Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  “So what happened?” asked Jeffrey when he didn’t go on.

  “Nothing yet. I had copies of everything here at my house. My meeting with them is scheduled for next week.” He smiled quickly.

  He slumped back down in his chair, as if he’d been drained of all his energy in the telling of his tale.

  “Then Mickey committed suicide, and Lily disappeared. Monica was nearly psychotic with grief, medicated to the point of catatonia. I was alone, on the verge of losing everything. Still part of me refused to believe that The New Day was behind it. Part of me believed it was punishment for my selfishness, my foolishness, all the crimes and sins of my life.”

  “When did you come to believe differently?” asked Lydia.

  “When you came to see me, started asking me about The New Day.”

  “Is that why you went there?”

  “I went there to make a deal.”

  Lydia frowned at him. “What kind of a deal, Mr. Samuels?”

  He shrugged. “I have something he wants. He has something I want. I proposed a trade.” Again he fell into silence. Then, “You know what’s brilliant about Rhames is that he doesn’t break you completely. He took Mickey. How? I still don’t quite know but I have an idea. But with the death of my son, he showed me what he was capable of doing. Everything else he just left dangling. He knows that once a man is without hope, once he has nothing to lose, there’s no way to control him. Things might go all right with the IRS, Lily might come home, Monica might come back from her place of grief. Things might normalize a bit someday. He knew it was that hope that would bring me to him.”

  “What does he want?” asked Jeffrey, shaking his head. “It can’t just be your money. All of this… there are easier ways to get a person’s money.”

  “No. Not just my money.”

  “He wants you to say Uncle,” said Lydia. “He wants you to surrender.”

  Tim Samuels shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “So what kind of deal did you make, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia. “Whatever it was, please let us help you.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t need any help, Ms. Strong. I got my family into this and I’ll get them out.”

  “How?”

  “The less you know, the better. And now, I’m going to ask you to leave.”

  “Mr. Samuels, you know we’re going to have to involve the police.”

  He rose and started walking toward the door. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look and followed.

  “You do what you have to do,” he said in the foyer.

  Lydia didn’t like his calm. It was eerily incongruous with the things he was saying.

  Samuels opened the door for them. His hand was pale with strawberry blonde hair and a riot of freckles, nails bitten to the quick. He rested it on the brushed chrome door handle and turned tired eyes on them.

  “Why are you telling us all of this now, Mr. Samuels?” asked Jeffrey.

  He didn’t smile; he didn’t open his mouth. He just looked at them and the answer was clear. That whatever arrangement he’d made, it was too late to stop it. Tim Samuels had wrangled with the devil and lost.

  What now?” asked Lydia as she climbed into the passenger seat of the Kompressor. Jeffrey didn’t answer, just put the car in gear and headed up the drive.

  “We can’t just go,” she said, looking back at the house. She felt the tension of helplessness in her hands, a deep frustration constricting her chest. She knew what Tim Samuels apparently did not; that there were no deals with people like Trevor Rhames.

  “We’re not going. We just need him to think we are.”

  Samuels stood in the doorway and watched them leave, face blank, hands hanging at his sides. Jeff turned off the drive as if they were headed back toward the highway and drove until the house was out of sight. After about a mile, he looped around on a winding back road that left them off on a scenic overlook where they had a clear view of Samuels’ driveway. The house sat below them, a picture postcard of white and gray against a moody sea.

  Lydia didn’t have to ask what they were doing: watching Samuels to see what happened next. She played the conversation they’d had with him over in her mind.

  “Anything bother you about that conversation?” asked Lydia.

  Jeffrey blew a sharp breath out of his nose. “Where do I begin?”

  “You know what’s bothering me?” she asked.

  “Hmm,” said Jeffrey, his chin in his hand, his eyes on the house below them.

  “Monica Samuels.”

  He nodded.

  “I mean, where is she?”

  “Catatonic with grief, doped up on tranquilizers.”

  “According to Samuels,” she said, leaning against the door. “But she wasn’t catatonic if she left him.”

  “Okay.”

  “So where is she?”

  Jeffrey considered it. “Well, we can’t ask Tim Samuels where his wife went. What about that girl you interviewed?”

  “Jasmine.”

  “Maybe she knows.”

  They spent the next few hours in the Kompressor watching the property, hoping that Tim Samuels would leave so that they could follow him, or that someone from The New Day would show up at his house. Neither of those things happened.

  Eventually Dax showed up in the Rover to relieve them. He pulled up behind them and didn’t exit the vehicle. He had a friend with him, a guy Lydia and Jeffrey knew only as Claude. He was mute; he looked like Frankenstein’s monster with a square jaw, bad hair, and assorted scars on his face and hands. Dax couldn’t work alone yet, since he still couldn’t run properly. He was slow and stiff, as they’d seen earlier at The New Day. And anything that didn’t involve him pulling out his big gun and firing from a sitting position was going to be difficult for him. He’d brought Claude along for anything that required speed and finesse. Which was kind of like using a sledgehammer to etch glass.

  “Maybe we should have asked one of the trainees at the firm to work with him,” said Jeffrey, gazing at Dax and Claude in the rearview mirror. They looked like a pair of escapees from an asylum, brooding, drinking Mountain Dew from giant plastic cups.

  Lydia gave him a look. “Dax doesn’t play well with others. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. There are no other houses for a mile or so, so hopefully the villagers won’t see them and come after them with torches.”

  Lydia’s cell phone rang and she looked in the rearview mirror as she answered.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Dax.

  “Anyone who comes in, follow when they leave. If he leaves, trail him.”

  “How long do you want us to stay?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, call us later.”

  She saw him nod in the rearview. She and Jeffrey took off and headed back to the city.

  Monica Samuels moved like she was made out of glass, as though the slightest misstep or sudden noise would cause her to shatter into a thousand pieces.

  “I didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she told Lydia, placing a cup of tea on the table before her. “I couldn’t stand the thought of a hotel. So impersonal. I feel disconnected enough as it is.”

  A call to Jasmine had revealed that Monica Samuels had moved into her daughter’s apartment. Now, Lydia and Monica sat at the small round table in Lily’s tiny kitchen. Monica had asked Lydia if she wanted tea and Lydia had declined. But Monica didn’t seem to hear, boiled some water and made her a cup anyway. The bitter smell of some herbal concoction drifted unpleasantly into Lydia’s nostrils.

  “I’ll stay just until she comes home,” she said with a sad, hopeful smile. “A young woman doesn’t need her mother hanging around.”

  Monica Samuels wasn’t a beautiful woman, not in the classic sense. Her nose was too long, her mouth too thin. Her long dark hair was streaked with wiry grays and badly in need of a shaping. But there was a fire to her, something wild that lived in the deep brown of her eyes. She was dulled by grief and
drugs but there was an unmistakable radiance to her, a captivating mix of sexuality and vulnerability. She wore an oversized blue cardigan, which she wrapped protectively around herself.

  “Timothy told me you were looking for Lily,” she said softly, giving Lydia a look she couldn’t quite read. “The police have given up. You can tell just by their tone, at first. Then they stop returning your calls.”

  She seemed to drift off then, her eyes focusing on a point somewhere above and behind Lydia. Her hand rested wearily on the cup of tea she hadn’t touched.

  “I feel close to Lily here,” said Monica. “Can’t you feel her? Feel her energy?”

  Lydia nodded carefully. She waited a beat before saying, “I need to ask you about The New Day, Mrs. Samuels.”

  She drew in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “They’re like a pestilence Tim let into our lives. They’re eating us alive.” She shook her head then, looked regretful. “But that’s not entirely fair. I’ve made mistakes, too. Awful ones.”

  “What kind of mistakes?”

  “The kind of mistakes that keep you hostage in your efforts to conceal them, to keep them buried in the past. The kind that make you prey to people like Trevor Rhames.”

  Lydia waited but Monica didn’t go on. That frustration she’d felt with Tim Samuels rose up in her chest again. What was it with these people and their secrets?

  “I can’t help you and I can’t help Lily,” said Lydia more harshly than she’d intended, “if you and your husband continue to be secretive and dishonest. What does Rhames have on you? What could be so bad that you will sacrifice both of your children to hide it?”

  Monica smiled patiently at Lydia and leaned into her.

  “I know you’re just trying to help, Ms. Strong,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “But what you don’t understand is that you are just making things worse. I think it would be best if you just leave now.”

  Lydia looked at Monica Samuels and saw a surprising mettle. Lydia shook her head.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I know you don’t,” said Monica, suddenly looking tired. She got up and took the blue ceramic teacup she’d placed before Lydia and walked it over to the sink. Lydia had never touched it. “Believe me; it’s better that way.”

  Lydia stood up from her place at the table. She could see that their conversation was over.

  “Your husband thinks he’s made some kind of deal with Rhames,” she said to Monica’s back. “Do you know what it is?”

  Monica let go of a mirthless laugh. “That’s Timothy for you. Always thinking he can make things right with the last-ditch heroic effort, never realizing that if he behaved properly in the first place there’d be nothing to save.”

  Out on the street, Lydia breathed in the cold air. Monica Samuels had asked her to leave and although she was no closer to Lily than she had been when she arrived, she respected the older woman’s wishes and left her to her grief. She leaned against the brick wall beside the entrance to Lily’s building and wished she had a cigarette, took a deep breath instead.

  The avenue was packed with rush-hour traffic and busy New Yorkers raced by talking on cell phones or staring at the ground beneath their feet. A bicycle messenger barely avoided a nasty collision with a taxicab and the driver rolled down the window to shout something in Spanish. She felt Lily slipping away and she quashed the tide of anxiety that rose at the thought of it. She started walking, bag clutched tight to her side, heels connecting purposefully with the concrete. She became part of the wave of pedestrians on the city sidewalk, lost in her own head, trying to find a way to believe that she hadn’t come to an absolute dead end.

  Sixteen

  Somehow the box she’d left in Jeffrey’s office had made it into their living room and it stood there taunting her for her cowardice as she stepped off the elevator into her apartment. The pile of letters sat on top and snickered their agreement. She stared at it a second and then made her way through the room, up the stairs of their duplex and into the bedroom. It was empty. She dropped her bag and stripped off her coat, throwing both on the bed. She marched back down the stairs, through the living room to the other end of the foyer and down the few small steps into her office where Jeffrey sat at the computer. Hiding, from the look of him.

  “Jeffrey,” she said.

  He swiveled in the chair to look at her. “Don’t be mad,” he said with a grimace. He held up his arms as if to ward off blows. She sighed and threw herself on the couch. He came and sat across from her.

  “I just thought you’d be more comfortable opening it here,” he said quietly. “If you decide that’s what you want to do.”

  She nodded. He was right as usual and she wouldn’t bother arguing. Anyway she wasn’t really thinking about the box. She was thinking about Lily.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling,” she said.

  “About the box.”

  “No, about Tim Samuels.”

  “Did you talk to Dax?” Jeffrey asked, sitting up.

  “I just called and there was no answer. I left a message,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Jeffrey, ever mellow. “He’ll call.”

  “I just feel like we screwed everything up,” she said, looking at him. “I feel like when we went to The New Day we lost every chance we had at finding Lily. I feel like she’s gone, Jeffrey.”

  She had pain in her neck and shoulder and she lifted a hand to rub the muscle there. Jeffrey came and stood beside her. She lifted her feet, he sat, and she dropped her legs on top of his.

  “No,” he said. “We did our best, what we thought was right. We’ll find her.”

  He sounded so certain, she could almost believe he wasn’t just saying it to make her feel better.

  “I don’t think Detective Stenopolis feels the same way.”

  She pulled her tiny phone from the pocket of her jeans and called in for the message she’d saved. She handed it to Jeffrey so he could listen.

  He’d left her a scathing message about how The New Day had cleared out of the building, wiped their computers, and lawyered up by the time he’d arrived. He didn’t say it outright but his tone implied that he blamed them. Which she thought was a little unfair considering that without them, he’d never have even known about The New Day in the first place. It wasn’t like his brilliant detective work had led him there and they’d screwed it up for him.

  “She was here, Lydia,” the detective said in his message, sounding angry and desperate. “I can feel her. But she’s gone now. I think gone for good.”

  Her heart had clenched at his words. Naturally, they hadn’t intended to shoot their way out of there. They’d expected the whole thing to go a little more quietly but it just hadn’t worked out that way.

  “I hope you can use some of those resources you were talking about to find out where Rhames might have gone,” he went on angrily. “Because, I’ll tell you what. When my CO finds out how badly this went, I’m going to be doing traffic duty for the rest of my goddamn career.”

  “He was just frustrated,” said Jeffrey, ending the call. “We all are.”

  “Besides,” he went on when she said nothing. “When you talk to him again you’ll be able to tell him that we have a good idea where to find Rhames.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said, sitting up. “Where’s that?”

  He smiled, patted her on the thigh. “Detective Stenopolis told you that The New Day owned a good deal of real estate in Florida, that they’ve been buying up a lot of property in a town by the Gulf.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I made some calls.”

  A contact of Jeffrey’s at the Westchester Airport confirmed that a private jet belonging to The New Day had left the airport after midnight en route to Tampa with five passengers on board. But there was no passenger manifest.

  “That’s illegal, isn’t it?” asked Jeffrey.

  “It is,” confirmed Jack Anderson, one of the Transportation Security Administration sec
urity directors of the Westchester Airport. Jeffrey had done a number of favors for him in the past, including running an in-depth background check on his daughter’s fiancé about six months earlier, who it turned out was a pretty stand-up guy.

  “But with the private jets, sometimes we seem to have this problem. People make a lot of ‘mistakes’ when money is involved, if you know what I mean.”

  “Seems like a pretty big security hole,” said Jeffrey uneasily. He hated airplanes and this was just one more thing he could add to his list of reasons to stay on the ground.

  “It is. And it has been. People flying privately are looking for the ultimate in security and secrecy. Passenger manifests are available only to customs and immigration. As long as other security precautions are met, that manifest is very rarely requested. So pilots are often, shall we say, ‘lax’ about obtaining the identities of all the passengers on board, particularly if that pilot works for the owner of the jet and not a charter company or one of those ‘jet share’ companies.”

  “Can we talk to that pilot?”

  “I’ll get in touch with him, see what I can find out. But he works for The New Day. Those guys are pretty slippery.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I had some questions for one of their pilots a while back and the guy just disappeared. They basically said that he left the organization and we were never able to find him.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “The same kind you’re asking.”

  Some unformed thoughts were tumbling around in Jeffrey’s head… Tim Samuels’ private security agency, The New Day’s private jet fleet, the dead jeweler and his missing cache of pink diamonds.

  “When was this?”

  “A couple of weeks ago actually.”

  “Did it have something to do with a murdered jewel dealer from South Africa?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “I can’t answer that, Jeff. Sorry.”

  An answer like that and he didn’t really have to.

  “So I guess we’re going to Florida,” said Lydia with a roll of her eyes.