by Earl Emerson
When Brown had accompanied me back to the meeting room, nobody seemed to be in any hurry. I said, “Captain Brown, were you rescuing me?”
“You looked like you were in trouble.”
“Actually, I can take care of myself.”
“I was trying to make it easier for you to extricate yourself from what looked like a difficult situation. If you want, I can go back and get Chief Douglas.”
He was purposely trying to irritate me for some reason. “No, thank you.”
“You did look like a cornered rabbit.”
Now he was really irritating me. “I certainly did not.”
“Oh, you most certainly did.”
Moments later when Mayor Carmichael entered the meeting room, Captain Brown’s reaction was almost visceral, as if he’d been punched in the stomach, yet it passed so quickly that if I hadn’t been standing next to him, I might not have noticed. Carmichael smiled at me and then did a double take when he glimpsed Captain Brown, but kept moving across the room toward Miriam Beckmann.
“You know him?” I asked.
“He’s our illustrious mayor.”
“But do you know him?”
“We’ve met once or twice.”
“Your tone of voice makes me think you don’t like him.”
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a shitbird.”
“Watch your language. He’s your boss. And he’s the one who ensured the city would fund this investigation.”
“You don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it.”
Mayor Carmichael spoke briefly to Beckmann and then Pastor Morgan. A few minutes later when the mayor and Beckmann approached, Carmichael was all flashing teeth and tight cheeks, although I noted his smile didn’t reach his eyes. I’d never seen Carmichael lose his composure like this before.
“Ms. Estevez,” Mayor Carmichael said, covering my hand in both of his, which were freezing. “I haven’t run into you in a while.”
“It’s been a year at least.”
“I was the one who suggested your name to Miriam Beckmann for this project. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Thank you.”
He turned his attention to Captain Brown. “Trey?”
“Stone.”
“Is it still Trey, or did you change your first name, too?”
“It’s Trey. I didn’t have any compelling reason to change that one.”
“It’s good to see you.”
“Is it?”
“I’ve thought about you, Trey.”
“Funny. I haven’t thought about you at all.”
“I guess you’ve been in my fire department all along?”
“Just the last fifteen years.”
“I’m glad you landed on your feet. It’s…good to see you. It really is. And I’m glad you’re going to be part of this new report.” And then a thought struck him. “You don’t happen by any chance…you aren’t the Captain Brown in the original Z Club report?”
“I’m the only Captain Brown in the department.”
“Well. This is interesting.” He reached out to shake hands with Brown, who pretended he didn’t see. “You think it’s a good idea to work on this report?”
“I don’t see as I have much choice,” Brown said.
Carmichael pulled his hand back and looked at Pastor Morgan and Miriam Beckmann, who was beaming. “Yes, well, I’m sure Mrs. Beckmann and Pastor Morgan know what they’re doing.” He turned to me and smiled. “Jamie Estevez and I have worked together on other projects. We’re old friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes, I suppose we are,” I said, though I didn’t regard a twenty-minute interview as working together or being old friends.
“I can’t get over it,” Carmichael said. “It’s just so strange seeing you again. And wonderful. I mean that.” Obviously Brown was supposed to reply in kind, but he said nothing, and after a few moments the silence grew to be too much for Carmichael, who stepped back and embraced me in his look. “I look forward to your report.”
A few minutes later, as we were preparing to leave, Miriam Beckmann approached and said, “Tomorrow night there’s a black-tie charity function for the Central Area Leadership Council’s reading project. All the movers and shakers in the white and black community will be there, and I think it would behoove you to be there, too. I’ll have tickets for the two of you waiting at the door. It’s the Miki-moto Mansion on Capitol Hill. Eight o’clock. Can you make it?”
“Of course we can,” I blurted, earning a glare from Trey.
“I’ll have to check my calendar,” he said, which made me feel silly, like an overeager puppy.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to make room in your schedule,” Beckmann said. “And Jamie? I want to thank you for going through our list of candidates and selecting Captain Brown. We had it narrowed down, but we didn’t really dare make the final choice until you saw the list. I think the two of you are perfect for each other.”
Trey gave me a sour look as I surreptitiously wiped my perspiring palms along the hem of my blazer. I’d known him less than an hour and had already been caught in a lie. This was going to be uphill all the way.
6. BLOCKING THE DOOR, STANDING MY GROUND
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
I’d had quite a few people ride with me in the Lexus since I got it last summer, but none of them seemed to fill the car the way Trey Brown did in his large black military-style work boots and navy-blue uniform. I was well aware he was in a foul humor, partly from his interaction with the mayor and partly because he knew I’d chosen him to be on this committee but had been deceptive about it. I should have followed my own instincts and been up front with him from the beginning, instead of following Chief Horst’s advice. Too late now.
We were a couple of blocks from Station 28, sitting at a stoplight, when I broke the silence that had enveloped the car since we’d left Chief Horst at Station 13. “So,” I said, my throat dry, “you and the mayor seemed to have known each other before?” For over thirty seconds he didn’t respond. “I’m guessing you haven’t seen each other in fifteen years.”
“Where do you get that number?”
“Oh, good. You speak.”
“Is this whole thing between us going to be about sarcasm? Because if it is, I’m pretty good at it myself.”
“I’m sorry. I was asking a serious question.”
“Where did you get that figure?”
“It’s the amount of time you’ve been in the department. The mayor didn’t know you were in the department.”
“The last time we saw each other I was seventeen. He’d just gotten out of law school.”
“How did you know each other?”
“What do you want from me?”
“You don’t have to snap.”
“I’m in a bad mood. I snap when I’m in a bad mood.” His voice grew softer. We were beside Station 28 now, parked in the visitor slot next to the front door. “What is it that you want?”
“I just want to know what was going on between you and Stone Carmichael.”
The question appeared to be unanswerable, at least by Trey Brown, because he got out of the car, went to the front door of the station, and was thumbing the combination lock on the door by the time I caught him. “Stone was my brother,” he said finally, opening the door and stepping inside.
Trey Brown was African American and Stone Carmichael was a blue-eyed Caucasian, so I wondered for a moment if he meant fraternity brothers, but that wasn’t how I heard it. Brother, he’d said. I followed him inside and trailed him down the narrow corridor to the engine officer’s room, where Kitty Acton sat at the desk filling out some paperwork.
“I’ve got some news,” Trey Brown said to Kitty. “Maybe you can get Clyde and the others together in the beanery.”
“Sure, Cap. Hey, Estevez,” she said to me as she squeezed past.
I stepped into the room and closed the door, leaning against it so that I�
�d effectively trapped Trey. The tiny office contained a desk, some tall lockers, and a bed in the corner. After he doffed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair, he took a step toward me, but I didn’t budge. “What?”
“You can’t just tell me he’s your brother and then walk away.”
“It’s personal.”
“It’s not personal if it affects what we’re doing together. I’m not going to tell anyone, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m not smart enough to understand? Is that it?”
We locked eyes until I blinked, though I didn’t look away. It was hard to know what was going on behind that slab of granite he called a face. “You’re tougher than you look,” he said finally.
“Anybody I’ve ever worked with could have told you that.”
“Sit down.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to stand.”
He stepped back and considered me for a few moments. “When I was four, I was adopted into the Carmichael family. Shelby Junior was fourteen at the time I was adopted, twenty-seven when he died in a car accident. Stone was seven years older than me, and Kendra was the baby of the family, a year younger than me. The old man had political aspirations, and it doesn’t hurt when a politician adopts a child of color. At least that’s what Stone told me four or five thousand times when we were growing up.”
“It was a fairly rare occurrence for a white family to adopt a black child back then, wasn’t it?”
“It’s still rare.”
“But your surname isn’t Carmichael. It’s Brown.”
“After the Carmichaels disowned me, I took my mother’s maiden name.”
“This is going to take longer than five minutes, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t going to take any time at all, because you’ve heard everything I have to say on the subject. I was Trey Carmichael. Now I’m Trey Brown. It’s that simple.”
“And you haven’t seen your brother in fifteen years?”
“Nineteen.” I did the calculations quickly. Nineteen and seventeen; he was thirty-six, six years older than I was. He folded his arms across his chest and waited for me to step away from the door. The story was probably as complicated as it was personal, and even though I desperately wanted to hear the rest of it, he was bent on guarding his privacy, and I had to respect that.
“Does anybody else around here know this?”
“No, and that’s the way we’re going to keep it.”
I couldn’t help thinking about it all through our first interview, which was with a firefighter named Justin Hinkel, a tall, thin man who’d done a lot of joking around earlier when Chief Horst and I were waiting for Captain Brown to return from the alarm. Brown told me that Hinkel had been in the department for four years and was assigned to Ladder 12, which worked out of Station 28, but on the night in question had been riding Engine 33, stationed just down the road to the south. Hinkel had a prominent Adam’s apple and a cowlick over his forehead; he appeared nervous when he came into the room. I expected them all to be nervous.
7. SPLATTERFEST
FIREFIGHTER JUSTIN HINKEL, ENGINE 33, C SHIFT>
The fire came in at 2230 hours. Dowd had already gone to bed, and the lieutenant was in his room on the phone to his wife. Me and Harrington were out in the beanery watching a movie called Splatterfest. Cowboys and werewolves.
So we all bunk up and we’re screaming down Rainier Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, and the lieutenant turns around to me and Dowd and says, “It looks like we’re going to be first in.”
Harrington says, “I’ll pull the preconnect.”
“Unless we see something different when we get there,” says Lieutenant Smith.
The club—well, you know where the club is: two blocks off Rainier, down in Columbia City. It turns out we are first in, just like we thought.
It was an old wooden building. Right away I figure balloon construction with a lot of old pipe chases and crap like that. We’ll get it out, but we’ll be chasing spot fires in the walls all night. The front doors are on fire, actually burning pretty good, with a lot of black smoke and heat flowing into the building. That’s the strange part. While there’s plenty of smoke and shit—excuse the language—coming onto the street, and there’s smoke on the sidewalk, there’s also a lot going back into the building, like this funnel effect. We figure out later that somebody left some back windows or doors open, and there’s a breeze blowing the fire right through the first floor.
Dowd parks in front of the building—I mean, smack in front of the doorway that’s on fire—and when we get a good look at it, you can tell a preconnect isn’t going to be big enough, but the lieutenant’s busy talking on the radio giving a report and a size-up, so me and Harrington, we go behind the rig and pull out two hundred feet of two-and-a-half. Dowd comes around and helps us, then takes couplings and wrenches across the street to the hydrant.
By the time Harrington and I get all that hose into loops on the sidewalk in front of the building and get our face pieces on and air flowing, we have water. Harrington hits the doorway real good, water splashing us, and then, thinking he’s put out most of the fire on the porch, we head inside. Ideally, with the fire in the front of the building, we should be laying lines through the building and coming out the front door instead of going in the front door.
That’s when all these little Mexicans started busting around the corner of the building yelling there are people inside. So now we’re not sure how to proceed. By this time Harrington is in the doorway. There’s this big old foyer, and there’s fire everywhere. I mean, on the walls, the ceiling, even the floor. And he’s hitting it with a two-and-a-half, which should put it out in an instant, only it’s not going out. Meanwhile I’m behind him pulling hose. That stuff is heavy when it’s full of water. Harrington crawls into the foyer, and he’s hitting the ceiling, and he’s really going at it because we both know there are people. It’s a big building, and we know if we can’t put the fire out right away we’re in trouble.
We’re stuck in the doorway, Harrington using that nozzle like it’s a jiffy hose. Then after a few minutes have gone by, he gets tired and we switch off. I get most of the first room knocked down, but by now it’s dark and smoky and we can’t see anything. About that time some truckmen come up, but they don’t have hose lines and don’t get very far. They’re using the thermal imager and telling us where there’s heat in the walls. They keep telling me it’s up high, so I hit it with a straight stream thinking I’ll bounce it around on the ceiling, but the stream goes right through the wall and there’s a ton of fire up in there. I mean, it’s boiling inside that wall.
I’m getting tired, so the two truckmen take over the line and I go out the front door, where Harrington’s pulling hose, and it occurs to me that there’s another set of doors on the front porch. Only these doors are on the other wall, facing kind of into the building toward the north. I try one of the doors and it opens up a couple of inches, and then it kind of shatters and the top falls off, and there are flames leaping out in my face.
That’s when we get the line back from the two ladder guys and we aim it up the stairs, but it’s like pissing into a hurricane, because absolutely nothing happens. After a while, Harrington looks at me and says, “Are we supposed to go up?”
I’m thinking those stairs are rotten with fire and they’re going to collapse if we put any weight on them. “Are you kidding?” I say. “We’re staying here.” Lieutenant Smith is just coming up to join us. He asks me what I’m doing, and I tell him we have fire in the stairs. We pour water up those stairs like crazy, but there’s a ton of fire just around the corner and we can’t get to it because the lower part of the stairway is already falling apart.
Meanwhile, Engine 30 shows up and parks across the street on the hydrant, and they bring another line off our rig. They’re fresh, so they go inside while we stay in front holding the fire in the stairs. But by now the fire’s built
up a little bit on the first floor, and they don’t get more than fifteen feet inside the front door.
We never do see any civilians come out. Don’t see them and don’t hear them.
Whatever is in that big hall, it takes off and is boiling. It was Chief Hillbourn’s order later to line up the dead people under the canvas tarp. I guess some of the media didn’t think that was cool. Like if you’re on a drinking binge and you line up all the dead soldiers on the windowsill or something.
The worst part is the crowd. The Hispanics are one thing, but we get this crowd of black folks, you know, in their late teens or early twenties, and they start to get angry. They all have cell phones and they are calling their friends, getting more people to come down, and the cops can’t handle them. Then they start yelling things like “Put the fire out!” and “If this was a white neighborhood, you would be saving the building!”
One guy tries to tackle Harrington when he goes to get a fresh bottle, tells him he’s going the wrong way. They arrest five or six people near us. I mean, by then fire is starting to come out every crevice on the front of the building. Finally they send some black chief—I think it’s Lennox—around the crowd to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. In the end, the cops have to come and pull Lennox out of there to save his butt. I think that’s where the rumors start, right there that night on the fire ground, people standing around with bottles of malt liquor and flipping us shit. In the end we don’t get to help with the bodies. They were having truck companies from the north end do that, guys who are fresh and haven’t fought the fire, guys going in with ropes and stuff.
8. SUDDENLY TREY BROWN LOOKS WHITE
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
Hinkel’s voice was actually quivering during parts of his testimony. I let him talk without interruption, and when he finished, asked if he had anything to add, then turned to Brown, who thought about it a while and said, “Did anybody call out to you for help from inside?”
