House of Smoke (32 page)

The phone clicks in her ear.

Her heart is pounding like it is going to break through her chest. Bastards. Sons of bitches. They can’t intimidate her like this: they can’t.

At least she didn’t tell them she had resigned the case. It would have been the smart thing to do, since she has; but she doesn’t want them to have the satisfaction of knowing they blew her down.

A small satisfaction, but her own.

Miranda flies United Express into the Oakland airport. It’s closer to the city than SFO, and it’s less likely she’ll see anyone that she knows in the Oakland terminal. Normally she would take one of the family planes, but she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s coming up this time, not even her own pilot.

She could have conducted her business over the telephone, but a personal meeting will better convey the gravity of her concern. Also, the family has some business interests in the Bay Area, and she likes to shop here as well.

She hails a taxi, gives her destination. The cabbie is a blackened-tooth Russian who drives his beat-up Mercury like a kamikaze pilot. They drive across the Bay Bridge into the city. He pulls up in front of a restored Victorian mansion near the Presidio that’s been converted into offices.

She’s wearing a business suit with a slit skirt that rides two-thirds up her thighs as she gets out. She tips generously. The driver takes a long, appreciative look at her legs and backside before peeling off into traffic.

The secretary, a woman about Miranda’s age who looks a generation older, ushers her into Terwilliger’s office. He owns the building, it’s his firm. His personal office is large, octagonal-shaped, filled with mementos Terwilliger has picked up while working on cases around the world. The sun refracts through the beveled-glass windows.

Terwilliger Investigations is not a large agency; at any given time no more than a dozen operatives. But they’re the best in the world at what they do, and they charge a fee commensurate with the quality of their work: two hundred dollars an hour and up, plus expenses. And they turn away five times as many cases as they take.

“Mrs. Sparks.” He comes to her from behind his desk, shakes her hand. He’s a big man in his late forties, power forward—size. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“Thank you.” She sits across his massive desk from him, her legs crossed. Her relationship with this man is strictly business. She’s never given him the signal that he should make a play for her.

“This is a bit unusual,” he tells her. She had called the day before and outlined the problem. “We don’t normally do surveillance on people in our own line of work.”

“I understand. But this is an emergency.”

“I see.” Even for an agency as much in demand as his, the Sparks family is special. Aside from their wealth and position in the state, they have been steady clients from the beginning of his practice. Some years he’s billed them over a quarter of a million dollars: serious money. The Sparkses are clients to whom being loyal is good policy.

“Someone has hired her to check up on my family. I need to know what she knows, if anything.”

“Is there something in particular you think she’s looking at?”

“The incident regarding the dope trafficking on our property, of course. And the aftermath. That’s my main concern.”

“Do you want background on this investigator as well? What’s her name”—he opens a manila folder on his desk—“Blanchard?” he says, reading the name. “Where she comes from, her credentials, family life, that sort of thing?”

“I want whatever you can dig up on her,” Miranda says forcefully.

“You don’t want her finding out things that could be harmful.”

“That is precisely what I don’t want.”

He pulls a legal pad and ballpoint towards him.

“Okay,” he tells her. “We’ll get to it right away.”

“How long will it be before you can give me what I’m looking for?” Miranda asks.

“I’ll have a detailed report to you within a week.”

Another taxi drops Miranda off at the St. Francis. The family maintains an apartment in Pacific Heights, but she’ll stay in a hotel tonight to maintain the secrecy of her mission. No one she knows would stay at the St. Francis, it’s too large and commercial. To play it extra-safe she even takes her suite under an alias, “Mrs. Torres,” after the original owner of the family ranch. She’ll pay the bill in cash.

Room service brings up a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, with two glasses: Veuve Clicquot ’85, the best the house offers. She draws a bath, and while she’s waiting for it to fill she places a phone call.

“I’m in town,” she tells the party at the other end of the line, “the St. Francis. Suite 2312.” She listens to the other end of the line. “I’ll be waiting.”

Hanging up, she disrobes where she stands, pours herself a glass of champagne. At the vanity in the bedroom she puts her hair up, then goes into the bathroom and steps into the tub, sinking to her neck in the oil-scented hot bathwater.

She’s toweling off when there’s a knock on the door. Throwing on the courtesy robe, she walks across the living room and opens the door, tendrils of hair at her neck still wet from her bath.

“What took you so long?” she asks Blake Hopkins.

He smiles as he looks at her. “I left the office as soon as you called. This is the big city—we have a problem called traffic.”

Taking his face in her hands, she pulls him to her in a kiss, the robe coming open, her moist body dampening his shirt and tie. Then she leads him in, closing and locking the door behind them, the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle. As they head for the bedroom her robe drops to the floor next to her dress, undergarments, and shoes.

T
HE WOMEN SIT IN
their circle. Almost all of them sit in the same chair every week, consciously. It gives them the security of being grounded, at least in this one part of their lives. Being grounded, if only for a few hours a week, is important to them, because most of the time they aren’t.

As soon as check-in is over Kate claims the floor. Her last time here she had to be dragged into opening up her soul. This time she’s eager to, almost impatient.

“When I was in the shelter,” she begins, “I got into therapy—it was mandatory. I resisted like crazy, partly because of the fact that it
was
mandatory—that’s my MO, if someone tells me I have to do something I’ll do everything in my power not to. I’m a champ at cutting off my nose to spite my face. Even though the police psychologist had been helpful when all the shit came down, I was still suspicious, paranoid. But anyway, even someone as obstinate as me has to figure out that finding out why you’re fucked up might have some benefit. So then I started working things out a little.

“One psychologist there got to me to the point where I decided I could trust him, and from then on things went better. I didn’t live there very long but I went back twice a week for therapy. One time he said something that was really important to me. I wrote it down, so I’d never forget it.”

She fishes a four-by-six card out of her purse, reads from it:

Most of us come from the past, and we re-create the present. Those who excel come from the future, their vision, their mission, and it pulls them forward.

She puts the card back into her wallet. “I’m still bogged down in my past,” she explains. “It becomes my present, so I don’t have a future, I can’t. And that’s what I’ve got to get to: my future, my vision. It’s why I’m here. And to do that I’ve got to get the past out of the way.”

She thinks of the events of the past weeks: sleeping with Juan, a married man and a cop to boot; the frightening and humiliating encounter with the men from the Mexican Mafia; leaving a case without having it come to a conclusion—all which she knows she’s responsible for, there are no accidents in life.

“Otherwise,” she goes on, “I’ll always be a prisoner. I’ll always be held captive. It’ll be like living with Eric all over again, except I’ll be my own warden.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Maxine interjects. “You’re doing great. These are big changes you’re going through, they take time, they don’t want to be rushed.”

Kate shakes her head.

“If I don’t push myself through this,” Kate tells her, tells all of them, looking them all in the eye, “I won’t get through it. I’ve got to be hard on myself, much harder than I have been up to now.”

The first thing the people at the Women’s Shelter did was take her to the hospital. They wanted to call the police—her own force—and press charges against Eric. He’d beaten her up bad, she looked a mess, although her training had saved her from being hurt much worse.

She wouldn’t let them make the call
—
she didn’t have the strength to go through another departmental ordeal so soon after the previous one. Besides, even though she had been cleared, she knew there was residual resentment towards her from some members of the force, and this would be like throwing gasoline on a dying fire.

Miraculously, she looked worse than she was. Two ribs were broken, some teeth were knocked out, swollen eyes, a fair amount of internal bleeding. About as much damage as a boxer might endure in a tough fight, except she didn’t get to do any punching back: her biggest regret.

No one knew where she was except Julie and Captain Albright. She didn’t want the kids to know because she was afraid Eric might wheedle it out of them, and she didn’t want them to see her until the initial swelling and bruises had gone down. She’d had to tell Captain Albright that she couldn’t come back to work like she was supposed to, and why. He took it okay, but she could tell he was pretty worried and maybe suspicious, too. Like none of it was her fault but was she one of those cops who somehow drew problems? A jinx?

She stayed in the shelter two weeks, until she was presentable enough to go out into the world. Then she went back to work. Captain Albright put her right back into the swim, assigned her a new partner and a car, and she was back on the job. She moved in with Julie and Walt. They were happy to have her.

Her daughters’ attitudes were more ambivalent. Their lives were totally screwed up and she was part of the reason, even though it hadn’t been her fault. Except that she’d brought Eric into their lives, so some of it really was her fault, in their minds. Wanda’s acne flared up fiercely, and Sophia turned inward, barely communicating even the simplest requests. She tried to be there for them, but her own problems were so overwhelming she didn’t do very well at it; they were young, she rationalized to herself, they could bounce back. That part of her life would have to wait
—
it would be over pretty soon, and then they’d have her full attention. It was selfish, thinking that way, she knew that; but she couldn’t do anything about it, not right in the moment.

The girls withdrew from her and turned to her sister for affection and attention.

She got a restraining order against Eric. He couldn’t come within a hundred yards of her, and he couldn’t see the kids at all. She felt better after that was handed down, safer, not only for herself but for Julie and Walt and the girls, too.

So on the outside things were getting better; but on the inside they were turning to shit. She was under a lot of stress. The therapy sessions were helping, but it was all too much. People were talking about her at work behind her back. Not only Eric’s buddies, of which in this situation there were plenty, but other male officers, too. Like if there was this much smoke around her, there must be something burning somewhere.

With every passing day her anger built. She started taking it out on the people who were closest to her: her kids. Everything they did was wrong. Their schoolwork, their friends, the way they put on their socks, whatever. Yelling at them like crazy, really ragging on them. She was crazy, impossible. Wild mood swings. And she could see herself doing this shit while she was doing it and she knew it was fucked and crazy and she couldn’t stop herself. Which had to be some kind of definition of some kind of insanity.

The girls started going to therapy with her. That helped. Not them, but her. She started seeing what demons were driving her. When the truth about you comes out of your daughters’ mouths and the truth is ugly … you don’t
w
ant to hear it, but you’d better. She was in total denial most of the time around it, but she heard it.

After a while the girls started resisting therapy. She had the problems, not them. They stopped going with her. She didn’t push it. They were right
—
it was her problem, not theirs.

It got claustrophobic living with her sister, who couldn’t help but disapprove of her behavior, so she gave them all a break, she moved out and got her own place nearby, a small efficiency. Technically she was supposed to reside in Oakland, but no one ever checked. The little place was all she needed, because the girls stayed with Julie and Walt. She saw them almost every day. It was better for them there, more stable. Until things worked out. Not for long.

After three months she hired a lawyer and filed for divorce. Eric had been expecting the papers.

“What took you so long?” he sneered at the marshal when he was formally served, right in the middle of the squad room, one morning after the daily briefing.

He laughed about it
—
big fucking joke. Some of the other cops laughed about it, too. Not the women, just some of the men.

“Looking good, Kate,” Eric taunted her. Checking her out: “Your ass is getting kind of big, though, isn’t it?”

She ignored him.

They were in the corridor outside the courtroom, waiting to go in. Her with her lawyer, him with his. The first time they’d laid eyes on each other since that night. Normally, before a divorce can proceed, the participants have to go to meditation, to try to work things out by themselves. She and Eric had filed waivers for that, because of their special circumstances.

Most divorces are basically settled by the time the participants get to the courtroom. Not in this case. A third party, a judge who didn’t know them, would have to decide. There was no middle ground between them, no way they could work anything out. They were both in it for blood, especially her
—
Eric had had his ration, she wanted retribution.