Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  At one point Harlan strides over to the massive stone fireplace and grabs an iron poker, swinging and slashing at the air, mad with grief and furious with the urge to make things right—a man seeking retribution if not blood. For a few moments I feel a twinge of regret over the fact that Trey is probably in the worst trouble of his life. But then, I didn’t ask him to start banging the Overby girls.

  When he notices Harlan waving the poker, Renfrow gets up from his game, and together he and Father calm Overby down. Not much later Renfrow is dispatched to the cottage to scout the scene of the crime and to look for Trey, who according to Renfrow is probably hiding somewhere in the knowledge that he is guilty and will have to pay the piper. Renfrow has a law enforcement background, having worked for the FBI, so he is the natural choice to investigate and apprehend the malefactor. He returns twenty-five minutes later without Trey but with an object wrapped in a handkerchief, which he deposits on the coffee table in the great room and which we all eyeball apprehensively until finally Father walks over and unwraps the handkerchief to reveal a Corum, the diving watch Father gave Trey on his seventeenth birthday at the beginning of the summer.

  It’s perfect.

  25. A COMPLAISANT MEETING ONLY LEADS TO ANOTHER SQUABBLE

  JAMIE ESTEVEZ>

  Monday morning at the prearranged time, I found Trey at the long table in the beanery at Station 28, sipping coffee from his personal mug amid the hustle and bustle of the fire station. A different shift from the one that handled the fire was working today, so I wasn’t certain how much we would get done, though we were likely to find at least a few people to interview.

  When I entered the room, Trey was reading the official fire department report on the Z Club fire, which was half an inch thick, a black plastic spiral binding holding it together, with dozens of diagrams and schematics. He pulled out a chair for me and offered me coffee. “How are you this morning?” he asked, his tone solicitous if not downright friendly.

  “A little tired,” I said, wondering if he wasn’t still trying to make amends for the motorcycle ride Saturday night.

  “That’s right. The wedding. How’d that go?”

  I told him about Patti and Howard, leaving out the part where I cried on the flight home because I was despondent after the beautiful ceremony. My mother was in typical form during the reception, pointing out in a beleaguered voice to anyone who would listen that I still didn’t have a man in my life, and that she wasn’t likely to see any grandchildren before she left this cruel world and was gone to glory. It didn’t help that, truth be told, I had been feeling low over the lack of candidates in my pool of prospective boyfriends. Who would have guessed Seattle would be a place where all the men were either just out of prison, committed—usually to white girls—or so full of themselves you were mad at them before they even asked you out? I didn’t need to be married, but it would be nice if there was somebody I could go to a movie with, or somebody I wouldn’t be ashamed to take to a friend’s wedding.

  I sat directly across the table from the dark television, put my bag on the floor, and sloughed off my coat. Trey wore black wool uniform pants and an official white shirt with captain’s bars on the collar, the pleats in his clothing razor-sharp. His coppery skin was a perfect contrast to the white, and as he brought the coffee mug to me, the sunlight from the windows brightened his shirt. As he sat and looked into my eyes, Trey seemed warmer, friendlier, less antagonistic, more at home in his own skin and more at ease with me. Maybe it was the fact that we shared a secret now, the story of how and why he’d left his family at seventeen. Or maybe he was getting used to me. He seemed altogether relaxed, which stood in contrast to how I felt being this close to him again, my stomach filled with butterflies, my palms damp. Only a few men in my life had affected me this way, and it was annoying to realize I wasn’t beyond irrational juvenile crushes that took hold with a first look and wouldn’t let go.

  “Where would you like to start today?” Trey asked.

  “With Chief Fish. We never finished with him.”

  “He called in sick today. Dependent care. His daughter’s got the flu.”

  “You already checked?”

  “I already checked.”

  “How old’s his daughter?”

  “Thirteen, I think. Fourteen.”

  “She must be pretty sick if he has to stay home with her.”

  “There’s just the two of them. His wife died in an automobile accident a few years back. The day it happened he was in the garage working on the CV joints in his wife’s Acura, so she borrowed his truck to drive to the store. While she was getting groceries, a freezing rain started coming down and the roads turned into ice rinks. On the way home she slid off the roadway and went down an embankment and turned upside down in a culvert. Nobody saw the accident, so by the time Fish got worried and launched a search, several inches of snow was covering the roads. It had to be about the hardest thing he’s ever done, walking down that hillside knowing there were no footprints leading away from his truck, the roof all crushed in. She was dead by the time he found her. He’d been putting off work on her car and blamed himself for the accident. Now his daughter’s the center of his life.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “He was a good chief while we had him. Never got rattled at fires, always remembered the basics, and looked out for his guys. He’s one of the few chiefs who hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a firefighter. On the other hand, on a strictly personal level he’s hard to figure.”

  Except for us, the room had emptied, and now the two fire trucks in the apparatus bay had their engines running. “Where are they going?” I asked.

  “Inspecting. Every year we do building inspections on businesses in the city. Looking for fire hazards. After you’ve been at a station a while, there aren’t too many buildings in your district you haven’t seen inside and out. You get a fire and find yourself stumbling around in the smoke, it helps.”

  “Had you been in the Z Club? Did you know the layout?”

  “I remembered it was a tinderbox. I remembered there was an upstairs and a downstairs, that they weren’t connected through the interior. I forgot about the door in back at the northeast corner of the building.”

  “They found people inside that door, didn’t they?”

  “Ladder One found them.”

  “But you might have found them if you’d remembered?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just…”

  “This is why you should have a different partner. This is why I’m no good for this.”

  “Do you feel bad that you might have rescued those people if you’d remembered the door?”

  “No, I feel great that three more people are dead because in the middle of the night I couldn’t remember a building inspection I’d done three years earlier.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I don’t like being the subject of an inquisition.”

  “It isn’t an inquisition. I was only trying to get a sense for how you were thinking.”

  “Okay. Here’s how I was thinking. I was thinking I could forget this whole thing and move on with my life until you came along and drafted me to be your helper. That’s how I was thinking.”

  “It has to be done, Trey. You know that. The community is never going to relax until they get an independent investigation.”

  “How can this be independent when I’m in the department and was at the fire?”

  “I’m the one who’s writing it. You’re my technical advisor, nothing else. Listen, I’m sorry if you’re not happy about this assignment, and I know I should have asked you before I went ahead and planned out your next few weeks.”

  “You would have nixed me the first time I opened my mouth.”

  “Probably.”

  “That’s okay, because I would have nixed you, too.”

  “Nice start to the morning.”

  We glowered
at each other for a few seconds before I broke it off and stirred some cream into my coffee. He sighed and said, “I jumped on the computer and found three people on shift today who were at the fire. Also, I thought we should talk to the guy who owned the building. His name is McDonald.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “It’s a hunch, mostly. That club on the second floor was supposed to be for members only, but they were charging admission to the public. Also, the row of windows along the north wall had been boarded over. The fire department report mentions it in the configuration of the building, but they don’t say whether it was legal under the fire code. I’m wondering why they did that. And when.”

  “What was the building like?”

  “Downstairs was basically a huge hall, big enough to play basketball in, with a corridor and offices and restrooms on the north side. That’s where the wedding reception was. At the front door there was a separate entrance, wooden steps ten feet wide leading up to what used to be a small theater on the second floor with a stage and dressing rooms and so forth behind it, bleacher-type seating at the east wall. A runway up above with balcony seating. If we contact the building owner, we might be able to find some recent photographs.”

  “I don’t know. It’s going to take forever just to see all these firefighters. Plus, there are victims we need to talk to.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  “You are, sir.”

  “I thought we were going to be Trey and Jamie?”

  “Jamie, sir,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, the antagonism evolving into a joke.

  “By the way. I went down the list and found another name this morning, spoke to a Frank Putnam on the phone.” Putnam had resigned from the department after the Z Club fire.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked. “Jesus, just when I thought we were going to be buddies. Now you’re talking to people without me?”

  “I knew he’d left the department and was only trying to locate him, but then when he answered the phone in B.C., he said he wouldn’t be around for a few days, so I started shooting questions at him. I didn’t think about it.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “You knew he had resigned from the department?”

  “I heard.”

  “He said he didn’t quit because of the fire. Said he’d been thinking about it for some time.”

  “He only had two years in the department. How long could he have been thinking about it?”

  “I’m only telling you what he told me.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “You’re really mad, aren’t you?”

  “Two sets of rules, lady. One for you and one for the rest of us. I could have been interviewing people all day yesterday while you were at your wedding.”

  “I told you how this happened.”

  “So what’d he say?”

  “You really think I have two sets of rules?”

  “Absolutely.” He glared at me for a moment. “So what did he say?”

  “You don’t have to be like this.”

  “No, I don’t. But I am.”

  “He said he was on Ladder One. That they had been assigned to place a ladder to the roof on the north side of the building so Ladder Seven would have an alternate means of egress if they ran into trouble. Putnam said the four of them were carrying some ladder that was apparently huge.”

  “A fifty-five. It’s only forty-five feet now, but we still call it the fifty-five. It has tormentor poles out to the side to brace it when it’s upright, and it weighs over two hundred fifty pounds, so it’s a four-person ladder. Aside from the aerial, it’s the only thing that would have reached the roof.”

  “They were carrying the ladder when they heard some feeble pounding that sounded like it was coming from inside a pair of painted-over doors. There weren’t any handles on the outside of the doors, so they got axes and broke in. I don’t know where they got the axes.”

  “Truckmen carry axes on their person.”

  “Putnam said when they got the doors open there were six victims at the base of a stairwell. One of them was on his back and had been kicking at the door. Could barely lift his leg by the time they got to him. They dragged all six out and got help. Turned out two were already dead. The other four were semiconscious from smoke inhalation. They helped work on the victims for a few minutes, then were assigned to take a line up those back stairs. He said it was pretty disorganized on that back side.”

  “Are you accusing me again?”

  “I’m just repeating what he told me. Where were you?”

  “Probably inside the building by then. I don’t recall seeing those doors being opened. I remember them open, but I didn’t see it happen.”

  “Does the person in charge generally go inside?”

  “You’re thinking about Clyde accusing me of taking over his job? No, the division commander does not generally do any work. But when we arrived there were only three of us, and I couldn’t sit on my hands while people were dying. I knew neither Clyde nor Kitty would be as capable at carrying out victims as I was, and we had no other help back there. There wasn’t time to wait around for more manpower. Jesus, they were jumping. The first one broke his neck.”

  “Okay. Putnam said after they got the victims out they were told to work a hose line up the back stairs. He seemed to think that wasn’t a job for a truckman, but his officer was from Engine Ten and wanted to use some water. They didn’t make it even halfway up the stairs. He said it was roaring. That it was hopeless by then. He said he was never so happy in his life than when they were told to pull their lines out.”

  “Not even when he quit the department?”

  “You resent him quitting, don’t you?”

  “Not as much as I resent you judging my performance when you haven’t heard my story.”

  “Listen, calm down. I’m not judging you or anybody else. Besides, you can tell your story any time you want. Right now would be fine with me.”

  “Did any of Putnam’s victims say anything while they were bringing them out?”

  “I don’t know. We have the names and addresses of the survivors. We can talk to them later.”

  “What they say now, after the whole community has been in an uproar, and what they may have said that night might be two different critters. Or didn’t you think about that?”

  “I’m sorry. Next time I’ll be sure you’re along so you can ask the really important questions.”

  “I didn’t say it was important. Just somebody should have asked.”

  “You want me to call him back?” Angrily, I pulled my cell phone out of my bag and found Frank Putnam’s number, dialing it before Trey could stop me. It rang unanswered.

  Half an hour later our first interviewee was a member of Ladder 12 working at Station 25 for the day. We drove Trey’s ten-year-old Infiniti to Capitol Hill and met him in the engine officer’s room.

  26. NO POINT IN KNOCKING YOURSELF OUT

  ACTING LIEUTENANT WILLIAM RUDOLPH,

  LADDER 12, C SHIFT>

  I was walking alongside the north face of the building next to the parked cars when something heavy hit the pavement in front of me. Fell out of one of the upper windows. If I’d taken two more steps, two hundred pounds of woman would have driven me into the pavement like a spike. She was staring up at me when I put my flashlight on her, making these gurgling sounds. Agonal breathing, we call it. She was dead, of course.

  We were supposed to report to Division C, but we couldn’t find him, so after we hauled the jumper away, we helped put Ladder 1’s fifty-five up to the roof. There was already a thirty-five up with some firefighters working off it, getting people out, so after we got the fifty-five up, we grabbed a third ladder off Engine 33 and threw it up to the window the woman jumped out of. There wasn’t much hope of getting anybody else out that window, though. There was a lot of flame coming out of it. We were getting ready to go up and try anyway when w
e heard the Mayday. Lost firefighter.

  Me and Nash ended up going back around to side A and being one of the two teams going inside, which turned out to be ironic, because the missing man was Sweeting, our number three guy that night, only we didn’t know it at the time.

  What happened earlier was we all went inside with Engine 13’s crew looking for the little girl who was supposedly still in the building. Then they realized she was already out and we got called back outside. I got out onto the porch with the crew of Engine 13 and my partner, Nash, and I saw McMartin coming out behind us through the smoke, so I said, “Is your partner coming?” And he says, “He’s right behind me.” So I didn’t think anything more of it.

  I found out later that McMartin turned around right after he said that, and no Sweeting. He should have called out his name, you know, oriented Sweeting by voice contact, and he should have told us ’cause we were on our way to get fresh bottles, but he thought it was a simple thing to just step back into the smoke and grab him. So without telling anybody, he went back in. It was a fatal mistake for Sweeting and almost fatal for McMartin. Meanwhile, I’m thinking him and Sweeting were outside behind us.

  McMartin made a couple of wrong turns in the smoke, and all of a sudden he was lost, too. Right then he should have got on the radio and called a Mayday, but he was convinced the door to the building wasn’t more than a few steps away, so he kept wandering around until his low-air bell started ringing, and then before he knew it, he was out of air. Somebody at the command post heard the bell and put out a call for all units on scene to check their manpower, make sure everybody was accounted for, but I didn’t hear anything. I had two guys lost inside the building and I didn’t even know it.