Liquid Smoke (14 page)

“No offense,” she said. “But I don’t see how that’s gonna help figure out what happened to Darcy.”

“It may not,” I said. “I’m going to go talk to him, though. Can you set up the visit like you did last time?”

Annoyance rippled across her face. “Finding out who killed Darcy is more important to me than setting up a reunion with your daddy. I know you’ve got issues, but I came down here to figure out what happened to Darcy, not to be your secretary.”

“I’m not asking you to be my secretary,” I said, resisting the urge to yank on one of those metal bars in her stomach. “If you don’t want to make the call, fine. Tell me what I need to do.”

“Do you really think the cops are working hard on Darcy’s murder?” she asked. “Please. They’ve probably got fifteen other cases just like hers.” She folded her arms across her chest. “No. We do something about Darcy first before you go back to San Francisco.”

I felt my teeth grind together and the muscles in my jaw twitch as I tried to keep from picking her up, carrying her down to the ocean, and drowning her little gothic ass. I looked at Carter.

He held his hands up like he wanted no part of her.

Which, unfortunately for him, gave me an idea.

“How about this, then,” I said to Miranda. “You set up the visit with Simington, I go to San Francisco, and you and Carter stay here and do some interviewing.”

“What?” Carter said, his voice shooting up about three octaves. Miranda and I both looked at him. He cleared his throat and tried for his normal voice. “What?”

“Start checking with the neighbors and see if you can’t find out more about the guy who was seen here the night of Darcy’s murder,” I said. “You know the people who live around here. They’ll talk to you. They won’t talk to Miranda if she’s alone.”

Miranda nodded. “Alright. I can live with that.” She looked at Carter and the sneer from earlier reappeared. “How about you, King Kong? Think you can ask a few questions without sounding like your nuts are caught in the drawer?”

Carter’s cheeks reddened. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had the pleasure of witnessing that before.

“As long as you keep your cauldron and broom away from me,” he said, trying to save a little face.

She sauntered around the table toward him. He pressed himself further into the wall, which only made it easier for Miranda to corner him.

She looked him up and down, then placed her index finger on his chest. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart. I’ve got other plans for you.” His eyes widened.

She let her finger fall down to his stomach, gave a short, harsh laugh, and disappeared into my bedroom.

I caught an early-evening flight to San Francisco, and by the time I’d landed in the mist and fog, Miranda had left a message on my cell phone telling me that she arranged a visit with Simington the next morning at nine. No word on how she and Carter were getting along.

After renting a car, I spent the night at a hotel near the airport, watching TV in between useless fits of sleep. The anxiety of the entire situation was doing its best to wrestle me to the ground, and I was doing a poor job of fighting it off.

I crawled out of bed at six and did an hour of running on the treadmill in the hotel’s fitness room. I showered, dressed, checked out, and made the drive up to San Quentin under a wet, gray sky.

The guard at the gate found my name on the visitation list and seated me at the same window as before. Simington appeared in the yellow coveralls, his hair damp and slicked back, the glasses gone from his face this time.

“Surprised you’re back,” he said as he sat down.

I saw the letters of my name tattooed on his wrist again, snagging me like a piece of cloth on a nail. I ripped my eyes away.

“You and Landon Keene worked together,” I said. “I’m not sure how. My guess is you worked for him. He handled the money and the business.” I paused. “You handled the killing.”

Laughter drifted in from somewhere behind me. It seemed heavy and awkward and out of place.

Simington didn’t move. His expression didn’t change.

“Am I right?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” he responded.

“You were the one who threw his name out there,” I said. “You wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t matter.”

Simington looked away. I knew I was right. I hadn’t said it to Liz when she’d asked me why I was doing this, but I felt like there had to be a reason for Simington to have thrown Keene’s name out to me. He could have said nothing and let me walk away. But he chose to give me a crumb.

Simington let his gaze come back to me. “You meet Keene?”

I nodded.

“You tell him who you were?” “Does it matter?” I said.

The corners of his mouth tightened. It was as much emotion as I’d seen from him in either visit. But I could tell he was agitated. And I took some juvenile pride in having splintered his exterior.

“Did you tell him who you were?” he repeated.

“I didn’t know it was him when I met him,” I said. “But I got the sense he knew who I was.”

The corners tightened again and the green in his eyes went a little darker. “Where did you meet him?”

“Bareva Casino. I met the casino operator, Ben Moffitt, too.”

Simington folded his hands together and several of his knuckles cracked. He brought his eyes back to me.

“Don’t go back there,” he said, his voice dropping an octave.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

I leaned forward, my face close to the window, the anger washing through me like a dam had burst.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “Because you said so?” My neck burned, the blood working its way up my body. “Don’t
ever
speak to me like you’re my father again. Ever.
We
don’t have that kind of relationship.”

We stared at each other through the plexiglass. I realized I was breathing like I’d just run a five-minute mile. I pulled back and tried to catch my breath.

Simington looked cool and collected. He unfolded his hands, seemed unsure of what to do with them, and then put them back together.

“I shouldn’t have given you his name,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Why?” I asked, my breathing returning to a normal cadence. “Because I learned what you did with him? You think I thought you were in here for littering?”

“Nothing good is going to come from messing with Keene,” he said.

“Surprise. What about Moffitt?”

Simington licked his lips slowly, then shook his head. “Him either.”

“But you gave me Keene’s name, I found him, and now I’m here. You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything, Noah,” he said. “Remember? We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

Throwing my words back in my face. Clever. And effective. “Darcy’s dead,” I said, trying a different path. “The lawyer?” I nodded.

His eyes shifted away for a moment, and he glanced down at his hands. He pulled them apart, laid them flat on the small overhang in front of him, and looked at me. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “She didn’t deserve it. She was trying to help you.”

“I didn’t want her help.”

“And, yet, she tried anyway. So maybe you don’t owe me. But you at least owe her.”

A guard appeared behind Simington. He stood there for a moment, just checking to make sure things were okay. We both watched him until he moved on.

“I figured Keene would be dead,” Simington said.

“What?”

“When I gave you his name. I figured he’d be dead by now,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Why?”

“Because he’s a piece of shit, and I thought someone would’ve punched his ticket by now. I wanted to make sure he was in the ground.” He took his hand away from his face. “You’re in danger.”

“I can handle myself.”

He laughed and shook his head. “You think because you have a PI license you’re tough? Because maybe you get in a few scrapes here and there? That makes you tough?” Simington leaned closer to the window. “Keene is a different kind of tough, Noah. Not your kind.”

I shifted in the seat, uncomfortable under his hard watch. “You still haven’t explained your relationship with Keene.”

He grunted, pushing back from the window. “You got it right. I worked for him. I killed those two men in the desert because he told me to.”

“Why?”

Simington stared at me like he was trying to make a decision. Sitting under his look was uncomfortable, but I didn’t turn away. I refused to be the one who blinked. And in that hard, unflinching stare, I could see it—all the years of what he’d done and the time in prison. There wasn’t much that could reach or scare Russell Simington.

“Why?” I repeated.

And then a tiny crack appeared in his expression, his hardened features softening for just a moment.

“Because if I hadn’t,” he said, “you and Carolina were going to die.”

Simington rubbed a finger over the tattoo of my name on his wrist. “Your mother was smart to tell me to get lost when she did. I wasn’t a complete disaster when you were born, but I was heading in that direction.”

I took a deep breath. I knew I was about to hear some things I’d wondered about my whole life. I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said, an empty smile on his face. “I was never into anything good. It was just varying degrees of bad. Didn’t know any different. And I was good at what I did.”

“Which was?”

“I enforced.” He laughed, shaking his head. “I always liked that word. Almost made it sound legit. I was hired muscle. Threatened, intimidated, beat the shit out of people.” He paused. “Sometimes more.”

The glass between us was cloudy, smudged. I wanted to wipe it clean so I could see his face clearly.

“Keene and I ran in the same circles,” he said. “When all you do is the wrong thing, you get hooked into the bad guy underground network. We were both in it. We had done some jobs together, some small-time stuff.” The expression on his face darkened, and he folded his thick arms across his chest. “Then he got something on me.”

“Your gambling?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow, surprised, then slowly nodded. “Nice work. Yeah. The gambling. I was shit deep in debt, and it was growing by the hour. I couldn’t stop it.”

“You could’ve stopped gambling.”

“Please. You’ve proved already that you aren’t stupid. All the clichés about gamblers? They all applied to me. I always thought my next big play was the one that would right the ship. And it wasn’t like I was going to get a job to pay off the debt.” The empty smile reappeared. “A real job, anyway.”

“What did you do before the casinos and Keene?” I asked for my own curiosity.

He shrugged. “Nothing you’d wanna hear about. Like I said. Hired muscle. Some of it was legit, some of it wasn’t. Same shit, different places. Not like I was punching a clock. Money was always good and when you aren’t afraid of much, you can always find work. I collected for dealers. Did some protection work for them. Pickup and delivery. I tried construction, but it didn’t take.” He shifted his weight. “I was better at destruction.”

That sounded about right.

“Not like I ever put a resume together, Noah,” he said. “The work I did, you don’t need one. You meet people in bars and your name gets around and you hang around in the wrong crowds. That’s your resume. I started right out of high school, delivering boosted cars, and it just grew. Always had cash in my pocket, never had a schedule, and I was good at it. Hard to believe you could get by doing that shit for thirty years, but I managed alright. And if I hadn’t started gambling, I’d still be doing it.”

“How’d that start?”

He laughed, shook his head. “Simple hundred dollar bet on a Lakers game one night. I won. Wasn’t a big deal that night, but, man. It flipped a switch.”

I took a deep breath, settled my thoughts.

“Okay. How did Keene play in?” I asked.

“He was employed by the casino,” Simington said. “By Moffitt. They extended me some credit lines—probably because they knew I’d never be able to get even, I was so far in. So they let me fall a little further. When it got pretty obvious that I wasn’t getting out of the hole anytime soon, they cut me off and told me I owed them.”

Simington leaned back in the chair and glanced over his shoulder as another guard did a walk-by. “I did some simple stuff first. Collecting and what not. Enough that I thought we were square.”

“Wait. Was Keene running a smuggling operation?”

Simington shook his head. “Yeah. Moffitt lets him scout his casinos for guys who are desperate for cash, maybe in over their heads, deep enough that they’re willing to do something illegal.”

“Drive people over the border.”

He nodded. “In return, Moffitt gets a percentage of Keene’s operation.”

“Why would Moffitt want in? That’s a huge risk for nickels and dimes.”

Simington shrugged. “I don’t know. Moffitt and Keene were tight. Keene ran a lot, though. Wasn’t just nickels and dimes. He was making some serious money.”

I filed that away for later thought. “Okay. You thought you were square.”

“Right. I thought I was done. My debt was square and I’d curbed the gambling. I was picking up odd jobs, looking for something steady. But then Keene told me I had one last job.”

“Vasquez and Tenayo?” I said.

“Names all sound the same to me.”

I looked away, thinking it was a bad idea to try to punch my hand through the window to choke him.

“Hey.” He leaned toward the window again. “Wasn’t my business to know their names.”

“What a professional,” I said, turning back to him.

“I was a professional,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Because I told him I wouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was a bullshit job and I knew it,” he said. “I knew the two Mexicans had probably paid Keene and he was just being the vicious asshole he loves being. I had no problem collecting from guys who owed. But I didn’t make it my business to take out guys who had paid their debts. I don’t know if Keene did it on a regular basis—knowing him he probably did—but I didn’t want any part of that.” He laid his palms flat on the counter beneath the glass. “So I said no.”