House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “I hear you,” Kate tells him.

  Ted Saperstein is an “assets searcher.” A former IRS official, now in private accounting practice, he’s one of the best in the world at finding out an individual or a corporation’s worth—net and gross—down to the dime, no matter how much they try to hide or bury it.

  Revenge of the nerds, Kate thinks as she looks at Saperstein, who she’s never met before. Square, baggy Brooks Brothers suit (black, natch), white socks, thin tie, Bobby Fischer haircut, the whole ensemble. A stereotypical accountant, she thinks; however an accountant is supposed to look. Which is good, because he’s going to be looking into places you don’t look into if you have a vanilla personality, so it’s good he has a bland, almost invisible outer appearance.

  “Give her whatever breaks you can,” Louis tells Saperstein. “She’s a working girl.”

  “I’m okay with money,” she assures Louis and Saperstein. “I want a first-class search. Otherwise, it’s a waste of my investigation. This is personal,” she adds, “it’s very important to me.”

  There’s a touch of dark humor in this, but no one except her will ever know it: she’s going to use a portion of Miranda Sparks’s settlement (bribe?) to investigate the Sparks family’s finances. It’s the best use of that money she can think of—a delicious irony, especially if it pays off.

  “Ballpark?” Louis asks for her.

  “A civilian, it would probably be ten K, maybe more if it’s really a maze, which this sounds like,” Saperstein replies. “For you, I’ll try to do it under five. As I said, there may be other hands in the till besides mine.”

  Meaning he may have to pay off some of his informants. That goes unspoken, of course.

  “I appreciate that,” she thanks him.

  “And my shielding you,” he adds.

  “I appreciate that, too.” Which she does, for real. Saperstein will have to go outside legal boundaries to get her some of the information she needs; but she won’t know how or where, only the results. That kind of insulation is one of the biggest costs of hiring a man of Saperstein’s caliber.

  He nods. “I assume you’ve already done a lot of the preliminary work, so that’ll help,” he adds. “Let me see what you have.”

  She hands him a legal-size manila envelope filled with the data she’s gathered over the past few days on the Sparks family: exact names, birthdates, and current addresses of Frederick Sparks, Miranda Sparks, Dorothy Sparks, and Laura Sparks, for openers. He glances at the information.

  “County records?” he asks.

  “Voter registration,” she nods. “And I did title searches on some of the properties I know they own locally, plus the building up in San Francisco.”

  “Good,” he acknowledges her effort. “This’ll jump-start the process by quite a bit. The trick,” he explains self-importantly, “is to procure as many ‘identifiers’ as possible, meaning exact names, social security numbers, birthdates, addresses, etc. It’s like cutting a key—the more specific information you put in the mold, the more complex a lock you can open.”

  He stuffs the information back into the envelope, sticks it in his briefcase, which he snaps shut and locks, takes a black Uniball pen from his inside jacket pocket, and opens a small notepad.

  “As specifically as possible—what are we looking for?”

  “Everything the Sparks family owns. Property, stocks, whatever. All their bank accounts, anywhere in the world.” She pauses as he scribbles this down. “All debts, liens, judgments against them for the past twenty years. The current book value of their holdings. What their estimated worth is as of right now, and what it was five, ten, fifteen years ago.” She looks up. “Have I left anything out?”

  “We’ll start with this,” he says. “Basically, you want to know what their worth is now, what it used to be, is it going up, down, or sideways, and where it’s coming from, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The husband’s a high roller, you say,” he asks, as he closes his notebook and places it in the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.

  “According to my source, he’s lost millions over the years.”

  “Which means he had millions to begin with, which probably means he still has millions.” Saperstein pushes away from the table. “Lunch is on you,” he winks. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “How much time will this take?” she asks.

  “I hope I’ll have some good information in a week. You can bet the farm there’s going to be all kinds of paper companies, dummy corporations, any way they can think of to hide money. Not because they’re crooks,” he says, “but they don’t want the government taking it all. All rich people are the same that way. That’s how come they stay rich.”

  “How well can they hide it?” she asks. If Bay Area Holding Company is any indication, the Sparkses have a lot of deeply buried treasures.

  “Very well. But unless they’re really, really good and really, really devious, not well enough to keep it from me,” he boasts. “If there’s anything to be found, I’ll find it,” he says, smiling foxily.

  He leans in to her. “This is the most important thing I’m going to tell you: you will have detailed reports of anything I can put on paper, but the delicate stuff is going to be oral, face-to-face, not on the phone. It’ll be my mouth to your ear—and not even God gets to listen in.”

  Blake Hopkins leans against a wall near the front of the County Board of Supervisors’ chamber, insouciantly checking out the scene. Hopkins has a proposal to make today; it’s the only item on this morning’s agenda. Oil is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla around here, so when it gets an itch, a lot of people start scratching.

  The weekly board hearings are sparsely attended generally, mostly by local-government wonks; today the turnout is healthy, almost filling the room. Environmental activists are sitting on one side of the aisle, pro-oil people on the other. They never commingle—oil, for decades, has created a sacred schism. In Santa Barbara, you are pro-oil or anti-oil: there is no middle ground.

  The pro-oil people are developers, businessmen and businesswomen, Chamber of Commerce representatives, and anyone who in any way profits from oil production in the county, which is a lot of people—thousands of them. Also in the pro-oil camp are ordinary citizens who simply don’t see big oil as the bogeyman, who accept oil exploration in the county as necessary and inevitable.

  Their opponents are a coalition that’s been in existence since the sixties, when oil first became intrusive in county lives and county politics. It includes environmentally oriented legal organizations; local chapters of the Sierra Club and other national environmental groups; professors from the local universities and schools; students, from elementary schoolers to grad students at UCSB; fishermen and others in the fishing industry, which has always been one of the county’s largest and most important industries, and has fought an ongoing and frequently bitter battle with oil interests for decades; and people who have no particular axe to grind but are anti-oil because they believe that oil production is the largest single danger to the quality of life in the region, which is one of the most beautiful areas in the country, and worthy of preservation.

  Since his announcement of Rainier Oil’s huge donation to the Sparks Foundation, which was his calling card into the community, everyone in the region who has a connection with oil—pro and con—knows who Blake Hopkins is.

  Miranda and Dorothy Sparks are in attendance, of course. They’ve taken their seats three rows from the front, on the environmentalists’ side of the aisle (right on the aisle, as if hedging their interests).

  Dorothy can’t control her agitation and apprehension—she sits bolt upright, spine and hips at a ninety-degree angle, lips pursed tight, hands nervously twisting a handkerchief. She knows what Hopkins is going to propose, and that knowledge, which she hasn’t been able to tell any of her friends and allies in the movement, is excruciating. Once she had agreed to hear Hopkins’s scheme, she was honor-bound not to divulge it. But she
will most definitely speak her piece when the opportunity arises. She will not betray a lifetime’s commitment, even if it’s personally and familially painful.

  Miranda, conversely, is relaxed and comfortable, smiling and greeting her friends on both sides of the aisle. As the time draws near for Hopkins to make his way to the lectern and begin his presentation, she fixes her attention on her lover’s face, as if by sheer force of will she will be able to penetrate his brain and be as one with him, to make this all work out.

  Sean Redbuck, the board chairperson, calls the meeting to order with a loud bang of his gavel.

  “Mr. Hopkins. The floor is yours.”

  Hopkins strides to the lectern. He takes his time organizing his notes, then looks up to the five supervisors who sit above the audience like judges on the bench—which is what they are. You propose, they dispose. And they will often leave cleat marks on your hide.

  “Mr. Chairman, members of the board, thank you for having me here today. To formally introduce myself for your record, my name is Blake Hopkins, and I am the incoming project manager for Rainier Oil’s operations here on the central coast.” He pauses for a moment, making eye contact with each supervisor in turn.

  “I can understand how you folks feel about the oil industry,” Hopkins begins. “Maybe if I’d lived here all my life I’d share those feelings. Feelings that I had a certain responsibility, a guardianship as it were, to make sure this area stayed as beautiful and unsullied as it always has been.” A pause. “Or was, until the hordes from L.A. discovered it,” he adds with a smile.

  There is a rustling in the seats behind him, particularly on the environmentalist side of the aisle.

  “But I haven’t lived here all my life,” Hopkins continues. “So my feelings are abstract. And less clouded with emotion.”

  Now the shuffling behind him becomes louder, less subtle: people bracing for a storm that they have vowed, for almost thirty years, to resist: to fight fiercely and to prevail against.

  “The time has come,” Hopkins states, “to find a way for your commitment and my company’s needs, the needs of all the oil companies drilling in your channel, to strike a new path. One we’re both comfortable walking on. That allows you to maintain the great quality of life that you have worked to preserve—and let me say, in the short amount of time I’ve spent here I can state, without exaggerating, life here really is nice, about as good as anywhere in the world that I’ve seen—and at the same time allows us in the oil business to do what we have to do, which is to provide quality petroleum products around the world, including here in Santa Barbara.”

  He pauses for a moment, taking a sip of water.

  “I’m here today to make a radical proposal. Rainier Oil, the largest petroleum corporation that is currently extracting product from the Santa Barbara channel, wishes to initiate the removal of its drilling platforms from the channel. All of its platforms—every last one,” he adds for emphasis.

  “We plan to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible, with a timetable for complete removal in five years. It’s what those of you who are anti-oil have been fighting us for for years.” He pauses a moment, to let this bombshell sink in. Then he goes on: “Today, I’m here to tell you—you’ve won.”

  Everyone is frozen in the moment; hearing, but not yet comprehending the awesome scope of Hopkins’s proposal.

  Sean Redbuck finally leans forward in his chair. “This is a shock, to put it mildly,” he says. “Why are you people making this proposal?”

  “Because we have to,” Hopkins answers. “The times, they are a-changing. When a conservative, pro-business governor like Pete Wilson signs a bill banning future offshore oil development up and down the entire coast, we have to adjust, because that’s how we survive, even though that development has thrown off millions of dollars a year to the state, and to localities like yours.”

  “Please continue, Mr. Hopkins,” Redbuck says. “Is there more to your proposal?” he asks. “Besides just pulling all your oil rigs in the next five years?”

  “Yes.”

  The rancher talking: “I figured as much. You gonna tell us what it is?”

  Hopkins nods.

  “In exchange for abandoning all of our offshore operations, Rainier wants your permission to drill a series of extended-reach wells that will be based on a small section of property onshore. I repeat, onshore. This will allow us to increase our extraction capacity, will completely get rid of further drilling in the channel, and will create new revenues to the State of California and Santa Barbara County of more than two billion dollars over a twenty-year period. That figure is conservative, by the way—the final income could be double that amount.”

  The chamber is deathly quiet.

  Redbuck looks at the other four supervisors. “We’ve heard similar proposals before.”

  Hopkins shakes his head emphatically. “Different technology,” he answers. “Different results. Can I explain?”

  “We’d like you to. Everybody in this room would very much like you to,” Redbuck says dryly.

  “The other companies wanted to take out one or two rigs that were on their last legs,” Hopkins says. “Rigs that were economically draining for them; bleeding them in the pocketbook, where it counts. We’re much bigger out in the channel—we dwarf everyone else, and our rigs have plenty of staying power, a dozen years or more, maybe a couple decades. We can stay with what we’ve got and still make a decent profit.”

  “Then what’s your incentive?”

  “Like I said—more production. More product. More money. Look, we’re not proposing this because we’re altruistic, I’m not going to insult your intelligence. Multi-billion-dollar corporations don’t work out of altruism. We’re doing this to make money—we’re not going to beat around the bush about that. But—it’s a much safer technology, which should be what’s important to you. Even people who hate the petroleum industry know that slant drilling is immeasurably safer and cleaner than channel drilling. That’s a given. A painful example: the Exxon Valdez incident has already cost Exxon billions of dollars, and there’s more losses to come. Rainier doesn’t want to have to pay out billions of dollars someday because one of our tankers ran aground in the channel, or a rig blew, like has happened in the North Sea.

  “We get more oil with extended-reach drilling, and it is safer. That is the point: it is safer. We will make more money, yes, but your environment will be safer.”

  Hopkins concludes: “The world needs petroleum. It can’t run without it. We want to take it anywhere we can find it, but especially in this country, because we use more oil than anyone else does, and we should supply ourselves as much as we can. It makes economic sense, it makes political sense, it takes the pressure off being held hostage by OPEC, and it’s the right thing to do morally.”

  Jeers and catcalls come forth from the environmentalists’ side of the chamber. Redbuck bangs down his gavel.

  “I know talking about the morality of oil drilling isn’t what you people are used to hearing,” Hopkins says stoutly, defending himself, “but it happens to be true.”

  “What about pollution around the drilling site?” Marge Cantley, another supervisor, asks from her perch next to Redbuck’s.

  “Like one of our competitors’ slant-drilling proposal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Site selection is a major problem,” Hopkins replies. “They had no choice but to situate their onshore operation cheek to jowl with a residential community and dangerously close by fragile wetlands. The ecology of the area might have been damaged, and it would have been unpleasant for the people who lived nearby, the university professors and so forth. Noise, oil fumes, the unfortunate but necessary by-products of what we do.”

  “Won’t you create those same by-products?” she presses. “Which, quite frankly, this community is not willing to tolerate.”

  Hopkins shakes his head. “They had no choice. That was the only land they could access. But our situation is different.
We’re going to drill our wells on a piece of land where no one will see oil, hear oil, or smell oil. To the naked eye, ear, or nose, no one will know we exist.”

  Redbuck leans forward, intrigued. “That’ll be the day, partner,” he drawls a la John Wayne. “So where is this mystery location?” he asks. “This perfect combination, where commerce marries ecology?”

  One last glance towards Miranda. Her smile is relaxed, perfectly set in her face. Dorothy’s face, in contrast, is rigid as a board; but her hands are shaking in her lap.

  “The Sparks ranch,” Hopkins announces. “Which this board rezoned for commercial use a few months ago, so the Sparks family could establish a world-class oceanography school. Which,” he reminds the assemblage, “my company is funding.”

  Every face in the room turns towards Miranda, whose benign countenance is inscrutable, while all around her the chamber begins exploding in a clusterfuck of chaos.

  Sitting above the melee, sensing the potential for an immediate and potentially physically threatening catastrophe, Redbuck gavels for a week’s recess.

  Kate drives south, listening to Tracy Chapman on her car’s funky sound system, the song a metaphor for the story of her life, she’s never been able to hold a man, she’s forced to admit to herself; not a real man, a good one. What’ll happen with Cecil, how will she fuck that up?

  Anything is better. Is it?

  Self-pity fills all the crannies in the car like a killer fog. What was she thinking about up north, proposing that ludicrous, pathetic pipe dream to bring her kids down to Santa Barbara? In the middle of the school year, Wanda’s senior year, no less. With a court order denying her custody still in place (she’s never formally requested custody, she thinks with a heavy hit of guilt), which her sister, and her girls as well, she suspects, would fight.