Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

your wife look like?”
    Bill Jensen described Sue and then Carol, giving their height, weight, hair color, age. His voice was as calm as if he was telling a salesclerk about them as he bought a present of clothes.
    Lisa repeated the car descriptions. And then she asked about Jenny. “Your baby got a car?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    She asked about his son. “You don’t want nothing to happen to your son, right?”
    “Not particularly—no, not particularly.”
    “All right, we can leave him then? If we can get them away, even if we have to, like, you know, tie him up, knock him out—something—but we can leave him there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What if something happens to him?” Lisa asked.
    “Oh well.”
    “Oh well ?” For a moment, Lisa’s world-weary attitude faltered, and then she nodded. “All right.”
    She could tell that Bill Jensen was calmly prepared to see his whole family gone. Now he warned her that Sue wore an alarm button on a chain around her neck. If she activated it, it would call the Bellevue Police.
    Lisa asked Bill to tell her both addresses, reminding him that she had to memorize them until she walked out of the building. She didn’t want the jail guards to see her writing anything down. She repeated the addresses over and over.
    Next, Bill described what the house in Newport Hills looked like, including the seventy-foot sequoia tree in the front yard.
    Finally impatient, Bill reminded Lisa that Yancy had all that information already.
    “I know,” she said, “but he ain’t out.”
    She was getting antsy, even though Yancy had reassured her it would be easy. “He keeps telling me on the phone, ‘You can take care of this. You can do this. This ain’t going to be hard. They ain’t going to put up a fight—’ ”
    “Yeah…yeah,” Bill interrupted, eager to calm her down. It looked like it was going to be Lisa and some guy—probably Yancy’s brother—who would carry out his instructions.
    “How old is your daughter? What’s she look like?”
    “She’s eighteen.”
    “Jenny.”
    “Jenny, all right. Jenny. Sue. Carol.
    “She’s pretty,” Bill said about his daughter. “Kind of light brown hair. About five seven, five eight. And she’s in good shape. Athlete…Basketball, softball—she’s a good athlete.”
    Lisa asked Bill if he wanted her to take his family away from the house.
    “Yeah. I was hoping that—well, he [Yancy] was going to try to make it look like it was an accident, but—”
    “All right, that’s cool. So we ain’t trying to make it look like they just packed up and left, and you gotta wait. They ain’t nobody heard from them?”
    “Right.”
    Bill admitted he was nervous getting so many people involved, knowing what was going to happen. Lisa reminded him there were only three—Yancy, herself, and Yancy’s brother. As far as she was concerned, she was going back east with her kids, using fake ID, and would be long gone. She wouldn’t be talking to anyone.
    Bill assured her that there would be “big, big dollars,” although Yancy knew that they would have to wait on that. “It’s all going to come through, you know, the estate process. You know what I’m saying?”
    They had talked for a long time, speaking through the glass with phones held to their ears. Whenever Lisa mentioned money—$2,500 that Bill was apparently supposed to give to Yancy before August 4—Bill returned to how chagrined he was that ten days had gone by after Yancy bailed out before Lisa showed up. He had felt like a patsy, like someone had duped him. Although that seemed to have little to do with the money Yancy wanted now, Bill Jensen kept repeating his grievances.
    Lisa said she owed Yancy because he’d been cool with her when she was down on her luck. “He tells me, ‘This is going to work,’ and I’m cool with that. I ain’t asking for no money. But I don’t know you from Adam’s house cat.”
    What was she supposed to tell Yancy? Was she supposed to say he had to wait for “the big money”?
    “Right.”
    Bill told Lisa that his sister had had the second payment all ready to give Yancy—$2,500—that she’d been Johnny-on-the-spot, but Yancy hadn’t shown up. So it was his own fault that he didn’t have that money.
    “I don’t want any more suspicions from my sister,” he cautioned.
    “We need someplace to stay,” Lisa argued. “I’m giving up my apartment. If we do this by the first, I don’t want to be there.”
    Of course she