House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  She was going to die; he was going to kill her, gun her down in her own house, and she realized with that terrible clarity people have when they’re facing their own mortality that she was that woman back there in that house, that her fate was that woman’s fate.

  “My children,” she chanted to herself, as if saying a final act of contrition, “my girls.” Because she was never going to see them again; of all the worst things death would bring, it would be that she would not see her children again.

  And then he was on her, two steps forward and his hand was going up and coming down, the side of his pistol smashing against the side of her head, she actually saw stars, it was like her head was exploding, and then he was beating her, beating her to a bloody pulp, smashing his fists against her face, her body, his arms working like jackhammers, beating her within an inch of her life.

  She was curled up on the floor in the fetal position, unable to move. She felt the pistol barrel pressed against her temple.

  “The next time,” he threatened her, “the next time, I will pull the damn trigger. Consider yourself lucky this time.”

  She knew that was true. It was a matter of time.

  She lay on the floor, semiconscious, listening as he got dressed, went out, drove off in his car.

  Somehow she managed to drag herself onto her bed, to peel off her nightgown, stained with blood, her blood, to stagger into the bathroom; seeing herself so wasted and so beaten was as frightening as when he had been beating on her, she wanted to cry now, to wash this horror away, but she couldn’t, she was far beyond tears, bone dry, somehow she managed to wash off the worst of it and pull on some sweats and get her feet into flops and stagger out of the house with nothing but her purse and her gun. Somehow she managed to get down the sidewalk to her car, start it up, and drive away. To the Oakland Women’s Shelter, the only place she knew she would be safe.

  “Jesus!” one of the women in the group exclaimed, shaking her head.

  “That’s bad,” mutters another. They’ve all heard these stories, but they never, thankfully, get inured to them. “That’s brutal.”

  While she was telling this story Kate had maintained her composure; now her hands are shaking, her entire body shivers involuntarily.

  “Can I have one of your cigarettes?” she asks the woman sitting next to her. She doesn’t know why she wants a smoke, since her lips are dry, she has cotton mouth to the max, but she needs a crutch, an immediate fix.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Maxine says.

  “I don’t, but I want one now.”

  The woman sitting next to Kate holds Kate’s hand steady while she lights the cigarette and takes a deep drag. Another woman puts a fresh cup of coffee into Kate’s free hand.

  “Thanks,” she mutters. She feels completely wiped out.

  “Did you go back?” a woman ventures to ask. They have to ask these questions, even if they seem insensitive, it’s the way the group works.

  “No. I never went back,” she tells them.

  “Good,” several say, cheering, encouraging her. “Way to go.”

  “Piece of shit!” This expletive comes from Conchita, who is sitting two seats away, vaporizing her own Marlboro Light 100. First-generation Mexican-American, thirtyish, strong and proud. On the edge of her chair as she listens, she is always the most empathetic woman in the room. Kate feels closer to her than to anyone else in the group, and has from her first time here, there’s a similarity in backgrounds and attitudes—neither suffers anything easily. Conchita is blind in one eye, the pupil fixed, opaque. A gift from a customer when she was, as she insists on bluntly putting it, peddling her unliberated ass on Haley St. several years ago.

  “I’ve never laid this out to anyone before,” Kate tells her group. “Not even the shrinks. Not this way.”

  “You did great, wonderful,” Maxine assures her. She comes over and gives Kate a hug. Several of the other women do also. She can feel the evil shit pouring out of her body in a rush.

  “All those years I’d been feeling this incredible guilt,” Kate tells them. “I was convinced that whatever punishment Eric dished out to me, I deserved it. That’s how I felt.”

  “You were not guilty,” Conchita says, getting in Kate’s face. “You thought you were guilty,” she amplifies. “Thought, not were. You were not guilty of any fucking thing!”

  The women laugh at the double entendre, much-needed relief.

  “Of anything, period,” Conchita continues, laughing herself. “Fucking or not fucking.”

  “I know that now,” Kate says. “I know that. Hey,” she adds, “don’t forget—I won.”

  “What did you win?” Maxine asks.

  “I got out,” Kate answers. “And I never did let him have sex with me, he couldn’t make me screw him.”

  “Screw him!” Conchita crows.

  “All of them!” cries another woman.

  “Not all of them,” Kate says, disagreeing. “Just Eric.”

  “God Almighty, girl, aren’t you down on all men, after living in hell like that?” yet another member of the group throws out.

  Kate shakes her head emphatically.

  “No,” she answers. “I liked men before Eric, I liked men during Eric, and I like men now, after Eric. He was a prick, but that doesn’t mean they all are.” She smiles, almost sheepishly. “I like men, what can I tell you?”

  “You’ve got guts, lady,” Maxine tells her, admiringly. “It’s a great thing, too, after you’ve been through what you have.”

  “I’m not going to curl up and die because one asshole wants me to,” Kate answers.

  “That took incredible courage,” Mildred Willard tells Kate.

  “Thank you, but I didn’t have much choice. It was either that or let him kill me.”

  “Telling your story, that’s what I meant,” Mildred clarifies. “You told it so cleanly, so directly.”

  The two of them are standing in the near-empty parking lot, next to Mildred’s Range Rover. The others have left, they’re the last stragglers.

  Kate admires Mildred. Mildred is a substantial woman in her own right. Just coming here, week after week, a woman of her age and stature. Most women in her position would say the hell with it, they wouldn’t have the guts to come out of the closet.

  “Thanks. And thanks for the recommendation,” she adds.

  “Laura Sparks?”

  Kate nods.

  “She’s my client, which, by the way, is privileged, but since you sent her to me, I guess I can tell you that much.”

  “I wouldn’t say a word to anyone, believe me,” Mildred swears.

  “She doesn’t know about … how we met, how we know each other?”

  “Oh no,” Mildred vows. “No one knows about this except the people in our group. And I would never want that information divulged.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kate assures her. “Me, either.”

  “She’s a nice girl,” Mildred comments. “I hope you can help her.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “With her life,” Mildred clarifies. “She comes from a powerful female lineage. She needs to find her own space.”

  “That’s not what people hire me to do,” Kate states. “Out of my range.”

  “You can help,” Mildred rejoins, touching Kate’s hand. “You have your own brand of power. Let some of it rub off on Laura.”

  Kate shakes her head. “No,” she repeats adamantly. “No way, that’s just …The answer is no, I’m sorry, Mildred. I’m not a social worker and I’m not a psychologist. They get involved in people’s lives in ways I don’t ever want to. I’ll do as good a job for her as I do for all my clients, but I’m not a nursemaid.” She’s talking more rapidly than usual, there’s a nervousness in her voice, the cause of which she doesn’t quite understand. “I do not want that kind of personal involvement with a client,” she insists. “With anyone,” she adds in a sudden but not completely unexpected flash of clarity.

  “That’s not m
e.”

  5

  SLEEPING DOGS

  THE THIRD MAN ON the boat—Rusty’s helper—is named Wes Gillroy. Laura had been introduced to him when she’d first come on board. After that they had barely exchanged a dozen words; anything that had to be communicated to him from Morgan or her had gone through Rusty or Frank, like Wes was someone who didn’t exist for the women as a person in his own right.

  That’s all Laura remembers about him, his name. And what he looks like, in a vague, general way. She wasn’t paying him any attention, she had tunnel vision for Frank.

  Kate hands her visitor’s slip to the duty officer at the county jail. He looks at her. She’s wearing a professional suit, low heels, not much makeup.

  “Are you a relative, or the attorney?”

  She hands him her identification. “I’m a private investigator assigned to this case.”

  “Does the prisoner know you? Know you’re coming?”

  “No.”

  “He doesn’t have to see you if he doesn’t want to.” He hands her back her ID.

  “That’s up to him.”

  “Hang on a minute.” He punches some data into the computer on his desk.

  Jesus, these guys, she thinks. If you’re a civilian who they don’t know they’ll give you the runaround from here until Tuesday. She recalls a line of dialogue from The French Connection—“Never trust nobody.”

  The duty officer looks from his screen to her. “No can do,” he tells her.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s not in custody here.”

  What the hell? “Where is he?”

  “He made bail. He’s gone.”

  Well, fuck. She’s just starting out on this case and already she’s on the wrong foot.

  She goes back to her office, thinking about her next move. She’ll have to find out who wrote Gillroy’s bond, where he lives, all that drudge stuff she was hoping to avoid.

  The phone rings.

  “Hello,” she answers curtly. She hates getting phone calls when she’s thinking unpleasant thoughts.

  “Is this Blanchard Investigations?” the voice on the other end of the line asks; a man’s voice, one she knows. “The famous Blanchard Investigations?” he adds.

  She laughs. “That’s debatable—the ‘famous’ part.”

  “I heard you were at my shop earlier,” he says.

  “How’d you know that?” she asks, astonished. “I just left there.”

  “The walls have ears,” he tells her. “Especially when it concerns you.”

  “Well, I’m impressed. I do need to pick your brain, though.”

  “I’ll meet you at the cafe at Hendry’s Beach in an hour,” he tells her. “It’s a nice day. We can take a walk.”

  Talking on the phone with this man is okay because it’s anonymous; her going down in person would be another matter, she isn’t welcomed where he works. His colleagues view private detectives with strong skepticism. But this man talking to her on the phone from his desk likes Kate, he knows she’s good people, he’ll help her out when he can if he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but they shouldn’t be seen together.

  Kate and Juan Herrera stroll down the beach in a westerly direction, away from the restaurant and parking area. It’s midweek—except for mothers and kids there are few people about; a good place to not be seen while taking a walk.

  Kate had gone home and changed. Now she’s wearing last year’s Big Dog Fiesta T-shirt over a pair of cutoffs, and a big floppy straw hat on her head for protection against the sun. She’s barefoot, she left her sandals in the car. Herrera, by contrast, has on a short-sleeve dress shirt, tie, seersucker sports coat, slacks. It’s his lunch hour, he came straight from the office. He doesn’t even bother to take his well-worn Dexter dress shoes off; as they walk the hard-packed sand along the water’s edge he takes care not to get them wet, salt ruins the leather. His pistol rides his hip, hidden under his jacket, which is why he’s kept the jacket on.

  He’s a tall, rangy man, a few years older than she is, good-looking. He appeals to her—but he’s married with kids. She doesn’t know if he fools around or not; being married and a cop automatically puts him off limits, a double whammy. She has to keep vigilant in her stand against dating cops; it’s like quitting smoking, you don’t tempt fate by trying it even one time. Her relationship with Herrera is clean; better that way.

  “You’re not exactly inconspicuous, dressed like this,” she teases him. “What if someone sees us?”

  He shrugs, loosens his tie. “What I do on my lunchtime, that’s my business,” he says dismissively. “Meeting you at work, that would be waving a red flag.”

  She knows a fair amount about him, from the several conversations over coffee they’ve had during the past year. A detective in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department for over twenty years, Herrera is an eastside homeboy who joined the force after his tour of Vietnam. A lieutenant for a long time, he’s advanced as high as he’ll go.

  After she started taking on Carl’s caseload her natural instinct had been to go for information to the people she knew, the police; but she found out very quickly—as soon as they learned she was working as a PI—that door wasn’t open to her anymore. Oh, they were nice enough, they weren’t rude or nasty, nothing like that. They just didn’t tell her one thing she couldn’t have learned from the papers, the library, or her computer network. There are two kinds of people in this world: cops and everyone else. She isn’t a cop anymore.

  Herrera, Kate learned, was the exception. He’s going to night school, getting his master’s degree in sociology at UCSB; working with kids and gangs is where he wants to go at some point in his life, he’s told her with strong conviction. He knows she’s been shut out and that hasn’t sat well with him. He doesn’t believe the police have a mission to protect society from itself, and he doesn’t go along with the attitude of secrecy and benign deceit that too many cops practice.

  “It’s bullshit,” he’d said when they’d first gotten to know each other and were swapping war stories. “We don’t have the answers any more than anyone else. Just because I’ve got a badge and a gun doesn’t make me omniscient.”

  She’d never known a cop who used words like “omniscient.” It was little things like that that made her feel she could trust him, that he wasn’t using her. That and the fact he didn’t hit on her.

  “So what is it you need my expert advice on today?” he asks.

  “The suicide in your jail.”

  A wave washes up in front of them. The wet cold brine splashes on her feet, a tangy, stinging feeling. Herrera sidesteps the water, attempting to keep his wingtips dry.

  “You serious?” he asks, looking at her sideways.

  “Is that a problem?” she asks, searching his face.

  “Not for us,” he tells her. Without breaking stride he bends down to pick up a shell, a small mussel shell, perfectly ridged. “Unless somebody decides to make it one.”

  “What can you tell me?” she asks.

  “It’s cut and dried. The man was staring at life without parole, he took the lesser of two evils.”

  “But he hadn’t even been arraigned. Why so soon?”

  He shrugs.

  She hesitates a moment before continuing, she doesn’t want to turn him off, but she has to say what she’s thinking. “You don’t sound like you’re being completely open about this, Juan.”

  “This one’s different,” he admits.

  “Like how?”

  He polishes the shell on his tie, sticks it in his jacket pocket.

  “It was a screwup.”

  He picks up another shell, a flat one, skims it out across the water. It skips three times before it sinks.

  “It was a fiasco for the department. Somebody dies in your jail, it’s lousy public relations.”

  “Frank Bascomb’s friends must not be very happy, either,” Kate says.

  “Frank Bascomb? Hey, fuck him, the guy was a dope dealer. That’s
the bottom of the food chain, down there with child molesters.”

  “You knew him as a dealer?” Kate asks. “Before this incident?” she adds. That surprises her; she doesn’t know anything about Frank Bascomb, except Laura would have, and why would Laura hire a detective if Frank really had been dirty? Of course, Laura had been duped by Frank, so maybe there had been others.

  “No, I didn’t,” he says quickly, covering. “That was a libel, I shouldn’t be talking like that.” He pauses. “You hear things. In this job hearing things is a part of it. You were a cop, you know that.”

  “What kind of things did you hear?” she presses.

  Instead of answering her, he asks his own question: “Who hired you? Who wants to know about this?”

  “Laura Sparks. That’s confidential, of course,” she adds. She has no good reason to hide this from him, he won’t tell anyone, and she wants to keep him on her side.

  “Figures,” he says, “since she was there. Lucky for her she wasn’t there then. She probably feels guilty, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She seems like she’s a nice girl, even if she does rake the department over the coals in that horseshit newspaper of hers. She was his sweetie,” he adds, half-question, half-accusation. “That’s what I hear.”

  “That I wouldn’t know either,” Kate lies. Laura is her client. Kate will be straight with Herrera whenever she can, but the client’s privacy and protection comes first.

  “That’s the story out there,” he says, vaguely waving his arm towards a cloud.

  “Anyway, how did a prime suspect in a major drug bust wind up in a common tank with a bunch of drunks and crazies?” Kate asks, trying to focus the conversation.

  This is the first sixty-four-thousand-dollar question; if she can find out what really happened—not only in that tank but why he was in there at all—she might get several steps closer to the truth.

  “How?” Herrera says. “We made a mistake. People make mistakes, even the police, or don’t you remember?” He grimaces. “The officer in charge that night has been put on administrative leave.”

  “That’s all? Just a plain old mistake?”