Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said when he came to the door.

  “Can we talk, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “That depends.”

  “On?”

  “On what you have to say,” he said nastily.

  Gone was the hospitable, helpful, and concerned father. Tim Samuels looked like a man on the edge, someone who’d abandoned the petty civilities that help people to get along with others. He had an aura of unstable belligerence. This was Lydia’s cue to step back and let Jeffrey do the talking. She didn’t deal well with unpleasant people; they tended to make her behave unpleasantly, which never helped matters.

  “Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey quietly. “We know you visited The New Day building sometime in the past week. We need to ask you about that visit because when last we spoke you told us that you’d never heard of that organization.”

  He stared at them blankly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Samuels? Because so far we haven’t gone to the police with this information. But we will.”

  “You can go to the police with whatever you want. I’ve never heard of The New Day,” he said, and slammed the door so hard, the small glass panes along the top rattled.

  “There’s a videotape, Mr. Samuels,” Jeffrey said loudly to the door. “It shows you entering a building in Riverdale owned and occupied by New Day members.”

  This was a lie but it seemed to have the desired effect. Samuels opened the door a crack.

  “Do yourselves a favor and get out of here right now,” he whispered desperately. “Don’t make me talk to you about this. I guarantee you’ll both be sorry.”

  “We’re already in pretty deep,” said Jeffrey. “We broke into the building last night, created some chaos, rescued one of their members. If these people have Lily, Mr. Samuels, she’s in big, big trouble. Please. Talk to us.”

  Samuels closed his eyes and when he opened them again, two tears trailed down his face.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “What have I done?”

  Before paying Tim Samuels another visit, Lydia and Jeffrey had returned James to his parents. Lydia had called the number on the website and asked to speak to Mr. Rainer.

  “Mr. Rainer,” she said when he came on the line. “My name is Lydia Strong. Do you know who I am?”

  “Uh, yes,” he said. “I do. You’re the true crime writer.” She heard the mingling of hope and dread in his German-accented English. It was a tone she recognized in the families of victims. They knew her involvement would generate publicity that might well bring justice or answers. But they also knew that tentatively healing wounds would be reopened, that reignited hopes might be shattered once again.

  “I want you to know that in the commission of an investigation we’ve found your son, James Rainer.”

  She heard him make a sharp inhale and a long slow exhale. “Please,” he said. “This is not a joke?”

  She heard a woman’s voice in the background.

  “No,” she said quickly. “We have reason to believe that your son joined an organization called The New Day to help himself with some of his problems.”

  “The New Day,” Mr. Rainer repeated as if in a daze. The woman’s voice in the background grew louder, more urgent.

  “We infiltrated this group in the search for another missing person, a young woman. We encountered your son and removed him against his will from the premises.”

  “Against his will?”

  “Yes, Mr. Rainer.”

  It took a while to make him understand what had happened to his son and that the road home was going to be more difficult than just arranging a place to meet. She tried to explain that he called himself Charley now and that he might not acknowledge them until he’d gotten some help, to undo the things that had been done to him at The New Day. But she wasn’t quite sure he understood her. He just seemed dazed and a little confused as he shared the news with his wife, who started to weep.

  “I’ve arranged to have him accepted to a psychiatric facility in New York City,” she said when Mr. Rainer returned to the phone. “It’s the best possible place for him right now.”

  “I-I can’t afford that. I’m sorry. We’ll have to help James here at home.”

  She’d already anticipated that.

  “I’ve taken care of the expense, Mr. Rainer,” said Lydia. “And I just want you to do one thing for me. When he’s well, if we haven’t found Lily Samuels, I’d just like to talk to him again.”

  She heard him sigh on the other end. “I can’t,” he said, his voice growing strained with tears, “express my gratitude.”

  Lydia had made a late-night call to Irma Fox, a child psychiatrist she had met through Ford McKirdy, a retired homicide detective whom she and Jeff had worked with on the Julian Ross case last year. Irma was unlucky enough to be the only shrink in Lydia’s Palm Pilot and Lydia recalled her having mentioned doing cult deprogramming work with adolescents and young adults in their late teens. On hearing the situation, Irma was very quick to accommodate Lydia, calling back immediately to say that a bed could be arranged for James Rainer that night at a facility on the Upper West Side. The cost was exorbitant. But Lydia figured it was the least they could do, since Jeffrey had practically killed the kid and Dax had pumped him so full of Xanax to calm him that James was nearly catatonic.

  Tim Samuels wasn’t looking much better than James had when they dropped him off, beaten and drugged and about to undergo the worst few weeks of his life.

  “This is what they do,” said Samuels in his living room. The beautifully appointed space was a mess. The couch was being used as a bed. Half-empty glasses and cups with congealed liquid, dirty plates crusted with dried food, and empty fast-food containers occupied most available spaces. The shades had been drawn against the view and the room had an unpleasant odor.

  “Who?”

  “The New Day. They ruin. What they can’t possess, they destroy.”

  He put his head in his hands and started to weep. It sounded a little forced and pathetic to Lydia, but then she didn’t have a lot of patience for sobbing men.

  “Where’s your wife?” she said. He looked up at her.

  “She left.” He sighed and hung his head. “She can’t stand the sight of me.”

  Lydia bit back an impolite comment but he must have seen it on her face.

  “Yeah, imagine that. Right?” he said.

  Lydia raised her eyebrows at him but said nothing.

  “Time for you to come clean with us, Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey, sitting across from him. “For Lily’s sake. And by the looks of it, for yours too.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said, looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes.

  Jeffrey showed Samuels his palms. “Make me understand. Make me understand what’s happening here.”

  ***

  Tim Samuels was desperately unhappy. So he had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old stripper and bought a Ferrari. When that didn’t work, he went looking for God.

  “I just started getting this feeling like everything worth doing was already behind me,” he said quietly. He looked beaten as he sipped from the glass of ice water Lydia had fetched him from the kitchen.

  “The kids were grown, living their lives. Much more fulfilling, exciting lives than I ever dreamed of, I might add. Monica and I, we love each other, you know. She’s my best friend. But after twenty-five years, things were not exactly hot… if you know what I mean.”

  Lydia hoped he wasn’t going to go into detail and she shifted in her seat on the couch across from him. Jeffrey stood by the hearth, watching Samuels in that way that he had. Listening carefully, critically. Looking for all the cues that Lydia looked for, the shifting eyes, the tapping foot. It was the furtive gesture, the uneasy glance, the unconscious tick that told you the most about a person. Words were chosen. But the body never lied. Tim Samuels gave her the impression of someone who�
�d been crushed. He slumped in his chair like he didn’t even have the energy to sit upright anymore.

  “When I retired a year and a half ago, sold my business, I made a killing. I mean like, more money than I ever dreamed of.”

  He let out a little laugh. “It was what I had worked for my entire life… to have enough money so that I didn’t have to work. It took about a year of golfing and drinking, sleeping late, watching soaps, to realize that I didn’t know anything about myself. All my life I had always done what I was told to do, the right thing, work hard, marry well, send your children to college. I was always so busy working, or working on the house, or raising the kids, or taking care of my marriage. I’d never had any time to really think about myself, my life. Do you know how scary that is? To realize that your life is more than half over and that you are a stranger to yourself? It scared the shit out of me.”

  He was looking at them both with pleading eyes. He wanted compassion, sympathy. Jeffrey nodded solemnly and sat on the hearth.

  “I understand,” he said. Lydia looked at him and back to Tim Samuels. She couldn’t imagine two men more different.

  It seemed like Samuels’ generation of men, men in their late fifties, early sixties, had been robbed in a way, that they’d never really been given the tools to be happy. They’d been taught to work, to provide for their families, to accrue wealth. But no one had really taught them how to love, how to reflect, how to communicate. So many of them held onto sexism, racism, elitism as crutches to make themselves feel better, feel bigger. They seemed clueless to Lydia, lost and wandering with these outdated ideas in their heads and unexpressed emotions in their chests and no idea what to do with either of them.

  “So I’m embarrassed to say I started acting like a typical jackass having a midlife crisis. I bought a 575M Maranello Ferrari, started staying out late or not coming home at all. I met this young girl at a strip club in the city; she made me feel like I was twenty-one again.” A wide smile spread across his face as he thought of her. Lydia felt like smacking it off his face.

  “Mariah,” said Lydia, fishing the picture from her pocket.

  He hung his head and didn’t say anything for a second. “I didn’t know her as Mariah. I knew her as Marilyn.”

  “But you recognized her when we showed you the picture?” asked Jeffrey.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Where was your wife during all of this?” asked Lydia.

  “Here. She kicked me out; I stayed in the city. A friend of mine divides his year between New York and Paris. He has a nice place on Park Avenue South. For a few months, I was having a ball… hot car, hot woman, clubs every night. Then suddenly, it all started to seem a little hollow.”

  “Imagine that,” said Lydia. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jeffrey shoot her a look. It wasn’t a good idea to be judgmental when someone was spilling his guts. You might dam the flow. “Sorry,” she said.

  “No,” said Samuels. “You’re right. I walked away from this beautiful life that Monica and I had constructed over twenty-five years together, looking for whatever it was I imagined was missing. And then I realized that the only thing missing was gratitude. But it was too late. It’s amazingly easy to walk away from your life; it’s almost impossible to go back. When you tear the fabric of trust, it never feels the same again.”

  He released a heavy sigh, seemed to sink even deeper into his chair.

  “So by then I was lower than when I started what I called my ‘vision quest.’ That’s when Marilyn told me about The New Day.”

  Lydia leaned forward. “Did you join?”

  “She took me up to Riverdale and I met some of the members at this old house off of Broadway behind the train yards.”

  Lydia nodded. “We’ve been there. Mariah or Marilyn-her real name was Michele LaForge-had that address on her driver’s license. We received information that a black SUV was seen waiting outside the bank for Lily as she closed all of her accounts. That vehicle was registered to Michele LaForge.”

  He nodded. “I see,” he said. He looked at some space on the wall behind Lydia. Maybe imagining Lily at the bank, with Michele waiting outside.

  “So what happened at the house?” asked Jeffrey.

  “I’ll tell you what. It’s a powerful message. They make a lot of sense. They tell you that everything you’ve been taught will make you happy is exactly the opposite of true. Possessions, the craving for more possessions, attachments to unhealthy relationships, media-generated low self-esteem, chronic busyness are elements of the deep sense of despair so many people feel. Most people are completely divorced from themselves. I really related to it, considering how I was feeling when I left Monica. And how none of the things I’d done to make myself feel better had helped.”

  Lydia nodded. The message was powerful, because it was so deeply true. But The New Day was only using that truth as a hook for desperate people… not to help them, to own them.

  “After meeting with her friends a couple of times, Trevor Rhames sent for me. We talked for hours. I told him things about myself, about my life, that I had never told anyone else.”

  “Did you drink the tea they gave you?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “Yes, I did.”

  “We had it analyzed,” said Jeffrey. “It contains a very mild tranquilizer. Nothing that would knock you out and nothing that you would notice more than, say, if you’d taken a cold medicine. But it makes you very relaxed, very receptive to suggestion. A psychiatrist might prescribe it before a session of hypnosis.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense. Because, you know, they never force you to stay. You can always leave when you want to, at first. But the more often you go back, the more you talk to Rhames and the other members, the less you want to go each time, until finally you find yourself staying at the dorm.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “If you stayed, you were given a job the next day, something easy like dusting or emptying wastepaper baskets. They gave you a clean set of clothes, this cotton tunic and blue jeans, a pair of flip flops. You feel so peaceful, so relaxed… but it’s more than that. It’s like this low-grade euphoria. You’ve found the way. Then it was the next day and the next day.”

  A kind of a half-smile had spread across his face as he remembered the experience. He’d moved up in his chair and leaned into them. He looked back and forth between their faces.

  “But you left eventually,” said Lydia.

  He nodded.

  “I saw something that frightened me,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “I saw horrible things. I was cleaning floors and I walked into a room filled with computers and closed-circuit monitors.”

  He put his head in his hands.

  “I saw it, too,” said Jeffrey. “The people in restraints, on feeding tubes.”

  “Their heads shaved, their eyes open in terror,” he said, his voice low. The room had taken on a kind of hush and no one spoke for a moment.

  “What did you do?” asked Lydia softly.

  “I stopped drinking the tea,” he said, giving her a small smile. “Suddenly, the euphoria was gone and I felt like a prisoner, even though ostensibly I could leave at any time. I realized that I had told them virtually every intimate detail of my life. I had told them every mistake I ever made and, believe me, there were some big ones.”

  He released a shuddering sigh that seemed to come from deep inside of him.

  “I was afraid then, afraid to leave. But when Rhames asked to see me, started talking about my turning assets over to The New Day and entering the ‘cleansing’ phase of my initiation, I realized that the whole thing was just a scam, just a way to steal people’s money. I got mad. I flipped out.”

  “How did Rhames react?” asked Lydia.

  “Very calmly,” said Samuels. “I was ranting and screaming and he was just sitting. We were in this room with the door locked. It was dim, so he flipped on a light that sat on his desk and he slid this file over to
me. I took it and opened it.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at the blank space on the wall behind Lydia.

  “What was in it?” she asked finally.

  “Everything,” he said. “Everything about me, about Monica, about Lily and Mickey. There were copies of my tax returns, medical records, account numbers. It was a complete dossier.”

  His breathing came quickly now, labored and slightly raspy. “He said to me, ‘It’s too late, my friend. You’ve shed this life. It belongs to me now.’ I told him to go fuck himself and I walked out of there. No one stopped me. I went back to Monica. I didn’t tell her about The New Day. I begged her to forgive me. She let me move back in and promised to work on our marriage but no guarantees. I changed all my bank accounts and was terrified for a few weeks. I called some of the guys that used to work for my security firm and I asked them to hang around me and Monica, Lily and Mickey. After a few days with no incident, I started to think everything was going to be all right. And for a while, it was.”

  He laughed a little at his own stupidity.

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just go to the police and tell them about The New Day?” asked Lydia.

  He laughed again; it sounded hard and angry like the bark of a dog. “With what they knew about me? Not an option.”

  “What did they know about you?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not falling for that again.”

  Lydia looked at him and thought he had the aura of a kite with its line cut, as if there was nothing to hold him to this world.

  “Then slowly,” he said, “they started to take my world apart.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “First, I was notified that I was being audited by the IRS for the period of fifteen years during which I owned the security firm. My tax attorney who’d been with me since 1980 told me, ‘Hey, buddy, don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.’ I was relieved. He was a powerful guy, had a way of making problems disappear, if you know what I mean. The next night, he was mugged and died from a gunshot wound to the heart. All my records disappeared from his office.”