House of Smoke Read online

  House of Smoke

  J. F. Freedman

  TO MY MOTHER, GLADYS S. FREEDMAN (1914–1989),

  AND TO MY SISTER, SARA FREEDMAN:

  TWO FORMIDABLE WOMEN

  Contents

  Prologue OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1993

  INSIDE THE HOTHOUSE

  Santa Barbara, California 1995: TWO YEARS LATER

  1 THE QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE

  2 DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

  3 VERY DRY BONES

  4 WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE

  5 SLEEPING DOGS

  6 CHASING YOUR TAIL

  7 WEDDING BELL BLUES

  8 KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ’EM

  9 THE PEN IS MIGHTY

  10 SLOUGHING THE PAST

  11 TWO WHITE CHICKS SITTING AROUND

  12 THE HILLS ARE ALIVE

  13 BROKEN

  14 HIGH STAKES

  15 NEED TO KNOW

  16 MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL

  17 THE BIG SETUP

  18 THE CASES FOR AND AGAINST

  19 ANY NEWS IS BAD NEWS

  20 HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL

  21 HOUSE OF SMOKE

  22 HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

  23 PEACE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Biography of J. F. Freedman

  PROLOGUE

  OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1993

  INSIDE THE HOTHOUSE

  “MR. LOSARIO, WOULD YOU point that gun down, please?” Kate’s underarms were soaking wet. “Just point it away from Loretta and Mrs. Losario, okay? Would you, please?”

  For the umpteenth time already she’d made this request, trying to make it sound as reasonable as asking him to pass the goddamn butter. The screaming was all inside her head: Put the fucking gun down, you crazy-ass fucker, you’re going to kill us by fucking accident, I don’t want to die from some fucking accident! Not the kind of language that should be going on inside a proper lady’s head, as if she’d ever been one. Her mother was still alive, though, and had standards that had to be met. Her mother hated that she was a cop, her dreams for this daughter had been so much grander.

  The man was deranged. You have to talk respectfully, be deferential. He’s the king, in his own house especially.

  Her voice sounded foreign to her, distant, like it was coming out of a tinny tape recorder across the room and she was a third party listening to it. A voice belonging to a woman trying like hell not to sound like she was scared out of her mind, but not quite succeeding.

  “Nobody wants you to put it down—just don’t point right in her face, okay?”

  That was an outrageous lie, of course, which she didn’t believe and didn’t expect him to, either. Putting the gun down was the entire point of all this: disarming a crazy person without anyone getting killed.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Dirty Harriet?” His laugh at his own childish joke was short and mirthless, a barking har-har-har.

  She had her blue-wool-covered butt parked firmly on the edge of the practically brand-new-out-of-the-carton brown-tufted La-Z-Boy, trying as mightily as she could to maintain steady eye contact with Mr. Losario, who talked like a rational human being but had gone completely round the bend. A rational human being doesn’t hold a locked and loaded pistol on his wife and daughter.

  She was trying to apply what she’d been taught several years before in the police academy, when she’d taken the three-day training seminar in dealing with a hostage situation. Make the offender look at you, keep your look locked with his. Whatever it takes, keep that eye contact. She’d take her clothes off if she had to, to keep him looking at her.

  Her own gun, a regulation-issue .40 S&W, was on the floor, in the corner. No help to her. Ray’s, too. Neither of them could do a fucking thing. She hated this feeling of powerlessness. He’d blow them both away before they could take two steps. Or even worse—do the woman and kid. He was crazy. The problem was, he didn’t know that and he never would, not even if—strike that, when, if could not be part of this equation—they somehow managed to overpower him or talk him into voluntarily giving up the gun, either way, so that the paramedics could take him out of here in a straitjacket. He could spend the rest of his life in a padded cell on the heaviest medications in the world and he’d still be crazy.

  He was sweating. Flop sweat. His armpits were stained under his shirt, large moist circles. The odor permeated the room. He was overweight, flabby, way out of shape. The sparse hair on the top of his head was also wet, plastered down across his pale blotchy scalp.

  “Mr. Losario?”

  He was looking at her but he wasn’t seeing her. She was afraid of that. Was he not hearing her as well? Was he off somewhere, in some private world of his own, shut off from her?

  “Mr. Losario?”

  “What?” he asked, with the petty tyrant’s perpetual impatience. “What do you want?”

  “To make sure we’re still all here together,” she answered, remembering to smile at him. Nothing suggestive, a professional smile, nonjudgmental.

  “Looks like it to me.” He glanced around the room, from his wife to his daughter, to Ray, who was sitting on the other chair, his hands on his knees, to her. “Looks like we’re all here. One nigger cop”—Ray breathed in deeply but didn’t move a muscle—“one pussy cop, Miss Teenage Prom Queen, the missus, and me, myself, and I.”

  He’d never use that kind of language ordinarily, she thought. “Nigger.” “Pussy.” He wasn’t the type. Scared to death of women, yes, but not bigoted, racist. It was the time and place, his need to show mastery. And that made this worse, because he was in waters for which he had no charts.

  Losario pushed back a section of the oval throw rug with his toe. “Anybody else here? No? Good.” He stared at her. “All present and accounted for. Satisfied?” A sardonic sneer, a cheap knockoff from a B-movie heavy.

  “Thank you,” she said. Trying to keep the rage from her voice. Little Mary Sunshine, that’s what she had to be. A small, powerless object; what a man like this demanded in a woman. All women, his wife and daughter most importantly.

  She and Ray Burgess, her partner of five months, had only been out of the Academy six weeks when they’d been teamed up. Her old partner, Sam “The Man” Gonzalez, had retired on three-quarters disability from a car crash while on duty in the pursuit of a fleeing suspect—the fact that he’d been drunk out of his gourd and was on his way home alone was conveniently swept under the rug at the discharge hearing. Burgess and she had taken the call.

  Investigate a domestic quarrel. In cop language, a 415F, the “F” for “family.”

  She’d handled dozens of family feuds over the years. Occasionally there would be some heavy-duty physical action, injuries from kitchen knives or blunt objects—hammers, ashtrays—that required a trip to the emergency room; but mostly it was blusters, threats. She herself had never been hurt, not a scratch, knock on wood, but still, her stomach would tie up in a knot every time a 415F came over the car’s speaker, because you never knew. A family blowup could turn violent in a heartbeat. Some of the strongest passions and most tragic behavior come out of husband-wife fights.

  This had been the one.

  The phone rang across the room. She almost jumped out of her skin from the sudden jolt of the sound.

  “May I?” she asked. Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer.

  “Be my guest.” He gestured towards it with the gun, his voice sour with anger and resentment. “It’s for you, anyways.”

  This was true—all normal communication into the house had been cut. The only line to the world outside was a digital patch-in that connected them to the car phone of her captain, Phil Albright, who was standing in the street, less than fifty yards away.

  She crossed the room, taking a peek at the t
elevision set in the corner. They were on TV, a live feed. The cameras were right outside the front door. Half the block was lit up like a baseball diamond, a cluster of spotlights beaming down on them. At the moment the camera was shifting from the house and was panning the street and sidewalk. Christ, she realized, there must be over a hundred people out there—cops, press, ordinary citizens behind the police lines. Ghouls. It was turning into a full-blown media circus.

  “Hello?” She spoke tentatively, even though she knew who was on the other end.

  “How’re you holding up, Kate?” Captain Albright’s voice was down-home, laconic. A cop’s voice, trained to eliminate the highs and lows.

  “Still here,” she replied, trying to keep her voice as neutral as possible, keeping her eyes on Mr. Losario, who was watching her keenly.

  “How’s the squirrel? Still as squirrelly?”

  “More or less.” She didn’t want to say anything Losario could misunderstand, use as an excuse.

  “Things are getting kind of antsy out here,” he said. “The damn TV people have blown this up into a first-class clusterfuck. I sure would like an opportunity to sneak a sharpshooter around the back of the house, see if we could get a shot through a side window, end it fast.”

  “Not a good idea, sir,” she responded with alarm. “I think that would be …”; she didn’t know what word to use that wouldn’t maybe inflame the man with the gun.

  “Counterproductive?” he finished for her.

  “Exactly, sir. I mean very,” she added, to make sure he fully understood her position. He was the captain and she was a patrolman, but she was in here. It was her life and her partner’s and the family’s on the line here, no one else’s.

  There was a pause from his end. She could hear the wheels turning inside his head.

  “It’s your call to make,” he said finally. “For now. As long as it isn’t going anywhere nasty.” He paused. “The natives are getting restless.”

  She knew the debate that was going on: the press, the politicians, the police brass. All players, all with their own agendas. She glanced outside, through the crack in the curtains. Dozens of officers were lining the street, dressed in full riot gear, holding their heavy artillery at port arms. Ready to storm the house if given the command.

  There were two factions out there: One wants to wait them out, the other wants to storm the place. Somewhere the powers that be were discussing the pros and cons. On the one hand was what happened when they moved on David Koresh. On the other hand, this man inside had disarmed two officers. He was crazy. He needed to be neutralized.

  A broad and a rookie. That’s what some of the men out there were saying to each other, she could almost hear their voices, dripping with contempt. What did you expect?

  It looked like all of the media in the whole Bay Area was on this street. A lot of movement, cameras pointed right at this window. They couldn’t see her; maybe a shadow. She didn’t want to be seen. Being a celebrity wasn’t her style, she was hating all this. Go away, you parasitic bastards, she thought. She knew there was no chance of that, but she wished it anyway. They were news in the making, the genuine article.

  “I can believe that, sir,” she answered Captain Albright, getting back to the matter at hand. A shitload more than any of you, she thought to herself, glancing at Ray, her partner, whose thoughts she was reading like they were her own.

  “Check back with you in a little while.”

  “Good. Thank you, sir.”

  The phone went dead in her hand. She set it down in the cradle, moved back towards the center of the room.

  “Sit your ass down, lady cop,” Mr. Losario commanded her, indicating the chair she’d been in.

  She sat. The gun lay heavy on the floor, drawing her attention. Five seconds of distraction, that’s all she needed. Take this fucker down and walk away to tell the tale.

  Don’t be a hero. One of the first things they teach you. The cemetery’s full of heroes.

  Losario glanced over at the TV set, which had been on to Ricki Lake when she and Ray had arrived. At first, when the TV crews had shown up and the live feed had started, Losario had been transfixed. He was on television. A nobody all his life, now suddenly a celebrity. He had started flipping channels with the remote, finding himself on several of them.

  “We’re making history!” he had crowed to his wife and daughter.

  “You’re sick,” his daughter, Loretta, had spat back at him. She was the type of kid who didn’t take squat from her father, Kate knew that ten seconds after she and Ray had walked into this inferno. An admirable quality and one of the main reasons they were in this shit barrel.

  Losario had smacked Loretta good for that remark, a heavy closed-fist blow across the cheekbone that had sent her reeling. Kate had winced at the sound—she knew the feeling, all too well.

  That had been three hours ago. The cheek was turning blue/yellow now, the left eye closing to a slit like a boxer’s. Losario wouldn’t let Loretta put ice on it, he wouldn’t let anyone out of the living room where he could keep his two eyes on them. He paid particular attention to his wife, “the ungrateful cunt” (which seemed to be his normal way of describing her).

  “We’re in here because of this ungrateful cunt,” he’d told Kate and Ray shortly after the mess started seriously unraveling. “I hope you appreciate what you’ve caused,” he’d railed at his wife, who sat cowering on the couch, her hands covering her smashed-in face with a dishtowel.

  “It’s not her fault,” Loretta had come back at him. “It’s you, it’s always you, Daddy!”

  “I didn’t ask you, miss!” he’d screamed at her.

  Shortly after this had come the exchange that had led to his daughter’s getting hit upside her head.

  This was not the first time, not by a long shot. Kate knew that; now. Unfortunately, the information had come too late. She wished she’d known the history before she’d walked into the middle of this. She would’ve done things much differently. Her own personal experience with this kind of dehumanizing behavior would have guided her, changed her approach.

  Too late now. She was going to have to play the hand she’d been dealt.

  She’d been suckered into it by the circumstances, the normalcy on the surface. She should have known better, because they weren’t very different from her own. The banality of evil. Where had she read that? She didn’t remember, but it was true.

  It was a normal house in a normal lower-middle-class neighborhood. Small yards, most of them fenced, the lawns mowed, everything neat and clean and orderly. Nothing to indicate the danger within. She and Burgess had parked half a block away, walked up to the front door, and knocked. Hardly anyone had been on the street. It was a neighborhood where wives held jobs as well as husbands. A few kids passing by on their way home from school checked the cops out. In some neighborhoods the police are part of the scenery. This wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. This was a nice, middle-class, law-abiding neighborhood.

  “Who is it?” A girl’s voice from the other side of the door. It sounded guarded, but that hadn’t registered.

  “Police,” Kate had answered. “We got a call there was a disturbance at this residence.”

  Silence after that. She heard some low voices talking, nothing distinguishable.

  “You’ve got the wrong house,” the girl’s voice finally answered.

  “We have to check it out,” Kate said to the door. “Would you open the door for a moment so we can see that everything’s all right? It’ll just take a moment. We don’t want to disturb you, but we have to respond whenever we get a call.”

  “Nobody here called you,” came the reply. “It’s a mistake.”

  “Fine. Just open the door then, we’ll take a quick peek in, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Another silence. Kate glanced at Ray. He was wetting his lips, reaching for his holster. She put up a calming hand to restrain him. You don’t pull your weapon in the street unless the situation calls for it. This
didn’t. So far all they had was a scared kid behind a door.

  “Are you alone in there?” Kate asked. “Is that why you’re afraid to open the door?”

  A pause. “Yes,” came the reply then. “My mom doesn’t want me opening the door to strangers when she and my dad aren’t here.”

  “Okay. I can understand that. I wouldn’t want my kids opening the door to strangers, either. Tell you what—you’ve got a peephole in your door there, I can see it. You look through that peephole so you can see I’m what I say I am, me and my partner. We’re police officers. We’re here to help you. But we have to check inside. So go on, look at us through that peephole. I’ll hold my badge up so you can see it.”

  She motioned to Ray to stand next to her in front of the door, so the girl could see both of them. She waited. Longer than necessary.

  “Okay,” she spoke, after giving the girl the benefit of the doubt and then some. “Now you’re going to have to open up, miss, or we’re going to have to radio for some other policemen to help us out, and what do you want that for? All we want is to make sure you’re okay, okay?”

  Slowly, the door swung open. The girl stepped back enough to allow them to see into the empty living room past her.

  “Can we come in just for a second?” Kate asked, “to make sure you’re all right?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she pushed by the girl. Ray followed. SOP, by the book.

  The girl stood in the center of the room, looking sideways at them. About fifteen, sullen, dark-eyed pretty, dressed in the white-blouse-blue-skirt uniform of a parochial high school. A large silver cross hung around her neck.

  She had two daughters of her own. The older one was almost exactly the same age as this girl, she realized. Given her own family dynamic, how suspicious of authority would either of her daughters be in this kind of situation?

  The room they were standing in was neat, clean. The furniture was a cut above Sears. Matched couch and chairs in pastels, dark-stained oak end and coffee tables. A new 32˝ Sony television set tuned to The Ricki Lake Show stood prominent in the corner, and there was a bowl of fresh fruit on the dining-room table. A large wooden crucifix was prominently featured on one wall.