House of Smoke (47 page)

“To a beneficial partnership between environmentalists and business,” Hopkins adds.

“Yes, that will be refreshing for a change,” Dorothy notes, unable to keep the tartness from her tone. “Is your family with you, Mr. Hopkins?” she adds politely; the man is, after all, their guest, one is always civil with one’s guests, even if you don’t care for them and despise their policies. “Have they moved down yet from San Francisco?”

“Tiburon,” he gently corrects her. “And please, call me Blake.”

“That’s a pretty area … Blake,” Miranda notes pleasantly. As far as anyone in her family is concerned she has never laid eyes on this man until a few days ago, when they met to discuss his company’s incredible endowment.

“It’s pretty here, too,” Hopkins answers, comfortably making small talk. “And I’m single,” he explains to Dorothy, “so I have no family.” He resists glancing at Miranda; this old dame is sharp, she’d figure them out in a second if given the slightest reason to.

The servants have been given the night off. Miranda serves. They eat a simple cold dinner: filet of salmon, asparagus vinaigrette, stuffed artichokes. The food is accompanied by a nice Santa Ynez chardonnay made from their neighbor Cecil Shugrue’s grapes.

Dinner is over. The sun has set. They sit outside by the pool under the heat lamps, drinking a second bottle of wine.

“What are your plans, Mr. Hopkins?” Dorothy asks. “Rather, your company’s plans?” It’s difficult, having a civil conversation with someone from big oil, but she was brought up that way.

“Why do you ask?” he smiles.

“Because I don’t see them sending someone as capable as you down here just to hand over large checks to environmentalists,” she says forth-rightly. “You must have an agenda.”

Hopkins turns to Frederick. “Is your mother psychic?” he asks.

“I’ve always thought so,” Frederick answers. “She’s always been able to read my mind, even when I haven’t wanted her to.”

“So, Mr.—Blake,” Dorothy presses. “What are you really down here in Santa Barbara for?”

He blows out his breath, steeples his fingers, sits up straighter in his chair.

“I’m here for change,” he says, looking directly at her.

“What kind of change?” she asks, equally directly.

“Change for the better, I hope,” he parries. He’s enjoying this informal colloquy.

“You weren’t really serious when you said your company is planning on pulling your platforms out of our channel, were you?” she asks, smiling as she does at the absurdity of the question. He’s a nice enough man and his company did give them a fortune, but he’s oil, a fact not to be forgotten. “That was politics as usual, wasn’t it? I don’t mind,” she continues airily, “developers say all kinds of outrageous things when they want to get on our good side. It’s part of the game, we’ve been playing it for decades.”

He pauses for a moment. The smile leaves his face. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what we’re planning to do.”

“Are you serious?” Miranda says, acting for all the world as if this pronouncement has stunned her.

“Yes. Very.”

“That’s … remarkable,” Dorothy says. Hopkins has thrown her off balance.

“Yes and no. Pulling our platforms up and giving up our oil rights are not the same thing.” He leans forward, his body language all business now. “We want to replace all our offshore rigs with onshore slant-drilling ones.”

“Like Mobil,” Dorothy says. Now her suspicions are way up. She’s a charter member of every anti-oil organization in this county.

“Same technology, different goals.”

“How?” Her tone has taken on a note of belligerence. She’s as blunt as she can be; impolite, almost.

“Mr. Hopkins is our dinner guest tonight,” Frederick softly reminds his mother, trying to defuse an argument before it catches fire.

“No, that’s okay,” Hopkins says. “I don’t mind talking about this. We, meaning Rainier Oil, have nothing to hide.”

He exchanges the slightest of glances with Miranda as he says that.

Frederick watches, amused and detached. Big oil is the ever-looming heavy in this community, for the past three decades. Now here is this man in his house, debating with his mother, the
grande dame
of local environmentalism.

“Mobil wants to improve on what they have,” Hopkins says, looking at Dorothy. She’s his target—if he can sell her, the rest of the opposition will follow.

“And yours?” she asks, as if cueing him from a script.

“We don’t want to rewrite the present book, patch here, modify there. We want to write a whole new book, starting from page one.”

“Unfortunately, you are not the only writer of this book,” Dorothy reminds him.

“That’s true. But we’re the biggest in this area.” He pauses to gather his thoughts. “We want to take all our rigs out—not a select few—and replace them with slant drilling, every last one. We want to be the forerunner. If we’re successful,” he goes on, “our plan is to persuade the other oil companies to come along with us; to convince them that this is the way to go for the future. No more platforms, no more offshore spills, a cleaner environment.”

Dorothy regards him skeptically. “Your gift to the oceanography project,” she says. “You said there were no strings attached, but this seems to tie in awfully closely. Am I missing something? Is this all of a piece? Are you using us?”

“No,” he says, “there are no strings. Our donation stands alone, as I’ve promised.” He pauses a moment, taking a judicious sip of wine. This has to be played out exactly right. “But there is something we want from you.”

“There always is,” she nods, her intuition confirmed. “And what is this one?”

“We want to put our slant drills on your property.”

Dorothy closes her eyes. She knew it.

“That is a definite string, despite your disclaimer to the contrary, and a very large one,” she says. She turns to her daughter-in-law. “Do you know something about this?” she confronts Miranda.

Miranda looks at Hopkins, then at Frederick, finally at Dorothy.

“Yes.”

“For how long?” Dorothy asks her. Her lips are pressed tightly together, her hands are fists in her lap. Consorting with an oil company, the enemy, is bad enough; when it’s done behind her back, that’s absolutely unacceptable.

“About a month,” Miranda answers easily. “Mr. Hopkins confided in me when he first approached me regarding his company’s donation.”

“I see.” So Miranda had lied when she told the press that nothing of this nature had been discussed prior to the oil company coming forward with their “no strings attached” gift. She doesn’t know if she’s angrier about the deceit or about being excluded from participation.

“I run our business and the foundation,” Miranda reminds Dorothy. “Who else would Mr. Hopkins approach?”

She’s got Dorothy there, much as Dorothy detests it.

“When I said ‘no strings,’ I meant that,” Hopkins interjects, reading the tension between the two. “The donation is unconditional. It’s yours, no matter what happens.”

Dorothy turns to Miranda. “This is diametrically opposed to everything we’ve ever stood for,” she says.

“I know, Mother,” Miranda answers. She calls Dorothy “Mother” only when she’s being extremely deferential. “But if Rainier Oil is willing to fund our project, an incredible commitment, and if by taking their rigs out of the channel they’ll lessen the chance of an oil spill, which has been a huge concern for all of us for three decades, shouldn’t we at least hear what they have to say? That’s why I got us all together tonight.”

“A fair hearing, that’s all we ask,” Hopkins weighs in. He hesitates so slightly that only Miranda picks up on it.

“Technology in my industry is exploding exponentially,” he tells Dorothy. “What we can do now we couldn’t even have dreamt of five years ago, and today’s cutting-edge stuff will seem like museum pieces by the end of the decade. Fossil fuels are going to be a zero-based process as far as pollution is concerned. The means are available now—all that’s required is the will, and Rainier Oil has the will. Our chairman wants to revolutionize the industry, and when Mac Browne wants something done, it happens.”

Dorothy looks out towards the ocean. The oil rigs, their night lights twinkling like Christmas-tree ornaments, rise out of the water in the distance, like Poseidon’s army on the march. In just this one quick glance over a very narrow area her eye spies over a dozen of them. Slowly, she turns her attention back. “I’ve always prided myself on being a fair woman, willing to hear the other side’s argument, even when I am in total opposition to them philosophically,” she says to Hopkins.

“So although I’m sure I’ll wind up disagreeing with you, I am willing to listen.”

“Thank you,” Hopkins says to her. “That’s more than fair.”

Miranda turns away so that Dorothy won’t see the expression on her face.

There’s no control tower at the Santa Ynez airport. Anyone flying out of that area who wants to file a flight plan does it out of the Santa Barbara airport, on the other side of the pass.

Kate stands across the counter from a woman in the operations department as the woman looks at her identification. She can tell that the woman is curious to know about what train wreck did the damage to her face, but is too polite to ask.

“How long ago was this flight you’re interested in?” the woman asks instead. “Our records go back only so long.”

“Just a little while back.” She gives the woman the exact date.

“We should have that, if one was filed. A lot of times planes flying in and out of there don’t file flight plans.”

“It was nighttime, both when it landed and took off,” Kate says. “And it was a jet. A small one.”

“Well, it probably did, then. Jets usually want to fly over eighteen thousand feet, and if it was at night they would have been on IFA.” She pulls out a thick binder. “Do you have the N number? The registration number from the plane?”

Kate reads of the number from her notepad. She’d written it down from memory, the morning after she’d seen it.

The woman flips some pages until she gets to the one with the date Kate gave her. “Here it is. That airplane flew in from McCarran Field, Las Vegas, landed on a private strip in the Santa Ynez Valley, then flew back to McCarran.” She glances up. “Do you know who that plane belongs to?”

Kate nods. “The Sparks family. I’m doing some work for them. Records verification, that sort of thing.”

“They need a private detective to find this out? A phone call would do it.”

“When you’re in their position, you hire people like me to do things for you other people would do for themselves.”

“I wouldn’t know.” She takes another sideways glance at Kate. “Is that all you wanted?”

“That’s all.”

“It must be nice to be that rich,” the woman says, putting the book away. “Having others do everything for you.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Kate says. “I just work for them.”

The Sparkses fly to Las Vegas in their private jet. Kate drives. A couple hundred of the twenty thousand goes into a long-overdue tuneup of her car, particularly the air-conditioning. She isn’t about to motor across the desert in a car that won’t stay cool.

Don Lockridge is assistant head of security at the biggest and gaudiest hotel in town. He got the job after retiring from the Oakland PD, where he’d done his twenty-five, rising to assistant chief. He’s cueball-bald, but he looks more like Yogi Berra than Kojak. He greets her warmly, his brow wrinkled in question as he sees her face.

“Line of duty?” he asks.

“Actually, it was a car accident.”

“You mending okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Glad to hear that. So when was the last time we saw each other?”

“Your retirement party.”

“Six years. That long? Time isn’t standing still. Although you’d think it was to look at you, busted-up face or no.”

“Thank you, kind sir.”

They’re in his office, a small cubicle off the main security area. The walls are glass, he can look out and see everything in front of him. On her way up here she’d noticed the cameras, the computers, the elaborate security apparatus. All modern, state-of-the-art. The war rooms in the Pentagon can’t be much better equipped than this, she thinks to herself. Certainly no big-city police department is.

Don’s the one person working in Vegas that she both knows and feels okay to semi-confide in. He was first and last a stand-up guy, a strictly by-the-book no-bullshit cop. One of the reasons he got a cushy job like this, she figures—he can’t be bought. He’s probably making twice or three times his police salary, and he never has to put his life on the line.

She called yesterday and said she wanted to see him, that maybe he could help her out. He’d be happy to, he said over the phone, if he could. Explanations would come later.

“How’s things going in Oakland?” he asks, making small talk. “I haven’t been back in over four years.”

“I don’t live there anymore either, so I don’t know. Not much different, I assume. I left the force two years ago myself,” she explains.

“I didn’t know that. What about Eric?”

“He left, too.”

“Are you two still together?”

“No.”

She could go into the details, but that’s not the point. His not being aware of her full history is better, especially on the job. And since he knew Eric, her splitting is not unexpected news.

“Where’re you living?” he asks.

“Santa Barbara.”

“Ah, that’s a great little city,” he enthuses. “That must be a great place to live.”

“Most of the time.”
When you’re not getting beaten within an inch of your life.
She fishes a card out, slides it across his desk.

“PI work, huh?” He turns her card over in his hand, drops it in his shirt pocket.

“It’s what I know.”

“Tell me about it. Old cops never die, they just …” He leans back in his chair, smiling at her. “How can I help you, Kate?”

“I’m looking for a woman and a man who work here. In one of the casinos, I would guess.”

“Know their names?” He begins reaching for a thick book.

“I don’t know either one of them.”

“Do you know what they look like?”

She nods. “I’ve seen them. I could make either one.”