House of Smoke (52 page)

“Yes.” She smiles at him. “Well, nice talking to you.”

“And to you.”

She turns to go, then turns back to him. “By the way—what did you say the name of the owner was?”

“I didn’t. You didn’t ask.”

“I thought I did.”

“No—but I can tell you. Sparks is the name. A woman, actually, owns the place. The building’s been in her family for a long time.”

Sparks? A woman?

“This Mrs. Sparks—is she from Santa Barbara?”

He’s surprised. “Yes. Do you know her?”

“I’ve heard of her,” she covers quickly. “They’re a prominent family.”

Miranda Sparks owns this building. Jesus fucking Christ.

“They are,” he confirms in a proud tone of voice, as if by association he, too, has prominence. Boastfully: “They used to own dozens of buildings in this city.”

“They don’t anymore?”

“No. Just this one and one other, over by Telegraph Hill.”

“They sold the others?” she prods.

He shakes his head. “Sold some. Took some big losses. Lost some others outright. Bank foreclosures, bankruptcy filings. Building by building, over the years.”

“The real estate market’s been bad in California,” she sympathizes.

“That’s not why,” he snorts.

“Oh?”

“They blew it. They’re bad about managing their money. I told Mrs. Sparks that, when she relieved me of my duties. But she didn’t want to hear. A tough woman, her. Kind of woman doesn’t let anything get in her way.” His voice takes on a bitter, angry tone.

That’s Miranda, all right. “So the Sparks family definitely owns this specific building, though,” she confirms.

“Yep. But not for long. You watch and see.”

“Why not?”

“Same reason they lost all their other properties,” he says prissily. The man is a self-righteous exemplar of the poor-but-honest school, she realizes belatedly—forever bitter. A PI’s dream—you get them to open up, it’s a deluge. “They squander their money.”

She thinks back to the private jet, the casual meal she and Miranda had that probably cost over a thousand dollars. The perks of wealth, mindless indulgence. That role Miranda plays now—how she made it “the hard way,” and appreciates things in ways her husband and his family don’t—is so much bullshit.

“I tried to tell Mrs. Sparks that, but she didn’t want to hear it. Hey, who am I?” he says, the bitterness in full flower now. “I’m just the ex-building manager. What the hell do I know?”

Back to her car, running all the way. She snatches her PowerBook out of the trunk, fidgets impatiently while it boots up, types in “Bay Area Holding Company,” waits a few seconds while the computer cross-references the name.

Bay Area Holding Company. The security that had been posted for Wes Gillroy’s bail.

Wes Gillroy—the third man on the boat. The sole survivor.

“T
HIS ISN’T KOSHER.”

“That’s okay. I’m not Jewish.”

“That’s funny. You don’t look Jewish,” Ted Saperstein tells Kate.

Kate is sitting in a booth at Jerry’s Deli in Studio City in the San Fernando Valley with Saperstein and Louis Pitts, her Los Angeles-based ex-CIA detective colleague, the one who swept her office for bugs after her one-night stand with Miranda Sparks. Pitts, who definitely doesn’t look Jewish, is wolfing down a four-inch-thick pastrami on rye.

“This isn’t kosher, either, strictly speaking,” Louis says between mouthfuls, indicating his sandwich, “’cause they serve ham and stuff like that in here, but who’s complaining?”

He’s here as an intermediary for Kate, helping her out by introducing her to Saperstein as a professional courtesy, because she isn’t heavy enough in the profession to be on an equal footing with a man of Saperstein’s standing. “How’s your fish?” Louis asks her.

“Great,” she mumbles, wiping her mouth, which is full. She’s eating lox and bagels, heavy on the cream cheese, with tomato and onion. Swallowing, she tells him, “there are certain basics you can’t get in a place like Santa Barbara, and good deli is one of them.”

They aren’t talking about the food. They’re discussing her problem, and how to solve it.

“I’m going to have to call in a few favors, you understand,” Saperstein prefaces, spooning up some matzo ball with his chicken soup. In opening their discussion by telling her that her request wasn’t “kosher,” he was informing her up front that it would be difficult, perhaps costly, and potentially illegal, parts of it anyway. “And I may have to spread some goodies around, too.”

“I hear you,” Kate tells him.

Ted Saperstein is an “assets searcher.” A former IRS official, now in private accounting practice, he’s one of the best in the world at finding out an individual or a corporation’s worth—net and gross—down to the dime, no matter how much they try to hide or bury it.

Revenge of the nerds, Kate thinks as she looks at Saperstein, who she’s never met before. Square, baggy Brooks Brothers suit (black, natch), white socks, thin tie, Bobby Fischer haircut, the whole ensemble. A stereotypical accountant, she thinks; however an accountant is supposed to look. Which is good, because he’s going to be looking into places you don’t look into if you have a vanilla personality, so it’s good he has a bland, almost invisible outer appearance.

“Give her whatever breaks you can,” Louis tells Saperstein. “She’s a working girl.”

“I’m okay with money,” she assures Louis and Saperstein. “I want a first-class search. Otherwise, it’s a waste of my investigation. This is personal,” she adds, “it’s very important to me.”

There’s a touch of dark humor in this, but no one except her will ever know it: she’s going to use a portion of Miranda Sparks’s settlement (bribe?) to investigate the Sparks family’s finances. It’s the best use of that money she can think of—a delicious irony, especially if it pays off.

“Ballpark?” Louis asks for her.

“A civilian, it would probably be ten K, maybe more if it’s really a maze, which this sounds like,” Saperstein replies. “For you, I’ll try to do it under five. As I said, there may be other hands in the till besides mine.”

Meaning he may have to pay off some of his informants. That goes unspoken, of course.

“I appreciate that,” she thanks him.

“And my shielding you,” he adds.

“I appreciate that, too.” Which she does, for real. Saperstein will have to go outside legal boundaries to get her some of the information she needs; but she won’t know how or where, only the results. That kind of insulation is one of the biggest costs of hiring a man of Saperstein’s caliber.

He nods. “I assume you’ve already done a lot of the preliminary work, so that’ll help,” he adds. “Let me see what you have.”

She hands him a legal-size manila envelope filled with the data she’s gathered over the past few days on the Sparks family: exact names, birthdates, and current addresses of Frederick Sparks, Miranda Sparks, Dorothy Sparks, and Laura Sparks, for openers. He glances at the information.

“County records?” he asks.

“Voter registration,” she nods. “And I did title searches on some of the properties I know they own locally, plus the building up in San Francisco.”

“Good,” he acknowledges her effort. “This’ll jump-start the process by quite a bit. The trick,” he explains self-importantly, “is to procure as many ‘identifiers’ as possible, meaning exact names, social security numbers, birthdates, addresses, etc. It’s like cutting a key—the more specific information you put in the mold, the more complex a lock you can open.”

He stuffs the information back into the envelope, sticks it in his briefcase, which he snaps shut and locks, takes a black Uniball pen from his inside jacket pocket, and opens a small notepad.

“As specifically as possible—what are we looking for?”

“Everything the Sparks family owns. Property, stocks, whatever. All their bank accounts, anywhere in the world.” She pauses as he scribbles this down. “All debts, liens, judgments against them for the past twenty years. The current book value of their holdings. What their estimated worth is as of right now, and what it was five, ten, fifteen years ago.” She looks up. “Have I left anything out?”

“We’ll start with this,” he says. “Basically, you want to know what their worth is now, what it used to be, is it going up, down, or sideways, and where it’s coming from, right?”

“Yes.”

“The husband’s a high roller, you say,” he asks, as he closes his notebook and places it in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.

“According to my source, he’s lost millions over the years.”

“Which means he had millions to begin with, which probably means he still has millions.” Saperstein pushes away from the table. “Lunch is on you,” he winks. “I’ll be in touch.”

“How much time will this take?” she asks.

“I hope I’ll have some good information in a week. You can bet the farm there’s going to be all kinds of paper companies, dummy corporations, any way they can think of to hide money. Not because they’re crooks,” he says, “but they don’t want the government taking it all. All rich people are the same that way. That’s how come they stay rich.”

“How well can they hide it?” she asks. If Bay Area Holding Company is any indication, the Sparkses have a lot of deeply buried treasures.

“Very well. But unless they’re really, really good and really, really devious, not well enough to keep it from me,” he boasts. “If there’s anything to be found, I’ll find it,” he says, smiling foxily.

He leans in to her. “This is the most important thing I’m going to tell you: you will have detailed reports of anything I can put on paper, but the delicate stuff is going to be oral, face-to-face, not on the phone. It’ll be my mouth to your ear—and not even God gets to listen in.”

Blake Hopkins leans against a wall near the front of the County Board of Supervisors’ chamber, insouciantly checking out the scene. Hopkins has a proposal to make today; it’s the only item on this morning’s agenda. Oil is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla around here, so when it gets an itch, a lot of people start scratching.

The weekly board hearings are sparsely attended generally, mostly by local-government wonks; today the turnout is healthy, almost filling the room. Environmental activists are sitting on one side of the aisle, pro-oil people on the other. They never commingle—oil, for decades, has created a sacred schism. In Santa Barbara, you are pro-oil or anti-oil: there is no middle ground.

The pro-oil people are developers, businessmen and businesswomen, Chamber of Commerce representatives, and anyone who in any way profits from oil production in the county, which is a lot of people—thousands of them. Also in the pro-oil camp are ordinary citizens who simply don’t see big oil as the bogeyman, who accept oil exploration in the county as necessary and inevitable.

Their opponents are a coalition that’s been in existence since the sixties, when oil first became intrusive in county lives and county politics. It includes environmentally oriented legal organizations; local chapters of the Sierra Club and other national environmental groups; professors from the local universities and schools; students, from elementary schoolers to grad students at UCSB; fishermen and others in the fishing industry, which has always been one of the county’s largest and most important industries, and has fought an ongoing and frequently bitter battle with oil interests for decades; and people who have no particular axe to grind but are anti-oil because they believe that oil production is the largest single danger to the quality of life in the region, which is one of the most beautiful areas in the country, and worthy of preservation.

Since his announcement of Rainier Oil’s huge donation to the Sparks Foundation, which was his calling card into the community, everyone in the region who has a connection with oil—pro and con—knows who Blake Hopkins is.

Miranda and Dorothy Sparks are in attendance, of course. They’ve taken their seats three rows from the front, on the environmentalists’ side of the aisle (right on the aisle, as if hedging their interests).

Dorothy can’t control her agitation and apprehension—she sits bolt upright, spine and hips at a ninety-degree angle, lips pursed tight, hands nervously twisting a handkerchief. She knows what Hopkins is going to propose, and that knowledge, which she hasn’t been able to tell any of her friends and allies in the movement, is excruciating. Once she had agreed to hear Hopkins’s scheme, she was honor-bound not to divulge it. But she will most definitely speak her piece when the opportunity arises. She will not betray a lifetime’s commitment, even if it’s personally and familially painful.

Miranda, conversely, is relaxed and comfortable, smiling and greeting her friends on both sides of the aisle. As the time draws near for Hopkins to make his way to the lectern and begin his presentation, she fixes her attention on her lover’s face, as if by sheer force of will she will be able to penetrate his brain and be as one with him, to make this all work out.

Sean Redbuck, the board chairperson, calls the meeting to order with a loud bang of his gavel.

“Mr. Hopkins. The floor is yours.”

Hopkins strides to the lectern. He takes his time organizing his notes, then looks up to the five supervisors who sit above the audience like judges on the bench—which is what they are. You propose, they dispose. And they will often leave cleat marks on your hide.

“Mr. Chairman, members of the board, thank you for having me here today. To formally introduce myself for your record, my name is Blake Hopkins, and I am the incoming project manager for Rainier Oil’s operations here on the central coast.” He pauses for a moment, making eye contact with each supervisor in turn.

“I can understand how you folks feel about the oil industry,” Hopkins begins. “Maybe if I’d lived here all my life I’d share those feelings. Feelings that I had a certain responsibility, a guardianship as it were, to make sure this area stayed as beautiful and unsullied as it always has been.” A pause. “Or was, until the hordes from L.A. discovered it,” he adds with a smile.

There is a rustling in the seats behind him, particularly on the environmentalist side of the aisle.

“But I haven’t lived here all my life,” Hopkins continues. “So my feelings are abstract. And less clouded with emotion.”