Blowing Smoke

by Barbara Block

  Their tiredness must have been contagious, because suddenly I felt exhausted, too. The adrenaline I’d felt after leaving Quotations, that had buoyed me up on my ride over here, had vanished, leaving me doubting my judgment. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this. Maybe Johnny Q would bust out of the closet and call Sinclair before I could get to him. Maybe I should have dialed the INS right away and let them handle it. But I wanted to have a look at Sinclair’s records before they moved in and shut the place down.

  If the records were still there. I figured it for a fifty-fifty possibility.

  Because the truth of the matter was that even if the INS wasn’t there, the homicide guys had probably already sealed off the place and carted them away. I wouldn’t know until I arrived. It wasn’t as if I could dial them up and tell them to wait for me. I was a nobody. I had no official status whatsoever. No one had to talk to me. Nor would they except to ask me what the hell I was doing back here and drag me down and take another statement from me. Something I preferred to skip.

  This trip might turn out to be a gigantic waste of time. But I didn’t care. Even now, with my bones aching with fatigue, I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. The idea of motion, of movement, seemed both a necessity and a solace. I had the feeling that if I stopped, if I remained still, I might fall apart. It was better to keep going. After all, things in motion remained in motion. It was an immutable physical law. Stop and you risked going over the edge of the whirlpool. And anyway, if I was doing something, I wasn’t drinking.

  I spent the rest of the twenty-five minutes it took to make the crossing from Kingston to Wolfe Island staring over the railing at the black water below and seeing Murphy and myself in the wooden motorboat he’d dredged up from somewhere, cackling maniacally, drunk off our asses, sailing down the East River. How we’d managed not to kill ourselves or anyone else, I didn’t know. I was thinking about how it had taken us four tries to dock the boat at the City Island slip when I realized that the ferry had stopped. We were here.

  Once I drove my car off the ramp, there was no one on the road, and I made good time. I’d been thinking that there’d be a squad car around keeping an eye on things, but except for a screech owl on a branch of one of the pine trees, the parking lot of the Center for Enlightened Self-Awareness was empty. The guests had left. They’d certainly gotten a lot more than they’d bargained for. They’d come here for a little peace and gotten a lesson in the duality of the universe.

  It looked as if Sinclair had gone, too. I wasn’t surprised. Given Sinclair’s history, it was the logical thing for him to do. It’s what I would have done in his place. Why stick around when there’s trouble? It’s better to just disappear. He was probably on his way to points south by now, planning his next scam. It looked as if George could stop worrying about getting stuck with an assault charge. Although I didn’t think that would make George feel better. George. Man oh man. Just thinking about him made my stomach churn.

  It wasn’t my fault he’d lost it with Sinclair and beat him up. It wasn’t my fault that it had brought back all of his bad memories. That it had ruptured the view of himself as an academic that he was so carefully constructing. Not talking to me wasn’t going to help. I was really, really tired of his withdrawing every time anything went wrong. I was tired of waiting for him to decide that it was okay to talk to me. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Well, screw him. If he didn’t phone me soon, it was going to be a long time before he heard from me again. I could see our relationship ending, as Eliot wrote, “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

  I took a deep breath and told myself to think about Sinclair. He was simple. His motives were clear. I focused on how much money he’d taken with him as I drove over the lawn, up to the lodge, and got out. A sign on the door read: Closed Until Further Notice. Down a ways I could see the flickering of the yellow crime-scene tape, a reminder of where I’d found Pat Humphrey

  Twigs from the branches brought down by the storm crunched beneath my feet as I walked down there. A warm breeze was coming off the river, bringing with it the smell of fish. The pop, pop, pop of fireworks going off floated by in the wind. I studied the tape’s boundaries, looking for what, I wasn’t sure.

  There was nothing to see, nothing that was going to help me with Humphrey’s death. I crouched down and sifted the dirt through my fingers. A beetle crawled onto my hand. I let it get to my palm before I brushed it off, wiped my hands on my pants, and stood up.

  On impulse, I went over to a rock where a small clump of wild asters was growing, plucked a sprig, and laid it on the place where Pat Humphrey had died. It seemed the least I could do. I said a short, silent prayer, went back to the lodge, and got a flashlight out of my car. The cops had padlocked the door and sealed it, not that that was going to stop me.

  I picked up a big rock, walked around to the side away from the lake, and smashed one of the windows. When I finished knocking the remaining pieces of glass out of the sash, I hoisted myself up and climbed inside.

  I went directly into Sinclair’s office. I’d pretty much expected the police to have impounded his records, but they hadn’t. Everything seemed the way I’d left it when I’d last been here, right down to the splotches of blood from where Amy had shot herself. I drew the curtains, covered the lamp with a cloth to dim the light further, and got down to work.

  I spent the next two hours going over Sinclair’s records. His records for the center were in good shape. His accountant would have been proud. He’d kept all his tax, water, and phone bills. Nothing unusual in any of them, although I noted that Sinclair had made frequent calls to Pat Humphrey’s and Rose Taylor’s numbers. By now I was positive Rose Taylor was the person who had set up the foundation that was responsible for giving Sinclair this house. The question was, what relevance did that fact have? Rich people often donated property to religious and educational institutions so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it. That Rose Taylor had didn’t mean that she knew what Sinclair was doing here. On the other hand, all her help was Hispanic. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

  I moved on to another file, which listed the center’s members and the amount of money each one had donated. Most had given between three and five thousand dollars, some had given as much as ten thousand, while a couple of unlucky souls had donated twenty grand each to the building of a temple. Sinclair even had a brochure printed detailing the structure. It was supposed to have stained-glass windows and everything. All told, I figured Sinclair had between one and two hundred thousand grand in the bank from contributions alone. Not bad for an ex-con who’d gotten religion. And if he had just left it at that and invested it in the stock market, things would have been fine, but he hadn’t. He’d branched off into another sideline.

  Maybe someone had suggested it to him. Or maybe he was in Canada and someone had approached him and asked him for a lift over to the island. Offered to pay him. And he’d agreed. And the man or woman Sinclair had transported had told his friends and they’d gotten in touch with Sinclair. And then he’d started providing other services.

  The money was so easy, it had probably seemed irresistible. It was strictly a no-muss, no-fuss operation. He had a couple of boats already. Just bring the undocumented workers over from Canada on them, put them up in a few of the cabins, and then transport them to wherever they were going and get paid for doing it. Due to the beefed-up presence of border patrols on the Mexican-U.S. border over the last few years, it was now cheaper and easier for someone to fly to Canada and come into the United States that way than to pay a smuggler to get him across the border down South. Go figure.

  Of course, so far I hadn’t found records or evidence detailing any traffic of that sort. Either Sinclair had been smart enough not to record his profits—or do something like claim a tax deduction on wear and tear on his boat, as someone that had recently been arrested for cigarette smuggling had done—or he’d taken his records with him. A more likely possibility. Or there were no records and I had an extremely overactive
imagination. I pulled out a couple of cartons by the desk into the middle of the floor and dumped them out. There was nothing in them but old newspapers and magazines. I thumbed through half of them in case there was something of interest, but from the looks of it, Sinclair had been saving them for the recycle bin.

  After I searched his desk, which yielded nothing except a collection of bad pornography and a number of pens and pencils, I went through the clothes in his closet, at which point I finally found something of interest. A theater stub for a movie that Sinclair had attended the night Shana Driscoll had been killed was in one of his pants pockets. According to the time marked on it, Sinclair had been happily watching cars exploding and large men beating each other up when Shana was being drowned. That was good to know, not that it helped me much. I put the stub back where I’d found it, replaced the boxes with the newspapers, and tidied up and closed Sinclair’s file drawers before I turned out the lights and left.

  It was now a little past three in the morning. I decided to have one more look at the cabin Pat Humphrey and Amy had been staying in. I wasn’t expecting to find much there, either, but I couldn’t get off the island until 5:45 A.M., when the first ferry of the day went back to Kingston, so this seemed as good a way as any to kill a few hours.

  Even with my brights on, it was difficult staying on the path, and I bumped and humped my way down it, my tires crunching over rocks. As I got out of the car, I saw bats flitting around under the trees. They were eating the mosquitoes the rain had brought out. They weren’t doing a good enough job, though, because the mosquitoes started biting me as soon as I stepped outside. I kept slapping at them as I walked to the cabin, wishing I’d brought bug spray with me.

  The door was open. No one had bothered to secure it. I stepped in and flicked on the light. Someone had tidied up the place. The beds were made, the clothes that had been lying on them were gone, but the room was still impregnated with Humphrey’s perfume. I looked around some more. Except for a couple of aspirin, the nightstand was empty. I got down and glanced under the bed frames. There was nothing there except for some dust bunnies and a lone white sock. The dresser drawers were empty, too, but in the closet, all the way in the back, buried behind a couple of ripped screen windows, I found a box filled with stuff.

  I lifted it up, carried it over to the bed, and tipped the contents out. The mattress groaned as I sat down on it. There were pictures of Pat Humphrey when she was growing up. A six-year-old Pat Humphrey—dressed up for Halloween as a fairy princess holding a wand in one hand and a goody bag in the other—with her mother and father. An older Pat Humphrey embracing the family dog, a golden retriever, who was wearing a T-shirt and hat. Pat Humphrey and family at a country fair. Pat Humphrey and her date at the senior prom. Pat Humphrey’s high-school graduation picture, posed with her family in front of her high school, G. B. Delworth. The name was printed right on the front of the school in big black letters.

  I slipped the picture into my backpack and continued looking. There were pictures of Pat Humphrey in her twenties in a bathing suit at a beach and pictures of her on a tennis court holding a racket and ball and smiling. I picked up some recent pictures of her in a waitress uniform, standing in a dining room in front of a large stone fireplace with a fire going in it, holding a trayful of drinks aloft.

  I found a notebook from a class she’d taken in English poetry and a small stuffed dog, the kind they give out as prizes at county fairs. I found a couple of small trophies that she’d received for winning tennis tournaments when she’d been in high school and one for winning a swimming competition and another one for gymnastics.

  I picked up Pat Humphrey’s photos and shuffled them around, dealing them out like a pack of cards, but they didn’t provide any answers. Neither did staring at them. I got up and stretched the kinks out of my back, then returned everything to the carton. I knew I should put the carton back in the closet where I’d found it, but I decided to take it with me instead. Just in case.

  I stood in the center of the room and let my mind go blank. Johnny Q had told me to talk to Sinclair and Amy. Sinclair was gone. Amy wasn’t. She was at home, having just been released from the hospital. But she had been here. Yet there was no sign of her presence. It looked as if someone had come and collected her possessions and left Pat Humphrey’s. Why?

  My gaze drifted around the room. If there was anything else here, I couldn’t see it. I closed the door on my way out and went on to my last stop. As long as I had time, I figured I might as well check out the cabin Sinclair’s other guests—the ones that weren’t signing the register—had been staying in. I was calculating that the cabin was set somewhere back in the woods, away from the main drag.

  The trees got thicker and the path smaller and rougher as I drove down the trail that was doing stand-in duty for a road. Finally, I was driving over stones and branches, and I had to stop before I ripped the bottom of my car out. I halted, took my flashlight out, and began walking. A fog was rolling in, making it harder to see, and the dew on the long grass soaked my legs and sandals. The hoarse croaking of a bullfrog broke the silence from time to time. I found myself tripping over twigs and stones as I walked farther into the pine grove. I was just about to turn back when I spotted what I was sure was the cabin I was looking for ahead.

  I was positive I was right as I got closer. In contrast to the other cabins, this one looked neglected. The screen door was ripped, and a shutter was hanging down from one of the windows. A trash can outside overflowed with refuse. When I pushed on the door, it opened with a creak. There was a hole where the lock should have been. When I walked inside, the smell of unwashed bedding overwhelmed me. I tried the light switch, but it didn’t work.

  I shone my light around the room. It was filled with beds, twelve of them, each arranged as close to each other as possible. A few of them had stained mattresses; others had bottom sheets over them. The floor was strewn with fast-food wrappers. A table in the middle had paper plates with pizza crusts on them, piled grease-stained pizza boxes, and half-empty bottles of beer. I picked up the pizza box. Someone had scribbled a bunch of addresses and phone numbers on it.

  It was too early in the morning to call them now. Instead, I copied them into my notebook, closed the door, went back to my car, and drove down to the ferry. Once I got to the parking lot, I called the local investigation unit of the INS on my cell and left an anonymous tip. Somehow it seemed simpler that way. Experience has taught me that the less I have to do with the federal government, the happier I am.

  I checked my watch. I had an hour and a half to go before the ferry came in. By the time I got to the pier, a few streaks of light were visible on the horizon. I was the only car in the lot. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but the damned birds were chirping so loudly I couldn’t.

  I raised my windows to shut out the noise, but then it was too hot.

  Finally I gave up, opened the windows back up, and lit a cigarette, the last one I had in the pack. I took out the sheet of phone numbers and addresses I’d copied down off the pizza box and looked at them carefully.

  Which was when I realized that I knew some of the addresses on the list.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Manuel was sound asleep on my living-room sofa when I got home. He was curled up on his side with Zsa Zsa snuggled up against him. When she saw me, she jumped off and came running over, stopped a couple of inches away, made sure I was watching, squatted, and peed on the floor to tell me exactly what she thought about my leaving her alone.

  “Bitch,” I said. But in a nice way. She was right.

  She came over and allowed me to pet her, after which she pranced back over to Manuel, wagged her rump, and jumped up next to him. I knew she’d forgive me—that’s one of the good things about dogs—but not before she made me suffer for a little while.

  “Be that way,” I told her, and headed into the kitchen for a roll of paper towels.

  I checked my answering machine. There was a message from
Rose Taylor’s lawyer asking me to call and a message from Tim telling me he was opening the store, and that was it. Nothing from George. If that’s the way he wanted it, I told myself, fine. Screw him. I opened the fridge door and downed some of the orange juice Manuel had bought and devoured a half-eaten doughnut that was sitting on the kitchen counter. But that just made me hungrier. I felt slightly guilty about finishing the box of Frankenberry Manuel had also purchased but not guilty enough to not eat it. Then I wiped up Zsa Zsa’s mess, went upstairs, turned on the fan, and collapsed on my bed. I fell asleep instantly.

  I woke up at two o’clock in the afternoon feeling groggy and out of sorts. Zsa Zsa was splayed out next to me with her head on my pillow. I knew better than to tell her to get off. I stumbled out of bed, took a long shower, got dressed, and headed downstairs while she looked on. Manuel had left a note for me in the kitchen.

  “Thanks for eating all my food,” he’d written. “You owe me $7.53. We need milk, eggs, and more cereal. Catch you later.”

  It dawned on me as I read the note that Manuel was planning on staying for a while. Again. George wouldn’t like it, but that didn’t matter. Manuel made me laugh. Which, at the moment, was a hell of a lot more than I could say for George. I balled up the note and threw it in the trash.

  I tried returning Moss Ryan’s call, but he wasn’t in. I left a message, then fed the cat, who’d just come meandering in, whistled for Zsa Zsa, and headed out the door. It was late, and I had several people I wanted to speak to. I figured I’d start with the Petersons, Bethany’s parents, since I already knew them. Their address had been one of the ones listed on the pizza box. I stopped at the minimart, gassed up the car, grabbed a large coffee and a couple of doughnuts, and headed off to Caz.

  As I came around a bend in the road, I caught glimpses of Cazenovia Lake between the trees. It was filled with Saturday sailors manning their boats. A wedding reception was in progress at one of the inns. Cars were parked all along the town’s main street. But once I got near to where the Petersons lived, everything was quiet except for the hum of the occasional lawn mover. I hadn’t called to tell them I was coming, and Millie Peterson seemed flustered to see me when she answered the door. She was wearing an old stretched-out T-shirt and stained Bermuda shorts. Her face was shiny with sweat. Her blond hair stuck out in clumps. Specks of dirt clung to her cheeks. I apologized for dropping by without calling first.