House of Smoke (46 page)

Seeing herself now, without preparation, she recoils, immediately turning away.

She looks like the women you see on
Oprah
or
Hard Copy
. Pathetic souls, throwaway statistics.

This is worse than anything Eric ever did to her.

She had vowed that would never happen again, and it did. The same old … what? Was this her fault? Does she secretly harbor a death wish, a dream of destruction?

She catches herself wallowing, snaps to. Fuck that.

Money is going to be a problem. She gets by, but there’s no nest egg. Five hundred dollars a month goes up north for the kids (who she’ll be seeing in a few days), the rest is daily living. She would have gone up to the Bay Area two weeks ago on her usual monthly trip—she hadn’t missed once since the shit came down between Eric and her—but she can’t face them seeing her looking like this. They’ve talked on the phone, several times. They know she’s been hurt; but they don’t know how badly. She doesn’t want them to. When she goes up this trip she’ll spend extra time there, because she wants them down here with her.

It’s time to be a family again.

She isn’t sure of her bank balance—she’ll have to check it out. It’s scraping bottom, she’s sure of that.

Only one thing is really important now: to put her life back together. To do that, she’s going to have to find some missing pieces of the puzzle.

Surprise, surprise. Her bank account is suddenly twenty thousand dollars heavier.

“A cashier’s check,” the assistant manager, a young woman built along the lines of a frog, tells her, looking up the record on her computer. She seems surprised Kate didn’t know about the addition to her bank account, since it is, after all,
her
account. “It was deposited a week ago.”

“Is there a record of who made the deposit?”

“No, on a cashier’s check there wouldn’t be.”

A week ago. Miranda Sparks had visited her a week ago.
If there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all …

“Do you have a copy of the check?”

It takes a few minutes to locate it.

“It was drawn on Santa Barbara Bank and Trust,” the woman tells her, handing the copy over for Kate’s perusal.

The bail check for Wes Gillroy, the sole survivor from the bust on the boat, was also a cashier’s check drawn on Santa Barbara Bank and Trust. Sure, it’s a coincidence, probably nothing more; SBB&T is the city’s most popular bank, and whoever bought that check could have paid for it in cash, they wouldn’t even have to have an account there; still, given the overstimulation her antennae have recently undergone, the congruity jolts her like a sudden injection of adrenaline.

She drives to Miranda’s office, parks on the street, goes inside. Celeste, Miranda’s executive secretary, flinches as she sees Kate—she knows the identity of this woman with a plastic guard covering half her face, the bandages underneath not doing much of a job hiding her swollen and misshapen parts.

“Miranda Sparks,” Kate states in a firm don’t-fuck-with-me tone. “I need to see her. Now.”

Celeste ducks into Miranda’s office, emerges almost immediately “Mrs. Sparks is finishing an important call. Please wait,” she implores Kate. “Mrs. Sparks very much wishes to speak with you.”

Kate leafs through a back issue of
Architectural Digest
that’s lying on a side table. She feels hyper, she can’t sit. Twenty thousand dollars. Serious money—real serious. Somebody slips you twenty K, they want something substantial in return, it’s not like tipping the parking attendant a buck. Even if they don’t tell you they’ve given it to you. You find out sooner or later, there’s no way you won’t, and then you’re obligated. Bought and paid for. She doesn’t want to be a bought woman, not under circumstances she hasn’t agreed to.

Miranda opens the door to her office. “How are you?” she asks. The face guard causes her to wince in spite of herself.

“Better. I was at my office earlier today.”

“Are you back to work already?” Miranda seems surprised.

“No, I’m not working. I was cleaning up old business. I won’t be able to work for a while.”

“Yes. You should take as much time as you need.”

She takes Kate’s arm and leads her into her private office, closes the door. There is a pause as she smiles at Kate, taking her measure, trying to put her at ease.

“Tea? Coffee? Something cold?”

“How about a glass of Montrachet?”

Miranda looks at her strangely. “Wine? At this time of the day?”

The woman has a short memory—conveniently. “Nothing. Thank you.”

“Have a seat,” Miranda offers, moving to the chair behind her desk.

“No, thanks. I’m only here for a minute.”

“Are you calling on me about something specific?”

“The deposit into my account. Twenty thousand dollars. Last week. And my paid-up hospital bills.”

“Yes?”

“That was you, wasn’t it?”

The answer comes right away. “Yes, it was me.”

“I told you I didn’t need anything,” Kate reminds her.

“It isn’t a question of need. We are obligated to you. My family—all of us. We have to meet our obligations.”

This statement angers Kate, it’s so lacking in feeling, in heart. “I did not obligate you,” she insists.

“We obligate ourselves. It comes with our territory.”

Don’t fight city hall. “I guess that makes us even,” she hears herself saying.

“No,” Miranda contradicts her. “You saved my daughter’s life. Money can’t be an equal in that equation, no amount of money.”

“Then I’d better keep it,” Kate tells Miranda; understanding now that she’d intended to, before she laid bare the issue. Her own woman, not someone who can be bought—a nice conceit, but this is the real world here.

“I did earn it,” she stoutly avows. Okay, so there’s a little self-bullshit there. More than a little—so what?

“You most certainly did.”

“And I can use it.”

“Then I’m glad to have been of help.”

“Well …”

Now that it’s over she isn’t comfortable here. Her skin feels hyper-dry; she realizes where the expression “making my skin crawl” comes from. In the future, if there have to be further encounters with Miranda Sparks (she hopes there won’t be), they’ll be on neutral ground, not on Miranda’s home turfs.

“I found out what I wanted to know,” she declares.

“As you say, you earned it,” Miranda says as she stands, a clean act of dismissal. This conversation is finished; maybe their entire relationship, as short and exciting as it was.

She walks Kate to the door, opens it. “I know you don’t like my saying this, but if there’s anything I can do for you …”

“You’ve done enough already,” Kate tells her. In more ways than one.

“Good luck then.”

“Thanks.”

She leaves, feeling Miranda’s eyes on her back all the way until the front door is shut behind her.

Good luck to you, too, Mrs. Sparks. I know I’m going to need my share and then some.

Maybe, down the line, so will you.

Twenty big ones in the bank. That changes things. The pressure is off—for at least four months, more if she’s frugal, she can do any damn thing she wants. Twenty thousand dollars. What the Mexican Mafia guys offered her, to the dollar. Coincidence, or something more sinister? That will be one thing to find out. One thing of many.
Don’t trust anybody.
That’s going to be her mantra, from now on.

“You’re as stubborn as an ox,” Carl tells her with a halfhearted feigned anger, too old and infirm to be convincingly outraged anymore. Under the crusty-shell hard-boiled persona that’s evolved over more than fifty years of get-down detective work, his true colors show, and in them there is admiration for her tenacity and guts. She knows it, he knows she knows it, it’s part of their ritual. She also knows that his days of being useful to her are numbered.

He’s changed since she last saw him not long ago. More shrunken, more bent. It is a subject never broached by either of them, but it’s there. Well, she thinks, I’ve changed, too. Is he looking at her any differently?

Someday, maybe pretty soon, Carl will die.

They’re outside, in their usual gathering place. The day is cool, overcast. Carl wears an old-man’s button cardigan to keep his fragile bones warm. He doesn’t—or won’t—comment on the way she looks.

“I don’t have a choice.” Her voice is sodden with resignation. “In my shoes, you’d do the same thing.”

Any answer in the negative would be bullshit, so he doesn’t give one. He looks out at the horizon, to the oil rigs reflecting what little late-afternoon sun there is, and past them to the islands, obscured by clouds.

“What do you want me to tell you?” he asks her instead.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want advice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s just sit here a while till you figure out what it is you do want.”

They sit in quiet. The sound of the breakers hitting the beach down below echoes in the wind.

She wants strength. She wants to leech some from him, but she can’t tell him that. He doesn’t have that much left that he can spare.

Carl is her touchstone, her family. She doesn’t have a family anymore, not at the moment and not in the near future. There is pain in that which she cannot deny. That’s why she keeps going back to him, over and over again—for the great relief of having someone to talk to, and to try to bottle his wisdom, his memory. He knows how it’s done—he’s always known.

“Don’t worry about me,” he pronounces out of the blue, as if reading her mind.

“What do I have to worry about you about?” His statement startled her, put her on the defensive. One of his favorite ploys.

“Nothing. That’s why I’m telling you not to.”

He’s opened the door. She’ll be insulting him if she doesn’t walk through it.

“I have to find out who did this to me.”

He says nothing.

“Who gave the orders to do it.”

A slight nod: I hear you. Continue.

“I feel it’s got to be connected to the Sparks family somehow, like you said. All my instincts tell me that. But I don’t know how. I keep running down false trails.”

“You’re playing their game,” he says.

“How do you mean?” Talk to me, you’re the expert, compared to you I’m a neophyte at this. “What am I doing wrong?”

“You’re reacting.”

“What else can I do?”

“Someone hires you, you do their bidding, yes?” he asks rhetorically.

“Yes.”

“They set the agenda. You follow it.”

“I’m for hire. Isn’t that how it works?”

“Yep.”

“Then what?”

“Don’t be for hire.”

She stares at him.

“You’re a person with a problem,” he elucidates. “Generic you, not specific you. You need to have it solved. You hire an expert to help you, to do the work this expert is trained for. Does that compute?”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

“They tell you what they want and you get it done,” he goes on, patiently. “You try to, anyway,” he continues.

“Yes.”

“Like this girl. She hired you to find out if her boyfriend was murdered or else killed himself. You found out he was murdered.”

She nods yes.

“You did the job you were hired to do. You fulfilled your contract. You did a professional job.”

“If you put it that way, I did, yes.”

“She didn’t come to you to find out
who
it was. Just
what
it was. And you did.”

She nods. He doesn’t need her to actually answer, because there is no question in these questions.

“But your problem was, you did too good a job. You got too close to
who
it was, when
what
was all that was needed.”

“I didn’t look at it that way,” she responds. “It’s not something you can separate.”

“Precisely,” he tells her, pouncing like a kitten on a ball of yarn. “That’s the problem in a nutshell, the whole damn enchilada. You can’t compartmentalize these things, because the world out there isn’t neat enough. The world out there doesn’t understand the difference between the
who
and the
what
. And that’s why you get your tit caught in the wringer.”

She winces at the metaphor.

“So how do you get around this problem?” he queries.

“You tell me.” Like try to stop him. It would be like trying to stop a runaway train.

“You be the client. You hire yourself,” he posits. “You set your own agenda.”

“I know that,” she says. That’s obvious.

“Then why are you here?”

She exhales, a deep heavy breath. “Because I’m chicken. I almost got killed. I don’t want to be in that position again.”

He nods. “Well, you don’t,” he tells her.

“Well …”

“You don’t. You can walk away from this, like I told you before. It’s a different situation now, but you can still walk away.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“Then what’re you talking about?” she barks out in exasperation.

“Technically you can. Emotionally you can’t. So you can but you can’t. Elementary, my dear Blanchard.”

“I can’t sleep,” she confides in him. “I jump out of my skin at every sound in the night.”

He leans forward so they’re close, reaches out and takes her hands in his. His are liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, but they’re still strong enough to grip hers like vises.

“You need to find out who these bastards are,” he instructs her vehemently. “And then you need to take whatever steps are necessary to eliminate them from your life forever.”

The guest of honor at dinner at
Desierto Cielo
is Blake Hopkins. It’s a small gathering, so they’re eating in the informal dining room, which is adjacent to the swimming pool and has a 180-degree view of the ocean, from Ventura County all the way up the coast.

Hopkins is seated across from Dorothy. Frederick is at the head of the table, Miranda at the far end.

“Thank you for inviting me up here,” Hopkins tells them.

“The least we can do is feed you a decent meal,” Miranda quips. “After what your company has pledged for us.”

She raises her wineglass in toast. “To a wonderful partnership.”

“Hear, hear,” Frederick seconds.