by Earl Emerson
Kerrigan gave me the kind of eyeballing people give you when they’re trying to decide whether you’re bonkers. “What makes you say that?”
“The Shasta cans are back. Plus, he told me.”
“He told you? What do you mean, he told you?”
“It’s a long story.”
Kerrigan mulled it over. You thought about it, it did sound preposterous.
“I was hoping you’d tell me about the night my father died.”
“At the time we hadn’t lost a firefighter in quite a few years, so it shocked us.” Kerrigan looked out the window wistfully. I could see the emotion welling up in his eyes. My father’s death had been the seminal event in this man’s career, just as it had been the seminal event in my life, though I couldn’t recall the emotion the way he did. “Your mother, Emma? At the memorial service she lost all the strength in her legs. She got so weak, she practically had to be carried. Watching her about tore my heart out. I never seen anybody suffer so much.”
“She suffered for a long time.”
“What a damn shame,” he said, shaking his head. “I hate to hear that. Anyway, this arsonist started working, and before we knew it we had copycats. We figured about six of ’em. Are you in FIU? Is that why you’re here?”
“No, sir. I’m on Three Truck. I’m here because he killed my father and he’s in our district, playing cat and mouse. Getting closer all the time. Last week he booby-trapped a house so the roof would cave in. Two of my guys almost got killed.”
“Jesus. That don’t sound good.”
“No, sir.”
“What it boils down to is they start fires because they like to. Pyromaniacs. They’re weak personalities, ineffectual in the real world, the kind of people who get laughed at. Screwups who blame their problems on others.”
“Can you tell me about the night my father died?”
“It was wintertime . . . God, I remember you both at the memorial service. Were you the older one?”
“The little guy.”
“Sure. You kept taking off your clip-on tie. A woman kept putting it back on.”
“That would have been my grandmother.”
“The night your pop died, Engine Seven had maybe twelve, fourteen calls. Running from one to the next. He used matches or a cigarette lighter. He had a tendency to set two or three small fires in a vicinity. While we were fighting those, he’d wander off and set more. Mostly he worked the Central District. Once in a while Capitol Hill. He left these Shasta diet black cherry cans. One night your father left his crew while they were working a ‘shed in the red’ on Thirtieth and Pike. The crew figured he was scouting for more fires. Maybe ten minutes later somebody spotted smoke a block away. Your father still hadn’t come back, but Engine Seven took the run anyway. It was close enough, they figured your father would see the rig. It turned out to be a basement fire in a little crackerbox house.”
“Twenty-ninth and Pike, right off Union?”
“That’s the place. It was coming out the windows by the time they spotted it. You couldn’t even see the floor. Shit piled to the ceiling. The old lady lived there was a pack rat.”
“You ever figure out how my father got in that basement?”
“Nobody ever did. Engine Thirty was helping with the overhaul, dragging smoldering material out. Mattresses. Furniture. He’d been missing about an hour when Stanley Bumstead began wading around down there. Bumstead found your dad all curled up into a ball with his back to the wall like somebody waiting for a bus.”
Kerrigan’s eyes began to water over. I was touched by how much of this he’d taken personally. I wished he’d come around when we were kids. It would have meant a lot to know this gentle and thoughtful man had been mourning our father.
Kerrigan sat upright. “We hoped he went fast. It’s always hard to know for sure. I guess the fire was rolling around in there for a good little while. I think he realized he wasn’t getting out and just went over to the corner and sat down.”
The thought of my father panicking in that tiny basement chilled me to the quick. You get lost. You get burned. You panic. No way around that. I actually began to go into shock thinking about it. I wanted to tell Kerrigan to stop talking, that I thought I was going down, but I didn’t do either one. The last time I felt this woozy I’d been hit in the back of the skull with a hardball by Billy Winston. Tenth grade.
“I’ve talked to firefighters who came close to burning to death. Both of them went into a sleeplike state, so I don’t think after the beginning he was hurting much.”
I figured this last was a fiction Kerrigan had been telling himself over the years to make himself feel better.
For twenty-five years I’d wondered about my father’s last minutes. By the time I was eight, Neil had instilled in me a legend of our father as the city’s biggest hero. Then, between ourselves, we propagated a religion of hatred, vowing revenge against the pyromaniac.
Pyromaniac. I was six when I learned the meaning of that word.
58. HE’S GOING TO DIE ANYWAY
“Was my father wearing a mask?” I asked Kerrigan.
“Naw. We had them on the rigs, but you were a sissy if you went for a mask before you’d taken your share of smoke. The second-in group might use them after the first crew knocked the fire down. The thinking was, the extra forty or fifty seconds it would take to put your mask on would let the fire grow too big. Of course, what they found out later was that you go in there without a mask, choking and puking, you weren’t going to put out much fire. You took that extra minute to put your mask on, then you could breathe and think and the fire went right out. It turned out being macho was the worst thing to do, but none of us knew that back then.”
“Did you ever think maybe he surprised the firebug as he was starting a fire and got blindsided?”
“There was no way to know one way or t’other. We took pictures of the crowds. We interrogated several young males but never got anywhere.”
I told him about the cross-dresser I’d chased. I told him the story of the second man in the alley. I told him our pyro said my father fell into a basement window well after getting into a fight with another fireman. “Is there any possibility he’s telling the truth?”
“Whoa now. You’re not thinking a fireman pushed your father in?”
“That’s what our suspect told me.”
“The only firefighters in civvies would have been in fire investigation. Myself and a few others, and most of us had been downtown until after they found the body.”
“Who else was around from FIU that night?”
“Dan Traffic. Carl Whitney. Steve Slaughter.”
“Lieutenant Slaughter?”
“Steve, yeah. He was there.”
“You know where these other guys are?”
“Traffic is dead. He had a heart attack six months after he retired. Whitney is living in Europe. He got pissed off at the federal government and left the country. Slaughter’s still around. Isn’t he something?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Whooo. Of all the unfinished business in my life, that’s the thing I’d give my left nut to have turn out different. Your father.”
“Did Steve know my father?”
“Hasn’t he told you any of this?”
“No, sir.”
“Your father was Steve’s first officer. Your old man nursed him through his probation up at Twenty-five’s. He worshiped your old man. You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
Kerrigan stared at the floor. “So this cross-dresser gives you some song and dance. Do you have any reason to believe him?”
“At the time, he thought I was going to kill him.”
“Were you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re going to spoil the rest of your life for some asshole’s going to die anyway?”
“We’re all going to die anyway. It’s just a matter of how and when.”
Kerrigan remained silent for a moment. “If he thought you were going to
kill him, he might have been making up stories.”
“Maybe.”
“Whatever you think, there’s nobody your father could have been fighting that night except the arsonist.”
On the way out the door, Bill said, “I meant to tell you how sorry I was to hear about your mother. That was a bad way to end. I thought about you boys when it happened. I know that was a long time ago, but I am sorry.”
“Thanks.”
It wasn’t until almost two hours later when we were sunning ourselves on the windswept deck of the Bainbridge ferry that Vanessa said, “Do you mind if I ask about your mother?”
“I don’t mind. Actually, I’d like to tell somebody. I never have.”
59. I WASN’T ALWAYS THE NICE GUY
YOU SEE IN FRONT OF YOU TODAY
Vanessa looked at me with stark expectation in her gray-blue eyes. It was true I’d never told anyone this story before, and a part of me wondered why I was telling her now.
“My mother was raised by the Captain Queeg of fathers. She eloped at seventeen basically to get out of the house. That marriage lasted four months. Our father, her second husband, had not been the love of her life so much as a second ticket out of the house, which she’d been forced to move back into after her first marriage failed. She didn’t really fall in love with our father until a few years later. He knew she didn’t love him when they got married, but he’d been determined to win her over. And he did. The only thing he wouldn’t do for her was quit the fire department.
“After a year of marriage my brother, Neil, came along. Three years later I was born. When my father was at work, my mother didn’t like being alone at night with two babies in the house. She didn’t like the stories our father brought home about crispy critters or the guys he worked with or the things he’d seen. I remember a dog we used to have named Gibbs who got hit by a car when our dad was at work, and I remember my mother crying like a baby over it for days.
“Not long after my father made lieutenant, an arsonist began setting fires in the Central District. At one of the fires, my father got trapped in a house and died. My mother fell apart. It was just like Gibbs getting hit by the car all over again, only this time she didn’t stop crying for a year. These days they would call it clinical depression. About a year after my father died, our mother began drinking. She just . . . when my father died, something broke inside her.
“She loved Neil and me, but she couldn’t cope and couldn’t take care of us the way she should have. My brother and I got into trouble. We used to steal stuff. Neil got a BB gun and he must have broken out every car windshield in a radius of two miles. In the end, our mother fell in with this man named Alfred T. Osbourne. Alfred lived with us maybe six weeks before he got into one last drunken fight with my mother and ended up killing her.”
“Oh, no.”
“There’s more. If you lived in town you might remember the thirteen-year-old who got sent up for murdering his mother’s lover?”
“It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“I was ten. The thirteen-year-old was my brother.”
“Oh, no,” she said again. “But this man killed your mother. Surely it was justifiable.”
“Neil ended up with a court-appointed attorney who drank. It’s a long story.”
“So you went to live with your grandfather?”
“Right. He was a disciplinarian, and I was the kid raised by wolves. We didn’t get along.”
“What happened to you?”
“I became a firefighter, rescued a famous movie star, met her granddaughter, and we took trips.” I grinned.
“No, really.”
“I lived with my grandfather and grandmother for a few months. Then I lived with my uncle Elmo, where I lasted until I was almost twelve. Back to my grandparents for a month. I got passed around like a bad cold. I guess I deserved it. I was a jackass. I used to steal things. I guess what I’m saying is I wasn’t always the nice guy you see in front of you today.”
She laughed at my lame joke.
60. PEOPLE SAY YOUR MOTHER WAS A WHORE
Katie Fryer was working a trade for Zeke on the tailboard of the engine. It was January 2.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if your mother was really a prostitute,” Katie said.
“Where did you hear that?”
“They’re talking about it in the beanery.”
“Who is?”
“Everybody. Haven’t you seen this morning’s papers?”
The irony was that until today I’d been relentlessly scouring every local newspaper for news of the arsonist, listening to news on a transistor radio as I walked to work, checking the wire services and the websites for the local papers four and five times a day. The arsons had been an enormous ongoing threat to the city, and each day the letters-to-the-editor columns and radio call-in shows were flooded with exhortations for more investigators, along with threats of renewed vigilante patrols, talk of recalling the fire chief and the mayor. It was unlikely any new angle would not be seized by the dogs of the local media. I began to get a sick feeling I was that new angle.
I knew whatever was in the papers was bad by the way the lieutenant I replaced that morning stared. Joe Williams wasn’t sensitive enough to have figured out on his own that I would be wounded by the articles; somebody must have told him, which meant they were all in the other room talking about my feelings. The idea made me cringe. “Hey,” Williams said cautiously.
“How’s it goin’?”
“Fine.”
Moving through the early morning routine on the apparatus floor, I could feel adrenaline pumping through me in amounts it never did on a fire alarm. Much as I wanted to dash into the beanery and read the newspapers, I’d learned long ago not to let anybody know I cared.
Eventually, I sequestered myself in my office with an armful of papers. There were two articles in The Seattle Times, one of which began on the front page. I recognized the author: Anthony R. Webber, the reporter who’d found me at the garage fire the other night.
Webber started by recapping the events of the past few weeks, the injuries to civilians and firefighters. He theorized freely that, because of the injuries and roof collapse, my crew was being targeted by the arsonist. When he asked Deputy Chief William Hertlein about it, Hertlein said, “No targeting, just inexperience. Some of our younger officers haven’t gained the skill to handle certain situations that come up.”
It was a public slap in the face from a man I’d KO’d in private.
Hertlein, who had burned Pickett and screwed us in Pennington’s mansion by turning off our fans, now claimed I lacked experience.
Further on, Webber drew a connection between my father’s death at the hands of an arsonist and the fact that his son was now a lieutenant in the SFD fighting a similar string of arson fires. “In 1978 Wollf’s father, who hadn’t been wearing an oxygen mask, was found dead in a burning basement.” Oxygen mask? Our tanks contained compressed air. Pure oxygen could make dirt burn.
The Times chronicled the fires my father fought twenty-five years ago, comparing that arson string to ours, comparing his career to mine. There were side-by-side photographs of my father and me. The head shots we’d each had taken for our fire department ID cards. We might have been twins in some sort of time-travel experiment.
Apparently the father-son-arsonist triangle wasn’t enough of a story, because there was also a sidebar about my mother’s fall from grace and her untimely death at the hands of Alfred T. Osbourne. About how, after my father’s death, she had turned to drink and ultimately to men to drown her sorrow. They made it seem as if she went from the funeral directly to the tavern, failing to mention the eighteen months when she didn’t leave her bedroom.
“Without Wollf’s calming influence, Emma Wollf soon became an habitué of the local tavern scene, sometimes bringing home paying customers to the cramped apartments where her two young boys were sleeping.”
Paying customers? I couldn’t hel
p but wonder if this peculiar slant on the story hadn’t come about because I’d refused to give Webber an interview.
In another sidebar titled the brothers, the Times capsulized our school records, including my expulsion from three different high schools for fighting. They listed Neil’s incarcerations, beginning with the one for the murder of Alfred T. Osbourne. They chronicled my career in the fire department, inserting quotes about me from unnamed sources inside the department. “Few close friends,” said one. “One of the most aggressive firefighters I’ve fought fire with.” “Has problems with authority.”
My life had been lived in a shell, and now the media crows had broken it open on the rocks of journalistic integrity.
I sat in the chair for a long time trying to breathe. Deep, heavy inspirations. Purposeful expirations. It could have been worse. There were things nobody knew about, things that mercifully would never appear in any paper. For instance, nobody knew about my drunk mother passing out on the freeway with two boys in the car; nobody had witnessed Neil reach over her shoulder to steer the car to the shoulder until we could revive her.
All morning I hid out in my office futzing about with paperwork and rereading the articles. Just after nine I got a call from a columnist with the King County Journal, the major paper serving the growing population east of Lake Washington. “When can I come out and interview you? I want to ask about the arsonist.”
“You can’t.” I hung up.
Next came a television producer who wanted me to drive downtown and appear on the noon news. I refused that too. I was rude to them all. I couldn’t help it.
At ten I knocked on the office next door. “Steve?”
“Yeah.” He had a dressing on his right wrist, where the handcuffs had marked him a week ago.
“Your burns okay?”
“What d’ya want?”
“I spoke to Bill Kerrigan on Monday.”
“Who?”
“Kerrigan. Retired Fire Investigation.”
“Yeah, Bill. Sure. I used to know him. Hell of a fisherman.”
“He said you knew my father.”
“A lot of guys knew him.”
