by Earl Emerson
“So you still own the building?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They were having club parties upstairs, Mr. McDonald,” I said. “Did you know about that?”
“Chaps and Campbell are dead. I can’t remember what all they told me.”
“Do you have any paperwork with their names on it?” Estevez asked.
“Paperwork?”
“A rental contract. Something in writing between you and them?”
“We done business on a handshake. They paid on time, and that was all I cared about.”
“Where’d you meet them?” I asked.
“Don’t recall.”
“How long were they renting the space?”
“Now, that I would have to think on. I been in and out of the hospital so many times this year, I’m not remembering the way I should. You know we’ve had people out here throwing white paint in our rockery? Oil-based. Trying to mess up my things. All I know about these two guys is they changed the locks on me. Said people was stealing stuff. I raised a fuss, but what could I do?”
“Did you know the building had been condemned by the building department?” I asked.
“The fire department never told me that.”
“In the beginning the fire department didn’t know, but you should have. It was the building department. You never saw the notice?”
“No, I never knew. Musta happened when I was in the hospital. I got mail I ain’t opened piled from here to Timbuktu.”
“This picture,” I said, holding up a photo I’d found on his desk. “When was it taken?”
“When we first rented the place to them guys upstairs. Before they changed the locks.”
“Who’s this in the background?”
“That guy there?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he worked with the guys upstairs.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“I mighta met him. I don’t remember names very well anymore.”
30. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE THIGH
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
On the way out of Chester McDonald’s house I got a call on my cell phone from one of the Z Club Citizens for Truth members, explaining that a pair of deacons wanted to meet us in fifteen minutes at the Mount Zion church. We got into Trey’s car and he began driving toward the church.
“They think we’re going to drop everything and run to them whenever they have a question?” he said.
“How long could it take?”
“The point is, we’re either doing this investigation or we’re at their beck and call.”
“Oh, I think we can manage both.”
“Do you? This is Monday. We’ve been at this exactly two days, and this’ll be your third meeting with them.”
“Actually, my fourth.”
“Good God.”
“You’re kind of a whiner, aren’t you, Trey?”
“Tell you what. You meet with them. I’ll go talk to the next guy on our list.”
“I thought you wanted to do this together?”
“You’re the one who went off on your own.”
“I told you how that happened. It wasn’t as if I planned it that way. And stop whining.”
“I’m not whining. I’m bitching.”
Neither of us spoke as he drove. In my case, I wasn’t speaking because I was so angry I could almost spit, but in his case, it was hard to tell what he was thinking. I wasn’t sure he didn’t grouse just to be grousing. At one point he smiled at something on the road, and I got the feeling from his erratic change of mood that he really wasn’t in such a foul humor at all.
I wasn’t sure how much we’d learned from Chester McDonald, though I quickly began to get the feeling most of what he told us was embellishment if not outright prevarication. His vaunted cooperation with the fire department didn’t match Lieutenant Hogben’s recollections. During the interview, Trey had acted disinterested and began walking around the room, casually picking up an item or a photo, motioning behind McDonald’s back for me to keep him chattering—which wasn’t hard, because McDonald had convinced himself we were flirting. Meanwhile Trey wandered around the room and finally snatched one of the photos from the desk.
“So what’s the deal with the picture?” I said.
“What picture?”
“The picture in your right-hand trouser pocket. The one you stole off McDonald’s desk.”
“Borrowed.”
“Borrowing is when you ask somebody and they give it to you. Stealing is when you just take it.”
The snapshot was still warm from his body heat when he handed it to me, a photo of the Z Club taken before the fire, Chester McDonald and three hapless young women in the foreground. “So?” I said.
“There are three people in the background, two workmen in hard hats with their backs to the camera and one man walking toward the camera. Check out the guy walking.”
The figure was blurry but looked vaguely familiar, a heavyset Caucasian male in a long black leather coat. “Who is it?”
“Remember the person I was rude to at the party Saturday night?”
“Were you rude to only one person? Oh, you’re just counting the men?”
“Real funny. Barry Renfrow. What do you think he was doing at the Z Club three weeks before it burned down?”
“It resembles him, but are you sure?”
“It’s Renfrow, all right.”
“Okay. Maybe it’s him, I can’t tell for sure. What makes you think it was three weeks before the fire?”
“The date on the side of the picture. And it’s not that blurry.”
“Even if it is him, could it be some sort of coincidence?”
“Renfrow works for the Overby family, but he works for the Carmichaels, too. India confirmed it Saturday night when I generously offered to throw out all the freeloaders, starting with him. She said we couldn’t throw him out because he still worked for Stone and her father.”
“When you showed it to him, McDonald said he didn’t know who the man was. You didn’t really offer to throw Renfrow out, did you?”
“I said I did.”
“You think McDonald was lying?”
“Absolutely.”
We were silent for another mile or two. It took me a while to work up my nerve, but finally I said, “I have a question, but I don’t want you to be offended.”
“Shoot.”
“May I look in your personnel file at headquarters?”
“What for?”
“It’s a matter of making sure there aren’t any surprises when we come out with this report. Even if what we write isn’t controversial, there’s going to be a degree of scrutiny on both of us, and it’s my standard practice to clear the decks before going into battle. I do this with all my sources. I need to know the sorts of background stories that might crop up.”
“You consider me a source?”
“I was thinking about the man who fell out of the fourteenth-floor window.”
“Bernie Withers? Who told you about him?”
“Blame it on my profession. My concern is that this will come out somewhere along the line. The papers are going to find out you’re the brother of the mayor, too. None of this is going to work to our benefit.”
“I told everybody I wasn’t the one for this job.”
“It’s not that. I just don’t want any surprises.”
“You want to look in my file, look in my file.”
“Thank you. If you’d like to tell me the story first, that might help.”
“Sure. I don’t mind. We were called to a fire downtown in a condominium complex on Boren Avenue. I was working on Engine Six, where I was assigned at the time. Somehow Withers and I managed to get on the first elevator. We were going to scout the fire unit and give a report, maybe tap it with pump cans if we were lucky. As per procedure, we got off the elevator on floor twelve and hiked up the two flights to fourteen. Bernie was running, afraid the guys from Engine Twenty-five would beat us.”
“Does that happen often? Racing somebody to their fire?”
“Often enough. When we got to fourteen, we could see the light from our flashlights in the smoke, but that was all. The apartment was vacant. A string of tiny lights above the patio doors had overheated and set the wall and the drapes on fire. There was an overhead sprinkler that had gone off, so we encountered a huge spray of water along with smoke. Withers found the patio doors and slid them open. Then I heard his pump can working. He was in deeper than me, and after a moment I heard this noise and called out to him but he didn’t answer. I couldn’t hear his SCBA anymore, either. I was feeling my way in the smoke, and all of a sudden I was smack up against this railing that hit me in the middle of my thigh. I almost went over it. Then the smoke cleared a little, and I realized I was on the patio, looking down fourteen stories at the street. Bernie had done the same thing, only he hadn’t caught himself. He was sprawled out on the sidewalk. Until the Z Club it was the worst day of my career.”
“That’s horrible. Is there anything else about your background I should know?”
“Lots of things. I like children, but I don’t like large dogs, bowling, long bus trips, or slow drivers who hog the passing lane. I like fried chicken and mashed potatoes, but I don’t like cheese, and I’m not partial to people who spend a lot of time talking about wine.”
“I meant anything pertinent.”
“All of that is pertinent, but Bernie’s the only firefighter who ever died on my watch, if that’s what you want to know.”
“At the Z Club, weren’t you on the side of the building where Sweeting died?”
“Okay, Bernie and Sweeting. Maybe one or two others.” When I looked at him, he said, “Just kidding.”
“You weren’t involved with Sweeting at the Z Club, were you?”
“On that one, I got lucky. I was on the side of the building where we lost thirteen civilians.”
31. RIDING IN A CAR WITH THE ICE QUEEN
TREY>
On the drive to the Mount Zion church, Estevez seemed to be reinvigorated. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she’d caught me stealing the photo off Chester McDonald’s desk or because she’d learned I’d lost a partner at a fire. I’d spent the whole morning trying to figure her out. I’d thought at first Estevez was one of those women who had been coasting on her good looks all her life and thus didn’t know how to deal with real people. I know I’d made things difficult for her, but I was still irked at some of her presumptions, the worst being that I didn’t need to be asked about being on this committee. One of my specialties, though, was being difficult, and knowing this, I was beginning to regard our clashes less as irritation and more as entertainment.
The photo was a trifle blurry, and there was a chance it might not have been Renfrow, but with fifteen deaths to be accounted for, I wasn’t going to write it off to coincidence the way Estevez seemed inclined to do. I had been virtually certain of my identification until Estevez sowed seeds of doubt, but then, that appeared to be her subcontract in our arrangement—to cast doubt on any thoughts I had that weren’t based on fire department technicalities.
We were almost at the Mount Zion church when Estevez said, “While we have a minute, would you explain how a normal fire operation works. Or is there such a thing as a normal fire operation?”
“Seattle adopted an incident command system maybe ten, twelve years ago. We use it on every fire call now, the same basic system that’s utilized in a lot of places around the country. The same plan for every fire call. One person, the incident commander, essentially runs the show. He or she gives the orders, makes the decisions, and delegates. Everybody works as a unit, because there’s one brain driving things. The weakness is that if the IC is disorganized or forgets something important—or worse, if he chokes—any fire can go to hell in a handbasket. Another problem is that the IC generally doesn’t go inside and often doesn’t get around to the back side of the building, so he knows only what he’s told and what he can see from the command post. If the reports he’s getting are garbled or inaccurate, things can go south in a hurry.
“Also, there’s a span of control we try never to exceed. One individual should have no more than five to seven people reporting to him or her. The IC will have four to seven divisions reporting, and each division commander will have no more than that number of company officers under him or her.”
“Every fire has the same basic command structure?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good to know. And thank you for coming to this meeting.”
“My pleasure. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. I’m going to take notes and put them in my journal.”
“You keep a journal?”
“I’m going to start one tonight.”
“You are so sarcastic.”
We parked in front of the church and walked to the main entrance, where we found the front doors locked. There were lights on in the back, so I pounded on the doors until a smallish woman with a red-haired wig let us in.
“They’re waiting in back,” she announced.
Just as I suspected, it was two deacons from separate churches who’d joined the Z Club Citizens for Truth just today, each insisting they wanted to pick our brains, though it quickly became apparent that what they really wanted was to complain about the fact that half a dozen young people were arrested Saturday night on charges of disturbing the peace, and another dozen were detained last night for throwing rocks and bottles at a fire engine. “You gotta get this report out so we can put an end to all this,” said the larger of the two men.
“How about telling people to behave?” I said.
Estevez gave me a harsh look and then listened patiently to their concerns, which was more than I could manage, knowing that the more time we wasted here, the longer it would take to complete our task. Forty-five minutes into the confab, my cell phone rang and I stepped out of the room to answer it.
“Can you meet me?” I recognized the caller immediately.
“Where are you?”
“Downtown.”
“Whereabouts downtown?”
“Right now I’m in the Georgian at the Four Seasons Olympic.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I stepped back into the room and caught Estevez’s eye. The two men liked listening to themselves talk and didn’t stop even when she got up to speak to me. “What is it?” she whispered.
“Something’s come up. It’s personal.”
“Now? We’re almost finished.”
“Yeah. Sure we are. And after that the four of us are going to start a rock band and turn out a hit single.”
She glared at me for a moment. “When will you be back?”
“Sometime this afternoon.”
“In the meanwhile, what do I do for transportation?”
I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “If you ever finish up here, take a cab. I’ll call your cell phone when I’m free.”
“I hope this is important.”
“It’s at least as important as all this pissing and moaning.”
“Shhh, I think they heard you.”
“Tell them I send my love. See you later.”
It was with a rising sense of anticipation that I parked in a garage off Fifth Avenue near the Four Seasons, then walked across the street, throwing on a jacket to cover my white uniform shirt and badge.
I found India Carmichael seated at a table for two in the restaurant, looking both casual and elegant in a simple white blouse and blue skirt, hair pulled into a loose ponytail; the woman I’d fallen madly in love with the summer I turned seventeen. You know the one—the one you never forget. And here she was, married to Mayor Stone Carmichael, my ex-brother, having already given him two children, a pillar of society, while I was a lowly unmarried captain in the Seattle Fire Department, subject to the whims of every nutcase who got the itch to dial 911.
When I sat across from her at the table I was starkly aware of the contrast in our
social positions, and not just from the five-thousand-dollar watch she wore or the silk blouse. The rich also project an air of privilege the rest of us can never quite exhibit. I know; I had been one of them.
She looked at me coolly. “How are you?”
“Fine. You look good.”
“I was surprised to see you Saturday night. Pleasantly surprised. I really didn’t know you were going to be there.”
“Nobody did. I gate-crashed.“
She smiled, indulging me. “I know they gave you tickets. It’s been so long. It seems like forever.”
“Does it?”
“Do you ever think about that night?” She asked it as if we were a couple of geriatric patients in a nursing home, as if there couldn’t possibly be an ounce of passion left between us, but I knew she was talking about the two of us making love in the gardener’s cottage and not about what happened later.
“I think about it once in a while,” I lied. I thought about it all the time, both parts of the night.
“Do you know I’ve never talked to Stone about it.”
“He still doesn’t know?”
“He’s never had a clue. Not that I haven’t been tempted occasionally in our worst fights to blurt it out just to hurt him. You still don’t like him, do you?”
“He hasn’t done anything to change my opinion, but that’s okay, because I think the feeling is mutual. You have two boys. How old are they? Or did I ask Saturday night?”
“You did, but I’ll tell you again. Seth and Marshall. Eight and ten. Marshall’s a sports fiend. Seth wants to be a musician and already plays the guitar and piano.”
“I bet they’re adorable. It’s too bad how it turned out the other night.”
“John has a habit of making a jackass out of himself. I felt sorry for my little sister. And for you.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me. I rather enjoyed being called a rapist in front of my date.”
“I really am sorry.”
