Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  She had a sudden, stabbing realization at what might await her at the other end of the hallway. People who live alone often aren’t discovered dead until their bodies begin putrefying enough to alert neighbors. An open window in winter could dissipate the odor and delay that process for weeks. With her gloved hand, she flicked on the hallway light switch.

  And then she heard it. At the end of the hallway. A click, followed by a whoosh, like a gas stove igniting. The wind over her shoulder suddenly intensified. The cat raced past her, out of the apartment. When she looked back at Jamie Sullivan’s bedroom, flames were mushrooming across the ceiling. The bed crackled like it had been hit with napalm.

  “Get out of the apartment!” she yelled to the super. “Call nine-one-one.”

  Georgia had never seen a fire move so fast. Within seconds, flames were shooting up the bedroom curtains. The wind, too, had intensified. It howled through the apartment and gusted over her shoulder like a train barreling through a subway station at top speed. And yet, perhaps because of that god-awful wind, there was very little smoke. She could see everything as if she were watching a Hollywood movie. She looked back one last time at the bedroom, now completely engulfed. She saw no body. Heard no cries. She prayed Jamie Sullivan wasn’t home. Without turnout gear and a hose line, she couldn’t save him. Then again, she had no illusions that anyone in that bedroom would be alive now anyway.

  She raced out of Sullivan’s apartment, then slammed the front door shut to stop the spread of fire to the rest of the building. The super had said there were a lot of elderly people living here. If the fire expanded beyond Sully’s place, some of them might not make it out. Already, the super was knocking on other apartment doors, trying to evacuate tenants. Georgia joined him. In the street, a pumper was turning the corner.

  Georgia didn’t leave the building until she had rounded up all the tenants she could. Many of them had canes. Some didn’t hear especially well. She helped them make their way down the stairs while firefighters filed up. By the time she got to the street, dark gray clouds of smoke were puffing out the back of the building, blotting out the halogen-lit sky. Now that the flames had been contained, the smoke had intensified. It looked more like the fires Georgia normally rolled up on. Deadly, yes. But recognizable. She shuddered as she recalled the sudden fury of the flames in Sully’s bedroom. The room had to have been doused in accelerant. But why didn’t she smell anything?

  An EMS technician walked over to Georgia. “Do you need medical attention?”

  “No, thanks.” Georgia squinted over at a dark blue Chevy Caprice pulling up across the street. She closed her eyes and cursed softly as a tall, lean black man got out of the driver’s seat.

  “Besides, I think I’m going to be stuck here awhile.”

  22

  Randy Carter gave Georgia a dark look as he approached. “Girl, don’t even try to tell me you had nothing to do with this.”

  “All I wanted to do was talk to Jamie Sullivan,” she sputtered. “He wouldn’t return my phone calls.”

  “Well, for sure, he ain’t gonna return them now.”

  Georgia paled. “Firefighters found a body?”

  “The ten-forty-five came in over dispatch as we pulled up,” said Carter.

  “Oh, God.” She collapsed against the side of a fire engine. “I killed him.”

  “Can’t tell that until Suarez and I get inside.” Carter shot a look over his shoulder at his temporary partner, just getting out of the car. Eddie Suarez was a squat marshal with a weight-lifter’s physique and a broad, black mustache like Pancho Villa. He had hung back on purpose, Georgia suspected. He knew better than to get between two partners. It was like refereeing a fight between a husband and wife. Suarez, twice divorced, had had enough battle scars in that department. He approached them gingerly, making eye contact only with Carter.

  “I’m going to talk to the super, check out the fire scene,” Suarez offered.

  “Be there in a minute,” Carter grunted. Then he turned back to Georgia and wagged a bony finger at her. “You and I have to talk. Now.”

  Georgia meekly followed Carter over to the Caprice. She felt naked being at a fire scene without a length of hose, a halligan or a tool kit in her hand. Worse still, she was on the wrong end of the questioning. Carter was barely inside the car when he tore into her.

  “I want to know everything that happened tonight. And don’t give me some jive story about how you were just in the neighborhood. Broph is missing, Skeehan. He never showed up for work last night. I know you saw him after I asked you not to. And now he’s missing and Sully’s dead.”

  “But I don’t get it,” said Georgia. “Broph didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Well he told you about Sully or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Randy, what’s going on?”

  “You tell me.” He opened up his notebook and clicked on a tape recorder.

  “You’re doing a formal interview?”

  “You entered a man’s apartment without his permission and cremated him. You think I’m just going to shrug it off?”

  “No. But you’re being pretty hostile.”

  “You did something I asked you not to do. Who’s the hostile one?”

  A voice crackled over Carter’s handy talkie. It was Suarez.

  “Is Skeehan still with you?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Tell her I’m up in Sully’s apartment and I just checked out the body,” said Suarez. “I think he was dead before the fire started. He’s on his back, not his stomach. He wasn’t anywhere near the window. The area beneath him is protected, so he wasn’t moved. And there’s no evidence of cherry red lividity.”

  Georgia felt a small twinge of relief. She knew that blood settles in the body after death—a condition known as “lividity.” A cherry red coloring would suggest the victim had inhaled carbon monoxide from the fire. The absence of it suggested that the victim hadn’t inhaled any fumes because he was dead before the fire started.

  Carter didn’t seem the least bit mollified by the news. “Any gunshot wounds? Strangulation marks?” he asked Suarez.

  “None that I can see,” Suarez answered. “But I figured Skeehan would be relieved to hear that maybe she didn’t roast the poor bastard.”

  “All right, thanks,” said Carter. “I’ll be up there soon.” He clicked off his handy talkie and turned to Georgia. “Don’t get all comfortable yet, Skeehan. The medical examiner’s still got to check his windpipe for soot and do a toxicology screen for carbon monoxide in his blood.”

  “I know that,” she shot back. “I’m just relieved there’s a chance I didn’t kill him.”

  “The moment you decided to talk to him, you killed him. I told you to stay away.” He looked down at the running tape recorder and pushed Stop, then Rewind. “I don’t want that on tape,” he explained. “That’s between you and me.”

  Georgia opened her bag and pulled out the tape Reese had given her earlier. “Here’s something else you probably shouldn’t have on the record.” She handed the tape to Carter.

  “What’s this?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Play it,” said Georgia.

  “Is it the Glickstein tape?”

  “That, I fear, may already be in that big blank-tape heaven in the sky. But this is almost as good. Listen for yourself.”

  He did, and his face worked through all the same emotions Georgia had had when she first heard it: shock, rage, determination and, finally, a little bit of disappointment. While it seemed painfully clear to them that Michael McLaughlin had set the fire at Café Treize and didn’t care that two firefighters had died as a result, it would be useless as evidence in a courtroom.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I can’t say,” Georgia told him. “And you can’t do anything with it right now except share it with Mac and Chief Brennan and then lock it up. I guess you could call it our emergency backup plan. If all else fails, at least we have an ‘almost’ admission fr
om McLaughlin. Maybe we can’t present it to a jury, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Carter pocketed the tape. His mood brightened a little and Georgia felt more at ease as she slowly poured out what had happened tonight from the time she entered Sully’s building until she saw Carter on the street. After she’d finished, Carter shut down the recorder and turned to her.

  “Now do you believe me when I tell you you’ve got to get off this case with McLaughlin?”

  Georgia thought about Rick standing outside that construction trailer in the semi-darkness. “Believe me, Randy. I’m going to be kicked off this case soon, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Conflict of interest. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  “Whatever the reason, far as I’m concerned the sooner the better,” said Carter.

  “When I get off, will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “No.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Georgia promised.

  “It’s not anyone I’m concerned about,” said Carter. “It’s you. I can’t tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once I tell you, I can’t un-tell you. And this is something I don’t think you are ever going to want to know.”

  “Broph was mixed up in some gambling trouble with Freezer, is that it?” she asked. “You always said he was a big gambler and that he owed a lot of money to underworld types. And Sully was involved somehow, too.”

  Carter gave her a sad smile and shook his head. “Skeehan, you are so far from the truth.” He sighed. “Sully had no enemies. McLaughlin killed him. Or he had someone do it for him. Those are the only two possibilities. Believe me, I know.”

  Georgia stared up at the third floor. A gaping black hole, wreathed in soot, was all that remained of Jamie Sullivan’s life. Now that he was gone, the building he’d tried so hard to save might be sold off for condos anyway. The old-timers would be scattered to relatives and nursing homes. Only a few people in the neighborhood like Bobby Kelly would even recall his name. Maybe he wasn’t as lucky as everybody claimed after all.

  “I guess I have to let the Feds know I was here tonight,” said Georgia. “That alone is probably enough to get me drummed out of the FBI.”

  Carter agreed. “Call them. Then come upstairs and walk me through what happened, step by step, okay? This may be the fire that allows us to finally put the screws to McLaughlin. I don’t want anything overlooked.”

  23

  Georgia couldn’t reach Krause on his cell phone or beeper. She felt relieved that all she had to do was leave a brief message. She didn’t feel like going through everything tonight.

  Upstairs, in Sully’s apartment, Georgia picked her way across the inky slush that had once passed for wall-to-wall carpet. The air was acrid with fumes from the burning of foam rubber and plastics in the carpeting, draperies and furniture. If there was any accelerant in the apartment, Georgia’s nose was too overloaded with odors to distinguish it.

  She spotted Suarez in the living room, hunched over a section of carpet, taking samples. He was dressed in navy blue fire department coveralls, his latex gloves filthy from handling debris.

  “What have you found so far?” she asked him. He straightened and glanced down the hallway to where Carter was measuring something. He seemed unsure whether to answer. There was a dividing line between them now. Georgia was working for the FBI. Suarez and Carter were fire marshals. On top of that, Georgia was, at the very least, a witness to the crime. Carter frowned in her direction.

  “You’ve been invited up here to walk us through what happened,” he said. “Not participate in the investigation.”

  “Well, then here’s something you should know,” said Georgia. “The fire lit up in Sully’s bedroom like there was gasoline in there. But I never smelled any accelerant in the apartment.”

  Two technicians came out of the bedroom now with what looked like a black garment bag. Carter asked them to stop a moment and unzip the bag. He made sure Georgia had a long look at Jamie Sullivan’s charred face, burned like a marshmallow left too long over a campfire. Only a very intense fire could’ve done that much damage to him. Only a fire started by an accelerant like gasoline could’ve done it so quickly.

  Georgia turned away, feeling ashamed and guilty that her desire to talk to him had in any way contributed to his death. When the zipper again closed, she flinched. There was a finality to that sound that all the priests with their talk of God and heaven couldn’t erase. She’d heard that zipper close too many times on this job, and in her experience, there was very little afterlife in it.

  “You’ve made your point,” she muttered to Carter when the technicians had left. “I’m sorry I went against your wishes the other day. That doesn’t mean I know who murdered Jamie Sullivan and doused his bedroom with gasoline.”

  “There aren’t any pour patterns in that bedroom,” said Carter. “No pour patterns or evidence of gasoline in the entire apartment, as a matter of fact.”

  “But the fire looked just like something started with a lot of gasoline,” said Georgia. “It was the most intense blaze I’ve ever seen. Like something from the movies: fast-moving flames, no real smoke, tremendous heat. The only way to describe it was—”

  “A fireball,” Carter offered.

  “Yeah,” said Georgia. “Was there a bomb back there?”

  “No bomb,” said Suarez. “Somebody rerouted the bedroom light to the hallway junction box, then clipped them so they’d short when you threw the light switch.”

  “That was your spark, your ignition source,” said Carter. “You had plenty of oxygen from the open window in the front hallway.”

  That was two-thirds of the fire triangle, thought Georgia. Heat and oxygen. But where was the third prong—the readily combustible fuel? “Was there a natural gas leak?”

  “Negative,” said Carter. “We checked. The only odor of fuel so far came from the roof, when firefighters vented one of the scuttles during the blaze. They smelled gasoline.”

  “On the roof?” asked Georgia. It didn’t make sense. The fire never reached the roof. And besides, gasoline vapors are heavier than air. They don’t rise, they settle.

  Georgia stood at the entrance to the bedroom hallway. The carpet squished beneath her feet. The walls were blistered and blackened. She tried to picture it before the fire, when she stood here, feeling for the light switch. It was dark. She noticed nothing but the breeze over her shoulder, and the…

  “The dumbwaiter,” said Georgia, walking over to the shaft in the wall. It was still open. She checked the upper rim beneath the soot and saw a fresh tool mark imprinted upon the many blistered layers of paint.

  “Eddie, pass me a screwdriver.”

  Suarez retrieved one from his toolbox and handed it to her. She matched it against the marks on the metal. “This was pried open recently, and it was open when I entered the apartment.” Georgia stuck her head into the shaft and looked up. She could see the night sky above. She could smell gasoline vapors below.

  “I’ll bet you anything this was the shaft firefighters vented when they reported an odor of gasoline on the roof.”

  Carter and Suarez exchanged glances. “I’ll check it out from the basement,” said Suarez. He left the apartment. Carter gave Georgia a long appraising look—part impressed, part annoyed. None of this, in his opinion, would have been necessary if she hadn’t talked to Broph.

  “That still doesn’t explain how vapors as heavy as those in gasoline would end up concentrating in Sully’s bedroom,” he reminded her. “It takes a pretty sophisticated torch to manage that feat.”

  “You think Freezer did it,” she said.

  “Or someone who works for him.” Carter led her over to the soot-smeared kitchen table. Evidence—in the form of samples from rugs, bedspreads, paint chips and floorboards—lay sealed and labeled inside plastic bags and silver coffee-can-sized containers.

  “Sully had an appointment this morning,” said Carter. “He w
rote it on his phone pad.”

  Carter picked up a sealed evidence bag and handed it to her. Inside the clear plastic, Georgia saw a day calendar. The top page was blackened with soot and shriveled at the corners from the heat. The second sheet, tomorrow’s date, had pencil rubbings on it—an old trick Georgia had learned as a child to make impressions in paper legible. There was a telephone number on the sheet. In the 732 area code. New Jersey. The number must have been written on the top sheet—today—before it was damaged in the fire. Beneath the phone number was some scribble, presumably Sully’s: R @ 10:30 a.m.

  “Where did you find this?” Georgia asked.

  “By the telephone in the kitchen. The fire never really got that hot except in the bedroom. By the time it started making its way in this direction, our guys were here to put it out.” Stacked paper, Georgia knew, never burns particularly well anyway. She had only to look at the pile of old newspapers Sully had by the front door to see that. Despite the intense, napalm destruction in the bedroom and the heat damage to the living room ceiling, the papers were only soggy and surface-burned.

  “Do you think this ‘R’ person had anything to do with Sully’s death?”

  “All we’ve got to go on is the phone number,” said Carter. “And I can’t tell if the number is related to the appointment or not, but we’ll check it out.”

  Suarez bounded back into the apartment carrying a five-gallon container of gasoline, a broad smile beneath his Pancho Villa mustache. “Look what I found inside the dumbwaiter in the basement. Here’s your gasoline.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how those vapors got from the basement to the third floor,” said Carter.

  “Or why the whole dumbwaiter shaft didn’t burn when the fire took off,” Georgia added.

  “Maybe all the vapors were concentrated in Sully’s bedroom by that point,” said Suarez. “Even so, that’s a pretty neat trick.”

  Carter’s eyes canvassed the blackened hallway. “I’m too old for tricks.”