Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  I was in the doorway, Slaughter at his desk about seven feet away. The thick glasses. The shock of hair. The Fuller brush mustache. That way of holding himself that told you he knew what the world was about and had licked most of it.

  “Your dad meant a lot to me, Paul.” His eyes began watering over. “Your old man showed me the ropes. He took me up into my first attic fire.” Slaughter stared at his desk, his elbows looking like flesh-colored fudge as they pressed into the glass-covered desktop. “I always had a warm spot for you, Paul. Because of your father. I tried to look out for you.”

  “The way I remember it, you were on your way to firing me.”

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt like your old man.” He looked up at me. “Nobody even knew he was down there. That was the worst part.”

  We looked at each other for a few moments before the bell hit. Aid tones. It was for Attack 6. Slaughter brushed past me, and I knew we would never speak of it again.

  61. IT’S MY PARTY AND I CAN CRY IF I WANT TO

  We parked Ladder 3 across the street from Station 10, a four-story concrete station on the corner of Second and Main in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square area. A gaggle of tourists traipsed down the sidewalk on their way to view what was left of the Seattle that had been buried after the great fire in 1889.

  Parked in and around the intersection outside Ten’s were four or five television trucks with antenna dishes pointed at the sky.

  Eddings greeted us in the lobby, her eyes as bright as hot marbles in grease. Her nostrils whistled when she breathed, and when she opened her mouth to speak, a foul smell hit me. It occurred to me that carrying all that extra weight couldn’t be healthy, not after you added in the stress she shouldered as a fire department battalion chief.

  Gripping my arm tightly, Eddings escorted us to the elevator, which we took up to the second floor, where the firefighters’ living quarters were. She walked me past the beanery, the TV room, and the handball court, past the weight room and down the corridor to the large windowless meeting room clogged with reporters. A current of electricity buzzed through the room.

  The chief of the department, Hiram Smith, was standing next to the podium at the far end of the room, as was Chief Hertlein, who caught my eye with a mixture of triumph and surly smugness.

  The room grew hushed. Somebody whispered, “Here he is.” All heads turned. For a split second I was confused.

  Eddings pulled me along to the front of the room, where I immediately slipped into a panic.

  Chief Smith was a jovial man with dozens of dirty jokes at his disposal at any given moment and the W. C. Fields nose and spider face veins of a longtime drunkard. He was easygoing and the troops loved him, as did the press.

  Chief Smith looked at me and said, “Thanks for coming.”

  Hertlein knew enough about me to realize privacy was what I treasured most. If he hadn’t engineered this spectacle, he’d had a hand in it.

  It took Smith a few moments to silence the room. “Excuse me? People? It has lately come to our attention that one of the four or five identifiable arsonists working in the past few weeks has a modus operandi nearly identical to an arsonist who, as far as we know, set his last fire in the late Seventies. We lost a good man back in the Seventies. His name was Neil Wollf. I knew him. He was a fine fire officer. His son is standing beside me today. Ladder Three’s own Lieutenant Paul Wollf.”

  They began asking questions without prompting. “Lieutenant Wollf. How are you reacting to all this publicity?” For the first time, I realized what Eddings had dragged me into. They expected me to give a press conference!

  “The publicity? I’m not sure how to take it,” I stammered.

  “Is any of this bringing up old wounds?” The question came from Tony Webber, who was standing in front, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Do you believe this is the same arsonist who killed your father? And if so, in light of what happened to your crew the other night, do you think he’s trying to kill you too?”

  I stared at Webber for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to reply, Chief Smith turned to me and said, “The man asked you a question, Lieutenant.”

  Thirty seconds.

  I could see where they were coming from. They’d been riding this story for weeks, and the news had been the same. There was a fire. The fire department put it out. There was another fire. There was X number of dollars of damage. A few injuries. The pyro was still out there. No suspects. Copycats were discovered and some were arrested, but the fires continued. Now suddenly there was a new angle. The pyro was being linked to the man who’d killed my father twenty-five years ago. And here I was, Paul Wollf, battling fires in the same part of town where my father had died. There was definitely a new twist to it. You almost couldn’t blame them for adding in all that crap about Alfred killing our mother and my brother killing Alfred. After all, the best headlines were always written in blood.

  As the silence lengthened, other reporters began peppering me with questions. “Are you still in touch with your brother?” “What was the domestic disturbance on the police blotter at your address this past week?” The last question came from Tony Webber. As long as he had the protection of the pack, I could see his contributions getting nastier and nastier.

  Flashbulbs had been going off in my face sporadically since I’d come into the room, and there were at least four video cameras focused on me. My throat was dry, my armpits wet. When it became clear that I was not going to answer, Webber shouted over a flurry of other questioners, “What do you remember about the morning your mother was murdered?”

  His words muted the assembly like a cannon shot. The room grew so quiet I could actually hear the motor in one of the cameras. Eddings’s nostrils whistled with the inhalation and exhalation of each breath. I turned to her. “Chief, I’m taking emergency leave. I’ll be gone the rest of the shift.”

  I walked to the back of the room and out the doorway, followed by Towbridge, Rideout, and Crapps, the detail. On the way down to the apparatus, Towbridge said, “I wouldn’t have answered any of that shit either.”

  I found his comment strangely comforting.

  At the station I signed myself off duty in the daybook, retrieved my lunch from the refrigerator, got my jacket, and left.

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I picked it up, listened for a moment, and racked the receiver. It rang all morning and most of the afternoon. In a funk, I watched Raintree County with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint, and Lee Marvin. I watched National Velvet with Mickey Rooney and a young Elizabeth Taylor. The latter movie never failed to move me to tears. I’d noticed that whenever I was depressed, I turned to early Elizabeth Taylor movies.

  Vanessa called, and I hung up before I realized who she was. I thought about calling her back but didn’t.

  At six Vanessa phoned again. “Paul? I called earlier, but we got disconnected.”

  “I’m kind of in a bad mood right now. Maybe we could talk later.”

  “Sure. I saw you on the news. I thought you might want somebody to talk to. Call if you change your mind.”

  I wasn’t going to call.

  I’d been on a John Wayne jag recently, so I watched The Searchers, The Shootist, then fell asleep in the middle of the black-and-white version of Patricia Pennington’s Duel at Water Creek. There was something soothing in the black-and-white moralizing of a B western. A little after nine P.M. the phone rang for maybe the fiftieth time since I’d come home. “Will you accept a collect call from—”

  “Yes, operator.”

  I’d just slipped my copy of The Graduate into the video recorder, thinking to myself I’d chosen that particular movie because it was about a young man journeying from a summer of numbness into a life of genuine feeling, while in my own life I seemed to be reversing that journey.

  “Neil. How’re you doing?”

  “I saw you on the news. How are you doing?”

  “Fine.”


  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I made a trade.”

  “You’re sitting in the dark watching old movies, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t shit a shitter. Listen to me, Paul. This isn’t the end of the world. I know how private you are. But you can blow this off.”

  “Did you read what they wrote? They practically called our mother a goddamn hooker!”

  “You got two options here. Blow it off or let it eat your heart out. I say fuck ’em.”

  “Don’t give me that prison psychology crap, Neil.”

  “Listen to me. Nobody rents out space inside your brain but you.”

  “You talk the talk, but look where you are.” The line was silent for a few moments. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “No. You’re right. Where I am is a direct result of thinking I didn’t have any control over my thoughts and feelings.”

  “Neil, I had no business saying that. I know damn well it was an accident of fate that you’re where you are and I’m where I am. I think about it every day.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it could just as easily have been me going to Echo Glen for what we did to Alfred.”

  “Don’t ever say that! I did the time and it’s over. You understand?”

  “Neil—”

  “Hey. This is what I’m going to tell you, and then I’m going to hang up. Listen close. Somebody says something about our family, tell ’em to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Around here people are already wiping their butts with that newspaper.”

  62. ROCKY IN THE PARKING LOT

  By six in the morning my machine had collected twenty-two messages. It took twenty minutes to listen to the first eleven and clear them. Most were from the media, including one from Tony Webber, who seemed to be under the illusion there was a bond between us. “Lieutenant Wollf. I’m guessing you probably weren’t happy about everything you read yesterday. I’m free for breakfast, so this’ll be a chance to give your side of the story. I’ll call in the morning and we can arrange a time and place.”

  I erased it and moved to the next. “You and your newspaper buddies. You think you know everything.” That was all it said. I was pretty sure it was the pyromaniac.

  There were a lot of ways to kill somebody with fire, and if you were trapping firefighters who were already putting themselves at risk in fairly predictable patterns, the task was that much simpler.

  Apparently the newspaper coverage hadn’t pleased him any more than it had pleased me. What his gripe was, I could only guess, but then, people who set fires and jacked off in public were not easy to understand.

  There was a TV truck in the parking lot, which I had to assume was there to ambush me, so instead of going out front to collect my papers, I read The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the Internet.

  SEATTLE FIRE LIEUTENANT REFUSES TO COOPERATE WITH MEDIA.

  The PI was the primary offender today, as if they needed to catch up after yesterday’s greater discretion.

  They made it sound as if my mother had been a linchpin in a circle of lowlifes who drank and drugged and partied and tricked and neglected their kids and did God-knows-what-else. Maybe some of that was true, but our mother had never taken drugs and never tricked, and she’d loved us right up until the morning Alfred plunged the kitchen knife into her throat.

  When I’m hurt, bored, or in trouble, I clean.

  I scrubbed the bathroom, mopped the kitchen floor, did three loads of laundry, articles of bedding I thought Susan and her friends might have touched the other day. I washed up and prepared a vegetable omelet, using a recipe I’d found on the Internet. I took my time with all of this, hoping the day would go faster if I slowed things down.

  It was noon when I thought to turn on the television. Our local cable channel carried a crime network piped in from Atlanta. I was in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea when a big-eyed, bleach-blond news anchor named MacKenzie began speaking to an on-the-scene reporter in Seattle named Rocky. I recognized Lake Washington in the background before I realized they were broadcasting from the parking lot outside.

  “Rocky. There have been new developments in Seattle over the past twenty-four hours. Tell us more about what’s going on.”

  “Well, MacKenzie. There’s been one primary pyromaniac working Seattle for several weeks now. And that’s what they call them out here on the West Coast, MacKenzie—pyromaniacs. Now I looked up pyromania in the dictionary as I was preparing this piece, and it is described as an excessive desire to set fire to things. That’s certainly what’s been going on here, MacKenzie, because over the past two weeks there have been over a hundred and fifty arson fires, and even though most of those fires were caught in their incipient stages and put out by the fire department, or tapped, as they call it, some of them got going pretty good, and so far the damage estimate, including overtime for police and fire investigators, is well into the millions.”

  “Rocky, there’s more than one arsonist working. Isn’t that correct?”

  “That’s right, MacKenzie. They’re not sure how many. They have the primary arsonist, who’s working in the Central Area, a part of town that is mostly poor and African American. Then they have at least four other firebugs, who are thought to be copycats and have been active in other parts of the city.”

  “What’s the thinking on the relationship between the primary arsonist and this fire lieutenant, Paul Wollf?”

  “Well, MacKenzie, even the local reporters are finding this man, Wollf, to be something of an enigma. We do know this. He’s been in the Seattle Fire Department a little under nine years. Three years ago he became a lieutenant. MacKenzie, after that the record gets a little murky. It is said that he had the top score on the promotional register, but on the other hand, his personal relationships with his superiors have sometimes been, let me say, on shaky ground. In fact, there’s been a pretty strong rumor circulating in the fire department over the past few months that Lieutenant Wollf actually got into a fistfight with a chief and knocked him out. I haven’t been able to get any official comment on this, but it’s widely thought to be true.

  “Also, local reporters have dug up some interesting information. His father was likewise a lieutenant in the fire department and lost his life in an arson fire twenty-five years ago. MacKenzie, the locals here now believe the pyromaniac working the Central Area is the same pyromaniac who set the fire in which Lieutenant Wollf’s father lost his life.”

  “Rocky, you’re not suggesting Lieutenant Wollf is fighting fires set by the same man who killed his father twenty-five years ago?”

  “MacKenzie, that’s exactly what a local wag suggested in one of the Seattle papers yesterday morning. And that brings us to some of the more bizarre aspects of this already bizarre case of fire-setting and murder. At this point in time we have no idea what the lieutenant or the arsonist knows about the other. We do know that when this lieutenant was ten years old, his mother was killed by her live-in boyfriend, and then the boyfriend was killed by Wollf’s brother in a bizarre incidence of domestic violence.”

  “It is bizarre. Rocky? What does Lieutenant Wollf say about all this?”

  “That’s just it, MacKenzie. At a hastily called press conference at fire department headquarters yesterday morning, Wollf refused to answer questions.”

  “Rocky. We have a tape of that news conference. Let’s air that now.”

  I hadn’t seen myself on a video camera since the last time I walked through a television store and wasn’t especially happy with the way I looked then. This was worse.

  “It’s a sad case all around, MacKenzie, and getting sadder each time there’s another fire. Meanwhile, the men and women of the Seattle Fire Department continue to battle on valiantly.”

  “Rocky, is there any chance you might speak to Wollf in the near future?”

  “We’re outside his condo right now, and we’re sure going to try, MacKenzie.”
<
br />   “Thank you for that update, Rocky.”

  63. TESTING THE WATERS WITH A BAD BOY

  At four-thirty I picked up the receiver when I heard Vanessa’s voice on my answering machine. She was right. I needed somebody to talk to. It was hard to believe how good it was to hear a friendly voice.

  “Hey. Listen. I know you said you’d call if you wanted to talk, but I just happened to be in the neighborhood to visit my grandmother when I thought of you.”

  “Vanessa. You’re not that good of a liar. You called to cheer me up, and I’m glad you did. I have to warn you, though, I’m in a pretty lousy mood.”

  “After all that crap in the papers, who wouldn’t be?”

  “Since you just happen to be in the neighborhood anyway, maybe you’d like to stop by for a while? I could use some company,” I said, feeling grateful I could get the words out.

  “I’ll be right over. How about if I pick up some groceries and make dinner?”

  “I don’t know if I feel like eating, but that sounds fine.”

  She arrived at my door thirty minutes later with two grocery bags, droplets of rainwater from the drizzle outside highlighting her hair and coat like dust under a diamond polisher.

  I checked to see if anybody’d followed her, then locked the door behind her.

  “Expecting company?” she asked.

  I grunted.

  “By the way. Did you know there are news people standing in your parking lot like buzzards on a fence. I mean birds on a fence. Did I say buzzards?”

  I laughed for the first time in two days.

  She slid the bags onto the kitchen countertop. “How long have they been out there?”

  “I spotted them this morning.”

  “What happens when you try to get to your car?”

  “I don’t.”

  “No wonder you’re in such a bad mood.”

  Vanessa began working on a stir-fry with chicken and rice. I stood at the sink, where I diced a tomato and chopped onions, a bell pepper, a cucumber, then washed lettuce for a salad. Neither of us spoke. She’d kicked off her shoes and lost her coat. After I cut my finger and swore, she told me to sit down. I turned on the gas fireplace and flopped on the couch in the living room near the windows to the deck. I have no idea how long I sat staring at the fireplace.