House of Smoke (64 page)

“What’s that?” he asks.

“What I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I thought we were going to do that later.”

“I decided to do it first. So we could get it out of the way.” She grins at him. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He pauses. “Why—should I be?”

She nods. “I think you’ll find what I’m going to tell you very interesting.”

His erection is wilting. It’ll come back fast enough, but he isn’t in the mood to talk, or listen. Still, it’s her deal. He’ll make a good show of being interested, and then he’ll fuck her brains out.

“You know what’s really interesting?” she asks him.

“No. What?” He pushes himself up against the headboard, arms behind his back. It’s more comfortable that way. If he has to talk and listen, he might as well get comfortable.

“How easily you manipulated me. And how willingly I let you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just an observation.”

“If anybody manipulated anybody, it was you,” he says. “You got a ton of information out of me, stuff no one else where I work would have told you. No one else would give you the time of day,” he adds.

“That’s true. So I guess that makes us even, right?”

“More than even.”

“Good. Oh, before I forget,” she says. “What does a lieutenant on the sheriff’s down here make after twenty years?”

“Why do you want to know?” he asks suspiciously. What the hell is this all about?

“This thing came up. I was talking to somebody, and it came up, I don’t remember. Maybe I was talking to someone on the Oakland Sheriff’s I used to work with. Asking about rates down here, in case he wanted to move.”

“Sixty-six thousand a year. But tell your friend not to bother,” he adds, “there’s no openings. The county doesn’t have any money, and there’s a waiting list as long as your arm. Answer your question?”

“Sort of, but not really. The thing is …” She looks at one of the pieces of paper in her hand. “The reason I asked is, two days after Frank Bascomb expired in your jail you deposited $100,000 into your bank account, and there’s no record where it came from. Sixty-six K is good money, but it doesn’t account for a sudden windfall of $100,000. And then, a week later, you transferred the hundred into an offshore money-market account in the Cayman Islands, which is a place people hide money so the U.S. tax collectors can’t find it. In impolite society it’s called ‘laundering,’” she adds.

He sits bolt upright. “What the fuck? Where did you find … what’re you talking about?” he stammers. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“A payoff, of course,” she answers calmly. “What else could it be?”

“It could be my wife’s money. Which is what it was,” he says with indignation. “She and her sisters owned some property up north, which they sold, and she wanted to invest it, so I did it for her.”

“So it had nothing to do with the fact that you were on duty at the jail that night,” she says, pressing on. “The night Bascomb so-called hung himself, which you and I both know is bullshit. We do agree on that point, at least, don’t we?”

“It was Fiesta,” he points out. He doesn’t like the direction this conversation is headed, not a bit. “Everyone in the department was on duty that night.”

She shakes her head. “But not jail duty.” She looks at another sheet of paper she’s holding. “According to official records you went to the jail an hour after Frank Bascomb was locked up and volunteered to take over from another officer. You relieved him of his duty, which you didn’t have to do, since you have seniority. You don’t have to pull that kind of duty at all, in fact. And according to your records—” she glances down at the papers again—“you hadn’t worked at the jail for over a year. Which is no surprise, since you’re a detective and detectives don’t normally work inside the jail.”

He stares at her. “You’ve been a busy little beaver, haven’t you?”

“You don’t know how busy I’ve been. Not the half of it.”

“Well, for your information, since you’re so curious about my comings and goings, that officer had a sick wife, and he asked me for a favor. That’s the reason—there’s nothing sinister about it.”

“Oh, good. Then I guess there’s nothing sinister about the strange fact that Frank Bascomb was transferred out of a high-security cell into a common tank, either.”

“It was a clerical error.”

“No,” she tells him. “It was deliberate.”

His eyes narrow. “You sound like you’re making an accusation.”

She flips him a county jail computer printout. He picks it up, looks at it. As he does so he edges closer to the side of the bed, the side where his gun is sitting in its holster on top of his neatly folded clothes.

“Bascomb’s arrest sheet was altered,” she says. “From a major drug-trafficking offense down to a petty possession charge, barely a felony at all. Which made it easy to kick him out of his isolation cell, under twenty-four-hour watch, into a group tank. With a whole bunch of drunks who had just ten minutes before being processed and put into that cell.” She stares at him intently. “The same men, coincidentally, who tried to kill me the night that phony informant set me and Laura up.”

He lunges for his gun.

Hers is out of her robe pocket while his hand is a good five feet from even grabbing the holster, let alone pulling the weapon out.

“Not a cool idea,” she tells him, cocking her automatic and aiming it at his pecker. “Unless you want to talk in a high voice for the rest of your life. I’m loaded up with Winchester Black Talons,” she says, “you know the awful mess they make.”

“You’re crazy.”

She pulls the robe around her, tying the cord tightly. “Peep show’s over.”

“You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”

“No,” she shoots back. “The biggest mistake of my life was trusting you, taking you into my confidence. You were in this from the get-go.” Her free hand balls into a fist—a fist she’d like to smash his face in with, like hers was. “As soon as I got on this case—the first time I went down to the jail to check up on Wes Gillroy—you found out about it and called me in a flash with this bullshit story that I needed help, and you were such a sweet guy, you’d take care of me when no one else would.” She stares hard at him. “You needed to know what I knew, didn’t you, Juan?—so you could keep the brakes on. And like a dumb fucking idiot I played right into your hands. I kept giving you more and more information—as soon as I knew anything, so did you. Which made it pretty easy to counter my every move. Even to the point of setting me up to be murdered.”

He starts to move.

“Freeze,” she commands. “I will have no problem at all pulling the trigger on you, Juan. Not after what you’ve done to me.”

He does as she tells him.

“Dorothy Sparks hired you, didn’t she?” she goes on. “That was her hundred grand you banked. And there have been other payments, going back. You’ve been on her payroll for years. The documentation exists, it’s got you nailed.” She shakes her head, as if trying to shake a bad dream out of it. “You’re a disgusting son of a bitch, Juan. A cop on the take. That’s the lowest form of life there is.”

“This is all conjecture,” he spits out. “It doesn’t mean shit.”

“Dorothy Sparks knew Frank Bascomb had been arrested even before he got to the jail,” she continues. “She was this nice old lady who was always doing nice things for the department, throwing benefits for widows and orphans, real do-gooder stuff. She even monitored police calls, a strange habit for a seventy-five-year-old heiress, but she had good reasons. She was protecting her investment. So as soon as Bascomb was booked, she made a call to her man on the inside. You, Juan. She told you to get your ass down there and fix things up so he could never put her into it. And like a good soldier, that’s exactly what you did.”

“No fucking way.”

“Only one person knew I was going down to Newport Beach to look for Wes Gillroy. You. You were the only one I confided in, because I had to have some backup, and you were the logical choice.”

Her hand is shaking, holding the gun.

“You followed me down, you shit. I led you right to them. You killed them, yes—but my hand was on the gun as much as yours, because I was the Judas goat that led those two poor bastards to slaughter.”

She takes a deep breath.

“And if I had been on time for our rendezvous, I would have been dead along with them. You had already tried to have me killed once. This time you were going to make sure, you were going to do it yourself, and you sure as hell weren’t going to take any prisoners.”

He looks at her, trying to decide when to go for his gun.

“How long did you wait for me? Ten minutes? Fifteen? You should have waited five minutes longer, but you couldn’t, you lost your nerve, so you bailed out and called the local cops, hoping I’d show and walk right into it. And I almost did. But thank God my blind dumb luck was with me a second time.”

She takes another deep breath. Her nerves are shot.

“You had already killed Frank Bascomb,” she says. “You personally killed Wes, and Morgan. And you would have killed me.”

“You don’t have proof about any of this shit,” he says in answer.

She reaches into her robe pocket again and pulls out a baggie that has a bullet inside it.

“In your panic you left one of the shells behind, down in Newport Beach. It rolled under the bed, you couldn’t find it like you found all the others.”

She dangles it in front of him.

“This shell and your 9 mm. I’d bet my life against the hundred thousand in your secret bank account they’re a perfect match.”

She tosses it in her hand. “The smoking bullet. From the smoking gun.”

And for the split-second she looks away to catch the baggie he has lunged for his gun and has pulled it and is turning towards her to fire.

Which is how she planned it.

The repercussive explosion from the automatic is deafening in her small apartment. The bullet enters his face in the middle of his right cheekbone, driving him back with such force he splits the headboard in half.

Later, when the coroner’s crew is cleaning up, they can’t find any of his brain tissue inside his cranial cavity. It’s all over the back wall of her bedroom, along with the rest of his head.

The women sit in their circle. The mood is somber. It’s Kate’s farewell night in the group. Outside, it’s raining, the first hard rain of the season.

She begins. “I got the past out of my present. That part of it, anyway. It’s a great feeling, because now I can really believe I have a future. You can’t hold onto things, whether they scare you or give you comfort, you have to be with them and then let them go. Whether it’s your job, your kids, anything. Everything.”

Everyone in the room is attentive to her. There’s no fidgeting around, loud sipping of coffee, spacing out. They all know what she’s gone through—it was impossible not to, the details (those Kate orchestrated and managed to control, which were the most important ones) were all over the television and newspapers. It was the biggest scandal to hit Santa Barbara in years. And she had been the catalyst, the one who had broken it open.

“Whatever I’ve hidden,” she goes on, “I don’t apologize for. In my heart I know I did exactly the right thing under the circumstances. I’d do it the same way again, that’s how I know.” She pauses, thinking back. “The most important thing is, I committed to a course of action, and I followed through on it. Right or wrong—flag that, there is no right or wrong in affairs such as these, that’s judgmental, God give me the strength never to be judgmental again—I did what I had to do.” She takes a deep breath. “And I did it for me. What was right for me. What I had to do. For me.”

Everyone in the basement room sits in stunned silence.

“I thought
my
job was stressful,” Maxine, the group leader, says at last. Her comment isn’t meant as a joke, and nobody laughs.

“You got some
cojones,
girl,” Conchita says admiringly. “You are a
woman
!”

Other voices sound out in praise, commendation, support.

Mildred Willard, the Sparks family friend who brought Kate into the case, sits silently, watchful.

Earlier, in the parking lot, the two women talked briefly. Mildred was profusely apologetic about ever getting Kate involved in such a sordid mess, especially when she already had enough troubles of her own. Kate reassured the older woman that there was no fault or blame attached; how could anyone have known what a snake pit this would become? Their friendship was intact, Kate promised Mildred. Their bond was not of the outside world but of their shared experiences here.

They hugged, hard. It was a good feeling for both of them. A cleansing.

“So,” Kate concludes, “I’m rid of my demons. Some of them, anyway. The scariest ones. I’m not afraid anymore,” she tells the women. “Of anything.”

“God bless you,” one of the other women says. “I hope I get to that place someday.”

“You will,” Kate assures her. She looks to Maxine for confirmation.

“We all will,” Maxine states. “There is no question of that.”

“That’s why I’m not afraid of leaving the womb here,” Kate tells the women sitting in the tight circle with her—her sisters in pain.

“Because I’m not a victim anymore.”

I
T’S BEEN A WETTER-THAN-AVERAGE
winter, which means a fertile spring. Kate trudges up the hill towards her secret place, hacking away at the dense undergrowth with her machete. She hasn’t set foot on this property since her near-fatal beating.

The double killings caused a monumental uproar, much greater than the brouhaha over the killing-suicide during Fiesta weekend. It dominated the front pages of the newspapers for weeks; nobody talked about anything else, from the small neighborhoods on the westside to the multi-million-dollar-mansions in Montecito and all points in between.

Despite intense grilling by the police, Miranda and Laura stuck to the story Kate scripted for them: they had arrived at their ranch house to find Dorothy already dead, the assailant running away across the open fields and disappearing, heading in the direction of the highway.