically as an advertising agency, buying the time for our clients when we are instructed to do so and creating campaigns for them when they want to expand their brands.”
“Is that what the people out in your office are doing?” Ms. Washburn asked. I had wondered that myself, seeing that most advertising agencies do not solicit clients by phone and that was what the employees in the office bullpen appeared to be practicing.
Mr. Alvarez shrugged. “They’re cold-calling to try and find new clients,” he admitted. “Radio and TV aren’t as important as they used to be. A lot of companies are advertising strictly online. We offer that service, too, but it’s not as lucrative. We have a good deal of broadcast time we’d like to get rid of, but the market is slow. The sales staff outside is trying to do something about that.”
“So what George Kaplan does is not a standard industry practice?” I said.
“Not really, no. There isn’t much upside in it. He has a large amount of outlay in the time he has to buy and then he’s got to find people who think they’re going to make their fortunes by taking it off his hands and marking up the price. It’s not illegal, but most agencies wouldn’t even think of doing that. You can get a bad reputation, and George has that.”
“Is that why you reacted so strongly when I mentioned his name?”
Mr. Alvarez’s face changed expression. His eyebrows dropped. His lips flattened into a horizontal line. When he spoke, his voice was considerably more restrained. This was a complex set of communicational cues happening all at once and I found it difficult to interpret in the moment.
“The thing is, when the corporate office in Seattle informed the people here that George Kaplan was being transferred to Mendoza—and this is strictly hearsay, you understand, because I wasn’t here then—the man who came to work here was not the George Kaplan who’s doing all this business in Reseda right now.”
I suppose Mr. Alvarez expected us to look more surprised than we did. “We are aware there are multiple George Kaplans,” I told him. “In fact, that is one of the reasons we have come here today. Can you tell me anything about the man who came here first with the name George Kaplan?”
Mr. Alvarez, perhaps disappointed in our subdued reaction, hesitated, then shook his head. “Like I said, I never worked with him. I don’t think anybody who’s working here now was in the company at the time, either. But the name George Kaplan has b
ecome something of a scourge in the industry.”
“Because so many men with that name were planted in other companies and ended up causing them trouble?” Ms. Washburn asked.
Mr. Alvarez blinked, now informed that we were aware of that part of the scheme as well. “Yeah,” he said. “It got to the point a couple of years ago where people in the business had been talking to each other enough they could figure out the scam. Anytime someone with the name George Kaplan applied for a job in a communications company, there would be emails all over the place sounding the alarm.”
“Do you have the employment file on the man who first came here with that name?” Ms. Washburn asked. “Maybe that could tell us something.”
Mr. Alvarez consulted his computer screen. “It’s been a while but all our files were digitized last year.” He punched various keys and watched his screen closely. “I think it’ll be here. I’ve never even looked at it myself, to tell you the truth. I figured George Kaplan was somebody else’s problem now. And he was, all over the country.”
“Is the file there?” I asked.
A few more keyboard strokes and Mr. Alvarez nodded. “I just want to make sure there’s no proprietary information here. I don’t mind helping you find this guy but I’m not putting the company at risk.” The fact that we had no interest in harming his company was irrelevant; Mr. Alvarez couldn’t be certain of that with three people he had met ten minutes earlier. The fact that we hadn’t suggested we were searching for George Kaplan was also unimportant because we hadn’t been explicit about our intentions. “Just deleting a couple of documents you don’t care about and I do,” he continued.
After a moment he turned his computer screen 180 degrees so those of us on the other side of his desk could see the image on it. Most of the split-screen images showed company documents all labeled Mendoza Communications with a previous version of the company logo now displayed behind Ms. Mkombo’s desk. But one, the company identification card for the employee there named George Kaplan, bore an image of the man who had been transferred from the Seattle headquarters of the Rayborn Corporation.
Ms. Washburn gasped lightly. “Samuel,” she said. “That’s your father.”
twenty-one
“Our course of action should be clear,” I said.
“Good. What address?” asked Ms. Washburn.
We sat in the blue Kia Soul outside the offices of Mendoza Communications, where we had examined the employment documents of “George Kaplan,” and found remarkably little of interest considering the infamy the name had acquired in subsequent years. This Kaplan had been something of a model employee, had not made any complaint to a government agency regarding his treatment at the company and had, obviously, not brought the business to bankruptcy as a “whistle-blower,” a term I understand now but which always brings amusing images and disturbing sounds to my mind when I hear it used.
After looking through the files we had thanked Mr. Alvarez for his time and left the Mendoza Communications offices. We had again retreated to the Kia Soul and Ms. Washburn had, thankfully, engaged the engine and the air conditioner. I looked at her now.
“I believe another visit to the Neighborhood Council is probably pointless,” I answered. “It was something I’d suggested because I could not think of an alternative. The information we discovered here changes that.”
“Why?” Mike asked from the back seat. “You already knew your father had come here from Seattle and that his paychecks were being made out to George Kaplan. It can’t come as much of a surprise to you that he was the Kaplan who seemed to start the ball rolling in this business.”
“Indeed not,” I agreed. “It is not a surprise that Reuben Hoenig was using the name Kaplan when he arrived here. What is interesting is that it became something of a franchise, passed from man to man, and what we need to discover is how that came to be, considering the records do not indicate scores of George Kaplans before Reuben arrived here in that guise.”
“We’ve checked the records pretty carefully,” Ms. Washburn said. “I don’t know how much more there is we can get in Internet research.”
With months to work with and much more powerful computers I believed we could uncover a great deal more information, but under our current time limit I was inclined to agree with Ms. Washburn, and said so. I considered unanswered questions I’d had throughout this affair and remembered one I’d left unexplored before.
“Ms. Washburn,” I said, “did you hear a humming noise at the house in Reseda where we received the package containing the forty thousand dollars?”
Ms. Washburn had not yet engaged the transmission of the Kia Soul because we had not yet set a destination. She was checking her cellular phone, possibly for the time (which was also displayed on the dashboard of the Kia Soul) when I asked the question. She looked up and her face took on a thoughtful expression.
“A humming sound?” she asked. “Inside or outside?”
“Inside.”
Again, she took four seconds to think. “I can’t say,” she said. “I really don’t have a memory of that part of the visit at all. Why?”
“Because I believe I did hear that sound, almost a mechanical hum, and if I’m correct it might provide very valuable information regarding the question we are attempting to answer. Ms. Washburn, would you mind driving back to the house on Jamieson Avenue?”
The address of Kaplan Enterprises had already been programmed into the Global Positioning System device, so I retrieved it from the proper menu and the device began to direct Ms. Washburn in her navigation. The estimated time of the trip on the display was fourteen minutes and twenty seconds. I assumed it would be closer to twenty-eight minutes.
“I’m starting to get hungry,” Mike said from the seat behind me. “We should be thinking about finding a place for lunch.”
“You want to eat or go to Jamieson Avenue?” Ms. Washburn asked. “I have to get to Burbank by one thirty.”
“I thought the tour was at two,” I said.
“They want you there a half-hour early.”
I looked at my iPhone; the time was now 11:52. “That doesn’t leave us much time,” I said. “Perhaps we should go to a restaurant first.”
Ms. Washburn, although driving, raised her eyebrows. “Really? I’m surprised you don’t want to get to the house first, Samuel.”
“If we do that, there is no guarantee that you will have time to get to your tour at the scheduled time,” I said. “If you can drop Mike and me at the Jamieson Avenue address, we can take a taxicab back to the hotel.”
“Busman’s holiday,” Mike mumbled.
“Really?” Ms. Washburn sounded genuinely surprised. “You’d do that for me to have the tour? I was under the impression you thought it was stupid.”
I was navigating the Global Positioning System device to search for restaurants in the area. “I trust that you are not stupid, Ms. Washburn,” I said. “It follows that you will not want to do stupid things. If it means something to you, it is important and should be respected. Mike and I can handle the situation at the Jamieson Avenue house.”
Quietly, she said, “That’s very sweet of you, Samuel.”
I believed I had merely been stating the obvious but did not dispute that with Ms. Washburn. She asked me to read the suggestions from the screen aloud, and together we arrived at the idea of having lunch at a Chili’s franchise in Encino, California. Ms. Washburn had previously insisted we stay away from chain restaurants but suggested it once the name was mentioned. I did not ask her why she had changed her thinking on the subject, but was more relaxed than I would have been at an establishment whose menu I could not predict.
Once we had been served, Mike asked about the neighborhood surrounding the Jamieson Avenue house. “Is this going to be a security problem?”
Ms. Washburn considered and said she thought it would not, but I was not as certain. �
��I’m not concerned about the people outside the house, but we don’t know exactly the nature of the business going on inside, and if it is illegal or almost illegal, we might be dealing with some more unpredictable individuals,” I told Mike. “Do you have your gun with you?”
Mike’s expression suggested I might as well ask if he’d brought his left leg. That is an exaggeration.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m fully licensed and I don’t think you asked me to come out here so we could try out at the talent agencies.”
I did not know what he meant by that, but agreed that was not the reason I had requested his presence. “To minimize the possible danger in what we’re going to do, I think it best that we have an escape plan should things go wrong. Do you think a private ride service like Uber might be our best bet? We could call once Ms. Washburn drops us at the house.”
Mike shook his head. “I’ve seen Ubers, and they’re hit-or-miss,” he said. “Personally I’m inclined to go with a licensed cabbie like myself, and remember that you are somewhat particular about the kind of car you’re willing to sit in, Samuel.”
It was true; part of my fondness for Mike’s driving is grounded in the fact that I know he keeps the interior of his vehicle immaculate. I was the first passenger Mike drove in his taxicab and I had let a number of passengers in line take rides ahead of me because the cars that drove up were not at all clean. I am not a germophobe but I do not understand how people can sit comfortably and chat in cars that appear unsanitary.
I nodded. “Perhaps we should make sure we have the phone numbers of taxicab services programmed into our phones to save time,” I said.
“I have a better idea,” said Ms. Washburn. “I’ll park by the Jamieson Avenue house. I’ll stay in the car. If I have to leave to catch the tour, I’ll call a cab myself and leave the rental with you. Then if you’re in a bad situation, you can drive the car to pick me up at the studio, Samuel.”
The Question of the Absentee Father Page 18
