Fire In The Mind: Leonard Wise Book 1

by Arjay Lewis

  His leaving changed the energy in the room and I leaned against my cane, dazed.

  Jenny walked over and shut the door. “What an unpleasant man!”

  “A very dangerous one,” I said.

  “Only his wardrobe.”

  “Come on, Jenny. I’m serious.”

  “Look, Lenny. He was here because Detective-Sergeant McGee showed up at his office, and I was the only connection. He came here to yell at me.”

  “And I show up to give credence to the idea that you’re working with the police.”

  “Insurance companies always work with the police when arson is suspected. It’s nothing new.”

  “He just takes it very personally, and he doesn’t like me.”

  Jenny frowned. “You know him?”

  “Actually, this was the first time we’ve met. It’s complicated.”

  “Dealing with him is complicated.”

  “Does he ever take off those sunglasses?”

  “He can’t,” Jenny said. “I asked him about it the other day. He’s got something called uveitis. It’s a sensitivity to light.”

  “We should go to the police.”

  “Jeez! He annoys me, and now I lose out on lunch, too?”

  “Did he threaten you? You could file charges.”

  She shook her head. “No, just yelled. He has a temper, but he chooses his words carefully. He implied that if I didn’t start helping him, I would be the one needing help.”

  “Sounds like a threat to me.”

  “He said it better. He could deny any threat easier than a politician with his hand in the till.”

  “I should let McGee know.”

  “You could try the phone. I hear it’s even faster than walking.”

  I smiled and pulled out my cellular phone. “All right. Besides, it’s probably better if I only show up when I’m invited these days.”

  “He hasn’t tried to arrest you again, has he?” she said as I pushed the speed dial.

  “That was merely a misunderstanding…” I said.

  “McGee,” came the voice over the line.

  “Bill, it’s Leonard.”

  “I was just thinking of you—you must be psychic.”

  “I won’t touch that,” I said. “I’m at Jenny Baines’s office at Associated Insurance. Jack Hallman was just here, raising hell about the police being all over his place of business.”

  I heard a chuckle over the phone. “Yes, we asked him a lot of questions, and he was pretty sore about it. We can do more once we have a warrant.”

  “He’s the man I saw at the graveyard.”

  “Really? You gave me the impression he was taller,” McGee said.

  “No, he’s the one, and the same as in my visions. I’m worried about Jenny, Bill.”

  “Did he threaten her?”

  “Not exactly—more like it was implied.”

  The phone on his end was silent for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. “Well, if she wants to sign out a complaint, I could assign a man to her.”

  “Hold on,” I said and hit the mute button on my phone. “If you sign out a complaint, Bill says he can get you protection.”

  “Lenny, I can handle this.”

  “Jenny…”

  “I’m not filling out anything,” she said, crossing her arms in that Cathy way of hers. I knew there would be no way to convince her.

  I touched the button and was live with Bill again. “She’s not sure she wants to go that route…”

  “Then there’s little I can do, Len.”

  “Can you have a car go by the house at night, maybe, once in a while?” I said.

  “That’s not necessary,” Jenny argued.

  “Sure, I can arrange that,” McGee said. “But I have something more pressing. Can you be here in an hour? Don’t worry about Tice, he’s still off.”

  “Sure, what do you need?”

  “Two of my men are picking up Lonny the Match from Paramus and giving him a ride here for questioning. I want your impressions.”

  “Do I get to grill him?” I asked.

  “Very funny—grill an arsonist. You’re a regular comedian.”

  “Actually, I’m not a regular. I’m an extra large. I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks, Len. Don’t bring the jokes when you come,” McGee said and hung up.

  I put the phone down and looked at Jenny. “Lunch is still on.”

  “Goody!” she said, getting her jacket. “You’re treating, right?”

  “Yes, but I wish you’d change your mind about the police. I’m telling you that man is dangerous. I believe he killed Wendy.”

  “I can handle myself, Len. Come on, there is a place just a few doors down from here…”

  Off we went.

  JACK’S DIARY: WEDNESDAY

  So, the cripple has a name—Doctor Leonard Wise. Oh, and he made damn sure to stress the Doctor. An overeducated oaf, who has to impress you with his doctorate. As if that makes him better or smarter than me.

  I’m educated more than enough. Besides, once I knew of my talent, it was much more important to learn how to use it. I built my small financial empire by using it cleverly. Of course, I live comfortably, not grandiose. Well, not yet.

  The cripple has to be the link between Mrs. Baines at the insurance company and the police. He feels like a cop, and yet, not. And every time I’m near him, I sense him. Being so close to him was almost painful. I think he felt it, too. But if he has any abilities, of course he’d sense my power.

  I’ve drawn a bit of suspicion with the three fires so close together. Mishan and his shop were enough, but then Wendy. That may have been a miscalculation.

  It’s just a lesson to me about letting my emotions get the best of me. That Baines woman, the way she keeps insisting to my face that I can’t have the money. I wanted to reduce her to a flaming corpse right there in her office.

  I guess that is what attracted the cripple. He knows the woman and sensed the danger she is in.

  If that is so, perhaps I have a way to keep the cripple on the run and speed up getting my money. It will mean I shall have to play cat and mouse with the two of them. I may even have to eliminate them both, but it has to be done quietly.

  I would enjoy frying the cripple—Doctor Leonard Wise. I haven’t liked him since we met, and he is the only one who might be aware of my talent.

  I shall have to plan carefully and perhaps bring a few of my other pieces into play. It will be a challenge.

  But, more fun than burning up Mishan.

  fourteen

  An hour later, after an enjoyable lunch at a nearby Mexican place with Jenny, she took me to her car and dropped me off in front of the police station.

  “Thanks for the ride, Jenny,” I said.

  “Thanks for lunch. I’m stuffed. I think I’ll just make a salad for dinner.”

  “Sounds great. I’ll see you later.”

  I hobbled into the station and saw the sergeant named Tony at the desk again. McGee had been correct. Tice was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey, Professor!” Tony said as he smiled up at me. “McGee’s expecting you. He’s in the detective bull pen. You know the way?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Thank you…um, Sergeant…?”

  “Williams, I’m Sergeant Williams.”

  “Thanks,” I said and wandered past him down the short hall to once again get buzzed into the main corridor. I quickly walked to the detective’s room across from processing and went in to find McGee at his desk.

  “Ah, Len,” he said, rising. “You’re here. Can you go into Observation C and watch through the window?”

  “Sure.”

  “If anyone asks, you’re here to observe in an unofficial capacity. But if you get any impressions, I want to know abo
ut them.”

  He took me into the small room and shut the door that led to the squad room. I leaned against the table so I could easily look through the large one-way mirror. The lights were on in Interrogation B, and I got an unobstructed view of the room, the rectangular table, and its four chairs.

  On the chairs sat Officer Galland in full uniform, and across from him, a man in a cheap suit that all but screamed public defender. Next to the lawyer was the man who’d stepped out of my vision, or off the page of the police sketchbook: Lonny Briback, aka Lonny the Match.

  He was even oilier than I recalled, his hair slicked back with something from the ’60s—Brilliantine or Vitalis. But the one thing I hadn’t noticed was that his eyes didn’t move together. One eye was either paralyzed or replaced with a glass one. This gave him an unfocused look that moved from the cross-eyed to walleyed.

  “Anything you can tell me?” McGee said.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I would estimate that the vision I saw took place several weeks ago.”

  “I still have Wendy’s statement that he was there the day Mishan died. Though I wish to hell I had the actual witness. It would hold up better in court.”

  “Thus giving him motive to remove her,” I said and gazed at Lonny. He couldn’t keep still and shifted nervously in his chair. His hands fiddled with his shiny black hair and inserted themselves into his large ears as if they were points of fascination.

  “You think he’s our killer?” McGee asked.

  I looked at the small man as he shifted and probed his ear with a pinkie. “I think he knows something that could help us.”

  McGee nodded, faced the wall, and turned a dial on a small metal box. “You can hear everything we say. If you have something to tell me, push this button.” He pointed at a red button on the box. “I will hear a signal and come right out.”

  I nodded and kept my position on the table edge that faced the window. McGee gave me a nod and stepped through the door of the detective’s bull pen, which he closed behind him. There was a pause, and then I watched as he opened the door to Interrogation Room B, a thick folder in his hand.

  He sat across from Lonny, his back to me, and went through the folder carefully.

  “So, Lonny, we got you for parole violation and possibly more,” McGee said, not looking up.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” Lonny said, his eyes going in two directions. “I just took a trip.”

  I listened to his voice amplified from the box. He had an accent, Brooklyn or the Bronx.

  McGee continued. “So, you left California, ignoring the fact that you are not allowed to leave that state.”

  “Is this all you have, Detective?” the young lawyer said. “If you are extraditing him to California, I can’t see the reason why I’m here.”

  I smiled. The public defender was a young man whose very presence suggested he’d had other aspirations but ended up in a job he ultimately didn’t care for.

  “You are here, counselor,” McGee said, pulling out some papers, “because Mister Briback is a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. He also requested a lawyer, and we do things by the book in Mountainview. But I want to make it clear that he isn’t going anywhere except prison.” McGee went through the papers and rustled them noisily. “Now, Mister Briback, I have a reliable source that places you at a late-night meeting with one Philip Mishan at his jewelry shop, and a witness who places you in the same store the day he died.”

  “So?” Lonny shrugged.

  I got an impression that Lonny was wondering just how much McGee knew.

  “Mr. Briback, you served time for arson,” McGee said, slowly standing up as his voice got louder. “And the man burns to death. I think that is relevant.”

  Briback shifted in his chair again, his one good eye looked around the room, perhaps for an escape.

  McGee sat back down and pulled some pages out of the file. “Plus, I have information suggesting you created a weapon that shoots projectiles that start fires.”

  Briback leapt up from his chair as color stood out on his cheeks. “That’s a load of crap…”

  “Sit down, Mister Briback,” his young lawyer said.

  “I didn’t build nothing since I got out, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t brag about it online so any fuckin’ cop in the world could find it,” Briback said, and sat back down, folding his arms as his voice grew sullen. “Besides, it’s impossible.”

  “What do you mean?” McGee said.

  “It can’t be done. I heard the rumors and how it’s supposed to work. Sodium metal can’t be made into a bullet! It would disintegrate, even if you used compressed air to shoot it. It just can’t be done.”

  His words possessed the ring of truth.

  “But you just happen to know what I’m talking about?” McGee said, leaning forward to tower over the smaller Briback.

  “Yeah, I heard my name was connected with this—whatever the hell it is. I went to the library, used their computer. The whole thing’s a freakin’ fairy tale.”

  “Well, Mister Briback, or should I call you Lonny the Match?” McGee said. “You’d better start explaining your visits to Mishan, or I see an indictment for conspiracy to commit murder.”

  “Look, Detective, I don’t have all the facts of this case,” the public defender fretted from his chair. “But, you are threatening my client. If you are able to charge him with a crime, you would have—”

  “We pulled him in for violating his parole, and we’ll keep him locked up here in New Jersey until I am sure he has no connection to Mr. Mishan’s death! Right now, he was seen in the vicinity, and he has a history with incendiary devices. That makes him my prime suspect.”

  “It’s not like that,” Briback said, sweat beginning to drizzle down his face. “Look, I went to see Mishan, OK, but just to ask him some questions. Then the day he died, I was getting money off him.”

  “He gave you money? Why? Out of the goodness of his heart?” McGee demanded, his sarcasm plain as he leaned back in his chair. “If you got something to tell, now is the time.”

  Briback turned to the attorney and whispered in the young man’s ear. The lawyer listened, nodded, then spoke.

  “If he tells you, it would be admitting to a crime in another jurisdiction. What assurances does Mr. Briback have that you won’t charge him?”

  “My interest is Mishan and the town of Mountainview, New Jersey, here and now. I have no interest in pursuing crimes committed in other locales.”

  I smiled on my side of the glass. McGee was lying. If Briback admitted to something big enough, McGee would make sure he was charged for it as well.

  The attorney gave Briback a quick nod. Briback pulled a stained white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow.

  “I did a job for Mishan a few years back, a jewelry store in Ohio,” Lonny said. “He paid me to burn the place down—but to do it so it wouldn’t be found out. Y’know, for insurance.”

  “So you were blackmailing him? Cough up more money, or you’d tell the authorities?” McGee said.

  “Nothin’ like that,” Briback said as he mopped his forehead. “I mean, I got principles, y’know. I got paid for that job, fair and square. Nothing went wrong—nobody died or nothing. But later, while I was in jail, I heard about that amusement park fire in South Jersey and that Mishan was involved.”

  “So?” McGee said.

  “I got everything I could find about it. Had some friends send me stuff from the Internet, the newspapers. I figure if he’d hired me to burn one place, he must have hired somebody to burn that one. You get it? Same scam, different state.”

  “I fail to see…” McGee started.

  “He hired someone, all right,” Briback said as if the answer were obvious. “But I know all the best guys in the business, and not one of ’em was involved. And look, tha
t fire was a work of art—I mean a freakin’ Picasso. There was a little trace of an accelerant, but it was chemicals that you would have at an amusement park, paint ’n’ stuff. The kicker was that there weren’t no sign of a timer—not even a cigarette, which, y’know, is a cheap and easy fuse.”

  “Get to the point, Briback,” McGee griped, his patience wearing thin.

  “It bugged me. I mean, it had to be a set fire, because I knew Mishan. But the more I looked into it, the more I can’t find any trace of arson. It bothered me. I don’t know, it became, like—an obsession.”

  McGee leaned forward in his seat. “Let me get this straight, Briback. You broke parole and schlepped all the way here to New Jersey because of how an amusement park burned down?”

  “Hey, Detective,” Briback said, his eyes almost together and focused on McGee’s face. “If you had a case that didn’t work out, I mean you knew it was murder and couldn’t prove it, wouldn’t you be obsessed?”

  A bleak smile came to McGee’s face. He was in the middle of a case like that now.

  Lonny leaned back in his chair. “I mean, I got here and went to the location of that pier, then talked to some locals and a few friends who would know. I couldn’t find out nothin’, and the site is a mall now.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, Lonny,” McGee growled, his police scowl returning.

  “Well anyway, I tracked Mishan down. I mean, if he had something that was untraceable, I wanted it. I’m an expert with fire, and if somebody’s got something this new, I want to know about it. I got my pride, y’know.”

  “So you showed up at his door,” McGee said.

  “I called him first. I mean, I didn’t want he should think I’m putting the bite on him,” Briback said as he looked from McGee to his lawyer.

  “No, that came later,” McGee muttered.

  “Well, me and Mishan talk, and I tell him what a nice job the amusement pier was, and I suggest that I could stay around if he needs my help, and he laughs.”

  “Why?” McGee asked.

  “He tells me that he don’t need me anymore. Says he’s got the real thing, a guy who can burn anything, anywhere, anytime. So I sez, ‘How?’ And he just laughs some more. Finally, he says that he has a partner and the fire just comes out of his head. That’s what he tells me.”