House of Smoke (13 page)

“You need help. You have cases outstanding.”

“I’ll take care of my own work, thank you,” he stated belligerently.

“Not in the condition you’re in,” she rejoined bluntly. “I need to make a living. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

She did come back the following day, and Carl X. was ready for her, and pretty soon he’d taught her everything she knows about detective work in the private sector. She thought she knew a lot, having been a police officer for ten years. She found out she didn’t know anything about being a PI.

“The worst PIs in the world are ex-cops,” he told her. “You know why?”

“No.”

“Your average cop is heavy-handed, has no finesse. Brings an institutional disdain towards the very people they’re working for. They don’t know how to listen. That’s what being a good PI is all about. Knowing how to listen. You listening to me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

He looked her up and down, lingering on her breasts.

“You’re a wise-ass, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“A good-looking one.”

“Thanks.” Often from a man she was offended by a remark like that. She wasn’t this time. It meant they could be friends.

Kate picked up his pending cases, operating under his license until she took the test to get her own. When the convalescent facility had done what they could for him, she helped him find his current digs, a decent nursing home in a nice area of Goleta near the beach.

She would have stayed partners with him, sharing her fees, but he would have no part of that.

“I don’t take charity.”

By then she knew him well enough not to argue.

Out on her own, she’s doing all right. Carl lives on his pension and his memories. She comes to see him when she can, once a week usually. They talk about her cases, he listens, gives her advice. But he doesn’t tell her how to do it; he steers her towards finding the right answers herself.

“So if this foreman character was murdered, so what?” he asks, after she’s filled him in.

“So what? What do you mean, so what?”

“If a bunch of drunken bums killed the guy, what difference would that make in the great cosmic scheme of things?”

“It makes a difference to my client. I’m not working for the cosmos.”

“But that’s not what your client’s looking for, is it?” He stares at her, like a schoolteacher awaiting an answer.

“You mean, what’s the reason,” she says. “Assuming there is one.”

He glances down at the volleyball game. What he wouldn’t give.

“I’m sitting here,” she commands, grabbing his chin and jerking his head towards her. “You can drool over the babes on your own time.”

“I am on my own time,” he reminds her.

She crunches ice cubes.

“Whether this turd-bird killed himself or a bunch of rummies did it is not what matters,” he repeats. “It’s barely relevant.”

“If somebody ordered it up, though, that would sure as hell make it relevant,” she offers, her mind in lockstep with his. “That’s what this is all about—if the men who killed him had been put up to it by someone else, because let’s face it, where would a ranch foreman come up with the money to make a dope buy of that magnitude, unless he had a partner? A partner who would be scared that Bascomb would talk once he realized he was looking at ten to twenty-five.”

“Now you’re thinking like a detective,” he says, unable to hide the grin.

“But the men in the tank with him were derelicts, falling-down drunks,” she continues, following her train of thought. “If someone wanted Bascomb permanently shut up he wouldn’t trust a bunch of drunks to do the job. It could be botched too easily, and then Bascomb would really have incentive to spill his guts. Anyway, it all happened in less than twelve hours. It’s impossible to put something that heavy together in that short a time.”

“If you’ve got enough money, you can do anything. And as far as the
who
of it, beggars can’t be choosers,” Carl lectures her. “If that’s the only hand you’re dealt, you play it and hope for the best.”

“Do you really think this is a plausible scenario, Carl?”

“It’s something,” he shrugs noncommittally.

“Then why doesn’t it smell better?”

“Finally!” he waxes sarcastic.

“Finally what?”

“Finally you’re thinking like a detective, not just going by the numbers.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“Some people never get to that place, Kate. Look,” he continues, building up a good head of steam, “any time you find a bird’s nest on the ground you’d better be suspicious as hell. It could be booby-trapped, blow up right in your face.”

She thinks about that for a moment.

“What else could it be, then?”

“I’m thinking out loud here, that’s all I’m doing, thinking out loud, okay? What if this client of yours wasn’t innocent after all? What if she was part of it? The boyfriend, who’s also a hired hand, is sitting in jail, cooling his heels, she’s going to make his bail in the morning and get him a fancy lawyer who gets him off somehow. That’s what they’ve cooked up, okay?”

“Maybe,” she concedes dubiously.

He laughs at her skepticism. “I’m just thinking out loud, I didn’t say that’s what happened. If you’re not asking
what if
all the time, you’re not doing the job. Am I right?”

“Yes,” she admits, “you’re right. When you’re right, Carl, you’re right.”

“Which is most of the time. Practically always. So—she’s going to hire the fancy lawyer and the foreman walks and everybody is happy. Except she goes on down to the jail and realizes that’s not the way it’s going to be. The hired hand is going to bring her down with him. Might, anyway; so she thinks.”

“But if she arranged to have him killed why would she hire me? If I find out she did it, she’s screwed herself. The police have already closed this case. She’s home free.”

“Maybe she’s afraid it isn’t. Look, Kate. You haven’t lived here too long. The Sparks family is wired in this town like you can’t imagine. Maybe the DA told them something off the record that scared the bejesus out of them.”

She shakes her head, stubbornly. “No. It doesn’t total up. I don’t understand why anyone would hire a private detective who could blow it up in their face.”

“Fear. Panic. Guilt. Stupidity. Any or all of those. The girl has an agenda,” Carl says, schooling her. “She tells you she thinks maybe he didn’t kill himself. And maybe that’s all it is. What you see could be exactly what you’re going to get. Maybe it’s no more than guilt. She probably feels guilty, like she should have saved him somehow. Rich people can get that way, they get that socially conscious hair up their ass. Her grandmother’s the prime bleeding heart in this town, she’s the patron saint to every homeless bum living along the tracks down there.” He slurps some of his drink. “What the hell, it’s her life. She’s actually a fine woman, old Mrs. Sparks. She just doesn’t know the real world, not thing one.”

He turns pensive for a moment, glancing at the volleyball game, then to Kate before she can rank on him again.

“The mother, though. That’s a different story. She could make a decision like that in a heartbeat.”

“Laura’s mother?” Kate asks, reeling from all this information.

He nods. “A tough customer. When she has to be.”

“Maybe I should find out a little about this family,” she says. “Some research on this client of mine.”

“Yes, I think you’re going to have to,” he confirms for her.

She sighs. “So my client could be setting me up, to throw me off the real trail, or her mother could have been a player, which really seems off the wall, since I can’t see what she could have had to do with anything. Or it could be a plain old suicide, just like the police say it was.”

“Or none of them,” he adds. “Give you yet another option. Maybe he pissed one of his cellmates off, and they jumped him. Maybe he was gay and hit on the wrong hombre, or they were and he wouldn’t play catch, or some other combination. You pays your money, you takes your choice.”

“What do you think?” she asks him. “That vaunted intuition of yours—what’s it telling you?”

He drains the last of his drink, turns his attention to the volleyball game.

“There’s one rule that’s inviolable,” he tells her.

“What’s that?” she bites.

“There was a lot of money at stake here,” Carl reminds her. “Some of it’s lost now, a hell of a lot more than lunch money. Somebody might want to make sure more of it doesn’t float away.”

“When in doubt, follow the money,” she states. Another of Carl’s maxims.

“You’re the detective, detective.”

There are many beautiful buildings in Santa Barbara. The County Courthouse is the most famous, an enormous Spanish colonial design built in 1875 that occupies a full square block of downtown space, featuring an immense sunken garden and the famous Mural Courtroom. Directly a stone’s throw to the south you come upon the arresting purple-tinted whitewashed adobe buildings of Meridian Studios, while a scant block to their west, forming the borders of De La Guerra Plaza, sits City Hall and the Santa Barbara News-Press Building, the oldest daily newspaper in Southern California. You find such buildings all over town, blocks of them—lovely structures, many with important historical significance.

And smack-dab in the middle of all this tectonic beauty sits one eyesore: the County Administration building, a gigantic aggravating bunker situated directly across Anapamu St. from the courthouse.

The way this sad state of affairs came about is a classic example of why bureaucracies are intrinsically fucked. Back in the early 1960s the geniuses in Sacramento contracted out the construction of a raft of county buildings to be erected up and down the state; and in one of those strokes of inspiration that can only come from the minds of entrenched civil-service mediocrities, they (whoever
they
are) made it a one-style-fits-all deal, the style being poured concrete, about as appealing as a wart.
They
did it to save money; and of course, by the time all the cost overruns were accounted for, it came out more expensive than if each locality had done its own plan. So right across the street from one of the prettiest courthouses in the U.S. sits this four-story slab which would be marginally acceptable in some bombed-out place like Chernobyl, but in lovely Santa Barbara is flat-out pitiful.

Dorothy and Miranda Sparks are seated together in the back of the Board of Supervisors’ hearing room on the fourth floor of the county building, listening to county staff drone on about some triviality they, the bureaucrats, hold sacred.

The staffer falters to an end of his presentation. Miranda sits up, immediately alert. She taps Dorothy on the shoulder.

“They’re about to call our item number,” she notes. Smoothing her dress, she escorts her mother-in-law to the front of the chamber.

“Mr. Chairman, members of the Board of Supervisors. Thank you for allowing me to speak. For the record, my name is Miranda Tayman Sparks.” She speaks in a clear, distinct, and forceful voice, establishing eye contact with each supervisor sitting on the rostrum above her.

“I am appearing here today as chief executive officer of Pacific Land and Trust,” she continues, “and also as the board chairman of the Sparks Foundation, which is a charitable organization known not only in this county, but statewide and nationally, as a contributor to women’s causes, children’s-rights causes, and environmental causes.”

Miranda is dressed demurely and professionally in a business outfit by Jil Sander, sheer hose, black pumps with a modest heel. Her makeup is subdued and her hair is conservatively styled, falling naturally around her high-cheekboned face.

As she squares her notes preparatory to starting her formal presentation, the man she had fucked out on the ranch slips unobtrusively into the room through a door at the rear, taking a seat in the last row. No one pays him any attention.

Miranda takes a sip of water, begins her formal presentation.

“As you know, we own coastal property north of town. It’s a fairly large piece, a few thousand acres, and it’s all undeveloped. From time to time we’ve run some cattle on it, and raised a few crops, grains mostly, which haven’t worked out particularly well, due to a million problems, none of which I want to bore you with, so we’ve basically left it fallow. Except for a few small farm-type buildings, this land is pretty much like it was two, three, four hundred years ago, before anybody except Native Americans had set foot on it, and even then it wasn’t inhabited, because it didn’t produce, not even on a subsistence level. That’s the sad truth. It’s a beautiful piece of property. It would be a great location for multimillion-dollar homesites or a big resort, none of which we’ve ever contemplated, even though there have been resorts and golf courses and developments approved all around it. We’ve never asked for that, and I’m not here today to ask for that, so if you’ve been getting jittery just now listening to me you can relax. I’m not going to ask you to approve five hundred homesites or a thousand-room hotel or anything like that.”

There are a few smiles and nervous chuckles around the room, including up on the podium where the supervisors are sitting, looking down into the chamber. No one’s quite sure what Miranda wants from them, so this disclaimer is a relief.

She pauses, slips on a pair of half-frame tortoiseshell reading glasses. Opening a folder in front of her, she flips a few pages.

“I should mention that this particular piece of property is very important to my husband and my mother-in-law, because it was the first piece of land their family acquired, well over a hundred years ago. The leases they arranged with the railroads and the state over the years enabled them to buy other ranches and properties, to grow and prosper.”

She looks behind her to Dorothy, then turns back to the supervisors.

“Because the Sparks family did well, which was the result of hard, hard work, perseverance, and guts, they wanted to help others do well also. So they established the Sparks Foundation, which, as I mentioned, is a benefactor to many charitable causes, particularly environmental ones. I don’t think there’s any question that Dorothy Sparks is the main mover and shaker in this county as far as donating her time, her energy, and her money to worthy causes.”