California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “Yes.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes.”

  Which strictly speaking is true, because he and Bentley went out and got a gas can, jammed Teddy’s hand onto it, placed it on the site and “found” it.

  “You planted that evidence, didn’t you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you beat up my client?”

  “No.”

  “You beat this so-called confession out of him, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  Jack hangs tough.

  Billy Hayes is watching this and thinking that Deputy Wade is a genuine tough guy.

  Judge Mallon lets Jack off the stand but instructs him not to leave the courtroom. Jack sits in the gallery sweating bricks while there’s another endless huddle at the bench, the clerk makes a phone call, and twenty minutes later Brian Bentley walks in.

  Walks right past Jack without looking at him, and the back of his jacket is soaked.

  He takes the oath, and the stand, and the judge asks him how the statement was obtained and Bentley tells him that Jack Wade beat the confession out of Theodore Kuhl.

  Bentley is sweating like a sauna as he turns into a Chatty Cathy doll on the stand. Tells about how Jack told him to leave the room and when he came back in Wade was stomping on Theodore Kuhl and threatening to really hurt him. How he had pulled Wade off the suspect, explained to the suspect that they had an eyewitness—

  No, no, no, Jack’s mind is screeching.

  —who could place him at the scene, so he might as well try to help himself, and how based on that, Kuhl had written his statement. How Jack had forced Kuhl to put his prints on the gasoline can and then planted that evidence, and it was all so unnecessary because they did have an eyewitness—

  “I want that witness produced,” Judge Mallon tells the DA.

  No, no, no, no.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “What’s the witness’s name, Deputy Bentley?”

  “Mr. Porfirio—”

  Jack stands up and yells, “No!”

  “—Guzman.”

  Jack, he wants to race out of the courtroom and get to Guzman first, except he’s in handcuffs because the judge orders him arrested for perjury. Teddy’s sitting there grinning at him. Azmekian is smiling at Billy Hayes, who’s calculating how many millions it will take to settle his lawsuit. Bentley’s on the stand wiping his brow with a handkerchief as he reaches for his spiral notepad to give up Guzman’s address.

  Which he does, in front of God, the judge and the defense attorney, and when the sheriffs go to pick up Mr. Guzman—surprise, he’s disappeared.

  Dropped off the face of the earth.

  Jack always hopes that he’s in Mexico somewhere, in some village by the sea, drinking cold beer to some sweet canciones. He knows it’s far more likely that Teddy’s crew took him out.

  And it’s my fault, Jack thinks.

  I didn’t do the job.

  I didn’t do it well.

  And I got that good gentleman killed.

  As Teddy Kuhl walks, as Kazzy Azmekian gets two million bucks from California Fire and Life, as Jack pleads out to perjury in exchange for unsupervised probation and his uncontested dismissal from the department.

  All through this Jack doesn’t say shit. Doesn’t rat out Brian Bentley, doesn’t say a word in his own defense, doesn’t offer any explanations. Just takes the ass kicking and goes.

  Worst thing is, he can’t get a job.

  28

  Any job.

  He’s a lying felon. A corrupt, brutal cop. And with that kind of reference he can’t get a gig asking, Would you like fries with that, sir? And his dad’s retired, so that’s out, and then a few months later his dad dies while on a sport boat fishing off Catalina, and Jack disappears inside himself into his trailer across the PCH from Capo Beach and drinks beer for breakfast and surfs but after a couple of months he stops surfing.

  Letty wants to stick it out with him. Letty is there, man, she ain’t going anywhere. She is one hundred percent solid gold, she walks the talk. She’ll even walk down the aisle with him, have kids, do a life. She tells him that and he looks at her like she’s some freaked-out skell and says, “Married? What are you, drunk?”

  She starts to answer, No, asshole, you are, but she swallows her temper and says, “I thought you wanted to get married.”

  He laughs. “I don’t even have a job!”

  She says, “I have a job.”

  “What, you’ll support us?”

  “Sure,” Letty says. “Until you find something.”

  “There’s nothing to find.”

  “It’s not like you’re busting your ass looking.”

  Unless they got jobs at the bottom of Budweiser cans.

  “What do you want from me?” Jack asks.

  “I want us to get married,” Letty says. “I want us to have a life. I want kids.”

  Jack says, “I won’t bring kids into this shitty world.”

  “Jack, you got beat,” Letty says. “You lost a case—”

  “I lost everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  “I got a man killed!”

  “Not everything, Jack!” Letty yells.

  “Yeah,” Jack says. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “Go away, Letty.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I want you to.”

  “No, you don’t,” Letty says. “Don’t throw me away, Jack. I’m too good to throw away.”

  “You’re too good to hold on to, Letty.”

  “Don’t give me that self-pitying shit. If I didn’t want to be here, I’d—”

  “What are you, fucking deaf? I’m telling you to get out! Leave! Go! Split! ¡Pintale!”

  “I’m gone.”

  First word in Spanish he ever says to her and it’s Go away.

  “I’m gone,” she repeats.

  “Good.”

  “Yeah, good.”

  She slams the door shut behind her.

  Two months later Jack’s unemployment has about run out when Billy Hayes trots his cowboy boots up Jack’s steps and into the trailer where Jack’s slumped on the sofa, drinking a beer and watching the Dodgers on TV. Jack recognizes him as the insurance guy he jammed up, so Jack asks, “What, are you here to give me shit?”

  Billy says, “No, I’m here to give you a goddamn job.”

  Jack stares at him for a long time, then says, “Mr. Hayes, I did everything they said I did.”

  “You have some construction background,” Goddamn Billy says. “And you already been to fire school, so you save me some money right there. I figure you can make a pretty decent adjuster. Basically, it’s putting people’s houses back together. You want the job or not?”

  “I want the job.”

  “Seven o’clock tomorrow morning,” Goddamn Billy says. “And leave the beer at home—”

  “I will.”

  “—unless you bring one for me.”

  So Jack goes to work for Cal Fire and Life.

  Twelve years later he’s sitting in Nicky Vale’s mommy’s driveway getting a phone call from the past.

  29

  There’s no smoke in Pamela Vale’s lungs.

  Is what the woman whispers over the phone.

  I shouldn’t be telling you this but I thought someone should know, the autopsy showed no smoke in her lungs.

  30

  Dr. Winston Ng is thrilled to see Jack.

  “Go away” is what Ng says when Jack appears in his office. Ng has just taken a minute to sit down and have a cup of old rancid coffee and he doesn’t want to be hassled. And Jack Wade is a hassle.

  “You had a fire fatality in here this morning,” Jack says. “Mrs. Pamela Vale?”

  “No kidding?”

  Jack says, “She didn’t have any smoke in her lungs.”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  I don’t know
, Jack thinks. But he asks, “Did you test for carbon monoxide?”

  Ng nods. “I tested her blood for a level of carboxyhemoglobin.”

  Carbon monoxide loves red blood cells. CO enters the body, seeks out those red blood cells and goes there. In the body of a person who dies from CO asphyxiation, you’d expect to find, for instance, two hundred times more CO than oxygen in the red blood cells. You’d find a high level of carbon monoxide in the blood.

  “What was the saturation level?” Jack asks.

  “Under 9 percent,” Ng answers.

  Which is negligible, Jack knows. A charred body will absorb small amounts of CO through the skin.

  “Postmortem lividity?” Jack asks.

  “Blue-black.”

  “Should have been bright red,” Jack says. Carbon monoxide turns the blood bright red. “Blisters?”

  “A few,” Ng answers. “Small, filled with air.”

  Jack nods. It’s what he’d expect on a body that was dead before the fire. Otherwise the blisters would be larger and filled with fluid. He asks, “Rings?”

  “No rings.”

  Same thing. A live body in a fire develops inflamed rings around the blisters. Not so with a dead body.

  “She was dead before the fire,” Jack says.

  Ng pours a second cup of coffee, for Jack. Hands him the styrofoam cup and says, “You know she was or you wouldn’t be here busting my balls.”

  “I’m not busting your balls.”

  “Yeah you are.” Ng plops down on his old wooden desk chair. Slides open a drawer in the gray metal desk and takes out a file. Tosses it on the desk and says, “You didn’t see this.”

  Jack opens the manila file and about pukes.

  Photos of Pamela Vale.

  Half of her anyway.

  Her legs are pretty much burned off. Shinbones exposed. Her arms are bent and pulled up, her fingers clawed as if she’s trying to protect herself. Her face is intact, violet eyes open and staring.

  Jack gags.

  “Hey,” Ng says, “you come here busting my balls, you get what you ask for.”

  “Shit,” Jack says.

  “Indeed,” Ng says. “Any thoughts for me on why we have half of her intact?”

  “The leg bones are exposed,” Jack says. It would take twenty-five to thirty minutes at 1,200°F for an average structural fire to burn through to the shinbones. Except this fire didn’t burn that long. But he says, “Fall-down effect, probably. Shielded her torso and face from the flames.”

  “Lucky girl,” Ng says.

  Jack makes himself look at the photos again and says, “She went pugilistic.”

  He’s not talking about boxing exactly, except for the fact that when a human body is exposed to high heat its arm and leg muscles contract, the arms pulling up into a classic boxer’s pose. One reason that it wouldn’t do this would be if rigor mortis had set in.

  “Rigor?”

  “No.”

  “No smoke in her lungs, no carbon smudges around her mouth, low carboxy, and she went pugilistic,” Jack says.

  Ng says, “She died before the fire but not long before the fire.”

  “Faceup or facedown?”

  “Faceup.”

  Most people who die in a fire are found facedown. It’s not a situation where you lie down on your back and wait for it.

  “And this is an accidental death?” Jack asks.

  “That’s what the cops say,” Ng says. “And the cops would never ever lie.”

  “She had alcohol in her blood.”

  “Yup.”

  “A lot?”

  “She would have been considered legally drunk.”

  “Enough to pass out?”

  “Hard to tell,” Ng says. “I also found traces of barbiturates.”

  “So it could’ve happened,” Jack says. “She’s drinking and taking pills and smoking, she passes out, the cigarette ignites the alcohol …”

  “Say she is unconscious,” Ng says. “She’s still breathing. She’s inhaling smoke. No, this woman was dead before the fire.”

  “So how did she die?”

  They sit there for a second, then Ng says, “There’s no bruising around the throat, no ligature marks, no apparent trauma to the trachea. There are no signs of a struggle, as they say on TV. I wanted to talk to the husband about it but his lawyer shut me down. The cops won’t pick it up. They say it’s an accidental fire, accidental death. Now you know what I know.”

  “It doesn’t strike you as funny that a guy gets a call that his wife died in a fire and ten minutes later he has a lawyer?” Jack asks.

  “I’m an ME. I don’t analyze live behavior,” Ng says. “Yes, of course it strikes me as funny.”

  Jack asks, “Sexual activity?”

  “Those parts were consumed by the fire,” Ng says. “Why?”

  “Some sicko rapes her, sets a fire.”

  Ng shrugs. Says, “I saved blood and tissue samples. If there’s interest I can send them off to a specialist, get an opinion on violent suffocation.”

  “Can I see the body?” Jack asks.

  “The body’s gone,” Ng says.

  “Already?”

  “I released it,” Ng says. Sees the look on Jack’s face and says, “Jack, what do you want me to do? I have a fire inspector’s report that says accidental, smoking in bed. I have a bloodstream juiced with alcohol and barbiturates—”

  “She died before the fire.”

  Ng nods. “She drops the cigarette, loses consciousness and ODs before the fire ignites. It’s all consistent. If you’re fishing for reasons to not pay the claim—”

  “Fuck you, Winston.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ng says. “It’s been a long shift. That was unworthy.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a day. So …”

  “So I’m calling it an overdose.”

  An accidental fire and an accidental death.

  “That’s cool, Winston. I just wanted an explanation.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “Fine,” Ng says. “I think they’ll be glad when school starts again. I know I’ll be glad when school starts again.”

  “Elaine?”

  “Busy,” Ng says. “I hardly see her. She’s in that EBD phase—‘everything but dissertation.’ ”

  “Tell her I said hello.”

  “You got it,” Ng says. “Hey, you want the End of a Long Day Dark-Humor Special?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mrs. Vale?” Ng says. “They’re going to cremate her.”

  Jesus, Jack thinks.

  Again?

  31

  Jack watches Pamela Vale walk around the house.

  It’s pretty eerie. He’s sitting in an A-V room back at California Fire and Life, watching the video that Nicky had given him.

  They had to scrape her off the springs.

  Now here she is, Pamela Vale walking around the same room that’s now full of cold, black ash. Where Jack saw her blood baked onto the melted bedsprings. Now she’s looking into the camera and talking to him.

  Very weird, almost voyeuristic. He’s seen pictures of her charred, naked body—right down to the leg bones—and now she’s walking around talking to him.

  Young and very beautiful, is that how Nicky had put it? And no kidding, because Pam Vale is—

  —was, Jack reminds himself, a very beautiful young woman.

  It’s sick, Jack thinks, because if you didn’t keep yourself aware that this woman is dead, you’d be falling in love with her. She’s wearing a print sundress that shows her body. She has black satin hair framing a heart-shaped face, but her eyes are what really get to you.

  Purple.

  Violet.

  Some shade in there that he’s never seen before.

  They grab the camera, they grab your eyes and hold them.

  And her voice.

  Is pure sex.

  Even narrating this inventory that Nicky’s walking her through.
He’s holding the camera and whispering instructions. But it’s not Nicky’s voice softly telling her what to do, it’s her voice describing, the television, the VCR, the paintings, the sculptures, the furniture, that gets to Jack. He expected it to be that high-pitched beach-girl trophy-wife kind of voice but it isn’t. It’s a woman’s voice—a woman who was a wife and a mother of two kids and a manager of an expensive, complicated household—it’s a voice with some real life experience behind it and it’s deeper than he expected, and fuller. It’s a mature woman’s voice and it’s pure sex.

  Even in this video of Nicky’s, basically saying Dig my possessions and this sexy woman is one of them.

  She knows it. You can see in her eyes that she knows what he’s about.

  But she’s above it.

  How? Jack wonders.

  Maybe it’s the kids—she has the status as their mother and maybe that’s enough. Or maybe she’s just loaded, anesthetized into a pleasant zonk which gets her through the day. He decides the question is unanswerable and irrelevant and tries to concentrate on what she’s saying.

  And on the room.

  The video is invaluable to Jack because it shows the room before the fire.

  It’s huge, of course, with high, peaked ceilings. There’s the center beam and the rafters coming down off it. Highly polished pine flooring. The wallpaper is white and rich with gold pattern striping. It shouldn’t work. Thick red draw curtains come over the sliders that lead onto the deck outside the bedroom. Oval, gilded mirrors and old English hunting prints in walnut frames complete the effect.

  Jack rewinds the tape, takes out a notebook and stops and starts the tape as he jots down Pamela’s narration. He has Nicky’s inventory on his lap and he’s trying to match the descriptions up with the listed items and prices.

  Of Nicky’s precious furniture.

  She poses by a desk, gesturing with both hands. (“Show them what they’ll win, Vanna.”) At Nicky’s prompting she says, “This is a George III mahogany pedestal desk, made in about 1775. It has fluted columns at the corners, and note the unusual carved scroll feet.”

  The camera pans down to the unusual carved scroll feet.

  Jack scans the inventory and finds the desk.

  Evaluated at $34,000.

  Pam continues, “The mirror above it is a Kent mirror of carved gilded wood with a shell-backed neoclassical head. This piece was made in about 1830.”