House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  How can you give something up when they won’t let you?

  She’s been barely aware of the road passing under her tires. Now she looks up, as something familiar jogs her eye: the entrance to Cecil’s ranch, where she came and they made love—and spied on Miranda Sparks.

  It’s late—past midnight. Instinctively, as if the car were driving her, she yanks the steering wheel and heads up his driveway.

  The door to his storage barn, where he keeps his wine barrels; is open. A light is on inside. He’s back from his trip to Paso Robles—the old Caddy is parked in front.

  She gets out of her car and walks across the gravel drive to the barn. Looking in, she sees a shadow playing against the far wall, cast by a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling near the back.

  Then she sees him. He’s suctioning wine out of a barrel into a beaker. He brings the beaker to his face, examining the color of the wine inside it. His back is to her; he doesn’t know she’s here.

  “Cecil.” She’s a few feet from him. She walks quietly, her running shoes silent on the concrete floor.

  He turns, startled, almost dropping the glass in his hand, a look of bewilderment on his face.

  “Kate! What are you doing here?” He smiles, a wide, engaging smile. “What’s going on?”

  She comes closer. Then she draws her right arm back and slaps him across the face as hard as she can.

  The beaker smashes on the floor, wine splattering both their pants legs. His hand goes to his face, which has reddened from the blow.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were screwing Miranda Sparks?” she screams at him. “Are you still humping her?”

  He stares at her. “What’s going on here?”

  “You fucked her, didn’t you, you bastard!” She’s shaking. “You fucked her and you didn’t tell me.”

  “Hey, calm down here a minute.” He steps towards her.

  She backs away. “Tell me about you and Miranda Sparks,” she orders. “Are you still lovers?”

  “Who told you this?” he asks quietly.

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Were you?”

  He rubs his face where she slapped it. “Yes, for a brief time, several years ago,” he answers, his voice flat. “So what? I don’t question you about your past.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” she persists.

  “Because you didn’t ask, and it isn’t any of your business, anyway.” He moves towards her again, and this time she doesn’t back away. “Let’s go in the house.”

  They’re in his living room, sitting side by side on the sofa.

  “Can I explain?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Miranda Sparks means nothing to me.”

  “You slept with her. That’s something.”

  “You don’t have to care about someone to have sex with them. Haven’t you ever?”

  “I don’t know.” That’s a lie—she had sex with someone an hour ago she doesn’t care about.

  “I don’t have to,” he says. “Although it’s better if you do care. Like with you.”

  Everything he’s saying is logical. So why does she feel betrayed?

  “It was there and I took it. That’s all. She’s a beautiful woman, I’m not attached. If she wanted it, why shouldn’t I?” he asks.

  “But what about her husband? Don’t you know him? Aren’t you friends?”

  “Sure, I know him. Friends? No. Longtime acquaintances at best. I wouldn’t sleep with a friend’s wife.”

  “Don’t you feel ugly when you encounter him?”

  “No, I don’t feel ugly. Sorry, maybe. Look, we both know Miranda sleeps around. We saw her with another man the last time you were up here. But that’s her business, not mine or any other man’s. Just like it’s your decision who you sleep with.”

  She dumb-nods. She knows where this is coming from: her feelings of guilt about sleeping with both Miranda and Herrera. He’s right—she has no reason to be angry with him. What he did with Miranda Sparks happened a long time ago, before he met her. She’s the one who’s been unfaithful, if that’s the right word. They’re not going together or anything, but she knows he wouldn’t sleep with anyone else now. If anyone should be feeling ugly, it’s her.

  “If it’s any consolation to you,” he says, breaking into her thoughts, “Frederick Sparks is gay.”

  That’s a jolt. “He is?”

  “I don’t have firsthand knowledge, of course,” he says, “but that’s the word on the street. Which is why Miranda takes lovers.”

  That would make sense. A woman as sensual as Miranda isn’t going to go celibate because her husband isn’t having sex with her.

  “I’ve also heard that if she were to bail out of the marriage she’d lose most of her money,” he continues. “Rumor is they signed a financial agreement when they got married—Frederick’s desires weren’t the issue then, it was a standard arrangement rich folks make, in case she turned out to be a gold digger. What’s important to Miranda is if she wasn’t a Sparks she’d lose her power base, which is her life’s blood. She lives to hold power.”

  “I’m starting to discover that,” she says, and suddenly she’s exhausted, wasted from the effects of everything that’s happened. “I’m wiped out. It’s been a very long day.”

  “Stay the night.”

  Wouldn’t that be wonderful, to fall asleep in his arms?

  “I can’t. Not tonight.” He would want to make love, and she can’t, not tonight.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nods. “Can I take a rain check?”

  “Make it soon.” He pauses. “Is there something going on I should know about?” Another pause. “Let me rephrase that. What’s going on I should know about?”

  “I can’t talk to you now,” she says, turning away from him. “Not about myself.”

  She watches him fade away in the rearview mirror as she drives down his lane. He was warm and understanding, under the circumstances. But she knows that he knows something is going on.

  12

  THE HILLS ARE ALIVE

  LOUIS PITTS IS A senior operative for a big PI firm in L.A. A black ex-Marine who learned his trade working for the CIA, he’s one of the best in the business. Kate calls on his company occasionally to help her out when she has a case that requires backup, or when she needs the kind of specialized technical assistance they can offer.

  “Your office is clean,” he assures her. He’s spent a couple hours checking it out for bugs and other electronic snooping devices. Before sweeping her office he checked out her car and her apartment. “Clean bill of health, the whole shebang.”

  “Nothing on my phone?”

  “No.”

  “What about my computer?” she inquires fretfully.

  “No taps anywhere that I can find,” he says. “I’d stay off the modem for a few days as a precaution. And I’ve installed a warning system that should alert you if anyone’s trying to access illegally.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. Professional courtesy.”

  “Thanks, Louis. I owe you one.”

  He shakes his head. “Investigators tailing investigators; I don’t like it. Reminds me too much of the government.” He finishes packing up his gear. “If that warning I installed in your computer goes off let me know—if someone is tapping in we can track down those suckers, ’cause they won’t know they’ve been found out unless they’re at my level of expertise, which they aren’t. Unless they’re CIA or some organization like that, in which case you can just pack your bags and catch the first plane to Brazil.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  He smiles. “Feels like a good background check is what they did. I doubt you were ever bugged.”

  Relieved of that anxiety, Kate spends the next two days catching up on her caseload, going out with her lawyers to interview clients, workaday things like that. She has a feeling of relief—heroics are great in the movies, but in rea
l life she can do without that level of stress.

  She returns to her office at the end of a long day in the field. It’s almost nine o’clock, she realizes. She’s starving—she skipped lunch, as usual; too busy.

  Her phone machine is blinking—one message. Earlier she had checked the machine and cleared what was on it. This one must be recent. She punches playback, waits while it rewinds.

  “This is Laura Sparks calling Kate Blanchard.” Her voice sounds urgent but not frightened. “I tried your pager but didn’t get a response. I have to talk to you immediately. Call me at home, 555-5538. Call no matter how late it is.”

  Shit—is this never going to end?

  Her pager is in her briefcase. She takes it out. It’s dead—the battery’s down, it must have happened within the last hour. She needs to pay better attention to details like that, that’s how you lose clients.

  In this instance, though, she isn’t upset that she was forgetful, because she’s off this goddamned case. She told Laura that, clearly, firmly, and repeatedly. If she has half a brain in her head she’ll shine this call on until tomorrow morning.

  Reluctantly, unable not to and hating herself for it, she picks up the phone and dials.

  “Thank God you called!” Laura exclaims breathlessly even before Kate identifies herself. “I was afraid you were out for the evening. Your pager doesn’t work,” she adds peevishly.

  “Yes, I know. I’m putting in a fresh battery even as we speak,” Kate answers, resisting the urge to answer Laura in kind. “What’s so urgent it can’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “A woman called me. She has information that will help us out. She wants to talk to us about it right away. Tonight.” She’s jumping up and down over the phone she’s so excited.

  “You, not us,” Kate corrects her.

  Laura ignores Kate’s unsubtle differentiation. “I think she really knows something. A reporter develops a sense about these things.”

  Yeah, right, Kate thinks. You’re a real reporter. And I sing backup for Bruce Springsteen. “I’m off this case, in case you’ve forgotten,” she firmly reminds Laura. “I don’t want to be involved anymore.”

  Laura, at the other end of the line, is momentarily silenced by the vehemence of the response. Kate fills the space with her thoughts. She is off the case. And yet … she can’t put that evening with Miranda out of her mind. And there is something heavy going on in all this, and dammit, she is a detective, whose job is finding things out. Playing the devil’s advocate in her head, she thinks: if Miranda is involved—and there’s a decent chance she is—it could be devastating to Laura. Should she be the agent to open that Pandora’s box?

  She tries to shake off her instincts. “I’m off this case,” she says again.

  “I know,” Laura answers. “But can’t you just do this one thing?” she pleads. “I’m afraid to meet with this woman by myself.”

  “That’s smart thinking. You should be.” You’d pee your little panties if you ever went through what I did, she thinks.

  “Just this one thing,” Laura begs. “She heard about you,” she goes on, “from someone you talked to on the street.”

  “How did she wrap you into it?” Kate asks.

  “From my editorial.”

  The conclusion is easy to draw: another leech, trolling for money.

  “I promise I won’t bother you anymore if you do this,” Laura beseeches her. “Please.”

  She’s off the case. She’s off the case. And not only that, she’s off the case.

  “Okay,” she hears herself saying. “I’ll meet with her.”

  “Oh, great, thank you so much!”

  “Don’t thank me yet.” Did she actually say she would do it? Too late now. “Do you know how to get in touch with her?”

  “Yes. She’s hanging around a pay phone downtown. She’s been waiting a long time,” Laura whines.

  Kate ignores the tone of voice. That’s who Laura is—you deal with her, you get that as part of the package.

  “She wants to meet someplace private” Laura adds. “She’s afraid of being seen with us.”

  “That’s out of the question,” Kate tells Laura forcefully. “We meet with her in a well-lit public place or we don’t meet at all. I’m not setting myself up for an ambush, or you either.”

  “But she might not, then.”

  “The McDonald’s in Victoria Court,” Kate orders Laura. “In half an hour. There or nowhere. Call her and then call me back. I’ll wait five minutes, then I’m leaving.”

  She hangs up before Laura can protest any further. If the woman is trying to set them up, and balks at this arrangement, she can walk away from it with her conscience clear. And if—unlikely as she thinks it is—the woman agrees, their exposure to getting hurt is low enough to be acceptable.

  The phone rings. She glances at her watch. That was quick.

  “She’ll meet with us,” Laura tells Kate. “She didn’t want to do it there, but I told her it was the only way.” She sounds proud of herself—that she stood up to somebody and made it stick.

  “See you then.”

  Kate drives home and changes: dark sweater, dark sweat pants, black lightweight jacket, black running shoes. Comfortable clothes, and hard to be seen in. They’re meeting in a place where they’ll be surrounded by people, but she still wants to be inconspicuous.

  She’ll be extra-vigilant. If she gets the slightest whiff of anything wrong, she’ll abort the mission. She’s off the case—she has to remember that.

  As she’s about to leave one cautionary thought jumps into her mind.

  Her gun.

  She takes the heavy S&W out from where she keeps it hidden on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, under a pile of old sweaters she hardly ever wears, and turns it over in her hand. A device made to kill people. Taking a handful of copper-tipped shells from the accompanying box, she loads the clip, slides the barrel to load one in the chamber, thumbs on the safety.

  She’s never used it in real life, and she doesn’t plan on using it now; but it might provide some psychological comfort.

  Lock and load. Ready. She shoves the gun into her jacket pocket.

  She’s halfway out the door when the phone rings. She dashes back to catch it before the machine kicks in. Maybe it’s Laura, aborting the mission. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  “Hello?” she answers.

  “I’m glad I caught you in.” Cecil’s voice comes on the line.

  “Oh.” Caught off-guard. “Hi.”

  “Listen. About the other night …”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’ve been worried about the way we left things. I want to talk to you about it. I like you too much to let any pettiness get in the way. I’m coming into town tonight. I can be there in less than an hour.”

  God, how she wants to see him. “I can’t. Not right now.”

  She feels him tense on the other end.

  “Are you with someone else?”

  “No,” she forces a laugh. “Absolutely not. I … I …” She can’t tell him what this is about. “I’m working, a case.” She laughs—it sounds tinny, phony. “Detectives are like doctors, we’re always on call. I’ll call you tomorrow morning, first thing. Promise.”

  “Yeah.”

  She hears the click as he hangs up.

  One more bridge burnt. How long do you live like that until you wise up?

  She locks up, walks outside to her car (taking a fast precautionary glance up and down the street to make sure she isn’t being watched), cranks the old engine to life, and heads towards her rendezvous with Laura; one eye on the street, the other on the rearview mirror.

  She parks in the public lot behind Victoria Court. As she starts to get out she feels her automatic, hanging heavy in her jacket pocket.

  She can’t take it into a public place. She doesn’t like carrying it anyway; a good detective doesn’t need a gun—if you’re in that deep, you fucked up.

  She lays it in
the trunk, securely wrapped in a beach towel, and double-checks that the car doors are locked.

  The woman isn’t one of the whores she had talked to. Kate’s never seen this woman before; but she’s obviously a low-rent junkie like the others.

  She’s young, younger than Laura, still in her teens, with a surly stance. Hispanic, with high Indian cheekbones. Her attire is vaguely punker-biker: black leather jacket with about ninety-eight zippers, baggy denims, ankle-high Doc Martens. She looks Kate up and down with a hard staring directness.

  This girl is only a couple of years older than her older daughter. That jolts her.

  They sit in a corner booth. Harsh, flat fluorescent lighting. A kid wearing a paper hat is mopping the floor. The girl has a cup of coffee in front of her. Kate and Laura aren’t eating or drinking.

  There are no introductions. “You have serious information?” Kate queries the young whore, jumping in without preamble.

  The girl nods. “I don’t want to talk here. It’s too open.” Fidgeting, staring around nervously, she turns to Laura. “I’m in deep shit anybody ever finds out I’m talking to you.”

  “Anybody like who?” Kate asks.

  The girl doesn’t answer. She blows on her coffee, scratches the side of her face, a nervous tic.

  “You told me you had important information for us,” Laura says, trying to push things along. “What do you know?”

  “You said there was a reward,” the girl comes back in reply, fixing her look at Kate. “Out there.” She points with her thumb like a hitchhiker.

  “Maybe,” Kate answers evenly. “It depends on what you have to tell us.”

  “You got the money on you?”

  Laura starts to answer, but Kate puts a restraining hand on Laura’s arm.

  “The money will be there, if you have information that can help us. But you’ll have to trust us. Tell us what you know, and then we’ll decide.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I can really trust you.”

  Kate’s heard a voice like this before. Two years ago, in Oakland, from the mouth of a girl whose father had a gun to her head.

  The thought sends a shudder through her body. Laura and she should not be here, she thinks to herself. There’s something unhealthy in the air. She can almost smell it, it’s so palpable.