Smoke

by Meili Cady

  “Your family is Samsung?” he asked. “What do you mean? Your family owns the company?”

  Lisette was getting irritated with him. “Yes.” She stared out the window. “They’re not going to be happy about this.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  The SUV took us through downtown Columbus, then pulled into the covered parking garage of what looked like a government building.

  The officers opened the SUV doors and helped Lisette and me out of the backseat, starting by unbuckling our seat belts for us. We’d arrived at DEA headquarters for Columbus, Ohio. We were escorted inside the building and into a small, whitewashed, sterile-looking room with a folding table and two chairs. Lisette and I once again sat side by side in handcuffs, but this time only for a minute or so. An officer came into the room, told me to stand up, then removed my handcuffs. As I was led out of the room, I took one last look at Lisette. She was lost in thought, staring ahead of her. As I left the room, I wondered when I would see her again. It didn’t occur to me that this might be the last time, ever.

  I was taken to an almost identical room a few paces away. Two male officers followed in behind, closed the door, and sat down on folding chairs across a table from me. One officer looked gruff from first glance, and the other one looked vaguely amicable. The gruff one could have almost been considered handsome if he hadn’t looked so rabid. I noticed an open, bloody gash on his shin, just below his cargo shorts. “What happened to your leg?” I asked him.

  “One of your bags fell on it,” he grunted. I knew this wasn’t going to go well for me.

  The agents told me that I had the right to consult with an attorney before any questions were asked, but I was also assured that no attorneys would be available until the morning, and that the DEA would be happy to provide me with a jail cell to sleep in until my counsel could get here. I opted for an interview instead. As the first hour of interrogation began, I was reminded of how hungover I was. The shock of the arrest had eclipsed my physical discomfort for a while, but it was all coming back to me now. Thankfully, I didn’t have anything left to throw up.

  The agents tried to pull the truth out of me; the gruff one was a real bastard. I told them I didn’t know it was pot. Of course, we all said that. The officers asked me where I was born and how long I’d lived in Los Angeles. They asked me what my parents did for a living, what sort of jobs I’d had in the past. They went through my wallet and asked if I’d brought any drugs, then pushed again to see if I would admit to having any weapons with me. The gruff officer discovered three punch cards to various yogurt shops in L.A. inside my wallet and eyed me suspiciously as he asked if I enjoyed eating frozen yogurt. Everything was subject to scrutiny.

  In a room two doors down from mine, Lisette gave her own version of events to DEA agents. She told them she was in Ohio to move supplies to a horse farm for a boyfriend in town. I don’t know how far she made it with that story before she began to alter it, but it wasn’t long. Before the end of the interrogation, she conceded that she’d been paid $60,000 to bring the suitcases to Ohio, and while she had no knowledge of their content, she suspected it was “weapons and money laundering or something.” The agents listened as she explained to them that she was not only an heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune, but also a pop sensation in Korea. They were so befuddled by the interview she gave that they simply wrote “heiress” as her occupation in official police paperwork.

  In her crocodile purse they found the baggie of cocaine, three cell phones, $6,500 in cash, and a piece of paper from a hotel notepad that was essentially a drug ledger tracking $300,000, with numbers representing weights and purchase prices. During my interrogation, an agent walked into the room with the piece of paper in hand. “Sorry, guys,” he told the agents interviewing me, “I just have to ask her a quick question.” He held the paper out for me to take. I recognized the hotel logo from a previous trip. I stared at it in disbelief. “Is this your handwriting?” he asked me stone-faced. I had to bite my lip in order to keep a straight face. While there were a few damning numbers scribbled on it, the majority of the paper was dedicated to Lisette practicing her signature in variations. “Um. No, that’s not my handwriting,” I said, and quickly handed back the paper. “Do you know who wrote this?” he asked. “Nope,” I replied, shrugging. He nodded and walked out of the room.

  I told the DEA the truth about everything, except about that paper—and the fact that I knew it was pot in the suitcases. I decided to leave that detail out. I suspected that if I didn’t, I’d be offered that jail cell again, and I might not have the option to turn it down. It was true that I hadn’t known at first, so I skipped over the part when it started smelling like a hot box on the plane and Lisette asked us to hose down the luggage with Febreze. The officers didn’t believe me, of course. It seemed like they didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, not even the parts that were true, which really was the vast majority of it. Everything I said sounded like lies because I was nervous and exhausted, and I was talking in circles. Both officers seemed frustrated and mystified by the entire arrest today. After what must have been two, maybe three hours, they left me alone in the room and shut the door.

  I could hear voices in the hallway. They were talking about Lisette. Someone said, “They all believed her. All of them.” Then I heard the gruff bastard’s voice. He was talking about me. He said, “That has got to be the stupidest girl I’ve met in my entire life. I tell ya.” I leaned back in the chair with my arms crossed. I would like to retract what I thought about him being possibly handsome underneath his horrible personality.

  Thanks a lot, asshole.

  A new voice joined the conversation. It was another male officer. “All right, guys,” he said. “Parker won the bet. We just weighed it.” A voice asked, “How much? I said four hundred.” The other officer went on. “Nope,” he said. “Five hundred and six pounds.” The officers were talking about the pot from the suitcases. They had been making bets on how much was there.

  After a few minutes, the voices faded and I heard nothing. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. There were no clocks in the room. With no watch, no cell phone, and no ability to leave, I felt a sudden pang of loneliness. I just didn’t want to be alone in this damn room. I didn’t know what was happening. I wanted to leave and be with other people, and I wanted to eat something.

  I was startled when the door opened. It was the “good cop” from my interrogation. I was relieved to see another human. After I’d stopped hearing people in the hallway, I was afraid everyone had gone somewhere else and I really was alone. “All right,” he said. “Come here.” I was finally able to walk out of the room.

  “You ready?” he asked me.

  “For what?”

  My initial feeling of relief turned out to be fleeting. “Your close-up,” he said. He grinned at me and stood by something that looked like some type of camera. It was facing a white wall that had a box with black lines and numbers on it. I knew immediately what was about to happen, and my stomach lurched with the sinking awareness that I could do nothing to prevent it.

  I had a terrifying flashback to the last time I’d looked in a mirror today. The damage had been irreparable before the arrest, and I could only imagine that it had gotten exponentially worse since then. But there was no way out. Three DEA agents gathered around and snickered as I stood in front of the camera. One of the men said, “Aren’t you gonna smile?” The flash made me blink a few times. I could only pray that no one would ever see this photo.

  I was sent back into the room to wait for what felt like an eternity. After ten minutes or so, the door opened. It was the “good cop” again. I looked up at him from my chair, hoping for some kind of update. He rubbed his hands together like he was trying to start a fire. “And now, for the moment of truth,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, fearing what fresh new hell he might have in store for me.

  “Now we get to run your ID and do a little
background check. We’re gonna find out whether you’re going home tonight.” He flashed me a cryptic smile before backing out of the room and closing the door behind him. I didn’t want to find out the alternative to going home. I was quite certain it would involve a jail cell. If I had a “clean record,” then I got to leave. I’d never been arrested before in my life. I should have felt more confident right now, but my luck seemed to have started on empty today. I stood and walked a few paces around the room, then sat back down. My palms were sweating. I crossed my legs, then uncrossed them. Time passed. A minute, an hour; I’d lost any reliable sense of it. Finally, the door opened again. I held my breath as the officer returned with a grave expression on his face.

  “So?” I asked meekly, a feeling of dread creeping in.

  The officer looked stern. “You’re under arrest.”

  “Am I really?” My voice cracked as I spoke. I began to go into a state of shock. I felt like someone had just punched me in the stomach.

  “Nah, I’m just playin’,” he said, breaking into a hearty laugh. “You can leave.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, you got no record,” he said. “But, man, I totally had you goin’.” I was too stunned to speak for a moment. Then I laughed too.

  “That was so mean.”

  “Yeah, but I got you smilin’, though,” he said. “Hey, at least you’re not going to jail. Not today.”

  “Yeah . . . So we can go now?”

  “Three of you can,” he said. “Your homegirl is staying with us.”

  “What?” My emotion rose again on instinct in defense of Lisette.

  They’re keeping her?

  I took a deep breath, trying to process what he’d just told me. I raised my head to look at him. “Can I see her?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Of course you can’t. She’s being booked right now anyway. She’s going to jail.”

  Booked? Jail? She’d always seemed so invincible. I couldn’t imagine Lisette in some dirty cell, defeated, the way I’d seen her look today. The officer watched me as my mind raced.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Why would you want to see the person who got you into this whole mess in the first place?” His words hit me. “Think about that,” he said. “You got a lot to learn.” He held the door open for me to walk out of the interrogation room.

  IT WAS AFTER 11:00 P.M. when the DEA released us. An officer escorted me out of the building alongside Chris and Frankie. We’d been given our belongings back, and each of us towed a piece of personal luggage behind us. Outside, the streets of downtown Columbus were eerily empty and dimly lit. When the officer disappeared back into the building, the three of us let out a collective sigh of relief. After exchanging wide-eyed and dazed looks at one another, we stood in silence for a moment. “I don’t know about you two, but I need a fucking drink,” Frankie said.

  Chris eyed the building. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Before they change their minds.”

  We checked into the first hotel we saw and left our bags in a room. We were eager to sit down with a drink and attempt to collect ourselves. Two blocks from the hotel was one of only two late-night bars in downtown. I sat on a bar stool next to Chris Cash. Frankie stood. We all ordered beers. Frankie took a few long pulls on his drink, then set it down. “Man, I haven’t drunk in years,” he said, shaking his head. “But I’m probably getting drunk tonight. I gotta call my wife and tell her about this shit first.”

  “You’re going to tell her?” I asked him. I hadn’t even considered telling anyone. From what I’d understood, Frankie’s wife had been as informed about the details of Lisette’s business as everyone in my life had. His wife knew that he worked for Lisette, but she didn’t know anything past that. I’d never been sure whether Frankie knew what was going on from the beginning, or if he’d found out sometime before I had. I couldn’t fathom the phone call he was about to make. He had to tell his wife, the mother of his children, that he’d just been arrested.

  Frankie headed outside with his cell phone drawn. “Good luck,” I said as he walked off.

  When we’d left the DEA headquarters tonight, an officer said, “Bye, guys. We hope we never have to see you again!” What if they didn’t charge us and it was possible that we could each just go on with the lives that we had before Team LL? We could start over. I had no doubt that Lisette’s prominent family would get her out of jail soon. They’d figure something out. Maybe this would all go away.

  “I’m doin’ a shot,” Chris said. He leaned one elbow on the bar in front of him as he tried to get the bartender’s attention.

  “I’ll join you,” I said. We each did a double shot of whiskey. It helped. “Hey,” I said. “Lisette told me that you didn’t bring your business phone with you for the trip. I should probably get your cell number so we can communicate about getting in and out of the hotel room and stuff until I can get a flight out of here tomorrow.” Chris stared at me like I was crazy.

  “Mama, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in an exhausted tone. He took a drink of beer. “I only got one phone.”

  “The business one,” I said. “The one Lisette gave you for work.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows like he still had no clue what I was talking about. I began to get a little irritated. “The one you’ve sent me like a hundred texts from.” It was probably more like hundreds of text messages, back and forth, giving information about work. This phone number had even sent me messages about how I should be more patient with Lisette as a friend and told me that she loved me and had never felt this way about anyone before in her life, that it was worth my while to hold on and have some faith in her. I had often wondered if maybe she’d been encouraging “Richard” to send me these kinds of messages, maybe even overseeing them; perhaps she needed someone else to express for her the things that she couldn’t bring herself to say, which required being vulnerable.

  “Listen,” Chris said, also a little irritated now, “I’ve never sent you a single text message before in my life. I’ve never even had your phone number.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “I’m serious.” Chris ordered another shot of whiskey from the bartender. “I don’t know who’s been texting you, but it ain’t me.”

  It was Lisette the entire time. It was so brazenly obvious. It made me want to drink away my embarrassment for having believed her.

  She’d said she’d given Chris her “old phone” to use for business, but in reality she must have kept it as a second phone. I instantly felt like a fool, imagining how hilarious it must’ve been for her every time she’d sent me a message, and how she must have laughed about how gullible I was. Chris eyed me. “Someone texted you saying they were me?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I think it was Lisette. It had to have been. But every text always had a sign-off as ‘Richard.’ ” Chris grabbed a handful of bar food from a small bowl and shook his head.

  “Richard,” he said under his breath. “Wow. You know, I don’t even know why she called me that.”

  “You’ve never gone by Richard?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You haven’t really been her assistant for six years, have you?” I asked. Chris turned his head to fully face me.

  “Come on. I met Lisette maybe, I don’t know, three months ago,” he said. “She wanted advice on how to run her business, and she asked me to help her.” I found out later that Chris was a jet broker who had assisted her in arranging some of the flights, and then agreed to come along after a flirtation began between them and he figured out what she was up to.

  “I knew you guys had just met,” I said. I finished my second beer and ordered a whiskey on the rocks. “Why would she lie about that?” I asked.

  Chris shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You want to know how long I’ve really known her?” I asked Chris. He laughed a little and took a drink.

  “Sure. I’m guessing it ain’t since you w
ere kids; otherwise she wouldn’t treat you so badly.”

  “I’ve known her just over four years,” I said.

  “Well, I guess that makes sense,” he said.

  “You think she treated me badly?” I asked him. It had never occurred to me that anyone present had noticed, though in retrospect it seemed logical.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A couple weeks ago I was hanging out with her and she was sayin’ she knew she treated you badly, and she didn’t know why.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yeah. She said she felt bad about some drama with your boyfriend or something. Some joke about him having a new girlfriend, I don’t know.”

  “What?” I said, my pulse raising. “Did she say she’d lied about seeing him with someone?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was something like that. I wasn’t really listening, to be honest. I don’t think she saw it as a big deal or anything, but she said she felt a little guilty about it.”

  A little guilty. She’d gone out of her way to fabricate something that she knew would hurt me more than almost anything. She’d regaled me with every painful, made-up detail about her supposed encounter with Ben and his new girlfriend. I remembered what she’d said at the restaurant, “It breaks my heart to tell you this . . . maybe I shouldn’t have told you . . .” Maybe it’s possible that she actually meant that second part and she was already starting to regret it. I’ll never know. It didn’t matter now.

  The revelations continued when Frankie came back after a long conversation with his wife. He told Chris and me that he hadn’t worked as a bodyguard for Lisette’s family since she was a child, as she’d always said that he had. Frankie had known her for only three years, and they met at a party. We were all floored by Lisette’s deception and embarrassed for having allowed ourselves to be fooled. She lied to all of us, and she’d made us lie to one another. That was what the DEA officer was talking about when I heard him in the hallway saying, “They all believed her.” During the interrogation, I was asked who else was on the plane and what I knew about them. I was sure everyone had been asked the same questions. We must have looked like idiots to the DEA. No wonder they’d kept Lisette. It was so obvious that she’d been pumping us up with lies, that we’d been her puppets in some sick game that only she knew the rules to.