Touched by Fire

by Greg Dinallo

  CHAPTER SIX

  The previous evening, after being caught on the traffic-packed freeway, Merrick finally reached the Pacific Coast Highway. He raced north on the twisting road that paralleled picturesque beaches, passing long convoys of fire trucks and rescue vehicles.

  Multicolored flashers strobed in the darkness. The wail of sirens mixed with the crackle of radios. Iridescent stripes on fire coats streaked the night as frantic crews worked in a blizzard of eye-stinging ash. Overhead, low flying tankers spewed pink flame-retardant foam in the path of the fire, which was roaring across the terrain at twenty-five miles an hour.

  Merrick turned into the parking lot of an oceanfront restaurant where a command post had been set up. A group of firemen hovered over maps, plotting strategy and deploying fire-fighting units. “Merrick!” the one in the white helmet growled as he approached pulling on an ARSON SQUAD raid jacket. “Where the hell you been?”

  “Making it with your daughter.”

  “Fuck you, Merrick.”

  “That’s what she was doing.”

  “Fuck you, anyway.”

  Battalion Chief Roscoe Decker had black skin, intelligent eyes, and the bone-weary posture of someone being pummeled by a relentless adversary. He turned into the gusting wind and pointed to a man reading a newspaper. His clothes had the ragged edges and oily sheen of constant wear. A long ponytail hung across one shoulder. “Walked out of there without getting his butt barbecued and said he saw who started it.”

  “He say who?”

  “Nope. He said he wants to make a deal first.”

  Merrick nodded and studied the man for a moment. Most arsonists watched their handiwork from afar like a pornographic movie. Some derived a sense of power from seeing the human chaos firsthand. Others took insidious pleasure in helping fight the fire. A few, driven to be lauded as heroes, claimed to have seen the arsonist at work; and Merrick wouldn’t put it past one to stride boldly into the command post and do so.

  He palmed his ID case, letting the badge shimmer in the light. “Lieutenant Merrick, Arson Squad. I hear you want to make a deal.”

  The man looked up from his newspaper and nodded.

  “Okay, I get the pyro. You get the film rights.”

  “I wish,” the man said with a wistful smile. “Here’s my problem: When I tell you what I saw, you’re going to want to know what I was doing there.”

  “Something illegal,” Merrick said matter-of-factly.

  “Just being homeless seems to be illegal around here, you know?”

  Merrick nodded and lit a cigarette.

  “Look, I wouldn’t hurt anyone: but I do what I have to, to survive; and I don’t want to be fucked over for helping you out. We have a deal or not?”

  Merrick dragged on the cigarette and studied his eyes. Rather than the manic glint of someone enjoying the chaos, they had a forthrightness confirmed by steady. hands, the fingernails clipped and clean. “Deal.”

  “Okay,” the man began hesitantly. “There’s this house up near the crest. I use the pool sometimes when they’re out. To freshen up, you know? Anyway, they left a patio door open. I was . . . I was inside raiding the fridge when I saw headlights in the brush. I thought they were coming back, but the driver chucked something out the window and took off. Couple of minutes later—fire everywhere.”

  Merrick nodded pensively. “You happen to get the plate number?”

  “Naw, way too dark.”

  “Can you describe the vehicle?”

  “Yeah, it was a van. Dark one—black, green—it looked real beat up. The driver was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap . . . and he had a ponytail—long, like mine—pulled through the back. He lit a cigarette. That’s when I got a look at him.”

  Merrick nodded thoughtfully. “You’re sure it was a man, not a woman?”

  The man cocked his head to one side, then winced. “I couldn’t swear either way.”

  “You just said he, several times.”

  “Power of suggestion, I guess,” the man explained, holding up his newspaper. This was the third wildfire in a month, and the front page was covered with stories. “Says eight out of ten arsonists are men.”

  “They are.” Merrick ground out his cigarette with frustration. “And most don’t get caught.”

  The man nodded, then began laughing softly.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “No, that.” He gestured to the inferno, then slipped a wallet from his jeans and removed a driver’s license. It had a local address and a photo of an executive in a shirt and tie. The man’s face was thinner now, and ruddy from exposure, but the crisp blue eyes hadn’t changed. “I used to live here. I would’ve ended up homeless anyway.”

  Merrick jotted down his name and D.L. number on a note pad. “Sounds like you’ve got an ax to grind.”

  “With the bank that foreclosed on me, not my neighbors. I worked here too.” He took an ID card from his wallet. It had a similar photo and proclaimed HUGHES AIRCRAFT.

  “Engineer?”

  “Missiles,” the man replied with obvious pride.

  Merrick nodded knowingly. “Yeah, Reagan really screwed it up.” He took the man to Decker’s map table and had him locate the house from where he saw the van, then peeled a twenty from a billfold. “Stay out of other people’s kitchens.”

  The man smiled thinly and walked into the darkness.

  Merrick put out a bulletin for a battered van, dark color, ponytailed driver, then assembled an investigation team: Bill Fletcher, boyish, quiet and new to A.I.; and Pete Logan, a crusty forensic expert with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms based in L.A.’s World Trade Center. He and Merrick had worked dozens of cases over the years.

  It was about an hour before dawn when they headed up the canyon to start their manhunt. They heard the hundred-decibel roar and felt the two-thousand-degree heat well before reaching the fire line. The fifty-foot-high wall of flame had just come into view when the Blazer’s headlights cut through thick smoke to find a fire truck blocking its way. The crew had been trying to keep the blaze from jumping the road, but a sudden wind shift sent the firestorm racing in the opposite direction, trapping them in a field of dry grass. Within seconds the entire expanse of scrub ignited with an oxygen-sucking whoosh that knocked them to the ground and tore the hoses from their hands.

  Merrick, Fletcher, and Logan left the Blazer to help them, but the flames and lung-searing heat drove them back. Merrick buckled his fireman’s coat, pulled an air tank from the back of the four-by and began following a length of hose through the blinding smoke in search of the nozzle. It brought him face-to-face with the towering wall of flame.

  “Hey! Hey, Dan!” Fletcher shouted, aghast. “What the bell are you doing? Dan? Dan!”

  “Nothing you can do, dammit!” Logan protested.

  Merrick secured his helmet, hooked the hose over his arm, and strode into the heart of the inferno.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thick burnt-umber smoke stretched to the horizon like miles of dusty drapery drawn across the morning sky. The winds were still hot and still gusting, and the slip of yellow paper was fluttering wildly against the mailbox labeled L. E. GRAHAM.

  Lilah captured it and peeled the tape free. “Go get this for me, will you?” she asked, handing the slip of paper to Kauffman. “Little room around the side there. Should be open.”

  Kauffman left his backpack and loped off, his eyes already smarting from the microscopic cinders in the air. Lilah removed the rest of yesterday’s mail from the box and was giving it a quick once-over when he returned with the package—a corrugated carton about the size of the one the lab supplies came in.

  Her head tilted curiously at the bold black printing that spelled out her name and address. It wasn’t familiar, nor was the post office box that served as a return. Lilah was about to cross the courtyard and have Kauffman put the package in the condo, but thanks to their lusty encounter, the day had barely started and she was already running la
te. With luck, she could drive to Santa Monica, give her father his checkup, and make it back to campus in time to teach class—if traffic wasn’t snarled, if she made the lights, and if her patient was cooperative. “Better put that in the car,” she said, heading for the gate.

  The green Jaguar looked as if it was covered with a thin layer of dirty snow. They raced down the hill toward the village, sending trails of soot spiraling from the car’s graceful curves. The package with the bold, angry printing—the package that could burn a block-square market to the ground—rode in the backseat along with her briefcase, his backpack, and their gym bags. Lilah ran the light at Le Conte and pulled to the curb opposite the Chevron station.

  Kauffman removed his gear, then crouched in the open door and grinned at what he was about to say. “Thanks for the ride, Dr. Graham.”

  “It was a selfish act,” Lilah said with a chuckle. “See you at the gym tonight?”

  “Can’t,” Kauffman grunted. “Histology study group.”

  “Come by my place when it’s over.”

  Kauffman winced, his head lolling sheepishly. “We usually go for pizza.”

  “So bring me a couple of slices,” Lilah said in her sassy way. She kissed her fingertips, then reached across and touched them to his lips. “Gotta go.”

  Kauffman stepped back as the Jaguar’s exhausts added their noxious fumes to the eye-stinging air; but it was the delicate scent of Lilah’s perfume that filled his head now. He inhaled deeply, savoring it, and watched until she made the turn into Wilshire, heading west toward Santa Monica.

  Over the years, the sleepy seaside community where Lilah Graham grew up had become a politically polarized battleground where property owners and rent control activists squared off regularly. It had been going on for over two decades now. Ever since the spring of ’74—the spring Lilah came home on break from Berkeley and got into a discussion with her father over it.

  “Shelter is a basic right,” she declared with the self-righteous indignation favored by college students and clergymen. “It shouldn’t be exploited for profit.”

  “Tell that to Thomas Jefferson,” her father retorted, unable to reconcile his daughter’s views with her upbringing. “I don’t know what they’re teaching you up there, young lady, but this is America.”

  “Yeah . . . land of the brie, home of the slaves,” she quipped with a smile. “Spare me the national anthem, okay?”

  Doug Graham dragged hard on an unfiltered Camel, and suggested they take a walk. “There’s this guy I know,” he began as they strolled along the golf course that bordered their neighborhood. “Hardworking, nice family . . . wife works too.”

  “Wow, a liberated woman,” Lilah teased. “I thought they were outlawed in Santa Monica.”

  “Let me finish,” her father said evenly, exhaling through his nose and mouth as he spoke. “This couple . . . they scrimped and saved and bought a little house. A few years later they scraped up enough to invest in a building with rental units. Now, thanks to this rent control nonsense, it’s damn near worthless.”

  “Hey, what goes around comes around,” Lilah replied in the flippant tone of a rebellious eighteen-year-old.

  “Talk English, will you?” Doug Graham pleaded.

  “Well, they were sticking it to their tenants all those years. Now, the tenants get to stick it to them.”

  “I’ve known them a long time,” her father said calmly. “Rents were reasonable. The place was kept up. Did it themselves too: leaky faucets, clogged toilets, paint jobs, the whole nine yards—”

  “Hey, life isn’t fair, you know?”

  “Well, that’s one thing we agree on,” her father said with a thoughtful exhale. “Now, what if they’d been planning to sell the building and use the money for something special?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, like . . .” he replied, mimicking her, “to take that dream honeymoon they never had.”

  “Hey, you’re really breaking my heart, Dad. Next you’ll be telling me their kid needs open-heart surgery.”

  “What if the kid did?” he asked, setting the hook he’d so patiently baited. “Is it okay to ‘exploit shelter for profit’ to pay for some things, but not others?”

  “Well . . . yeah, I guess,” Lilah replied, sensing he’d trapped her.

  “Okay, now that we’re communicating, what if they had a bright—no, make that a brilliant—daughter?” He paused and his eyes locked on to Lilah’s. “And they were planning to use the money to send her to medical school?”

  That was the moment Lilah Graham grew up. She’d known her parents owned that building and had spent untold hours working on it. Yet, she’d been so intent on spouting her sophomoric platitudes, she’d blocked the truth from her mind.

  Lilah often reflected on that moment, especially when she wrote the monthly check repaying her med-school loans; but today she was more focused on her father’s failing health and the intricacies of screening imprisoned sex offenders. The latter prompted her to dig out her cellular and check with Cardenas for messages. “Ruben? . . . Yeah, it’s me. Anything going on?”

  “Nada,” he replied, his attention on one of the many medical school applications he was filling out. “Things are real quiet, boss.”

  “Dr. Schaefer didn’t call?”

  “Not on my watch.” He sorted through a rack of message slips. “Not on anybody else’s either.”

  “Okay, have him try my cellular if he does.” She hung up and angled south toward Santa Monica’s Sunset Park section. The rambling enclave of Spanish bungalows and English cottages was home to public servants, blue-collar workers, and young families getting a foothold in the pricey real estate market. The Jaguar cruised past the municipal airport and started down the steep hill toward the golf course. It was just a few blocks to the house where Lilah grew up, to the bungalow with the sunny den where, in the shadow of the exercise equipment he once used regularly, Doug Graham spent his waking hours chain-smoking and channel surfing with the remote that seemed grafted to his hand. That’s how Lilah pictured him now, slouched in his slipcovered recliner—the piping frayed, the arms and headrest burnished with grime, the fabric dotted with pinhole-sized bums—encircled by snack tables that held his can of Coors, Marlboros, ashtray, and cordless phone. He’d lost so much weight that the nylon warm-up suits he once favored for their macho style made him look frail and diminutive, like a child in a grown-up’s chair.

  There was a time when Lilah’s image of him was more manly, more heroic, more befitting a man who’d spent thirty years on the Santa Monica Fire Department; a man who had a dozen community service awards and four citations for bravery hanging on the wall behind him, along with the golf trophies and softball plaques.

  Lilah turned into the driveway and parked behind her mother’s station wagon. She’d been doing it since the day she started driving, and it still topped her mother’s list of pet peeves. Lilah had no idea why she did it then, or why she was still doing it now. Probably some Oedipal thing, she thought, one of those petty adolescent rebellions that went unresolved. She ground out her cigarette and popped the Jag’s door, stepping into what felt like a blast furnace. Slipping her briefcase from between the gym bag and package on the backseat, she hurried toward the house.

  Like most older homes near the coast, it wasn’t air-conditioned; and the small oscillating fan in the den strained to keep perspiration from forming on Doug Graham’s brow as he squinted at the television where a huge helicopter was taking off from a beachfront parking lot. One of the reporters covering the wildfires was shouting over the deafening clatter. “That’s right, Trisha. We still don’t know the fate of those five firemen trapped by the inferno. There are reports an arson investigator, working in the area, went in after them. A search-and-rescue chopper has just been dispatched and paramedics are standing by to care for survivors—if and when they’re found . . . .”

  Doug Graham was shaking his head in dismay when he heard the jangle of keys outside and
brightened.

  “It’s me,” Lilah announced, letting herself in.

  “Marge? Marge, Lilah’s here,” Doug called out in his dry rasp, thrusting his arms from within the haze of tobacco smoke. “Give us a hug, princess.”

  “Hugs are on special today,” Lilah said, concealing her reaction to his wasted pallor. His stubble pinched when she kissed him, and his breath carried the sour odor of bile. “Sorry I didn’t make it last night.”

  “Hey, I know how busy you are, sweetheart.” Doug Graham’s watery eyes glistened with sincerity. “I know you’re doing important things.”

  Lilah squirmed with guilt and set her briefcase on one of the snack tables. “So, how’s my favorite patient?”

  “Lousy.”

  “Rather be out there hauling hose, huh?” she said, gesturing to the inferno raging on the television.

  “Would be too, if I had me a decent doctor.” His deadpan delivery gave way to a mischievous twinkle.

  A little grin—that was pure Doug Graham—turned the comers of Lilah’s mouth as she plucked the Marlboro from his yellow-stained fingers. “Okay, smarty pants, let’s have a listen.” Doug eagerly unzipped his warm-up suit, revealing an expanse of waxen skin. Lilah’s ivory-smooth hands with their long fingers and manicured nails placed the stethoscope on his chest and moved it through a graceful arc that grazed his upper abdomen and ended well below his left armpit; then, gently bending him forward, they slipped beneath the warm-up suit and moved across his back with the same grace and precision.

  As always, Doug Graham remained silent and still. He lived for these moments, for the sense of well-being that came from being cared for by the daughter of whom he was so proud; moments that were far more beneficial than anything she or his doctor could prescribe. His illness-glazed eyes, closed in sublime reflection, were brighter and more alive when they opened. “How am I doing?” he finally asked.