Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  “All that evidence,” Stevenson said. “And now it’s gone. Don’t you think that’s amazing?”

  “It is unfortunate. The whole thing is.”

  “Oh, hey, that’s right. You’re the guy our chief was talking about. You’re on some sort of final countdown. Got a week to live or something?”

  “That’s right.”

  The two of them looked at each other. “We’re in the process of narrowing our list of suspects. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t Caputo.”

  “And?”

  “We think it might have been you.”

  “What?”

  “We think you might have set the fire.”

  “I was on the goddamn rig. I was one of the responding firefighters. I’m the one who figured out it was going to blow. If I hadn’t been there, a whole bunch of people would be dead right now.”

  Shad said, “One: We can find no record of Caputo buying any fertilizer or fuel oil. We spoke to everyone else who responded to his accident the day before, and they said it wasn’t in the trailer then. Two: We found his other dog in a ditch outside the property. He’d been poisoned with enough phencyclidine to drop a cow. We’re assuming that’s also what happened with the dog we can’t find.”

  “What’s phencyclidine?”

  “PCP, angel dust, crystal,” said Stevenson.

  Shad added, “Also known as hog. Or rocket fuel. Everybody says Caputo loved those dogs.”

  “I agree. Max loved those dogs. So go find somebody who didn’t like the dogs.”

  “We heard you didn’t like Max or his dogs,” Shad said.

  “You heard what?”

  “We heard you didn’t like Max Caputo.”

  “You had trouble with him in the past, didn’t you?” Stevenson said. “Didn’t his dogs bite one of your people?”

  “I never even thought about him.”

  Shad said, “We got a phone call said you were depressed about your physical health. Said you were thinking about killing yourself and you were planning to take some people with you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You are sick, though. Aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Is it terminal?”

  “It’s not good.”

  “You thought about suicide?”

  “No,” I lied. “Hell, no. Who called you?”

  “Can’t tell you,” Stevenson said, but Shad gave it away with his eyes.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Maybe it was anonymous,” Stevenson said. “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “You got an anonymous call from some crackpot, and now you’re jumping all over me? Why don’t you go after the caller?”

  “Pay phone,” Stevenson said. “You know any women in Tacoma?”

  “Not any who could make the call.”

  “You sure? You see, the trouble is we know about firefighters. Lots of times they start fires. We also know about terminally ill patients. Lots of times they want to die. It all fits. You’re depressed. You want to die. You know how to set a fire.”

  Stevenson might have done a better job of staring me down if he hadn’t had those Clara Bow lips and those baby-butt cheeks with the pink circles in the center. “We figure you planned on wiping out the whole fire department,” Stevenson said. “Even taking your kids with you. Then at the last minute you got the touchy-feelies and decided to let them live.”

  I got up and walked to the door. “They actually pay you guys for this?”

  “You trying to get rid of us by walking out?” Shad asked, kicking the swivel chair across the room behind him in a display of toughness.

  “Take it easy with the furniture. It was Harold Newcastle’s.”

  “You’re not walking out of here.”

  “Unless you’re planning to arrest me, I am.”

  That would come back to haunt me.

  41. THE LPG DISASTER

  It was nearly nine-thirty when I walked through the door of the officers’ room at the rear of the station. Stephanie looked up. “Line two.”

  “We’ve been paging you,” Arden’s wife added.

  “You hear from Donovan and Carpenter?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “Maybe this is them.”

  I picked up the receiver. “Lieutenant Swope.”

  “Hey, Lieut. This is Carl Steding at the Chattanooga Times Free Press. I had a chat with Scott Donovan. Apparently he spoke to you yesterday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He claims you folks are in the middle of some sort of plague related to an alarm you went on.”

  “If you’re calling out of idle curiosity, I really don’t have time. If you know anything about those three firefighters who went down three years ago or the Southeast Travelers incident, that’s a different story.”

  “Funny you should mention Southeast Travelers. I followed that for our paper. It was the Chattanooga Times then.”

  “You know a firefighter named Charlie Drago?”

  “For a while Charlie Drago was one of my primary sources. The last year or so, he’s been a little less than reliable. What Donovan told me about you was intriguing, though. Especially in light of what I saw on the wire service yesterday. I understand you folks had an explosion a couple of days after you found out about this syndrome. We had almost the same thing happen three years ago.”

  “Okay. You’ve got my attention. What happened?”

  “Three of our firefighters turned into vegetables after that Southeast Travelers fire. About a week after that, just about the time we were gearing up to start an investigation, the fire department got called to an LPG tanker accident. Big explosion. Six firefighters died. These were the same guys who’d worked with the three who went down after Southeast Travelers. Same shift. After that everybody was talking about the tanker incident, not Southeast Travelers. You could almost say somebody’d planned it that way. At least that’s how it looks from this perspective.”

  “So you think somebody caused your tanker explosion in order to get rid of the rest of the people who were going to get sick?”

  “All I’m saying is you people start talking about this syndrome, then a day or two later you come within a cat’s whisker of losing everybody who’s left. Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Basically.”

  “Same thing happened here. That’s all I’m saying. Now we get a pretty big explosion in this area maybe once every twenty-five or thirty years. How often does your department respond to something like that?”

  “I don’t even remember one.”

  “If everybody had died at your trailer fire, how much time do you think the authorities would have for the syndrome? For one thing, there wouldn’t be anyone left to get the syndrome. They establish a cause for your trailer?”

  “Ammonium nitrate was the agent. It’s beginning to look like it was not an accident, either. What about your LPG tanker?”

  “Never really figured it out. Driver died in the fire. Impeccable driving record. A family man with kids. Nondrinker. Never used drugs. That we knew of. No reason for a wreck. It’s funny how much stuff happened right around that time. This isn’t really on the point, but the daughter of one of the downed firefighters died in a house fire during all the investigations. Pretty gal. Anastasia was her name. I guess she’d been doing a lot of legwork, kind of an unofficial private investigator for the families. Cops found her in her burned-out apartment. Somebody torched it with gasoline. Never found the perp.”

  “You say Donovan called you?”

  “Sure did. I know Scott from way back. Him and some other guy stuck around for a coupla weeks. Top-notch. Both of them. Couldn’t ask for a better pair. We had many a Scotch together. Those two slaved away from six in the morning until midnight. Canyon View was only one of a couple of dozen firms had packages in that fire. And hey, nobody else sent help. You see Scott, tell him ‘hey, boy’ from Carl in Chattanooga, will you?”

  “I’ll do that. Did Scott happen to mention J
CP, Inc.? Jane’s California Propulsion—”

  “I know who they are. Why do you ask about them?”

  “Did he mention them when he called?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “They have any packages at Southeast Travelers? Anything that might have broken or spilled?”

  “Why are you singling them out?”

  “They had some stuff in the truck we think caused our problem.”

  “I honestly don’t know. Only saw the complete list of companies once. I think I could get it for you, though. Might take a couple of days.”

  “I would appreciate that, Carl. In fact, that might be about the best thing you could do to help.”

  “You got it, buddy. I’ll call back when I find out something.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and one other thing. Charlie Drago mentioned he caught somebody prowling Southeast Travelers sometime after the fire, maybe destroying evidence or looking for something. He said the guy threatened him.”

  “Never heard that, but I wouldn’t doubt it. For a while here we had private investigators and legal aides crawling all over the place. And Charlie has a way of failing to ingratiate himself with people. It’s just a way he has. I wouldn’t put too much stock in what Drago says. He’s a little over-the-top these days.”

  “I gathered that. Thanks.”

  42. WE’RE A LITTLE LATE TRYING TO SAVE YOUR LIFE,

  BUT WE GOT THE CAR WASHED

  Minutes before the funeral, Wes Tindale found me in the fire station. “Mamie and Lill ready?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Mamie and Lill.”

  I’d forgotten my in-laws penchant for renaming our kids, forgotten that their need for control was so overwhelming they couldn’t bear to utter the names their daughter and I had given their grandchildren.

  “Allyson and Britney have a couple of hours free this morning. After lunch I’m going to need them back.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m going to need them back.” For someone who often blustered like a whale coming up for air, Wes was easily hurt and nursed grudges for years. I’d always assumed his thin hide was one of the reasons for the drinking.

  More surgically than any family I’d ever known the Tindales could express disapproval with a look or an exhalation or a mere twitch of the lips. The expression they used most often on my girls, sometimes mouthed in perfect synchronicity, was, “That’s a no-no.”

  Disapproval of those around them was constant. Living in Arizona with them would be worse for my girls than being in a seventeenth-century Moroccan prison.

  Crazed with the thought that I’d uncovered a conspiracy of some sort, or that Carl Steding from the Chattanooga Times Free Press had, that somebody or something was orchestrating the events of the past week, I sought out Stevenson and Shad. I found them in the kitchen munching doughnuts meant for the volunteers who’d come in to empty the hose beds and decorate the fire engine that would serve as Stan Beebe’s hearse. Bloated with sugar and grease they’d washed down with free coffee, Shad and Stevenson shrugged off my news about the coincidence of explosions in Tennessee and Washington.

  “That’s what fire departments are about,” Shad said. “They respond to emergencies.”

  “I don’t think you can equate this trailer explosion with an LPG incident three years ago in Tennessee,” Stevenson said. “An LPG truck that rolls over on the highway is an accident. What we have up the hill there was a triggered explosion. You sure you don’t know anything about how it started?”

  “Wait. Let me try to remember. Yeah. I killed Caputo and then almost blew up my little girls.”

  “You did?” Shad asked.

  “You guys need to lay off the junk food.”

  Stan’s funeral was held in the white wooden-frame Lutheran church on Northeast Eighth, a few blocks north of the station.

  When Karrie Haston spotted me on the church steps, she ran over and hugged me until I could feel my own ribs against her small breasts, the buttons of her dress uniform coat pressing against the buttons on mine, our shared grief dulling the hard feelings between us.

  Stephanie, who hadn’t known Stan and who said she had a million phone calls to make, skipped the service. Along with a group from Beebe’s church, Ian and Ben and Jeb Parker acted as pallbearers. I’d been asked to help but was afraid I’d fall while we were packing the coffin out of the church.

  Mary McCain arrived at the church without her husband, sparing us all the sight of a former coworker with a brainpan full of mush. I knew the spectacle would have been too much for me and certainly would have been devastating for Karrie, who was still balancing on a tightrope of denial. When I asked Mary how Joel was doing, she replied, “There are definite signs of improvement.”

  Maybe this wasn’t terminal after all. Maybe Holly and Jackie and I had a chance. Maybe with time and therapy . . . or with Christian Science. At this juncture, I would eat dirt to have a healing. “Can he talk?”

  “Not exactly. But he tells me what he wants.”

  “He blinks? Taps his fingers? What?”

  “Well, no.”

  “So how do you know what he wants?”

  “I just know.”

  I had the feeling that Mary, like her mother, was an optimist almost to the point of criminality. “You think I could visit today?”

  “I think he’d like to have visitors.”

  “Good. I’ll be over later. That all right?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Absent the mainstays of Stan’s life, it was the most dreadfully executed funeral observance I’d ever attended, filled with sour notes, miscues, unprepared participants, and poorly written eulogies. I knew it had been orchestrated by the widow, Marsha, who’d called the station repeatedly over the past two days to fine-tune the arrangements, sending over lists of demands she said were nonnegotiable. She asked for twenty firefighters to ride the apparatus with his coffin. She wanted a white riderless horse led by a marine in dress blues—Stan had been a marine. Later I called her back and told her the rig wouldn’t hold twenty firefighters even if we had them and the marines had turned down our request for the riderless horse and the man to lead it.

  At that point she demanded two hundred bagpipe players to march the three miles with her from her house to the church on foot. As if Marsha could even walk three miles.

  What was saddest of all was how few of Stan’s close friends reached the podium. I tried to let it go, knowing Stan was beyond caring and that, as easygoing as he was, he probably wouldn’t have minded even if he’d been there.

  It was a short service, with four hymns and a lone bagpipe solo. There were funerals that magnified men, but this one, sadly, had shrunk Stan.

  Afterward, I was getting ready to return to the station when I bumped into Linda Newcastle, whom I’d last seen a month earlier at her husband’s funeral. She wore the same black dress, her long blond-gray hair in its familiar casual wave. “They’re telling me Harry might have had this syndrome you have.” Everybody in town must have known about me for the word to have reached Linda, I thought.

  “That’s our working hypothesis.”

  “You no longer think he had a heart attack out there in the hills?”

  “No.”

  “You think he was on the ground for a day or two with nobody to help him? Paralyzed or whatever?”

  “I’m no authority, Linda. This is all speculation.”

  “Harry liked you, Jim. He said you had your head up your ass where your private life was concerned, but he liked you. Excuse my French. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No. He was right. I did have my head up my ass. I know that now.”

  “He also said you were kind to others, and being kind to others counted for a lot in Harry’s book.”

  “Thank you.”

  “By the way, if things don’t get better for you, what’s going to happen to your girls?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because I would be m
ore than happy to take them. They’re wonderful kids.”

  “I’d love to consider that, but we have family.”

  “Sure. Good luck, Jim.” She squeezed my hand.

  I went back to the station, and as I was walking through the open apparatus doors, Donovan and Carpenter showed up in a shiny black Suburban. It was twenty minutes after noon, which made them tardy by almost three and a half hours. What pissed me off more than their lack of punctuality was the beads of water on their vehicle, as if, after pulling into town, they’d stopped to get it washed. I knew those buttons of water sitting on the wax job weren’t tears for me.

  I walked into the building alone.

  When I poked my head into the computer room, Stephanie looked up. “How was it?”

  “Like a funeral. Any word?”

  “Charlie Drago left a number for you. It’s a four-two-three area code.”

  “Chattanooga. I’ll call him in a minute. I’m going to change.”

  “Still no sign of our friends from Canyon View?”

  “They’re outside.”

  On my way upstairs, I heard Donovan and Carpenter at the front door, Donovan’s squeaky, high-pitched voice a distinct contrast to his bulky physique. “Hello? Heeellllooooooo?”

  Moving almost in slow motion, I went to the second floor and opened my locker, changed into my civilian clothes: jeans and a navy-blue North Bend Fire T-shirt. The next time anybody saw me in my blacks, I would be in a coffin, same as Stan.

  It had occurred to me that there were two big ifs in my life right now. The first: Would I make it past this week as a viable human being? The second: If I wasn’t going to make it, was I willing to kill myself in order to avoid thirty years in a diaper? I didn’t have the answer for the first and couldn’t decide on the second.

  Beebe’s death would allow his wife and children to carry on in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had he been relegated to a nursing home. Marsha wouldn’t have the nagging worry about whether Stan was being cared for and wouldn’t have to feel guilty for failing to visit a man who didn’t even know she was in the room. Nor would she have to go through the anguish of divorcing the poor bastard if she found someone else to be a father to her four children.