House of Smoke (28 page)

“… I’d follow it to the bitter end,” he finishes, snapping to.

“I knew you’d say that.”

“But it isn’t what you want to hear.”

She doesn’t answer.

“You aren’t doing this to please me,” he reminds her. “You do the job for yourself. Only yourself.”

“I can’t help trying to please you.”

“That’s nice. I’ve always wanted to be somebody’s mentor. But that’s not the point, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“I’m not forty years old and I’m not a woman. And I don’t have children.”

“But you are a professional. Which I am, too. It says so, on my card.”

“If you got killed over this, you’d be a dead professional.”

She rubs her eyes with her knuckles. She’s bone-tired, she hasn’t had any sleep for a day and a half, and the fear has fatigued her even more.

“Bag it,” he advises her—forcefully, almost vehemently.

She jumps, startled by the power in his voice.

“Look,” he tells her, ticking the numbers off on his fingers. “One, you can’t locate any witnesses. Two, heavy people want you off this case. Three, putting your life on the line is not what you enlisted for.”

“I hate quitting.”

“This isn’t quitting. You’re not a quitter, I’ll go into court and swear to that if I have to.”

“I hate quitting more than anything.”

“You were hired to find out if some joker committed suicide, or if somebody did him. Okay, you’ve found out. You’ve done your job. Anything beyond that is
not
your job. Finding
who
killed him is
not
your job, can you understand that?”

“It feels like quitting to me.”

“Your life is not worth this. Listen to me,” he presses, “it isn’t. Certainly your children’s lives are not worth this.” He grips her hand again. “Resolving what happened to this scumbag is not worth your life. Or anyone else’s.”

Kate takes her gun out of the drawer where she’s kept it locked up since she moved to Santa Barbara. The S&W automatic sits in an expensive leather gun box (a birthday gift from Eric, in lieu of earrings or flowers), a full box of ammunition beside it. She hasn’t fired one round since the day she left the police force. She doesn’t carry it. She has never used it in a real-life situation.

She holds the lethal weapon in her hand, turning it over. It’s hefty—she feels the weight of it. A fine layer of dust has settled on the stock and barrel, which she wipes off with a piece of rag.

She should oil it before she fires it. Give it a good cleaning, make sure all the parts are in proper working order. Your weapon is one of your most valuable allies. Treat it with the respect it deserves. It says so, in the training manual.

Right now, she doesn’t have the time for that. The patience—that’s what she doesn’t have. She just wants to pull the trigger, feel the explosion in her hand.

She pops the clip: empty. She won’t keep a loaded gun in her house.

She puts the gun, the box of ammo, a pair of thin leather gloves, and a set of earplugs into a duffel bag, carefully lays the bag on the seat of her car next to her, and drives out of town up Highway 154, turning off onto one of the camp trails past Lake Cachuma.

The shooting range is in an arroyo. You fire at your targets against a limestone bluff. There are millions of bullet holes in the side of the bluff.

Kate pays her fee and walks down to the far end. Only a few people are out here, all men. Two are pistol shooters like her. The other has a target rifle, a .22-long. None of them pay her any attention; they’re here for a purpose.

She takes her gloves out of the duffel bag and puts them on, snugging the leather on the fingers against the webs. Then she takes her weapon out of its case and loads it, a bullet at a time. Eleven in the clip, one in the chamber. The plastic cups of the earplugs cover her ears. As soon as she puts them on the sounds from the other shooters diminish to almost inaudible pops.

Firm grip. Eyes on your target. Squeeze, don’t jerk.

The gun explodes in her hand with a kick much stronger than she’d remembered. She feels the action of the recoil in her wrist, especially the tendons. The bullet hits high above her target, several feet above where she was aiming.

She should have worn a wrist guard. She’ll have to ice the wrist down when she gets back to town, or she’ll be sore tomorrow. She grasps her right wrist with her left to steady it and give it support.

She fires fifty rounds, half a box. By the time she’s finished she’s doing well, the bullet holes grouped together on the target in a nice tight cluster. She was in the middle of her class during training. Good enough to get the job done.

She’s never had to shoot at a real person in earnest. She hopes never to have to. If she doesn’t carry, she won’t have to; she won’t be able to. People do kill people, this is true, but they use guns to do it. Killing is not her style.

When she’s finished she removes the clip, making sure there isn’t one left in the chamber. She puts everything carefully away, walks back to her car, and drives off.

Instead of locking the gun up where she had before, in a safe place but not easily accessible, she puts it along with a box of ammunition in a drawer in her bedroom, where she can reach it without even having to put her feet on the floor.

“What have you found?” Laura can’t keep the anticipation from her voice. Dread mixed with excitement mixed with hope. “Have you found anything out?”

“Yes,” Kate informs her. “I found something. Several things, in fact.” Her voice is calm, her manner understated—she is the professional private detective that Laura Sparks, her client, hired.

“Was I right? About Frank?”

“Yes,” Kate says slowly in answer.

She’s been dreading this, since calling Laura on the phone earlier, several hours ago, and telling her they had to meet ASAP. She has information for Laura, things to tell her; but they aren’t going to be what Laura wants to hear.

It’s not about Frank Bascomb, how he died, why he died. She doesn’t know those things, and she isn’t going to. And not because the trail is dead, that there are no leads. That’s not the truth.
She
can’t go on, she has gone as far as she can go. As far as her sense and guts will let her.

She’s never quit on a client before; the thought of it is repulsive to her. More than anything else she hates quitting, because that is her deepest fear, that at the core she is a quitter. It’s what Eric always told her, over and over, until she believed it, for a long time.

She managed to get past that, to put it in the shitcan where it belongs. He was wrong, she came to understand that. The therapy and the groups taught her that.

If you quit on one client, what’s to stop you from quitting on others?

More importantly, on yourself?

They are in Kate’s office, seated opposite each other in the only two chairs in the room. Kate had asked Laura to meet her here, so that this final rendezvous would have the semblance of a formal meeting. A professional meeting. That, as she clearly sees now, was a shuck. But the client doesn’t know that—not yet.

“He
didn’t
kill himself.” It isn’t a question Laura poses, but a vindication, a triumph. She was right and everyone else, the elders who knew better, were wrong. “I
knew
it!”

“I’m pulling off this case,” Kate tells her in a low, flat, emotionless voice.

If she had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water square into the girl’s face she couldn’t have stopped her faster in her tracks.

“What? What did you say?”

“Yes, he didn’t kill himself,” Kate says. “That’s what you hired me to find out. I don’t know how he died, but I am convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Frank Bascomb did not do himself in.”

“I don’t understand.”

Kate looks at her. “You asked me to try and find out if Frank Bascomb took his own life in the county jail. I don’t have any proof, but I know he didn’t.”

“Then how do you know?” Laura asks, suspiciously.

“Trust me. If I know one thing, it’s that.”

“I’d like to know how you know. You must know something to say what you’ve just said. I’m entitled to know what you know, I’ve paid you for it.”

Kate shakes her head. “You paid me to find out. Now …” She takes a long breath to compose herself. “… as I said, there is no proof, no tangible piece of evidence. Maybe there is, somewhere, but I don’t have it, and I can’t get it. Look,” she implores Laura, “listen to me. This is bigger and deeper than I could have imagined. I can’t get to it, not without putting myself in personal jeopardy, and I’m not willing to put my life on the line for this case—or any case, for that matter. And I’m not willing to tell you what I do know because then
you
would be in jeopardy, and that would be even worse.”

“That should be my decision, shouldn’t it?”

“He was murdered. That’s off the record, I didn’t say that, but he was. By people you do not want to mess with.”

“Who says?”

If Kate could strangle some sense into Laura, she would. If she could hug some sense into her, she would do that, also.

“Let it go,” she begs Laura, suddenly feeling old. Not
old
old, but grown-up, not young and blissfully unknowing. “It’s not your life, it’s not your world, it has nothing to do with you.”

“It has
everything
to do with me! I was there, with him!”

“Don’t you understand that that was a setup? That he used you for that very purpose?”

“He didn’t use me. He didn’t even know there was dope on that boat. He was the one who was used.”

Joan of Arc was the only martyr Kate would have been willing to throw her hand in with. Certainly not with Laura Sparks, a young woman who doesn’t know shit from shinola about the real world.

Carl was right. Herrera was right. If this spoiled innocent wants to be the first lemming off a cliff, why should Kate follow her?

“Did you spend all the money I gave you?” Laura asks coldly.

“You got your money’s worth,” Kate answers bluntly. Last night was the price of admission by itself. “And then some.”

“When will I have your written report, like you promised me?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Good. Maybe there will be something in it the next detective I hire can use.”

No one else will touch this with a ninety-foot pole. Not in this world; not with that family. That’s why Kate was hired in the first place, or has Laura already forgotten that?

“Please,” she beseeches Laura, one last time. “This is not your fight. It never was. Let it go.”

Laura stands. Three strides takes her to the door.

“Thank you for your … ‘help.’”

“Thank you for shitting all over me” would have had less of a bitter ring to it, Kate thinks, as she inwardly winces.

Laura closes the door behind her. Even in anger she’s too much the product of her breeding to slam it in Kate’s face.

Kate slumps back in her chair. She did the right thing, she tells herself. An irrational client is impossible, particularly one who has never been told “no.”

Still, it eats at her, and will for a while, until she’s able to look at it rationally, not emotionally. She did the right thing. She is a professional, and a professional acts from her head, not her heart.

“S
HIT. THAT SUCKS.” LAURA
Sparks sits in her corner office, staring intently at the writing on her computer screen.

Chastising herself for not getting it right. The story of her life.

Laura started up
The Grapevine
—Santa Barbara’s left-slanted, ecology-oriented alternative weekly newspaper—two years ago, when she moved back home after graduating from Wellesley and living in New York. She had worked in the Museum of Modern Art’s documentary film department (two members of the museum board are friends of her family) for a while until it got to be boring, and followed that with a briefer stint as a production assistant in public television. That was even more boring, a lot of drudge work—getting coffee for directors and mundane shit like that—and hardly any flash, nothing like what she had envisioned. She had never been introduced to Jonathan Demme or Meryl Streep, for example.

Being a newspaper publisher suits her. It’s hip, cutting-edge, relevant. She especially loves the perks of her position, the social parts: the art gallery openings, the literary cocktail parties, the UCSB fund-raisers, rubbing elbows with writers and artists, all that stuff. And it’s a real job, her own legitimate entry, not her parents’ or grandmother’s, it makes her feel grown-up and self-sufficient.

The offices of
The Grapevine
are located on the second floor of an old commercial building off Gutierrez St., a stone’s throw from the freeway, which provides a constant teeth-jarring din throughout the building even when the windows are closed, like an urban crash of waves against rock.

This raucous ambiance suits Lester Wolchynski, a transplanted Chicagoan who is the paper’s editor-in-chief and driving force, just fine. Lester is in his late middle age, a wire-haired dynamo who cut his teeth on Mike Royko and Studs Terkel; the paper reflects his progressive, in-your-face brand of political involvement.

Laura funds the paper with her own money (actually a loan from her grandmother; she doesn’t come into the bulk of her inheritance until she’s thirty, but her allowance is generous, she can do most anything she wants, within reason). Once in a blue moon she’ll get her back up and contest some editorial policy or specific article that unfairly, by her lights, blasts a part of Santa Barbara that’s important to her. She’s progressive herself—at one time she was Dianne Feinstein’s deputy county campaign chairman, for example—but this town and what it stands for is dear to her, you don’t put it down for no good reason, throw a bomb for the sake of doing it.

Lester likes to break plates to hear the noise. Laura doesn’t like uncomfortable sounds, anarchy is not her métier.

It’s late in the evening; everyone’s gone home. The heat hangs heavy in the air. She’s wearing shorts and a tank top. Sweat moistens her upper lip. She wipes it off with a tanned forearm, scrolls up a page, makes a correction in her text.