Smoke

by Meili Cady

  As the three of us sat at the bar, Chris’s cell phone rang. He picked it up. “It’s Lisette,” he said. He answered anxiously and walked away. I could hear him saying things like, “We’re gonna get you out of there. Stop crying. Listen, mama, it’s gonna be okay.” Apparently the spell she had over him had yet to be broken.

  As I sat alone with my whiskey, anger boiled inside me. Lisette, who’d claimed to be my best friend for more than four years, had actively tried to hurt me by making up some ridiculous story about my ex-boyfriend. I decided that crossed a line. For whatever reason, after everything else, this made me the angriest. It was my tipping point, when my feelings about Lisette changed forever. Perhaps I’d been waiting for something I could hold on to with conviction, something that I couldn’t talk myself out of. From this, there was no going back. I pulled my phone out of my purse. I had one missed call. Lisette had tried to call me before she’d called Chris. I was glad that I hadn’t heard it ringing. I needed to let all this sink in before I could think clearly. I knew that hearing her cries from jail would have melted my anger and forced me to surrender to having some compassion for her.

  This was the first time I’d held my phone since I’d raised it into the air when I was at gunpoint. I’d been trying to text my father. Thinking about my parents made me want to cry—I missed them so much right now. I wished that I could snap my fingers and be with them in Washington, sitting at our family dinner table to one of my mom’s gourmet home-cooked meals. I wished I could hug my mom right now. “I’ll be right back,” I told Frankie as he came back from outside to take a seat. I left the bar stool with my phone in my hand. My fingers shook as I dialed my home phone in Washington.

  “Hello?” My father’s ever-cheery voice answered the phone.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, forcing a smile to try to make my voice sound less troubled.

  “Well, hello, sweetie! I didn’t think I’d hear from you today!” he said. “How are you doin’?”

  “I’m okay,” I lied. Another lie. “I’m just . . . I don’t really have that much time to talk, but I just wanted to hear your voice . . . I really miss you and Mom.”

  “We miss you too, honey,” he said. I heard my mom in the background call out, “Love you!”

  “I was thinking that I’d really like to come home soon,” I said. “I just want to come home and, uh, see you guys for a little while . . . I really miss you.”

  “Well, you know we’d always love to have you here.” My dad’s tone softened. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have to go though. Love you.” I took a moment to collect myself before I headed back to the bar for last call.

  THE NEXT DAY, I SAT inside our shared hotel room on my computer, looking for one-way flights back to L.A. I had less than a thousand dollars in my bank account, and most of the flights cost about eight hundred dollars. I felt trapped in Ohio. I heard the hotel room door being unlocked. The door opened and Frankie and Chris walked in with their heads down and their eyes wide, like they’d just seen a ghost. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Frankie didn’t answer me and just shook his head while he paced around the room. I looked to Chris. “What’s wrong?” I asked again.

  “We’re on the news,” he said. “We were sitting at the bar downstairs watching TV, and then some local reporter started talking about the story.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “That’s not good.”

  “No. It’s not,” Chris said, looking nervous for the first time.

  “Man, I need to get out of here,” Frankie said. “I need some air.”

  When the guys left to go on a walk, I turned on the TV. I flipped through news channels. It didn’t take long to see the headline scrolling at the bottom of the screen: “Alleged Samsung heiress arrested with 506 pounds of marijuana.” Lisette’s face appeared in an incredibly unflattering mug shot as a news anchor gave the story. The reporter said that the self-proclaimed heiress to Samsung had been arrested with two assistants and a bodyguard, and that we’d been caught coming off a plane with a quarter ton of marijuana stuffed into thirteen Louis Vuitton suitcases. Louis Vuitton?

  None of those bags was designer, let alone Louis Vuitton. More like something purchased from Costco with a few years of wear on them. These people just wanted it to be a juicier story. The only thing that was Louis Vuitton had been Lisette’s small, personal bag. The reporter went on to say that Samsung had released an official statement saying, “Lisette Lee is not an heiress of Samsung and is not a member of Samsung’s Lee family.” I turned the TV off. I didn’t know what to believe.

  I had plenty of confirmation that Lisette was a liar, but I wasn’t sure whether she’d made this one up entirely. She had some whoppers under her belt, but this one would take the cake by a long shot. Maybe Samsung was just trying to dodge the negative press. But if she really was a family member, why would they turn their backs on her?

  As my vision of the Lisette I’d known disappeared, so did the net that I’d thought would catch me if I fell. If I was charged with anything, she wasn’t going to be able to help me. She couldn’t save any of us, perhaps not even herself.

  When Chris and Frankie returned to the hotel room an hour later, Chris said that he’d spoken to Lisette again. “She gave me the PIN number for her card,” he said. “She said you can use it to buy a flight back to L.A.” The day before we’d left for Ohio, Lisette gave me seven thousand dollars in cash to deposit into a bank account in her name that was to be used for traveling expenses for the team. When we were arrested, I still had the debit card tucked into my purse. Earlier that morning I’d asked Chris to get the PIN number from Lisette and ask her if I could use it to buy a ticket home. With her permission to do so, I used the card to book a flight to Los Angeles. The plane was leaving in a few hours. Before getting into a cab to the airport, I gave the debit card to Chris. “Take it,” I said. “I’m not going to use it.” Part of me wanted to take the card with me, but it wasn’t my money. I’d never stolen anything in my life, and now probably wasn’t a good time to start. I didn’t feel like adding another item to the list of things I’ve done that I wasn’t proud of.

  When the plane touched down at LAX just after sunset, I felt some small sense of relief. Every inch of my body was still wired from nerves, but I was trying to be optimistic about what was going to happen next. The past few months had been such hell that it was hard to imagine it getting worse. I wanted to run to the nearest cab to get home, open a bottle of wine, and start looking for jobs online.

  As I stepped off the plane I could feel that the weather outside was warm. Another summer night in Los Angeles. I made my way through the airport and arrived at baggage claim to collect my suitcase. I turned my phone on as I waited at the carousel. I had one new voice mail. It was from an Ohio number I didn’t recognize. My heart dropped into my stomach as I began to listen to the message. It was from the head DEA agent, Matt Heufelder. He wanted my address so he could mail me some documents. He was calling to inform me that I had been named a “target of investigation.”

  18

  TARGET OF INVESTIGATION

  I sat silently in the back of a taxi on my way home from the airport. The world outside the car passed by me in a dingy blur of palm trees and streetlights. The last time I’d been driven from an airport I was in handcuffs in the back of a DEA SUV. It almost didn’t seem like real life, but hearing Agent Heufelder’s voice mail made it impossible for me to believe it was just another terrible dream. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant to be a target of investigation. I was willing to bet it was a step beyond being a “person of interest,” a term I’d heard in TV shows and movies when it was somebody else’s fictional life that hadn’t really happened, and when no one was going to really pay for those fake crimes. Our crime was quite real, and the consequences for it would be equally real.

  The sun had disappeared completely by the time I arrived back at my apartment. I was relieved to find that Brie wasn’t home from wo
rk yet. It bought me more time to think of how I was going to tell her what had taken place in Ohio. I wasn’t prepared to tell anyone about this yet. It was slowly dawning on me that the arrest of Team LL, as well as the truth about our business, wasn’t going to remain a secret. I couldn’t yet admit it fully to myself, let alone anyone else. Once I got inside the apartment with my suitcase, I immediately shut the door behind me and locked it. Someone was missing 506 pounds of marijuana, and people knew I was involved. I was a target of investigation, and I could be a target of God knows what else.

  I’d eaten only once in the past two days. My clothes were hanging on me. I’d been too wired to eat or even have caffeine. I texted Brie to let her know I’d come back into town early. I said that I needed to tell her something when she got home. She replied she’d be back within the hour. I opened a bottle of merlot and took out two glasses. I’d have some poured for Brie when she walked in. While I waited for her, I took my computer out of my suitcase and opened it on the dining room table. I checked my e-mail and found that I had a new Google alert on my name. I followed a link in the e-mail to a YouTube video. It was a news clip from a national television station. Our arrest was national news now. The media had nicknamed Lisette “the Pot Princess.” The one-minute video was similar to the report that I’d seen on the news in Ohio, but then the anchor added something more. “Lee was arrested with a bodyguard and two assistants.” I watched in disbelief as footage of my acting demo reel played on the news report. “One of Lee’s assistants is an actress named Meili Cady.” My name and face were on the news.

  Who else has seen this?

  At least they weren’t using my mug shot—some small consolation.

  After scanning YouTube to find three other news videos about the arrest, I heard the door to the apartment being unlocked from the outside. Brie walked in looking concerned. “What’s wrong with our lock?” she asked. “I could barely get it to open. Did you put anything in the keyhole besides the key?”

  “No, I just got home,” I said. “I don’t know, it seemed to open fine when I came in.”

  Granted, I had other things on my mind so I was more than a little distracted.

  “The key didn’t fit at first,” she said as she took a closer look at the lock. “I had to jangle it around. I hope no one tried to break in.” She looked at me. “Is that what you were going to tell me?”

  “No,” I said. “I doubt anyone tried to break in.” I walked up to her with a glass of wine. “I already poured you one.”

  “Thanks . . .” she said, eyeing me as she took a sip.

  “Okay,” I said, inhaling a deep breath. “Um . . . I think the best way to do this might be to show you a video.”

  “A video?” Brie looked confused.

  “It’s . . . it’s a news video,” I said. “Er, you might want to sit down.” Brie looked nervous as she sat at the table in front of my computer. I reopened the first video and pressed play. I took a step back and stood with my arms crossed as she watched it.

  When it ended, she lifted her eyes from the computer screen to look at me for a moment. “Wow,” she said with wide eyes and an open mouth. “That explains a lot.” She took a sip of her wine. “I guess I’m not that surprised. I mean, I always thought something was off . . . but I never thought it would be drugs.”

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  “You didn’t know what was in the suitcases?” she asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. “I thought it was money.” I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I’d known for months what we’d been doing, and that I’d continued to do it. I wanted to deny everything, even to myself. I especially didn’t want to discuss anything here since I’d already been wondering for weeks whether our apartment might be wired in some way. Lisette said that she’d installed surveillance in David’s apartment a while back. Why not mine too? I didn’t trust my cell phone, either. I didn’t trust anyone’s phones. It was safest to assume that everything was being tapped. To have a safe conversation, Brie and I needed to speak outside of the apartment, and we needed to take the batteries out of our cell phones. Chris Cash told me that was the only way to make sure no one could hear you if your phone was tapped.

  THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE up to a call from my brother, Nick. When I answered the phone, he asked me right away, “Meili? Are you okay?” I could hear in his voice that he knew what had happened.

  “No,” I said. His girlfriend had seen the story of our arrest headlining Google News and told him.

  “Do Mom and Dad know?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t told them yet . . . I’m kind of scared to.”

  “I can see why,” Nick said. “Maybe it’s best if I tell them.”

  My parents wasted no time in calling their attorney in Washington to get a referral for a federal defense lawyer in Los Angeles. They dipped into their retirement to pay the hefty retainer fee for my new lawyer, which by itself cost more than any car I’d ever owned. After years of discomfort whenever I’d had to ask them for money, it made me sick to my stomach to know that they were now literally paying for my mistakes. In the midst of the down economy and my father’s challenges with the suffering real estate market, my parents were left with the decision to either hemorrhage money from their savings to try to save their daughter from years in prison, or leave me to lie in the bed I’d made for myself. They were rightfully mad as hell that I’d gotten myself into this and they were scared for my safety, but they decided to risk everything and stand by me. The two people who’d raised me with such love as a child and did everything they could to protect me were now trying frantically to catch me as I fell from something that they might not be able to save me from.

  Michael Proctor was a partner in a fancy downtown law firm in L.A. Within hours of getting the referral from my parents, I drove to meet him for the first time at his high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard. After checking in at a lacquered wood reception desk, I was led into a huge, glass-walled conference room that overlooked the building next door. As I waited to meet my new attorney, I stared out the window. From the conference room at the offices of Caldwell, Leslie and Proctor, I was rattled to my core when I discovered that I had an unobstructed view of the building David Garrett used to live in, where it all began. I could see clearly the back entrance where the limos would park and be loaded with suitcases before we rode to the airport. The suitcases were kept in his apartment in the beginning, long before I knew what was in them. I remembered getting into the limo there on the first two trips, before Lisette started coming with us. I remembered her texting me as I waited inside the limo, telling me to have a good trip.

  Little did I know she was just hoping that I wouldn’t get arrested, because I was a guinea pig for her. If I’d been arrested, she would have probably left me for dead and claimed innocence. That must have been why she had all the money for the planes wired through my banking account. She was setting up a wall between her and the federal government, and that wall was me.

  Michael Proctor walked into the conference room. He introduced himself and invited me to have a seat. He asked me what felt like an endless list of questions about my history with Lisette. He told me that Lisette was in big trouble, and so was I, bringing law books into the conference room to make me see what I was up against. The sentencing guidelines said that I was looking at between five and forty years in prison.

  Mike furrowed his brow and studied my reaction to what he’d just read out loud from a thick book of sentencing guidelines that stated clearly that even one of the trips I’d made to Ohio could earn me a felony and up to forty years behind bars.

  “Do you think I’m going to go to prison?” I asked him after staring at the open page and taking a dry swallow of air.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” He closed the book and looked at me intently. “I think that’s enough for today.”

  As much as I couldn’t imagine myself going to federal prison, it was equall
y bizarre to imagine Lisette there. She was already in a county jail now. I struggled to wrap my head around any of it. She had always seemed undefeatable. I kept thinking that her family would step in soon and get her out of custody. When I left Ohio, Chris told me that she didn’t even have a lawyer yet, but she must have had one by now. It was strange that Chris was the one trying to get legal counsel for her, rather than her family. I wondered if she would ever come looking for me when she got out, which could be soon.

  Questions raced through my mind: If I tell the DEA that I knew it was pot in the suitcases, will she be angry enough to have me killed by the supposed hit man she has “on speed dial”? Is a plan like that already in action? I knew that other people were involved in the business, and it was safe to assume that whoever was missing that quarter ton of pot wasn’t happy.

  If I admitted to everything and cooperated with the government, my attorney said that I’d get a more lenient sentence. That would mean telling the DEA everything I knew about the person I used to call my best friend and possibly pissing off some Mexican gangsters . . . but I was looking at five to forty years. I now knew that Lisette was never a genuine or loyal friend to me, so I didn’t feel guilty about not going out of my way to protect her. I couldn’t protect her at that point even if I wanted to. We never discussed having a consistent cover story for what we were doing. I was extremely grateful that I had never been privy to many details about the operation, as the “everything I know” in reality wasn’t very extensive. I could only tell my own experience, and I wasn’t sure if that would be enough.

  When I left Mike’s office that day, I was consumed by thoughts of the horror that might well be awaiting me in a decades-long prison sentence. Five years was the minimum sentence for just one trip. I went on maybe ten trips. I wasn’t even sure how many; they could easily add up to more years in prison than years I’d been alive.