House of Smoke (20 page)

She checks out the various customers, force of habit, narrowing her focus on the man and woman seated three tables away. The woman looks familiar but Kate can’t place her. Someone rich, whoever she is. Her dress cost a couple thousand dollars, easy, and she has a big diamond ring on her finger, which this man didn’t give her, they’re not married. She’s flirting with him too much to be married to him.

As the maître d’ passes he pours some wine into Kate’s glass, the house chardonnay, eighteen dollars a bottle, a nice wine.

“How’s everything tonight, Mr. Shugrue?” he asks. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Everything’s great, Wayne, thanks.”

“Enjoy your dinner,” the maître d’ says, moving away.

“You’re a regular,” Kate observes, forking up some eggplant puree.

He nods yes. “It’s a nice room, and they have the best wine list in town. So what’re you working on these days?” he asks, deflecting the conversation back to her.

“This and that,” she answers. Working hours are over for the day, she doesn’t want to talk shop. She takes a sip of wine. “Umm, good.”

“Locally grown grapes. The county is one of the best wine regions in the world, which people are beginning to recognize.”

“Do you know about that stuff?” she asks. “About everybody in this town seems to. Me, I just drink it.”

He cocks his head, looking at her kind of funny.

“What?” she asks.

“I didn’t tell you? When we met?”

“Tell me what?”

He laughs. He’s got a nice, genuine laugh. “I grow grapes for a living,” he tells her.

“You’re a winemaker?” She’s astounded.

“I make some wine. I sell grapes more than I make wine.”

“I’m impressed.”

“It’s farming,” he says modestly, “like growing artichokes or cantaloupes. We used to run cattle, now it’s grapes.”

A sudden thought comes to her. “This wine—” she holds up her glass—“the grapes from this wine, did you grow them?”

A big grin: “Yes.”

“I’ll be damned.” She takes another sip. “You’ve been holding out on me, Cecil. You’re a man of many talents.”

She was turned on before and now she’s more turned on, this guy is cool.

“I don’t know about that,” he responds. “Anyway, we were talking about you, what you’re up to these days. Are you working on a case, do you do a bunch at the same time, what I know about detectives comes from novels and movies.”

“Can’t we talk about something other than business?” she asks.

“If you sold insurance, I’d say yes, but what you do is interesting.”

“I guess to an outsider it is,” she agrees. “When you’re doing it, though, it can be pretty boring. As a matter of fact, though,” she allows, “I am working on something kind of interesting.”

It’s the wine, it’s his being close, it’s wanting to make a connection. “I shouldn’t talk about these things, a client wants to know his PI isn’t blabbing his story all over town.”

“I’m not much for gossip,” he says. “If you tell me not to say something, I won’t.”

“I’m working on a murder case,” she confides.

“That sounds pretty important.”

“It could be.”

“Is it something local?” he asks. “I haven’t heard about any murders around these parts recently.”

“It’s local,” she tells him. “The reason you haven’t heard about it as a murder is because it hasn’t been called that.”

He shoots her a quizzical look.

“Officially, on the books, it’s a suicide. My client knew the deceased. She—” That was a slip, she can’t give away names or otherwise identify Laura. “My client thinks it might not have been. Suicide. That this person was killed and it was made to look like a suicide.”

Now he really is staring at her.

“You’re talking about Frank Bascomb,” he says.

“I knew I shouldn’t have started up with this.”

“That’s high-profile, Frank dying in the county jail, everyone in town knows about it.”

“Keep it to yourself, okay?”

“Like I said, I don’t gossip.” He hesitates before asking her the next question. “Who hired you?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you. My client doesn’t want anyone to know. I have to respect that.”

“Of course, I understand.” He looks away for a moment, in the direction of the couple nearby who are finishing their coffee.

“You see that woman?” Cecil asks Kate.

“How could I not? Everyone in this room has noticed her. She’s a stunning woman.”

“That’s Miranda Sparks,” Cecil says. “She was Bascomb’s boss.”

So
that’s
Laura’s mother. “I’ve heard about her,” Kate says.

“She’s famous around town.” He cocks a finger at her. “One thing I do know—whoever hired you to look into this suicide of Bascomb’s, it wasn’t Miranda.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t, but why would you say that?”

“Because Bascomb, her longtime faithful employee, was caught smuggling a million dollars of contraband onto her family’s private property,” he says. “It made the Sparks family look terrible, and Miranda was furious, especially since she was going into the county the next week to have it rezoned. Frank’s getting caught like that could’ve screwed things up. You don’t screw things up for the Sparks family without paying a big-time price—although not that big, I’m not implying anything. But if old Frank had ever wound up beating the case Miranda would’ve fired him, run him out of the county on a rail, the Sparks family is very protective of their image. Plus it’s common knowledge the foreman was sleeping with the owner’s daughter, which is a strict no-no. I’ll tell you one thing—if you’re making a list of people who wanted to see Bascomb out of the way, you put Miranda at the top.”

“It sounds like you and Mrs. Sparks aren’t exactly bosom buddies,” Kate says. No wonder Laura didn’t want her mother to know she had hired a private eye to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding Bascomb’s death.

“I personally don’t have any complaints about Miranda. We get along okay … considering.”

Considering what? she thinks; but doesn’t ask.

“Different points of view. About life,” he says, reading her mind.

Their dinner completed, Wilkerson pays the bill and pulls Miranda’s chair out for her. As she rises she leans in and says something to him in his ear; he turns and looks in Kate and Cecil’s direction.

Miranda links arms with him, leads him over to Cecil’s table.

“Please don’t stand up, Cecil,” Miranda says, but he already has. She touches her cheek to his, which Cecil endures self-consciously. A look passes between them, which Kate, who’s watching, picks up on with curiosity.

“Cecil Shugrue, I’d like you to meet John Wilkerson, from The Friends Of The Sea. John and I are working together on an important project.” To Wilkerson she says, “this is my friend and fellow-rancher Cecil Shugrue, who makes lovely wines, among other nice things.”

Cecil extends his hand. Wilkerson takes it reluctantly, wondering if Miranda and this guy ever had a relationship of any kind.

“Nice meeting you,” Cecil says. “And this is my friend Kate Blanchard. Kate, Miranda Sparks.”

Kate looks good tonight—better than good, she put some thought and time into this outfit she’s wearing, but next to Miranda Sparks she’s wallpaper, invisible. Poor Laura, she thinks, to have a mother this powerful.

“Hello,” Kate says.

“Hello,” Miranda says back, checking Kate out cursorily. “It’s good to see you,” Miranda says heartily to Cecil, for one brief moment focusing all her attention on him. Turning it off as quickly: “And you, too, nice meeting you … Kate? We’ve got to run. I’ll see you soon, Cecil?”

“I’m sure.” He’s pretty dry.

“Watch this one,” Miranda says to Kate, half-winking at her, woman to woman.

“Nice meeting you, too,” Kate says to Miranda, who doesn’t hear her, she’s already taken Wilkerson’s arm and is leading him out, greeting a few other parties as they make their exit.

“Close personal friend of yours?” Kate asks Cecil, as she watches Miranda make her regal retreat.

He shrugs his hands:
comme ci
,
comme ça
. “We’ve known each other a long time. I wouldn’t call it close or personal. I run across her husband once in a while, he’s an okay guy. Like I said, we come at life from different angles.”

“Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,” Kate states, chewing the bone raw. She doesn’t want to be catty but Miranda Sparks rubbed her the wrong way. She hopes Cecil’s being honest, that he and Miranda aren’t friends; but if they are, tough shit. She goes where her gut leads her.

“Deep down she’s ice,” Cecil says, mollifying her.

“But she covers it with a lot of heat.”

“She covers it with a lot of heat,” he agrees with her. “And I don’t feel like wasting my time talking any more about her, if that’s okay with you.”

Dorothy Sparks sits in a weathered Adirondack chair on the back lawn of her waterfront estate, looking out to sea. All the lights are out; she’s in darkness. On the eastern edge of the horizon the low-hanging moon, a few days past full, casts lantern ripples that make the ocean look like it’s lit by pale-yellow fluorescent globes from underneath the surface. Far down the beach, near the Miramar Hotel, a lone nocturnal fisherman is casting his line, standing at the water’s edge, the foam breaking over his high green-rubber boots, the anchovy on his hook shimmering silver against the sky, against the blackness and the clouds and stars.

It’s a warm night, not very humid, and clear. The air is still. Dorothy wears an old summer dress, of the style that was fashionable when Rita Hayworth was a movie star; she was never one to spend money on clothes, she wears the same dresses for decades. On the table next to her is a vodka collins in a highball glass.

Dorothy’s house, which she’s lived in for forty years, is an old rambling mansion that was built in the craftsman style at the turn of the century. It’s two stories, redwood construction, too many windows and french doors, the kind of inefficient house that isn’t built anymore and is great to live in, especially for large families with lots of kids. She and her late husband didn’t have lots of kids, they only had Frederick, but they had dogs and horses and servants and they filled the place up.

Frederick would have benefited from having brothers and sisters, but after his birth, which was difficult, Dorothy couldn’t have any more children. All the energy went into their son, all the love and concern and fear and pampering.

Besides the main house, which overlooks the ocean from a bluff about forty feet high, there is a guesthouse, a studio (which used to be a house for the gardener and his wife, who was the laundress, when they had a live-in gardener and laundress), a large garage with chauffeur’s quarters, a stable for horses, a tennis court. In the old days, up until the 1970s, Dorothy and her husband maintained a large staff, more servants than family. You needed a lot of help to run a house, with all the entertaining and so forth. Now she’s down to two live-ins, a maid and a cook. A gardener comes three times a week, but doesn’t live on the property.

After her husband died, Dorothy cut all the dead wood away. It’s easier, you can spend too much of your life worrying about what’s going on in your house, consumed with the minutiae of routine. Now she has time to think, to do what is important, which to her means protecting the environment and helping those less fortunate. Miranda oversees all the family business, but the foundation is Dorothy’s child, her passion. She is someone who believes that one person can make a difference in the world.

As she ponders the events of the day she reflects on Miranda. Miranda always wanted more. That was the reason Dorothy turned over the company’s reins to her instead of to Frederick, her own flesh. He already had enough, he wasn’t hungry. Dorothy is a good businesswoman in her own right, and one thing she knows, you have to want it. If you don’t you’ll lose what you have.

The ceremony this morning was a good example of Miranda’s mind at work. The family lost nothing, really, they don’t do anything with that land up there, and they gained a great amount of goodwill and support, which down the line will pay a dividend. For every motion there is a corresponding countermotion, in moral deeds as well as physical ones.

Dorothy also believes (or she’s convinced herself she believes, which by now has become one and the same) that deep down Miranda is a good person, that her pushiness and bravado and toughness is a shield against her humble beginnings, a need to prove herself. It’s pop psychology, Dorothy knows that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to it, she knows her daughter-in-law, after twenty-eight years you can’t not know somebody you’re that intimate with. She’s seen Miranda in unguarded moments, when the vulnerability shows through.

Most importantly, what she has forced herself to find peace with, is that Miranda is the wife of her only child, and she has always been blind when it comes to Frederick. His artistic needs and dreams, his lack of toughness in the business world, his etherealness—she has cherished those qualities in him for all of his life, delighting in those attributes that have made him the sweet man he is—have been the cause of her pain and of letting him go alone into the world.

Dorothy knows that Miranda has always believed that she manipulated Frederick Sparks, the scion to one of the largest fortunes in California, into falling for her, and then marrying her, which despite her looks and brains and drive was a major coup to pull off. But the wise old lady is no fool; she was the one who did the manipulating, it was the protective mother who warded off all the logical candidates of their set and maneuvered her shy, endearing son into union with this powerhouse of a woman.

Miranda married Frederick for his money. Dorothy knew that. But she felt that over time Frederick would come to love Miranda (if he hadn’t already by the time they got married) and depend on her. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Miranda would love Frederick back, in ways more fierce and unfathomable than Dorothy can imagine. There’s a lot that’s imperfect about their life together, but somehow it works.

As a mother, she takes satisfaction in that.

A pair of headlights cuts through the darkness. A car pulls into the compound, a door opens and shuts.