Blowing Smoke

by Barbara Block

  The fourth kid on my list was a girl by the name of Michelle Morgan. She lived a ten-minute drive away, in a gimcrack development a little bit outside of town. Judging from the look of the houses, I’d be willing to bet that they were a good deal cheaper than the other places I’d been to so far.

  “Yes,” she said, opening the door without bothering to see who was there.

  A heavy girl, she was dressed in fat-girl clothes. Her face was plain, with too big a nose and a receding chin, and even if she lost the hundred pounds she needed to, she still wouldn’t be attractive. As I introduced myself and explained what I wanted, I couldn’t help noticing that she was wearing the same type of earrings Bethany had on in the photo.

  “Nice,” I said, indicating them.

  She felt one and smiled. “Thanks. We got them in the city.”

  “Syracuse?”

  She nodded.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re out seeing a movie. Do you want me to tell them you came by?”

  “Not really. I want to talk to you.”

  “Me?” The girl pointed a finger at herself.

  “That’s right, Michelle, you. Bethany’s parents have hired me to find her. You know she’s run away, don’t you?”

  Michelle nodded, her eyes wary.

  “Well, I was hoping you could help me out.”

  The girl shook her head and fingered her earrings again. “There’s nothing to tell. The last time I saw her was a week ago.”

  “Are you a good friend of hers?”

  The girl nodded again, unsure of what was coming next.

  “So why do you think she ran away?”

  The girl looked down at the ground. “She wasn’t happy.”

  “And why was that?”

  “You’ve met her mom and dad?”

  I nodded, even though the question was rhetorical.

  “That’s why.”

  “They seem like nice enough people to me.”

  Michelle made a face. “You wouldn’t say that if you were their daughter. They’re always watching her. Asking her these dumb questions. Wanting to know how she feels.” She gave the words a sarcastic spin. “They won’t even let her go out at night during the week. That’s so lame.”

  Seemed sensible to me, but then what did I know? Once again I gave thanks that I didn’t have children. “How does she like school?”

  “She hates it! We all do. That’s another thing. Bethany wants to go to school down in the city, but her parents want to transfer her to private school.”

  “Why the city? Usually people pay to keep their kids out of the schools down there.”

  “Because that’s where the real people are.”

  “As opposed to robots?”

  Michelle gave me a sour look. “Everyone in our high school thinks we’re freaks. At least it’s not total white bread down there.”

  “You’re probably right.” Syracuse City high schools were like a mini-UN these days. Bosnian, Russian, Vietnamese, white, black. You name it, the schools had it. “So where did she go?”

  Michelle shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  I took a cigarette out of my backpack and lit it.

  “My mother doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” Michelle said self-righteously.

  “I’m not in your house. Listen,” I said taking a puff, “your friend could be in a great deal of trouble.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  Michelle folded her hands across her chest. “Because Bethany always is. She knows how to take care of herself.”

  I flicked the ash toward the grass. “There are lots of men out there that prey on fifteen-year-old girls who know how to take care of themselves.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Michelle scoffed.

  I leaned an arm on the doorframe. “You know why I think you’re not worried?”

  Michelle didn’t say anything.

  “I think you’re not worried because you’ve spoken to her and you know that she’s fine.”

  “That’s not true,” Michelle cried.

  “I think it is. Maybe I should just wait till your parents come home.”

  Michelle tossed her head defiantly. “Go ahead. Wait as long as you want.”

  I reached out and lightly touched one of Michelle’s earrings. “Where did you get the money to buy these?”

  Michelle jerked back. “Baby sitting. What do you think?”

  “How about Bethany? Does Bethany do much sitting?”

  “I have no idea,” Michelle said stiffly. “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Why was it so important for her to go out last night?”

  “I told you I haven’t spoken to her.”

  “You know,” I continued, swatting at a mosquito that had landed on my hand, “in the last month or so the cops have been picking up a whole group of nice, suburban teenage girls who have been hooking on the streets....”

  “Bethany would never—”

  I interrupted. “Are you so sure?”

  “Yes,” Michelle blurted out. “She’s been taking money...” Michelle put her hand over her mouth.

  “From who?”

  Michelle developed an intense interest in a copper beech tree off in the distance.

  “Tell me. Her mother? Her father? The local convenience store? You started the sentence. You might as well finish it. I’m not going to leave until you do.”

  Michelle looked down at the ground, back at the tree, then at me. “She’s been stealing money from the lockers at school.”

  “You know this for a fact? You’ve seen her.”

  “She told me. The other thing that you said...”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I hope so.” But I wasn’t convinced. “Michelle, if Bethany’s your friend, if you care about her, tell me where I can find her. She needs to be home—even if she doesn’t like it. Her other options are even worse.”

  Michelle bit her lip while she thought.

  “This is something you need to do for her.”

  “But her parents . . .”

  “Want her home. Of course they’re upset, but they’ll get over it. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it. Honest.”

  It was getting darker now. The streetlights were beginning to come on. I watched Michelle as she struggled to make a decision. “She could die,” I told her. “No kidding around.”

  “All right. All right. She’s gonna kill me for telling.” Michelle took a deep breath and let it out. “Bethany’s at Karim’s house.”

  “But I was just there,” I protested. “Karim’s mother said she hadn’t seen her.”

  “His mother doesn’t know. She’s staying in their attic.”

  “The attic?”

  “That’s right. She snuck in when Karim’s parents went to work. You won’t tell her I told you, will you?”

  I promised her I wouldn’t. Then I turned around and headed for my car. The attic. It figured. All the time Bethany’s parents were going nuts, imagining the worst, Bethany had been at Karim’s house, probably playing video games and talking on the phone. That house was so big, I could see how you could have someone living in it and not know. Actually, a house didn’t even have to be that big for something like that to happen. When I was in high school, one of the kids in my class had run away. They found him two weeks later. He’d been living under his girlfriend’s bed the whole time. And this was in an apartment in the Bronx, unbelievable as it sounds.

  I wanted to corroborate Michelle’s story before I called Bethany’s parents. To do that though I had to convince Karim’s mother to let me in the house. At least that’s what I thought as I drove over there. But Michelle must have had a change of heart and gone in and called Bethany the moment I’d left her, because just as I was pulling into the circular driveway of Karim’s house, I saw Bethany dash ou
t from behind a clump of bushes.

  “Stop! I just want to talk to you,” I shouted at her.

  She looked in my direction, then jumped into the waiting SUV at the other end of the driveway. The car took off.

  I cursed and took my foot off the brake of my car, but as I did, Karim’s mother ran out of the house and planted herself in the middle of the driveway. “I demand to know what’s going on,” she said.

  I slammed on the brake again and leaned my head out the window. “Why don’t you ask your son?”

  “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “Bethany was hiding in your attic.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “He’d never do anything like that.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Go on. Ask him.”

  “Do you know who my husband is? He’s the head of—”

  “Lady, I don’t care.” I started maneuvering the car around her.

  “My flower beds,” she screeched. “Watch out. You’re driving over my flower beds.”

  “Sorry about the daylilies,” I said as I flattened them. The damned things were like weeds. They’d come up next year, anyway.

  “I’m going to sue you for this.”

  “Go right ahead.” The nice thing about being practically broke is that you have nothing to lose.

  By the time I got to the end of the driveway, it was too late. The SUV and Bethany had vanished. I spent the next hour cruising around, looking for them, before I wrapped it up and went home. Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, was waiting to greet me at the door. As I bent down to pet her, I thought once again how much nicer than children dogs are.

  Chapter Two

  To clarify in case you’re wondering, I’m not a licensed New York State private detective. I don’t work for an agency. I don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. My business comes to me strictly by word of mouth. I also don’t carry a gun, although I can shoot one if I have to. And have. I also run a pet store called Noah’s Ark, which specializes in exotics—read reptiles—though these days I seem to be doing more detecting and less pet storing, if I can coin a word.

  I started doing investigative work to save my own ass and turned out to be good at it, good enough so that people keep asking me to help them and I keep saying yes. I usually work a handful of cases a year. Mostly, I find lost children and animals and leave the high-end sexy stuff to the big boys.

  It was almost eleven-thirty at night by the time I walked through the door of my house, and I was not in a good mood, possibly because I hadn’t had anything to eat since ten o’clock that morning. When I saw the blinking light on my answering machine, I was hoping it was Bethany’s parents calling to tell me their daughter had come home by herself. But it wasn’t. It was someone called Hillary Cisco, wanting to hire me to do a job for her.

  Normally, I would have turned her down. I prefer giving people their money’s worth by concentrating on one thing at a time. But with the proverbial wolf at my door in the form of quarterly tax payments to good old New York State, I figured it was time to make an exception to my rule. The next morning, before I went to work, I phoned her back.

  “How’d you get my name?” I asked her while I let James in and got a can of cat food out of the cabinet.

  “Calli gave it to me.”

  Calli was an old friend of mine who’d gone out to California and was now back. At the moment, she was covering the Metro section in the local paper.

  “She said you’d be perfect for this.”

  “Really?” As I set James’s food in front of him, I told her about my fees and how I worked.

  It sounded fine to Hillary, so I said I’d swing by her place later that afternoon. As I hung up, I noticed that James’s ear was torn.

  “Fighting again, I see.”

  He answered me with a growl. I wondered why I kept him around as I went to get the peroxide. Of course, he’d disappeared by the time I’d come back, and after searching the house for five minutes or so, I gave it up as a bad job and called Calli.

  I wanted her to tell me about Hillary Cisco, but either Calli wasn’t home or she wasn’t picking up. I left a message on her machine, got Zsa Zsa, and finally left the house. I was only twenty minutes late.

  Tim, the guy who works for me, and I spent the rest of the day restocking shelves, cleaning cages, and feeding the snakes. Bad day for the mice, good day for the snakes. In between, I popped into the back, arranged to go in and have a TB test, and made calls about Bethany while I tried not to listen to the asthmatic wheeze of the store’s air conditioner.

  The temperature was in the nineties, and the machine was not happy. It probably wanted a vacation, but then didn’t we all, a fact I was reminded of when I stepped outside. I was drenched in sweat by the time I walked to my car. Which didn’t improve my mood any. If I wanted heat, I’d be living in the Southwest instead of central New York.

  On my way to Hillary Cisco’s, I swung by Warren Street, but Bethany wasn’t there, and after about twenty minutes or so, I gave up and drove over to Starcrest, the development in which Hillary Cisco lived. When I saw her leaning against the porch railing, I was reminded of a kid who’d been locked out of her house and was waiting for her mommy to come home. Even though she wasn’t a kid. Not even close. And 113 Wisteria Lane was her house.

  Listening to her voice on the machine, I’d pictured her as blond and big-boned, but this woman was as small and brown as a wren. Her gauze dress, incongruously long-sleeved and high-hemmed, fluttered around her thighs as she came down the steps to greet me. She moved with a slow, languid pace, but then, I reflected, it was too hot to move any other way.

  Her hair, straight, black, and chin-length, hung like a curtain on either side of her face. But it was her eyes I noticed. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. A pale grayish blue, they were too light for her complexion, casting a vacant expression over her features. Her eyeliner and mascara had run in the heat, smudging into dark circles underneath her eyes. Beads of moisture ringed her hairline. She looked tired, as if she’d been wrestling with something for a long time and lost.

  “Robin Light?” she asked. In person, she sounded breathier, less self-assured than she had on the phone.

  I nodded. “Hillary Cisco?”

  She bobbed her head and nervously plucked at the hem of her dress, trying to make it longer. “You’re late. I thought you might have decided not to come.”

  “I got lost.” I’d been circling around streets that all looked the same for the last twenty minutes, kicking up plumes of dust and growing more and more irritated by the second.

  “Everyone does.” She swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand. Her arms, I realized, were exceptionally long. “They designed these roads like a maze, you know. That’s so the blacks from the inner city can’t come up here and rob us.” For a moment I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. Then the corners of her mouth formed a slight smile. She shook her head as she contemplated the houses on either side of her. “As if they... or anyone would.”

  I followed her gaze. The place didn’t seem so bad to me, just raw in the way that new housing developments are. They were popping up all around Syracuse, siphoning off its population. In twenty years, when the trees and the hedges grew in, it would be a pleasant enough place. At six o’clock, the day was just beginning to cool off. Somewhere a cardinal was singing his song over and over again, the notes rising and falling away like a benediction.

  His notes mingled with the happy shouts of children chasing each other with water guns while their parents, still in their suits from their day in the office, were busy adjusting and readjusting the hoses and sprinklers on their lawns before they went inside and changed into shorts and T-shirts.

  Hillary snorted her opinion of them and beckoned for me to follow her. “My brother and sister are anxious to meet you,” she told me, as if she’d invited me to tea instead of to discuss a job. “Nothing big,” I remember she
’d said on the phone. “We just need to clarify a few issues.”

  Issues. Right. The new buzzword. As in, he has issues with alcohol or she has issues with men. Meaning he drinks and she sleeps around. I wondered what particular issues Hillary Cisco had in mind. They had to be substantial. People don’t hire a private detective otherwise. Then I thought about how much I wanted it to rain as I mounted the three steps that led to Hillary’s house.

  A small white colonial, 113 Wisteria Lane was indistinguishable from the ones sitting to its left and right, even though Hillary had made a stab at decorating. Two wind chimes constructed from spoons hung from the eaves of the porch. A blue banner with several white music notes stitched to it jutted out from the porch beam. Half-dead red geraniums lay wilting in the ceramic pots lining the path to the house.

  “The banner is my sister’s handiwork,” Hillary explained. “She does crafts,” she continued, making the word crafts sound like some arcane sexual practice. “I sing, you know. Professionally. Teaching is my day job.”

  I nodded politely. I guess I should have acted more impressed, because a spasm of irritation rippled across her face. She compressed her lips, pulled the door to her house open, and stalked inside. But I didn’t feel bad. I got the feeling she got irritated a lot.

  The air in the hallway smelled faintly of cooking grease, room deodorizer, and kitchen trash. It had a dank, underwater quality to it, the kind you get in cheap motels in which the windows don’t open and the air vents need to be cleaned. The living room was done up in a Chinese motif.

  The rug, furniture, and walls were all white. Badly painted Chinese scrolls hung on three walls. A lacquered screen, dotted with someone’s idea of a bamboo tree, stood off in the corner of the room, while a matching black lacquered coffee table sat in front of the sofa. Even the cabinet housing the television was in had an Asian motif. It looked like the kind of room they advertised on TV at two o’clock in the morning. Five pieces for seven hundred dollars. No money down. Two years to pay. By which time it would have come apart.