Blowing Smoke (3 page)

“Anyway, what she thinks is besides the point,” he said.

“It most certainly is the point.”

“No, it isn't. The point is that we don't want Mother taken advantage of.”

“That's right,” Hillary agreed, entering the room. As she handed me an iced tea, I could see that her nails were bitten down.

“I was just curious,” Amy said, but her tone had changed from defiant to defeated.

“You'll have to forgive my sister,” Hillary told me. “She's just concerned about our mother.”

“As are we all,” Louis chimed in.

I took a sip of my tea and put it down. It had that chemical aftertaste of the powdered instants. “Does your mother have a name?”

“Oh.” Hillary paused. “I thought you knew.”

“Should I?”

“Of course not. Why should you?” She gave a dismissive little laugh at her own foolishness. “It's Rose. Rose Taylor,” she continued, idly caressing her arm with her hand.

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it, and I didn't ask, figuring I could always do that later.

“I suppose,” Hillary continued, “I could go to one of the larger detective agencies, but that seems like overkill.”

“Not to mention expensive,” I couldn't help volunteering. As an unlicensed part-timer I charged bargain-basement prices.

“That, too,” Hillary conceded, her gray eyes widening a fraction. “I won't lie about that.”

“One hundred dollars an hour is a lot on a postal worker's salary,” Louis griped.

Evidently they'd already made inquiries at other places.

Hillary fingered the hem of her skirt. “Actually, I thought we needed a more personal touch.”

“So what is this job about?” I asked.

Louis and Hillary exchanged glances as Hillary sat down on the other side of me. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. She seemed to like the way they looked. I noticed she had a small half-moon tattooed on her left calf.

“Tell me,” Hillary asked, turning her head in my direction. “Do you believe in psychics?”

“Psychics? You mean people who communicate with the dead?”

“Yes.”

“No.” I'd tried one after my husband Murphy had died. It had cost me a hundred bucks and left me feeling like a fool.

Hillary and Louis exchanged another look. “Do you believe people have the ability to talk to animals?” Hillary asked me.

“I think we can communicate.” My dog, Zsa Zsa, was pretty good at letting me know what she wanted.

“I mean talking.”

I looked to see if she was joking. She wasn't.

“As in my cat telling me, watch out, the lady down the street is in a bitchy mood today?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

“Not outside of the movies.”

“Well, my mother does.”

“She believes she can talk to animals? I don't think...”

“No, she believes a woman named Pat Humphrey can.” Hillary spread her hands and studied what was left of her fingernails.

“Go on,” I finally prompted.

“This is so embarrassing.”

I waited.

Hillary sighed and brushed a strand of hair off her forehead. “All right. Three months ago—more or less—my mother's cat disappeared from the house. At first, we thought someone let it out by accident. Now, of course—” Hillary stopped. “Well, you decide. My mother was hysterical. She's very attached to ... this animal. Anyway, the next morning at nine o'clock, this woman—”

“Pat Humphrey?” I asked.

Hillary nodded. “She appeared at my mother's door with the cat in her arms. She said she was a pet psychic. She said she'd found the cat wandering in the park and the cat told her where my mother lived.”

“So you're saying you think this woman might have stolen your mother's cat and then brought it back?”

Hillary gave me the kind of smile a teacher bestows on a promising pupil.

“She said she didn't want any money,” Louis continued, “but my mother insisted on giving her a reward.”

I leaned forward. “How big?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

I whistled. “Five thousand dollars is a fair chunk of change—even these days.”

“Not for our mother,” Amy blurted out. “She's rich.”

Hillary glared at Amy, who turned her eyes downward. “Comfortable,” Hillary corrected. “She's comfortable.”

While Amy bit her lip, Louis took up the narrative.

“In any case,” he said, “our mother talks to her every day now. Sometimes twice a day. We're worried. We think our mother is giving this woman money.”

“I assume you think this woman is running a scam.”

Hillary nodded.

“So, then, why don't you go to the police?”

“We will if we have to,” Hillary said. “But we're hoping to avoid that. We don't want to upset Mother unnecessarily. She's a very private person. She would be furious if she thought we involved the authorities in her private business.”

“It would be like saying we thought she's losing her grip,” Louis said.

Hillary nodded her head in agreement.

“But going to me isn't?”

“She's not going to know. At least until we have something definitive to tell her.”

“I'm confused here. Now, what is it exactly that you want me to do?”

Louis looked at Hillary, and Hillary gave a nod.

“We've been thinking about that,” Louis said. “And this is what we've come up with. We want you to get an appointment with this Humphrey woman. And then we want you to tape your session with her. I don't care if it takes one, two, or five times. We want tangible proof that this woman is a fraud.”

It seemed as if that wouldn't be too hard a task to accomplish.

T
he first thing I did when I left Hillary Cisco's house was drive over to Upstate. I'd been thinking about the man I'd picked up on the road yesterday. The picture he'd pressed into my hand felt like a hot potato, something I wanted to get rid of as quickly as possible. I had enough to do without finding Dorita. Especially now. All I wanted to do was give the damned thing back to him.

On my way down I called Calli on my cell phone, hoping she could tell me a little more about Hillary. But she wasn't in. That's probably because she was busy screwing her brains out with her latest fiasco of a boyfriend. She specialized in unredeemables.

“Call me, you black-hearted bitch,” I said when I heard the beep from her answering machine. “I need to speak with you.”

Then I rang up Pat Humphrey, told her I was Nancy Richardson, and asked for a consultation on my German shepherd, Duke. All business, she informed me that a phone consultation was thirty-five dollars for fifteen minutes, or we could do a half an hour face-to-face for seventy-five dollars, which is what she recommended for her first-time clients. Either was payable by major credit card. Naturally. These days everything is.

I could hear the pages turning as she consulted her book. “I can squeeze you in this Thursday at four o'clock. Two days away.”

“That's fine. Should I bring Duke along?”

“No. That's not necessary. I can read your companion's vibes through you.”

I guess vibes must be like dog hair; they stick to your clothing.

 

 

I was wondering how well Humphrey was doing with this gig as I pulled into Upstate's parking lot and went into the hospital. Probably better than I was. I'd seen ads for pet psychics in several of the pet magazines the store sells and discounted them. But maybe I shouldn't have. After all, a pet psychic combines three current trends: spirituality, treating animals as humans, and lots of free spending cash. In these days of doggie day care and homemade doggie biscuits, not to mention doggie treadmills, doggie portraits, doggie albums, doggie downers, and doggie hip replacements and MRIs, it stands to reason that someone who claims to be able to tell you why your precious pooch keeps peeing on your Oriental rug would be making money.

I was mulling over the possibility of taking our back room and offering it to a visiting pet psychic—a kind of itinerant spiritual vet—when I ran into my first roadblock of the evening.

“You can't go in there without permission,” a nurse the size of Big Bertha barked as I started to enter the room my John Doe was in. “Can't you read the sign?”

The sign said Respiratory Isolation, which was new speak for quarantine. I took my hand off the door handle and held both of them up in the air.

“Okay. You got me.”

“That warning is there for a reason, you know,” she huffed.

“Gee and I thought you just hung it on random rooms. Sorry,” I said as her frown deepened. “I was told the unidentified guy the EMTs picked up in Caz last night is in there.”

“That's correct.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Are you family?”

“I could be.”

No response.

“I have something to return to him.”

She held out her hand. “I'll put it with his belongings.”

But I didn't want to give the photograph to her. I wanted to give it to him. Suddenly, it was very important that I put the picture in his hand.

“Thanks, but I'd like to wait till he's up and about.”

“Suit yourself.” Her tone made it clear that she didn't think that was going to happen any time soon.

“Do you have a name on him yet?”

“Even if I did, which I don't, I can't tell you without proper authorization.”

“You're just a regular ray of sunshine, aren't you?”

“If you don't mind.” Her uniform crinkled as she folded her arms across her chest again. When I didn't leave, she added, “Do I have to call Security?”

“Only if they'll take me out to eat.”

She didn't smile. But then, if I looked like her, I probably wouldn't be smiling, either.

I went home and had a drink and my dinner, which consisted of two chocolate doughnuts left over from the morning, looked at the picture of the family, then tucked it back in my backpack and went to sleep.

I spent some of the next day and most of the evening looking for Bethany. I called up her school principal and found out she'd gone from a straight-A student to someone that was barely passing. The school psychologist said she was “at risk” but wouldn't provide me with any useful information.

I showed Bethany's picture at the malls and pizza parlors and handed out my business card, and when I was done with that, I cruised downtown and talked to the women working the street who would talk to me. One of them, a skinny span-dexed ghetto-talking blond, identified Bethany.

“You ain't gonna be finding her around here parading her fat white ass up and down the street, I can tell you that,” she said while keeping her eyes open for squad cars and customers.

“How can you be so sure?”

“‘Cause I told her, she tried any of that shit down here, I'd put a strap to her so fast it would make her head spin. Her and those other burb bitches, thinkin' they can just waltz in here. Now we got the cops swarmin' all over us.”

“So I take it you haven't seen her today?”

“What I be telling you?”

I handed her my card and told her there was a fifty in it for her if she called me if Bethany showed up. Jeez what a world. I couldn't believe that she was just doing this because she wanted money to buy a gold necklace. Although that's what a social worker who'd interviewed a couple of these girls before turning them over to their parents had told me one night over a beer at the bar.

“Oral sex,” he said, wiping the beer from off his mustache. “It's not a big deal to some of them. It's like kissing.”

God. I hadn't even known what that was at fifteen.

I tried calling Karim, but his mother hung up on me. Michelle wasn't home, and neither were the first two names on my list of Bethany's friends. What I was really hoping, even though I wasn't going to say this to her parents, was that she hadn't decided to take off for someplace like New York City or Buffalo with the guy who'd picked her up from Karim's house, the guy no one knew, because then my chances of finding her were going to go from good to slim to none.

Around nine that evening, I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for a coffee and my chocolate-peanut doughnut fix, then drove over to Satan's End, a place off of East Genesee Street that showcased punk and hard-core. It looked like Bethany's type of scene, and I was hoping she'd be there.

Tonight, according to the handwritten sign at the door, Bad Breath and Scum were playing. Who was going to be there next? Puke and the Amputees? A wall of noise hit me when I walked through the door. I wondered if I could collect workmen's comp for hearing loss. I looked around. The place was jam-packed full of black-clad and pierced boys and girls, most of whom I placed between the ages of fourteen and twenty, though it was hard to tell. I was scanning the dance floor when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“What do you want?”

I spun around and glanced up. A granite block of a man with the blond curly hair of a Botticelli angel was staring down at me.

“I'm looking for someone.” And I showed him Bethany's picture.

“You her mother?”

“No. I've been hired to find her.”

“What's she done?”

“She's a runaway.” I was yelling to make myself heard. “Have you seen her?”

“These kids all look the same to me.”

“Mind if I look around?”

“As long as you don't cause any problems—no.”

I nodded and started walking through the place. The kids ignored me, pretending I wasn't there. When I tried to show them Bethany's picture, they all shook their heads and averted their eyes. There were lots of kids that looked like Bethany—maybe she was even there—but between the lighting and the constant motion, it was difficult to tell. I found a relatively quiet corner and stood there and watched. After about ten minutes my eyes and ears adjusted, and I spotted Bethany leaning against the wall, sipping something out of a paper cup and watching the band. She looked lonely standing there by herself.

“Bethany?” I said once I'd worked my way over to her.

She shot me a glance and started moving away. I grabbed her arm, which in retrospect was a mistake.

“Let me go!” she cried.

“I just want to talk to you.”

She tried to wiggle out of my grasp. “You're hurting me.”

I tightened my grip. “Your parents want you to come home.”

“Tell them to screw themselves.”

“Bethany... please... all I want to do—”

“Get away from me!” she screamed.

By now we'd begun to attract a considerable amount of attention.

“She's trying to kidnap me!” Bethany yelled. “Help, help!”

Suddenly, we were surrounded. Everyone was yelling things like “Let her go” and “Leave her alone.”

The next thing I knew, my feet had left the floor. “I warned you about creating a disturbance,” Granite Guy said as he deposited me outside.

I called Bethany's parents from the parking lot and told them to come down. Hopefully, they could talk some sense into their child. I waited around till they showed half an hour later, and then I went home. The phone rang about two minutes after I walked through the door.

It was Bethany's dad. He just wanted to let me know they'd lost her. She'd jumped out of the family car and run off again. He sounded furious, and I didn't blame him.

 

 

The next day, I kept my appointment with Pat Humphrey. She lived in Strathmore, one of the last upscale areas left in the city of Syracuse. The area has a Fort Apache feel, since it sits like a citadel looking down over Onondaga Park, grandly ignoring the slums that are creeping up on all sides of it. It has streets with pretty French names, lilac bushes in the front yards, and houses made of quarried stone and stucco, parquet floors, oak doors, cove molding, and mullioned windows, houses made by craftsmen who expected them to last for a hundred years instead of twenty.

The cottage Pat Humphrey lived in looked as if it had been built during the Arts and Crafts Movement era. Small and tidy, the outside was painted a teal blue, and the windowsills, a deep matte red. The pillars supporting the wide front-porch roof were made of quarried stone. A rocking chair and three weathered Adirondack chairs faced out to the street. It was easy to imagine myself sitting there, drinking a tall iced coffee, smoking a cigarette, and listening to the cicadas. Alongside the house a stunted perennial border of coneflowers, shasta daisies, and black-eyed Susans, decorative grasses, and deep purple petunias struggled in the afternoon heat.

I checked one last time to make sure the voice-activated tape recorder in my backpack was working, then got out of my car and rang the bell. A moment later, Pat Humphrey came to the door. She didn't look the way I'd expected her to, but then I hadn't expected her to live in a place like this, either. I thought I'd be meeting someone who favored ethnic dresses and wore sandals and large, dangling earrings, someone like Amy. Instead, Pat Humphrey was cool, unwrinkled, and in control. Just looking at her made me feel hot, sweaty, and dirty.

Tall and thin, she wore her carefully tailored short sleeve beige linen blouse and slacks well. She had a long, narrow nose, eyes set a shade too far apart, and a mouth that looked as if it didn't get to smile too much. Her hair was an indeterminate shade of blond. Straight, it came to right below her ears and was cut in the sort of style that looks as if it's easy to do and actually takes hours in front of the mirror with a brush and blow-dryer to accomplish.

The diamond studs she had on were large enough to be noticed but small enough to be tasteful. But for all the care Pat Humphrey had taken with her appearance, she couldn't completely conceal the rough red patches across her cheeks and on her chin. Then I noticed she had similar patches on her wrists and arms. Little pinpricks of dried blood marked where'd she'd been scratching. Eczema, I'd be willing to bet. One of my cousins had had it. The doctor had told him it was caused by stress.

“Come in,” she told me, casting a somewhat jaundiced eye on my wrinkled black linen short skirt and bubblegum pink T-shirt. “I should have told you to wear neutral colors. Vivid ones can interfere with reception.”