Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  “Can’t investigate yourself,” Miriam had said to me on the phone the night before. “And this new tape from the nine-one-one dispatchers proves it.”

  4. WHITEWASH BY THE WHITE GUYS

  TREY>

  Funny how many times sin brings you closer to the Lord. Years ago I’d been with a woman who belonged to Mount Zion Baptist and tried to coerce me into attending services there. While attractive and well educated, Charlise had been emotionally needy, if not a little nuts, a woman my pal Rumble called high maintenance. She told me repeatedly that if she could turn me into a churchgoer she might think about marrying me, although I’d never seriously contemplated marriage. In fact, the longer I knew her, the less tantalizing the notion became. We broke up after she threw a screaming fit in the lobby of the ACT theater, falsely accusing me of sleeping with not one but two of her girlfriends.

  Inside the foyer of the church, Estevez, Horst, and I were directed to a good-size meeting room, where we found eight or ten brothers shaking hands with a group of white guys who’d arrived in front of us. There were thirty or more people in the room, more trickling in each minute. The white men were from the mayor’s office, but I didn’t see Mayor Stone among them. A few minutes later the police chief, who was Caucasian, showed up with a small entourage of mostly black officers; followed by the fire chief, also white, flanked by two African-American deputy chiefs. It was around then that I realized I might be there merely as wallpaper and also that I was mentally dividing the room into black and white, segmenting everybody into groups in just the way we’re taught not to do in Sunday School—an infraction I’d wager most people commit on a daily basis and then, if challenged, deny.

  Horst, Chief Smith, the two deputy chiefs, and Estevez performed the obligatory handshakes, Chief Smith ignoring me. Chief Douglas moved next to me and spoke conspiratorially. Douglas was a man who clearly wanted to be the next head of the department and who knew that any further racial strife was likely to squeeze Smith out and propel one of our black deputy chiefs in.

  “Smith’s still sore at you for the awards thing,” Chief Douglas said.

  “I figured.”

  “You got a clue what’s going on here?”

  “They’re putting together a committee. You guys see the pickets at Twenty-third and Jackson?”

  “No. You see the freeway on TV?”

  “We had a patient from there.”

  “Not the gal who got her foot run over?”

  “Somebody else. You don’t think there’s a chance they’ll ask me to be on the committee, do you?”

  “They’ll want a chief.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. The vice president was over an hour late getting into Seattle. We were told the Secret Service came close to turning him around and flying him out of town.”

  “Trouble in River City.”

  Chief Douglas, who had cinnamon skin, hazel eyes, and a buttery line of patter, was considered a ladies’ man by those who knew him better than I did. He’d been in the department almost twenty-five years, most of it at a desk. Some fairly reliable scuttlebutt circulating among black firefighters (but not among white) had it that he’d gone through several years of heavy cocaine usage, but if true, he’d come through unscathed.

  Unlike some police and fire departments around the country, and despite the rather heated conversation I’d had that morning with Winston, there was surprisingly little overt racial disharmony in the Seattle Fire Department. Historically there had been problems, but to be honest, most of the heavy stuff had died down long before I got into the department. I’d had a white instructor in drill school who I thought was out to shitcan me for no good reason, but then, we all had at least one instructor in drill school we thought was out to can us.

  I edged away from the group and studied the room while Chief Douglas began flirting with Estevez. My suspicion and hope was that this committee, after bringing Estevez on board, would be supplementing the panel with either Douglas, Lennox, or both: two black fire department officers with solid qualifications.

  My absence from the awards ceremony had, by all accounts, brought a good deal of embarrassment to Chief Smith, who’d touted my so-called heroics at the Z Club to the local press for many long minutes before he realized I wasn’t going to show. It wasn’t that I’d tried to embarrass anyone by not showing; it was more like I was trying to keep from humiliating myself. A week after the Z Club, I barely felt like going out in public to buy a tomato, much less collect an award.

  A tidy but overweight black woman bustled into the room with a sheaf of file folders under one arm and a large purse swinging from the other. When she turned around to address the assembly, I recognized her as one of the sign carriers at 23rd and Jackson.

  “People! People! We have to get started. We have to get started if we’re going to get this off the ground today. I know you’re all busy. If everyone who has a chair can please sit?”

  Moving close enough that I could feel her shoulder brush my arm, Estevez whispered, “That’s Miriam Beckmann. She’s the chairwoman for the Z Club Citizens for Truth.”

  Estevez remained beside me, pressed close by clusters of people on either side, more citizens packing the room every minute until there were seventy, maybe eighty of us. I didn’t mind that Estevez had made a quick and easy alliance with me in the way that new acquaintances in a room full of strangers sometimes do; in fact I rather liked it. Beckmann took an informal roll call, shouting out names as she recognized individuals, asking for group leaders to introduce the members of each contingent. When the fire department was invited to step forward, Chief Smith introduced Chiefs Lennox, Douglas, and Horst, but skipped me. Estevez gave me a gentle nudge. “That’s the second time. What was that all about?”

  “He must have got mixed up and thought I was Denzel Washington,” I joked.

  After she’d introduced herself and the other members of the Z Club Citizens for Truth—Reverend Morgan, three other ministers from local churches, and two parents of Z Club fatalities—Miriam Beckmann said, “Why don’t we all bow our heads while Reverend Morgan says a prayer to get us started?”

  A tall man, Reverend Morgan was darker than either Estevez or me, regal in appearance, with a patch of hair under his lower lip and a voice low enough to sound like the beginning of an earthquake. “Lord, thank you for bringing us together here in your temple on this solemn occasion. Lord, we’re here to make peace in a community that’s been torn apart by suspicion and anger over the demise of thirteen of your precious angels. We pray we will have the wisdom to do as you see fit and that all of us can agree on a steering committee that will look into the catastrophe and reveal the truth to us. Lord, grant us the wisdom to proceed with this undertaking, and from the actions we take here this morning, help us bring healing to a disrupted community. God bless the families of all who died, and God speed their souls into your grace and into the arms of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.” The room rumbled with a chorus of amens.

  “To order,” said Beckmann, slamming a small gavel onto a wooden block she’d taken out of her coat pocket. “First of all, I would like to thank the chief of police and the chief of the fire department for coming to this forum. I would like to thank the mayor’s office for sending along the deputy mayor, although I understand the mayor cannot be here. Now, let me give you the situation in a nutshell. We’ve lost thirteen young people. As you know, there have already been several self-serving statements made by the city about the fire department’s actions—or inactions—at the Z Club, and now this report has come out and basically given us a version of what happened that many of us have a hard time swallowing, especially in light of that nine-one-one tape. The way I see it, we can march on the freeway, we can send our young people out to throw rocks at fire engines, or we can commission a new report—one that we all know will be unbiased.”

  “We’re not going to take this lying down,” shouted a woman who’d come in with Beckmann. “They
passed by our people and left them in there. We heard it on the TV.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chief Smith said, stepping forward. “I can’t let that go by.”

  “Sit back, please,” said Beckmann. “Sit back.”

  I liked this woman, who by all accounts had been an unemployed bakery worker until three weeks ago and who wasn’t afraid to tell city officials to get out of her face.

  “No, I’m sorry, but have you read the report?” said Chief Smith.

  “I’ve read enough to know it was a perversion and a whitewash. Saying it was those poor babies’ own fault that they died in that fire. They don’t put the ‘white’ in ‘whitewash’ for nothing.” There was a loud chorus of amens after that.

  “I know the people who wrote it did so in good conscience. Nowhere in those pages did it say those people died because it was their fault. And that tape didn’t surface until after the report came out.”

  “If it wasn’t the fire department’s fault, whose fault was it?” somebody shouted.

  “Yeah. Whose?”

  A chorus of voices chimed in. Beside me, Estevez edged closer. Given what had happened elsewhere in the city over the past few weeks, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that violence would break out in this room.

  Eyebrows like cattle burs, Chief Smith stepped alongside Chief Douglas against the far wall. “We’re here to help,” Smith said by way of surrender. “We’re here to do whatever it takes to heal things. That’s all.”

  “Maybe you should heal up your fire department,” yelled a woman from the back of the room. Several others shouted along with her.

  “Now, now! Let’s not get ourselves outraged all over again,” Beckmann said, slamming her wooden gavel on the table and displaying the attitude of someone who didn’t get center stage often and wasn’t about to give it up when she did. It tickled me that she’d brought her own gavel and wooden block to slam it on. “We’ve got a plan. We’ve decided to appoint our own investigating committee. Next time they wave that whitewash in our faces, we’ll have our own report.

  “Let me introduce Jamie Estevez. Most of you already know who she is, but let me remind you that Ms. Estevez is the reporter who broke the story on the police scandal in Spokane two years ago. You all remember? Four police officers lost their jobs after they were found guilty of police brutality against three of our young men on their way home from a church picnic. It was just another arrest and beating until Jamie Estevez started digging into it.”

  “What about the mother of one of the victims getting her foot run over by the vice president down on the freeway this morning?” somebody shouted.

  All eyes in the room turned to the chief of police, who said, “We’re looking into it.”

  A minister at the front of the room yelled, “Like you looked into the Jones assassination?” Marvin Jones was the alleged rapist-hijacker whose death via police shooting caused an uproar four months prior to the Z Club.

  “Now, wait a minute.” It was the deputy mayor, a man named George David, with a three-piece suit and a bald head. “You’re doing yourselves a disservice by linking these cases. Jones had a record for sexual assault and mental instability. If he’d lived, he probably would have spent the rest of his life behind bars. This fire is a completely different matter.”

  “It ain’t no different if you’re black,” somebody yelled.

  “Please, Mr. Officer. Just shoot me!” another man repeated.

  Somebody else said, “Burn us up, Mr. Fireman! Burn us up!”

  “This is different,” repeated the deputy mayor.

  “It ain’t no different if your children are dead,” came a voice from behind Reverend Morgan.

  Beckmann banged her gavel loudly for half a minute before the room grew quiet. “Brothers and sisters, listen to our plan before you get all distressed. Ms. Estevez has the experience to dig into this and find out what happened. Does anybody here really think she won’t get the truth?” The room went silent. “But she can’t do this by herself. In the same forthright manner in which this committee has struggled to embrace these issues, we’ve decided to ask the fire department to give us a representative to help her.”

  “Not this fire department!” shouted one of the ministers.

  Slamming the gavel down, Beckmann said, “Hear me out before you go spouting off. Two days ago Chief Smith gave me a list of officers who might assist Estevez. But after talking to rank-and-file members in the department—several, by the way, who are members of the Mount Zion congregation—we decided to forgo the fire chief’s recommendations and nominate our own adjunct. We’re asking Captain Trey Brown to serve with Ms. Estevez.”

  All eyes in the room followed Chief Smith’s murderous look toward me. Even Estevez, who was standing next to me, turned and stared. Chief Lennox glared daggers while Chief Douglas simply looked stunned, as I’m sure I did. “You want an answer right here in front of everybody?” I said.

  “We want you to say you’ll do it,” said Reverend Morgan. “We are asking you for help. We understand you spent several years as a fire investigator. Your expertise will be invaluable.”

  “I was at that fire.”

  “That’s a good part of why you’re the perfect man for this job,” said Reverend Morgan.

  “Nobody who was there should be involved in the investigation. I will never be an objective observer, sir. I cannot be. Nor does this make sense from your point of view. If it doesn’t represent a conflict of interest, it gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. You want a separate investigation, and that’s an idea I can understand and support, but you’ll be advised to take my name off the table.”

  Beckmann said, “Chief, I thought you said you would give us the services of anybody we selected.”

  Chief Smith’s face began to turn red in the way that only a heavy drinker’s face can. “Captain Brown will do this if I tell him to. But he does have a point. He will not be regarded as a dispassionate observer. Not by the papers and not by the—”

  Reverend Morgan stepped forward. “Not by the what? The white community? We’re not here to satisfy the white community. We’re here for justice. And we’re not looking for lack of passion, Chief. Passion is exactly what we want. Along with answers.” He turned to me. “Son, the very fact that you don’t want to do it makes you all the more perfect. I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you all something else. We spoke to a lot of people in the fire department, and we didn’t have very many conversations where this man’s name did not come up. Everything that everybody tells us about you points to you finding those valuable answers that so far have been eluding us. Why did those young people die? What was the fire department doing that led to this tragedy? Was there willful misconduct? What’s going on inside the city, and specifically the fire department, that we in the African-American community need to be aware of? We’ve considered over a dozen candidates for this post, both inside and outside your department, including retired investigators from San Francisco and Baltimore, and Captain Brown is our man.”

  Resignation clouded Smith’s voice. “Okay, but I’d like to place somebody else on the committee for balance. Chief Douglas here—”

  “Screw the balance,” said a man who hadn’t spoken until now, storming up and down in front of the police and fire department members as he spoke, the veins in his neck standing out. He was dressed in a shabby sport coat with no tie, and if he’d been walking down the street I would have been tempted to hand him a dollar. “We’re not looking for balance. We’re looking for truth. Captain Brown saved my niece’s life. As far as I’m concerned, that clinches it.” Several others shouted in concurrence.

  “Can I say something?” I said.

  Beckmann slammed the table with her gavel. “You’ve got the floor, Captain Brown.”

  I took a moment to organize my thoughts. “I will gladly work with Ms. Estevez and whoever else you put on this committee. But I want to make certain you’re hearing me clearly. Whatever I find,
I report. I can’t guarantee anybody will be happy.”

  “That’s how I feel, too,” Estevez said. “If what we come up with settles grudges or reinforces biases, so be it. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to tailor it.”

  A chorus of amens and hallelujahs burst forth from a significant population in the room. The angry man in the tattered sport coat spoke. “You just tell us how it came down, and we’ll go home satisfied.”

  “We want something we can believe,” shouted a woman in the back of the room.

  Beckmann slammed her gavel down and said, “Estevez and Captain Brown, you’re hired. Meeting adjourned.”

  A few minutes later in the foyer of the church, I found Estevez with Marvin Douglas, his black dress uniform impeccable, his smile dazzling. Estevez looked like a cat cornered by a stray dog.

  5. STONE CARMICHAEL SHOWS UP AND THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG

  JAMIE ESTEVEZ>

  In his usual way, Mayor Carmichael came rushing through the front door like a freight train. A small man, he was dapper in a tailored suit, a walking advertisement for the most lavish tooth brighteners. He cultivated an intellectual image, but local political cartoonists drew him with a huge head, gigantic ears, and oversize glasses. He was courteous and rarely contentious in public, a charming family man with a socialite wife and two children who appeared frequently in photo ops, yet he ran a disciplined administration from which there had been few leaks.

  All in all, he was a politician’s politician, and most of the time he had the city council eating out of his hand. Before running for mayor, he’d been a private attorney for several large multibillion-dollar enterprises run by his well-heeled family. He could charm the devil, and I liked him. So did most people, which is why Captain Brown’s reaction shocked me. Brown who had only moments earlier shanghaied me from Marvin Douglas with the most delicate of lies. “Sorry to interrupt,” he had said, “but the committee people need to be somewhere else in a few minutes.”