Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  TWENTY-ONE

  John Alderdyce wasn’t at his desk and wasn’t answering his cell phone. I left a message both places, fired up the 455 and started drifting downtown on the off chance he’d show up, but I didn’t get three blocks before he called me.

  “Nesto’s off the hook, sort of,” he opened; “dangling loose, anyway, one foot in the air. We got the results from his lie detector test.”

  “I didn’t know you gave him one.”

  “We keep the cap on long as we can. The press doesn’t really understand technology. They report all kinds of things based on the slightest variance. We had his sister’s permission. He didn’t do Zorborón, and the stylus said that story about marching in and waving that lighter under his nose wasn’t cock-and-bull after all.”

  “What about the garage fire?”

  “That whole section of the questioning was inconclusive, and the expert circled back twice. My guess? Him. But with no injuries and little damage and without El Tigre around to press charges, the economy’s too tender to bother. The boy got in with bad company; but that was the whole point of this exercise.”

  “I think he’s salvageable. So is the job over?”

  Air stirred. “Why do I think you want me to say no?”

  “I’d like to play with it a little. Off the clock, expenses-wise.”

  “You’re still on it if you turn anything.”

  I asked who was investigating the arson at Sister Delia’s.

  “Ray Charla: commander who works like a beat cop. Goes through the ashes with a flour sifter. What do you want from him?”

  “I’m curious what accelerant was used. I’m working on the theory it was out of the reach of the local gangs.”

  “So are we. We duplicating efforts?”

  “No charge if we are. I’ll eat the gasoline.”

  “Just don’t get in his way. He works alone.”

  “Where can I get in touch with him, Thirteen hundred?”

  “What good’d he do there? Go to Sister Delia’s and look for the guy with black under his nails as far as his hairline.”

  * * *

  At first glance the charity shop—it had never been christened, so the locals had just called it Sister Delia’s—looked intact. The flames had managed only to blacken the McKinley-era iron front, so that looking at it directly from the street the building looked sound, until you noticed that the panes were missing from the windows and when you saw that you noticed that there was no inside wall opposite. You were looking directly across the street that ran behind the building all the way to the apartment complex on the other side. It resembled a false front on a western movie set, constructed of plywood with a clever paint job, entirely supported by two-by-four braces. But long before you saw that you smelled the piles of ash made sodden by high-pressure hoses and the dirty smoke from flare-ups among the embers. They spurted like orange crocuses, extinguishing themselves when they encountered dead char.

  In the middle of all this, visible through the front door that no longer existed, a tall narrow figure with stooped shoulders tramped about in knee-length galoshes, a black fire-retardant Macintosh girded with broad reflectant acid-green horizontal stripes, and a fiberglass firefighter’s helmet, distinguishable from the DFD only by a gold Detroit Police Department cap insignia screwed to the frontplate. His face was cherry-red; but that might have been from the heat. Standing three feet in front of the vacant doorway I could feel it leeching all the moisture from my body.

  “Commander Charla?”

  He glanced up, startled, and leaned on his instrument: not a flour sifter, but the next best thing, a long-handled rake with two sets of teeth, one coarse, one fine. An orange bucket hung at his hip from a shoulder strap, half-filled with unidentifiable smoking debris. “No comment.” A respirator like a painter’s dust mask muffled his voice. Together with close-fitting goggles and his long thin build, it made him look like a giant praying mantis.

  “I’m not a reporter.” I showed him my ID. “I’m working with Inspector Alderdyce. You can call him and confirm.”

  “If you say you’re working with Alderdyce and it turns out you’re not, you’re too dumb to do much damage with anything I tell you. There it is!” He lifted his rake and plucked something curved and blackened from between the teeth with a gloved hand. For one brief moment he sounded like a boy finding an Easter egg.

  “Glass?”

  “A little more than half of a bottle. Just enough more it doesn’t belong to the one I found ten minutes ago.” He indicated the bucket on his hip with his elbow.

  “So he did use a bottle bomb.”

  He carefully placed the fragment in the bucket, tugged down his goggles, and looked at me from inside a strip of sunburned-looking flesh that was bare of the soot that covered the rest of his face, a reverse-raccoon effect. “Who said he might’ve? And who’s he?”

  “Miguel Ortiz. The first who. He’s not the second. The Michigan prison system’s his alibi.”

  “Mike the Match. I admire his work, know why?”

  “He’s made a science of it.”

  “Not that, though he has. I admire his work because he makes double sure no one’s in residence before he torches a place. That’s how I know he wasn’t in on this.”

  “He told me he’d never use a super-accelerant in a Molotov without taping a bottle bomb to it so he could be drinking a bottle of Moosehead in Windsor while it was blowing up in Madison Heights. Words to that effect.”

  He nodded and put the goggles back on. “You’re working with Alderdyce okay. That speculation about the accelerant is strictly off-limits outside the department. Cyclostyrene. Combination of styrene and cyclohexane. Not new, either one. Together in sufficient quantity they could blow the moustache off Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore.”

  “Hard to come by, I suppose.”

  “Nope. Cyclohexane’s a common saturated hydrocarbon derived from common benzene, a coal-tar byproduct. Any home improvement store that deals in roofing materials has it in stock. Styrene’s the base in several glues sold in hardware departments and art-supply shops. The trick’s in mixing them without turning yourself into a human Olympic torch.”

  “So obtaining the materials wouldn’t require a sophisticated organization.”

  “You mean like Al-Qaeda or the Mafia?”

  “Or like the Mexican Zapatistas.”

  “Materials, no. Guts, yeah. I wouldn’t put those two agents in the same room without an advanced degree in chemistry, and then I’d use forty-foot tongs and someone working them who is not me.”

  “How do you know what chemicals were used?”

  “I’ve been on this job since they invented Devil’s Night. Every hydrocarbon leaves fingerprints. I know a cyclostyrene burn pattern on first sight; the stuff flashes out in every direction, obliterating on contact everything inflammable within its range and putting not more than a virgin’s blush on brick and iron and concrete. The sergeant with the first-response crew saw right away this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill burn, and that’s why I’m here.”

  “‘Have rake, will travel?’”

  “Damn straight. If I put a notch on this handle for every defense lawyer I made mush of in cross-examination, it wouldn’t hold a strand of straw.”

  I watched him working with the rake. “How long you been on this job?”

  “Forty years, man and boy. Just like Captain Ahab.”

  “I meant today.”

  “I was here at dawn, but I had to wait a couple of hours for it to cool down enough to go in. I only get three pairs of these a year before I have to start paying for replacements.” He lifted a smoking galosh.

  “Not much of a harvest for a full day’s work.”

  “Oh, I’ve refilled the bucket a dozen times. There’s the plunder.” He pointed the rake handle—no notches, I saw—at a cleared corner where foundation blocks met at a 90-degree angle, now occupied by a heap of sooty evidence that looked more orderly than the rest.

 
“Mind if I take a look?”

  “It’s your suit. Just don’t put anything in your pocket.”

  I took off my coat and tie, stashed them on the Cutlass’s front seat, rolled up my sleeves and the cuffs of my pants, and waded into the ashes. If Alderdyce put up a beef about a shoeshine and a new pair of socks on the expense sheet, I could always refer him to Ray Charla.

  I didn’t expect to find anything, or to know what I’d found if I found it; but that’s the job description. I turned over charred pieces of hardwood—remnants of Sister Delia’s desk—a surprisingly intact patch of leaf-patterned upholstery the size of a long-playing record—part of the armchair I’d sat on during my first visit (God knows what made that evidence)—some bent and twisted pieces of unidentified metal that must have been near the epicenter of the firestorm, and odd black-fringed sheaves of paper that Delia should be glad to see, because they might help her reconstruct some of her lost files. Soon my hands were as black as what I was sifting through, my body oiled with sweat from the heat from the hotspots still smoldering under the ash, and all I knew about the bombing was that fire is a random destroyer, obliterating seemingly indestructible substances while sparing some of the most fragile.

  I used a charred piece of wooden molding to probe the pile to the bottom, came across something solid, and teased it out the side until I could pick it up with my hand. It was still warm. I was holding a pointed length of steel half as long as a knitting needle, anchored to a cast-iron base. Apart from being relatively impervious to flame, it looked as if it hadn’t been touched. Probably a piece of debris had fallen on top of it, shielding it from the worst of the heat. I wiped off enough smut from the base to examine the embossed design, a crucifix on a hill with rays of light radiating out from it. I got Charla’s attention and held it up.

  “Bill spindle,” he said. “You know; you pay a bill, skewer the stub on the point like kebab and forget about it. You find them in antique stores with the ice picks. These days everybody pays their bills online and trusts the record to the hard drive.”

  “Everybody but me and Sister Delia. What makes it evidence?”

  “Not a damn thing except it’s still here. Anything that passed through unharmed is worth a look.”

  I had an idea that was unworthy of me. “Would you have it tested and let me know what you find? Alderdyce will tell you how to get in touch.”

  “Well, can you narrow it down? Chemical analysis, microscopic, what?”

  “Both, I think. Just the pointed end. I don’t care about the base.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Tell you when you find it. Or when you don’t.”

  “That doesn’t move you any closer to the top of the list.”

  “Alderdyce will tell you where I belong on it.”

  “Whatever. I retire next year, unless I get lucky and nobody notices the age requirement. Either way, who gives a rat’s ass?”

  “You like this job.”

  “Love it. Ask anyone who works with fire or on the water. Ash and salt, they get in your blood.”

  “What if they force you out?”

  “Then I’ll take up smoking and purify my lungs.” He went on raking slowly. Ray Charla; I never got a good look at him, but he’d made an impression.

  * * *

  I used my handkerchief and one of the emergency bottles of water in the car to rinse the top layer of soot from my hands, knocked off what I could from my shoes against the curb, and threw away the handkerchief. At the first service station I came to I went into the men’s room and got rid of the rest with liquid soap and half a dispenser of stiff brown paper towels. I went into the convenience-store part of the establishment and bought a package of black crews, then returned to the bathroom, hobo-washed my feet, changed socks, and ditched the ruined pair. On the way out I told the attendant the dispenser was out of towels.

  So I was presentable, but inside the car I smelled like burned-over rainforest. That wasn’t a bounceable offense where I was headed.

  It was Judas weather, one of those deceptively hot days we sometimes get in early spring that tempts us to put away the snow shovel and throw a fresh log on the air conditioner. Then the next day the furnace kicks in. With the bank thermometers teasing eighty and the sun turning the window ledge on the car into a branding iron, the former mission looked more than ever like the Addams Family house it was modeled after, complete with its own pool of gloom and clouds of tiny flying biting insects swarming just above the seedy tops of the dead weeds in the front yard.

  There was no sign of the black Lolita who matched her nails to her chewing gum; but it was a school day. The bronze bell knob brought nothing—it had stayed broken after my valedictory pull the other day—so I banged on the door with the meaty part of my fist. If Luís “El Hermano” Guerrera wasn’t babysitting Domingo “Seventh Sunday” Siete, I’d never raise the junky tapping delicately with my knuckles.

  I didn’t raise him anyway. Before I could, the door snicked, a demure intake of breath, and drifted away from my fist. Whoever had closed it last hadn’t made sure the latch sprang all the way back into place.

  It hadn’t been locked the last time, but this was one more step away from common caution. In cities across the U.S. in our time, criminals are almost the only people left who don’t shut a place up tight whether they’re at home or not. At this rate, the next time I’d find the door wide open. I checked the load in the Chief’s Special and once again had it in my hand as I let myself in.

  Same old pungent mix of dry rot and pot; same old finery slumbering under a century and a half of tarnish and grime and general apathy. The staircase griped as I climbed it, same as before, the same bees made honey inside the wall, humming as they worked, and I found Siete, Lord of the Maldados, sprawled on his back on the same mildewed mattress catching flies in his mouth in the same room, not quite as dim as before because no one had bothered to tape the newspapers back up over the windows. The snoring was missing, but whatever blue ruin had him by the throat this time might have taken him to a depth his adenoids couldn’t reach.

  In fact the only new thing in that fetid room was a pair of ordinary brown beer bottles standing on the floor at the foot of the bed, neatly bound together with silver duct tape.

  I went into a dive, hitting the floor on my left shoulder, and in the same motion scooped up the bottles with one hand and lobbed them toward the window. It should have been overhand, but the logistics were awkward. There was an even chance the bottles would strike the frame and bounce back into the room, jostling the contents and bringing about just the thing I was hoping to avoid. As it was, sloshing the stuff around probably did speed up the timetable.

  Whatever. The pane gave way and then there was a flash and a crump that shook the floor and stained the air bright orange. But I didn’t get an opportunity to appreciate the fireworks because the wall hit me in the face and I went to sleep.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I woke up burning.

  I couldn’t have been out more than a few seconds. My coat sleeve was on fire—some of the flaming liquid must have slopped in through the broken window—but it hadn’t burned through. I slapped at it energetically and rolled to my feet with smoke pouring from the ruined material. I’d had the suit almost a year, a record.

  Through the window I looked down at the burning weedy lawn and flecks of yellow and orange trying to gain a purchase on the house’s siding. When the bottle bomb had exploded, it had launched the accelerant toward the street, where the fire was already dying, having consumed the fuel and found nothing underneath but concrete and asphalt. I didn’t see any burning pedestrians, so the timing had been lucky.

  No sirens yet, but a crowd was getting a toehold on the sidewalk. I turned to rouse Domingo Siete. He’d slept right through the blast, but that was nothing unusual for a deep-sea doper like him.

  He lay on his back, his favorite position, on the filthy mattress. He had on the same green army undershirt and boxer brie
fs, a few days dirtier and more pungent than when I’d seen them last, and you could scrape your boots on his chin. His face was bloated and plum-colored under the eyes. I reached down and shook him by the shoulder. I took my hand away fast. His skin was cool to the touch.

  I looked him over. No wounds or blood showing, but I wasn’t about to turn him over for a thorough check without surgical gloves; when a body’s had time to cool the microscopic horrors come out to play. I walked around the bed. Something crunched under my shoe; I thought at first it was a cockroach, but when I lifted my foot I saw the plastic syringe and, poking out from under the bed, the curled end of the latex rubber hose he’d used to pop the vein. He hadn’t even had time to put the syringe on the nightstand.

  Black tar heroin. A Mexican export, many times more potent than the Old World variety, and a bargain at only ten dollars a bag. If you weren’t familiar with it and measured it the same way as always, it tore through your circulatory system like fifty thousand volts of electricity and stopped your heart in seconds, if you were lucky. I’d heard tales of nightmares Poe couldn’t dream up on his worst day, and I was superstitious enough to think they carried through to the next life.

  Eighteen years old. A hell of a waste of youth. A tragedy, if you believed in accidents.

  * * *

  “Who won the scrimmage?” Alderdyce asked.

  The firefighters had come and gone. It had taken only a few short blasts from an extinguisher to put out the flames, but getting rid of the spectators was taking longer. DPD uniforms were sticking up barricades and unspooling yellow tape to keep them out of the hair of the Arson Squad combing the charred grass for glass fragments and the investigating team working in Seventh Sunday’s bedroom. No sign of Ray Charla yet. He was probably still raking up Sister Delia’s life and depositing the results in neat piles.

  I glanced down at the syringe I’d crushed underfoot and moved a shoulder. “I was a little rattled. It’s been weeks since the last time I was on fire.”