House of Smoke (23 page)

It takes her about an hour to work her way through her calls. She has seven active cases currently, which is her average. She likes to work, it’s about all she does besides exercise, but she doesn’t like to spread herself so thin that she can’t service each client properly. Some PIs contract out their overflow, but she prefers not to. Occasionally she’ll bring in another detective, but for additional help only—usually if it’s a big, complex case with a looming deadline.

The calls returned, she turns on her computer.

If there’s one thing she wishes she could afford it would be a part-time secretary to keep her current on her paperwork. She’s always falling behind in her billings. It’s drudge work, staring at the screen, going through her worksheets, totaling up the hours. Except in the rare case, like this one with Laura Sparks, she works with attorneys and bills through them. That keeps it clean: she doesn’t have to dun clients directly, something she hates with a passion. The flip side is that she has to file accurate and complete reports on a weekly basis. Lawyers spend their lives sorting out disputes, differences of fact and opinion, so whatever they can control, they will. Billings they can control.

She types in a brief synopsis of what she’s done in each case, and how long it took. Her system breaks her time down into tenths of hours, each six minutes a billable fraction. As she logs in the time the machine automatically calculates the fee, depending on the pre-established daily rate. Even though her customary rate is sixty-five dollars an hour, it can fluctuate up or down depending on the circumstances.

She prints out each case as she finishes entering it, sticks it into an envelope. She’ll drop them off in a mailbox on her way home tonight, and be done with it for another week.

There’s a knock on her door. The skinny delivery kid from Sealy’s Deli sticks his head in.

“Got a breast of chicken on a French roll, pasta salad, and a lime Koala,” he announces, planking the brown bag down on her desk.

She glances at her watch: 8:30. Is it that late already?

“Thanks, Adolfo. Am I your last stop?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re closed now. I’m on my way home.”

“Well, thanks for stopping by.”

The bill is $8.15. She tips him two dollars. He’s a good kid.

She walks across the floor to the lone window, which faces south, and looks out. The sun is setting. She’s been here for hours. In the back of her mind she was hoping Cecil was going to be in town and they’d have dinner together; the sandwich was insurance. She might as well eat it now, it’s too late for him to come.

A disappointment. She likes him; it’s a good feeling, and a scary one, too.

Picking through half her sandwich, she rewraps the rest and puts it in the cube fridge in the corner. Tomorrow’s lunch, or next week’s garbage. Getting back to business, she starts entering the information that Herrera gave her into her computer.

It’s basic stuff—the names and latest official addresses (all of which she suspects are either fictitious or outdated) of the men who were present in the cell with Bascomb when he died. Eleven in all, in a cell designed for eight men. She photocopies their booking slips and mug shots. A shitload of people were arrested that night.

One thing she does notice that’s a bit out of the ordinary—all the men in this cell except Bascomb were booked together. As the saying goes, they got a group rate. It reminds her of when she was still on the force up north, working the jail, and they would line the hookers up in night court and plea them, set their bail, and send them back out, all in about thirty seconds. Bang, bang, bang. Proposition a john in the courthouse corridor if they thought the cops weren’t looking, which they weren’t, because it isn’t the act that brings the police down on them, it’s where they do it, out on the streets where it’s a civic embarrassment.

Next step: she cross-references the database on the statistics of Bascomb’s cellmates and tries to get a line on them: current addresses other than what they put on their arrest form, driver’s license, workman’s comp, anything that might give her a lead.

Nothing comes up, validating Herrera’s assertion that they exist but they don’t, they’re too far outside the system. All the names are Latino—they could be illegal aliens. Maybe there’s something she can check with Immigration.

She’ll have to go looking for them the hard way. Her feet start aching again, just at the thought of that.

Time to call it a day and go home; but first, one more thing, as long as she’s still on the computer.

This will be a long shot, but she’s here, so why not? She flips through her notes from her meeting earlier this afternoon with Lutz the bondsman, finding the name of the property that had been posted for Wes’s collateral. Bay Area Holding Company. She types it in, then calls it up on her California real-estate system.

A few moments pass while the system comes on-line.

Bay Area Holding Company. The screen shows the basic data. Ownership in Delaware, Singapore, Japan. No names listed.

“Shit,” she says aloud. She should have seen this one coming.

The Bay Area Holding Company is a classic dummy corporation, a front for something else that in itself is a shell company. An onion that can be peeled to the core, at which time there may be no core. The building is real enough; if Wes skips and never surfaces, the bond company and its surety partner will have clear and legal title; but who the present owners are, and what their connection to her case is, if any, she may never know. It will be a long (and in all probability) fruitless paper chase to find out who the real owners are.

Like she’d feared, she’ll have to go at this one the hard way.

Bright and early the next morning she heads out into the world to earn her daily bread.

“Have you ever seen this man? How about this one?”

She’s in the homeless jungle, down by the railroad tracks. Barely nine o’clock and the humidity is already going through the roof, she feels like she’s exploring a Costa Rican rain forest.

“¿
Alguna vez han visto este hombre … Y este
?”

In some sections the sawgrass is up to her waist, the rough edges scraping at her arms and body. The area spans several acres in a random zigzag pattern, both sides of the railroad tracks, north of the beach and south of the freeway. Clusters of wild live oaks, their trunks ensnared in thick coils of ivy, adorn the landscape, while the old orange and lemon packing houses, faint memories now, lie rotting amidst the heavy overgrowth, a jumble of wooden ruins. Tin cans cover the ground like a grungy blanket, the hard-baked dirt festooned with Big Mac polyurethane container remnants. Beer, whiskey, and wine bottles by the hundreds are everywhere, sharing space with elephant-sized piles of dog shit, human excrement, and piles of old fouled clothing.

This is the bottom rung of the ladder, the pus of humanity. Kate knows homeless people who don’t want to be where they are, who desperately want to get back into the mainstream, find a job, a roof over their heads, be part of a civilized society. Those living here have no such aspirations. They live moment to moment; they have no hope, no dreams, no dignity. They fuck, get drunk and high, shit and piss anywhere. Right now, in the oppressively heavy heat, people are sitting around in a half-aware stupor, the men bareback, the women in filthy bras or in some cases topless, their scabby withered tits hanging lank; all drinking beer, tepid water, sour hot juice. The pungent smell of marijuana hangs heavy in the air.

Kate picks her way gingerly through the muck. Despite the heat she’s wearing hiking boots and jeans; protection’s more important than comfort.

She hunkers down next to two people who are nesting on the ground, a badly sunburnt man and his woman companion, who are passing a quart bottle of Colt .45 between them.

They smell. The acrid odor of the unwashed.

“Do either of you know any of these men?” she says, pulling out the folder of mug shots.

The man belches in her face, a horrendous effluvium. She recoils, gasping.

“What are you, some kind of fuckin’ animal?” the woman slurs at her mate. “Lemme see that,” she commands, grabbing for the folder.

Kate shows her the pictures.

The woman, who is probably thirty but looks a good fifty, scans them, trying mightily to focus; it doesn’t help that she’s stoned out of her gourd. “You got any spare change?” she begs aggressively, getting right in Kate’s face.

“Concentrate on this first,” Kate orders, trying to keep her cool. These people: damn!

“How the hell should I know any of these motherfuckers?” the woman bitches. “Come on, you got money.”

“Not today.”

She pries the folder from the woman’s grasp. Moving off, she makes sure she stays clear of the piles of dog droppings. At least half a dozen stray mutts, mangy and so skinny you can count their ribs, run in a wild pack around the grounds, biting at each other’s flanks.

She works the jungle. It’s hot, depressing, and tedious, but it has to be done. This is definitely worth sixty-five dollars an hour of her time. If this becomes the norm on this case she’ll put in for hazard-duty pay.

“I don’t know. A couple of them look familiar. I don’t know, man,” a young guy, his arms and torso covered with tattoos, most of them self-inflicted, tells her. “You see all kinds of weird assholes around here, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know,” Kate answers as she squats next to him in one of the few patches of shade. This one is truly wasted—a major drug-abuser or in a pretty advanced stage of AIDS; or both.

“Concentrate, could you?” she implores him. “It’s important.”

“You got a smoke on you?”

“Sorry. Not my vice.”

“I got vices,” he tells her.

“We all do,” she reassures him. “Take another look,” she asks again, showing him the pictures one by one. “Any of them, any of them at all ring a bell?”

“I got every fucking vice there is. I got vices you never done heard of.”

“I doubt that. Here,” pointing to another picture, “how about him?”

“Vices that ain’t been invented!” He slumps down, starting to nod off.

“Maybe you do,” she says, half to herself.

As she starts to get up he grabs her by the wrist, a fast, unexpected movement that catches her by surprise. She tries to pull free, but he’s got her in a death grip. For someone who looks to be in as bad shape as he is, his grip is surprisingly strong.

“These fucking guys,” he says.

“What fucking guys?”

“These killer fucking guys.”

He’s trying to tell her something.

“What fucking killer guys?”

“Ah, fuck ’em.”

“What fucking killer guys?” she presses.

“They’re all killers. Every fucking one of them. I’m a killer.”

“Your picture isn’t in here,” she tells him. Shit, this one’s so far gone he can’t even tell himself from these pictures.

“I could have. I could have done that.”

That is the point. It could have been any of these people. Any of them could have killed Frank Bascomb, and the next day they wouldn’t remember a thing about it.

“Bunch of fuckin’ Mexicans,” he drawls.

He’s referring to the men in the photos, all of whom are Hispanic. This man isn’t.

It’s a waste of time talking to people like him. That’s what he’s telling her. All the men in the cell with Bascomb were Hispanic. Maybe they were illegals, as she’d earlier thought. All back on the other side of the border. If that’s the case, she can kiss this one goodbye.

With a quick, sudden movement she wrests her arms from his grasp.

“Thanks for your time,” she says.

“They’ve been around here,” he tells her, his arm sweeping the area.

Now what? Is there anything here she can hang something on? He’s a fucked-up junkie; there’s nothing trustworthy about him. It’s a waste of her time.

“They come and go,” he intones solemnly, as only a righteous drunk will do.

She talks to everyone, although she realizes it’s a useless chore. No one knows any of these men, and they all want money.

One old guy, who seems to be a little more pulled-together than the others, has a hard look at two of the pictures. “This one, I think maybe was around here once,” he offers, his filthy fingernail touching the picture of the man who had baited Bascomb in the cell the night before Bascomb died. “I couldn’t say for certain, but he might could have. He might’ve been a pimp, cruising for fresh meat—he had that kind of attitude.”

“How long ago?” she asks. Something in the way he says it gives the declaration a slight ring of believability.

“Wouldn’t know,” he tells her. “Could be a week, could be a year. My mind’s gone, lady,” he admits truthfully.

“You’ve helped. Thank you.”

“You got a dollar on you? I’m dying of thirst out here.”

“Sure.” She digs a couple bucks out of her jeans pocket. “Go crazy.”

“Thanks, lady. Sorry I couldn’t help you more.”

“You helped,” she tells him again as she starts to walk away.

“Ventura,” he calls after her.

She stops, turns back to him.

“What?”

“Ventura. I think I heard he was from Ventura. Or was it Oxnard? Fuck, I can’t remember.”

“But one of them, maybe?”

“I’m full of shit. Don’t believe nothin’ you hear from me.”

She reaches into her pocket again, finds a couple more singles.

“Go take care of that thirst,” she tells the hapless man. “It’s hot out here.”

Haley St., 4:00
P.M.
Herrera had said one of the men in the cell might have been a pimp, and the man in the jungle had, too. So she has to check it out.

A handful of women line the south side (the shady side) of the street along the ten-block stretch from Garden to Milpas, miniskirted, halter-topped, their tits pushed up to the nipple out of their thin cotton uplift-padded bras.

These are not your healthy blue-eyed milk-fed Carpinteria flower growers’ daughters looking to make a little extra money over summer vacation, nor are they hot, sexy, voluptuously youthful stroke-dream Latinas supplementing their income to pay for tuition to SBCC so they can get their dental technician’s degrees and be fruitful members of society.