Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Kub and Finney exchanged looks, and Kub turned to assess the building again, effectively removing himself from the conversation. It was a head-in-the-sand move that surprised Finney.

  G. A. was holding a large clear plastic bag containing an article of navy-blue clothing. “We got lucky,” he said, flashing a mirthless grin. “We went over to the ER on the way here and talked to the fire victim. She said somebody came up behind her and put a bag over her head, knocked her senseless. When she woke up, she was on the second floor in the smoke.”

  “She see who it was?”

  “A fireman.”

  Finney paused. “She able to ID him?”

  “Oh, she knows the jerk. Not his name, but she can pick him out of a photo lineup.”

  “There’s always the possibility she’s covering for her own screw-up,” said Kub, without turning to look at them. “Say, she started a warming fire in there and it got out of hand. You know she was rambling. Some of what she said didn’t make sense.”

  G. A. gave Kub a disapproving look. “She was in pain and on morphine. But she’ll be a credible witness. People get burned like that, you get them on the witness stand, the jury wants to hang somebody real bad. And look at this,” he said, holding out the plastic bag. “My guess is the perp took it off and forgot about it. People get so simpleminded.” G. A. removed a jacket from the bag, and as he unfurled it, Finney realized it was nearly identical to one he kept in his clothing locker back at the station.

  He started to say something, but stopped himself as the scattered events of the morning began rearranging themselves in his mind. An anonymous caller had set up a meeting an hour before change of shift. The assignation had left Finney loitering near the fire location, where, but for the fog, he would have been seen by any number of early morning commuters. As far as he knew, the only person to see him was Annie, but what if Annie thought he was the one who’d mugged her? It would certainly explain the terrified look on her face when she saw him after the rescue, a look that he now realized was more than just pain.

  “You recognize this jacket?” G. A. asked, reaching into one of the pockets. He pinched a small green ticket stub.

  “That a laundry ticket?” Kub asked.

  Finney’s mouth went dry. He’d had his jacket dry-cleaned just last week, and Emerald City Cleaners used green tickets identical to the one G. A. was holding. Finney scanned the right sleeve, and there it was, a tiny blemish where he had accidentally splashed a drop of bleach a year ago.

  “Looks like mine,” Finney said.

  G. A. turned from the building and glowered at him. “What did you say?”

  “That looks like my jacket.”

  “This is your jacket?”

  “Looks like it.”

  G. A. glanced at Kub and then swung his gaze back onto Finney. “You running around setting fires on me, John?”

  “I’m just saying that looks like my jacket.” It was his jacket but he hadn’t worn it in weeks. The last time he saw it, it was in his locker back at the station.

  Kub said, “Could you have left it here the other day?”

  Finney said nothing. He knew he hadn’t been wearing it the other day.

  “If it had been out in the elements, it would be damp,” G. A. said. “Even if the fire had dried the top part, it was folded over pretty good and the bottom side would have been damp. It wasn’t. This was left here today. This morning.”

  G. A. Montgomery and Kub both looked at Finney for several beats before Finney said, “You don’t think I had anything to do with this.”

  “What I’ve learned over the years is that nobody’s ever quite what you imagine they are. This is the property you told us was set to burn. Maybe you didn’t think we were taking you seriously.”

  “You can’t mean that. Even if by some incredible stretch of improbability I did do this—which I didn’t—I wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave anything at the scene.”

  “You’re saying somebody else was stupid enough to leave your jacket here?”

  “If I’d set this, why would I come back and drag Annie out?”

  “Any sick son of a bitch can get a sudden attack of conscience. Or you mighta got bit by the hero complex. You see a chance for a medal and you go for it. You couldn’t help yourself. I’ve seen that before. Maybe you even put her in there just so you could come back and save her.”

  “Someone took that jacket out of my station locker and planted it. Somebody knew I was talking to you about this place, and they wanted to discredit me.”

  “I’d say you’ve been discredited.”

  “You told somebody,” Finney said. “You must have given the address to somebody.”

  “Sure. I spoke to Charlie last night right after you left.”

  “Charlie Reese?”

  “I called him at home. You think the chief of the department set this fire and framed you for it?”

  “You tell him about my theory?”

  “I told him. He said he was going to set up a committee to look into it. As soon as he found the time.” G. A. rotated the toothpick around his mouth a couple of times. “I doubt he’ll find the time now.”

  “This was not my doing.”

  “Put yourself in my shoes. You tell us about this building. Next day it burns down. At the scene, we find your coat, which you claim was stolen from your locker, a locker, I might add, that’s in a secure fire station. You know the stairs are gone when nobody else seems to, and then you go off and make a lone-wolf rescue without telling anybody.”

  “I told Gary—”

  “And now the victim tells us she talked to a firefighter on the street before the fire. I’ll bet a nickel against a dollar you can’t account for your whereabouts before you signed into the daybook this morning.”

  Across the yard two firefighters were yelling at each other playfully, some sort of joke concerning their nervous wait at the drawbridge during the drive to the fire. Finney knew if he told G. A. where he’d been that morning, he’d be in handcuffs before he finished the sentence.

  “You were here, weren’t you?” G. A. asked.

  “I didn’t set this fire.”

  “Everybody knows that mentally you’ve been all over the map since Leary Way. Now you get turned down for lieutenant. I don’t blame you for getting a little pissy, trying to get back at the department.”

  “I didn’t do this. You know me.”

  “Do I? Does anybody know anybody? A serial killer gets arrested. His neighbors show up at the trial as character witnesses. Did they know him? Not any better than I know you.”

  “This is a setup. Can’t you see that?” He might have told them about the phone call last night, but then he would have had to admit he’d been here this morning.

  “Maybe next time you’ll listen when somebody tells you to stop poking around a fire that’s already been investigated.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means if you hadn’t had your head up your ass for the last few months, this might not have happened. Plenty of people warned you to get your act together.”

  “I’m sure John has an explanation,” Kub said.

  G. A. stared into Finney’s eyes for a long while and then, bored with it, turned and strode away. Chewing gum madly, Kub palmed his skull and gave Finney a worried look. “Jesus, John. What the hell’s going on?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Did you light that fire?”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t see that old woman this morning?”

  “I didn’t light the fire.”

  “It’s beginning to look like you did.”

  “What he’s got is circumstantial.”

  “Hate to tell you this, John, but most arson cases are based on circumstantial evidence. For your sake, I hope that old woman doesn’t ID you. With the coat, the fact that you were talking about this place, your bad feelings towards the administration . . . Fact is, I could just about guarantee a conviction on
that much circumstantial evidence. Unless you have a rock-solid alibi. You want my advice? Get a lawyer. Make sure he’s good. When G. A. decides he’s going to hang somebody, they usually swing.”

  22. A HUG FROM THE WIDOW

  Finney headed down the dock toward his Pathfinder in the last of the afternoon light and spotted Emily Cordifis bustling along on a perfect collision course. She’d already seen him, so it was too late to hide. On the water there was no place to run from widows.

  For eighteen years she’d been like a mother to him. Now when he saw her, all he could think about was her dead husband. Even though he knew the possibility that she would criticize him was almost nil, he flinched every time he saw her.

  The woman striding down the center of the wooden dock was thinner than he remembered, grayer, her posture neither as tall nor as straight as it had once been. Her hair was still cut into a youthful bob, though now it was shot through with gray. Her long jaw gave her a thoughtful and distinguished look. Her eyes were as steady as ever and so dark they were almost black. They looked at you and did not blink and looked some more until you thought they were reading your mind. They came across as friendly, sincere, and interested, and they were. At times Bill had jokingly said he’d caught a doe in the headlights and then married her.

  When he thought of Cordifis these days, Finney’s mind flooded with Bill’s last moments. Rarely his boisterous spirits or his raucous laugh. Rarely his storytelling or the pleasure he took in a practical joke. Never about the time he caught Balitnikoff napping and tied his shoelaces together, then hit the bell. Never about his knack of turning a bad day into one big joke.

  Aside from everything else rotten that had come out of Leary Way, the event had erased the living Bill Cordifis from Finney’s brain and replaced him with a corpse.

  Virtually every weekend the clan had done something together—boating, camping, barbecues. The daughters with their boyfriends, and later their husbands and kids, would be there. So would Bill’s cronies from the fire department. Guys who’d been alongside Bill when he coached his daughters’ softball teams. Friends he knew from the Masons. The Cordifis household had been a clubhouse.

  Bill was orphaned at an early age and afterward raised by a succession of indifferent relatives. Emily grew up with ten brothers and sisters. Coming from opposite poles, family was the one thing they both treasured above all else.

  Sixty years old and as thin as a rail, built with the same wide bony hips, protruding ribs, and flat chest as her three daughters, Emily’s dark eyes entertained a limpid look this afternoon.

  “Emily.”

  “John, I know I should have called. I can come back if you’re leaving.”

  “I was only going to the store. Nothing important. Come in. It’s good to see you.”

  “I know. You, too. You don’t come around anymore.”

  “No. I told you I wasn’t going to. Things are just . . .”

  “Sure. I know. But we miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “You’ve hurt yourself.” She was looking at his bandaged hand.

  “It’s nothing.” One of the pension doctors had put two stitches in the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. C-shift wouldn’t be off until seven-thirty the next morning, but Finney was home on temporary disability leave.

  Emily reached out and embraced him, the ribs in her back prominent under his palms. As always, she was spry and remarkably pretty.

  Emily embraced him for a long time. “You are so tense, John.”

  “Am I? It must be the dampness from living on the lake.”

  Once they were ensconced in Finney’s living room, he offered Emily a seat and a drink, both of which she declined. Dimitri eyed her warily from across the room, prepared to bolt at any sudden move.

  “You’ve done a lot with this place. It’s going to look nice,” she said.

  He glanced around. He’d taken the carpet up and hadn’t replaced it, exposing a wooden floor scarred with nail holes and scratches. There were tools scattered in the corner, a skill saw on the floor behind the couch, and next to one wall, unpacked cardboard boxes. The trim had been removed from around the doorways and windows where he had yet to paint. “I’m a little behind schedule. It should look better in about . . . twenty years.” He tried to laugh. It came out as half-burp and half-chuckle.

  “No. I can see it’s going to be quite nice.” They were quiet for a few moments.

  It was odd to be alone with her because the Cordifis clan had always done everything in clusters, the rowdy Christmas parties and the annual spring trip to Hawaii en masse. He could count on one hand the times he’d been alone in a room with Emily, mostly this past summer when they’d fallen into a reversal of roles, she striving to console him over her husband’s death, he desperately inconsolable.

  She’d aged. Her once-steady eyes had a haunted look. She’d given up whatever it was she’d done to keep her skin youthful, and her face was a skein of wrinkles, bags ballooning under her eyes. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I still expect to hear his voice booming up from the workshop in the basement, ‘When’s the eats, Babe?’ You know what bothers me more than anything? The house is so quiet.”

  “I wish—”

  “I know you do, John, but he’s in the Lord’s hands.” She sighed and let the silence widen around them like oil on a pool of water. After a few moments she said, “I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  “Anything you want, Emily. Anything at all. You know that.”

  Her eyes had a liquid sheen, seemed almost to glow in the dim light. “As a courtesy, I suppose, I was given one of the first copies of the fire department’s report, which won’t come out officially until sometime next week. I want you to read it, see if you can spot any inconsistencies, anything that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Emily, you know I’d do anything for you, but I’m not sure—”

  “They’re talking about units taking lines here and there and hydrant pressure and vertical ventilation, and I try to put this together with the story you and others told me, and I just get confused.” She pulled the report out of the tote bag she was carrying and handed it to him. It was the size of a small phone book, its heading in bold, black ink: SEATTLE FIRE, JUNE 7, 2000. “I need to know exactly how this relates to what you saw and remember, John. I need us to talk about this.”

  “Emily, I’d do anything for you, but I don’t know if I’m the person you want for this.”

  “You’re the only person, John. Bill said you had the best natural instincts of any firefighter he’d ever worked with. He told me if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you for the truth. He said you would know.”

  “He said that?”

  “Many times.”

  Finney wondered if Bill had had a premonition he was going to die.

  He wanted to help her, but what was she going to think after he was charged with arson? And he would be charged. He couldn’t tell her and he couldn’t turn her down.

  “I’ll need some time.”

  “Just read it and get back to me when you’ve come to a conclusion. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but it all seems so artificial, like a huge construct. It should be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some sort of meaning, but it’s just a bunch of loosely assembled facts that don’t jibe. At least not for me.”

  “I take it you discussed this with G. A. Montgomery?”

  “The report or my coming to you?”

  “Either.”

  “We talked about the report.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Well . . . I’ll be frank with you. He said it was basically your fault, but they didn’t spell it out because that wasn’t the fire department way.”

  “It was basically my fault? That’s what he said?”

  She nodded. “Don’t worry. I don’t believe that. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Thank you for your confidence.”

  They
listened as a floatplane landed on the lake. Dimitri stalked across the room in the way that some cats have, walking so heavily you could hear his feet strike the floor like padded hooves. Finney caught Emily looking at a picture on the wall, a photo taken five years earlier of the crew of Ladder 1. The six of them were in their dress blacks lined up in front of the truck on the ramp at Station 10, Cordifis in the middle with a somewhat bemused look on his face and Finney to his right looking serious as all get out. “I miss him so much,” she said.

  “I miss him, too. He was a tremendous guy.”

  “You’d think thirty-odd years would be enough of risking your neck. Enough taking the chance of contracting hepatitis or AIDS from a patient. Or TB. Enough of getting up three and four times a night to put out a bed fire or pick up some drunk off the sidewalk. But every time I brought up the possibility of retirement, he got mad at me.”

  “He made that station a great place to work, Emily. Everybody there loved him. I’ll read it and we’ll talk.”

  She kissed his cheek, and he walked her down the dock to her car, gave her another hug, and watched her drive off in Bill’s old Ford Bronco, the red IAFF union sticker in the center of the rear window.

  The report was in binder form with three large flat staples buttoning it together along the left edge. Three-quarters of an inch thick, it was printed on regulation typing paper, eight and a half by eleven inches.

  He began skimming the report while he ate dinner.

  23. THINGS THAT DID NOT GO WELL

  Oversized blue pages divided the report into sections: Table of Contents, Introduction, SFD Overview, Key Issues, Building History, FIU Report, FAC Report, Incident Overview, et cetera. The fire investigation unit report, G. A.’s investigation and determination that the fire had been accidental, as well as the Fire Alarm Center report that had been generated separately were included.

  Within the Conclusion section was a page labeled THINGS THAT WENT WELL. Another page was headed THINGS THAT DID NOT GO WELL. Finney thumbed to the latter.

  It was noted that the incident was short on manpower from the beginning. That heavy smoke in the vicinity obscured early reconnaissance of the buildings so that the first Incident Commander reported the building as being fifty by seventy-five feet, when in fact the warehouse portion alone was double that. The buildings on the north side of the complex contained the same approximate square footage. No other incoming units corrected Captain Vaughn’s initial miscalculation, probably because they had the same visibility problems he had, so that all night calculations were based on the original figure. It was mentioned that fans were put up and then taken down, thereby wasting valuable time. Nobody mentioned the lack of visibility inside the warehouse that the fans would have cleared.