Blowing Smoke

by Barbara Block

  “Moss has been trying to get hold of you,” she continued. “He wants to know what progress you’re making.”

  “I called him back earlier today. He wasn’t there.”

  “He’s at the club.” Rose absentmindedly brushed the pearls with the tips of her fingers. “You can reach him there. So where have you been?”

  “Out at Wolfe Island. Among other places.”

  “Wolfe Island,” she mused aloud. “It’s been years since I’ve been there. Sanford and I used to have a nice time there when the children were little. His father built the place as a fishing lodge.”

  “That’s what Louis said.”

  A smile flickered across Rose’s face. “He used to love to catch frogs when he was little. He always wanted to bring them back with him. He used to cry when I made him let them go.”

  “The lodge you’re talking about. Did you turn it over to a man called Sinclair?”

  “Sinclair?” Rose looked puzzled.

  “The Reverend Ascending Moon, the one who renamed your place the Center for Enlightened Self-Awareness.”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded. “Him. Of course. How could I have forgotten?”

  “I was wondering the same thing myself.”

  “Do you know how many charitable donations I give each year?” she demanded. “Exactly,” she said when I demurred. “Amy begged me to.” Rose rested her hand on the pearls. “The reverend needed a place, and he seemed to be doing Amy some good. She seemed quieter, more at peace. I couldn’t see any harm.”

  “And you get to write the property off.”

  “That, too,” Rose agreed. “I won’t deny it. I don’t see anything wrong with helping someone as well as getting a little bit back for myself. Isn’t that what enlightened self-interest is all about? I’m not religious, but when Sinclair told me about his beliefs, I thought they made a lot of sense.”

  “What are they?”

  “You have to give back.”

  “Mostly to him, it seems.”

  “It’s a good principal nevertheless.”

  “Did Amy also tell you Sinclair has a sideline?”

  “I know he teaches yoga.”

  “Besides that.”

  “Tell me,” Rose ordered. “I don’t like guessing games.”

  “He smuggles undocumented workers into the country.”

  Rose’s eyes narrowed. She compressed her mouth into a thin line. She looked angry, but I couldn’t tell if she was angry because of what Sinclair was doing or because I’d found out about it.

  “That’s a serious accusation. Do you have any proof?”

  “I’m sure the authorities will find some if they look.”

  “Can I infer from your comment that you’ve already notified them?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How enterprising of you.” Rose steepled her fingers together and rested her chin on them. “And what does Sinclair say to this?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s gone, along with the men he brought over.”

  “So where’s your evidence?”

  “The guy who owns Quotations . . .”

  “Fred’s child . . .”

  “If you say so. He’s involved. I think he’ll testify.”

  Rose tapped her nails on the wheelchair’s railing. “You realize you’re talking about a relatively minor offense here?”

  “Possibly,” I conceded.

  “Definitely,” Rose corrected. “In addition, I know Fred. He’s extremely well connected. Believe me, he’s not about to let his only son go to jail. Or allow himself or his friends to be caught in whatever you’re conjuring up.”

  “I’m not conjuring up anything.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Now my question to you is, do you think this alleged sideline of Sinclair’s is connected in some way to Pat Humphrey’s death?”

  “It might be.”

  “Might isn’t good enough. I’m paying you a rather large sum of money to investigate a specific subject, not go tearing off after anything that takes your fancy.”

  “This found me. I didn’t find it.”

  “How far have you gotten with Patti? What have you found out about my children?” Then, before I could reply, Rose raised her hand. “No. Stop. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Tell Moss. I don’t think I can take anymore.”

  We heard a low moan.

  Rose sighed. “That’s Amy.”

  Tom moved. It was like watching a boulder come to life. “Do you want me to take care of her, Mrs. T?” he asked.

  “No.” Rose shook her head. “Finish your lunch. I’ll see what she wants. If I need you, I’ll call.”

  I followed Rose into the bedroom. She looked as if she wanted to tell me not to come in, but she didn’t.

  Amy was lying in the bed Shana had recently occupied. One of her arms was in a sling, while the other lay down by her side. She was dressed in a white cotton nightgown. Her usually wild hair had been combed off her face and secured with a large barrette. She was watching television with the sound turned off. Her eyes were dull. Her face slack. A thin strand of saliva made its way out of the corner of her mouth and down her jaw.

  “She’s been like this since we took her home from the hospital,” Rose explained as she wheeled herself toward her daughter. She reached over and patted Amy’s hand. “Everything will be fine,” she told her. “I promise.”

  Amy continued to watch television.

  “What is she on?” I asked Rose.

  “Something to quiet her nerves.”

  “It must be a pretty strong something. I’d say it’s doing a little bit more than that.”

  “The doctor says he’ll be able to lower her dosage after a while.”

  “She didn’t seem bad enough to warrant this the last time I saw her.”

  “She got worse in the hospital. Much worse.” Rose turned to look at me. “Moss says this is the best thing to do.”

  “Do you always follow what he says?”

  “Not always, but he is my adviser. Which is why I’m not holding it against you that you didn’t tell me about Amy’s involvement in ... you know . . . Patti’s . . .”

  “Death?”

  “Yes.”

  The telephone rang. A moment later, Tom called Rose to the phone. I went over and sat down next to Amy. She didn’t look at me. She kept her gaze focused on the television. I took her hand in mine and stroked it.

  “How’s it going?” I asked her.

  She kept watching the screen.

  “Sinclair’s taken off.”

  She didn’t raise her eyes.

  “I think the police are going to arrest him.”

  “Good.” Her eyes were still on the screen, and her voice was so low that it took me a minute to realize she was speaking.

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he lied to me.”

  “About what?”

  Amy scrunched up her face. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “He told me he loved me. He told me we would be together. If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be back in that crummy apartment.”

  I thought back to the scene I’d witnessed between Sinclair and Pat Humphrey on the beach. “When did you find out that he was seeing Pat Humphrey?”

  “The morning she died.” Amy looked at me for the first time. “I know this is a cliché, but I thought she was my friend. I thought she cared for me. But she didn’t. She betrayed me. Just like everyone else. She’s a liar. She lied about everything. Everything. She said she didn’t, but she did.”

  Now Amy’s tears were falling faster.

  “How did you find out about her and Sinclair?”

  “I saw them. I saw them together. I wanted to talk to him. I’d had an idea about how to attract more people to the temple, and she was coming out of the room.”

  A picture of Amy, her skirt pushed over her hips when we walked in on her and Sinclair after we’d found Pat Humphrey’s body,
flashed through my mind. “Yet you and he—”

  I didn’t get any more out before Amy started yelling, “He made me. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.” She brought her hands up and began clawing at her cheeks. Lines of blood appeared.

  I reached over, grabbed hold of her hands, and wrested them down to her side. “Stop it,” I ordered. “Just stop it.”

  Tom materialized by my side, hypodermic in hand. Amy screamed as the needle went into her forearm. She went limp almost immediately.

  “Get away from her,” he growled as I let go of Amy.

  “You see what I mean,” Rose Taylor said from the doorway. She was clutching the pearls around her neck with her right hand. “You see what I’m telling you. My daughter is crazy.”

  The string broke, and the pearls cascaded onto the floor.

  Tom got down on the floor and began picking them up.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The thwack of Geoff’s racket hitting tennis balls punctured the stillness of the afternoon. I caught sight of him as Zsa Zsa and I rounded the bend in the path that led to the cottage. He was totally engrossed in what he was doing. I don’t know a lot about tennis, but the serves he was dishing up looked pretty good to me.

  As I glanced up toward the house, I caught a glimpse of the maid who’d let me in the first time I’d come around, the maid Geoff said wasn’t here. She was carrying a laundry basket. I started toward her, but when she saw me, she turned and limped back inside. I went around and knocked on the back door, but she didn’t answer, and after peeking in the kitchen windows, I finally gave it up for a bad job and walked away. Whether or not she had a green card wasn’t my business. I didn’t really care.

  I’ve always thought that line about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette was a crock of shit, but now I’d gone and done just that. A woman like Rose’s maid would be gone in the blink of an eye. I phoned the guy at the Hispanic Alliance and told him what had happened. He said he’d see what he could do, but I still felt lousy as I walked back.

  As I started up my car, I decided that contrary to what her mother wished to believe, Amy wasn’t crazy—unless crazy with guilt counted. Geoff’s comment about welcoming “our little murderer” home was a distinct possibility. If Rose Taylor wanted to, she certainly had the power and the money to keep Amy a virtual prisoner in that cottage. Maybe that was the idea.

  As I drove to the country club, I contemplated which would be worse, being a ward of the state or a ward of Rose Taylor. The parking lot was crowded with Saabs and Mercedes and SUVs, and I had to circle three times before I could find a space for my dented-up Taurus. I stopped briefly to admire an MGB. I wondered if Geoff had finally gotten his present from Rose as I took in the clubhouse terrace. Moss Ryan was sitting at a round table, under a striped umbrella, drinking a beer and playing cards with three other men. Everyone was laughing and looking as if they were having a good time.

  When he saw me approaching him, he said something to them, put his cards down, pushed his chair away, and stood up. As he came toward me, I saw he was wearing his golfing clothes, a yellow Izod polo shirt, and bright lime green slacks, and I wondered again why it was that when men play golf, any sartorial intelligence they’ve acquired seems to vanish. Then I noted that Ryan looked slightly ill at ease in his togs, as if he couldn’t adjust to being out of a suit.

  “Let’s go back inside the club, shall we?” he said as he steered me into what was the main lounge.

  It was a cozy kind of place, with large, overstuffed sofas and club chairs, the kind of place where you’d sit in the winter and have a cup of hot mulled cider. But this was summer, and the large room was empty. Everyone was outside. Moss Ryan leaned against the wall of the fieldstone fireplace. “I was just speaking to Rose. She called me a few minutes before you showed up.”

  “And?”

  “She’s extremely upset.”

  I put my backpack down and massaged my shoulder. I really had to take some things out of it unless I wanted to have a permanent kink in my back. “I kinda figured that out. The pearls tipped me off.”

  “They’re South Sea,” Moss Ryan absentmindedly informed me. I felt as if I were suddenly taking a tour of a landmark house. “Hand-strung and knotted. Very expensive. Sanford gave them to her on their second anniversary. I helped him choose them.”

  “How nice.” Murphy had given me a set of knives he’d picked up at a discount place for our second anniversary. I changed the subject. “I take it she’s not very happy about my handling of Sinclair.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Like Amy?” Always go with the obvious. That’s my motto.

  Moss Ryan nodded. “She needs peace and quiet. What she doesn’t need is someone barging in and upsetting her.”

  “I’m not the thing that’s upsetting her.” I waited for Moss Ryan to ask me what I meant. When he didn’t, I said, “Tell me, you don’t really think you can establish an insanity plea by keeping her doped up like that, do you?”

  “I’m not establishing anything.” He feigned stifling a yawn. “In fact, I have nothing to do with Amy’s legal troubles. I handle civil matters, not criminal ones. My role is Rose’s legal adviser. That’s it.

  “But,” Moss continued, “you saw Amy. She’s hysterical. She’s self-destructive. She’s begun to mutilate herself.” He shuddered. “She needs to be protected from herself. I think there can be very little argument about that.”

  “If that’s the case, she needs to be in a good psychiatric hospital.”

  “I don’t think that Rose’s strategies—not a felicitous word choice, I admit—need to concern you at the moment.”

  “Let me guess. She’s firing me.”

  Moss Ryan waved hello to someone out in the lobby before replying. “Not firing. It’s true she wants you off the case for now. But what she wants to do instead is keep you on retainer so you’ll be there if any future problems arise. To that end, she wants you to keep the money she’s given you as a gesture of goodwill.”

  What a nice, polite way to buy someone off, I decided. So this is how the rich did things. “I take it you want a report.”

  “Of course.” He smoothed the front of his polo shirt down. “But there’s no great hurry.”

  “Why the change?”

  “I think, if truth be known, that Rose doesn’t want to know what her children have been doing. She says she does, but she doesn’t. Mind you,” Moss Ryan continued, “I don’t agree with Rose’s decision. But it’s not mine to make. And now, if you’ll excuse me”—he made a sweeping gesture with his hand—“I have to get back to my friends. I’m winning, and I don’t want my luck to change.”

  I picked up my backpack. “Just so you know, I’m putting the rest of the money in the envelope with the report.”

  “You must do as your conscience dictates.”

  “I intend to.”

  Moss Ryan shrugged and walked away.

  As I watched him, I wondered why Rose was trying to pay me off. Who was she protecting?

  Did she already know that one of her children was a heroin user and the other a transvestite? That her son, Louis, was involved with a drug dealer?

  Or maybe I was wrong.

  Maybe Moss Ryan was telling me the truth.

  Maybe it was a matter of scale.

  After all, ten thousand isn’t a large sum of money to someone like Rose Taylor.

  It was like my spending a dollar on the lottery. If it paid off, fine. And if it didn’t, so what.

  I was still mulling over my conversation with Moss Ryan as I went back outside. This must have been Rose Taylor family day, because I was halfway down the clubhouse steps when I spotted Geoff coming toward me, tennis racket tucked under his arm.

  “I don’t know why he bothers competing,” I overheard someone in back of me say. “Ever since he married Sanford’s widow, he’s lost his edge.”

  “He was good playing mixed doubles, though,” his companion replied as the two me
n came abreast of me.

  “He’s gotten fat. And slow.”

  “So what do you think about the Orangemen making the playoffs this year?”

  “You know, I’m not sure.” Then the two men walked by me, and I couldn’t hear any more of what they were saying.

  As Geoff came closer, he raised his free hand in a salute. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “I came to talk to Moss Ryan.”

  “I know. Rose wasn’t too pleased with you.”

  “So I understand.”

  “She’s given orders to the staff to have you shot on sight. Just kidding,” Geoff added. “Just kidding.”

  “So what do you think about Amy?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not paid to think. I’m paid to shut my mouth and do what I’m told.”

  “That must be difficult.”

  “It all depends on what you want out of life.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “I used to think it was to be able to play tennis and live in a fancy house and drive a nice car. Now I’m not so sure.” He glanced at his watch. “The tournament is going to start soon. I’m going to be late.”

  I watched him vanish into the afternoon heat. Then I went back to Noah’s Ark, but I couldn’t settle down. I kept seeing Amy’s face. I kept wondering why Rose had called me off. Then I started thinking about George and what I should do about him, call him or not, break it off or not—which somehow was even worse—so I went back to thinking about Rose Taylor.

  Later that evening, after I’d closed the store, I went over to the apartment where Amy lived. I figured, if the police hadn’t been through her stuff, maybe there was something in there that could shed some light on what was going on. After all, just because Rose had told me to stand down didn’t mean I had to. Especially since I still had her money in my bank account. She’d told me to keep the whole ten thousand. If you thought about it, I was actually doing her a favor by just billing her for the hours I was going to put in and returning the rest.

  Amy lived in an apartment on James Street. The building was one of those mansions that had seen better days and was now divided into several apartments. I got the landlady to open the door by telling her I was Amy’s sister and that I’d come to collect some of her belongings.