House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “What was it set at?”

  “A million dollars.”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “High,” he confirms. “One of the biggest bonds I’ve written.”

  “How come?”

  “Bonds for drug smuggling are always set high, even more so when the party is from out of town and unknown to the local authorities. Particularly on this one, since one of the other traffickers was shot trying to escape and the third one took his own life.”

  “When was bail made?” she asks, taking out her pen and notebook.

  She uses a reporter’s notebook, a number 800, a size that can be slipped into a jacket or back pocket. She never employs a tape recorder; it didn’t take her long working as a PI to learn that people don’t talk as freely when a tape machine is running. Carl could have told her that, but he reasoned she’d figure that one out for herself.

  “Shortly after arraignment. As long as it took to process the paperwork.”

  “That was fast,” she comments.

  “It was set up in advance. Not uncommon. All they had to know was how big a number to write on the check.”

  “That’s a hundred thousand cash advance?” she continues, writing this all down.

  Lutz nods.

  “Plus a 5 percent fee, in case he skips and I’ve got to go looking for him. It was paid with a cashier’s check,” he adds, anticipating her next question. “I called Santa Barbara Bank and Trust to make sure it was good. It was—you don’t play games on this level.”

  Make it a hundred and a half. Real money. “What was the security? There was security, right?”

  She knows that in a bond written this big, particularly with a client who isn’t local, you have to, by law, put up something tangible that will cover at least one and a half times the amount of the bail, in case the person doesn’t show up. In this case, probably twice the amount.

  “Of course there was security. The surety company wouldn’t cover me otherwise.” He picks up a file that he pulled when she called and asked to come see him.

  “Property,” he tells her. “The security was property.”

  “What kind?”

  “A piece of commercial real estate in San Francisco. An office building, fully tenanted. Good collateral, solid.”

  “What’s its value?” she goes on with her questioning, writing it all down.

  “Over two million.”

  “Can I see the title?” she asks.

  He hands her the document. It’s the trust-deed to a five-story building in downtown San Francisco. She doesn’t know the exact building, but she knows the neighborhood. It’s a desirable location, well worth the price, she assumes.

  “Bay Area Holding Company,” she says aloud, writing down the name that’s listed under Ownership.

  “Real original,” Lutz remarks dryly. “As original as A-1.”

  “Who brought you the check?”

  “A local attorney.”

  “Do you know who hired him? This attorney?”

  “Could’ve been a woman,” he spars.

  “Okay. Or her. Who hired … whoever.”

  “I can’t tell you. You got what you need?” he asks, plucking the title from her hand, quickly getting out of his chair and placing it back in the manila folder, which he sticks into a file cabinet behind him. A cabinet that has a lock on it.

  His action brings her up short.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I was instructed not to.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?” she asks, frowning.

  “It’s not usual, but it isn’t unheard of. The party doesn’t want to be known, that’s their business.”

  Not that it was a one-party transaction, she’s sure of that. This would have gone through several layers, to insulate the real source.

  “Must’ve been someone local,” she throws out, fishing, “to put it together that quickly. Or at least there was a local contact.”

  He doesn’t rise to her bait. “Not necessarily. With computers and faxes, it could’ve been done from Hong Kong.”

  That’s true. It was worth a try, though.

  “Do you think Gillroy will show up for his trial?” she asks Lutz. She folds the notebook up, puts it in her purse.

  “Oh, sure. He’d be crazy not to. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have written his bond,” he tells her. “His passport’s been confiscated, and he has to check in with Orange County Sheriffs Department every week. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “But you’ve got the title to a nice piece of property, just in case,” she comments.

  “You’ve got to be prepared for ‘just in case,’” he agrees.

  Kate’s office is located above a tortilla factory off Ortega St., between Olive and Salsipuedes. It’s not a prime location, but it has one overriding benefit: the rent is cheap.

  A few law firms have from time to time offered her space, but she’s turned them down because they would have a priority on her time and she doesn’t want to be obligated to take work she doesn’t want to do or work with people she doesn’t like. Several lawyers in town fit into that category. And if a prospective client feels it’s necessary to have a detective who has nice carpets and tasteful prints, there are other PIs they can go to.

  It’s late afternoon, the time when people who live normal lives think about what they’re going to be making for dinner. Kate rarely worries about what she’s going to eat, or when. Unless she’s with someone, she eats on the run. One of the advantages of living alone and having a job that isn’t nine to five.

  There are several messages on her answering machine. She hits the playback button, scrounges a pad and pen from the pile of clutter on her desk, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up, spreading her toes through her stockings and stretching the arches. Her legs, which she takes pride in, are sore, particularly her shins, a bad sign: too much pounding the sidewalks in heels and not enough surfing, running, keeping in shape. Since her Fiesta indulgence she hasn’t gotten back into a proper routine. Starting tomorrow she’ll force herself to begin her regimen anew—a promise to herself, for herself.

  The playback stops rewinding. The messages start.

  “Kate, Larry Wilson. It’s two-twenty-five. I need you to interview prior to deposition that witness in the Glen Annie traffic accident, we’re going to see the judge on Monday and I need that testimony. I’ve tentatively booked you to see her tomorrow before noon. Call me and confirm, please.”

  Click.

  “This is Mark Richards’s office at Watson and Stone, calling for Kate Blanchard. Mr. Richards has a personal injury case in Lompoc, and he needs to talk to you about doing the investigative work, as you did in the Moreto case last month. Please call him at 555-5557. Thank you.”

  Click.

  There are half a dozen calls similar to those; lawyers wanting to talk to her about cases that are currently in the pipeline that she’s working on for them, or new cases they want to hire her for. Some lawyers in town won’t touch a female PI; others think working with a woman is a definite advantage. It isn’t a gender thing—there are plenty of male lawyers who use her, and some female lawyers who won’t.

  She missed the last call by a few minutes.

  “Hi, Kate, this is Cecil. Just wanted to tell you how great the other night was. Hoping I could catch you in. Maybe later. Give me a call if you feel like it.”

  She has a stack of urgent and semi-urgent calls sitting in her hand, but she calls him anyway.

  He isn’t in—she gets his service: “This is Cecil. I’m not here. Leave a message.”

  Short and sweet, no nonsense.

  “This is Kate returning your call,” she tells his machine. “Hope we don’t play phone tag for too long. It was great for me, too. You already knew that, but I want to say it anyway. I’ll be in and out, so call me.”

  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.