Smoke

I wish there was something more I could do,” said Samuels as he helped Jeffrey load the boxes into the Kompressor. In the gray light of the outdoors, he looked older, more tired than he had inside. Lydia saw lines on his face she hadn’t noticed in the house. She saw dark circles, two days of pale stubble on a strong jaw.

“I’m going a little crazy with my own uselessness. Mickey’s gone. I don’t know how to help Lily, or her mother. You spend your whole life thinking you have some control and then in a matter of weeks…” He let the sentence trail.

“Just know that we are going to do everything in our power to bring Lily home to you,” said Lydia. “And if you think of anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it is, anything strange, anything off, anything that made you wonder even for a moment, please call me.”

He looked down at the gravel on the drive. “Do you think she’s alive?”

It was a hard question to ask, she knew. It was harder to answer. His whole body seemed to brace for the response. Part of her wanted to reassure him, give him some hope. But she couldn’t do that, it wasn’t right.

“I don’t know,” she said putting a hand on her arm. “But have faith, Mr. Samuels. We do.”

***

They watched him in the rearview mirror as they pulled up the drive. He followed them with his eyes and then turned his back, walked with slouching shoulders, hands in his pockets, back into the house. Lydia would have paid money to see his face when he thought no one was looking.

“He held something back from us,” said Jeffrey when the house was out of sight.

Lydia nodded. “Definitely.”

“What’s your sense of him?”

She thought about it a second. “It’s hard to say. I didn’t get a good read on him.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “That’s never a good sign.”

“I know,” she said. Usually a person’s essence was clear to Lydia within seconds of the first greeting. People emitted an energy that either meshed or clashed, that attracted or repelled. They’d both learned over the years that Lydia’s impressions, more often than not, would be proved correct over time. In the few instances when she’d had trouble getting a read on someone, they’d later discovered that the person in question was deeply veiled, guarded, or hiding vital parts of himself.

“I just didn’t buy that Lily and Mickey could be so close and she not know that he’d been on and off anti- depressants all his life,” she said.

“Why would Samuels lie about that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “But it kind of makes Lily sound like she didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. And it makes her certainty that he didn’t kill himself seem based on ignorance of key facts.”

He nodded his agreement.

“You know how he seemed to me?” said Jeff. “He seemed insincere. That little breakdown he had?”

“No tears,” she said. “I noticed that, too.”

They pulled onto the Long Island Expressway and Lydia was glad to see that traffic into the city was lighter than it had been on the way out. But still they came to a stop as the traffic thickened. The sky outside was hopeful, with patches of blue straining through the gray cloud cover.

“I got a call yesterday,” she said, looking out the window at the trees and the sea of cars.

“From who?” he answered, glancing at her.

“A law firm on Fifty-Seventh Street, representing my father’s estate,” she said. “They say they have a box for me. Things he left me supposedly. They want me to pick it up.”

He was quiet a second, then put a hand on the back of her neck. “How do you feel about that?”

She looked into his face. Warm hazel eyes in a landscape of strong, defined features. Strong cheekbones and full, wide lips, clean-shaven jaw. There was a vein on his temple that appeared when he was angry, a muscle that worked in his jaw when he was worried or thinking hard. She knew every line and feature of his face and just the sight of it could give her comfort.

“I don’t know. I think I hate it a little. I mean, what could he possibly have wanted me to have? It seems kind of cowardly to try to make a connection after he died.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m curious enough to go get the goddamn box.”

He smiled at her and it ignited her smile. “Of course you are,” he said, squeezing her shoulder.

“You know what’s weird? I just have this sense that I should feel more than I do about his passing. I mean, when Samuels was talking about Mickey, I could imagine that kid, sitting there in a dark car with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a gun in the other. I could feel despair so total that the barrel of a gun looked better than the future. I felt for him, felt the terrible sadness of it. But I don’t have any of that compassion or empathy for Arthur Tavernier. When I think of my father, I just feel empty.”

Jeffrey was quiet for a second, considering her words. She had always loved about him that he was a careful listener, always present for what she was saying, not just waiting to say what he wanted to say.

After a while: “Maybe the box will help you get in touch with that. Maybe you’ll find the place where your father should be is not as empty as you think.”

She let go of a little laugh. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Let’s stop and get it on the way to the office?”

She nodded and gave him a smile, took his hand and held it for a while as they crawled back toward the city.

It’s hard to say what happened, Detective Stenopolis,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Witnesses say a van approached the parade from a side street. A young woman ran into the crowd, wearing only a tee-shirt and underpants. Two men gave chase. When shots were fired, the crowd panicked and dispersed. Witnesses say that the men then lifted her body and carried it back to the van and reversed back down the street it had arrived from.”

Mount liked the sound of her voice; it was smoky, sexy. It belonged to a Detective Margie Swann from the Fiftieth Precinct in Riverdale.

“Did you get a description of the girl?”

“Thin, nearly emaciated. Short cropped black hair, like a buzz cut. That’s about it. I’m emailing you a jpeg right now. Are you at your computer?”

“I am,” he said, clicking on the SEND/RECEIVE button. “Nothing yet.”

“This photograph was just given to us this morning, Detective. It’s very fuzzy, hard to see anything, but we’ve sent it on to State to see what their techs can do for it.”

“You’d think a lot of people would have had cameras and video equipment that night since it was Halloween.”

“You’d think. But I guess people were too busy running away to be taking pictures. People freak these days when there’s a public disturbance, run for the hills.”

“No area businesses with outside surveillance cams?”

“None. It’s kind of a small main street area with lots of mom-and-pop type businesses still. Locals try to keep it that way. It’s pretty low tech around here.”

He pressed SEND/RECEIVE again and nothing popped up.

“Still nothing?” she asked.

“No. Sometimes things are a little slow around here.”

“Here, too,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“My partner said that there was no blood found at the scene?”

“That’s right. There was a squad car there right after the shooting. But they didn’t see anything. It might mean that she was shot in the back with small caliber bullets or from a far enough distance that there were no exit wounds to bleed out. Or it might mean that there were blanks in the gun and it was some kind of prank. I don’t know. It was Halloween after all. It could be someone’s idea of a joke.”

“A joke?” he said with a laugh. “I don’t get it.”