Blowing Smoke

by Barbara Block

  “My brother, Louis,” Hillary said, pointing to the man in Bermuda shorts and polo shirt sprawled on the sofa, watching television.

  “At last.” He clicked off the program he’d been watching, hoisted himself up, came forward, and shook my hand, engulfing it in his. “And yes,” he said, laughing. “We have the same mother and father. Everyone always wonders.”

  It was easy to see why they did. If Hillary was the mini version, Louis was the jumbo king-sized. A bear of a man, everything about him was big, from his ears, beaked nose, and lantern jaw to his hands and feet. Looking closely, though, I could see a similarity in the shape of the mouth between him and Hillary.

  “I’m glad you could come.” He was about to say something else to me when a woman burst out of the kitchen and planted herself next to Louis.

  “I still think this is wrong,” she told him, ostentatiously ignoring me.

  Hillary took a deep breath and let it out. “My sister,” she explained as her eyes lightened to an even paler shade of gray. “Evidently, Amy still has a few doubts about the wisdom of what we’re doing. Although I thought we’d straightened that out.”

  Amy flushed. “No, we haven’t.” She drank from the can of soda she was holding and brushed a strand of frizzy hair off her face. She seemed as if she were one of those women who always looked permanently disheveled. The jewelry she had on, a squash-blossom necklace and matching wrist-ful of silver bangles belonged on someone five inches taller. The peasant-style white blouse and pleated gauze skirt she was wearing accentuated her pendulous breasts and stomach. She was as short as Hillary, but she outweighed her by a good seventy pounds or so. “Listen,” Amy went on, “all I’m saying is that Mom is going to be furious if she finds out.”

  “She’s not going to,” Louis snapped.

  “She always does,” Amy countered.

  Louis glowered at her. “Don’t you think it’s time you grew up,” he said. “She’s not God.”

  Amy’s face turned sullen. “That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it.”

  “Amy,” Hillary said, tugging at her sleeves. “Please. We’ve already had this discussion. We’ve decided—”

  “You decided,” Amy snapped.

  “No. You agreed. We all agreed.”

  “I never said—”

  “Yes, you did,” Louis replied. “If you can’t remember, maybe you’d better change those antidepressants you’re on.”

  “That’s a lousy thing to say,” Amy flung back at him.

  “You’re right,” Louis apologized. “It is.” Even though he didn’t look particularly sorry.

  Amy put her can of soda down on the coffee table and began fiddling with her bracelets. “All I’m saying is that I’m not sure that this is the right thing to do.”

  “Well, I am.” Exasperation underlined Louis’s words. “Why do you always do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Say yes and then change your mind?”

  “But what if she finds out?” Amy wailed.

  “So what?” Hillary’s eyes flashed. “Big deal. So what if she does. We’re certainly not going to be any worse off than we are already.”

  When Amy started to reply, it was all I could do not to say, Hey, people. Why don’t you all shut up. Instead, I picked my backpack up off the floor and said, “Call me when you’ve de-cided what you want. I have other things I have to attend to.” Like finding Bethany. Like finishing restocking the shelves. Like repairing one of the filters in the big fish tank. Like ordering five more geckos.

  “Please.” Hillary took my hand and began leading me to the sofa. “Don’t go.”

  “Only if we can get down to business.”

  It was the money that made me stay. Though if you asked me, I’d say that what these folks really needed was a therapist instead of a private detective.

  Hillary glanced at Amy. Amy shrugged.

  “All right,” she said. “But I’m not taking the blame for this.”

  “How novel,” Louis sniped. “It’s not as if you ever take the blame for anything.”

  “Both of you stop it,” Hillary ordered. “It’s the heat,” she said to me. “The heat is making everyone crazy. Let me get you a drink,” she continued. “An iced tea.” And, without waiting for my answer, she went into the kitchen.

  As I listened to the air conditioner’s rattle and hum, I watched Amy wind a lock of her hair around her finger. Her face was round. She looked younger than her siblings and paler, as if she never got out in the sun. The outline of a faint mustache was apparent above her upper lip.

  “It must be nice to still be able to do that,” she said wistfully, referring to the high-pitched screams of the children playing outside that were seeping into the room. Then she sighed and sat next to me. A faintly sour smell came off of her. “Do you believe in life after death?” she asked suddenly.

  Louis rolled his eyes and flopped down on the armchair to the left of the sofa. “Ah... we’re back to the great unknown.”

  Amy sucked in her cheeks and straightened her back. “What’s wrong with that question?”

  “Well—” I began when Louis interrupted. Doing that seemed to be a bad habit of his.

  “Anyway, what she thinks is besides the point,” he said.

  “It most certainly is the point.”

  “No, it isn’t. The point is that we don’t want Mother taken advantage of.”

  “That’s right,” Hillary agreed, entering the room. As she handed me an iced tea, I could see that her nails were bitten down.

  “I was just curious,” Amy said, but her tone had changed from defiant to defeated.

  “You’ll have to forgive my sister,” Hillary told me. “She’s just concerned about our mother.”

  “As are we all,” Louis chimed in.

  I took a sip of my tea and put it down. It had that chemical aftertaste of the powdered instants. “Does your mother have a name?”

  “Oh.” Hillary paused. “I thought you knew.”

  “Should I?”

  “Of course not. Why should you?” She gave a dismissive little laugh at her own foolishness. “It’s Rose. Rose Taylor,” she continued, idly caressing her arm with her hand.

  The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it, and I didn’t ask, figuring I could always do that later.

  “I suppose,” Hillary continued, “I could go to one of the larger detective agencies, but that seems like overkill.”

  “Not to mention expensive,” I couldn’t help volunteering. As an unlicensed part-timer I charged bargain-basement prices.

  “That, too,” Hillary conceded, her gray eyes widening a fraction. “I won’t lie about that.”

  “One hundred dollars an hour is a lot on a postal worker’s salary,” Louis griped.

  Evidently they’d already made inquiries at other places.

  Hillary fingered the hem of her skirt. “Actually, I thought we needed a more personal touch.”

  “So what is this job about?” I asked.

  Louis and Hillary exchanged glances as Hillary sat down on the other side of me. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. She seemed to like the way they looked. I noticed she had a small half-moon tattooed on her left calf.

  “Tell me,” Hillary asked, turning her head in my direction. “Do you believe in psychics?”

  “Psychics? You mean people who communicate with the dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” I’d tried one after my husband Murphy had died. It had cost me a hundred bucks and left me feeling like a fool.

  Hillary and Louis exchanged another look. “Do you believe people have the ability to talk to animals?” Hillary asked me.

  “I think we can communicate.” My dog, Zsa Zsa, was pretty good at letting me know what she wanted.

  “I mean talking.”

  I looked to see if she was joking. She wasn’t.

  “As in my cat telling me, watch out, the lady down the street is in a bitchy mood today?” I asked.


  “Something like that.”

  “Not outside of the movies.”

  “Well, my mother does.”

  “She believes she can talk to animals? I don’t think...”

  “No, she believes a woman named Pat Humphrey can.” Hillary spread her hands and studied what was left of her fingernails.

  “Go on,” I finally prompted.

  “This is so embarrassing.”

  I waited.

  Hillary sighed and brushed a strand of hair off her forehead. “All right. Three months ago—more or less—my mother’s cat disappeared from the house. At first, we thought someone let it out by accident. Now, of course—” Hillary stopped. “Well, you decide. My mother was hysterical. She’s very attached to ... this animal. Anyway, the next morning at nine o’clock, this woman—”

  “Pat Humphrey?” I asked.

  Hillary nodded. “She appeared at my mother’s door with the cat in her arms. She said she was a pet psychic. She said she’d found the cat wandering in the park and the cat told her where my mother lived.”

  “So you’re saying you think this woman might have stolen your mother’s cat and then brought it back?”

  Hillary gave me the kind of smile a teacher bestows on a promising pupil.

  “She said she didn’t want any money,” Louis continued, “but my mother insisted on giving her a reward.”

  I leaned forward. “How big?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  I whistled. “Five thousand dollars is a fair chunk of change—even these days.”

  “Not for our mother,” Amy blurted out. “She’s rich.”

  Hillary glared at Amy, who turned her eyes downward. “Comfortable,” Hillary corrected. “She’s comfortable.”

  While Amy bit her lip, Louis took up the narrative.

  “In any case,” he said, “our mother talks to her every day now. Sometimes twice a day. We’re worried. We think our mother is giving this woman money.”

  “I assume you think this woman is running a scam.”

  Hillary nodded.

  “So, then, why don’t you go to the police?”

  “We will if we have to,” Hillary said. “But we’re hoping to avoid that. We don’t want to upset Mother unnecessarily. She’s a very private person. She would be furious if she thought we involved the authorities in her private business.”

  “It would be like saying we thought she’s losing her grip,” Louis said.

  Hillary nodded her head in agreement.

  “But going to me isn’t?”

  “She’s not going to know. At least until we have something definitive to tell her.”

  “I’m confused here. Now, what is it exactly that you want me to do?”

  Louis looked at Hillary, and Hillary gave a nod.

  “We’ve been thinking about that,” Louis said. “And this is what we’ve come up with. We want you to get an appointment with this Humphrey woman. And then we want you to tape your session with her. I don’t care if it takes one, two, or five times. We want tangible proof that this woman is a fraud.”

  It seemed as if that wouldn’t be too hard a task to accomplish.

  Chapter Three

  The first thing I did when I left Hillary Cisco’s house was drive over to Upstate. I’d been thinking about the man I’d picked up on the road yesterday. The picture he’d pressed into my hand felt like a hot potato, something I wanted to get rid of as quickly as possible. I had enough to do without finding Dorita. Especially now. All I wanted to do was give the damned thing back to him.

  On my way down I called Calli on my cell phone, hoping she could tell me a little more about Hillary. But she wasn’t in. That’s probably because she was busy screwing her brains out with her latest fiasco of a boyfriend. She specialized in unredeemables.

  “Call me, you black-hearted bitch,” I said when I heard the beep from her answering machine. “I need to speak with you.”

  Then I rang up Pat Humphrey, told her I was Nancy Richardson, and asked for a consultation on my German shepherd, Duke. All business, she informed me that a phone consultation was thirty-five dollars for fifteen minutes, or we could do a half an hour face-to-face for seventy-five dollars, which is what she recommended for her first-time clients. Either was payable by major credit card. Naturally. These days everything is.

  I could hear the pages turning as she consulted her book. “I can squeeze you in this Thursday at four o’clock. Two days away.”

  “That’s fine. Should I bring Duke along?”

  “No. That’s not necessary. I can read your companion’s vibes through you.”

  I guess vibes must be like dog hair; they stick to your clothing.

  I was wondering how well Humphrey was doing with this gig as I pulled into Upstate’s parking lot and went into the hospital. Probably better than I was. I’d seen ads for pet psychics in several of the pet magazines the store sells and discounted them. But maybe I shouldn’t have. After all, a pet psychic combines three current trends: spirituality, treating animals as humans, and lots of free spending cash. In these days of doggie day care and homemade doggie biscuits, not to mention doggie treadmills, doggie portraits, doggie albums, doggie downers, and doggie hip replacements and MRIs, it stands to reason that someone who claims to be able to tell you why your precious pooch keeps peeing on your Oriental rug would be making money.

  I was mulling over the possibility of taking our back room and offering it to a visiting pet psychic—a kind of itinerant spiritual vet—when I ran into my first roadblock of the evening.

  “You can’t go in there without permission,” a nurse the size of Big Bertha barked as I started to enter the room my John Doe was in. “Can’t you read the sign?”

  The sign said Respiratory Isolation, which was new speak for quarantine. I took my hand off the door handle and held both of them up in the air.

  “Okay. You got me.”

  “That warning is there for a reason, you know,” she huffed.

  “Gee and I thought you just hung it on random rooms. Sorry,” I said as her frown deepened. “I was told the unidentified guy the EMTs picked up in Caz last night is in there.”

  “That’s correct.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Are you family?”

  “I could be.”

  No response.

  “I have something to return to him.”

  She held out her hand. “I’ll put it with his belongings.”

  But I didn’t want to give the photograph to her. I wanted to give it to him. Suddenly, it was very important that I put the picture in his hand.

  “Thanks, but I’d like to wait till he’s up and about.”

  “Suit yourself.” Her tone made it clear that she didn’t think that was going to happen any time soon.

  “Do you have a name on him yet?”

  “Even if I did, which I don’t, I can’t tell you without proper authorization.”

  “You’re just a regular ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

  “If you don’t mind.” Her uniform crinkled as she folded her arms across her chest again. When I didn’t leave, she added, “Do I have to call Security?”

  “Only if they’ll take me out to eat.”

  She didn’t smile. But then, if I looked like her, I probably wouldn’t be smiling, either.

  I went home and had a drink and my dinner, which consisted of two chocolate doughnuts left over from the morning, looked at the picture of the family, then tucked it back in my backpack and went to sleep.

  I spent some of the next day and most of the evening looking for Bethany. I called up her school principal and found out she’d gone from a straight-A student to someone that was barely passing. The school psychologist said she was “at risk” but wouldn’t provide me with any useful information.

  I showed Bethany’s picture at the malls and pizza parlors and handed out my business card, and when I was done with that, I cruised downtown and talked to the women working the street who would
talk to me. One of them, a skinny span-dexed ghetto-talking blond, identified Bethany.

  “You ain’t gonna be finding her around here parading her fat white ass up and down the street, I can tell you that,” she said while keeping her eyes open for squad cars and customers.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “‘Cause I told her, she tried any of that shit down here, I’d put a strap to her so fast it would make her head spin. Her and those other burb bitches, thinkin’ they can just waltz in here. Now we got the cops swarmin’ all over us.”

  “So I take it you haven’t seen her today?”

  “What I be telling you?”

  I handed her my card and told her there was a fifty in it for her if she called me if Bethany showed up. Jeez what a world. I couldn’t believe that she was just doing this because she wanted money to buy a gold necklace. Although that’s what a social worker who’d interviewed a couple of these girls before turning them over to their parents had told me one night over a beer at the bar.

  “Oral sex,” he said, wiping the beer from off his mustache. “It’s not a big deal to some of them. It’s like kissing.”

  God. I hadn’t even known what that was at fifteen.

  I tried calling Karim, but his mother hung up on me. Michelle wasn’t home, and neither were the first two names on my list of Bethany’s friends. What I was really hoping, even though I wasn’t going to say this to her parents, was that she hadn’t decided to take off for someplace like New York City or Buffalo with the guy who’d picked her up from Karim’s house, the guy no one knew, because then my chances of finding her were going to go from good to slim to none.

  Around nine that evening, I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee and my chocolate-peanut doughnut fix, then drove over to Satan’s End, a place off of East Genesee Street that showcased punk and hard-core. It looked like Bethany’s type of scene, and I was hoping she’d be there.

  Tonight, according to the handwritten sign at the door, Bad Breath and Scum were playing. Who was going to be there next? Puke and the Amputees? A wall of noise hit me when I walked through the door. I wondered if I could collect workmen’s comp for hearing loss. I looked around. The place was jam-packed full of black-clad and pierced boys and girls, most of whom I placed between the ages of fourteen and twenty, though it was hard to tell. I was scanning the dance floor when I felt a tap on my shoulder.