Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  Georgia stared at him now. She was trying to reconcile the boy she knew with the man sitting before her spewing out this improbable tale. “Can anyone else verify your story?”

  “Yeah…Corinne.” Then, more sheepishly, he added. “My wife.”

  Georgia tried to keep her face impassive at the mention of the name, but she could feel a burning in her cheeks she was sure he noticed. Corinne. Corinne DeAngelo. The name conjured up long, shapely legs, a musical laugh, a flowing mane of dark hair. Corinne sounded like a name for a ballet dancer. An artist. An earth mother. Not a firefighter who crawled around in burning buildings and didn’t even get home in time to tuck her child into bed.

  “If you’re telling the truth, I can hook you up with people who can maybe help you.”

  “Help me how?”

  She reached into her bag and scribbled her cell phone number on a slip of paper, then handed it to him. “Wire you.”

  “Those two sixties leftovers aren’t going to tell me anything.”

  “I’m not talking about them, Rick. I’m talking about Buscanti.” And his relationship to Michael McLaughlin, Georgia wanted to add but didn’t.

  “Oh no.” He waved his hands in front of his face. “No way. I don’t know what Buscanti’s game is here. But I’m absolutely not going against the most powerful mobster in New Jersey. That would be suicide. For me and my family. You’ve heard of The Sopranos? Hell, these guys make the Sopranos look like choir boys.”

  He draped his arms over the wheel, dropped his head forward and cursed softly. “This can’t be happening. I swear, I’m not running with terrorists. I’m just trying to get out of debt.”

  “I’m sorry, Rick, but that’s the best I can offer.” She went to get out of the car. He put a hand on her wrist.

  “Please, Gee Gee. Please don’t do this. Buscanti comes after me, I’m either gonna have to tell him you’re a cop or get killed myself.” "

  “You’d rat me out to a mobster? The mother of your son?”

  “You’re not giving me any options.”

  “You got yourself into this mess,” she reminded him, then sighed. “Look, let me think about how to handle this, all right?”

  “No sweat.”

  “If you’re feeding me any crap—”

  “I swear, Gee Gee, I’m telling the truth.”

  26

  The house was dark by the time Georgia got in from her session with Rick. She crept down to the basement, stripped off her clothes and threw them in the gentle cycle of the washing machine. On her father’s old workbench, she noticed two fresh-cut panels of wood surrounded by sawdust. Above the panels sat a taped picture of a red sports car with some pencil markings she recognized as Marenko’s. He must have been over this evening to start building the race car with Richie. Georgia ran her hand along one of the sanded panels. She was touched by his efforts.

  I’ve moved on with my life, Richie’s moved on with his life. And now, Rick DeAngelo has to come back? Like this? She had thought that the worst that could happen to Richie was to never hear from his father again. Now, she knew there was something far worse—to find out that his father was a criminal, and his mother had helped send him to prison. She didn’t know how she could ever explain that one.

  She fished a clean sweatshirt out of the dryer, slipped into it, then quietly made her way upstairs to take a shower. Stepping out of the tub, Georgia suddenly realized that she had given Rick her cell phone number tonight, but he’d offered her no number to contact him. I probably have his number in my address book, she decided. She toweled herself off, checked in on her sleeping son, then rummaged in her bedroom drawers until she unearthed her address book. Rick’s home address and phone number were there, but Georgia had no idea whether he had a cell phone, a beeper number or a business number. All she had was a number that Corinne was sure to pick up. And if there was one thing she didn’t want to do, it was speak to Corinne.

  Georgia stared at the entry for Rick. The phone number was in the 732 area code. She closed her eyes, recalling that note in Sully’s apartment Carter had shown her: R @ 10:30, with a phone number starting with 732. She recalled that the three digits after 732 were 245—just like the number here. She couldn’t sleep until she knew. She dialed Manhattan base. After two rings, Carter grunted his name into the receiver. She could tell he was having a tough night. She was about to make it tougher.

  “Randy? It’s Georgia. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but did you try calling that phone number you found in Sully’s apartment yet?”

  “Skeehan…” He drew out her name with annoyance. “This isn’t your case.”

  “I know. But please indulge me. It’s important.”

  He sighed. “Suarez called the number. He got an answering machine and left a message.”

  “Did the machine identify whose number it was?”

  “It wasn’t a private number. It was a business. Some kind of electrical contracting firm. I don’t remember the name. We’ll check it out tomorrow.”

  Georgia’s stomach tightened. “Was the name ‘DeAngelo,’ by chance?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  She sank onto her bed. She hardly had the energy to speak. “Because the ‘R’ Sully may have been meeting was my old boyfriend, Rick DeAngelo—Richie’s father.”

  Dead air passed on the line between them. “What would he want with Sully?”

  “I’m afraid to ask. New Yorkers don’t normally import electricians all the way from Toms River, New Jersey, to rewire their apartments.”

  “You don’t think he’s…he’s involved in Sully’s death, do you?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” said Georgia. “Remember I told you I’ve got a conflict of interest working the FBI case?”

  “He’s the conflict? Sonofa…This has got to be Freezer’s doing.”

  “I think we need to talk,” said Georgia. “In person. Can you meet me tomorrow when you get off work?”

  “I’ll be in Queens tomorrow morning, over at the crime lab,” said Carter. “I talked Ajay Singh into coming in and giving me his thoughts on what happened inside Sully’s apartment. You want to meet me there?”

  “Yeah. I think I’d better.”

  “Have you told the Feds any of this yet?”

  “Not yet. I was going to in the morning.”

  “Let’s meet first. This is a humdinger of a situation. You’re gonna want to be careful how you lay it all out.”

  27

  The NYPD crime lab was a four-story concrete slab of a building in Jamaica, Queens, about twenty minutes southeast of Woodside, but a world away. It was in a poorer neighborhood where factories and brick housing projects loomed over storefront churches, check-cashing services and bodegas selling lottery tickets. The street that housed the lab sat across from an auto body mechanic. The adjoining parking lot had a chain-link fence with razor ribbon on top. Georgia parked the car by the curb under a No Parking sign.

  “You can’t park here,” said Richie in the know-it-all tone of a ten-year-old. Georgia rolled her eyes. She hadn’t planned on taking her son with her this Sunday morning, but she’d had no choice. Margaret was going Christmas shopping after church with her sister and some friends. Richie had been invited to a birthday party, but it wasn’t until this afternoon.

  “I can park here until I get you inside,” said Georgia.

  Richie clucked his tongue in disgust. He knew he was being dragged around like baggage, and he intended to get as much resentment mileage as possible out of it.

  Two unmarked steel doors and a buzzer fronted the building. Georgia held up her shield for the security cameras and waited for the door to unlock automatically. Inside, in what passed for a lobby, a receptionist sat behind a high, Band-Aid colored counter. She was a heavy set black woman with bifocals and Bo-Derek-blond braids. She did a double take when she saw Georgia walk in with a child in tow.

  “We’re not open for school projects,” said the receptionist.

  “I’m not her
e for my son,” said Georgia. “I’m here on a case and I had to bring him along. He’ll sit out in the lobby and he won’t bother anyone.” Richie gave his mother a sour look and stuck a pair of earphones in his ears.

  “Did a fire marshal named Randy Carter arrive yet?” asked Georgia. “I’m supposed to meet him here.”

  “No.”

  “How about Dr. Singh? Marshal Carter has an appointment with him.”

  The receptionist scanned a list of names on a pad at her desk. “He’s here. But if he’s in on a Sunday, honey, it means he’s way too busy to talk to you. I need the case number.”

  “I don’t know the case number,” Georgia admitted. She would if it were her case, but it wasn’t. Still, she wanted to understand everything she could about Sully’s fire—if only to figure out in her own mind whether Rick could have been involved. “Can you tell him Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan is here?”

  “I can try.”

  While the receptionist waited to get through to Dr. Singh in the lab, Georgia parked her car in the lot. As she started to close the gate, she saw Randy Carter pulling up. She beckoned him through. He rolled down his window.

  “I’ve got to go over the case with Singh first, then we’ll talk, okay?”

  “I’d like to hear what Singh has to say as well,” said Georgia. “After all, I’m the one who told you to look in the dumbwaiter.”

  Carter pulled a face. “Skeehan, you know I can’t do that. Forget the fact that it’s not your case for a moment. You’re a witness.”

  “Not to mention a suspect, right?”

  “You’re in the clear for killing him at least,” said Carter. “The ME estimates time of death about four hours before the fire. I spoke to Nelson this morning and he backed up your story that you were working then.”

  “So let me hear Singh out.”

  “No can do. You’re still the ex-girlfriend of a potential suspect—”

  “Who you only know about because I told you,” Georgia reminded him. “Look, Randy, we’re both breaking the rules here. I’m not supposed to divulge anything about the FBI’s case to you, and you’re not supposed to let me in on the Sully investigation. I gave you that tape of Freezer virtually confessing to the Café Treize fire—that’s FBI property. So we’re both stepping over the line. But what choice do we have? We’ve been played from the very beginning on this one. Let me just hear Singh out, okay? Maybe I can help.”

  “Famous last words.” He frowned at her. “All right. But only if you promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut in there, is that a deal?”

  “I promise.”

  By the time Georgia and Carter returned to the lobby, there was a brown-skinned man with a black beard and mustache sitting next to Georgia’s son, doing coin tricks. He wore a loud red-and-yellow flowered shirt and a turban the color of port wine. She wondered if all Sikhs had Ajay Singh’s odd sense of color. He rose when Georgia walked over.

  “Your partners seem to be getting younger and younger, Marshal.”

  “I see you’ve met my son.”

  Singh smiled and flipped Richie the coin. “He says he has no interest in science.”

  “Do you have children, Dr. Singh?”

  “Two, but the oldest—my son—is only five.”

  “When he’s ten, he’ll most likely tell you he has no interest in anything that doesn’t involve a ball, a video game or a skateboard.”

  “You are probably right.” He pressed his palms together and gestured to Georgia and Carter with the slightest bow.

  “You are here about the Sullivan fire, yes? The reports won’t be ready until next Tuesday or Wednesday, I’m afraid.”

  “I know that,” said Carter. “But I was wondering if you could explain something that’s puzzling me…us,” Carter corrected, shooting a quick glance at Georgia. Neither of them wanted to make issue of the fact that Georgia didn’t belong here. “Sullivan was burned very badly, yet there was no accelerant pour pattern in the apartment. The nearest evidence of accelerant we could find was a five-gallon can of gasoline at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft three stories below.”

  “Yes, I noticed that from your report.”

  “But given the nature of gasoline vapors, we’re at a loss as to how it got up that dumbwaiter shaft and then didn’t burn the shaft when the vapors ignited,” said Carter. “Do you have any idea how this could happen?”

  “There was a constant current of air blowing through the apartment, am I correct?” asked Singh.

  “That’s right. Entering from a window in the front hallway and exiting in the back, out of the bedroom.”

  “Are you aware of a scientific principle called the Venturi effect?”

  Carter nodded. “I know it has to do with air-pressure differentials.” Georgia gave Carter a blank look. “Did you forget your probie manual, Skeehan?”

  “I remember the term in relation to how certain pumps and siphoning operations work, but I’ve never heard it used to describe a fire,” said Georgia.

  “It is named after the eighteenth-century Italian physicist, Giovanni Battista Venturi,” Singh added.

  “Sounds like roll call at my old firehouse,” joked Georgia.

  Singh laughed. “It does. Do you understand the principle?”

  “Not exactly,” Georgia admitted.

  “Venturi discovered that when air enters a tube or narrowed opening, its velocity increases and its pressure drops,” said Singh. “At the point where the drop in pressure occurs, other substances—because of the unequal air pressure—can be sucked in. These can be fluids, gases—even smoke. Firefighters do this when they aim a fog nozzle out a window.”

  “The fog nozzle creates a column of low-pressure air traveling at high speed,” Carter explained. “It’s the same principle as when someone’s smoking in a car and you open the window. The smoke gets sucked out because the air pressure inside the car is greater than the pressure outside it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Conversely,” said Singh, “when the air or liquid leaves the narrowed opening, it expands rapidly. Atomizes, in other words. That can make some substances introduced into the restricted column of low-pressure air more flammable—even substances that were not flammable before.”

  “Could that narrowed opening apply to a dumbwaiter shaft as well as a tube?” asked Georgia.

  “Absolutely. A hallway. A pipe. An air duct. Any constriction,” said Singh. “The Venturi effect explains a lot of basic science we take for granted, from automobile carburetors to spray bottles.” He furrowed his brow, then gave them a satisfied smile. “I think the Venturi effect might explain why that gas traveled upward instead of settling at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft.” Singh checked his watch. “I am waiting for some solvents to run through a dye process. I can spare about twenty minutes. Would you like to see what the Venturi effect looks like in action?”

  Georgia looked at Richie, who was slumped in a chair, thumbing through a book with a bored look on his face. “I won’t be long,” she told him.

  Singh looked thoughtfully at the boy. “I may be able to sneak him back there if he promises not to touch anything,” Singh told Georgia. “All the rules can be bent a little on Sundays.”

  “That’s okay,” Richie answered. “I’ll wait here.”

  “I am going to take ordinary nondairy creamer—the kind people put in their coffee—and turn it into a raging fireball,” said Singh. Richie’s eyes lit up.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Richie shut off his CD and looked at his mother, who shrugged. “Cool. I’m in.”

  They followed Singh through a set of steel doors and down a long, drab corridor. At a bend in the hallway, Singh led Carter, Georgia and Richie through a glass door and into a tiled room with stainless-steel counters, microscopes and machines that whirred and hummed.

  “Stand right here. Do not touch anything and I will find what we need to demonstrate the Venturi effect,” said Singh. He went into an adjoinin
g supply room and came back a few moments later with three lengths of black rubber tubing, each a different diameter in size, some duct tape and a large brown jar of nondairy creamer.

  “I swiped the creamer from our stash of coffee and sugar,” said Singh. “The secretaries will hate me tomorrow morning.” He handed the largest-diameter tubing to Richie. “This is half-inch-diameter rubber tubing. I’m going to join the quarter-inch tubing to it, then attach the eighth-inch tubing to the quarter-inch.”

  “So the tube gets skinnier and skinnier,” said the boy.

  “Correct. Only it is in reverse. We will start with the constricted end and work our way up to the big tube.”

  “I don’t want him involved in anything dangerous,” said Georgia.

  “This is perfectly safe,” said Singh. He finished taping the ends of the tubes together, then knocked on a large, stainless-steel box, four feet high and four feet wide with a viewing window on top and several sets of gloves on the side. “We will do the whole experiment under this hood. But even if I did not, you would not have to worry. Do you know who uses coffee creamer and the Venturi effect to make fireballs?”

  “Who?” asked Richie, clearly riveted.

  “Disney World. When you see fire shooting out of a dragon’s mouth there, it is nothing more than coffee creamer blown out by compressed air and ignited electrically. Do you know why they use it?” he asked.

  “Uh-uh,” said the boy.

  Singh unscrewed the lid of the coffee creamer jar and poured about half a cup of the white powder into a glass beaker. He rummaged through a drawer, pulled out a book of matches and struck one of them. He threw the match into the creamer. It went out instantly.

  “You see? Under normal conditions, coffee creamer will not burn.” Then he smiled wickedly at Richie. “But we will make it burn.”

  Singh opened up the hood and stuck the tubing inside. He flexed the smallest end at a forty-five degree angle and placed a small petri dish full of coffee creamer underneath it. At the largest end, he rigged the tube up to a Bunsen burner. “Now,” he said. “We need a current of air. In this case, we’ll use compressed air.” He reached for a half-inch diameter rubber hose on the wall and turned it on, then snaked it through an entry valve in the hood.