House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “You said over the phone this was a matter of life and death,” Miranda says quietly. “You weren’t kidding, were you?”

  Kate nods. She realizes she’s never felt so clear and centered in her life.

  “You’ve been living a lie. For a long, long time.”

  She forces herself to stay calm, to keep her own voice on an even keel. Even though she is in control, for the first time in her dealings with this woman, her guts are churning.

  “Yes,” Miranda admits. “I have. We—” her arms extends towards the breakfront, towards the pictures of her husband, daughter, mother-in-law—“we all have.” She sits up straighter. “What do you plan to do with this?” she asks, indicating the documents.

  “That depends on the answers I get to the questions I’m going to ask you.”

  “What if I can’t answer them?”

  “You better hope to God you can, lady. Because if I leave here without getting all the answers I came for, I’m going to the DA, the News-Press, and every TV and radio station in town. And I’m giving them all this.” She takes some more papers out of her day pack, lays them on the desk in front of Miranda. “There’s more,” she adds. “Lots more.”

  Miranda glances at the papers, looks up at Kate, then down at the papers again, as she realizes the scope of what it is that’s in front of her. Slowly, her hand trembling noticeably, she picks the papers up and scrutinizes them carefully.

  “Where did you get this information? This information is privileged,” Miranda protests feebly. “You have no right to this.”

  “Big fucking deal. The thing is, I do have it. And by the way,” she adds, “I made copies of all this stuff. They’re tucked away in a nice, safe place, but if anything bad happens to me they’ll immediately see the light of day. I’ve finally learned how to take care of myself,” she informs Miranda.

  Gingerly, Miranda touches the papers on her desk, as if they were alive and lethal. “Why are you here?” she manages to ask. “If you’re thinking of blackmailing me—”

  “Don’t insult me, goddamn you!” Kate spits. “You’ve done that already. That fat deposit into my bank account, paying off my hospital bills—that wasn’t out of the goodness of your heart. You don’t have any goodness of heart.”

  “That money was because you saved my daughter,” Miranda insists. “There was no evil motive behind it. You’re wrong if that’s what you think.”

  “Oh, cut the shit! That was a payoff, pure and simple.” She glares at Miranda. “You tried to buy me off with your friends in the Mexican Mafia or whoever the fuck those men were down in Oxnard, and that didn’t work. Then you did the seduction bit—that didn’t stop me, either. So then you figured, might as well take the direct approach, kill the bitch off—and somehow, through some miracle, that failed, too. Now you’re really getting desperate, so you tried to buy me off again, you came at it from another direction, sugar-coating it with apologies and ‘Thank you for saving my poor baby’s life.’” She shakes her head in wonder. “You fuck me and then you try to kill me. You are some piece of work, lady.”

  Throughout this recitation Miranda is shaking her head. “You’re wrong,” she says. “Yes, I did seduce you, and I don’t recall any hesitation on your part, you liked it as much as I did, and yes, I did give you money, which one could construe as a bribe. But I did not send anyone after you, be it the Mexican Mafia or the Girl Scouts of America, and I most definitely did not try to have you killed.”

  “I don’t believe you but have it your way,” Kate responds. “That’s in the past now, anyway. This is the present,” she says, pointing to the papers on Miranda’s desk, “and the future. Not the future you envisioned, I’m sure.”

  Miranda sits back in her chair. She seems smaller all of a sudden, not so impervious.

  “No,” she admits. “It is not.”

  “How long did you think you’d be able to get away with it?”

  There’s no hesitation. “Forever, of course.”

  Kate’s taken aback at the forcefulness of the answer. “How?”

  Miranda’s mouth twists into a tight smile. “I’d find a way. Like I always have.”

  “The way being smuggling drugs?”

  Miranda sits up bolt-straight. “I had nothing to do with that!”

  Kate can’t help smiling at the woman’s brazenness. “Cut the shit, Miranda, would you? It’s way too late for that now.”

  “It’s the truth! I’ve done a lot of stupid and ugly things, I’ll admit it, you’ve got me dead to rights so there’s no point in conning you, but I was not involved in that. You have to believe me.”

  “I don’t have to believe shit,” Kate snorts. “Everything about you is a lie. What do you tell people you’re worth, the mighty Sparks empire? Two, three hundred million, isn’t that the figure you’ve been throwing around? You haven’t been worth close to that for twenty years, and it keeps draining away. Your former empire is nothing more than a mirage now—a house of smoke. The fire that fueled it has burnt itself out.”

  She gets up, walks around to Miranda’s side of the desk. Miranda’s almost slumped over, limp. Her face has gone pale, all the life, that great vitality, draining out of it—Kate can see it happening before her eyes.

  “Let’s go through it together, shall we?” Kate states, savoring the moment.

  She picks the pages up, starts rifling through them. “Here’s a good one to start with,” she declares, pulling a document from the stack. “Three office buildings in San Francisco. Your family—your husband’s family—bought them as a block in 1936.” She looks at the figures. “Boy, they really stole them, no pun intended.” She flips some pages. “Great moneymakers for decades, steady growth. But then you sold them—1986, it says here. Below market value, too.” She shows the papers to Miranda. “Let me refresh your memory.”

  Miranda waves the papers off with an aggravated air. “We had to. California real estate went into a depression in the eighties,” she explains.

  “Not in ’86. Things were still booming then. I don’t know that much about real estate, but this doesn’t look like very smart business to me.”

  “We had other expenses.”

  “I see.” She picks up another document. “More real estate. This one’s in San Jose. Commercial storage space, almost a million square feet. Whoa, you really took a bath on this puppy.”

  Miranda doesn’t respond.

  “More expenses, I take it?”

  Again, silence.

  Rifling through more documents: “Now these I can understand. Los Angeles. You owned an entire city block, almost. You got killed.”

  “Everybody got killed in L.A. real estate.”

  “You more than most, I’d bet.” As Miranda looks up inquiringly: “I’ve researched these deals, compared to other deals that were going down at the same time. You did worse than most. For somebody who’s supposed to be smart you sure did some dumb stuff,” she digs.

  Miranda remains quiet, watchful.

  Kate picks up a handful of other transactions. “Deal after deal gone south, like birds in winter. You’ve got to have some kind of perverse talent to fuck up so consistently.” She leafs though pages of documents, tsking through her teeth. “I find this interesting—for decades the Sparks family basically sat on what they had acquired in the first half of the century. But from the mid-seventies until the mid-eighties you were buying up property hand over fist, you couldn’t sign the deals fast enough. And then from the late eighties until now, it’s all downhill.” She tosses the papers on the desk in front of Miranda. “About the time you took control of the company, it appears.”

  Miranda simply stares, from Kate’s face to the damning evidence in front of her.

  “You were going to make your mark, that’s my educated guess. You were going to show this smug rich family you married into how to really make money, prove to them you’re just as good as they are—better. But you overextended to the max and got the shit kicked out of you, which yo
u couldn’t face up to it like honest folks, so you paid for it with the future. The Sparks family has a lavish lifestyle, which they entrusted you to maintain. But you couldn’t afford to keep it up, not with real estate plunging the way it did. Am I getting warm?” she asks, barely concealing the taunt and contempt in her voice.

  Miranda looks up at her. “Yes,” she chokes out.

  “It still doesn’t compute, though,” Kate continues. “Some of these properties—several of them, in fact—were turning a profit. And yet you sold them off, one by one, at fire-sale prices. Why in the world would you do that?”

  Tight-lipped: “I had my reasons.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you did.” She stares at Miranda, the force of her energy compelling Miranda to look away from her. “All those trips to Vegas that your husband made over the years. That must have drained you like an open wound.”

  Miranda turns to look at her. “How did you—?”

  “I’m a detective,” Kate answers, cutting her off. “I get that kind of work done before breakfast. How much money did your husband lose over the years?” she prods.

  Miranda shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Ten million? Twenty? Fifty?” she asks.

  Miranda looks up at her. “Maybe more,” she admits.

  “Year after year, selling off your assets to pay for that crap. And hating yourself every time you had to do it, I’ll bet. Seeing it all go down the toilet. Didn’t you ever try to stop him?”

  “Of course I tried.” Her eyes are blazing. “I did everything but …”

  “Put a gun to his head?”

  “Almost. Everything short of that.”

  “So. You can’t kill the old man’s gambling Jones. And you’re taking a pounding in your holdings. You’re losing millions, year after year. What’s a woman to do? You must’ve spent many a sleepless night thinking about a solution.”

  Miranda isn’t responding, but Kate doesn’t care—she’s on a roll, she knows what she knows and she wants Miranda to know it.

  “Then it hits you. You own all that private property on the beach, which no one has access to. And you own this big ranch, with its own runway. Bring in some drugs, that’s the ticket. If a kid standing on an L.A. street corner can make ten thou a week dealing dime bags, think of your possibilities.”

  “That’s an absolute lie!” Miranda yells. “We had nothing to do with that, nothing!”

  “Ah. Touched a nerve, did I? Hey,” she continues, “it’s easy money, and it’s only marijuana, everyone smokes grass, you’re not really corrupting the youth of America with coke or heroin—it’s like selling bootleg booze during the Depression. The only problem is, you got caught. Rather, your front man did, your foreman. That must’ve been a hairy moment, when you found out they’d been caught red-handed right on your property.”

  “It was awful,” Miranda admits, “but not because we were involved in his scheme. Surely, you can understand why we were upset.”

  “But of course. The family name and all that. The family name covers all transgressions, doesn’t it?”

  Miranda shakes her head stubbornly. “I don’t know how to convince you that I had nothing to do with any of that drug stuff,” she says. “But look at this: my family wants to do something with that property. Something that could be beneficial to the community and make some money for us as well, I won’t deny that. Why would I take the chance of blowing it all for a boatload of marijuana? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re right, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Greed.”

  “No.” Adamant.

  “Bullshit. That’s exactly what it is. Greed and arrogance. You’re the Sparks family, you can get away with anything. Drugs, sex, anything.”

  Miranda looks at her, her face squinted up in a quizzical expression. “What does sex have to do with any of this?”

  “You don’t know anything about your husband’s quirky sexual peccadillos? The thousand-dollar-a-pop hookers, the private airplane flights back here. That’s got to run you some hefty coin.”

  Miranda looks at Kate wearily. “I guess it was naive of me to think you wouldn’t know about that, too.”

  “Quite an interesting sexual life you rich folks lead. You and the mister.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Not all of it,” Kate admits. “But enough that if it ever came out you’d be ruined in this town.”

  “You think you know about us,” Miranda reiterates, “but you don’t. No one knows.”

  “I know about you. About the lovers you’ve had. Including Mr. Blake Hopkins of Rainier Oil”—Miranda visibly flinches—“a liaison that’s been going on a lot longer than you want the world to know.” She shoves her hands in her jacket pockets. “How easy was he to seduce? Easier than me? How many bottles of hundred-dollar wine did you have to ply him with to get him naked in the old hot tub?”

  “All right! You know everything about me! You can stop now.” She buries her head in her hands.

  “Not everything.” She places her hands on the desk, leaning in to Miranda, speaking slowly, clearly. “Here’s what I want to know. Do you love your husband? Even the least little bit?”

  Miranda can’t help cracking a wistful smile.

  “What?” Kate asks.

  “Somebody else asked me that very question not so long ago.”

  “One of your other multitude of lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what was the answer?”

  “The answer was that I love my husband very much.”

  “And him?”

  “He loves me, too. I’m sure of it.”

  “Then why? Why so promiscuous?”

  “I don’t need an excuse for what I do—do you?”

  The woman’s right about that, Kate has to agree. Who are you to pass judgment on someone else? she thinks. You’re not that far off from her, not deep down.

  Miranda sighs—a deep inhalation and exhalation. “My husband is a nice man,” she says. “A wonderful man, in most respects. Caring, sensitive, a great father. Everything I always wanted in a man. And I was lucky enough to know, at the tender age of twenty-one, that he was special, that not every man was like that. Which is why I decided to marry him.”

  “That and two hundred million dollars,” Kate adds.

  “Oh, yes. The money was important. Crucial. I freely admit it, and he knew it. I never had any and I’d always wanted it, lots of it. And he had it, and he wanted me.”

  “Sounds like the perfect match.”

  “It was. It still is.” Miranda pauses. “Except for one small detail.” She pulls the center desk drawer open, takes out a crumpled pack of Virginia Slims, shucks one partway out, bends over and pulls it from the pack with her lips. “Do you mind?” As she flicks a wooden match with her thumbnail, “why am I asking permission to smoke in my own house?”

  “No, I don’t mind. Somehow I had the idea you don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t, hardly. I chip when I’m nervous. Like now.” She offers the pack to Kate. “Care to?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve already got enough vices, I can live without that one.”

  “A couple a month won’t kill me.” Miranda waves the match out, flicks it into a waste basket, and inhales deeply, exhaling through both mouth and nose. “Anyway. I was telling you the story of me and my perfect marriage. Perfect except for one thing.”

  It finally hits home for Kate. She knows what Miranda’s going to say even as she’s saying it.

  Miranda confirms her sudden understanding. “He’s impotent.”

  “I heard somewhere that he was gay, or maybe bi.” Cecil had told her that, she assumed it was common knowledge, albeit closeted. “But not impotent,” she says, still not quite believing it. “He brings in call girls here. I met one of them.”

  What was it the Vegas call girl had told her? That Frederick didn’t fuck her, didn’t fuck any of the girl
s. He just watched, like a kid through a peephole, in his case the viewfinder of a camera. He was saving himself for his wife, Brittany had assumed.

  Miranda takes another deep drag, blows a perfect smoke ring towards the ceiling. “Think about this. What I just told you is not something you say about a man. Not a man you love. You’d say that about a man you hate, because it’s the most damning thing you can say. That in the most fundamental way he’s not a man at all.”

  “Well …” What a bitch. “It’s weird,” she hears herself saying. “So why are you telling me?”

  “Because …” Another heavy drag, another smoke ring. “Because I’ve been living with it for a long time, and I need to tell someone, anyone. And Jupiter’s aligned with Mars, I don’t know. It’s been eating me up inside, I know that.”

  “Shit,” Kate says softly, almost to herself.

  “Exactly.”

  “Couldn’t you ever do anything about it?” Kate asks.

  Miranda shakes her head. “Frederick is not psychologically impotent,” she begins to explain, dropping her smoke to the floor and putting it out under the sole of her shoe. “It isn’t in his head, and it isn’t any type of … it can’t be fixed through normal medical procedures. His problem is much deeper-seated. Genetically, probably. A birth defect, like a shrivelled leg or Down’s syndrome.” She pauses. “The poor bastard has never in his life had an erection. Not even nocturnally. He is incapable of having an erection. Under any circumstances.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Kate asks after what seems to be an interminable silence.

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you stay married?”

  “Like I told you. I loved him. I still love him. I will always love him. I just can’t have sex with him; which is why, I’m sure, I have it with almost everybody else, and have for the past twenty-five years. I’ve seen plenty of psychiatrists trying to work that one out, believe me.”

  Kate grunts under her breath.

  “There are other reasons we stayed married, of course. I signed a prenuptial agreement, at his mother’s insistence—she didn’t think I loved him, she thought I was a cheap gold digger out for her baby’s money.”