by Earl Emerson
Then it hits me and I scream.
Instinctively, I kick at her, not a solid blow, but it is unexpected and knocks her backward. She staggers and the torch rolls onto the floor. Jesus. If she starts this place on fire, no way I can get out of these cuffs.
I push the correct sequence of buttons on my phone and hide it under one of the pillows on the bed. I wait until I think the connection is made. All this time the woman is coming back.
I try to gather up the bedspread and wrap it around one of my legs. Anything for a buffer.
“Station Six. Gliniewicz.”
“Gliniewicz? I’m at Thirtieth and King. You know the place. You gotta get out here. I’m on the third floor. You gotta help me.”
“What?”
She is moving in on me, Anthony Perkins in drag, uglier, heavier, crazier. The torch aimed at my butt cheeks again. The bedspread’s all twisted around. I can’t get it out from under me. I scream.
Somewhere in the distance I hear Gliniewicz’s tinny voice on the phone asking if I’m all right.
53. PARDON, SIR?
BUT ARE THOSE BLOWTORCH BURNS ON YOUR ASS?
“This isn’t a real call, is it?” Towbridge asks. We are driving with red lights but no siren; stealth mode, as Towbridge likes to call it.
“No,” I say.
“The movie star’s crib? She in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, I get it. The housekeeper.”
“Gliniewicz called. They’re up there looking for Slaughter.”
“Slaughter? What the hell?”
In front of Pennington’s house, Gliniewicz, Zeke, and the detail from Twenty-eight’s are standing next to the engine. To stave off the cold, Zeke and the detail wear full turnouts, boots, pants, and coats, even their helmets. Gliniewicz wears only his boots, bunking pants, and a department sweatshirt, and is puffing away on a Salem cigarette. Despite a cold breeze rushing at us from the south, he is sweating. He’s bouncing around like a gerbil on speed. All of a sudden I’ve become his best friend. All the eye contact I haven’t been getting around the station is here in spades. The guy loves me. Keeps touching me as we talk.
“His truck’s around back. He sounded bad, man. Real bad.”
“You try to get in?”
“Everything’s locked up tight. But there’s an open window up there on the third floor. Our ladder won’t reach.”
“You knocked?”
“I did,” says the detail from Twenty-eight’s, a man named Moscowitz. “I think I heard somebody screaming.”
“Put the stick up,” I say to Towbridge.
“I don’t think it was somebody screaming,” Gliniewicz says hopefully.
But I am already moving. “How long ago?”
Moscowitz says, “Three, four minutes.”
I tell Towbridge to place the tip of the aerial just under the open window on the third floor, then I take Crapps around the house with our forcible entry kit. I carry the Halligan tool and flathead axe combination.
The back door is even stronger than the front. In the driveway in back I spot Slaughter’s truck.
When we go back around front, the aerial is just stretching up to the window on the third floor.
Gliniewicz is preparing to climb. “Not on your life,” I say, pushing him aside. Rideout is already on the apparatus, having donned a mask and bottle in standby position.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her.
“I know.”
“We’ll use channel seven,” I say to Towbridge. I scramble past the control tower and head up the ladder. “Put two people at the back door. And guard the front.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I reach the window before Rideout.
It is a bedroom window at the peak of the house, Pennington’s master suite. I have visions of the old lady huddled under her blankets with a pistol, blasting away as I approach. I pick up the pick-head axe out of its slot on the aerial and shine a flashlight through the window. A haze of light smoke lingers in the room.
When I force the window up, the room stinks of burned flesh.
On the floor near the bed a plumber’s torch is lit and hissing, scorching a hole in the carpet.
On top of the bed, in a sort of a stupor, Steve Slaughter gives me a dead look of incomprehension and bewilderment. I can’t tell if he is alive. One arm is handcuffed to the bedpost. His naked body is softer and less toned than it looks in clothing. In fact, without his glasses or clothes, he looks like a turtle that has been pulled out of his shell.
“She just left. God. You saved my life,” he says.
Carrying the axe and battle lantern, I work my way down through the house, down two flights of stairs. I’m on the second floor when I hear the back door open and close. When I get there, our firefighter guards are nowhere in sight. Neither is anybody else.
I walk through the house and open the front door, motioning for Towbridge to bring a hacksaw. Upstairs, Rideout has thrown a blanket over Slaughter and turned on the lights. They are talking about the weather as if there was nothing at all odd about the circumstances.
Rideout has turned off the blowtorch.
“I hope you had your gloves on,” I say.
“You’re not worried about fingerprints?” Slaughter exclaims. “Jesus Christ! You didn’t call the cops?”
“Didn’t call anybody.”
“Don’t. ’Cause I ain’t talkin’ to anybody. I’m fucked up, man. I’m drunk and I got a headache the size of Cincinnati.”
Slaughter stares at Rideout until I motion her out of the room. “Look, Paul. You’re not going to tell anybody, are you? I got twenty-seven years invested in the department—twenty-two in my marriage. I got a wife and two girls. The department finds out I took emergency leave and was up here bangin’ Jackie, I’ll be in deep shit.”
“You’re burned.”
“I been burned before. I can explain burns to my old lady. This other I couldn’t explain to the tooth fairy.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I woke up and some old bitch was tryin’ to barbecue me.”
“Not Patricia Pennington?”
“I don’t know. It was dark.”
Towbridge comes into the room with a hacksaw, looks at Slaughter in disbelief, then at me. I make a sawing motion. He cuts the manacles off Slaughter’s wrist, then the bracelets off the bed. Slaughter dresses quickly, stuffing his boxer shorts into his vest pocket. I watch him gather up the contents of his wallet.
“She rob you?”
“Yes. But you call the cops, I’ll deny I was here.”
“I want to hand that torch over to LaSalle and Connor. The prints might come in handy.”
“I told you I’m not testifying against anybody.”
“Humor me.”
“Fuck you.” He thinks better of his anger and places his hands on my shoulders, squinting through his glasses. “Look, we been having trouble, you and me, but when it gets down to the crunch, one firefighter will always take care of another. You proved that tonight. I won’t forget.”
Gliniewicz bursts into the room, breathing hard from the three flights of stairs. “What happened?”
“Not a damn thing,” Slaughter says.
Slaughter rides to the station on Attack 6 while somebody ferries Slaughter’s truck. The crew will nursemaid him and tend his burns until he’s had enough coffee to drive home. I call LaSalle. Then I call Vanessa Pennington.
She arrives before LaSalle and parks in the courtyard. Rideout is beside me. Towbridge and Crapps are in front of the house on the rig. Vanessa is more than annoyed.
“You just had to come back, didn’t you? She told me you were after her.”
“This isn’t about me, Vanessa.”
“Of course it’s about you. You knew this was her last night here, didn’t you?”
“Jaclyn?”
“Who else would you come here to see?”
“
Lieutenant Slaughter.”
“Who?”
“Steve Slaughter. She handcuffed him to your grandmother’s bed.”
Vanessa is silent for a moment. “Is Jackie here?”
“Not that we could tell. If I were you, I’d get the locks changed. Let me show you what happened.” She follows me into the house.
We climb four or five steps before Vanessa says, “I’m sorry about the way I came at you. Jackie told me . . . well, it doesn’t matter what she told me. I don’t know why I listened.”
“No problem.”
“I really am sorry.”
I take her upstairs and show her the burn marks on the carpet and the scratched bedpost.
“I’m sure glad Nanna is in Idaho.”
Five minutes later LaSalle arrives, takes in our story, picks up the blowtorch in a plastic bag and says, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You might want to dust it for prints.”
“We’ll see.”
54. CRIMINAL ERASURE OF A MOST
EXCELLENT PHONE MESSAGE
I spent Christmas day alone, same as I had for the last ten Christmases except those when I’d been at work. Funny how much I’d looked forward to those holidays surrounded by my built-in family—firefighters.
Christmas morning I took a ten-mile walk along the path on Lake Washington and through Seward Park. The weather was cloudy, with wind from the south pushing against my back most of the way home. The roads were devoid of cars except for the occasional family driving to see relatives, cargo areas laden with presents.
The walk gave me a chance to think.
My description Saturday night of the man made up as a woman wasn’t of much use to Marshal 5. They’d asked me to describe him for a sketch artist, but the drawing we made wasn’t very good.
Judging from Slaughter’s brief description of the woman with the blowtorch, his assailant was the same person I tried to kill Saturday night. I couldn’t even guess what the pyro had been doing inside Pennington’s mansion. It made me worry for Pennington. If it was the same person, that would make twice now that I’d come within a hair of nabbing him.
The story the pyro spun Saturday night gave me a lot to think about. It might have been a lie he’d made up to stall me, but on the other hand, if what he said was true, my father’s last act saved the pyro’s life.
I wouldn’t make the same mistake.
Besides my father, the original pyro was thought to have been responsible for at least two civilian deaths. Now he’d tried to kill me and my crew.
After all these years, I’d been expecting some hunchbacked monster, while the reality was nothing more than a mild-mannered wimp. I should have known. Arson was a crime practiced in secret, a crime that started off small and grew, but only after the perpetrator was safely offstage. Arson was the crime of a sneak. Still, I’d been taken with how ordinary he’d seemed. Even in women’s clothing and makeup, he could have passed for any of half a dozen simple-minded twits we ran into every day.
I was watching Clark Gable and Loretta Young in Key to the City when the phone rang. I especially liked the bumbling fire chief played by Frank Morgan, of Wizard of Oz fame. “Will you accept a collect call from Neil Wollf?”
“Yes, operator. Put him on.”
“How you doin’, little brother? You a chief yet?”
“Another couple of weeks. How are you?”
“Got over that cold finally. God, you know, one guy in here coughs and five minutes later six hundred peckerwoods have pneumonia. Thanks for the cookies and stuff.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What are you doing for Christmas?”
“Watching a video.”
“You seen Susan?”
“I called around, but she must be out with friends.”
“Jesus. You know you get to be a certain age, you just stop bouncing.”
“I know. I’ll drive over and look for her again after we hang up.”
“Will you?”
“Yeah.”
“So. What else is going on in your life?”
“I talked to the pyro.”
“You’re not still on that kick, are you?”
“Listen to me, Neil. I talked to him. It’s the guy! He was standing right next to our father when he fell into that basement.”
“He fell? I had the impression he went in looking for victims and got trapped.”
“He told me there was another fireman there. They had a fight.” I fleshed out the details.
“You believe him?”
“I think I do.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“Not bad. He got away.”
“So why don’t you talk to this other firefighter?”
“I don’t have a name. Besides, that was twenty-five years ago. Most of those guys are long gone.”
“You know what, Paul? I been in the joint most of my life, and I’d rather be dead than be where you are now and end up where I am now. Don’t do him that favor.”
“What makes you think I can control it?”
“Don’t give me that shit. Don’t trap yourself with a vow of vengeance.”
“Hey. I’ll drive past Susan’s place right now. Talk to the neighbors. See what I can pick up. You don’t hear from me, I didn’t get anything.”
“Thanks.”
Two hours later I carried two boxes full of her things into my condo. She’d been evicted months earlier, and a neighbor had been holding a few of her possessions. I should have kept tabs on her. Having a brother in prison was bad enough, but losing track of his wife who you’d promised to watch over was worse.
When I got home I found a message on my answering machine. “Paul? I wanted to apologize again for what I said last night. I just . . . well, I shouldn’t have said it. And thanks for calling me. I’m going to follow your suggestion and have the locks at Nanna’s place changed.” After a long pause she added, “I was thinking we could do something together, see the Kurosawa film at the Seven Gables maybe? It was just a thought. Or if you want to talk sometime. Call me . . . or not.”
I wanted to call her. God, how I wanted to call her.
I finished the Gable video, made some dinner while listening to the news on the radio, and spent the next few hours on the Internet looking up anything I could find on arson, fire investigation, and pyromania. I’d done this before. It was almost a fetish. I kept returning to a couple of old newspaper articles about Captain William Kerrigan, the fire investigator who said he’d never stop looking for my father’s killer. A Web search turned up a William Kerrigan residing in Sequim, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula two hours from Seattle. The listing said he was seventy-six. That seemed about right. I phoned and got his wife, who told me he was retired from the Seattle Fire Department. I made an appointment to see them Monday morning after my shift.
In the morning I listened a second and a third time to the message Vanessa left on my machine. I was falling in love with the sound of her voice, if not with Pennington herself, and I knew if I wasn’t careful I would lose my mind standing next to the answering machine. I could never have a woman like her and I knew it.
Feeling a large hole open up inside me, I erased the message.
55. GHOST IN THE BASEMENT
Sunday morning while we were waiting for the freshly waxed floors in the station to dry, I fabricated a list of boneheaded excuses to telephone Vanessa Pennington. I was almost hoping she wouldn’t answer so I could chalk up the call to good intentions and bad luck.
Secreted in the small study room at the base of the stairs, I dialed her home number from memory. “Hello?”
“Hi. This is Paul Wollf—”
“Paul! How nice to hear from you. I got the locks changed on Friday. No sign of the ‘J’ person. Nanna won’t be back until Tuesday, so I’m going to pick her up from the airport and help her get settled. Actually, I have the whole week off, so I’ll probably spend some time up there. I’m so glad you called.”
She knew from our earlier meetings I was no conversationalist, and I could tell she was trying to make it easier for me by yakking a mile a minute. Either that or she was as nervous as I was. Not likely.
You didn’t know better, you might have thought she was happy to hear from me.
“Do you have plans for tomorrow?” she asked. “Maybe we could meet for lunch somewhere . . . if you’d like.”
“I’m going up to Sequim tomorrow morning when I get off work. I don’t know. Maybe you’d want to take a day trip to the peninsula?” I couldn’t believe the words had come out of my mouth.
“Sure. That sounds nice. Would you like me to drive? Then if you have a rough shift tonight, you can sleep in the car.”
“That’d be great. I’m shooting for the eight forty-five ferry.”
“How about I meet you at the station? What time do you get off?”
We talked for half an hour longer, which, except for the evening we’d gone to the Harvard Exit together, easily made this the lengthiest conversation I’d had in ages with a woman I wasn’t about to screw. After I hung up I was floating on air. Not that anything was going to come of this.
The shift passed uneventfully until 0223 hours, when we were sent to a garage fire at Twenty-ninth Avenue and East Pike Street. Attack 6 and Ladder 3. No other units. Flames showing.
Gliniewicz made a right-hand turn off Martin Luther King Jr. Way onto Union, thinking he would make another left on Twenty-ninth. Except Twenty-ninth didn’t connect to Union. A minute later Towbridge chuckled when we got to the location first.
Despite the fact that they weren’t on the right street, Slaughter radioed the dispatcher, “Attack Six at Twenty-nine and East Pike. We have a single-story two-car garage fully involved. Laying a preconnect. Ladder Three, help with the lines.”
“They ain’t even here,” Towbridge said.
“He knows nobody listening on the radio knows that,” I said. “Except us.”
The fire was in a concrete-walled single-car garage with no vehicle inside, flames lurching out a missing window on the south wall. Massive amounts of smoke had already filled the street.
When Attack 6 finally rolled in behind us, Zeke climbed out of the crew cab and pulled the preconnect while I motioned Rideout to help.
