Fire Engine Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  I spent some constructive hours looking at departmental reports, sketching out a preliminary agenda for the next board meeting, and doing other essential but boring administrative stuff, so that I could feel virtuous over the weekend. Just past five Eric stuck his head in. “Do you need anything else, Nell?”

  “No, I’m good. Go on home, and have a nice weekend.” It was a Friday afternoon, and people usually left promptly; there was no reason for Eric to stay.

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  I hadn’t heard from either Jennifer or Peter, but I thought I’d give them a little more time. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I kind of relished the peace in the building when it was empty. I could hear people calling out farewells, the elevator making its slow way up and down, and the front door opening and closing two stories below me. At five thirty the phone finally rang, and I picked it up.

  “Oh, Nell, I’m glad you’re still there. He’s on his way over,” Jennifer said breathlessly. “He just left. Sorry I couldn’t call earlier, but I had trouble tracking him down. I wasn’t sure if he was coming back at all. I know you’ll be locked up. Can you keep an eye out for him?”

  “I’ll go down now and wait for him.”

  “Oh, thank you, Nell. I really appreciate this, and I’m sure it will make a difference.”

  “I hope so.” We both hung up. I decided to leave my bag and jacket upstairs, since I wasn’t sure where he’d be most comfortable talking, if he’d talk at all, and I certainly didn’t want to look like I was ready to race out the door.

  When I entered the lobby, Front Desk Bob was still there, shutting down the cash register and tidying the front desk. “Hey, Nell—you aren’t leaving?”

  “Not yet. I’m meeting a friend—he’ll be here in a few minutes. You go on home, okay? I can lock up after we’re done.”

  “You know the security codes and stuff?”

  “I do, don’t worry. See you Monday.”

  Bob escorted the last stragglers out the door. There were always a few who wanted just a few more minutes for their precious research, ignoring the fact that they were holding up more than one person at the end of the day. But their admission fees and membership dues paid our bills, so I smiled and nodded as they collected their things and headed out the door. It was past six when Bob made one last sweep of the ground floor. “You want me to leave some lights on?” he called out.

  “Just the catalog room, I guess. I’ll take care of that later.”

  He returned, put on his jacket, said, “Night, Nell,” and went out the door, which closed behind him with a metallic clang. I was alone in the building.

  It was nice, especially because it was rare. The building itself was over a hundred years old, and looked good for another hundred—it had been built to last. I didn’t want to get too far from the front door, so I could let Peter in quickly, but I drifted into the catalog room, the cork-tile floor there muffling my footsteps. The ceiling soared above me; the mismatched card catalogs huddled below, interspersed with sturdy tables. The commuter rail train rumbled far beneath my feet.

  The doorbell rang and I jumped—it was always louder than I expected—and I hurried to answer it. I pulled open the heavy doors to find Peter standing on the doorstep in the gathering dusk, looking, if possible, worse than the last time I’d seen him. “Thanks for coming over, Peter. Please, come in.”

  He stepped inside and took in the surroundings. “I’ve always liked this building—there’s so much space. It’s peaceful. Not like my museum.”

  “Jennifer said the same thing, more or less.”

  “She’s seen it?”

  I debated about telling him that Jennifer had been here earlier today. In the end I replied vaguely, “She’s been here.”

  Peter didn’t seem to notice the evasion. “She said you wanted to talk to me? Did you find something else about the collections?”

  “Not exactly. Come, walk with me. Have you ever had a behind-the-scenes tour here?”

  Poor Peter looked bewildered—obviously Jennifer had been cagey about the real purpose of this visit. But he didn’t protest, and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. I couldn’t blame him—I would certainly prefer to be here, in the solid silence, than back in his chaotic space. I led him to the first big room past the lobby. “This is the catalog room, and the research desk. Our microfilm collections are housed in a room over there”—I waved vaguely toward the left—“although the digital age is going to make them useless eventually. The card catalogs here represent a century’s worth of records, although we’re digitizing them slowly so we can include them on our website. On the right here is our reading room.” I led him through the nearer of the double doors.

  He paused on the threshold to take it in—the ceiling two stories above, the serried rows of shelves ringing the room, both at ground level and along the balcony above us, the mural over the broad entrance to the reference rooms with its local history collections. “What a handsome place this is,” he said softly. “You’re lucky.” Then he seemed to shake himself, tearing his gaze away from the room and turning to me. “Jennifer said you wanted to talk to me?” he repeated.

  “Let’s find a place to sit.” For some reason I was reluctant to take him upstairs—the grandeur of this room seemed to calm him. I led him to one of the long library tables, toward the back of the room, and turned on the lamp on the table. He pulled out a chair and sat, looking mystified, and I took an adjoining chair. “Peter, I don’t know you well, but I’ll just come straight to the point. Jennifer is worried about you. She says you haven’t been yourself since the fire, and she thinks something is eating at you. She thought maybe I could help, since I’ve had my own share of problems regarding collections. I may be way out of line, and if you don’t want to talk to me just say so, but I’d like to help, if I can.”

  He didn’t answer immediately, and his gaze returned to the soaring space around us. I wondered if he was weighing his options: stay or go? Would he tell me to mind my own business, then bolt? I waited.

  He didn’t seem to have the energy to move. Finally he looked at me, his expression bleak. “She’s right. I don’t know—maybe talking would help, but I don’t know if there’s a damn thing you can do about it.”

  “Do you feel responsible for the fire?” I asked.

  “Yes, but not the way you think. How much do you know?”

  I paused a moment, trying to decide whether to be completely truthful with him. James would probably be angry if I spilled the beans about what I knew—and the FBI knew—about the fire engine, but Peter was sitting in front of me now and in obvious pain. “I know somebody pulled a fast one with your prize fire engine. I saw the newspaper pictures after the fire, and when I compared the one of the destroyed engine to the picture in our files, it was obvious to me.”

  Peter slumped, almost imperceptibly. Then he nodded, once. “I’m surprised more people haven’t figured that out. If Gary knows, he hasn’t said anything to me. Who else knows?”

  “Marty Terwilliger—the engine used to belong to her grandfather, remember? So she knew it well, and she figured it out on her own. A couple more people on my staff. And I told the FBI.”

  Peter went still. Finally he said, “I didn’t know, I swear. It was bad enough that the collection was destroyed. I could live with a stupid coincidence, the warehouse fire. But someone died. I can’t believe anyone meant that to happen. To think that somebody planned this stunt deliberately…” He shook his head helplessly.

  “Do you know who?” I probed gently.

  He nodded. “I think so,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER 23

  I was waiting breathlessly for him to go on when Peter twitched like a rabbit and stopped talking. He looked at me. “Did you hear something?”

  I listened a moment, but I’d been so focused on what Peter was saying that I wasn’t sure if I would have noticed anything outside the room. “Like what?”

  “Breaking glass?”

  I really hadn�
�t heard anything, but I was used to this old building with its odd noises. “No, but it’s a kind of noisy neighborhood, and people throw things into the Dumpsters in the alley out back all the time.” We both held still for several seconds, but I didn’t hear anything out of place. I wondered if Peter had actually heard something or if he’d just spooked himself into thinking he had. “You have an idea what happened with the fire engine? Who’s responsible?” I prompted.

  He seemed to reach an internal decision, because he sounded calmer when he spoke. “How much time do you have?”

  Now he was going to play coy? I struggled to remain calm and soothing. “As long as you need.”

  “Good. I have to go back a ways, to put this in context. You know we started planning this renovation a couple of years ago?”

  “Yes. You told me when we first met that you wanted to tie it in to the tenth anniversary of 9/11.”

  “Right. Wait—maybe I should go back further. Or, no, let me just say that the Fireman’s Museum has been bass-ackwards from the beginning. It’s kind of like, a group of firefighters got together and said to each other, hey, let’s make a museum! And then they did—found the place, cadged collections items from their buddies, and presto, they had a nice little museum. That was fine for the first few years. Then the Bicentennial came along, and the city had some money to spend, and they decided to upgrade the museum, give it a higher profile. Along the way they thought they should formalize the organization, so they created the nonprofit entity. All this was long before my time.”

  Sad to say, at the moment Peter looked old enough to have been around since then. “Go on.”

  “The thing of it is, we’ve always been kind of a hybrid organization. Sure, there’s an official structure in place, but there’s always been a certain reliance on the city for support. Of all kinds, I might add. There are a lot of firefighters who lead tours, that kind of thing. No way could we afford to pay them, but we couldn’t keep the doors open without them. You see the problem?”

  “Yes,” I said, but truthfully, I still wasn’t sure how this led to arson and maybe murder.

  “Okay, fast-forward thirty years or so. That’s a whole generation. Traditions have changed, and the personnel at City Hall have, too. You remember Frank Rizzo?”

  “The former mayor? I knew of him, but he was a bit before my time.”

  “He was police commissioner before he was mayor. And his brother Joe was fire commissioner when Frank was mayor—he’s the one who helped formalize the museum structure. So both of them were tied to city government, right? And to the unions. Philadelphia was a different place back in those days. Then the bean counters took over—Wilson Goode, even Ed Rendell. They had to look at the business side of running the city, and things looked pretty bleak for a while.”

  I was beginning to wonder when Peter would actually get to the point, so I decided to nudge him in that direction. Otherwise we might be here all night. “And the Fireman’s Museum became a liability?”

  “In its own small way, yes. That’s not to say we haven’t had supporters on City Council, but there’s a faction that thinks we’ve outlived our usefulness. They want to eliminate our funding, and if that happens, we’d die a slow death in a couple of years.”

  That matched what Gary had told me. “I’m sorry to hear that, Peter, but how does that get us to where we are now?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure. I don’t want to see the museum disappear, and I know there are other people who feel strongly about it, too. This may sound odd to you, but what if one of them decided to torch the collection?”

  I stifled a laugh. “Don’t you have that backward? How does destroying the collection improve the chances for the museum’s survival?”

  “Think about it. Most of the collection was cobbled together from donations from various fire stations around the city. Most of the items weren’t valuable, and they’re easy to replace—we’ve already had a lot of donations. But what’s more important is that we’ve gotten a lot of publicity and a lot of sympathy—you know what that’s worth. I mean, we really are the people’s museum.”

  He had a point. Sacrificing easily replaceable, low-value items while attracting a lot of attention had certainly shoved the small museum into public awareness. But there was still a flaw in his logic. “What about the fire engine? Where does that fit?”

  Peter fell silent, his expression pained. Finally he said, “I’m not sure. Say someone deliberately set the fire to destroy the collection. The fire engine should have gone up with it, and we would have collected some insurance on it, although not as much as you might think. Maybe that was part of the original plan. But maybe somebody got greedy and said, hey, that’s worth some money—let’s slip in a ringer and pull the good one out of there and sell it. Who’s going to know?”

  I could see that. It almost worked, too. If I hadn’t happened to compare the two pictures, I would never have known. Most people wouldn’t be able to do that, anyway. And if I hadn’t known someone in the FBI and told him, it probably would have worked. “Peter, is there anyone you suspect?” I was getting desperate for any sort of answer.

  “I’ve tried not to think about it. I mean, I’m not stupid—I know how few people knew where we had stored the collections: me, Scott, Gary, Jennifer, the board members. There was a board member who insisted that we use that facility, but I think he was part owner of the storage company.”

  “Walter Barnes?” I guessed.

  Peter looked at me, startled. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I guessed. He seemed awfully nervous when I talked to him at the Bench Foundation event.”

  “He’s probably just worried about his liability. Look, Nell, you don’t have to make excuses—you did the right thing, and I know that the FBI has to look at me as a possible suspect. But I just can’t imagine that any of the people I’ve worked with for years could be involved in something like this.”

  But who else was there? “I know how hard that is. But maybe whoever set this up didn’t plan to kill anyone. Theft, no matter how large, is a far cry from murder. Assume for the moment that insurance fraud—or maybe that and the theft of the fire engine—was the only intended crime, and the watchman was—what do they call it? Collateral damage?—then who would be capable of planning the fire?”

  He was shaking his head again. “I don’t know! I mean, I see your point, but I still don’t believe anyone I know could have done this.”

  “Sure you do,” a voice said from the doorway. I turned in my chair to see Scott Ingersoll, in grubby clothes, a battered knapsack slung over his shoulder, slouching against the door frame that led to the catalog room. “Hey, Peter.”

  Peter stood up abruptly. “Scott?”

  My mind was working furiously. How had Scott found a way into the building? Of course—the noise Peter had heard must have been Scott breaking in. I knew that our security system covered mainly the doors; there was no way we could have wired each and every window, and there were plenty.

  “What are you doing here, Scott?” Peter’s breath sounded raspy.

  Scott ignored his brother’s question. “Nice to see you again, Ms. Pratt. Although I bet you won’t enjoy the visit.” Scott grinned but kept his distance. Of course, he knew he had our only escape route blocked.

  “It depends on what you want.” I should call the cops—except that my cell phone was in my bag two stories up, and Scott was between me and the nearest landline phone.

  “You know, Ms. Pratt, it would have been a lot simpler if you’d just stayed out of this.”

  “Peter asked for my help in reconstructing what was in the collection.” I wasn’t about to mention the FBI. What could Scott want? How much had he heard of our conversation while he was sneaking up on us? I didn’t know, but I had an ugly feeling I was about to find out.

  “I hadn’t counted on that. I figured Peter would be so broken up about the loss of his precious little collection that he’d just wallow in misery and l
et the cops take care of it while he collected the insurance. But, no—thanks to you, now he knows about that trade-off. You had to figure out the fire engine wasn’t the right one.”

  Wait—how did he know that I knew? Had he overheard me tell Peter? Had someone else told—Marty, Shelby, Eric, James? I didn’t think any of them would have let anything slip, and even if they had, how would it have gotten back to Scott? I tried to remember what Shelby or James had told me about Scott: he had a minor criminal record, but no one had told me the details. Maybe he was just guessing. “Why do you say that?”

  “Why else would you and the police still be poking around? If you weren’t suspicious, you would have handed over the records to Peter and that would have been the end of it, but you just kept right on asking questions. Looks like you were too smart for your own good, Ms. Pratt.”

  So it seemed. But…why would he know that I was still talking to law enforcement? I hadn’t said a word to Peter about the switched fire engines prior to today. Which left…Gary, and I could find no reason to believe he was behind all this. The gears in my mind ground slowly…

  What about Jennifer? Jennifer had engineered this meeting with Peter and made sure it was after hours when no one else would be around. Jennifer was the only one who knew we were both here. Ergo, Jennifer had told Scott. Bingo: Jennifer was the link—and she and Scott had to be in this together.

  Scott seemed amused as he watched me. “Figured it out yet?”

  “Jennifer,” I said bluntly.

  “Got it in one. I said you were smart.”

  How long had they been planning this? I really didn’t like the idea that Jennifer had played on my sympathy and used me to lure Peter here. She was a damn good actress.

  “Scott, what’s going on here? What does Jennifer have to do with this?” Peter wheezed.

  “Ask your friend here.” He nodded at me. “If you can get the words out.”