House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  He moves close to her, a reassuring arm going around her shoulders. She sags against him, feeling his warmth, his solid musculature.

  “They’re not going to get at you from that direction,” he assures her. “They want you to leave things alone, not get more involved.”

  “I know that, but I can’t help being scared about it.”

  “I understand. And I want you to understand that that’s an emotional reaction, not a logical one.”

  “Yes, I know that, too.”

  “People like this don’t work out of emotion, unless it’s something personal, which I don’t think this is.”

  “Okay, good. I knew that, but it’s good to hear it from somebody else.”

  She had been a cop. She knows what he says is true. But it’s happening to her right now, and thinking straight isn’t as easy when it’s this up-close and personal.

  “It’s scary, I mean they were talking about my kids,” she continues, and she starts to shake again, it’s the last thing she wants, but she can’t help it.

  She begins to cry. She’s been holding it in all night.

  His hand is on the back of her neck, gently caressing her, she moves to him, her mouth finds his.

  Kissing him. That’s all she’s doing. Kissing him, and being held. It feels so good.

  His hand is on her thigh under the robe. She parts her legs so he can find her. She’s wet, even before he touches her there.

  He’s more direct than Cecil, more forceful. They don’t say a word: he leads her into her bedroom, takes off her clothes, sheds his own—he has nothing on under the sweats—lays her on the bed, enters her.

  She’s all nerves and emotion. He is in control, bringing her off several times before spending himself.

  Her fear sloughs like an old unneeded skin. She can make a pot of coffee now, standing in her kitchen with her robe wrapped around her, pouring two cups, taking his into the bedroom where he sits up in her bed, his hirsute pelt glistening with her perspiration.

  She hands him his cup. “Would you mind getting dressed?” she asks him.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t step out on my marriage,” he tells her. “You’re the only one.”

  They’re both dressed, back on the living-room couch, a safe, discreet space between them.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself,” he says.

  “You’re married, I need to work with you, I can think of lots of other reasons we should not sleep together.”

  He states the obvious: “It was hanging over our heads like a rain cloud. This way …” he shrugs. “It was an excuse to not feel as guilty as we would have otherwise. I’m human, I wanted you.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t sleep with you again and ask you for help.”

  “I don’t equate the two.”

  “But I do.”

  He nods slowly. “I came here to help you. I still will.”

  “Whether or not we sleep together. Because …” She hesitates.

  “What?”

  “It’s not about your being married. I just said that, for an excuse.”

  He looks at her with a puzzled expression.

  “I’m seeing another man,” she explains. “I don’t know if anything’s going to come of it, but I don’t want anything getting in the way. I want to give it a chance,” she adds.

  He nods, drinks some coffee. “Why didn’t you call him?” he asks.

  “He can’t help me with this,” she admits candidly.

  Herrera has commandeered a small conference room at the station. Mug-shot books are stacked on the table. Kate leafs through the books page by page, carefully looking at each picture.

  “Here,” she says, pointing excitedly to a stark black-and-white photo. “This was one of them. One of the two I talked to in the house.”

  He looks over her shoulder; frowns, but doesn’t comment. “Go on. See if you can find any of the others.” He inserts a Post-It to mark the place.

  She pages through, more quickly.

  “This is the other one,” she declares, pointing to a picture of the other man who was inside, the one who had been silent until he spoke up about her daughters. “This one sent chills down my spine.”

  “Well.” He looks at the mug shot. He flips to the first picture, then back to the second.

  “Was I right?” she asks. “To be scared?”

  He sits on the edge of the table. “Being scared was the healthy thing to be. This is major bad news here,” he says, staring hard at her, to make sure she’s hearing him good. “They’re in the Mexican Mafia, both of them, big time. Hard-core offenders, nothing sissy about any of their convictions.” He points to the second man’s picture. “Rafael here, he’s a major offender. He just got out of Lompoc about six months ago. Assault with intent. He’s killed three men we’re sure of, but we could never stick him with those. The Feds have been trying to RICO him for years so they can bury him in a federal pen, although now, with the three-strikes law, anything the state can pin on him will put him down forever. Believe me, we’re hoping and praying.”

  “That’s comforting,” she says, beginning to shiver again.

  “The other man, Orestes Marrano, he’s no Sunday walk in the park, either.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yep, that’s right, shit. You’re in a pile of it. Jesus,” he wonders aloud, “what are these guys doing in this?”

  “Maybe it was their deal,” she says.

  “That’s an obvious possibility. One the department is going to have to look into.”

  “I don’t want to get involved in any of that,” she interjects immediately, her kids’ faces flashing before her eyes. “If there’s repercussions it could make things even worse for me.”

  “I’ll see to it you’re completely covered,” he assures her.

  “How can you do that?” she asks, not assured at all.

  “If I can’t, I’ll let it slide.”

  She knows how hard that is, for a cop not to pursue something he knows is dirty. “I appreciate that. I really do.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” he answers. “Not after earlier.”

  “I wish things were different for us, too.”

  “They’re not. It’s okay.”

  “What should I do in the meantime?” she asks. “What would you do?”

  “I can’t tell you what to do with your life,” he says, “much as I’d like to. But if it were me, I’d be watching my ass. Day and night.”

  “What about my client? I’ve got her to think about, too.”

  “I don’t know about her. I don’t much care, either.” He takes her hand, a protective gesture. “You’re important to me, Kate. So when I tell you these men are not to be fucked with, at any cost, I mean exactly that.”

  “That’s good advice,” Carl tells her. “Your friend the cop sounds like he’s got a brain in his head.”

  They’re sitting outside again, in the same spot. This time she has his undivided attention, at least for the moment.

  “What would you do?” she asks him. “If this was your case?”

  “Are you going to ask the same questions to everyone you know until you get the answer you want to hear?”

  “Sorry I bothered you,” she flares, standing up.

  “Sit down, goddamnit!” He grabs her wrist, hard. “Don’t treat me like this.”

  She drops back into her chair. “Sorry.”

  He lets go. She rubs the wrist. It’s sore, he’s got a grip like iron on him.

  “If this was my case …” He peters out, his mind drifting. He’s getting old, she realizes with a shudder. Wearing out.

  “What?” she asks impatiently. It’s the game he plays, to keep her staying longer; normally she doesn’t mind, but her nerves are frayed down to the last strand, she needs an answer.

  “… 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.”