Liquid Smoke (Noah Braddock)

by Jeff Shelby

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think to call. Can I come in for a minute?”

  “Of course,” she said, pushing the screen open and letting me through.

  The living room hadn’t changed a second since I’d been a kid. Same brown corduroy couch and loveseat. An old, cheap coffee table that sported faint crayon marks. Shag carpet that had moved from beige to dirty beige. An old console television against the wall. An attempt to freshen things up with the odor of Lysol.

  My childhood tried a full-scale rush into my head, but I slammed the door.

  “Sit, sit,” she said, moving the newspaper off the sofa.

  She wore a faded blue sweatshirt and jeans. Her brownish-blond hair was pulled away from her face and back into a rubber band. She still looked ten years younger than her age.

  “I wasn’t expecting company,” she said, straightening the magazines on the table. “So sorry it’s a mess.”

  “It’s fine. I didn’t mean to barge in.”

  “You’re never barging. Would you like something to drink?” In this house, that question always felt like a powder keg. “No, I’m good,” I said.

  Carolina walked over to the Formica dining room table and picked up a half-empty plastic tumbler. Ice and what looked like lemonade. A slight misstep as she turned back around forced her to catch herself and regain her balance.

  Not just lemonade.

  She smiled and came back to the sofa, tumbler in hand. “So. How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, wondering if the lemonade contained vodka or gin. She loved them both. “You?”

  She took a sip of the drink and smiled again. “Good. Really.”

  Maybe we had agreed to a truce, but there was nothing we could do about the awkwardness of it all.

  “I need to ask you about something,” I said.

  She held the cup in both hands, her delicate fingers around it like a vice. “Alright.”

  “Actually about someone.”

  Her eyes were clear, interested in what I was saying. “Okay.” “Tell me about Russell Simington.”

  Her fingers flinched on the big tumbler and anxiety filled the edges around her light blue eyes. She held the tumbler up to her mouth and took a long drink. She brought it down and set it on the table. She readjusted herself on the sofa cushion, her back ramrod straight.

  “I haven’t heard that name in quite some time,” she said.

  “I’d never heard it until a couple of days ago.”

  She folded her hands together, then unfolded them, like she didn’t know what to do with them. I couldn’t blame her. I had just showed up and thrown his name out there. She had probably been wondering what she was going to have to drink with dinner.

  “Is this about my never telling you about him?” she asked. “Because you never asked.”

  “No, it’s not about that,” I said. “You’re right. I never asked because I didn’t care. I’m not sure that I do now. But a lawyer came to see me.”

  Alarm flashed through her eyes. “A lawyer? Why? What does he want from you? He never wanted anything to do with us before.” “He’s in prison,” I said. “On death row.”

  She processed that, her mouth a tight line. “Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m surprised. Russell always seemed headed for something like that.”

  I moved back into the sofa, ready to let her talk. She cleared her throat and stared at the tumbler, but didn’t reach for it.

  “We met in a bar,” she said, a sad smile forming on her face. “I’m sure that’s no great revelation for you. It was out in El Cajon somewhere. I was with friends, and he was shooting pool. We struck up a conversation. He was polite, funny, charming.”

  I’d been in a few bars in El Cajon. I’d never seen anyone with those three qualities patronizing them. More like rough, violent, drunk. But I let her go on.

  “We dated for a few months,” she said. “He was into some bad things. He didn’t work, but he always had money. There were always hideous-looking people coming to his apartment at all hours of the night.”

  “Did you know what those bad things were?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, glancing at me. “I didn’t ask. He had a temper, and it always felt like one of those questions that wasn’t possible. And I probably didn’t want to know. I was starting to fall in love with him.”

  The image of Carolina and Russell together didn’t fit in my head. But maybe that was because I couldn’t picture him in any way other than behind that glass, in that jumpsuit.

  “I got pregnant,” she said, running a hand over her hair. “At first, he seemed to care. He was attentive, we talked a little about the future. I was excited. I wanted a baby. Maybe needed one, to give me direction. I don’t know. Then he came over to my apartment one night. With a gun.” She paused, clearly remembering the moment. “I asked him what it was for and he told me that he needed it, that he couldn’t take any chances. Very vague, but adamant. I told him that if we were going to have a child, he couldn’t keep going like that, doing whatever he was doing. I didn’t want that around my child. We fought, and he left.” She chewed her bottom lip, hesitating. “I wasn’t always a mess, Noah. I’m not sure how or why it turned, but back then? I thought I could be a good parent.”

  She reached for the tumbler, stared into it for a moment, then took a drink, closing her eyes.

  She placed it on the table again and swung her eyes to me, as sad as I had ever seen them in my lifetime.

  “I never saw him again,” she said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  We sat there in silence for a few minutes, and I felt like a teenager again. The prolonged periods of quiet in that house were some of my loudest memories. Sunday afternoons especially. Carolina emerging from a long, absorbed night of drinking, where all she could do was sit and hope for the hangover to dissolve, while I sat on the sofa watching football on mute, wanting desperately for her to be different.

  But it was always quiet.

  “What did he do?” Carolina asked.

  “Killed two men.”

  If that surprised her, she didn’t show it. “Are you trying to get him out of prison?”

  “I’m not clear on what I’m trying to do yet,” I said. “His lawyer came to me, told me about him, wanted my help. But Simington didn’t tell me much.”

  Carolina sat up straight again, as if she’d been poked with a live wire. “You’ve seen him?”

  “Yeah.”

  She started to say something, then stopped. She glanced at the drink on the table. I wanted to kick it, send it flying. But she didn’t reach for it.

  “That had to have been difficult,” she finally said. “Wasn’t the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever done.” “Then you know how much you …” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “Look like him?” I said, agitated at hearing the comparison again. “Yeah. I get it.”

  She picked up the tumbler and held it in her lap like a child would hold her favorite stuffed animal or blanket. For comfort.

  “I am sorry that he is your father,” she said.

  There was nothing for me to say to that, so I didn’t respond.

  “I’ve never regretted not looking for him or trying to drag him into your life,” she said, spinning the cup slowly in her hands. “I knew the question was always there for you, even though you never asked. But I knew who Russell was. I may have brought other problems into your life, but I always felt like that was different from what he would have brought.”

  I wanted to feel reluctant about that, but she was right. Being raised by an alcoholic was the preferred choice to being raised by a criminal. Still, I knew I would always have the feeling that I was cheated somewhere along the line.

  “You never saw him again,” I said. “Did you ever talk to him?”

  She stared into the tumbler. “Twice.”

  “When?”

  “Once when you were about five,” she said. “He called me. I don’t know how he found the number. Said he wante
d to start sending me money to help.” The bittersweet effect of the call was etched on her face. “I said okay. And he lived up to it, I guess. Sent cash in an envelope every so often. I put it all in an account that I used for you.”

  I tried to remember bringing in the mail as a kid, wondering if I’d held one of those envelopes in my hand. “And the other time?”

  She hesitated, took a tiny sip from the drink, and slid the cup onto the table. She ran the heels of her hands down the length of her thighs, like she was trying to push something away that wasn’t there.

  “It was a year after you’d moved out,” she said. “He called again. He wanted to know where you lived.”

  That explained where he got the information about me he’d given Darcy. It didn’t make me happy, though.

  “I tried to blow him off,” Carolina said. “But he was persistent. And when he brought up the fact that he’d sent some money over the years, I gave in and told him.”

  “How much of that money did I see and how much did the liquor stores see?” The bitterness in my voice surprised me.

  She stared at me for a moment, then stood and walked carefully into the dining room, her back to me. She placed her hands on the edge of the table, then turned back to me.

  Her face was flushed, her eyes lit with rage.

  “You have no idea what it is like to be left alone and pregnant,” she said, her voice bordering on yelling. “No idea. I am nowhere near perfect, and I have never, ever claimed to be. But I chose you. Not him. I chose you.” The veins in her neck were pulsing, and she was yelling now. “So you can sit there, comfortable in your life and who you are now, and try to belittle me all you want. But I won’t let you rip away the fact that I am proud of that choice!”

  I felt the heat rush up the back of my neck and into my face. I looked down at the carpeting.

  After a moment, she cleared her throat and sat back down in the chair.

  “You saw it all, Noah,” she said, an angry edge to her voice. “Every penny. I may have screwed up a lot of other things around here, but that money was meant for you and I did nothing other than feed and clothe you with it. It bought you a surfboard on your sixteenth birthday, and it was the spending money that magically filled your pockets in high school.”

  The silence gobbled up the room for a few minutes before I was able to look at her.

  On cue, she picked up the tumbler from the table and held it to her lips, her eyes piercing me as she drank. Some sort of defiant message meant to make me feel like a jerk.

  It worked.

  “Did you ever get any sense of what he was into?” I asked, choosing to coward out of an apology.

  She took a deep breath and shook her head. “Not really. Like I said, I don’t think he would have answered even if I had asked. He would disappear for days at a time, and as time went on, before he left, it became more difficult for me to find the courage to ask what he was doing.”

  “When he disappeared. Do you know where he went?”

  “I know he went to Las Vegas a lot,” she said, her eyes flickering. “He would bring back matchbooks from the hotels. Other than that, I don’t know.”

  It struck me as more than coincidental that casinos kept coming up when I asked about Russell Simington. I stood up. “I gotta go.”

  She walked me to the door, and we stood there awkwardly for a few moments.

  “Will they really kill him?” she asked, staring past me out the screen door.

  “Seems like it. From what little I know, there’s no reason not to.” She nodded slowly, her eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. Maybe the past.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That you had to learn about him like this. And that he turned out like he has.”

  I opened the screen door. “It’s not your fault. He is who he is.” I paused. “You were right to keep him away from us.”

  Her eyes moved from whatever she had been looking at to me. It was probably the first time I had ever complimented anything resembling her parenting skills. She looked as surprised to hear it as I felt for having said it.

  “Be careful, Noah,” she said, reaching out and touching my elbow. “You’ve managed this long without him. There was very little good in his life, and I can’t imagine anything has changed.” Her eyes were sharp, clear. “Don’t let him hurt you now.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I stopped for a sandwich at a deli on Grand before venturing back to Mission Beach to see if I could get back into my house.

  As I navigated the streets, I listened to Jason Mraz croon on the radio and thought about what Carolina had told me. Most of what she’d said hadn’t been a surprise. Meeting in a bar, lives that didn’t mesh, those were things that I expected.

  Sending money every month was a shock, though. To learn that someone who I had never considered part of my life had indeed been a very large part was unsettling. On one hand, it was a kind gesture that probably helped us out more than I’d ever know. But on the other hand, the one that hit me like a fist, why had Simington chosen to participate from a distance if he truly had an interest in my life?

  I wrestled with that as I drove down Mission Boulevard. I turned onto Jamaica and found the alley clogged with midday traffic. I had to park two blocks away and walk up the boardwalk. The crime scene tape was gone from the perimeter, but a familiar face greeted me from my patio.

  Miranda was sitting in one of the lounge chairs, a backpack next to her. She was wearing the same outfit of death she had on when I met her, black on black, with gigantic black sunglasses shading her face.

  She saw me and sat up. “Where have you been?” I stepped over the wall onto the patio. “What?” “I told you I was coming.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed, disgusted by my inability to comprehend.

  “You didn’t say when, and I wouldn’t have waited around anyway.” I sat at the table next to the chairs and unwrapped the sandwich. “You want half? It’s roast beef and turkey.”

  She looked at it and made a face. “I don’t eat meat.”

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  She twisted around, looking inside my place. “They found Darcy here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. In between bites, I told her what I knew.

  Miranda adjusted the glasses on her stark white face. “She was really good to me.”

  I nodded slowly and worked on the sandwich. The sun was sparkling across the ocean, the white water looking like snow atop clear blue waves. Most days, I could have sat there and watched it for hours, letting everything else wait and fall away.

  “You’re sure she wasn’t meeting with anyone else here?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” she said, finally pulling her eyes off the glass door. She glanced up at the sun like it had crapped on her shoulder. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

  I finished the sandwich and balled up the foil it had come in. “Wanna go inside?”

  She glanced at the sliding door again, then looked at me. “No.”

  I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t looking forward to going inside either. A lot of things had happened in my place in the years I’d lived there, but this was the first time it had housed a dead person.

  “I brought the files,” Miranda said. “Everything I could find.”

  “Great,” I said. “Darcy have any family?”

  “I don’t think she was conceived immaculately,” she said. “But I never met them.”

  Good to see Miranda hadn’t lost her edge. “So what are you going to do?” she asked. “I don’t know yet.” “Yet? What are you waiting for?”

  I knew Miranda was probably having a tough time of it. Her friend and boss had been killed. She’d flown down at a moment’s notice with no plan.

  But I didn’t need her shit.

  “Miranda, let’s get something straight,” I said, staring at her.

  She returned the stare, the giant oversized sunglasses making her look like a bumblebee.

  “If you think you�
�re gonna hang out here and run the show, you can forget it. Darcy brought a bunch of crap into my life that I’m still trying to get in order, and I’m not sure how long that’s gonna take. And I’m sorry about what’s happened to her, and if I can help the cops figure it out, I will.” I reached over and pulled the sunglasses down her nose so I could see her eyes. “But if you give me a single second of shit over any of this, I’ll stuff you in the coffin you arrived in and float you out to Hawaii.” I pushed the glasses back into place.

  I turned away from her and settled into my chair, closing my eyes and letting the sun warm my face.

  After a moment, Miranda said, “Fine.”

  I opened an eye and saw her lay back in the lounge chair. “Yep.

  It is.”

  “But Darcy was right about one thing,” she said. I shut the eye again and went back to feeling the sun. “What was that?”

  “You really are kind of a dick.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “What do you know about the two men Simington killed?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Miranda answered, tilting her head in my direction. “They were Mexican nationals, probably with fake working papers.”

  The papers weren’t hard to get and neither was work. If you were willing to take money under the table and endure the risk, anyone coming over the border illegally could find employment.

  “Were their families ever interviewed?” I asked.

  Miranda thought about that, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure that they were in the States. Most of the information about them came from your father in his confession.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Two illegal aliens involved in criminal activity. No one on this side of the border would have cared enough to track down their families. And once they got the guy they wanted—Simington—it was case closed.

  I was pondering that when Detectives Klimes and Zanella came strolling up the boardwalk.

  Klimes held up a fat hand in greeting. Even his sweat had sweat on it. “Afternoon, Noah.”