Tahoe Blowup

by Todd Borg

  “Sir,” the soft-spoken woman said. “Mr. Middleton will be with you in a moment. Please wait here.” She left.

  I stood still for a moment, wondering if my shoes were clean enough to proceed into the room which was carpeted with a thick, white nap softer than my bed. On the field of white sat a black Steinway. White leather couches were arranged at angles around a low, oblong, black marble table. The only color came from the art.

  A large Keith Haring painting of red and blue figures hung on a white wall at one end of the room. Although made of simple lines, the figures were so energetic they almost leaped off the canvas. Near the piano was one of David Hockney’s blue swimming pools, cool enough that it made me thirsty. Above the couches were a pair of ethereal flower photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. They were spectacular in their simple beauty and grace.

  “You admire fine art?” The voice from behind me was deep and resonant.

  I turned to see a man who was nearly my height, but rotund. He must have out-weighed me by fifty pounds. His gray wool pants were the same color as his close-cropped hair and beard. A white silk shirt draped his torso in such a way as to minimize a belly that suggested decades of the finest restaurants. His watch was expensive, though not ostentatious. On his feet were well-worn leather slippers. The overall impression was of a man who belonged to the aristocracy by birth.

  “Yes, I do enjoy art,” I said. I pointed to the flower photos in front of me. “Mapplethorpe’s talent for finding beauty was so obvious, it makes you wonder why he ever did the brutal stuff.”

  “Well, Picasso did Guernica,” he said, his voice booming like Paul Robeson’s. “And Munch did The Scream. Or look at all those Francis Bacons. My word, I have nightmares just to think of them. You wonder about brutal stuff, think again. That is half of what art is all about.”

  “I suppose,” I said, thinking of Sister Wendy and the Piss Christ and wondering if the arsonist thought of himself as a kind of performance artist.

  Middleton went on, “And my dear friend Antonio Scarpetti, you know, sings for The Met? He sat once for Lucian Freud. The way the painting came out, Antonio looked like a torture victim from the Inquisition!” Middleton lifted his hand and sucked on a cigarette I hadn’t noticed earlier. An ash fell to the white carpet. Middleton ignored it, making me wonder how the carpet stayed so white.

  “I’m Owen McKenna. Pleased to meet you.”

  Middleton gave me a firm handshake. “You said something on the phone to my secretary about an investigation.”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “I’m looking into the arson fires in Tahoe.”

  “How exciting.” Middleton looked disappointed. “Tell me, Owen, before we get all serious, would you like to see more of my art?”

  “Love to,” I said.

  “You’re not squeamish, are you?”

  “Well, Hockney’s swimming pool made me a little seasick, but I’m over the worst of it.”

  Middleton took another draw from his cigarette and spoke, smoke issuing out with his words. “You are a fun one! Come, we’ll go in the Japan room first.” He led me through a wide sliding door made out of teak with rice paper panels. We entered a long narrow room lit by soft red silk lanterns. I now understood the difference in décor between the living room and the entry. Each room was done in a different style. “Today I was in a Japan mood,” Middleton said, “so I had my breakfast in here.” He gestured toward the walls with a big sweep of his cigarette. An arc of smoke hung improbably in the air like I’d seen once in a photo portrait of Salvador Dali. I looked down the room and saw dozens of prints hung on what looked to be paper walls.

  Middleton continued, “I have one of the most significant collections of Japanese queer art in all of America. What do you think?”

  I wandered around and paused on several pictures. The prints were done in the standard style of erotic Asian art with fierce warriors and kings displaying impressive sexual acrobatics. But instead of young maidens, their partners were other men. Some of the prints showed group orgies engaged in activities far more inventive than any I had ever contemplated with women. Maybe straight guys just don’t have that creative gene.

  “Well?” Middleton asked.

  “Very impressive,” I said. “Do you collect any American landscapes?”

  “Is that your favorite art? Then let me show you my Wild West room,” he said, his big voice filling the room. He led me through another door.

  My thoughts paused for a moment on the Wild West concept, but it turned out that the room was a straight-forward collection of cowboy paraphernalia. Riding tack hung on the walls next to a Thomas Moran. On a pedestal was a Remington bronze of a cowboy lassoing a bull. I turned and saw that Middleton had a Bierstadt. It was less majestic than most, showing a placid river running through a gentle valley, Napa maybe.

  Middleton saw the painting I was looking at. “It’s a small one, but nice, don’t you think?” he said. He sat down on a big leather chair.

  “I like it a lot,” I said. “Tell me, what do you think Bierstadt was saying with these landscapes?”

  “I think he wanted to paint the West as a holy place, someplace sacred that should be worshiped and otherwise left alone.”

  “Which is what the League To Save Lake Tahoe is all about, isn’t it? Leave the lake alone?”

  Middleton looked down. “You would have to bring up that subject, wouldn’t you? Yes, now that you’ve mentioned it, that is sort of what we’re about.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “The Washoe Indians did that,” he continued. “Worship the lake, fish and hunt, but do nothing else. They lived that way for centuries, and the lake was pure for centuries. Then Fremont came through and claimed to discover the lake. What a joke. Those macho white guys have been trying to pave it over ever since.”

  “You’re not fond of development.”

  Art Middleton looked at me hard. “If I were in charge, I’d ban all motorboats on the lake and all cars in the basin. No motors at all. And the golf courses and private lawns! All that fertilizer goes right into the water! And they wonder why the water is turning green with algae. Fertilizer should be outlawed.”

  “That’s a pretty severe position, isn’t it?” I said.

  Middleton made a harumph sound.

  “Do you get up to Tahoe often?” I asked.

  “Now and then. I have a place up there on the North Shore, been in the family for generations.”

  “Drive a car?”

  “Oh, of course. I have several. Don’t be petty. But I don’t fertilize. And my little truck and cars are gas efficient, not like those monster sport utility gas hogs everyone drives these days. I do have a conscience and I act on it.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Middleton...”

  “Art.”

  “Art. Do you ever remember meeting a man named Jake Pooler?”

  Arthur Middleton stood up, walked over to a window and stared out at the Bay. “He’s the one who burned. I have the Tahoe paper mailed here. I’m not sorry, if that’s what you’re wondering. But unfortunately, I didn’t have the pleasure of doing away with him myself.”

  “Why the animosity?”

  Art paused. “Jake was a developer. I’m against development. We clashed at some meetings.”

  “Clashing at a meeting doesn’t usually make you wish someone were dead.”

  Middleton turned from the window and gave me a steady gaze. “Owen, even though you are a straight man, you must have an idea about how many rednecks live in Tahoe. God, I swear if you acted queer up there your life expectancy wouldn’t be long enough to chair an AIDS Awareness meeting. Anyway, the whole of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was deciding a development issue. I had just finished making a statement on behalf of the League To Save Lake Tahoe. Then Pooler had his turn at the lectern.” Middleton stopped talking, his face turning red at the memory.

  “What did he say, Art?”

  It took a moment for him to get his composure. “Jake Pooler yelled out in that twang
y voice of his, ‘We don’t need a bunch of rich, fat homosexuals coming up from the big city to tell us how to run our lives, do we?’” Middleton shut his eyes. When he opened them it was if there were flames way back in there behind the tears. “And then,” Middleton continued, “can you guess what happened? People clapped and laughed. The upstanding citizens of Tahoe laughed at me and clapped at that man’s homophobic remarks.”

  “Not all of them, surely,” I said.

  “Enough of them.”

  “Let me change the subject, Art. Do you know a woman named Joanie Dove?”

  “No. Who’s she?”

  “We had a second fire yesterday. She died of smoke inhalation in her home.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible! Did she suffer much? I hope not!” Middleton’s reaction to the second death was the reverse of his response to Jake Pooler’s death.

  “Art, what do you know about the fire danger in Tahoe’s forests?”

  Arthur Middleton took several deep breaths. He closed his eyes for a moment, calming himself. “Just that the forests have been ruined by old, old management policies that are still largely in place.”

  “You mean the Forest Service?”

  “I mean everybody. Forest Service, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, local fire departments. They all do the same thing which is putting out fires. It’s wrong, unnatural and it has destroyed the ecology of the forest.”

  “You would prefer that the forest burns up.”

  “That’s the way it has been through all the ages until white man got here. And the lake was pure and the forest healthy until people interfered.” Middleton was a bit more relaxed now that we were no longer talking about Jake Pooler. “Lightning struck and caused frequent fires in the basin. Those fires were like nature’s cleaning service, clearing out the dead wood and excessive brush. They also kept control of the most fire-susceptible species like the firs.

  “Now,” he continued, “we have a fir-heavy forest, with the fire-resistant pines being forced out of their natural habitat. Because we put out all the fires, we have an unnatural number of trees, all competing for the scarce rains of summer.

  “The firs especially end up stressed and vulnerable to the bark beetles. The bugs bore extensive galleries through the critical layers under the bark. That kills the tree which adds even more unburned fuel to the forest.”

  Art turned and looked out at the Bay. He continued speaking with his back to me. “Not only do regular forest fires clean out the fuel before it builds up to ridiculous levels, but fire kills the bark beetles. Putting out the fires allows an explosion of beetle populations which kill more trees and so on in a vicious cycle.”

  Art turned and looked at me with a new intensity. “The forest is now so heavy with fuel that a big fire will be catastrophic, burning right down through the soil and destroying the root growth that prevents erosion. Afterward, the first heavy rains will cause a massive runoff of ash into the lake. Lake Tahoe is now, for the first time in history, in a terribly precarious situation. And what is everybody doing? Still putting out fires.”

  “I don’t know about that, Art. They are constantly doing controlled burns.”

  “Those pissy little burns are nothing in the big picture,” he said, flipping his hand such that his cigarette flicked more ash onto the floor. “Think about where you’ve seen them. They burn in the areas that most threaten housing developments or the tourist areas.”

  “You don’t think they should do that?”

  “Of course they should. But they should expand the program a hundred times. A thousand times. And they should stop putting out lightning-caused fires.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “How many days can you stay?” He smiled at me. “Okay, Owen, I’ll give you a few more thoughts. Because of the rules about soil compaction, local firewood cutters aren’t allowed to drive into the woods in their pickups. So the worst areas are getting cleared much too slowly. Much of the lumbering is being done by helicopter, which is really slow and much more expensive. Meanwhile, the people who are getting firewood have to park on the road and walk in, a major inhibiting factor.” Arthur Middleton stubbed out his cigarette butt, pulled out a gold lighter and lit another cigarette.

  “Here is where I break from most of my environmentalist colleagues,” Art continued. “Imagine this paradox. We don’t want people to drive their pickups into the forest because the soil compaction is bad for the flora, a point no one disputes. Further, the permit process for cutting deadwood is designed to control the use of public lands and prevent them from being abused. Yet both situations act as constraints on what we really need which is the fastest possible removal of excess deadwood. So these efforts to protect the forest actually contribute to the likelihood that Tahoe will have a catastrophic blowup which will destroy the very soil that the environmentalists are trying to protect.”

  “By blowup you mean a very big fire.”

  Arthur Middleton pointed his cigarette at me and sighted down it as if it were a rifle. “I mean a fire that could destroy a major portion of the Tahoe Basin in just a few hours. A fire that will be so big it will create its own flaming thunderheads that will consume any aircraft that try to drop retardant. A fire that will take out the fire trucks and the men fighting it. A fire that will jump the firebreaks, cross the highways, leave the forest and take down the towns.” His eyes narrowed.

  “Art,” I said, “you make it sound exciting. Like you want this fire.”

  “Maybe part of me does,” he said in a low voice. “The people of Lake Tahoe burned me. Still do. They scoff at what I’ve said about letting the lightning-caused fires burn.” He turned around and looked at me. “They won’t laugh anymore when I’ve been proved right.”

  “About what?”

  “About the risk of a blowup. About the fire risk that has been created by the very policies designed to control fires, policies that have been in place for decades.” Arthur Middleton paused, his intense gaze holding my eyes. “When Tahoe burns — and it will — some of those bastards will finally admit that I am right.”

  NINETEEN

  I thanked Arthur Middleton the Sixth for talking candidly with me, then left. It was obvious why Terry Drier had thought that Middleton’s perspective was extreme. By Middleton’s own admission it was clear that he wanted Tahoe to burn, at least to some degree. And he was almost glad for Jake Pooler’s death. But I couldn’t believe he was the arsonist. Or Joanie Dove’s killer. Maybe it was just hard to see a blue-blooded aristocrat pouring gas onto the ground and striking a match. Even so, the man had motive with Jake and, probably, opportunity with both victims.

  It was late afternoon and I figured the rush-hour traffic would be stop-and-go over the Bay Bridge, so I went west on Lombard and then north over the Golden Gate. The traffic was slow, but I imagined going through Marin County to be the better route. As I cruised above Sausalito I thought that California had far more than its rightful share of beautiful scenery.

  I went north around the Bay, past the entrance to Napa Valley, and caught up with Interstate 80 where it turns east into California’s Central Valley.

  In Sacramento the freeway splits in two with Interstate 80 heading toward Truckee and Tahoe’s North Shore while Highway 50 heads toward the South Shore. I stayed on 50 and made the winding climb up 7400 feet to Echo Summit. The sun had set long before and, when I came over the top of the pass, the lights of the Tahoe Basin spread out before me in a spectacular vista. Driving down the cliff edge into South Lake Tahoe was a bit like floating in on a small plane. In a few minutes I was through town and turned up Kingsbury Grade to my office. Eager to get home to see Street, I hurried up to the second floor two steps at a time. Once inside, I picked the mail up off the floor and checked the answering machine. There was one message. I played it as I went through the mail. After a few words, I dropped the mail, hit the rewind button and started it over.

  The voice was tinny and buzzed as if the person were speaking through a kaz
oo. The voice was in an upper register, although the buzzing made it impossible to tell if it was a woman or a man speaking in falsetto.

  “You found the burned dog, but you must be either too stupid or too stubborn to understand the meaning or how serious we are. This is your last warning. Leave the fire investigation to the official agencies.”

  I played the message a couple more times, writing it out on a pad while I listened for some speech quality that might help me identify the caller. I could imagine the voice to be Arthur Middleton in falsetto. But was that only because I couldn’t imagine Terry Drier or some other man in falsetto? I also thought the S sounds were somewhat furry. The speech impediment that George the psychologist suggested? Winton, the young man with the lisp who had worked for Jake Pooler? But after several listens, I realized the recording was too well disguised for any identification to be made from the vocal characteristics. Which still left syntax and grammar. It seemed the caller was articulate, although the first sentence was an awkward construction. Not much to go on. And what of the plural ‘we?’ Was I dealing with a group or was this an attempt to mislead?

  The most peculiar aspect of the message was the part about leaving the investigation to official agencies. Did the caller worry that I was more likely to find him or her? It didn’t seem likely. Another possibility — though even less likely — was that the caller might not be the firestarter at all, but rather someone in one of the so-called official agencies who wanted to have the glory of finding the arsonist himself.

  I took the tape out of the answering machine, thinking I should turn it in to someone. I trusted Diamond completely. As well as Captain Mallory on the South Lake Tahoe PD. But would it be safe to give either of them the tape? There were many others in the Sheriff’s Department or the Police Department or the Fire Departments who would then have access to it. Not sure, I slipped the tape in my pocket and left.