House of Smoke (11 page)

“Okay, I believe you. I do believe you, I have to. Otherwise we have no future, not just you, all of us, the entire family. And that’s not a possibility.”

“Thank you,” Laura whines. She stares up at her mother. “But I wish it was because you love me, not because of the family’s future.”

“I do love you. That’s why I worry about our future. You’re our only child, you
are
our future.”

“I know that.”

“And you’ll never see Frank again.” A statement, not a question.

“I’ll never see Frank again,” Laura vows.

“Drive carefully,” Kate tells Cecil. “The streets are full of crazies tonight.”

They’re standing in the potholed driveway, by his old Cadillac. Her own car, a ’74 low-rider 327 Camaro hardtop, pearl on purple with rolled velour upholstery, which she bought at a police auction years ago, is parked next to it. She calls it the Rooster, because it’s a tough and feisty little bird. She keeps a sleeping bag in the trunk, which she’ll roll out on the deck for herself.

That they both drive big old American cars is a good sign, she thinks. If they’re compatible in this area, maybe they’ll be compatible in lots of ways.

“Nice wheels,” Cecil tells her. “Don’t see many of these old muscle cars around anymore.”

“I don’t have the heart to dump it,” she confesses. “It gets about four miles to the gallon if you’re coasting downhill, it would wind up in a junkyard. Be like putting an old pet to sleep. I’ll just keep it till it flat-out dies on me.”

He glances east, towards the horizon. “Besides, it’s almost dawn. Fiesta’s officially over.”

“I’ve kept you up way past your bedtime and you don’t have one damn thing to show for it.” Sexually, she means. The emotional stuff, she doesn’t know where that’s been going.

“I’ve got no complaints.”

He opens the car door.

“One more for the road,” she says, spinning him back towards her.

The kiss feels good. Better than good.

“Now go.” She pushed him into the driver’s seat.

“I don’t have your phone number.”

“I don’t have yours, either.”

He reaches into the glove box, rummages through what appears to be ten years’ worth of gum wrappers, auto registrations, grocery-store coupons, plus a shitload of other forgettable stuff, extracting in the midst of all that a dog-eared checkbook, from which he tears out a check and hands it to her.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he drawls.

“I need a pen.”

He hands her one from off his visor. She tears the check in half, keeps the part with his vitals on it, writes her name and phone number on the back of the remaining half, hands it to him.

“I’ll call you soon,” he promises. “Or you call me.”

“You,” she says. She doesn’t want to push it; it was nice, but it’s only the one night. These things have a way of losing their glow when the morning light hits them.

“Sleep well,” he tells her, with one last kiss of benediction on the forehead.

She watches his taillights fade off down the driveway. You be careful, she warns herself. Just because you’ve had no “relationships,” to use the term in its broadest sense, since leaving Eric, that doesn’t mean you should shut yourself off from a better man.

“You’re okay, as men go,” she says after him. “Hope you call.”

Both the city police chief, Bert Jenkins, and the county sheriff, Ralph Walker, had taken the same vow: the violence that had erupted in town during the past few Fiesta celebrations wasn’t going to be repeated.

Last year had been particularly gnarly. Two rival gangs up from Ventura had gotten into a dust-off right in the heart of State St., and when the shit had settled one teenage kid had been knifed to death, several people were seriously wounded, and the entire Fiesta
raison d’être
had been called into question. What had always been a celebration of the old Spanish heritage, bringing all the different ethnic and economic elements together more or less harmoniously, had evolved over the past decade into an excuse for roving gangs of kids who didn’t know what Fiesta was all about to band together, get drunk and high, and go looking for trouble, mainly along ethnic lines, with the major Hispanic gangs in particular visibly flaunting their colors.

The police covered the town like a blanket, especially the downtown shopping and restaurant areas that are the tourist centers. The bike patrol was especially visible—teams of uniformed cops wearing bicycle shorts and safety helmets, .44 automatics prominently strapped to their sides, rode their mountain bikes along the streets all day and night the entire weekend.

The extra vigilance had paid off. The gangbangers laid low, people had fun. To ensure the public tranquility, more arrests than normal had been made. You looked drunk—in the slam. Tell it to the judge tomorrow. And the same mind-set applied to the overaggressive panhandling from the homeless population.

Which means that the jail is jammed to overflowing, which is why Frank Bascomb, instead of being sequestered all night in his one-man lockdown cell, where a suspect in a big dope deal normally would be held, found himself unexpectedly transferred to a common tank, occupying the same space with drunks, derelicts, and scumbags of every description. It wasn’t what his jailers wanted, but there had been a highly publicized kidnapping and murder in the county a few months ago, and the case had gone to trial on the eve of Fiesta. All those defendants had to be quarantined, which took up most of the individual cells. Some of them had been doubled up in a single cell, which technically is illegal, but in a pinch you do what you have to. The rest of the individual cells were already occupied with level 5 inmates who had a history of violence and couldn’t be allowed into the general population. Frank Bascomb is a known quantity, the foreman of the Sparks properties, until tonight a respected member of the community. He isn’t going to cause any trouble. So when some really bad guys were brought in late, men who have to be kept in isolation, Frank was kicked out into the general population.

In the county jail, as in all modern jails, there are television cameras everywhere, high up on the walls, that monitor what’s going on. This doesn’t mean that they see every inch of territory—there are plenty of blind spots. But they give a sweep that allows a good general overview, so if anything is happening out of the ordinary, the jailers manning the observation areas, which are centrally located islands in each wing of the jail with banks of monitors receiving the TV camera feeds, know right away and can take the proper steps to fix it.

In addition, visual counts are made hourly, cell by cell. The guards look in each cell, making sure it’s full, that the inmate who’s supposed to be in it is, in fact, there. It’s a good system, but like all human systems it isn’t foolproof.

Tonight is a good example. Because the jail is over the legal limit there are areas, like the one in which Frank’s being kept, that aren’t properly monitored, since they normally aren’t used at night. Not that that should matter—they’re all drunks and derelicts, they’re sleeping it off, it’s one big den of bums.

So when one of the homeless winos sharing the tank with Frank starts yelling early in the morning, even before wakeup, the jailer running section duty in this wing doesn’t think it’s any big deal—another drunk fighting off a hangover. He drains his coffee before leaving the protection of the observation room to go inside and see what all the commotion is about, because by now it isn’t one voice screaming bloody murder, it’s all of them.

“Motherfucker!”

Some asshole’s lost control of himself, the stench from his diarrhea shit drifts halfway down the hallway, no wonder all the prisoners in there are yelling like banshees. Nothing worse than a drunk shitting all over himself.

“Oh, Jesus Christ! Jesus fucking Christ!”

Where the rope had come from, a length of clothesline like what you hang your wash from, they had no idea: the sheriff repeated that statement later on to the hordes of media vultures who jammed into his conference room, while glossing over why Frank had been sequestered in a drunk tank in the first place; he’ll have to do some fancy dancing later with Sacramento and the attorney general’s office about that little fuckup.

Bottom line, there shouldn’t have been any rope in there, it was an inexcusable fuckup, but so many men had been forced in here during the night there hadn’t been enough time to search everyone properly, that’s the only logical explanation.

Frank’s neck hadn’t snapped. He’d died from suffocation, which is no picnic—it could’ve taken up to fifteen minutes. His face was purple-black from the concentration of blood and his eyes had bulged out of their sockets like Roger Rabbit’s. There were claw marks around his neck where he had tried to loosen the rope.

What happens when a man hangs himself is that all the extremities open. Snot comes out of your nostrils, drool from your mouth, piss from your dick. And your sphincter relaxes as well, so if you have anything in your bowels out it comes, usually pretty watery. This is the reason the stench in the cellblock that morning was especially vile.

F
RANK BASCOMB IS DUMPED
unceremoniously into the ground in a small, private funeral at a tiny rural cemetery next to an evangelical church near Lake Piru, in Ventura County, where most of the markers have Hispanic surnames and no one’s ever heard of the Sparks family, none of whom attend except Laura, who comes out of a sense of guilt, fear, and anger, and confusion, standing near the scrubby grave site in the heat, listening to the funeral home preacher mumble the usual homilies about a man he’d never met, glancing up sharply as he suddenly snaps the dog-eared Bible shut, her eyes for a moment meeting those of the half-dozen other mourners, cowboys from the ranch who had worked under Frank and came because it was their duty to, plus two common-looking women she’s never laid eyes on before, not relatives of Frank’s, he’d had no family they’d been able to contact, his past had been strangely ambiguous, now it would be forever sealed under this hard-baked clay, who are these women, she thinks, her curiosity piqued, other girlfriends, people who wander into funerals, what?

There had been no public announcement. The family had wanted to get this over fast, without fanfare. Miranda had arranged everything, she pushed the coroner (another family acquaintance) to waive an autopsy, which is SOP in such deaths, so that the corpse didn’t lie around in the morgue for a week or more, which is the common practice in most overburdened county labs. She even supervised the purchasing of the casket, by phone: a plain pine box, the cheapest one. Frank was to be buried as cheaply and quickly as possible, the book to be closed and sealed shut.

The others drift away from the grave site. The cowboys glance at Laura, heads down, mouthing homilies of condolence. They get into ranch pickups and drive off; the boss might be dead, but they’ve got work to do, a 20,000-acre ranch doesn’t wait on anything.

Who are these women? Laura thinks, watching them from a distance as they linger a moment at a respectful distance from the grave, moving to the side as the backhoe starts pushing the dirt over the casket into the hole. They are both in their mid-thirties, she guesses, wearing bought-for-the-occasion cheap summer dresses that look like they came off the same rack at the Broadway, pantyhose (even in this heat; Laura is barelegged), cheap rickety heels. They aren’t the type of women who are comfortable wearing heels, Laura observes.

Could they be women Frank kept on the side? They’re not particularly attractive.

She can feel a wave of jealousy and insecurity washing over her. God knows how many women Frank had stashed all over creation.

The two unfamiliar women approach Laura, hands in vague salute on their foreheads to shield their eyes from the piercing sun. Laura is wearing sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. The light is fierce, and the kick from the hard clay ground compounds the glare.

“You are Laura Sparks, aren’t you?” one of them asks.

“Yes,” she answers, tight-lipped.

“We work on your ranch,” the woman informs Laura by way of introduction. She nods to her companion. “She cooks, I clean.”

“Oh.” Laura is taken aback. “Nice to meet you.” She extends her hand. And she had thought Frank was fucking them. That’s a relief, at least.

The women shake hands with her. Their hands are rough like men’s.

“Appreciate somebody from the family coming.”

Laura half-nods, half-shrugs. She’s uncomfortable and dazed.

“Must have been a shock.”

“Yes,” Laura says.

“That’s Frank,” the second woman offers. “Always scheming.”

“I … wouldn’t know.”

“Lot about that man you wouldn’t know.” The woman looks at her frankly, her eyes slits in the white sunlight.

“Obviously,” Laura replies firmly. These are employees of the family, they should be addressing her with a certain civility.

“Live hard, die young,” the woman tosses off.

They turned away abruptly, walking towards the road where the cars are parked.

“Hung himself,” one says caustically to the other, not realizing Laura’s still in earshot. “You think anybody’s stupid enough to believe that shit?” Her voice is flat second-generation dust belt, from Coalinga or one of those ugly Central Valley towns, Laura thinks.

“Newspapers bought it.”

“You believe anything you read in the dumb newspapers? Or TV? You got more sense than that, girl.”

“Nobody seems to be making much of a fuss over it.”

“People are stupid. Anyway, nobody gives a shit about a dead dope dealer.”

“The stories the walls could tell about that family.”

“And everything they touch.”

Their laughter is bitter.

What is going on? Laura wonders. And what are those references to her family? Is the whole world in on some sick joke and I’m the only one that doesn’t know about it?

Kate rides her body board, taking a long wave all the way into shore. She’s been out in the ocean—Butterfly Beach, near the Biltmore—for over an hour. It’s not mid-morning yet and the sun is already blazing, it’s going to be another scorcher, especially by Santa Barbara standards. But not as humid as it’s been, thankfully; the weather’s coming back to central coast normal.