by Earl Emerson
At this time the aide from the command post goes over to the front door, standing in all this smoke without a mask, and shouts that the door is right there, you know, orienting McMartin by the sound of her voice, and McMartin finally comes out, having run completely out of air. We used to think we could take all this smoke, that if our bottles gave out, we had two or three minutes to get out, maybe even five if we were tough. But the fact is, with all these new components in building materials and the gases they give off when they’re burning, a lot of times we take one breath and we’re down. But McMartin gets out, and they get a medic and put O2 on him, and after a couple of minutes he regains his senses and asks if Sweeting is out. That was the first anybody knew there was somebody else in there.
So we go back around the building, and me and Nash get assigned to go inside and do a right-hand search for the missing firefighter, who we still don’t know is Sweeting. We do two small rooms on that second search, but then the captain on Ladder 6 calls the search off, says conditions are untenable. We sure as hell don’t want to leave, but maybe it was a good thing. The thermal imager is registering 1300 degrees on the ceiling. Our worry was that the whole first floor would flash over and burn us alive.
We got out and went to rehab, where McMartin told us it was Sweeting who’d gone missing.
About ten hours later we found him in a back room on the first floor, where for some unknown reason he took off his gear and was sitting against the wall. They let us haul him out—the body, I mean. They usually do that, let the crew haul their own guy out. Engine 13 helped. He looked peaceful, actually, the way he was sitting. Of course he was dead from the smoke long before any fire got to him.
Did we pass up any civilians while we were searching for Sweeting? Hell, no. I didn’t see or hear anybody except my partner, Nash, and most of the time I couldn’t see him.
Do I feel bad about losing Sweeting? You bet. Everybody on the fire ground felt bad. I feel bad for his wife and kid, too, but we can’t turn the clock back, can we? There’s no point in knocking yourself out over it.
27. A MISTAKE WE’VE ALL MADE
TREY>
After Rudolph left the room, Estevez finished scribbling her notes.
As far as I was concerned, an officer, even an acting officer, had one job on the fire ground that was paramount to all others: ensuring his or her men were safe and accounted for. True, Rudolph didn’t stand in as an acting lieutenant often, but he’d been in the department sixteen years and had seen a good deal of action. You simply did not take a new assignment and walk around a fire building without verifying that your crew had secured from the previous assignment. Did I want to tell this to Estevez so she could write it in her report? Not any more than I wanted to tell her about missing that painted-over door in the back of the building, but I didn’t see any way around it.
The official fire department review of the Z Club had glossed over the disappearance of the firefighter but went on to depict the search for him in intricate detail. It was typical of an official report when covering a fatality to skip over details that might finger individuals, the operative theory being that there was nothing to be served by publicly skewering one person for a mistake anyone could have made.
The dead firefighter, Vernon Sweeting, had only been in the department a year and a half. Twenty-six years old, shuffled from one station to another at indefinite intervals, he landed at Station 27, where he’d been two months at the time of his death, not long enough for anybody to really know him or to grieve for him. He’d been riding Ladder 12 the night he died, and none of those guys knew him at all. We all found out from newspaper articles following his death that he’d been writing a novel. His young widow said he’d had literary ambitions since he was ten, that he’d viewed the fire department as a temporary job to put food on the table until he made his bones in the writing world.
Estevez and I were alone, sitting in the two straight-backed chairs in the Engine 25 officer’s room. “I have a couple of questions,” Estevez said. “Rudolph was an acting lieutenant. What does that mean?”
“Even though he’s only a firefighter, he was riding in the officer’s spot on the rig, performing the job of the officer.”
“But he’s not an officer.”
“No.”
“I would gather some of the blame for Sweeting’s death hangs on him.”
“Probably. Sweeting’s partner, McMartin, didn’t help things.”
“But doesn’t it seem pretty basic at a fire to keep track of your people?” Estevez asked.
“Sitting here in this room, it does. You put on fifty pounds of gear, sweat until you feel like you just stepped out of a sauna, and inhale a mouthful of poisonous smoke on the street, and you might feel differently. Especially after you’ve already put in a fifteen-hour day. Plus, there’s a lot of confusion at any fire.”
“If Rudolph had called a Mayday, do you think Sweeting would have been found in time?”
“It’s hard to know for sure, but there’s a possibility. McMartin was lucky the aide went up there and called out to him and that he was close enough to the doorway to hear her, or he would be dead, too. But if he was out of air, by that time Sweeting was out of air himself, which means Sweeting was probably dead before they even launched the search.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it this incident that set the stage for the rest of the night? Because the IC was busy looking for the missing firefighter, he couldn’t concentrate on victims?”
“The IC was swamped, but as far as he knew, we were removing victims successfully from side C. If they hadn’t been looking for Sweeting, they might have had more people looking for civilians, true, but it was bad any way you looked at it.”
“One last thing? Early this morning at the station I heard somebody mention a Lieutenant Hogben. They said he’d inspected the Z Club before the fire. Wasn’t he at Station Twenty-eight this morning?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t at the fire, so he’s not on our list. You want to see him?”
“I was about to suggest it.”
28. YOU CAN’T ASK THEM ANYTHING
LIEUTENANT LOUIS HOGBEN, ENGINE 28, D SHIFT>
I admit I’m not the most perspicacious building inspector in the department. Is that the right word? Perspicacious? I mean, let’s face it. The department doesn’t give us any training on how to inspect buildings. They used to present a measly two-hour class once a year, but they don’t even do that anymore.
And you have to realize, we’re squeezing all this building inspection in along with our other duties: drilling, physical fitness, equipment maintenance, endless classes, our alarms. I ride Engine 28, and if we’re not the busiest engine company in the city, we’re close. Sometimes we get fourteen, eighteen alarms a shift. There’ve been times I didn’t touch the sheets all night. Eight or ten runs after ten o’clock. Don’t get me wrong. I ride it because I like the action, but trying to squeeze a regular workday in between all the emergency stuff can get silly.
I inspected the Z Club this year. The guy in charge is named Chester McDonald. The place is locked up the first time I go around in late March. It’s locked again the two times we go by in April. So I finally get this McDonald on the horn, and he wants to meet me next shift, but the next shift we have an all-day class, and the shift after that is a Sunday, so I set up a meeting in two weeks.
Two weeks later he doesn’t show. We leave messages, but he doesn’t get back to us. I can’t remember the whole timeline, but we finally get hold of him on the phone two or three shifts later and he says he’s on his way down, so if we can go right that minute, he’ll meet us. So we meet with this Chester McDonald, and there are holes in the walls and open electrical boxes, and extinguishers are missing, and he doesn’t seem to be able to find his public assembly permit—though at the time we don’t think he needs it, because he’s telling us this place is a private club, just members. So I call downtown to the fire marshal’s office and ask if he needs a public a
ssembly permit, and they say he’s had one in the past but it’s up to me to decide if he needs one now. I write him up a permit application and an NOV for all the violations.
The trouble with this whole thing is I’m writing the Notice of Violation for the first floor only. We never get into the top space. McDonald says he’s got it rented out to some group and the guy in charge is impossible to get in touch with, and he doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing up there. I find this hard to believe, but it was hard enough to get into the lower portion of the building. So McDonald gives us a cell phone number for this guy who supposedly is renting the upper floor. Only he never answers and doesn’t return our messages. So one day we just happen to be driving past on our way back from an alarm, and there’s people there. So we stop, introduce ourselves, and meet this John Chaps. The upstairs was worse than downstairs. So we make a list of all the stuff they need to fix. It’s actually more than I think we can let them get away with, especially since they’re telling us they are going to be having a hundred and fifty paying customers there in two nights. So I call up the fire marshal’s office and ask what to do, because this guy John Chaps is telling me they’re hanging by a shoestring, and if we don’t let them open Friday they’ll go out of business.
It happens we’re working Friday night, so I tell him we’ll be back. So we go see them Friday night, and they’ve made a good-faith effort. I mean, they’ve got eight new extinguishers. They’ve put up exit signs. Almost everything we asked for. And here’s the kicker. They tell us Franklin from the fire marshal’s office was there looking at things the day before. Only Franklin never said a word to us about it. But that’s how they get down at the fire marshal’s office. They’re like gerbils trying to power a tractor—overworked. I mean, the only reason we even know he was there is because the occupants told us.
I need to know if those boarded-over windows on the second floor are legal or not, so I leave a couple more messages at the fire marshal’s office, and they still don’t get back to me. Meanwhile, I’m having trouble with McDonald. He’s not cleaning up the place and it’s rented out almost every weekend, and when I try to get hold of him, he’s in the hospital for another operation on his leg. Then our crew gets a whole series of classes, and we get into May and June, and we’re so damn busy I don’t get back to the place.
At the end of June I get a note from a lieutenant on the other shift telling me the cops are watching the place because they think there’s drug activity. So we go by the next Saturday night, and there’s a party going on. And they’re charging fifteen bucks a head to go upstairs. No permit. No clearance from us. Nothing. We go up and the place is jamming. Music. Maybe a hundred and fifty people. I found out later the building department had already condemned this place. In fact, they’d condemned it two weeks before our first inspection, but nobody told us. They put a yellow letter on the front of the building, which somebody just tore off. So I call the batt chief, and he doesn’t know what to do, either. We call the fire marshal’s office and get Franklin off shift. He’s on a pager. He says we can go home. He’ll take care of it. That’s the last we hear for another two weeks. What’s bothering me is that the back exit is blocked. There’s all these people and only one exit down the wooden stairs in the front. The rear exit behind the stage is blocked with a table and a pile of boards. We had them unblock the exit, but I had the feeling they were going to put everything back the minute we left.
By now we’re getting real close to September. The fire was September third, right? What we didn’t know was that Franklin never got down there at all. He got prostatitis and almost died and was off three weeks. And the fire marshal’s office didn’t have enough people to cover for him. I didn’t know the building department had condemned the place, and the building department didn’t realize they were still holding parties. They told us they never actually got in touch with anybody, that they simply wrote to the owner and posted a letter on the front of the building. In fact, when it burned down, I still didn’t even know who owned the place. The one time I tracked the tax records through the assessor’s office, they listed Silverstar Consolidated as the owners. When I called McDonald and asked about it, he said he owned it. And the guys running the club upstairs, Chaps and Campbell, both died in the fire, so you can’t ask them anything.
29. THE ONE-LEGGED LIAR
TREY>
After Lieutenant Hogben left the room, Estevez looked at me and said, “Did you know any of this?”
“Just at the end. About a week before the fire, we got a memo from Franklin and his captain at the fire marshal’s office stating that the address had been closed down by the building department and that any public assembly on the premises was illegal. I wrote a memo for all shifts to drive by every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights we worked to make sure nobody was there. Preferably late, when these parties would be going on.”
“The fire was on a Saturday night. Did you check it that night?”
“Not yet. The fire came in at ten-thirty. But they checked it the night before, and it was dark.”
We were back at Station 28, using the engine officer’s office, Estevez sitting alongside me. Lieutenant Hogben had been bouncing around nervously in the tilting swivel chair. A pasty-faced man with a good-size belly and a uniform that looked as if he’d been wearing it ten years, he was more nervous than anybody we’d interviewed so far.
“Hogben seemed nervous,” Estevez said.
“If you did the last building inspection on a place where fourteen people died, you’d be nervous, too.”
“Do you think he did his job properly?”
“You’d have a real hard time making a case against him. The department’s asking him to perform a task he’s never been trained for. None of us have. He asked for help any number of times, and the fire marshal’s office more or less ignored him.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Overworked. Just like us. We never saw a letter on the front of the building. Somebody took it down. My money would be on Chaps and Campbell. It would have helped if the building department had mentioned it, but we don’t work that closely with them. There’s no doubt in my mind that either McDonald or the two guys running the club upstairs removed the letter.”
“It’s not likely anybody’s going to admit they saw a letter.”
“No.”
Estevez had seemed high-strung on Friday when I got roped into this gig, and at the time I’d attributed it to nervous strain over the fact that people were rioting in the streets and she was being placed at the center of it all. Or maybe she was jittery because she’d lied to me. But even after all this time together she was tighter than a wet fiddle string. Oddly, the only time she had seemed to relax was when I was in her condo Saturday night telling her how my family had disowned me. She was relaxed around other people, but other people weren’t as hard on her as I had been, and I know they weren’t as sarcastic. For reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, Estevez brought out the worst in me. The funny part was that I was starting to like her.
Chester McDonald lived above Seward Park in a split-level house that, in today’s rising real estate climate, had to be worth a small fortune. The house was built on a knoll with a view of Lake Washington, Mercer Island, and a slice of Seward Park. I parked behind a ten-yearold Cadillac in a circular driveway, noticing bits of eggshell on the rear window of the Caddy.
The woman who answered the door was a light-skinned African-American woman around forty. She looked as though she’d been pretty once but had gained some weight in her face and midsection, her legs like sticks. She wore green polyester pants and green fuzzy slippers. After we told her who we were, she yelled, “Chester, people here to see you.”
She invited us into a large, well-kept living room and left us to our own devices. After a moment or two, an elderly man hobbled into the room on crutches, one leg missing from the knee down. He was short and shaped like a toad, his face a mass of circular growths, one of the ugliest m
en I’d ever met.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, sizing up Estevez and ignoring me. I had to admit, Estevez had been the highlight of the day for most of our interviewees.
She explained who we were while I used the free time and lack of supervision to wander the periphery of the room perusing photos on the walls. He’d been in the Navy. Then he’d worked for some service industry, as evidenced by a line of photos, a gas station maybe, judging by the brown uniform. The woman who answered the door was younger in the photos and clearly proud of the man she’d bagged, and he of her. There were earlier photos of McDonald with other women, all of them pretty. Rumble would have labeled him a sugar daddy. I wondered why his current woman, wife or whatever, would let him display pictures of former girlfriends so prominently on her walls.
“I’m glad you’re here,” McDonald said, hobbling across the room and into a den, plopping into an old wooden swivel chair. There were more photos in there.
“I’m just so damn glad you two showed up. Our pastor was on the news with that Beckmann woman. She goes to our church, don’t you know? Her cousin married our neighbor here. Always was a firebrand. I’m glad she’s looking into things. Too many people blaming this on me. All I did was rent the place to those scoundrels. And here I was in and out of the hospital. You see all the problems I have without people running around egging my car. Everybody knows Chester McDonald owned the Z Club. ’Course, nobody called it that until after the fire.”
“Mr. McDonald,” I said, “The King County tax assessor’s office has it on record that somebody named Silverstar Consolidated owns that property.”
“Oh, I think that was something the lawyers cooked up. I’d forgotten all about it. What I’m trying to figure out is how people can think it’s my fault when some crazy nigger goes and throws a Molotov cocktail into my building. I didn’t even know who he was until I saw his name in the papers.”
