House of Smoke (12 page)

The waves have been breaking good. She’s ridden several of them, enough to give her arms, shoulders, and legs a good healthy soreness.

The first thing she’d done the week she hit Santa Barbara was find an apartment, a furnished studio she survived in for six months before moving to her present digs. The second thing was to walk into a local surf shop down by East Beach and start asking questions about boards. That afternoon she took her first lesson.

She loves water, particularly the ocean; the sensuousness of it, the salt taste, cold temperature, the danger in the undertow, and the fatigue when you’ve been out for hours but won’t come in until you’ve ridden one more set.

That she had never surfed before didn’t matter. That many times she’s the oldest person out there, definitely the oldest woman, doesn’t matter, either. What mattered was that she was going to do all the things she’d wanted to do and hadn’t, including things, like surfing and swimming, she hadn’t even thought of. She was California born and bred, she should know how to surf. She doesn’t look like a surfer girl
—
her eyes are gray, her skin closer to olive than ivory, it matches up well with her luxurious hair, which she streaks occasionally, depending on her mood.

“You look like a rich Sausalito Jew-broad with that hair,” Eric had sneered once when she’d come home from Cut ’N Curl with tastefully feathered platinum streaks.

“In your dreams.”

He had probably smacked her for that crack. She doesn’t remember. If not for that, for something else equally trivial. Any excuse would do.

She windsurfs, too. Once, after she erroneously thought she knew it all (a big part of her stubborn nature), she went out way past the safe point, halfway to the islands almost, like she’d seen the hotshots do, and when it had been time to turn back the wind was against her and the tacking back and forth was tiring, too tiring to keep at, and finally, completely exhausted, she had dropped her sail and laid on the board and watched the sun fading in the horizon behind her and realized this was a way people died.

She wasn’t ready for that. It had scared the shit out of her, sitting out there all alone, no one around to help. She’d been more scared that afternoon than she’d ever been during any of her titanic battles with Eric, even more than she’d been during any of the terrifying incidents she’d encountered in all her years on the police force (including the Losario family disaster, the incident that had changed her entire life).

A fishing boat had spotted her, a tiny speck on the flat twilight horizon. That was a lucky fluke, because the boats don’t normally fish in that area, but on this day one was. They pulled her on board and took her in with the halibut and abalone.

After that she cut down on the windsurfing and put her energy into board surfing where she’s more in control, closer to the water and the shore.

She grabs her board, towel, lotion, slips into her sandy thongs, and walks up the path to her car, which is parked along Channel Drive. A quick run back to her apartment, shower and change—then she has to go to work.

“How did you hear about me?”

Kate and Laura are sitting in a back booth at Esau’s Coffee Shop, eating a late breakfast; rather, Kate’s eating. Laura, too nervous to eat, is drinking herb tea and picking nervously at a bran muffin, the crumbs scattered on her side of the table.

“From Mildred Willard. She’s a friend of my mother’s. She once told me she’d met this woman detective who’d moved here recently. She thought that was pretty neat, ‘a real lady gumshoe,’ she called you, ‘not a character out of a novel.’”

Mildred; from her group. That’s a first—a job referral from someone in the group. Almost all her cases come through lawyers, which she prefers, civilians coming in off the street aren’t always trustworthy.

“Do you have an attorney?” she asks.

“Tom Calloway’s our family lawyer.”

Kate knows Tom Calloway. Tom Calloway is no friend of hers. When she first started out on her own Tom Calloway hired her to do a background check for him, since the agency he normally used was too busy. Calloway’s one of the big guns in town; this was a chance to improve her clientele and her standing in the field, so she worked extra hard at it. She did a good job, quick and professional. Calloway told her he was very pleased with her work, and she never heard word one from him again. He went right back to his regular way of doing business, working solely with PIs who pee standing up.

Most of the lawyers she works with have gotten past that antiwoman nonsense, thank God. After all the feminist rhetoric, it’s still a man’s world sometimes. Taking a case from a Calloway client will taste extra sweet: if you can’t join ’em, kick their ass.

“He doesn’t know I’m seeing you,” Laura informs her. “I’d prefer he didn’t know,” she adds.

“That’s fine.” She knew that already.

She’ll have to remember to thank Mildred Willard, while at the same time tactfully making sure the woman keeps her mouth shut about how they really know each other.

She cuts into her order of ham, a slab large enough to cover a butter plate. With it she’s having eggs over easy, home fries smothered in salsa, sourdough toast, and coffee laced with half-and-half. She doesn’t worry about cholesterol or calories, the surfing works it off.

Laura watches Kate chow down. She takes a sip from her tea, to have something to do with her hands.

Kate looks at the girl sitting across from her. She’s having a hard time with this. If she wasn’t, Kate would be concerned.

“You didn’t see it, I hope? Or afterwards?”

“Oh God, no.” Laura places her cup in the saucer. “I never saw him again, once I left the boat.” She brushes strands of fine blond hair back off her face, a nervous tic. “I tried to see him when he was in jail,” she adds, wanting Kate to know that, “but they wouldn’t let me.”

“I’m really sorry,” Kate says, instinctively reaching across the table to touch the girl’s pale hand. “Was he—” she hesitates, wanting to get this right—“close to you?”

“He worked for us. Our ranch foreman. For several years.” There is an awkward pause, which Kate doesn’t attempt to fill.

“We were dating,” Laura admits, after some hesitation.

“Uh-huh.” Kate mops up the last of the yolk with a piece of toast, drinks some coffee, holds up the cup to the passing waitress for a refill.

“Actually, we were …”

“I understand.” He was the girl’s lover, Frank the foreman. She’d assumed that as soon as Laura had started in about it. The girl shouldn’t have to speak of something so personal with a woman she doesn’t even know, not this early in the game.

The subject needs changing. “So what is it you would like me to do for you? About your friend’s suicide?”

Laura looks up at her. It’s the first time she’s looked directly at Kate since they sat down.

“I don’t think it was a suicide,” she says.

The statement hangs heavy in the air between them, like a sudden sopping humidity.

The words reverberate inside Kate’s head. “You think your boyfriend was murdered? Inside the county jail?”

“Yes,” Laura says, “that’s exactly what I think.”

They stand in the late-morning sun next to Laura’s BMW convertible, in the parking lot on Gutierrez next to the freeway. The reflection off the asphalt burns Kate’s eyes.

“My fee is sixty-five dollars an hour, plus any out-of-pocket expenses I incur.”

“Okay,” Laura says without batting an eye. She takes her checkbook out of her purse. “How much do you want now? Will three thousand dollars be enough?”

“Half that amount will be fine for now.” It’ll be refreshing to have a client who doesn’t nickel-and-dime you to death. “I’ll provide you with summaries of my progress and itemized vouchers. If there’s any money left over after I’m finished, I’ll reimburse you the difference.”

“After you find out what happened to Frank.”

“Not necessarily,” Kate cautions her. “If it looks like it really was a suicide, or I run into a brick wall, I’ll terminate my work. I don’t like to take a client’s money for no good reason.”

Laura shakes her head. “I don’t want you to stop until you find out what happened,” she tells Kate with determination.

“Open-ended investigations can be expensive,” Kate cautions her. “It adds up fast.”

“I can afford it.” She signs the check, tears it out, and hands it to Kate.

“I’ll be in touch as soon as I find anything out. I won’t call you until I do,” Kate warns her, “so don’t bug me, okay?”

“Okay.”

They shake hands. Kate starts across the lot towards her own car.

“One more thing,” Laura calls. She runs back to Kate. “I don’t want my parents to know about this.” She touches her tongue to her upper lip, a nervous tic that expresses her embarrassment. “I don’t mean just my parents, I don’t want anyone to know. It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong or anything, it’s …”

“You’re free, female, and twenty-one,” Kate says, shortcutting Laura’s nervousness. “And you’re my client. I only report to my client.”

“I just wanted to make sure,” the girl says. She’s jumpy as hell about all of this.

“We’ll be talking,” Kate says, signing off.

“No matter what you find out?”

“You’ll know everything I know.”

Laura’s parting shot is a raw plea. “I have to know.”

The heavyset nurse, a young woman with the soft twilight skin of
café con leche
, her white uniform stretched tight against her body like Saran Wrap, ankles spilling over her Reebok high-tops, wheels Carl X. Flaherty out onto the veranda, where there is a view of the beach and the sea air blows in from the islands onto his face.

Carl can wheel himself around fine, which he does when she’s off duty. He isn’t an invalid, he just can’t walk anymore. His forearms are sinewy like a carpenter’s, he could wheel himself to Carpinteria if he felt like it. He lets her do it without grumbling too much because it’s her job, it’s how she pays her rent.

“Your visitor is here,” nurse Luisa Maria Montoya tells him in a lilting Salvadorian accent. “Such a pretty lady.”

She positions the umbrella attached to the wheelchair so it shields his face from the sun, puts a large Styrofoam cup of Diet Pepsi into the cup holder on the chair arm, adjusts the purple Lakers baseball hat on his head.

“You all set now,” she sings to him. “I’ll check back later.”

The veranda overlooks Hendry’s Beach, where a volleyball game on the sand is in progress below his perch. The players are bikini-wearing UCSB coeds. The nurse put him here deliberately, so he could see the pretty girls.

“So how’s life treating you these days?” Carl asks Kate, who sits in a beach chair facing him, her back pointedly turned away from the volleyball game. “You holding your own?”

“I met a man,” she abruptly informs him. She’s wearing a tank top and shorts against the heat, is drinking a Pepsi out of a paper cup, crunching the ice cubes with her teeth.

“I didn’t know that was a problem for you.”

“A nice one. A keeper. Maybe.”

“How’s he feel?”

“I just met him. We haven’t had a proper date yet.”

“You’ll blow it,” he says succinctly, taking a pull from his straw.

“Thanks for the confidence.” She knows it’s repartee, his way of maintaining, but it stings.

“He won’t be good enough for you,” he explains, smoothing her feathers.

“I’ve lowered my expectations.”

“Not you. Not in a million years. And you shouldn’t—you’ve got to hold out for quality. In a man or a bottle of wine or anything under the sun.” He smiles at her, both of his rheumy pale-blue eyes half-clouded with cataracts, which he’s resisted having removed. “I can see plenty good enough for government work” is his standard rejoinder when his few living friends, Kate foremost among them (although she’s known him the shortest amount of time), implore him to have surgery.

“Is he as good as me?” Carl teases her, glancing down at the volleyball players.

“If I wait for a man as good as you, Carl,” she says, “I’ll die an old maid.”

“An old maid is a virgin,” he corrects her.

“An old nonmaid, then.”

Carl X. is Kate’s mentor. The man has been a legend among West Coast private investigators for over half a century, as famous in real life as Lew Archer or Sam Spade are in fiction. Eighty-two years old now, he has been wheelchair-bound for the past twenty months, when he took a bullet in the spine down in Hermosa Beach from a Los Angeles County sheriff in what many think was a payback for all the times he had made that department look like dolts, although it has officially been classified as a mistaken identification on a dark street.

Case closed.

The shooting did what hundreds of criminals and dozens of police agencies couldn’t—it stopped Carl X. Flaherty from being able to work. Never married, no kids, no hobbies; work was his religion, the only passion in his life. The inoperable bullet pressing against the nerve bundles in his spine brings frequent, wracking pain. It makes him double over and scream, and sometimes he pisses his pants, which mortifies him.

Kate came into Carl’s life a few weeks after he’d been released from the hospital. She was new in town, needed to make some money (a week of waitressing at Frimple’s convinced her that was not the way to go), and she’d heard about this old PI, now laid up, who had a bunch of cases on his docket and needed assistance.

They’d stuck him in a low-rent convalescent home on Olive St. Eucalyptus Manor was the name of the place, a bunch of clapboard cottages connected by walkways, the floors cheap linoleum that was easy to mop up, the food starchy and utilitarian like a school cafeteria’s, all they could afford, the stench of stroke and Alzheimer’s clouding the air like cigarette smoke in a saloon.

He didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t want to talk to anybody, he was angry and he hurt like hell and he flat-out did not give a shit.

“I’ll come back tomorrow, when you’re feeling better,” she told him that first day, when he’d given her the cold shoulder.

“You can come back any damn day you feel like it, I don’t have anything to talk to you about,” he groused.