Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “Robert Johnson and Ted Tronstad.”

  “Where are they?”

  Tronstad is about sixty feet behind them, lying in the charred remains of the Pederson house. As patient now as he’d been impatient his whole life, he will wait until we have the time or inclination to unearth him. I note he’s died just about where the falling pig died, one story higher but in the same vicinity. It is ironic, because it all started and ended in the same spot. “Johnson just got off work. I don’t know where Tronstad is. He might be in some trouble.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He set this fire.”

  “This one here?” The younger agent is speaking for the first time. He’s been eyeballing my yellow WRX over my shoulder in a manner that makes it hard for me to decide whether he’s admiring it or checking it out for professional reasons. Perhaps I looked suspicious with those garbage bags in my hands. Or maybe I look suspicious now.

  “That your car over there?” asks the younger agent.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Bunch of old dirty laundry.”

  “You mind if we look inside?”

  “Not at all.”

  This is just another of my choices that hardly seems like a choice at all. Had I said no outright, it would look suspicious, perhaps suspicious enough for them to hold me and try for a warrant. I might cite some minor misdemeanor drug violation and tell them I don’t want the local

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  gendarmes looking in my car, but I doubt that would work, either. There doesn’t seem to be any right answer.

  I am finished. I know it, and from the way he is fixating on me, the younger agent knows it, too.

  Looking sober and grave, LaSalle joins us and says, “I thought you guys might want to know, we found a body on the second floor.”

  “There were four people inside?” I ask. “They told me there were only three.”

  “It’s Tronstad.”

  “Jesus. Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. The wallet in his hip pocket didn’t take that much damage.”

  “This the guy you just told us about?” the older FBI agent asks. “The one who set this fire?”

  “Yes, sir.” I am dismayed at the use of the word sir. I know it makes me look suspicious to be overly submissive here.

  “He’s dead?”

  LaSalle nods. “He was acting crazy last night. He set two fires that we know about.”

  LaSalle looks at the three of us in turn. We are quiet. I am because I know the jig is up, that I am going to jail in a few minutes, and later, after the trial, to prison. The two agents are because they are about to break the back of a major conspiracy. “You guys want to see the body?”

  The agents nod and follow LaSalle toward the house. Before they’ve gone too far, LaSalle gestures in my direction and says, “You guys realize you were talking here to the man who’s made the most single-handed rescues of any firefighter in department history?” Both agents turn back and ogle me while continuing to walk toward the house. Hard to know if I am looking guilty, heroic, or dim-witted, though I feel the latter more than anything.

  Awaiting my fate, I loiter at the edge of the yard in the blinding sunshine while firefighters straggle out of the house in ones and twos, heads hung low. Tears streaking her broad cheeks and mingling with traces of soot, Stanislow comes over to me. The guys on her shift call her pigpen because of her uncanny ability to accumulate dirt just about anywhere. She steps close and gives me a hug, snorting into my ear as she weeps. 300

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  “He’s gone, Gum. Tronstad’s up there on his face. He’s dead. There was so much debris stuck to his PASS, we couldn’t hear it.”

  Chief Mortimer shows up before the FBI and our two fire investigators are out of the fire building, bustles over to the Ladder 11 crew, and exchanges a few words. “How the hell could we lose a firefighter and not even know it? This is unacceptable! There’s no excuse for this sort of incompetence.” As if aware that the surest source of incompetence on the fire ground is me, he says, “Gum! What the hell went on here? How could you people lose a firefighter and not know it? Goddamn it! Answer me!”

  “It’s Ted Tronstad, sir. He wasn’t working yesterday.”

  “What do you mean, he wasn’t working? How the hell did he get in that house, all burned to shit, if he wasn’t working?”

  “He set the fire.”

  Chief Mortimer grows quiet, then moves to the front door and waits until the two FBI agents come out, exchanges words with them, and then watches them walk purposefully to their vehicle, climb in, and drive away. They seem to have forgotten about me.

  I remain in the yard, waiting to get handcuffed. Thirty minutes later I am still waiting when the chief of the department and his entourage show up. Shortly thereafter, the Pedersons come back and the police begin questioning Bernard and Iola. After a while, Sonja comes over to where I am standing.

  “Gum.”

  “Sonja.”

  “Somebody died in there?”

  “The man who set the fire.”

  “Bernard’s telling them he thinks the dead man was somebody Iola jilted. Is that possible?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “That he came here for revenge. You knew him pretty well, didn’t you?”

  “You never know anybody very well.”

  “I think I know you.”

  “I wouldn’t bet anything important on it.”

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  “Bernard’s going to get an attorney. Iola’s pleading ignorance. And I sure as hell don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Neither do I.”

  They say, when threatened, human beings react in one of five ways: fight, flight, freeze, fidget, or faint. I believe I found another F to add to the panoply of human reaction—falsehood. It has become my weapon of choice.

  After another ten minutes elapse, I tell LaSalle I’m leaving. “Sure, man. You had a rough night. These guys are taking over. They have any questions, they know where to find you. It looks like we’re going to tie this in with that car bombing last week, the house fire on Beach Drive, and about six grass fires last night. It’s beginning to look like he just cracked. People do that.”

  “Yeah. They do.”

  Out of sight of Bernard and Iola, who are both on borrowed cell phones, I kiss Sonja good-bye and walk to my car. I drive up Bonair at speed, then wait at the top of the hill to see if anybody is following. They aren’t.

  I drive to my mother’s apartment house on California Avenue, remove the three garbage sacks from the back of my Subaru, go inside, and knock on her apartment door.

  “Jason?”

  “Hi, Mom.” I give her a kiss. “I need to store some stuff.”

  “Sure. Use the spare bedroom.”

  We talk for a while, and after I realize she’s fallen asleep on the couch, I head back into the spare bedroom, where I open all three garbage sacks, my heart jumping in my chest like a frog on a hot sidewalk. Slowly and carefully, I spread out the bearer bonds and count them, making the tabulations in ink on the sweaty palm of my hand. Tronstad’s arithmetic was spot-on. Just over twelve million dollars. It is small consolation, but at least all these people haven’t died over three sacks of rubbish. I tie the bags and hide them in the back of the closet. 49. TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS SPLIT ONE WAY

  W SIX MONTHS AFTER my mother’s death, Sonja and I drive to Mount Rainier, where we scatter my mother’s ashes along a portion of the Wonderland Trail Mom admired. There had been no request to have her ashes dispersed in the wilds. Her death, like virtually every minute of her life, includes no personal requests.

  We never have that final chat you always believe you’re going to have with your loved ones before they die, that Kodachrome moment when you clear the air and say how much you love each other, when a lifetime of secrets gets unraveled and spills across the floor like
a ball of yarn. To this day I have no clue who my father is. My mother didn’t speak of it in life and made no reference to it as she lay dying. She gave birth to me when she was seventeen and single, the same year she got kicked out of her parents’ house in Yakima. She spent the rest of her life dedicated to making sure my days were happier than hers.

  A guess tells me I am the result of a high school romance, but after the age of ten, I stopped quizzing her. I have no brothers, no sisters, no father, only a set of grandparents who keep their distance emotionally and geographically. The only family I have now is the woman who sleeps beside me in the darkness. As if reading my thoughts, she says, “You awake?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t know you were.”

  “You were tossing and turning. Talking in your sleep again. You said something about money.”

  “I had that dream again.”

  “You have it a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get some rest. We’re going to look at houses tomorrow.”

  “Sure.”

  You screw up and get somebody dead, you either get very hard, go

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  nuts, or you get so you can surgically separate the event from the rest of your life. What they don’t let you know in murder school is how incredibly depressing it is to cause the death of another human being, or even to be involved in a death, and that the depression never entirely departs. The other thing they don’t tell you is that you’ll never be allowed to stop lying about it.

  Perhaps because we are both accustomed to driving sports cars, we get carsick in tandem as we are chauffeured around in the expensive SUV

  our real estate agent drives just a smidgeon too aggressively. He’s so vain about his prowess behind the wheel, no amount of polite hinting can get him to slow down, take corners on a firm line, or remove his left foot from the brake pedal as we bob and wobble across West Seattle looking at houses.

  He spends the morning taking us to homes we can afford and some we clearly cannot, seeming to take pleasure in showing properties for which the monthly payments are greater than our total monthly income. One of them is the estate on Beach Drive SW where Robert Johnson and I met Tronstad so many months ago, cleaned up and back on the market. When the agent walks us through, I give no indication I’ve been inside before.

  Next to the front door they’ve planted a wisteria that must have cost a fortune, because despite its newness, it is eight feet tall and in full bloom, a delicate purple.

  Despite the fact that I continue to feel an underlying depression, my life is blooming too.

  Sonja and I plan a quiet wedding in three months. Though Sonja visits them on occasion, I see her father and stepmother only infrequently. There are times when I fear my sweaty history with her stepmother will be the unmaking of our relationship, but Sonja seems cool with it. If Bernard knows about my liaisons with his wife, he gives no hint; Iola treats me as if I’ve immigrated from another continent, as if I’m of the servant class, someone she can barely tolerate. It’s hard to blame her, but I’m not giving up Sonja so Iola can be comfortable. For the past year I’ve been driving Engine 29. I’m the youngest driver in the battalion.

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  Unwilling to place another firefighter’s life, or a civilian’s, under the crude hammer of my judgment, I’ve given up my dreams of taking promotional exams. After Tronstad’s funeral, Robert Johnson transfered to Station 28 in the Rainier Valley, giving up five percent driver’s pay to relocate. Rumors surface that he’s become a heavy drinker. From time to time I get concerned that his buddy Jesus will tell him to turn himself in, and me with him, but so far it hasn’t happened, and we are fast arriving at the point at which it will be his word against mine.

  Tronstad’s funeral is massive, the third fire department funeral in a month. Exhibiting a familiar eagerness to conceal unpleasant facts, as well as an unwillingness to dig into the truth behind the catastrophes that have dogged Station 29 for so long, the fire department refuses to finger Ted Tronstad for anything more than the fire at the Pederson place. They don’t reopen the investigations into the deaths of Sweeney Sears or Chief Abbott. I find the videotape of me in the water with Sears in Tronstad’s station locker, and I destroy it. As usual, I keep my mouth shut. The death of the Browns goes unsolved.

  Although it is common knowledge inside the department that Tronstad had been behaving erratically and that he may have set at least one other fire, news of his string of possible felonies fails to reach the media or the general public. Nobody seems curious about why he set fire to the Pederson home, although there are fictitious reports in the department that he’d been seeing Iola Pederson.

  Rumors have gone around in the fire department that Tronstad’s death has traumatized me so badly, I cannot talk about it; consequently, few people press me for answers as to what happened that night or why I didn’t see him inside the house while I was making the rescues. Two days after the funeral, the FBI locates a bank deposit box in Ghanet’s name with $546,000 in cash in it. After more weeks of poking around, they close the investigation, satisfied Ghanet either blew or lost the rest of his booty.

  Waiting patiently for federal agents to show up at my door and arrest me, I sweat it out for weeks and then months, but by the first anniversary

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  of our discovery of Ghanet’s bearer bonds, I realize they are not coming, that they aren’t going to question me about the money or about Tronstad’s death. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t turned the bonds in or run off to spend them, but I haven’t. Actually, in the back of my mind, I believe I subconsciously want to be arrested. Sonja talks about the fire sometimes, but if she suspects me of ratholing Tronstad in her father’s bedroom to die, she does not bring it up. Sonja loves me. She is good to me. I love her, and I hope I’m good to her. Occasionally we argue, but we make up quickly and laugh about it later. It is easy to know we are going to be happy together for a very long time.

  We share our first Thanksgiving with her stepmother and father and grandfather and a couple of aunts and uncles. Toward the end of the evening, when I am swollen with turkey and cranberries and pie, I begin to relax. Bernard corners me and gives me a lecture on how the U.S. government is protecting world peace with military might. Iola glares at us from across the room. Changing the subject to hybrid vehicles, he bends my ear for another twenty minutes, a man more concerned with machines and public policies than with the people around him. It is easy to see why Iola is drawn to serial affairs.

  I’ve mistakenly believed my mother’s funeral is going to be just her and me, Sonja, and a couple of Mom’s elderly neighbors; but over 150 people attend: swimmers who’d worked out with her at the YMCA pool before she got sick, neighbors from her apartment house and the apartments where she’d lived in the past, co-workers from her last three jobs and the food bank where she’d volunteered, a doctor who cared for her, and the waitress we met at Three Fingered Jack’s in Winthrop, a woman who has driven five hours in a broken-down Ford to be here.

  Four days after my mother’s death, I am in her apartment going through her things—she’d gotten rid of just about all her personal items to make it easier for me—and am shocked to discover a life insurance policy worth $900,000. I can’t bear the thought of receiving money as a result of my mother’s death.

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  I cash out the insurance policy and make donations to my mother’s favorite charities. The American Cancer Society. Northwest Second Harvest. The Goodwill, where she did much of her shopping throughout her life. I retain an attorney and dump the rest into an investment account, to be reviewed once annually on the anniversary of my mother’s death. Eventually the money will go into a trust for the children Sonja and I will have together.

  I’ve had my mother’s mail rerouted to my place, so every time she gets a package of coupons or a
renewal notice from the Sierra Club or Amnesty International, I get sweet little reminders of a life lived well. A little more than a year after Tronstad’s death, Sonja takes a vacation to Hawaii with her three best friends, young women she’s been close to all through school and beyond. “You don’t mind, do you?” Sonja asks.

  “Not at all. It’ll give me a chance to spend some time at the titty bars.”

  “Quit it.”

  “If I get tired of boobs, and the weather cooperates, I might drive over to Eastern Washington and go hiking. Maybe even an overnighter.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  After her plane leaves, I drive home, pack up the bearer bonds in a large cardboard box, wipe it clean of prints, and take it to an attorney, where I lay out the entire story. The attorney contacts the local federal prosecutor and hashes out a deal. I will turn in the bonds in return for blanket immunity to any crimes associated with the theft. I will guarantee I’m not holding anything back, and they will trust my guarantee. Twelve million in bonds is far more than they were looking for. I will keep the names of any confederates to myself. In return, the government will not name me publicly. They will get the bonds, and I will walk away with a clean slate. Everybody will be happy.

  Sonja comes back from Maui, and a month later we buy a twobedroom fixer-upper on Thirty-fifth Avenue SW, a main thoroughfare near Station 37. We are pounding nails and restoring it one room at a time. The work is satisfying, especially my chores in what will be the baby’s room. I strive to be a man who defines himself, rather than having his possessions define him. I do not wallow in luxury goods or run up tabs on credit cards.

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  It is ironic that in death my mother has given me what she could never provide in life, a surfeit of material wealth. Just as ironic is the fact that I cannot bring myself to touch it.