by Earl Emerson
Using two fingers and a thumb, Gil Finney expertly flicked his cigarette stub onto the surface of the lake, where it sizzled for a fraction of a second and went out. A gull swooped down and swallowed it.
Sixty-two years of age, his father had lately become overly solicitous of the welfare of others, something Tony had once, after a couple of beers, theorized was a stunt to get people to think about him. Finney preferred to believe his father’s illness had actually transformed him into a better human being, just as Leary Way had in many ways transformed Finney into a lesser human being. Or so he reasoned.
Finney and his father had endured many years when they were barely speaking, and one where they didn’t speak at all, but time and circumstance had pretty much crayoned over the bad memories. These days Finney was glad for the visits and found, despite his own egocentrism, his father was often in his thoughts.
Gil Finney wore faded khaki slacks, deck shoes, and an old SFD windbreaker zipped to the neck. His wife, Finney’s mother, had bought him a goose-down, Eddie Bauer ski jacket, but he preferred the worn and the familiar.
After stepping jauntily through the front door, Gil Finney sank onto the leather sofa, picked up the remote control, and, with the speed of a startled cat running across a piano keyboard, began flipping through channels. “What do you hear about making lieutenant, young man?”
Finney had hoped somebody else would be there to face the heartache in his father’s eyes when he found out, but apparently, his old man’s connections to the department notwithstanding, nobody had had the temerity to spill it. Now that they were in the same room together, he realized he couldn’t do it either. At least not now. “All we can do is wait.”
“Whatcha doin’ now? Looks like you’re lazing around the house like a three-dollar chippy.”
“I would never ask for more than two dollars.”
“What? You have a bad shift at Twenty-six’s?” The TV remote in one hand, an issue of Kayaker magazine in the other, Gil Finney turned and looked at his son. His steel-gray, ball-bearing eyes squinted out from under caterpillar eyebrows. “Hey, you know what I just realized the other day? Reese was one of my boots. I remember him now. He used to walk around like he had his underwear on backwards.” He laughed, and the phlegm danced deep in his lungs.
“I know. I came in with him.”
“Thought I was going to have to pink-slip the little bastard, but then he had his first fire and didn’t stain his shorts too bad, so I let him alone. Hey, somebody said they saw you with Diana Moore.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d stay away from women in the department. Women are genetic cowards. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“I’ve heard your theory.”
Gil Finney’s bigotry had grown worse since his retirement. Finney guessed that all those years of being forced to pretend he was fair made him feel as if he had decades of hypocrisy to make up for. These days he rarely spoke of the department without bad-mouthing minorities, his most virulent harangues reserved for women.
“They aren’t tough enough,” he said. “They can’t help it. They’re bred to protect the nest. They hide with the young. God made ’em that way. It’s the rooster who’s out there fighting. It takes a cock to be a firefighter. And not a strap-on plastic cock.”
Before his retirement, the old man had followed all the political dictates of a fire department in one of the most liberal cities on the coast, but privately he’d always believed the department of forty years ago was the only department worth saving—all white, all male.
“Maybe I should go down and rattle little Charlie’s cage for you. There’s no reason you couldn’t be a lieutenant before the day is out.”
Finney tried to sound casual. “I’d rather you didn’t, Dad.”
“You know I want to see this happen before it’s too late.”
“I know you do.”
“By God, both you boys are going to end up battalion chiefs. Didja know Tony’s already studying for the chief’s test?” Finney knew it was another of Tony’s falsehoods, but he had no intention of exposing him. “You’re number one on the list. You’ll be number one on the captain’s list when you take that. This is what I’ve dreamed for you, John. You and Tony both. Ever since you were little. Remember when I used to take you down to Ten’s and you used to scramble over Ladder One? ‘Daddy, I be fireman.’ ” He sat back on the couch and reminisced silently for a few moments. “Believe me, John, a straight-arrow like you will fly through the ranks.”
Fire department culture was odd, Finney thought. Getting in, they called it, an expression that typified how most firefighters felt about the job.
They were in.
Everybody else was out.
As a child, he’d been fascinated by the sense of danger, the sirens, the smell of smoke off his father’s hair and clothing when he came home from work, the soot in his ears, the stories he told, the rough-and-tumble men who joked with him when his father took him to the station, the absurd confidence and astonishing resourcefulness with which they and his father attacked anything even remotely resembling an emergency.
Finney had been a sensitive boy, easily offended by his father’s careless remarks. He’d tried college; his grades had been good but he’d lacked a goal. He’d worked on the assembly line at Boeing and then at Puget Sound Paint, where he was bumped from one of the road crews to the front office after only nine months. He wanted to think of it as a lark when he applied for the SFD, but it turned out to be more.
“I got something for you off the news last night,” his father said, holding a videotape aloft. “You know a man named Patterson Cole?”
“He owned Leary Way.”
“Check it out.”
A cheesy local gossip program had done a piece on Patterson Cole’s ongoing divorce proceedings. The eighty-three-year-old Cole had been entangled in a much-publicized breakup with a woman forty-eight years his junior who’d been a waitress at Hooters when they met. She was disputing their prenuptial agreement, claiming she’d been coerced into signing it under false pretenses. Cole countered that she’d been married and divorced four times but told him she’d never been married at all, that she told him she wanted children when it turned out she couldn’t conceive and knew it.
There was film footage of the couple in less litigious times, Cole, an unremarkable octogenarian, stooped, withered, his hair stringy and unkempt, invariably in a dark suit and red tie; his cartoon wife a head taller, massively blond, massively busty, in high heels and tight skirts. In most pictures she clutched a cliché toy poodle, the dog’s collar matching her outfit. Cartoons, both of them.
She claimed Cole had tried to kill her by pushing her off the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Tower, that he’d had her Mercedes torched, twice tried to poison her dog, sicced private investigators on her, bugged her phone, slapped her, and even tried to bribe her mother to marry him so he would be her ex-husband and stepfather at the same time, anything to upset her and ruin her life.
If even a fraction of what his wife was accusing him of was true, he was a reprobate, and Finney knew reprobates were capable of a lot of things, not the least of which was arson. As the show concluded, Finney got up to remove the tape.
“Your buddy is next.”
“My buddy?”
Looking as sure of himself as a matador who’d just stabbed the bull, the chief of the fire department, Charlie Reese, was giving a short statement about Riverside Drive: “I’ve been working closely with my fire investigation team, and we’ve identified the culprit in the Riverside Drive arson. As soon as we’re finished tying up some loose ends, we’ll make an arrest.” Reese fended off all questions, then added, “I can only say we were as surprised as you will be.”
His father shut off the tape and began changing channels. “What does he mean by that?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“You must have heard something on the grapevine.”
Finney shrugged.
&nb
sp; “Reese—what a little shit!” his father said. “In the old days we would have made short work of him. You been to the Downtowner. Went in there on a bed fire once. Wrapped the mattress up in a tarp, me and a guy named Coghill, an old gummer. Had a heart attack about two years ago. Halfway down the hallway the tarp came unwound, and the mattress popped out like a spring and bounced off the wall. Fire and smoke everywhere. Coghill hauled that mattress by one corner and pitched it out a window. I think we were on the fourth floor. It caught some oxygen and flamed up like a meteor on the way down, landed on Chief Ballantine’s car. Coghill and I just about died laughing. Chief Ballantine. Remember him? Used to write charges on people if their boots weren’t polished? He’s living in Mexico now with some little señorita.” His father looked at Finney and held the look for a few seconds.
Ballantine had died of brain cancer a few months after retiring. Finney wondered if his father was purposely rewriting history or he’d actually forgotten. Maybe the cancer was eating away at his brain.
On his way out, Finney’s father kissed him on the cheek, a throwback to a routine he’d abandoned when Finney was three but which had become standard operating procedure since the illness. Fists like talons, his father gripped his arms and said, “John, you took a big hit. You sat on the sidelines until your head cleared, and by golly you got back in the game. I’ve known a lot of good men who couldn’t have done as much. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re a good man, John. You’re going to make a fine officer.”
“Thanks.”
After his father had climbed the wooden steps to the parking lot, Finney followed a gust of cool lake air back into the living room and stared out the window at the water. His father was so small and frail these days, and so lonely. Come to think of it, so was he, lonely.
30. MONAHAN’S MISSUS
Finney spent the next four days in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene looking for information on Patterson Cole, searching for irregularities concerning his properties. He learned that Cole owned thousands of acres of timber and most of one small sawmill town. He owned dozens of rental houses and apartment buildings in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane; one of the apartments had burned to the ground ten years earlier, a fire that had been judged accidental. Cole had collected a tidy little sum for a building he’d been having trouble keeping full. Finney was unable to contact either of the investigators. One had retired to Wyoming and the other had died in a car accident.
When Finney returned from Eastern Washington, one of his neighbors told him the fire department had interviewed him. By now G. A. Montgomery probably knew there was an hour Finney couldn’t account for the morning of the Riverside Drive fire. The only thing G. A. still needed in order to put the noose around Finney’s neck was for Annie or even a passing commuter to clearly identify Finney as the suspicious character outside the house before the fire took off.
On Tuesday C-shift worked a fairly typical shift. The chief in the Seventh Battalion gave them their monthly drill. Riding Engine 26 with Finney were Lieutenant Gary Sadler and Jerry Monahan. Their drill consisted of running a preconnect with supply and taking the hose line up a ladder to the roof of the station. The chief told them they’d done a good job and left while they were repacking dry hose and flaking the wet sections on racks for the hose dryer in the station. They cleaned up and went out to do building inspections before lunch. In the afternoon they fielded two alarms. One was to a single-family home where an infant’s head was wedged between the rungs of an antique crib. They lifted the squalling baby to the center and gently spread the slats with their hands. The other call was a false alarm to one of the Boeing plants off East Marginal Way.
At five-thirty Oscar Stillman showed up at the back door, squashing his face with its gap-toothed grin flat against the glass. Stillman, a born comic, worked downtown as a confidence testing officer and parked his private vehicle at Station 26 every weekday morning, leaving his department car in the lot each night. His habit was to drop in for a cup of coffee on his way home, making him an ongoing source of information for the members of Station 26. Now that he thought about it, Finney realized it was probably Stillman who gave Monahan the scoop about his not being promoted.
Wearing crumpled gray slacks and his department blazer, Oscar Stillman punched the coded lock box on the back door and sauntered into the beanery. Of average height, Stillman was in his mid-fifties, stocky, and hirsute everywhere except for his head, which was shiny on top but for a few long gray strands crossing from left to right. As always, he was as playful and friendly as a Christmas puppy.
Displaying teeth the size of baby corn, he stepped close and pumped Finney’s hand furiously. His glasses looked as if they’d been designed for a woman. His voice was deep and loud and cracked. “You really got fucked on that promotion, man. I don’t mind telling you. Nobody around here’s been fucked quite like that in a good while. Man, did you get fucked.”
“Thanks,” Finney said, trying to extricate his hand from Stillman’s tenacious grip.
“No. I really don’t know what he was thinking about. It’s hard to say. You know, when a guy gets that far off track . . . I want to go up there and give him a piece of my mind, even though everybody tells me he’d screw me next time he got the chance. But hell, I been screwed before and you know what?” Stillman winked. “I kind of liked it.” Stillman saw the look on Gary Sadler’s face and said, “Is that a little too homoerotic for you, Gary? It is, isn’t it? You know what your problem is? You’re scared to death of homosexuals. What you need is a big fat kiss.”
Stillman glanced at the others with a fiendish smirk, then started across the room. Sadler, afraid to run for fear he’d be chased, stood his ground and fended off Stillman’s grasping arms. In the end, Sadler let Oscar grab his face and give him a buss on the end of his nose.
“There’s nothing in the world warms my blood faster than a man in the throes of a full homoerotic panic,” Stillman said, smiling broadly and standing back to appraise a job well done.
“That wasn’t panic,” Sadler said.
“Hell, it wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t!”
“Maybe I should have given you a big wet one on the lips.” Sadler flew out of the room, laughter chasing him up the hallway.
Turning back to Finney, Stillman said, “Oh, man, you got fucked. I still don’t understand how Charlie scarfed up all that glory and that award for accomplishing basically nothing. Does that make sense? He goes into a building on a search, he comes out empty-handed, and they give him an award? Not to mention, three months later he’s sitting on the big Kahuna’s throne.”
Leaving the room with Jerry Monahan, Oscar winked and slapped Finney on the back. “Don’t worry, buddy. You’ll think of something. Every dog has his day.”
A few minutes later Gary Sadler poked his head out of the officer’s rest room in the hallway. “He gone?”
“Talking to Jerry on the apparatus floor,” said Finney.
“Christ, he’s crazy. I’ll be in my office till he leaves. Let me know when it’s safe to come out.”
Finney was washing spinach for the salad when another visitor appeared at the back door, Linda Monahan, Jerry’s wife. Finney let her in, offering her a seat and a cup of coffee, then called Jerry on the intercom to let him know she was here. Whatever else Jerry Monahan had done with his life, he’d certainly married a decent woman. They were Mormons, at least she was, and she’d presented him with five children, all boys, the youngest still at home. She’d worked through all of her pregnancies and had bailed Jerry out of financial difficulties several times during their marriage. Finney knew of three occasions in the last twenty years when, single-handed, she’d managed to save their home after Jerry went broke and the bank threatened to foreclose.
“How is it out there?” Finney asked. “Traffic bad?”
Linda Monahan was ten or eleven years older than Finney, and had dyed her hair black to complement her milky com
plexion. Her eyes were hazel and flitted away from his nervously at unpredictable moments as she spoke. Dressed in a plaid business suit, she was trim and tidy, sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles, her purse in her lap. “It’s so dark and gray out, that’s all.”
“It’s going to be worse next week when Daylight Saving Time ends.”
“Sometimes I wish for a whole year of sunshine. If we could have one year, maybe we could coast through this gray a little easier.”
“It gets to me, too.”
“Arizona was sunny. That’s where I met Jerry. He was on his mission. He was four years older than me, and it was love at first sight.”
It was hard for Finney to imagine Jerry Monahan inspiring love at first sight. But then, he did have that ingenuous smile.
“Jerry ever get that time off he needed?”
“Time off?”
“November seventh? Your anniversary?”
“We were married April twentieth. Whatever made you think it was in November? Jerry would never get that wrong.”
“I must have misunderstood. Maybe it was a birthday?”
“We don’t celebrate anything in November except Thanksgiving.”
Finney’s memory worked erratically these days, but he could have sworn Monahan told them he needed the shift off because it was his anniversary.
After Monahan showed up and walked her out to the parking lot, Finney went down the hallway to the officer’s room and peeked in at Sadler. “I was just wondering if it would cause a problem if I was off on the seventh of November.”
Tucking the phone under his chin, Sadler flipped open the captain’s journal. “Jerry’s already got it off. His anniversary.”
31. PATTERSON COLE
Late Monday morning, after calling Cole’s office for an appointment and getting the brush-off, Finney decided an impromptu visit was in order. He bluffed his way past a series of security guards in gray blazers, stepped off the elevator on forty-two, and glimpsed Cole and another man entering an office through tall glass doors at the end of the corridor. In person, Patterson Cole was a tall but stooped man who moved with the careful and precise gait of someone making his way through a room full of marbles.
