Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  “How will you get home?”

  “I’ll catch a bus off the island. It’ll drop me right near the subway. It’s a short ride to Woodside.”

  “You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure of anything anymore.”

  Georgia waited on a stiff bench beside a glassed-in guard’s booth, watching the big clock on the wall count down the time. The hallway smelled of Clorox, and the strong fluorescent light threw off any sense of whether it was day or night outside.

  “This way,” said a black man in uniform opening a steel door with a buzzer after almost an hour. Georgia followed him, hearing both their sets of steps on the bare concrete. He didn’t take her to a visitors’ room since the room was big and visiting hours were over. Instead, he led her to a cage not unlike the one she and Carter had interviewed O’Rourke in.

  Marenko was a detainee, not a convict, so he wore civilian clothes—a ragged, faded navy blue T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and track shorts. His sockless feet were shoved into a pair of sneakers. The blue in his eyes had darkened and dimmed, as if a light had gone off inside him.

  He was seated at a metal table in the cage. He put his palms on the table and started to rise to greet her as the guard undid the lock.

  “Sit down, Marenko,” the guard ordered. “No physical contact or the visit is over. You hear me?” Marenko nodded.

  “I didn’t hear your answer,” said the guard.

  “Yessir,” Marenko said meekly. He sat back down, his face pale and unreadable.

  The guard locked Georgia in, then stood over by a cinder-block wall ten feet from the cage with his arms folded. Georgia tried to forget his presence. She took a seat and stared at Marenko. Her mind had been filled with questions and accusations an hour earlier. Now that she was here, she didn’t know what to say. Marenko massaged his forehead.

  “I don’t know why you’d even want to see me,” he mumbled.

  “I believed you,” said Georgia. “And now, with this new evidence, I don’t know what to believe.”

  “That makes two of us.” Marenko ran his hands down his face. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a week. “Does Richie know?”

  “Not yet. I’ll have to tell him when I get home. How about your kids?”

  He slumped in his chair and looked up at the ceiling of the wire mesh cage. Georgia could see he was fighting for control. When he spoke, it was in a voice so congested, he sounded as if he had a head cold. “I wish some street mutt had just pumped a couple of slugs through my brain a week ago,” he said thickly. “That would’ve been a better ending.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Mac, please,” she said softly. “You can’t give up like that.”

  Marenko’s shoulder muscles tightened. What Georgia had offered as tenderness, he’d taken as pity. And if there was one thing Mac Marenko didn’t want, it was anybody’s pity.

  “Why the hell are you even here?” he growled at her. “Am I like some car accident you see on the side of the highway and you can’t look, but you can’t not look? Is that it?”

  “Is that how you see yourself, Mac? As some accident? You chose to go to Connie’s apartment Tuesday night.”

  “Because she called me,” he said indignantly.

  “She never got a threatening call. Why don’t you quit bullshitting?”

  The guard took note of the rising voices. “Keep it down in there or it’s over, Marenko,” he ordered.

  “Yessir.” Marenko shot Georgia a look of daggers. “Look, I’ve been in touch with Bernie Chandler.”

  “I know.”

  “He told me I can’t talk to you about the case. He said you could be called upon to testify against me.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Scout, listen to me. We’re not on the same side anymore. Connie was your best friend, and I stand accused of her murder.”

  “Have they found her body?”

  “Not yet. But the cops can make the rap stick on circumstantial alone.” Marenko laughed bitterly. “And they’ve got plenty of that, believe me.”

  “I know,” said Georgia, thinking again of Connie’s apartment and suppressing a shudder. Marenko caught the movement like a sock to the jaw.

  “Well, if you know, then what are you doing here? What do you want from me? A confession? Christ, Leahy was here trying to cut a deal with me, and he didn’t get one.” He feigned a shrug. “I guess I must be fresh out.”

  “That’s not why I came,” said Georgia. “I thought you’d know that by now.” She started to rise. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  “Wait,” Marenko muttered. He made a face like someone who was having gravel picked out of his skin. He kept his eyes on the table as he spoke. “I didn’t mean that. I just…” He let out a long exhale. “I want you here and I don’t want you here at the same time. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He ran a hand through his hair and looked at her now. “I’m trying to do the right thing, Scout. I don’t want to screw up your life.”

  Georgia sat back down. Marenko swallowed hard.

  “If it’s going to come to this—me in prison,” he said. “I want you to move on. I wouldn’t feel right otherwise. Hell, I can’t even watch your back on that money drop Friday. What use am I to anyone in here?”

  Georgia leaned forward. “Mac,” she said softly. “I meant what I said when I told you not to give up…I didn’t just come to Riker’s this evening to see you. I came to interview a man named Carl O’Rourke.”

  Marenko gave her a blank look.

  “Carl O’Rourke is the son of Albert O’Rourke, a firefighter who served under Pat Flannagan at Ladder One-twenty-one on the night of the Bridgewater fire.”

  “Bridgewater again.” Marenko rolled his eyes. “That fire has nothing to do with…”

  “—Carl O’Rourke is the brother of Connie Ruiz.”

  “What?” Marenko put his palms on the table and leaned closer to her. “But Connie’s Puerto Rican.”

  “Half, it turns out,” said Georgia. “Believe me, I didn’t know this either until tonight. But this is a link, Mac—a solid link—between Connie’s disappearance and the Bridgewater fire she was investigating before she disappeared. And there’s something else, too.” Georgia told him about Ajay Singh finding the red bottle cap at Connie’s and how an identical cap was found at Louise Rosen’s.

  “I wasn’t drugged,” Marenko insisted. “I would’ve known. Connie would’ve known.”

  “Maybe Connie was drugged, too.”

  He frowned as he thought about that. “I passed a drug test.”

  “You probably weren’t tested for GHB.”

  He shook his head. “Look, Scout—I wanna get out of jail so bad, I’m willing to believe anything. But I think your theories have jack to do with what happened here. Who’d want to kill Connie?”

  “Maybe Robin Hood,” Georgia whispered. “If Connie was on to him. And she might have been. Can you remember anything about Tuesday night? Anything at all?”

  “It’s still a black hole,” he said sullenly.

  “Did Connie make any phone calls while you were there? Did she receive any?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “What was the last thing you do remember?”

  Marenko leaned his head in his hands and tried to concentrate. “I was on her couch—you know, the white one with the green cushions?”

  Turquoise. Only a man wouldn’t know the color turquoise, thought Georgia.

  “We were watching television,” Marenko recalled. “Some rerun of Law and Order. I was drinking a beer. A Rolling Rock. Connie was having one, too. I got up to use the can. I think the bulb burned out in her ceiling light in the bathroom. I asked if she had another. I’d put it in for her. She told me she kept them in a cabinet above the refrigerator in the kitchen, so I went there and got one.”

  “That’s it?” asked Georgia. “That’s all you remember?”

  “Yeah, but…” Marenko frowned.

 
“But what?”

  “The bathroom light fixture had these tiny pain-in-the-ass screws you had to undo, and I think I’d remember if I’d unscrewed ’em. But I don’t.”

  “So?”

  “When I came to and I was so sick? I ran into the bathroom to throw up. And…the light worked.” He shook his head, as if it had never occurred to him until that moment. “Somebody undid that fixture and screwed in that bulb.”

  “Maybe Connie did.”

  “Don’t you think Connie would be a little too concerned that I’d passed out to be screwing in some bulb? And if she passed out, too—as you say—then who screwed in that bulb?”

  “Time’s up, Marenko,” barked the guard beyond the cage.

  Marenko flinched as if he’d been struck. He pressed his palms on the table and kept his eyes on them. He was already learning about prison life: keep your hands where the guards can see them.

  Georgia rose. “Mac, I…”

  “—Just go,” he muttered into his chest. “Don’t say anything, all right? Just go.”

  40

  The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees as soon as Georgia left Riker’s Island. She welcomed the air outside, even though it was bathed in the stench of sulfur and jet fuel. From the back window of the bus, she saw the razor wire and concrete blocks fade. It made her ache to know that Mac was still inside. Connie was dead—she was sure of that now. But that knowledge brought her no closer to finding Robin Hood or stopping the bomb.

  On the subway home, Georgia kept thinking about the lightbulb in Connie’s apartment. She wondered if Leahy had ever checked it out. Flushing was only three stops more on her subway line.

  Just walking back into the 109th Precinct again made Georgia feel sick. She saw the bored, glazed eyes of police officers as they walked by, heard the jingle of handcuffs on suspects being hustled through the doors. She saw the station house in a way she had never seen it as a fire marshal—as frightening, cold and indifferent. She didn’t think she could ever see the line between cop and suspect in quite such black-and-white terms again.

  “I’m looking for Detective Leahy,” said Georgia, flipping her shield at the desk sergeant and playacting a role she’d assumed quite naturally only a few days ago.

  “Homicide. Three doors down, on your left,” said the sergeant, directing her down a hallway painted the color of moldy bread with scuff marks and gouges along the walls.

  Homicide was not unlike Manhattan base. It was a room with fluorescent tube lights recessed in the ceiling, their filaments darkened by a collection of dead bugs. On the far wall, a couple of big windows overlooked a Dumpster behind a fence. The desks—six or seven in all—were topped with computers yet crammed with so much paperwork, one wondered what, exactly, the computers were for.

  Leahy was in the far corner of the room, typing on a computer while simultaneously talking on the phone. He was dressed in a rumpled white shirt and tie—no jacket. His fine, brown, fishing-lure hair was damp across his head—from sweat or hair gel, Georgia couldn’t tell which. She succeeded in catching Leahy’s eye, but he only frowned and turned his back to her, so she walked over and planted herself in front of him. He mumbled a “gotta go. Talk to you later” into the phone and hung up.

  “If this is about Marenko, Skeehan, you’re out of line walking into homicide. He’s at Riker’s, where he belongs.”

  “I know,” said Georgia. “I just saw him.”

  “Then you’re a fool, young lady.”

  “Did you know that Connie Ruiz had a brother?”

  That got his interest. He bit his lip, trying to size her up. “Marenko told you this?”

  “No. Carter and I found him ourselves. He’s at Riker’s too, Detective. His name is Carl O’Rourke, if you’d like to talk to him. He was picked up this morning on a parole violation.”

  Leahy made a note of the name on a slip of paper, all the while regarding her out of the corner of his eye. It was a typical cop look—always scrutinizing. “And you came all the way out to Flushing to tell me this, huh?”

  “That’s me,” said Georgia. “Helpful all over.”

  He put the note on top of an enormous pile on his desk. He had phone numbers written on brown sandwich bags and napkins and the backs of losing lottery tickets.

  “You didn’t know about O’Rourke,” said Georgia. “Here are two other things you may not have known about.” She told Leahy about the cap to the extract bottle. “Singh at the crime lab told me.”

  Leahy stretched his arms over his head and yawned. Georgia saw sweat stains on his shirt. “No GHB, no proof.”

  “Okay, how about this.” Georgia told him about Marenko’s recollection of the lightbulb in Connie’s bathroom. “Did you check it for prints?” she asked.

  “No. It wouldn’t prove anything, anyway, Skeehan. Charles Manson could’ve changed that lightbulb and it still wouldn’t prove he was in her apartment at that particular time.”

  “But Mac says the bulb had burned out and it was back in…”

  “—The accused can say anything he wants.” Leahy shrugged. “His lawyer is welcome to make that case when it comes to court. But it doesn’t prove anything, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no independent corroboration that anyone else was in that apartment at that time except Mac Marenko.”

  He fingered a chipped mug on his desk. The coffee in it looked like it had been sitting there since the building went up. “You should be less concerned about Marenko, and more concerned about yourself right now.”

  Georgia gave him a puzzled look. Leahy put down his mug. “I hear A and E found some tool marks on Charles Dana’s back door. They think you broke into Dana’s house and you’re covering it up.”

  Georgia froze. Leahy regarded her without looking up.

  “I didn’t…They can’t prove…”

  “Skeehan, I don’t care.” He spread his palms. “But Dana’s case is getting a lot of heat and someone’s trying to discredit you big-time. I had some guy from the mayor’s office in here last night asking if we’d found out anything unusual about you, going through Ruiz’s apartment. He was looking for something to take you down.”

  “Rankoff,” Georgia murmured.

  “Yep—that’s the guy.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you’d been questioned about Ruiz’s disappearance soon after it happened. You came up clean and nothing in her apartment said anything to the contrary.” He paused and gave her a slight smile. “I didn’t tell him that you walked through my crime scene later that day with your partner and could’ve been charged with obstruction of justice.” He held her gaze a moment to make sure it sank in.

  “Thank you,” said Georgia.

  “This way, you and I can both pretend it never happened.” He rose. “You see, I’m not out to get you—or Marenko. I even tried to cut him a deal in exchange for a confession.”

  “I’ll bet he threw you out,” said Georgia.

  “No, he didn’t,” said Leahy. “I told him a confession would save him the embarrassment of a trial and all the media coverage. He seemed to like that idea.”

  “His kids,” Georgia muttered. “He was thinking of his kids.”

  “Perhaps.” Leahy shrugged. “The point is, he was more willing to deal than you might think.”

  Richie was in his room, playing a video game, when Georgia got home with a pizza in hand. It was just after seven P.M. She’d called ahead to tell her mother she’d be picking up dinner. They both thought it might ease the pain of what Georgia had to tell her son.

  Margaret hummed as she poured three glasses of lemonade and dished out the salad Georgia made. This evening it was, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” Her Burt Bacharach repertoire was infinite.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Richie, bouncing a look from Georgia to his grandmother. He knew the cues as well as his mother did.

  “It’s Mac, honey.” Georgia sighed. “He…uh…got arrested this morning…Connie’s still missin
g and uh…the police think Mac’s responsible.”

  The child put his slice of pizza down and stared at his mother, as if her words were a cruel hoax. “But you said it was a mistake. You said Mac didn’t do it.”

  “I know. But the police think he did.”

  “But you’re the police.” The child’s pitch wobbled with panic.

  “I’m not a detective, Richie. I’m a fire marshal.”

  “You arrest people. You could say Mac didn’t do it.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Georgia noticed Richie never asked about Connie. Part of that, she suspected, was denial. If Richie accepted that Connie was dead, then he’d have to accept that Mac had killed her. Georgia shot a nervous glance at her mother, hoping she’d offer up some wise words of comfort. But Margaret said nothing. She looked pretty unsure herself.

  “Richie…I don’t know what to say,” said Georgia finally. “This is something a ten-year-old boy shouldn’t have to go through.” She pushed back from the table and went to hug him. But Richie pushed back, too. He didn’t want her tenderness—any more than Mac had at Riker’s.

  “Please, honey, it’ll be all right,” said Georgia.

  “No, it won’t,” the boy choked out. “Stop lying to me. Mac’s never coming back.” He left the table and ran up to his room.

  Georgia went to follow, but her mother put a hand on her arm.

  “Don’t, Georgia,” she said softly. “He’s not a baby anymore. You can’t make the pain go away.”

  “What do I do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Margaret, her face pale and nearly as frightened as Richie’s. “We’ll just have to feel our way forward on this one.”

  Georgia washed the dishes and cleaned up in the kitchen before she managed to pluck up enough courage to knock on Richie’s door. He was playing his rap music tapes at top volume. He’d picked some of his angriest selections.

  “Richie?” she shouted over the music. “Can I come in?”

  He didn’t answer, but he turned the volume down—a good sign. If he hadn’t wanted her, he would’ve kept it loud.