Blowing Smoke

by Barbara Block

  “Always. But they’re unfiltered.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I sat down, took my pack of Camels out of my backpack, and passed the cigarettes and the lighter across the table to Rose.

  “Thanks.” I watched her light up.

  I lit a cigarette of my own and inhaled, taking the smoke down into my lungs, then releasing it to the air.

  “It’s been a long time.” Rose pointed to a small, valuable-looking, crackle-glazed oxblood ceramic pot on one of the tables. “Bring that over.” She gave me a sly look. “Unless you use something else in your house.”

  “An ashtray.”

  Rose didn’t respond to my comment. Instead, she watched me as I positioned the pot between us. She took another puff of her cigarette and flicked the ash into the pot as I sat down. “Sanford would have a fit if he saw me do this. Of course, he would have had a fit if he saw me smoking. He hated it. Said it was a filthy habit.” Then she fell silent. I waited for her to continue. Finally, she did.

  “Really, it’s an old, boring story. High-school sweethearts. Madly in love. He wanted to marry me when I told him I was in the family way. Quaint phrase that.” Her lips turned up. “But our parents wouldn’t hear of it, and in those days you didn’t run away and set up housekeeping in San Francisco—at least no one in my circle of friends did. His parents left town and took him with them. Later, I heard they sent him off to military school.

  “My parents sent me away, too. I spent eight months in a little town in Pennsylvania. I remember writing letters to my best friend—her name was Edna; I wonder whatever happened to her—but the people running the place confiscated them. They wouldn’t allow me to mail them. My mother told everyone I’d gone out there to help care for a sick aunt. I never even saw the baby. They gave me a general anesthetic, so I wasn’t awake. Everyone said it was better that way. Less painful. They were probably right.”

  Rose took another puff of her Camel and contemplated the ash for a few seconds before continuing. “I’d almost talked myself into believing that the whole incident had never happened—it’s amazing what you can forget if you work at it—when Patti showed up with my cat.” Rose shook her head. “What’s so genuinely odd is that Sheba really had run away and Patti did find her. Patti did have genuine ability, just like my grandmother had. I never had that ability. I was a good athlete. I was smart. But I could never see things. Grannie was famous among the neighbors for knowing things. They came in the afternoons so she could read the tea leaves for them. She never took any money. Ever. She said she had a gift and that she owed it to the world to share it.”

  Rose sighed, held up her drink, and studied the amber liquid for a few seconds before taking another sip. “Patti told me that at first she had no intention of contacting me. She wanted to look at where I lived—that’s all. But then, when she found Sheba on a walk around my property, it seemed as if fate was calling to her. She told herself she just wanted to meet me, and then she’d walk away.

  “But we became friends. There was something there. I knew it the moment she walked in the room. We had the same taste in clothes and in art. We thought the same way. And so, after wrestling with her conscience, she decided to tell me. I didn’t believe her. Or rather, I didn’t want to, but when she showed me her birth certificate with my name on it ... well, you can see I had no choice but to believe her.

  “And you can also see what the police will think when they find out,” Rose went on. “They’ll suspect one of my children in Patricia’s death. And nothing I say will convince them otherwise.”

  “Do your children know?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so.” Rose’s voice was trembling, but whether from fear or rage, I couldn’t tell. “That’s the problem, you see. I’m not sure. I can’t bear to think that I raised someone who could—” She stopped.

  “Would you like me to get you some water?”

  “No.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I should have known better than to take Patti in. Sanford always said, ‘if you have three cats and you bring another one inside, you’re going to have trouble.’ But I couldn’t say no. For God’s sake, I should be entitled to do what I want at this stage in my life.”

  I didn’t point out that she already had.

  She straightened up. “I want you to find out who Patricia’s enemies were.”

  I looked her straight in the eye. “Aside from your children?”

  “There’s no need...”

  “I’m afraid there is.”

  Rose pressed her lips together and bowed her head. She could have been praying. When she lifted her head, her eyes were shuttered, all expression gone. “You’re right. I need to know about them, too. I need to know what kind of people they are. I’m afraid I’ve avoided that for far too long.”

  “Who did know about Pat Humphrey being your daughter?”

  “No one knew.”

  “No one?”

  “That’s right, no one,” Rose repeated in the face of my disbelief. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Not your lawyer. Not your husband.”

  “I didn’t see any reason for them to know. Why should they?” Rose rubbed the rim of her glass with her index finger. “In today’s parlance, I don’t like putting my business out on the street. Of course, I can’t say the same for Patti. She may have told someone. Even though I warned her not to.”

  A picture of Pat Humphrey and Sinclair embracing on the shore flashed through my mind. I wondered if Humphrey had told Sinclair and started a chain reaction in which Sinclair told Amy and Amy told Louis and Louis told Hillary. Sort of like the game telephone we used to play when I was a kid. And then I wondered how Shana Driscoll fit into the scenario? Because despite what Moss Ryan said, she did. How were Shana and Pat Humphrey linked? And did Geoff come into the equation? Was that why he seemed so nervous? Or was it just the stress of the last days catching up with him?

  I gulped down the rest of my scotch. As I did, I wondered how easy it would be to fake an adoption certificate. Not that difficult, I’d warrant, especially in today’s world of copiers and scanners. Especially since Pat Humphrey had supposedly shown Rose a copy of the original to begin with. The question was: If the certificate was a forgery, where had Pat Humphrey gotten her information from? How had she known that Rose Taylor had borne an out-of-wedlock child so long ago? How had she been privy to all the details?

  “So you’ll see what you can do?” Rose said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I told her I would.

  The next day, I had to go downtown to do some banking. Since I was in the area, I decided I might as well visit Paul in his office and check out his new digs. He’d set up shop on the fifth floor of the State Tower Building. The large brick building, which towered over the Syracuse skyline, had been constructed sometime in the thirties and still had the mail chute, the art deco overhead lighting fixtures, and the glass doors of that era. I took the elevator up and walked almost to the end of a long, angled hallway.

  The smell of wet paint and take-out Chinese food hit me as I opened the door to Paul’s office. The small waiting room was sparsely furnished, with two straight-back chairs, a wastepaper basket, and a piece of bad art on the wall. I knocked and walked into the office proper. Moderately large, the desk had been set flush up against the far wall. Three chairs had been arranged near it, while a brown sofa and a coffee table sat across the room. The rest of the space was taken up with bookcases and file cabinets.

  Paul glanced up at me from his computer screen. He’d buzzed his hair since I’d seen him last, which made his nose look even bigger than it already was and highlighted the gray.

  He threw his pen down and swiveled around in his chair. “Don’t have anything new for you, darlin’. Nothing except what I already gave you.” He made to turn the screen around. “I can show you if you want.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I told you, you want to find out about this Humphrey, you’re going to have to drive that
pretty little butt of yours out to the town she was raised in and talk to the people there.”

  “Anything new on the Oxford Agency?”

  “Long gone. It was taken over by something called Helping the Children. They’re gone, too. Busted for extortion.”

  “Nice.”

  Paul grinned. “But I do have somethin’ for ya from one of my friends downtown.”

  I rested my backpack on the floor. “Which would be?”

  He smirked. “That would depend on what you have for me.”

  “Don’t you have any sense of loyalty?”

  “Sure I do. But if you and George were serious, you’d be living together already. Not doing this separate-lives thing.”

  “Have you ever thought that we may like it this way?”

  Paul shrugged. “Hey, things go forward or they fall apart.”

  “Do you think we can skip Paul’s Personal Rules for living?”

  “If that’s what you want. But you’re missing some pearls of wisdom.” He winked, unwrapped a stick of gum, shoved it in his mouth, and began to chew. “The bullet that killed Humphrey was a .3006 caliber fired from a bolt-action rifle.”

  Just like the one I’d taken away from Sinclair and tossed in the river. Of course, every deer hunter in the Northeast used one.

  “Sinclair has a nice little collection of those. Claims he does a lot of hunting. None of them have been fired. And the paraffin tests on him and the woman are negative. Not that they couldn’t have hired someone.”

  “They gonna look for the rifle?”

  Paul shrugged. “Haven’t heard.”

  I thought about what Ryan had said about Amy’s finding the gun near Humphrey. It looked as if she’d been telling the truth, that the gun she’d had in her hand when we’d walked through the door was Humphrey’s. Humphrey must have been carrying it for protection. Not that it had done her much good.

  “Nice for her.”

  “Isn’t it.” I perched on the edge of his desk. “I want you to run these people for me.”

  Paul reached for his pen. I gave him Geoff’s, Hillary’s, Amy’s, and Louis’s names. “See what you come up with.”

  “You got money for this?” he asked as he jotted them down.

  I showed him the deposit slip for Rose Taylor’s cash.

  He whistled. “That’s rather a departure from the usual low-life scum you deal with.”

  “Charming as always.”

  He winked again. “That’s why the ladies love me. I’ll give you a jingle when I have something. And listen, my offer about working with me, it still stands.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. And Paul . . .” He looked up. “You’re working the thirties-gumshoe bit a little too hard.”

  On the way back to the store I stopped at George’s house and knocked on his door. I wanted to see how he was doing after the other night. Not well, I decided when he came outside. His eyes were bloodshot, and his clothes, a stained T-shirt and a dirty pair of shorts, looked as if he’d slept in them. He needed a shave, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought I smelled the faint odor of alcohol coming off him.

  “I’m working,” he told me when he saw me. He had a withdrawn expression on his face.

  “Can’t I come in for a few minutes?”

  George glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got the time. Is there anything else?”

  “So now we’re doing polite?”

  “Robin, what is it?” And he tapped his fingers on his thighs while he waited for me to complete my sentence.

  “I think we should talk about what happened with Sinclair.”

  “Let’s not.” George’s expression hardened even more. “There nothing to discuss. I lost my temper, I punched him. End of story. Hopefully, he wouldn’t file assault charges.”

  “George . . .”

  He lifted a hand. “Stop.”

  “But . . .”

  “No. I don’t like who I am when I’m with people like Sinclair; I don’t like what I become. That’s why I quit the force. So I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. I’m happy where I am now, studying history. I enjoy going to the library and teaching my classes. The other night . . . It just swept everything away, and I was back on the street again.

  “I don’t want that.” Then he added, “Although, I’d rather be dealing with the crackheads on the corner than with the group you are currently mixed up with. At least with them you know where you stand.” And with that he went inside and left me standing in the heat.

  I had a lump in my throat all the way to the store.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Later that evening, I went to hear Hillary sing in a North Side bar called Quotations. The full moon’s reddish tinge and the clarity of the air gave the streets the feel of a Rousseau painting. A gust of wind had kicked up, and I was watching a sheet of newspaper dancing across the pavement when Paul called me on my cell phone.

  “Darlin’,” he said, his voice sounding slurred from too much drink. I heard the plaint of country western playing in the background. “I got the info you wanted.”

  “Where are you?”

  He giggled and told me what he’d found out. But aside from the fact that Geoff had been a tennis pro before he met Rose and had two DWI arrests and that Hillary also had a DWI in her past, he hadn’t been able to turn up too much of interest.

  “You wanna join me? Keep old Paulie company? We could look together.”

  “I don’t do country western.” And I pressed the OFF switch. As long as I was on the phone, I tried George again, but either he wasn’t in or he wasn’t answering. “You’d better start talking to me,” I told his machine as I turned onto North State Street. Then I turned off my cell and considered what I was about to do.

  Hillary and I hadn’t parted well the last time we’d spoken. She’d accused me of betraying her to her mother. Even though I hadn’t, I could see her point of view. I wondered what she’d say to me now, especially in light of what had happened recently, as I parked in front of Quotations.

  Located in a working-class neighborhood, the club faced the backside of Saint Joe’s, offering an extensive view of the hospital’s concrete wall. It had been in existence for a little over six months. If the number of people sitting at the bar was any indication, getting through months number seven and eight was going to be somewhat iffy.

  I’d been told that the owner was a twenty-four-year-old college dropout called Little Johnny Q. He’d picked up his nickname to distinguish him from the four other Johnnies in his Cazenovia elementary-school class. The only son of a former county district attorney, he’d flunked out of Cornell due to his penchant for alcohol and weed, at which point he’d gone down to the city, kicked around, and come back after deciding he wanted to be Syracuse’s new impresario.

  His father, who was not exactly poor, had come up with the backing, and the kid had bought an old neighborhood bar, gutted the place, and decked it out in classic Soho industrial style. Quotations had a long, gleaming steel bar, a raised dance floor, exposed wires and pipes, and wall studs that would rip your sweater if you got too close—as well as lighting so dark you’d have to light a match to read the menu. And that, of course, was the problem. Johnny Q had put a trendy club in a neighborhood where the restaurants had never stopped serving mashed potatoes, iceberg lettuce, and Spanish rice. People that lived here not only didn’t get “it” but didn’t want to, and from what I could see, the place wasn’t drawing anyone from the other side of town. It was Thursday night, traditionally a night to hit the clubs, and this one was three-quarters empty.

  I paid my entrance fee, got my hand stamped, and walked inside. Hillary was up on the small stage making like Billie Holiday to a handful of chattering people who weren’t paying attention but should have. Because the lady was good. I was surprised at how good. Somehow I’d thought she’d be strictly amateur, one of those karaoke wanna-bes, but she had a real edge to her. She could have sung in any club in New York City and co
me out okay.

  Despite the heat, Hillary was wearing a long-sleeved black cotton sweater over a white tank top and a tight black rayon skirt that was slit up to her thigh and made her look even thinner than she already was. Her black hair formed a lank curtain around her face, and her eye makeup was smudged under her eyes, giving her face a bruised quality. She was leaning against the piano, her eyelids half-closed, her hands clasped around the mike, swaying very gently from side to side, seemingly oblivious to the whirring of the ceiling fan above her.

  She gave off the feeling that she was singing to herself and that I’d wandered into someplace private, someplace I wasn’t supposed to be. Her voice was rich, with a vibrato that she could turn on and off. And then suddenly it was over. The piano player stopped playing. Hillary opened her eyes, replaced the microphone on the stand, and abruptly walked off the stage without glancing at the audience or giving them a chance to applaud. The piano player, who looked as if he worked as an actuary in an insurance agency in his button-down short-sleeve shirt, got up, gave an abrupt little bow, and followed Hillary down the two steps and into the back.

  I shook off the seeds of sadness her song had planted in me, walked over to the bar, and ordered a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale from the bartender. A good-looking guy in an aging-hippie kind of way, he was broad-shouldered, stood a little over six feet, and sported a suntan and a long gray ponytail, but there was a vacancy around the eyes that didn’t inspire confidence. When he put my glass down in front of me, I asked him when Hillary was going to be singing again.

  He shrugged. “You got me. Sometimes she does two or three sets a night. Sometimes she just packs it up and goes home. It all depends on her mood. And the audience.” He pursed his mouth as he took stock of the room. “Tonight I have the feeling she’s going to go home early.”

  “She’s good.”

  “If you like that kind of music.” He stifled a yawn and glanced at his watch. “Myself, I prefer listening to something a little more upbeat.” His eyes drifted off, following a girl in tight white pants, a tank top, and mules who’d just gotten up.