California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “The dog was outside before the fire,” Jack says.

  “Don’t go off half-cocked,” Billy warns.

  “I’m fully cocked,” Jack says. “I figure Mrs. Vale let the dog out to do its thing and forgot about it. She was hammered. Anyway, I want to get it to the kids.”

  “Well, you’ll have your chance,” Billy says. “Vale called a half-hour ago.”

  Say what?

  “You’re kidding,” Jack says.

  “He wants you to come over.”

  “Now?” Jack asks. “His wife has been dead for what, six hours, and he wants to start adjusting his claim?”

  Billy snuffs out the cigarette on the rocks. The butt joins its dead brothers in an arc around Billy’s feet.

  “They’re separated,” Billy says. “Maybe he’s not all that torn up.”

  He gives Jack the address in Monarch Bay and strikes another match.

  Then says, “And—Jack? Get a statement.”

  Like he has to tell him.

  Billy knows that most other adjusters would just take the Sheriff’s statement, attach it to their reports and start adjusting the claim.

  Not Jack.

  You give a big file to Jack Wade, he’ll work it to death.

  Billy figures this is because Jack doesn’t have a wife, or kids, or even a girlfriend. He doesn’t have to be home for dinner, or to the school for a ballet recital, or even out on a date. Jack doesn’t even have an ex-wife, so he doesn’t have his every other weekend or three weeks in the summer with the kids, or I-have-to-get-to-Johnny’s-soccer-game-or-he’ll-end-up-back-in-therapy time demands.

  What Jack does have is his job, a couple of old surfboards and his car.

  Jack has no life.

  He fits the Vale file like a custom-made boot.

  Jack’s walking back through the lobby when Carol, the receptionist, calls and tells him that Olivia Hathaway is here to see him.

  “Tell her I’m not in,” Jack says.

  Olivia Hathaway is all he needs right now.

  “She saw your car in employee parking,” the receptionist says. Jack sighs, “Do you have a meeting room?”

  “One-seventeen,” the receptionist says. “She requested it. It’s her favorite.”

  “She likes the painting of the sailboat,” Jack says. “Can you look after this dog for a few minutes?”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Leo.”

  Five minutes later Jack’s sitting in a small room across the table from Olivia Hathaway.

  17

  Olivia Hathaway.

  She’s a tiny woman, eighty-four years of age, with beautiful white hair, a handsomely chiseled face and sparkling blue eyes.

  Today she’s wearing an elegant white dress.

  “It’s about my spoons,” she says.

  Jack already knows this. He’s been dealing with Olivia Hathaway’s spoons for over three years now.

  Here’s the story on Olivia Hathaway’s spoons.

  Three years ago Jack gets a theft file. An eighty-one-year-old widow by the name of Olivia Hathaway has had a burglary at her little house in Anaheim. Jack goes out there and she’s waiting for him in the kitchen with tea and freshly baked sugar cookies.

  She won’t discuss the loss until Jack has had two cups of tea, three cookies, told her his entire genealogy and received a report on what each of Olivia’s nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren is doing. Now, Jack has five other loss reports to do that day, but he figures she’s a charming, lonely old lady so he’s okay with spending the extra time.

  When she finally gets down to it, it turns out that the only thing that has been stolen is her collection of spoons.

  Which is weird, Jack thinks, but he’s looking out the window at a gigantic model of the Matterhorn replete with fake snow, the Crystal Cathedral and a gigantic pair of mouse ears on a billboard, so, like, what’s weird?

  Olivia’s just had an appraisal done (“I’m not going to live forever, you know, Jack, and there’s a matter of a will”) and the spoons are worth about $6,000. At this point, Olivia gets a little weepy because four of the spoons are sterling silver, handed down from her great-grandmother in Dingwall, Scotland. She excuses herself to get a tissue and then comes back in and asks Jack if there’s anything that he can do to help recover her spoons.

  Jack explains that he isn’t the police, but that he will contact them to get a report, and that all he can really do, sadly, is reimburse her for the loss.

  Olivia understands.

  Jack just feels like shit for her, goes back to the office and calls Anaheim PD for the loss report, and the desk sergeant just laughs like hell and hangs up.

  So Jack punches Olivia Hathaway in on the PLR (Prior Loss Report, pronounced “pillar”) system and finds that Olivia Hathaway’s spoons have been “stolen” fourteen times while insured with thirteen different insurance companies. They have, in fact, been stolen once a year since Mr. Hathaway’s death.

  Olivia’s spoons are what’s known in the insurance business as 3S, Social Security Supplement.

  The amazing thing is that thirteen out of thirteen prior insurance companies have paid the claim.

  Jack gets on the phone and calls number eleven, Fidelity Mutual, and it turns out that an old buddy named Mel Bornstein handled the claim.

  “Did you do a PLR?” Jack asks.

  “Yup.”

  “And you saw the priors?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why did you pay?”

  Mel laughs like hell and hangs up.

  Jack tracks down adjusters number nine, ten and thirteen, and they’re each pretty much in helpless hysterics when they hang up the phone.

  Three long years later Jack understands why they paid an obviously phony claim.

  But he doesn’t back then. Back then he’s in a quandary. He knows what he should do: by law, in fact, he’s obligated to report the fraud to the NICB (National Insurance Crime Bureau), cancel her policy and deny the claim. But he just can’t bring himself to turn her in and leave her without insurance (What if there was a fire? What if someone slipped and fell on her sidewalk? What if there was a real burglary?), so he just decides to deny the claim and forget about it.

  Right.

  Two days after he sends her the denial letter she shows up at the office. They have the same conversation roughly twice a month for the next three years. She doesn’t write letters, she doesn’t go over his head, she doesn’t complain to the Department of Insurance, she doesn’t sue. She just keeps coming back, and back, and back, and they always have the same conversation.

  “Jack, you’ve neglected to pay me for my spoons.”

  “I didn’t neglect to pay you for your spoons, Mrs. Hathaway,” Jack says. “Your spoons were not stolen.”

  “Of course they were, Jack.”

  “Right, they were stolen fourteen times.”

  She sighs, “The neighborhood is not what it used to be, Jack.”

  “You live outside of Disneyland.”

  Like, Be on the lookout for a large rodent carrying spoons. Suspect is approximately five feet tall with large circular ears and white gloves.

  “I need you to pay me for my spoons,” Olivia says.

  “Your spoons have been paid for thirteen times.”

  She thinks she has him. “But they have been stolen fourteen times.”

  “Mrs. Hathaway,” Jack says. “Are you asking me to accept that on thirteen prior occasions the spoon thieves have returned your spoons to you? And that they’ve been stolen again … and again and again and again … No, please don’t haul out the cookies.”

  But she does.

  She always does.

  She always sits there looking lovely, smiling, speaking softly, never raising her voice, and she always brings a Ziploc bag of sugar cookies.

  “I know how you like these, Jack.”

  “I can’t take any cookies, Mrs. Hathaway.”

  “Now,” she says, reaching into her
handbag and coming out with a stack of photographs, “little Billy has gone to junior college to study computer programming …”

  Jack lowers his head and thumps it repeatedly on the table as Olivia continues her recitation of the daily lives and personal development of each and every child, grandchild, great-grandchild and their spouses.

  “… Kimmy is living—in sin—with a motorcycle repairman from Downey …”

  Thump … thump …

  “Jack, are you listening?”

  “No.”

  “Now, Jack, you’ve neglected to pay me for my spoons.”

  “I didn’t neglect to pay you for your spoons; your spoons were not stolen.”

  “Of course they were, dear.”

  “Right, they were stolen fourteen—I thought Kimmy was living with an electrician.”

  “That was last month.”

  “Oh.”

  “Cookie?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Now, about my spoons …”

  It’s forty-five more agonizing minutes of the Olivia Hathaway Water Torture (drip … about my spoons … drip … about my spoons … drip …) before he can get rid of her and head out to Vale’s mother’s house in Monarch Bay.

  18

  Monarch Bay.

  Aptly named.

  Absolutely primo real estate location on the south coast.

  Monarch Bay sits on the border between the towns of Laguna Niguel and Dana Point and went through Bosnia-esque civil strife as to which town it would belong to. To most people’s surprise, the residents chose Dana Point over the more tony Laguna Niguel, even though Dana Point in those days was just the harbor and a bunch of fast food joints, surf shops and cheap motels on a strip of the PCH.

  The Dana Point that Jack loved.

  The choice pissed a lot of people off, especially the owners of the Ritz-Carlton/Laguna Niguel just down the beach, who never changed the resort’s name, even though it’s technically in Dana Point and not Laguna Niguel.

  This is fine with Jack, who doesn’t particularly want to be associated with the beautiful resort people. As far as Jack’s concerned, the resort is basically a place for the young surf bums to work as waiters and supplement their meager incomes by screwing the rich wives that they’ve otherwise serviced at lunch. More than a few of whom live in the exclusive gated community of Monarch Bay.

  You roll up to the gates of Monarch Bay in a Ford Taurus, you’d better be there to clean something. You’d better have some ammonia and rags in the backseat.

  Otherwise, this is a gate for Mercedes and Jags and Rollses.

  Jack does feel a little uncool in the Taurus, but he switched to a company car because somehow it just didn’t feel right to go to a house where people have lost a loved one and show up in a ’66 Mustang with a Hobie on top.

  Feels disrespectful.

  Getting the company car was a hassle.

  To get a company car, you have to go to Edna.

  Edna has those glasses with the little metal-bead chain hanging around her neck.

  Jack says, “Edna, I need a car.”

  “Are you asking or telling?”

  “Asking.”

  “We don’t have any with surfboard racks on them.” Jack smiles.

  “It was my last call of the day. Three Arch Bay, so, you know …”

  “I do know,” Edna says. “I saw the crew vacuuming the sand out.”

  What Jack doesn’t tell Edna is that he left two six-packs with the pool car crew for the inconvenience. Something he always does. The guys in the crew love Jack. They’d do anything for Jack.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Company cars are not for pleasure,” Edna says, pushing the keys at him.

  “I promise I won’t have any pleasure in it.”

  All of a sudden Edna has these images of twisted carnal goings-on in the backseat of one of her cars and her hand pauses on the keys.

  “Tell me you boys don’t—”

  “No, no, no, no,” Jack says, taking the keys. “Not in the backseat, anyway.”

  “Slip 17.”

  “Thank you.”

  So Jack takes a Taurus to Monarch Bay.

  Where the guard gives the car a long look, just to make a point, and then asks, “Is Mr. Vale expecting you?”

  Jack says, “He’s expecting me.”

  The guard looks past Jack on the front seat and asks, “You’re what? The dog groomer?”

  “That’s right. I groom the dog.”

  The house is a mock-Tudor mansion. The lawn is as manicured as a dowager’s hand and a croquet set has been meticulously measured out on the grass. A rose garden edges the north wall.

  Hasn’t rained in three months, Jack thinks, and the roses are dripping with moisture, fresh as a blush.

  Vale meets him in the driveway.

  He’s one good-looking man. He’s about six-three, Jack guesses, thin, with black hair cut unfashionably long except somehow it looks perfectly stylish on him. He’s wearing a beige pullover over faded jeans and Loafers. No socks. Wire-rim John Lennon glasses.

  Very cool.

  He looks younger than forty-three.

  The face is movie-star handsome and mostly it’s the eyes. They have a slight upward slant and they’re the gray-blue color of a winter sea.

  And intense.

  Like when Vale looks at you he’s trying to make you do something.

  Jack has the feeling that most people do.

  “Would you be Jack Wade?” Vale asks.

  There’s the slightest trace of an accent, but Jack can’t work out what it is.

  “Russian,” Vale explains. “The actual name is Daziatnik Valeshin, but who wants to sign all those checks that way?”

  “Sorry to meet you under these circumstances, Mr. Vale.”

  “Nicky,” Vale says. “Call me Nicky.”

  “Nicky,” Jack says. “Here’s Leo.”

  “Leonid!” Nicky yells.

  The little dog goes nuts, starts twirling around and stuff. Jack opens the door and Leo jumps out and leaps into Nicky’s outstretched arms.

  “Again,” Jack says, “I’m sorry about Mrs. Vale.”

  “Pamela was young and very beautiful,” Nicky says.

  Which is definitely what you want to be, Jack thinks, if you’re going to be married to a rich guy and live in a house overlooking the ocean. “Young and beautiful” is the baseline qualification. You aren’t young and beautiful, you don’t even get to fill out the application.

  Still, it’s a weird thing to say at a time like this.

  Jack says, “I know she did a lot of work for Save the Strands. I know you both did.”

  Nicky nods. “We believed in it. Pamela spent a lot of time in the Strands—painting, walking with the children. We’d hate to see it ruined.”

  “How are the children doing?” Jack asks.

  “I believe the expression is ‘As well as can be expected.’ ”

  One odd fucking dude, Jack thinks.

  He must see it on my face, Jack thinks, because Nicky says, “Let’s cut through the pretense, Jack. Obviously you know that Pamela and I were separated. I loved her, the children loved her, but Pamela couldn’t decide which she loved more—her family or the bottle. Still, I had every hope of a reconciliation. We were working toward one. And she was young, and very beautiful, and under these circumstances that is what I seem to bring to mind. A protective reflex of the mind, I suppose.”

  “Mr. Vale … Nicky—”

  “In all honesty, I don’t know exactly what I am supposed to be feeling right now, or even what I do feel. All I know is that I need to to put my children’s lives in order, because they have been in chaos for quite some time, all the more so this morning.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  Nicky smiles and says, “You weren’t saying anything, Jack, you are too polite. But inside you are offended by my apparent lack of grief. I grew up as a Jew in what your news readers like to call ‘the former Soviet Un
ion.’ I learned to watch men’s eyes more than their mouths. I’ll bet that in your world, Jack, people lie to you all the time, don’t they?”

  “I hear some lies.”

  “More than some,” Nicky says. “People can get money from you and so they lie to get it. Even otherwise honest people will exaggerate their loss just to cover the deductible, am I right?”

  Jack nods.

  “And I will probably try to do the same,” Nicky laughs. “Big deal—I’ll come up with a number, then you’ll come up with a number, and we’ll negotiate. We’ll make a deal.”

  “I don’t make deals,” Jack says. “I just carry out the policy.”

  “Everyone makes deals, Jack.”

  “Not everyone.”

  Nicky puts his arm around Jack’s shoulders.

  “I think we can work together, Jack Wade,” he says. “I think we can do business.”

  Nicky invites him in.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Jack says.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to,” Nicky says. He gives Jack a smile that makes him a co-conspirator. “Mother made tea.”

  Well, Jack thinks, if Mother made tea …

  19

  Mother is beautiful.

  A small, perfect gem.

  Sable hair pulled back tight against the whitest skin Jack’s ever seen. She has Nicky’s blue eyes, only darker. The color of deeper water.

  Head up, spine sergeant major straight.

  No, not sergeant major, Jack corrects himself, ballet instructor.

  She’s wearing August-appropriate white. A midlength summer dress edged in gold. She doesn’t shop in Laguna, Jack thinks—too funky and too many gays—but in Newport Beach. Come Labor Day, no matter how hot, she’ll lose the whites and go to beige and khaki. The first of November she’ll switch to black.

  Jack starts, “Mrs. Vale—”

  “Valeshin.”

  “Mrs. Valeshin,” Jack says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I understand that she was smoking in bed,” Mother says. She has more of an accent and there’s this slight edge, like Pamela deserved to choke to death in the dark, Jack thinks. Like she had it coming.

  “That’s the preliminary finding,” Jack says.

  “And drinking?” Mother adds.