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We looked at each other, my daughter and me.
Breaking the silence, Aja said, “Roger’s assistant called.”
“Which one?”
“Mo Li.”
“What she have to say?”
“He’s wiring you twenty thousand dollars for whatever you doin’ for Grandma B.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you doin’ for her?”
I explained in broad strokes the search for Arman Babylon’s granddaughter.
“All that just for him to say hey?” Aja asked.
“What you think I’d do to find you, if you’d been missin’ from my life for months?”
“Uh-huh,” she replied. “How can I help?”
“I have ten or so connections for Twyla under the names Mann and Macintosh in my temporary notes file. Could you look up each one and see if any’a them make any sense to run down?”
“Sure. Anything else?”
“I haven’t been able to find out about any children Arman and his wife, Connie, had.”
“Okay. That all?”
“You could check to see if there’s any news about a man named Malto Lamming or a young woman, Greta Hammett, out in LA. That’d be a passive search.”
By passive search I meant that she shouldn’t try to communicate with anyone about her, or my, interest.
My daughter and I had a very good working relationship. While she did her work for the low-residency Beckton University of the Radical Arts, she made a living being my assistant. Lately, she’d started studying in the department of the Digital Path, basically a hackers’ group, under Professor Rohan Sardar of Mumbai. Aja could find almost anything on, or below, the net. And she didn’t mind doing footwork for my many needs.
“Okay.” She jumped up from her slouching repose. “What you gonna do?”
“I think I’ll go out to Queens.”
Rego Park is an upscale section of the physically largest borough. That neighborhood had nice buildings and sedate streets, giving it a sense of prevailing calm that doesn’t exist in most parts of the city. On Haring Street, a block or so down from Alderton, was Turnings Rest Home, a sprawling multistory manor house that probably had a special family name at some point along the way. It could have been as much as two hundred years old, but it had been well maintained over the years.
The entranceway had its own roof, and four gray-green marble stairs led up to the double-wide door.
The back wall of the large room I entered was a perfect arc, with five evenly spaced desks set from one end to the other. Each workstation was manned by one worker, and there were other individuals moving here and there, dropping off papers or taking files from outboxes to be delivered somewhere else. There were few men’s or women’s business suits worn, but neither did anyone give off the vibe of the blue-collar variety.
“May I help you?” a man’s voice asked doubtfully.
Another aspect of Turnings was that all the workers were white.
“Sir?” the voice insisted.
He was sitting at the far-right desk, wearing a long-sleeved, mild yellow, maroon-pinstriped dress shirt with broad-band red suspenders. I smiled, thinking that he might have manned that post for the full lifespan of the manor.
“May I help you?” he asked again, quite sharply.
I sauntered over to his crowded but neat workplace and sat myself down in the chair obviously placed there for visitors and, considering his stern visage, maybe penitents too.
