House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “I heard about that,” Kate acknowledges. “So if you divorced him …”

  Miranda nods. “I’d be cut off without a cent. Although now, after all we’ve gone through, he and I, he’d take care of me. Like he always has. Because he loves me, too.”

  Kate thinks for a moment. “You’ve got a daughter who was not adopted,” she says, “I know that for a fact. And she’s the spitting image of her father.”

  Miranda nods. “I found a surrogate,” she explains. “A man to father a child for us.”

  Being in group has taught her how to listen patiently, Kate realizes. It would be helpful for Miranda to be in a group. They must have groups in prison, which is where Miranda Sparks is going to wind up.

  “So what did you do?” she asks Miranda. “Go to a sperm bank, one of those places that specializes in Nobel. Prize-winner spunk?”

  Miranda shakes her head. “I don’t trust those places. For me it was going to be a man, in a bed.”

  “How ever did you find Sir Galahad?” Kate asks, openly curious.

  “By sheer accident. I was at a conference on hunger, at Cal Tech. I was representing our foundation—donating money to a good cause, as usual. I was walking down a corridor and turned a corner and there he was. I practically bumped into him.”

  “How fortunate for you.”

  “It certainly was,” Miranda responds without a trace of irony. “He was about forty, a professor at Helsinki University. Married, which was my preference—a single man might have gotten romantic, when all I wanted was to get pregnant. But the great thing, the reason I seduced that poor man out of his socks—he looked so much like Frederick it was eerie.”

  Kate’s mind is reeling. She expects the unexpected, she sees that in her work every day, but this is weirder than anything she could have ever dreamed.

  “So you lured him into your web,” she says.

  “Not that it took any effort,” Miranda admits unself-consciously. “I guarantee you he’s never forgotten it.” Wistfully: “I haven’t, either. He supplied the missing piece in our life together, Frederick’s and mine.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t he in the least bit curious?”

  “I don’t know, nor do I care. He was a married man, and worldly enough that it was an interlude for him, nothing more.”

  Kate shakes her head. “You know how to get what you want, don’t you?”

  “I thought I did,” Miranda says, looking up. “Until now.” She smiles. “You know what I remember about that weekend with the professor from Finland? What I remember most?”

  “What?”

  “How much he was like Frederick—not only physically, but in other, deeper ways. When my eyes were closed I was imagining he was Frederick. In a strange way, which I don’t expect you to understand, I was making love to my husband then.” She closes her eyes, remembering. “And it was wonderful.”

  It’s quiet for a moment.

  “I told Frederick, of course,” Miranda continues. “Once I knew for sure I was pregnant—trying to pull an immaculate-conception scam wasn’t going to cut it. He agreed to go along with the deception, although it took him a while to adjust to the reality. That Laura is his spitting image was a bonus he hadn’t counted on. Frederick’s a wonderful father—a much better parent than I am.”

  Kate rocks back on her heels. “That’s a very heartwarming story,” she says finally. “That and a buck eight’ll buy you a cup of coffee in just about any restaurant in town.”

  Miranda glares at her. “You think I’m trying to soften you up?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so—partly. It’s …I know I’ve been a bitch. But I’m not a killer, and I’m trying to convince you of that.”

  Kate shakes her head. “There’s too much evidence against you, lady. Way too much.”

  She picks up the manila envelope that contains the secret contract between Rainier Oil and the Sparks family. “This,” she tells Miranda. “This is what finally convinced me. Because this really is life-and-death for you. Your only chance to recoup all those losses. Keeping this secret is worth killing for.”

  She paces the room, keeping her eyes on Miranda.

  “I’ve been looking for a smoking gun,” she says. “Some conclusive, irrefutable piece of evidence that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were involved in the murder of Frank Bascomb, of the two in Newport, and my own attempted murder. And this,” she says, brandishing the papers, “is it. This deal is worth killing for.”

  “No,” Miranda insists. “No amount of money is worth killing for.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Kate fires back. “We all have our price, and this is a hefty load. Worth killing Frank Bascomb for, he was a liability, he would’ve sung like Barbra Streisand, and those two poor bastards in Orange County, too, you don’t want to leave any loose ends dangling when this much money’s at stake.” She paused a moment—then it comes out. “And it was worth killing me for.”

  “No,” Miranda says emphatically. “No.”

  “No?” Kate opens the envelope. “This is your future, right here. To get back all that money you’ve fucked away over the years.” She leafs through a few pages, stopping at a certain part. “What was it you said at the board meeting? The mineral rights belong to the state, not the property owner, so your share will be small, a mere pittance, and what you do make you’ll give back to your oceanography school? ‘It’s preposterous that anyone would think the Sparks family would need money.’ Those were your exact words, I believe. And you uttered them with such righteous indignation.” She stabs a finger at the contract. “When the smoke’s all cleared, this is what it’s all about. This back-door deal between you and Rainier Oil, that guarantees you a fortune in royalties. More money than the family had to begin with by the time it’s all done.”

  She squints, reading the small, dense print. “They’re not going to pay you some measly rent, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s chump change. They are going to pay your family a royalty almost as big as the state’s going to get, according to this top-secret document between you and them.”

  She holds the secret contract in front of Miranda’s face with thumb and forefinger, as if it’s a dog turd she’s scooped off the sidewalk with a piece of Kleenex, too odious to touch.

  She’s super-mad now. Her voice drips with contempt.

  “You duped your best friends, you whore. Your oceanography school and everything about it was merely a smoke screen, to obscure your real purpose—to give the Sparks family an out, so you could endorse Rainier’s drilling scheme and make those millions under the table. Twenty million dollars every single year for the life of the lease, twenty years at a minimum, and it could be more, double that amount. That’s half a billion dollars to you.”

  She hammers at Miranda with her voice, although it’s her fists she’d like to be using, she’s itching to bust up that smug gorgeous face into a thousand pieces, like they did to her. “I don’t think anyone would call five hundred million dollars a pittance. More like an avalanche.” Angrily, she adds, “I’ve known some cynical people in my time, lady, but you take the cake.”

  Miranda sags like a hot-air balloon shot full of holes.

  “All right,” she admits. “Now you know all about us, every piece of our dirty laundry. What are you going to do with it?”

  “Use it to get you charged with murder.”

  “Lying about a business deal doesn’t equate with murder,” Miranda comes back at her, still arguing her position. “But it would ruin us. And all of our good projects, too. We do a lot of good in this world, whether you accept that or not.”

  “It’s an irrelevant argument,” Kate tells her flatly. “Good works don’t cancel out bad deeds.”

  Miranda stares at Kate. She doesn’t speak for a moment—the silence hangs heavy, portentous. Then, steepling her fingers and staring right into Kate’s eyes, she says, “
That’s too bad. Because there’s an awful lot of money in this.” She pauses, then continues her thought. “My family’s not the only ones who could get rich.”

  Now the air around them is really heavy, almost oppressively so—Kate consciously feels her lungs working, bellowing breath in and out. “Am I hearing you right?” she says slowly, weighing her choice of words carefully. “Are you offering me a bribe?”

  “‘Bribe’ is not a word in my vocabulary. I’d prefer to think of it as a partnership.”

  Kate nods, stalling for time. “A partnership. That has a nice sound to it. I’ve never been in this high-level kind of partnership before. What kind of split are you thinking about?”

  Miranda traces a manicured finger around the rim of her lips. “Ten percent would be an incredible amount of money. Two million dollars a year for twenty years, maybe more.”

  Two million dollars a year. She can’t begin to comprehend what that means. She sees the number in her head: a two followed by six zeroes. That’s more money in one year than she’ll ever earn in her entire lifetime, and that’s if she’s successful, considerably more so than she’s ever been up to now.

  “I would think it’s worth twenty-five percent to shut me up—wouldn’t you?”

  Miranda cocks her head, a wisp of a smile crossing her mouth. “Fifteen,” she counters.

  Kate smiles back. “Twenty.”

  “Okay. Twenty it is.” Miranda extends her hand towards the Rainier contract. “Can I have that back now?” In the snap of two fingers she’s immediately calm again, as if none of what’s been taking place here this morning ever happened. “And I’ll want your duplicates, of course.”

  Kate shakes her head. Ice, she thinks. That’s the only thing that runs in your veins.

  “I’ll hang on to it until we have a formal agreement between us—in writing,” she informs Miranda, keeping the papers at arm’s length.

  Miranda nods. “Fair enough,” she says, grudgingly. She glances at her watch. “Can we go now?”

  “In a minute. There are a few more things I need to know—to round out the picture.”

  “Like what?” Miranda asks suspiciously. She checks her watch. “I have appointments piling up.”

  Kate puts the Rainier documents back into her day pack. “This won’t take much longer.” She takes some other papers out. “Right before that dope deal went down, you secretly sold five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of foreign bonds through a Caribbean bank. Bonds that hadn’t reached their full maturity. That was to pay for the grass, down in South America, wasn’t it? Rent the boat, pay the crew, all those expenses.”

  “I don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about,” Miranda says.

  “Oh, man, cut the shit! We’re partners now, remember? I’m not going to blow the whistle on you. But I need to know, Miranda. I need closure on this case—for me, for my peace of mind.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She extends her hand. “Let me see that.”

  Kate pulls back.

  “I’m not going to bite you.” Miranda says. “I’m telling you the truth, I don’t know what that is. And I should, if it truly is our money you’re talking about.”

  Kate extends the papers across the desk, hands them to Miranda.

  Miranda holds them, squinting. “I don’t know this account,” she says. “I’ve never heard of these bonds.”

  “You run the company,” Kate comes back. “You know everything.”

  “I’m supposed to. But I don’t know about this. If you don’t want to believe me, that’s your choice. But I am telling you the truth about this.”

  “It’s signed,” Kate points out.

  Miranda turns to the back page. “That’s not my signature.”

  Kate laughs out loud. “What—someone forged it?” She leans in close to Miranda. “Don’t play me for a jerk, lady.”

  “Here’s my handwriting,” Miranda says angrily, reaching for her purse. She pulls out her driver’s license, hands it to Kate along with the papers. “Here’s my signature.”

  Kate looks from one signature to the other. She frowns.

  “It’s a forgery,” Miranda says. “Someone forged my name.”

  They stare at each other.

  Slowly, almost as if she were praying, Miranda touches her fingertips to her forehead.

  At the exact same moment, and with as much horror, Kate shakes her head, like someone trying to get rid of her worst nightmare.

  “Don’t tell me you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking,” Miranda says in a whisper.

  “Laura,” Kate replies in a voice equally low, as if the mere saying of that name is unbearably painful.

  Miranda starts to crumple. She grasps the edge of the desk for support. “Oh, God,” she moans. “She was in on it—the entire time.”

  Kate nods. “It looks that way,” she has to agree.

  “I believed her when she told me she was innocent. I never doubted her for an instant.”

  “Neither did I.”

  You dumb fucking ass, she rails inwardly. Don’t neglect checking up on Laura, Carl had warned her. This could be a ruse, he’d cautioned her, to throw you off your client’s trail.

  Shit. This explains it. How Laura managed to get away. She’s never been able to really come to grips with it. Yes, she had diverted their assailants, and Laura’s story later had been plausible; but looking back on it now, how does a naked, frightened, inexperienced girl outrun men who if they don’t find her and kill her are looking at the gas chamber, and know it?

  She had buried her suspicions. This explains why Laura had set up that encounter with the phony informant. It was a trap from the get-go. And she had walked right into it with her eyes wide open.

  You’re an amateur. That’s why Laura hired you. Laura wanted to cover her tracks, but she didn’t want anything real to be found out. That’s why she didn’t hire a more established agency—because they would have seen through her.

  “Now what?” Miranda asks.

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

  “That forgery,” Miranda says, pointing to it, still in Kate’s hand. “What are you going to do with that?”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Kate says. “I have to take it to the police.”

  “So bye-bye the money? You can walk away from millions of dollars? Just like that?”

  “She set me up,” Kate counters sharply. Her anger’s directed straight into her own gut, Miranda just happens to be standing in the way. “Your daughter tried to have me killed. I can’t walk away from that—there’s no price tag on my life.”

  “There’s no way I can …?”

  Kate puts up her free hand like a traffic cop. “No.”

  Miranda nods. “I guess that’s it, then,” she says with tired resignation.

  “I guess so.” Kate starts to put the forged papers back in her pack; then she hesitates, “There’s just one thing,” she says slowly.

  “What?”

  Kate rummages around in her pack, comes up with another stack of capers. She looks at them, turning to one particular page.

  “What is it?” Miranda asks.

  “It’s a telephone bill. Rusty Lukins’s phone bill, for July.”

  “Who’s Rusty Lukins?” Miranda asks.

  “The man who chartered the boat,” Kate says. “Frank’s accomplice. The man the police shot, trying to escape.”

  “How did you get …?” Miranda’s mouth flies open. “Those two that were murdered down in Orange County. That was at his house, wasn’t it?”

  Kate nods grimly.

  “Were you there that night?”

  Kate nods again. “I was meeting them. Wes and Morgan. I was late. By the time I arrived they were already dead.” She’s shaking, her body jerking spastically from head to toe. “I led the killer right to them, so I’m responsible for their getting killed,” she says soberly, feeling the pain welling up inside her. “If I’d been on
time, I’d be dead now, too.”

  They stare at each other.

  “Rusty called here,” Kate tells Miranda, referring to the telephone sheets. “Only one phone call, but it ties her in.”

  “When was that?” Miranda asks anxiously. “The date.”

  Kate looks at the bill. “July twenty-second.”

  Miranda stares at her.

  “What is it?” Kate asks.

  “I was out of town that day,” Miranda says. “And Laura was with me,” she adds, her voice rising. “We were in San Francisco, together. I can prove it—dozens of people were with us, all day long.”

  “He was calling Frank, then.”

  Miranda shakes her head. “Frank was never in this house without one of the family being here with him. This is our place,” she says, “for the family only. He didn’t even have a key.”

  “Laura could have given him one.”

  “Maybe. I suppose so.”

  All the color has drained from Miranda as she reaches into her center drawer again.

  Kate’s drained herself—all she wants now is to get out of here. She stuffs the telephone sheets back into her day pack.

  Click.

  Slowly, very slowly, she raises her eyes.

  Miranda is pointing a gun at her. A .32 revolver, a comfortable gun for a woman. Easy to use, and plenty of stopping power, certainly at this range.

  “Put that down,” Miranda says, indicating the day pack.

  Kate stands stock-still. “This is not a good idea, lady,” she tells Miranda. “You do not want to do this—you don’t. Trust me on this.”

  “I don’t have a choice.” Miranda nods at the day pack. “Put it down. On the desk. Slowly.”

  Kate places the pack on the center of the desk.

  “Now step back.”

  Kate takes two steps back. “Are you going to kill me?” she asks.

  “I’ve already told you—I have no choice.”

  “You have a choice,” Kate corrects her. “Everyone always has a choice.”

  Miranda shakes her head. “I can’t let my daughter be arrested for murder. And I’m not going to let you ruin our lives.”