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Robin Light mystery
BLOWING SMOKE
on sale in July 2001!
T
o clarify in case you're wondering, I'm not a licensed New York State private detective. I don't work for an agency. I don't advertise in the Yellow Pages. My business comes to me strictly by word of mouth. I also don't carry a gun, although I can shoot one if I have to. And have. I also run a pet store called Noah's Ark, which specializes in exoticsâread reptilesâthough these days I seem to be doing more detecting and less pet storing, if I can coin a word.
I started doing investigative work to save my own ass and turned out to be good at it, good enough so that people keep asking me to help them and I keep saying yes. I usually work a handful of cases a year. Mostly, I find lost children and animals and leave the high end sexy stuff to the big boys.
It was almost eleven-thirty at night by the time I walked through the door of my house, and I was not in a good mood, possibly because I hadn't had anything to eat since ten o'clock that morning. When I saw the blinking light on my answering machine, I was hoping it was Bethany's parents calling to tell me their daughter had come home by herself. But it wasn't. It was someone called Hillary Cisco, wanting to hire me to do a job for her.
Normally, I would have turned her down. I prefer giving people their money's worth by concentrating on one thing at a time. But with the proverbial wolf at my door in the form of quarterly tax payments to good old New York State, I figured it was time to make an exception to my rule. The next morning, before I went to work, I phoned her back.
“How'd you'd get my name?” I asked her while I let James in and got a can of cat food out of the cabinet.
“Calli gave it to me.”
Calli was an old friend of mine who'd gone out to California and was now back. At the moment, she was covering the Metro section in the local paper.
“She said you'd be perfect for this.”
“Really?” As I set James's food in front of him, I filled her in on my fees and how I worked.
It sounded fine to Hillary, so I told her I'd swing by her place later that afternoon. As I hung up, I noticed that James's ear was torn.
“Fighting again, I see.”
He answered me with a growl. I wondered why I kept him around as I went to get the peroxide. Of course, he'd disappeared by the time I'd come back, and after searching the house for five minutes or so, I gave it up as a bad job and called Calli.
I wanted her to fill me on this Hillary Cisco, but either Calli wasn't home or she wasn't picking up. I left a message on her machine, got Zsa Zsa, and finally left the house. I was only twenty minutes late.
Tim, the guy who works for me, and I spent the rest of the day restocking shelves, cleaning cages, and feeding the snakes. Bad day for the mice, good day for the snakes. In between, I popped into the back, arranged to go in and have a TB test, and made calls about Bethany while I tried not to listen to the asthmatic wheeze of the store's air conditioner.
The temperature was in the nineties, and the machine was not happy. It probably wanted a vacation, but then didn't we all, a fact I was reminded of when I stepped outside. I was drenched in sweat by the time I walked to my car. Which didn't improve my mood any. If I wanted heat, I'd be living in the Southwest instead of central New York.
On my way to Hillary Cisco's, I swung by Warren Street, but Bethany wasn't there, and after about twenty minutes or so, I gave up and drove over to Starcrest, the development in which Hillary Cisco lived. When I saw her leaning against the porch railing, I was reminded of a kid who'd been locked out of her house and was waiting for her mommy to come home. Even though she wasn't a kid. Not even close. And 113 Wisteria Lane was her house.
Listening to her voice on the machine, I'd pictured her as blond and big-boned, but this woman was as small and brown as a wren. Her gauze dress, incongruously long-sleeved and high-hemmed, fluttered around her thighs as she came down the steps to greet me. She moved with a slow, languid pace, but then, I reflected, it was too hot to move any other way.
Her hair, straight, black, and chin-length, hung like a curtain on either side of her face. But it was her eyes I noticed. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. A pale grayish blue, they were too light for her complexion, casting a vacant expression over her features. Her eyeliner and mascara had run in the heat, smudging into dark circles underneath her eyes. Beads of moisture ringed her hairline. She looked tired, as if she'd been wrestling with something for a long time and lost.
“Robin Light?” she asked. In person, she sounded breathier, less self-assured than she had on the phone.
I nodded. “Hillary Cisco?”
She bobbed her head and nervously plucked at the hem of her dress, trying to make it longer. “You're late. I thought you might have decided not to come.”
“I got lost.” I'd been circling around streets that all looked the same for the last twenty minutes, kicking up plumes of dust and growing more and more irritated by the second.
“Everyone does.” She swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand. Her arms, I realized, were exceptionally long. “They designed these roads like a maze, you know. That's so the blacks from the inner city can't come up here and rob us.” For a moment I couldn't tell if she was serious or not. Then the corners of her mouth formed a slight smile. She shook her head as she contemplated the houses on either side of her. “As if they ... or anyone would.”
I followed her gaze. The place didn't seem so bad to me, just raw in the way that new housing developments are. They were popping up all around Syracuse, siphoning off its population. In twenty years, when the trees and the hedges grew in, it would be a pleasant enough place. At six o'clock, the day was just beginning to cool off. Somewhere a cardinal was singing his song over and over again, the notes rising and falling away like a benediction.
His notes mingled with the happy shouts of children chasing each other with water guns while their parents, still in their suits from their day in the office, were busy adjusting and readjusting the hoses and sprinklers on their lawns before they went inside and changed into shorts and T-shirts.
Hillary snorted her opinion of them and beckoned for me to follow her. “My brother and sister are anxious to meet you,” she told me, as if she'd invited me to tea instead of to discuss a job. “Nothing big,” I remember she'd said on the phone. “We just need to clarify a few issues.”
Issues. Right. The new buzzword. As in, he has issues with alcohol or she has issues with men. Meaning he drinks and she sleeps around. I wondered what particular issues Hillary Cisco had in mind. They had to be substantial. People don't hire a private detective otherwise. Then I thought about how much I wanted it to rain as I mounted the three steps that led to Hillary's house.
A small white colonial, 113 Wisteria Lane was indistinguishable from the ones sitting to its left and right, even though Hillary had made a stab at decorating. Two wind chimes constructed from spoons hung from the eaves of the porch. A blue banner with several white music notes stitched to it jut ted out from the porch beam. Half-dead red geraniums lay wilting in the ceramic pots lining the path to the house.
“The banner is my sister's handiwork,” Hillary explained. “She does crafts,” she continued, making the word crafts sound like some arcane sexual practice. “I sing, you know. Professionally. Teaching is my day job.”
I nodded politely. I guess I should have acted more impressed, because a spasm of irritation rippled across her face. She compressed her lips, pulled the door to her house open, and stalked inside. But I didn't feel bad. I got the feeling she got irritated a lot.
The air in the hallway smelled faintly of cooking grease, room deodorizer, and kitchen trash. It had a dank, underwater quality to it, the kind you get in cheap motels in which the windows don't open and the air vents need to be cleaned. The living room was done up in a Chinese motif.
The rug, furniture, and walls were all white. Badly painted Chinese scrolls hung on three walls. A lacquered screen, dotted with someone's idea of a bamboo tree, stood off in the corner of the room, while a matching black lacquered coffee table sat in front of the sofa. Even the cabinet housing the television had an Asian motif. It looked like the kind of room they advertised on TV at two o'clock in the morning. Five pieces for seven hundred dollars. No money down. Two years to pay. By which time it would have come apart.
“My brother, Louis,” Hillary said, pointing to the man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt sprawled on the sofa, watching television.
“At last.” He clicked off the program he'd been watching, hoisted himself up, came forward, and shook my hand, engulfing it in his. “And yes,” he said, laughing. “We have the same mother and father. Everyone always wonders.”
It was easy to see why they did. If Hillary was the mini version, Louis was the jumbo king-sized. A bear of a man, everything about him was big, from his ears, beaked nose, and lantern jaw to his hands and feet. Looking closely, though, I could see a similarity in the shape of the mouth between him and Hillary.
“I'm glad you could come.” He was about to say something else to me when a woman burst out of the kitchen and planted herself next to Louis.
“I still think this is wrong,” she told him, ostentatiously ignoring me.
Hillary took a deep breath and let it out. “My sister,” she explained as her eyes lightened to an even paler shade of gray. “Evidendy, Amy still has a few doubts about the wisdom of what we're doing. Although I thought we'd straightened that out.”
Amy flushed. “No, we haven't.” She drank from the can of soda she was holding and brushed a strand of frizzy hair off her face. She seemed as if she were one of those women who always looked permanently disheveled. The jewelry she had on, a squash-blossom necklace and matching wristful of silver bangles belonged on someone five inches taller. The peasant-style white blouse and pleated gauze skirt she was wearing accentuated her pendulous breasts and stomach. She was as short as Hillary, but she outweighed her by a good seventy pounds or so. “Listen,” Amy went on, “all I'm saying is that Mom is going to be furious if she finds out.”
“She's not going to,” Louis snapped.
“She always does,” Amy countered.
Louis glowered at her. “Don't you think it's time you grew up,” he said. “She's not God.”
Amy's face turned sullen. That's not what I'm saying, and you know it.”
“Amy,” Hillary said, tugging at her sleeves. “Please. We've already had this discussion. We've decidedâ”
“You decided,” Amy snapped.
“No. You agreed. We all agreed.”
“I never saidâ”
“Yes, you did,” Louis replied. “If you can't remember, maybe you'd better change those antidepressants you're on.”
“That's a lousy thing to say,” Amy flung back at him.
“You're right,” Louis apologized. “It is.” Even though he didn't look particularly sorry.
Amy put her can of soda down on the coffee table and began fiddling with her bracelets. “All I'm saying is that I'm not sure that this is the right thing to do.”
“Well, I am.” Exasperation underlined Louis's words. “Why do you always do this?”
“Do what?”
“Say yes and then change your mind?”
“But what if she finds out?” Amy wailed.
“So what?” Hillary's eyes flashed. “Big deal. So what if she does. We're certainly not going to be any worse off than we are already.”
When Amy started to reply, it was all I could do not to say, Hey, people. Why don't you all shut up. Instead, I picked my backpack up off the floor and said, “Call me when you've decided what you want. I have other things I have to attend to. ” Like finding Bethany. Like finishing restocking the shelves. Like repairing one of the filters in the big fish tank. Like ordering five more geckos.
“Please.” Hillary took my hand and began leading me to the sofa. “Don't go.”
“Only if we can get down to business.”
It was the money that made me stay. Though if you asked me, I'd say that what these folks really needed was a therapist instead of a private detective.
Hillary glanced at Amy. Amy shrugged.
“All right,” she said. “But I'm not taking the blame for this.”
“How novel,” Louis sniped. “It's not as if you ever take the blame for anything.”
“Both of you stop it,” Hillary ordered. “It's the heat,” she said to me. “The heat is making everyone crazy. Let me get you a drink,” she continued. “An iced tea.” And, without waiting for my answer, she went into the kitchen.
As I listened to the air conditioner's rattle and hum, I watched Amy wind a lock of her hair around her finger. Her face was round. She looked younger than her siblings and paler, as if she never got out in the sun. The outline of a faint mustache was apparent above her upper lip.
“It must be nice to still be able to do that,” she said wistfully, referring to the high-pitched screams of the children playing outside that were seeping into the room. Then she sighed and sat next to me. A faintly sour smell came off of her. “Do you believe in life after death?” she asked suddenly
Louis rolled his eyes and flopped down on the armchair to the left of the sofa. “Ah . . . we're back to the great unknown.”
Amy sucked in her cheeks and straightened her back. “What's wrong with that question?”