Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  Seamus Hanlon’s pale blue eyes crinkled softly when he bounded down the stairs and found her waiting for him at the bottom.

  “God strike me dead if I don’t think of Jimmy Gallagher every blessed day,” he said as he hugged her. Georgia could smell the soot of a recent fire on his light-blue uniform shirt. Captain Hanlon was a bulky man, not fat so much as broad, with thick walruslike jowls accentuated by a mustache the color of cigarette ash. His crew-cut hair—the same color—stood up like a wire brush on the top of his head. Coupled with the bags beneath his eyes, it gave Seamus Hanlon the appearance of an over-the-hill boxer with a score to settle.

  “How’s your mother holding up?” he asked.

  “As well as can be expected.” Georgia sighed. “She misses him a lot.”

  “God knows, we all do.”

  Georgia recalled now that the captain had lost his own wife to cancer not too long ago. “How are you…?” she started to ask, but Hanlon cut her off.

  “You work a lot of overtime,” he said with a sad smile. “Kids are all on their own now. House is as empty as a bad gambler’s pockets.” He nodded to the kitchen. “You hungry? We got leftover sausage and peppers from dinner. You’re always welcome.”

  “No, thanks,” said Georgia. “I had dinner. But I would like to talk to you—maybe in your office.”

  He rocked on his feet and jingled some change in his uniform pants. “And I thought you were here to tell me a couple of good Gallagher stories. I could use a few these days.”

  “Oh, we can do that, too,” she said.

  He led her up the iron mesh stairs past the bronze plaque of her father. “I wish I’d known him,” Hanlon said softly, nodding at the plaque. The face chiseled out of bronze was rugged-looking with curly hair just like Georgia’s and mischievous eyes. It was her father, and yet not her father at the same time, and it made her ache the same way old pictures of him did.

  “In some ways,” said Georgia, “he was a lot like Jimmy.”

  “That I can believe. I know Jimmy thought the world of your dad.”

  At the top of the stairs, Hanlon turned into a narrow office across from the firefighters’ bunk room. The walls were beige, pockmarked by ink-black smudges and gouges in the plaster that crumbled like glazed sugar. A steel bed frame and a file cabinet piled high with dusty volumes of fire department regulations hugged the wall opposite the desk and computer.

  Hanlon flopped into a swivel chair with duct tape covering the rips in the armrests. “Jimmy was a character, I tell you. Most of the time, he worked in Manhattan, but he did a few overtime tours out this way. One time, we had this young kid, Eagan, who was trying to learn the bagpipes. Kid sounded like he was torturing a cat. The guys were going crazy listening to him every tour. They tried hiding his pipes, stuffing them with paper. Kid kept playing. One day Jimmy comes in, hears that God-awful sound and starts singing.”

  Georgia laughed. She’d heard Gallagher sing. Or rather, try to.

  “Jimmy was many things, but he was no Irish tenor.” Hanlon grinned. “Kid took the pipes home that night. Never heard another word. We owe our eardrums to an Irishman who couldn’t hold a note if it was Gabriel’s trumpet and he had both hands wrapped around it.” Georgia smiled sadly. “He was a great man.”

  “Aye, that he was. As dear to me as my own brother, Michael—God rest both their souls.” Hanlon sank back in his seat. They were both quiet a moment. Then he clapped his hands together. “So what can I do you for, Georgia?”

  “I need to know about a report you helped Ed Delaney prepare for the Division of Safety. It was back in 1984 when you were a firefighter at Ladder One-oh-six.”

  He rubbed a thumb and finger across his thick mustache. “That’s a long time ago you’re talking about.”

  “Do you remember the report? It had to do with a fire that took place in August 1978 in North Brooklyn.”

  He picked a rubber band off his desk and toyed with it. “Georgia, what in God’s name do you need that for?”

  “It has to do with a case I’m working on,” she said. “Were you at that fire?”

  Hanlon shot the rubber band across the room. He seemed to be aiming for the clock on the wall. It was the kind of goofy thing Marenko would do to distract himself from something unpleasant.

  “I was at that fire,” he said softly.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  He leaned back in his chair and stared at the peeling paint rippling across the ceiling like a bad sunburn. “It was at a warehouse on Bridgewater Street in Greenpoint. My company, Ladder One-oh-six, responded on the third alarm. By the time I got there, it had been turned into an outside operation. The men who went in came out. The rest of us never went in. Chief Nickelson—he was the deputy chief on the scene—he ordered a surround and drown. They brought in the tower ladders and got the job done in under six hours.”

  “Did the Empire Pipeline have anything to do with the fire?”

  “I seem to recall that they thought a leak in the pipeline might have touched off the blaze. It ran near the warehouse, I believe.”

  “Were any men injured at that fire?”

  Hanlon raked the back of his hand across his lips. His pale blue eyes had a razor’s edge to them. “Nobody went sick at the scene, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How about later?”

  Hanlon’s face grew dark. He palmed the bags beneath his eyes. “It was a long time ago, Georgia. The men are dead. Can’t bring ’em back. Nobody really knows what happened that night. Leave it be.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He stared at her now. “Because I busted up my liver not leaving it be. Almost lost my job.”

  “Over the fire?”

  “Nah.” Hanlon got up from his chair and walked over to the room’s only window. The bottom half had an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted into it with plywood fitted around the casing. It rumbled like an elevated train. He stared out at a potholed street.

  “A lot of stuff started happening in my life right around that time.” Hanlon didn’t meet her gaze. “Things got out of control. Lieutenant Delaney—Chief Delaney now—he helped me shake the monkey off my back, if you know what I mean.” Hanlon turned to her now. “I’ve been sober fifteen years,” he added with a nod that suggested it was still a battle of wills every day.

  Georgia recalled faintly that Jimmy Gallagher had referred to Hanlon as a “hellraiser” in his youth. “Hellraiser” was Gallagher’s gentle euphemism for an alcoholic.

  “It happens to a lot of guys on this job,” Georgia reassured him.

  “Yeah, well…” Hanlon sighed. “I want to help you, lass. For Jimmy’s sake. For the memory of your father. But this fire—I don’t really recollect the details anymore. And I’m not sure I want to. It was such a long time ago.”

  “Do you know if any firefighters applied for line-of-duty disability pensions as a result of that fire?”

  “Applied? Yes. Received? No. There were these two doctors back then.” Hanlon made a face. “We called them the hitmen of the One-B Board. They turned down line-of-duty pensions like they were St. Peter at the gates of heaven.”

  “Louise Rosen and Charles Dana,” said Georgia. Hanlon started.

  “Yeah,” he said warily. “How did you…?”

  “—They both burned to death within the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Holy Mother of God. Accidental?”

  “We don’t know yet,” said Georgia. She wasn’t about to divulge specifics that might compromise the case. “But that’s why I’m here. Would you know any firefighters who’d want to do something like that to them?”

  “No disrespect to the dead, lass, but I could fill a union hall with the men who got shafted by those two.”

  “Any particular names pop out?”

  “It was so long ago. I just don’t remember anymore.”

  “How about the report you helped prepare on this warehouse fire back in 1984?” Georgia pressed. “Is there any way to
get a copy? All I have is Ed Delaney’s cover letter.”

  “I’d have to go through Delaney, and right now, I’d feel funny asking him,” said Hanlon. “You’ve heard the rumors, right?”

  Georgia gave him a blank look. She’d been a little preoccupied for rumors.

  “Word is, Chief Delaney is Mayor Ortaglia’s top pick to replace Lynch as fire commissioner. I don’t think this is the time to ask him about the report.” He saw her crestfallen face. “I still have a couple of contacts at the Division of Safety,” Hanlon offered. “Maybe I can get them to dig it up for you.”

  “That’d be great,” she said.

  Downstairs, near the door to the firehouse, Hanlon grabbed a photo off the corkboard and pressed it into Georgia’s hand.

  “For your mother,” he said, then turned and hustled back up the stairs as if he didn’t trust himself to say more.

  When Georgia got outside, she looked at the snapshot. It was of a group of men and boys on a fishing boat on Long Island Sound. Their names were scribbled on back. Irish names, mostly: Hennessy, Dugan, O’Rourke, Mahoney…Seamus Hanlon was there. He looked about ten years younger. His jowls were less fleshy, his hair less gray. His arm was around a shorter, stocky man with hair just beginning to turn silver, holding up a two-foot perch. It was a great picture of Jimmy Gallagher—the way Georgia would always remember him, all sunshine and roguish good humor. Hanlon had given it away for the same reason that Georgia’s mother would probably stick it in a drawer and never look at it again. For the same reason that Georgia would not set foot again in Engine Two-seventy-eight for a long, long time.

  Some things were just too full of memory to go back to.

  13

  The morning light caught the Federalist columns of Grand Central Terminal at an angle as Georgia crossed Forty-second Street and headed for the doors on the lower level. Above, she had only the vaguest notion of the symphony of arches in steel and glass. But even when she didn’t let her eyes wander to the canopy of marble above her, she always sensed she was in the presence of a great building.

  There were taller, more opulent New York buildings than Grand Central Terminal. Yet those were built primarily as monuments to the greed of men or the fear of God. Here was a building laid out nearly ninety years ago for a practical purpose—to move people and goods into and out of the largest city in the world. It was an engineering feat as much as a work of art, for beneath the Beaux Arts stone exterior lay a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of tunnels, some at a depth of as much as a hundred feet—ten stories below street level. It had taken ten years to build Grand Central Terminal. And when it was done, nearly three million cubic yards of the city’s bedrock had been excavated—enough landfill to put a new island in the East River.

  A crush of morning commuters streamed through the doors on their way to midtown office buildings. Georgia was one of the few rushing in the other direction. She walked down a short flight of stairs to the main concourse. Pale, peach-toned marble shone beneath her feet. One hundred and twenty feet overhead, a seafoam green ceiling sported the bronze zodiac constellations of a New York sky at dusk.

  She walked through the nearly football field-sized concourse, past a sweeping marble staircase and sixty-foot windows, to the stationmaster’s office. The task force meeting was supposed to start in a conference room there at 0900.

  The conference room had none of the grandeur of the main part of the building. The ceiling was low, the walls, Sheetrock. There was a portable chalkboard at one end of the conference table and a coffee machine at the other. In between were several faces Georgia recognized and several she didn’t. Carter was there. So was Fire Marshal Eddie Suarez. He was a compact man with a weight lifter’s bullish torso and a black mustache that probably dipped a half inch below department restrictions on facial hair. But Suarez was one of the bureau’s best marshals, so nobody said a word.

  Suarez was seated next to his new partner, a newly appointed fire marshal whom Georgia hadn’t met yet. He had to be about her age, though there was still something unformed and boyish about him—as if his cheekbones and jaw were still waiting to burst through a late adolescence and give his face definition. He rose from the table and extended a hand.

  “I’m Andy Kyle,” he said. “You must be Marshal Skeehan.” He looked her in the eye. Firefighters rarely did that on a first meeting. Some were too shy to. Some were too busy looking at her breasts. And some just couldn’t get it through their heads that a woman could be their equal.

  “Georgia,” she offered, shaking his hand. There was no swagger about him, and yet there was a confidence there that she found fascinating. She could see it in the thrust of his hand, the crisp, clean way he pronounced his vowels, his simple, understated choice of linen jacket and silk tie. Andy Kyle wasn’t your typical firefighter.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he told Georgia.

  “I was afraid of that,” she said, only half kidding. He laughed.

  Georgia grabbed some coffee and took a seat beside Carter. In front of every chair was a booklet of photocopied Grand Central emergency procedures. She thumbed through hers now and smiled when she got to a memo concerning evacuation. The preparer was listed as C. Ruiz. Connie.

  “Your girlfriend,” said Carter, nodding to the name while he sneaked glances at a New York Daily News under the table.

  “Yours, too,” she teased him. He acted as if he had no idea what she was talking about. He would never admit he had a crush on Connie.

  Georgia peeked at the article Carter was reading on his lap. It was in the sports pages. “No Place Like Home,” read the headline. Beneath it was a color photo of a man in an expensive suit with prematurely white hair. Carter caught her eyeing the article.

  “Says here,” he mumbled, “that the city’s looking to build the Jets a football stadium of their own.” Carter was a big Jets fan. Marenko loved the Giants. At least that rivalry was a friendly one.

  “Who’s the white-haired guy?” asked Georgia.

  “Some dude from the mayor’s office in charge of land acquisition.” Carter pointed to the name, but didn’t attempt to pronounce it: Gus Rankoff. He was listed in the article as Mayor Ortaglia’s economic development advisor. Carter folded the paper and placed it on the table now. The session would soon be starting.

  “How’d your visit with Hanlon go last night?” he asked her.

  “Hanlon didn’t remember much about the fire,” said Georgia. “He’s going to try to track down the original report for me through the Division of Safety. But it may not come before we have to turn the whole case over.”

  The door to the conference room opened now, and two men walked in. The first was a short, egg-shaped man with a face too small for his body and hair so black, it looked as if he dyed it daily. He wore a navy blue suit that looked like a designer’s cut, yet he hadn’t bothered to get it properly tailored, with the result that the pants were a little too short and the jacket sleeves too long. He introduced himself in a soft, monotone voice as Lieutenant Sandowsky, commander of the NYPD’s Arson and Explosion Squad. The second man didn’t have to introduce himself. Georgia stiffened at the sight of the thick red mustache, the blond hair receding at the temples and the thickening gut over the waist of his pants.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Starsky and Klutz,” said Chris Willard with a broad smile on his face. “I understand they couldn’t scrape Dana off the floor when you were done with him. We find any screwups you haven’t told us about, we’ll be sure to let your chief know.”

  “I’m sure you will,” said Georgia stiffly.

  “Do me a favor, Skeehan?” said Willard. “Next time you feel like investigating a fatal fire, try getting a guy who’s fatal before you meet him.”

  The men at the table snickered. Georgia searched for a snappy comeback, but couldn’t find one. There was nothing funny about the image she had in her head of Dana on the floor of that flaming garage, crawling toward her, his skin hanging from his burning arms. There
was nothing funny about the possibility of Brennan kicking her out of the bureau for breaking and entering, either.

  Willard must have sensed he’d gotten to her—just like at the burn unit the other day. He smiled viciously as he pulled out a butane lighter and flicked it on. “Hey guys,” he said, nodding to the flame dancing above the lighter. “You know what this is? A witness who just talked to Skeehan.”

  “You know, Detective,” a voice piped up over the guffaws, “I think Marshal Skeehan is dealing with enough grief over this incident without you getting your laughs at her expense.”

  The table of heads turned. Georgia’s mouth dropped open. Andy Kyle was either the bravest or the dumbest fire marshal she’d ever met.

  “Her expense?” Willard mocked the word now, gave it a slight feminine lisp, as Georgia knew he would. “Who the fuck are you, kid?” Somebody murmured the answer, and Willard’s eyes became slits. “Oh, the little Yale college boy from Scarsdale playing fire marshal. Family’s in tight with the mayor, Daddy’s some hotshot lawyer, so you think you can say whatever you want. Well, fuck you. I don’t give a damn about your family or your money.”

  Kyle leaned forward in his chair, unfazed by Willard’s bluster.

  “You got a problem with me, Detective, take it up one-on-one. I don’t hide behind my family,” said Kyle, looking about the room. “Don’t hide behind yours.”

  “Now guys, guys,” said Lieutenant Sandowsky, rubbing a hand nervously over his shoe-polish hair. “Let’s cut this out and get down to business.”

  The rest of the lecture passed by in a blur. All Georgia could think about was the confrontation between Willard and Kyle. Although Georgia was sure that Kyle meant well, his misguided attempt at chivalry had given Chris Willard all the motivation he needed to sink her career.

  On their walking tour of Grand Central, Georgia pulled Kyle aside. They were on a platform with unfinished concrete walls, lit by construction bulbs. Kyle had just unwrapped a stick of gum. He held out the pack to Georgia, and she declined.