Earl W. Emerson
Page 23
“I know you are. Do you realize you just accused a fireman you work with of a double homicide? Did he know those people? Did he have something against them?”
“He met them once before.”
“Why would he want to kill two people he met only twice?” She’d been giving me the look she would have given a favorite crazy brother right before she was forced to commit him to the loony bin. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe you can go over and put the bug in the detective’s ear? Maybe if they put some pressure on him, he’ll say something incriminating. Could you do that without telling the detectives it was me who put you on to it?”
“They’re going to want to talk to you. ”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe a police dog could sniff out explosives in his locker . . . This sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Just a little.”
“The driver roughed him up.”
“They’re saying he was sixty-eight. How could he rough up anybody?”
I was trying to think of a way to explain without getting dragged into it, but of course, that was impossible. “Okay. Off the record. Can you talk to me off the record?”
“No. I don’t know what you’re going to say.”
“Okay. Forget I said any of this.”
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“Now you’re telling me your friend didn’t set that fire?”
“I’m saying I must have been delusional. Duress. Can you accept that?”
“I suppose.”
I turned to walk away. “One last thing?”
“What is it?”
“I hate to bring this up again, but I left something at your stepmother’s—”
“Anything between you and her stays between you and her. Leave me out of it.”
In addition to the rest of it, there could be little doubt in her mind now that I was obsessed with Iola.
32. FINDING JESUS AND KILLING YOUR FRIENDS
W ODDLY ENOUGH, WE got another car fire at a little after five in the morning, another plume of royal black smoke arching into the sky in billowing coils. This one was in an area of apartment houses near the Alki Point Lighthouse. In my mind I could still feel the stiff and crinkly charred pelts of the two dead bodies earlier.
Four of us responded to the second car fire: me, Johnson, Lieutenant Covington, and a firefighter called in on overtime, whose name I forgot as soon as she told me. Tronstad had been sent home on disability, his eye injury chalked up to an accidental splash of water at the first fire. Considering the crimes I’d been associated with, I was beginning to wonder if there was anything I could do that would land me in jail. I had stolen millions, been involved in four murders, lied to one and all, not been believed the one time I told the truth—to Sonja—yet remained free as a bird. Could I be bulletproof?
The afternoon after the first car fire, Tronstad found me just before he left the station. I was slumped in front of the television in the firefighters’
quarters.
“You fuckin’ murderer,” I mumbled, without taking my eyes off the tube.
“You’re getting a nasty mouth in your old age.”
“Fuck you. You just burned two people to death.”
“First of all, you can’t prove shit. Second of all, like I already told you, you say a word to the cops, you’re the one who’ll end up in jail.”
“Fuck you.”
“You got my cell number. Tomorrow noon at the latest. Call when you get them. You don’t, you’ll wish you had. And by the way, I’m cutting your share down for all this stalling.”
“I don’t want a share. I never did.” But he was gone. I felt like a cow-
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ard for not going to the police. I was afraid he was right, that they wouldn’t be able to prove he’d done anything and that I’d end up in jail because of the videotape. I needed time to think. I could always turn him in later, but I wasn’t going to accomplish anything sitting in a cell. The second car fire went smoother than the first, perhaps because I was working alongside the overtimer, a tough, brown-eyed woman who usually worked on a downtown company. We hit it with a semi-fog pattern, and by the time Covington met us with the five-foot pry bar, the fire was knocked down.
As far as I could tell there were no witnesses. Nobody in any apartment windows. No bystanders. Just us and a 1999 Toyota some poor boob of an owner was going to find burned out and half-filled with dirty water. As we were picking up the hose, Johnson and I found ourselves separated from the others. “It was Tronstad,” I said.
“What was Tronstad?”
“This fire. And the first one. He lit Brown’s car. Tronstad killed those two people.”
“Oh, come on . . .”
“No. Listen to me. When we were talking to Brown I saw him sneak out front with something in his hands. He rigged their car.”
“He could have been doing anything out there.”
“When the alarm came in he gave me a funny look.”
“Oh, now you’re beginning to sound like—”
“He did that eyebrow thing. You’ve seen it. Like we had this secret together.”
“The eyebrow thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, man! That’s why you knocked him down. You really think . . . ?
Jesus. They said it was an incendiary device. That’s what Marshal Five came up with. Covington said when they found out he was ex-FBI they figured maybe somebody he sent to prison came back with a grudge.”
“He actually was ex-FBI? I didn’t hear that.”
“But if Tronstad set fire to Brown’s car, why would he come back and do this one?”
“He’s giving us a message. He’s mean and he’s dangerous and he 212
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lights things and we better toe the line or he’s going to make us wish we had.”
“You might be right.”
After we got back to the station, I found myself alone with Johnson in the bunk room. “You awake, Gum?”
“I’m awake.”
“I’m glad I have Jesus on my side, because this whole thing is getting too weird. You been saved, Gum?”
“Not recently.”
“Don’t you think it’s about time? Gum, I’d feel a lot better if you’d accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Can you tell me you know Jesus loves you and you’re going to dedicate your life to the gospel?”
Other firefighters and one former girlfriend had saved me before, and each time I’d found it relatively painless. If it made him happy, undergoing another religious conversion was no skin off my butt. “There are a lot of answers I’ve been needing lately.”
“Accept the Lord. It would mean a lot to me. Tronstad’s never going to find Jesus, but you’re a horse of a different color. If you were a partner with the Lord, you’d be a partner with me, too.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s more later, but that’s it for now.”
“Okay.”
“You have to say it. I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.”
“I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.”
“Gum, that’s great. Will you come to church with me?”
“If I’m not in jail.”
“You don’t know how happy it makes me, Gum, that you’ve accepted the Lord.”
“No problem. It should make prison easier.”
“It won’t be easy to live up to.”
“I know what to do.”
“What’s that?”
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“Refrain from stealing anything else and don’t kill any more people.”
There was a long silence in the darkness before I heard Johnson coming toward me, sitting heavily on the
foot of my bunk, the thick material of his turnout trousers crinkling. “You making fun of me?”
“You don’t really think you’re going to heaven?”
“Gum, are you making fun of me?”
“It’s just that I don’t know how to square up Bible-thumping with what we’ve done.”
“What have we done?”
“To start off with, we stole twelve million dollars.”
“I didn’t steal anything.”
“Split hairs all you want, but Jesus isn’t going to look at it that way.”
“Okay. What else?”
“What do you mean, what else? How about Chief Abbott’s death?”
“Abbott died of smoke inhalation because he fainted.”
“Is that why we lied about it?”
“We can’t do anything about the people who are dead. Him or Sears. Or them old people. It’s best to forget them.”
“And just go on our merry way?”
“No. I’ve been thinking, and I think you and I should do something about Tronstad.”
“Christ, Robert. Are you . . . are you telling me—”
“I been thinking about it for a while, but these car fires clinched it. You got a gun, Gum?”
“Don’t say anything else.”
“Gum, you—”
“Not another word. I know he’s unhinged now, but he was my friend once. He stood up for me.”
“He didn’t stand up for jack shit.”
“At Arch Place.”
“Man, didn’t I already tell you he never wanted you to show up at Arch Place? He told the lieutenant you guys were on the rig, that you were both ready. That’s why we left the station without you. Don’t you see? He was in a win-win situation. He goes inside, but he can hide. You can’t tell on him because you’re not there to know about it, and Sears can’t tell on 214
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him because he doesn’t go in with him, and if anybody asks what he was doing, he was looking for you. You would have taken the rap for everything that happened there.”
“I should have taken the rap.”
“You know what else? He told me the old man was alive when he got there. That he heard him calling for help. But he just stayed in that hallway. There wasn’t even that much fire when we got there. He could have marched right down that hallway and got that old man, but he didn’t move from the doorway.”
“Why did you stand up for me?”
“I seen you go in there and I thought . . . well, I thought that was really something. First you come out with the old man. Then you come out with the woman. I thought that was really something. Besides, we all done things might have cost us our jobs.”
“I never did. Not until that. It seems to be an everyday occurrence now. I’ve made so many mistakes. Sometimes I think I’m the unluckiest bastard on the planet.”
In the darkness I could see Johnson’s teeth as he smiled, trying hard to convince himself that Tronstad’s operating principle was one we should adopt, doing something wrong to make something right. 33. A MAJOR CLUE FOR ALL YOU THIEVES,
MURDERERS, ARSONISTS, TURD-DROPPERS,
AND MOTHER-BEATERS
W TWO UNE VENTFUL DAY S passed, where I didn’t see or hear from Tronstad. Then Tuesday’s shift came and went, also uneventfully. By Wednesday morning, when I got in my car, I was getting pretty nervous. As soon as I rounded the corner, I downshifted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. As the turbocharger kicked in, the forward momentum pinned me against the seat back. I loved rowing through the WRX’s gearbox, working the clutch and shifter with split-second precision.
I tore through the quiet streets, making a right turn at speed, zipping onto California Avenue and into the residential streets, racing down the hill on narrow Ferry Avenue until my tires were screeching, then cruising south on Harbor Avenue along the West Seattle waterfront while “Something Vicious for Tomorrow” by Built to Spill played in the background. I might have gone past Iola Pederson’s place, except I knew on the days she worked she didn’t leave until just before nine, and on the days she didn’t work she hung around even longer. In either case she would be home, and I couldn’t retrieve the bonds while she was guarding the place. On Genesee I parked in front of my rental. Because I was frequently gone twenty-four hours at a pop, I left the living-room drapes cracked open to give the place a lived-in look. This morning the drapes were tighter than a freshly dug clam.
Somebody had been inside.
The place was a mess, pictures on the wall askew or thrown to the floor, the sofa upside down, panels ripped open with what appeared to be a sharp knife, the television on its face, glass shards everywhere, and a dirty boot print outlined in blue toothpaste depressing the service panel on the back. The rooms were uncharacteristically cold, and in addition, there was a stench I could not identify at first. 216
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As I picked my way through the rooms, stepping over items and clothing strewn on the carpet, I found the lock broken on the back door, the door wide, as were the doors on the refrigerator and freezer. Nothing had been stolen that I could tell, but plenty had been destroyed: my VCR, the DVD player, a small audio system I bought during my first six months in the department.
As I explored the rooms, I located a turd on the carpet next to my bed. If I suspected Tronstad, the signature giveaway was the etching on the bathroom mirror that said, ass wipe, one of Tronstad’s favorite verbalisms. He’d pulled everything out of every cabinet, dumped every drawer, and walked over most of it in his motorcycle boots. In the garage he’d climbed up through the attic scuttle and put his foot through the ceiling from above several times, leaving ragged holes with insulation poking through like pinched underwear.
What frightened me more than the wanton destruction was the fact that I could not ignore this the way I’d been ignoring everything else. The affront here was entirely too personal. Funny how my brain worked. I stood mute while Tronstad murdered people, but when he stepped on my toothpaste and took a crap on my carpet, things had gone too far. Panic didn’t set in until I realized my address book was missing. When I punched her number into my cell phone, she answered on the second ring. “If he’s there, just say, ‘Yes, I think so.’ ”
“He’s left.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I’ve had the neighbors in helping to clean things up. We’re just about finished.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“One of the men you work with. I saw him at your station. I don’t recall his name.”
“He have a patch over his eye?”
“How did you know?”
“You sure he didn’t hurt you?”
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“I’m okay.”
“Did you call the police?”
“A very nice man took a report and said to call if I saw him again.”
“I’ll be right there. Don’t let anybody else in.”
“Don’t worry about it. He was like a rooster, all strut and no bite. You’d be surprised how insignificant this is in the grand scheme of things.”
If I could ever see the grand scheme of things, I’m sure I would have agreed with her. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Hurriedly, I nailed my back door shut, cleaned the carpet, and performed a perfunctory search for the cat, Abraham, an old white tabby who’d been roaming the neighborhood when I moved in and who’d adopted me. I expected I’d seen the last of him for a few days. Tronstad hadn’t made nearly the mess in my mother’s apartment he had in mine. “You all right, Mom?” I asked, kissing her forehead.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Just fine.”
“Did he touch you?”
“He didn’t mean to. He told me to stand in the corner.” My mother was a small woman, barely five feet tall, and had been under a hundred pounds when sh
e was healthy. I hated to think what she weighed now.
“He said all he wanted was some money you hid. I gave him thirty dollars and some coins. It was all I had.”
“Did he hit you?”
“He did a lot of yelling was what he did.”
“But did he hit you?”
“He might have slapped me.”
I could tell she’d been crying before I got there and clearly had been terrified during the break-in. Her hands were still shaking, her face paler than I’d seen it since her last trip to the hospital. My mother was fortyone, but since her diagnosis she’d been hanging out with people much older, perhaps because they were closer to death than the other fortysomethings she knew.
“He said he was from the fire department. He said he was president of 218
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Local Twenty-seven. That there’d been an accident. I thought you were hurt, so I let him in.”
“Did you tell the cops you knew the guy?”
“I didn’t know what you’d want me to do.”
“He’s dangerous, Mom. Tell them.”
“But what do you want me to do?”
“His name is Theodore Tronstad. I’ll write it down for you. You can call as soon as I leave.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want me to do?”
“Do it.”
She sat at the kitchen table and considered me. Nobody looks at a person in quite the proprietary way a mother does, and I basked under her gaze as if she were a second sun in the sky. “He said he owes money to some bad people and he can’t pay them until you pay him.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in the hole for a good little bit.”
“Seventy-five thousand, he said.”
“Jesus. Listen, I’ve got some cleaning to do at my place. Then I’ve got an errand to run. After that I’m free till Sunday. Think about where you want to go.”
“You don’t need to spend all your time with your mother.”
“That is exactly what I need to do. I’ll put gas in the car, get some cash at the bank, and be back in an hour. How’s that?”
“It’s still warm east of the mountains.”