Lisa Unger: Smoke

“I understand,” she said, following him toward the elevator.

“I appreciate your cooperation, both of you,” he said, shaking each of their hands. “If you think of anything else, call anytime.”

He stooped back into the elevator and gave them a little wave as the door closed in front of him.

“Lydia,” said Jeffrey, his voice a warning and a question.

“What?” she said defensively. The buzz was so intense that her hands were shaking a little.

Detective Matt Stenopolis contorted himself into the unmarked Caprice. The whole car bounced with his weight when he got in and his partner Jesamyn Breslow was tossed around like she was in a ship on stormy seas.

“Jesus,” she said when he was finally settled, his knees fanned out around the steering column.

“Put on some weight. We won’t have this problem.”

She was small. Too small, he’d thought at first, to be a cop at not even five-four, barely a hundred and fifteen. Everybody knew that it was the smaller men and women who were more likely to use deadly force because they couldn’t handle themselves in a hand-to-hand struggle. But over the last two years, she had proven herself to be tougher than any man he’d ever known without ever drawing her weapon. He felt sorry for some of the perps who’d tangled with her. There was a skell they’d picked up in the Bronx for killing his girlfriend and their three-month-old son. He resisted and before Matt even realized what was going on, the guy was on the ground screaming like a little girl, his arm twisted unnaturally behind him.

“I know kung fu,” she liked to joke, imitating Keanu Reeves’ line in The Matrix . But it was no joke; she did know kung fu, had studied it for nearly ten years.

“How’d it go?” she asked him.

“They still have the original message,” he told her. “They’re going to have one of the techs from their firm email us the digital file.”

She nodded. “You didn’t give them anything, did you?”

“No. But they were definitely curious. Soon as they started asking questions I was out of there.”

“Good. Because that’s the last thing we need right now.”

They’d been warned about Lydia Strong. She had a national reputation as a major pain in the ass. And Jeffrey Mark, a former FBI agent turned private investigator, had a lot of connections, not just with the Feds but in the department as well. Enough so that it was hard to get rid of them once they got their teeth into your investigation.

“They’re like pit bulls,” warned their supervisor, Captain John Kepler. “Once they get their jaws around your leg, you’ll have to shoot ’em to get them to let go. And even then it won’t be easy.”

Matt wouldn’t have gone to see them at all except that he was desperate. Out of leads and out of time. Kepler wouldn’t allow them to focus on Lily Samuels full time for very much longer, he knew. It was the bank records that really did them in. They’d subpoenaed her banking records the first day and it had taken about a week and a half to get the information. Just this past Thursday, they’d learned that on October 22nd, Lily Samuels closed her checking, savings, and money market accounts at Chase Manhattan bank, withdrawing close to $40,000. As far as they could tell, it was all the money she had in the world.

“Okay,” said Kepler, Friday morning. “That’s it. She took off.”

“No,” said Jesamyn. “Not necessarily. What if someone forced her to withdraw that money?”

Kepler sighed, looked back and forth between them.

“Did you get the security tape from the branch where she withdrew the funds?” he asked.

“We’re still waiting for it,” said Matt.

“Well, what the fuck is taking so long?”

Matt looked down at the floor. “They promised by Monday.”

As soon as he’d seen the withdrawal he’d asked the bank contact for the security video from the branch. They’d been promising it for two days.

“Get that tape,” said Kepler. “If she’s on it and it doesn’t look as if she’s under duress, we’re going to close the case. I need you two on other things.”

They’d left his office. Jesamyn had her head down; he could see her jaw working the way it did when she was angry or frustrated. He was a little of both. Over the last two weeks they’d gotten to know Lily through her friends and family, through spending time in her West Village apartment. She was not the type of girl to close her bank accounts and take off for parts unknown. Something had happened to her; they were both sure of that. And sure if they couldn’t figure it out, they’d be failing someone who needed help. Big-time.

He drove up toward the Ninth Precinct, which was just a few blocks away. It was freezing, blustery outside but an oven in the Caprice. He could feel beads of sweat popping up on his brow. Breslow always had to have the heater going full blast; she was always too cold. He let her have her way because in the summer, she let him keep the AC on full blast since he was always too hot because of his size. All summer, she kept a fleece pullover in the car. But in the winter, for whatever reason, she couldn’t stand to be cold. It made her cranky.

“What did the message say?” asked Jesamyn as they rolled up First Avenue toward the station house on Fifth Street.

“She said that she needed some advice, that she was out of her league ‘big-time.’ ”

“What kind of advice?”

“Lydia Strong said Lily was her student at one point and that they talked now and then about stories she was working on. Strong was like her mentor.”

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t talk about her in the past tense. Not yet.”

“Sorry,” he said.

Jesamyn always, without fail, got personally wrapped up in their cases. It made her an incredibly determined and highly effective investigator but it was emotionally draining for her. He’d warned her about it, about the burnout that would eventually take her over. Like he was one to talk.

“But she’s also a private investigator, right?”

“Strong? I think she’s more like a consultant than an actual PI. But I don’t know. Why?”

“Maybe that’s why Lily called her. You know, she’s out there trying to prove that Mickey didn’t kill himself. She wasn’t working on a story. What she was doing was really more like an investigation. Maybe she called Lydia Strong for advice on that. Maybe that’s what she meant when she said she was out of her league.”

“Maybe,” said Matt, not sure where she was going.

They pulled into a spot in front of the precinct. The midnight guys were on their way out. Matt sometimes wished he were still in uniform. It wasn’t easy but there was something simple about patrolling the streets, answering calls. The midnight shift. That was the real job. Especially in a place like the Ninth, affectionately referred to as the Ninth Street Shithouse, because of its reputation as a place you were sent if you were a discipline case or a fuck-up. Its borders were Broadway to Avenue D, Houston to Fourteenth Street. They called it a “B” house because it was a healthy mix between the haves and the have-nots. The projects in Alphabet City were hot enough to keep you busy, but there were a lot of nice, law-abiding New Yorkers, too, living in the gentrified buildings around Tompkins Square, cool lofts on First and Second, the NYU dorms on Ninth and Eleventh. It was a good balance, not too crazy, not too slow. Not like the South Bronx, which was an “A” house where every night was like downtown Baghdad. Or Midtown North, a “C” house, which was basically Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood; you could go months without a decent collar.