California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  Underneath it there’s a big hole. Irregularly shaped, but roughly the size of the bed. Wider, in fact, on the side opposite the bottle remnants.

  Jack keeps digging.

  Digs right down through the flooring to the concrete pad beneath.

  Scoops the char off the pad, and what he sees is a white stain where the concrete was scorched.

  Spalling.

  It’s another sign of a set fire, because, once again, fire burns up unless it has a reason to burn down. You have spalling like this, you have juice dripping down onto the concrete, luring the alligator down for a snack.

  So Jack’s standing there and he has the hole beneath him, and above him, there’s the hole in the roof.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack says.

  The fire is screaming at him.

  Feels like it’s coming from inside his soul.

  Whoever set the fire poured accelerant under the bed. Then doused Pamela Vale with it. Doused it from her hips down her legs. Then lit a match.

  No professional arsonist does that, Jack thinks.

  Not on a strictly business fire, anyway. You douse a woman in a bed like that, it’s personal. It’s sexual. It comes out of rage.

  Jack goes through his whole routine again. Photographs the floor in black-and-white and color, logs the photos, videos the room, then sketches the pour pattern onto a floor plan of the room. Belt and suspenders, because he wants a lot of evidence to go in front of a jury.

  The best thing would be if the jury could visit the site, but he knows that’s not likely to happen. For one thing, the chances of getting an injunction against demolition and reconstruction of this room are practically nil, and two, judges rarely allow a site visit, especially when there’s been a fatality. It could prove to be too emotional and prejudice the jury.

  What it could prove, Jack thinks, is that Nicky Vale burned his wife up in their marital bed. If I could walk a jury through this place and explain to them what they’re seeing …

  But fat chance of that, so he documents the scene the best he can—photos, video, sketches—then grabs samples from around the pour pattern and under the bed. For each potential “dirty” sample, a potential “clean” one for comparison. He puts them into plastic evidence bags and logs them in.

  The samples are everything now.

  If the samples test positive for accelerants, it makes total bullshit out of the smoking-in-bed theory.

  Then it’s not an accidental fire or an accidental death.

  It’s arson.

  And murder.

  Jack heads off to see Accidentally Bentley.

  Tell him he needs to reopen the Vale file.

  45

  You got it wrong again, you dumb lazy fuck!

  Is what Jack wants to say to Accidentally Bentley. But Jack doesn’t figure that’s exactly diplomatic, so he settles for, “I think you might want to reconsider your call on the Vale fire.”

  “Get out of here,” Bentley says. He’s sitting at his desk at the Sheriff’s office. Actually, he’s cleaning out his desk, and what he means by Get out of here is not You’re kidding; what he means is Get out of here.

  Bentley jerks his thumb toward the door.

  Which looks good to Jack, too, but he reminds himself that he’s here to try to get Bentley to reopen the investigation, so he takes a breath and says, “Brian, the house has all the indicators.”

  “Such as?”

  “Deep char.”

  “There was a lot of stuff in the house.”

  “Alligator char on the beams.”

  “Old wives’ tale,” Bentley says. He doesn’t even look at Jack. He’s busy putting stuff into a cardboard box. “Could mean something, could mean nothing.”

  “Spalling on the concrete pad.”

  “Same.”

  “The damn bed frame was annealed.”

  Bentley puts a coffee mug in the box. “Jack, if you’re saying this was a hot fire—okay, it was a hot fire. I’m telling you, there was a fuel load in that place could have burned Chicago. Now get out of here.”

  A couple of deputies standing at another desk look over.

  “I found a pour pattern,” Jack says.

  “There was no pour pattern.”

  “You didn’t do a dig-out.”

  “Didn’t need to do a dig-out.”

  “The hell you mean you didn’t need to do a dig-out?!”

  The deputies are watching now. Ready to step in if this guy needs moving.

  Bentley yells back, “The deceased was smoking in bed! The most common cause of fire fatality there is!”

  “There was no smoke in her lungs!” Jack yells. “Less than 10 percent CO in her blood.”

  “She was drinking!” Bentley hollers. “She was bombed on booze and pills! She OD’d!”

  “But first she went around the room pouring accelerants?” Jack asks. “Gives herself her own Viking funeral? Come on, Brian.”

  “The fuck you talking about, accelerants.”

  “I took debris samples, and they’re going to come up positive—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “—and I just want to give you a chance to back off your call first.”

  “Well, you’re a hell of a guy, Jack,” Bentley says. “But I’m not backing off shit. Now go back to cheating widows and orphans.”

  “You need to reopen—”

  “You just can’t stand being an insurance adjuster, can you?” Bentley says. “You still wanna be a cop. Well, you’re not, Jack. They threw you out, remember?”

  I remember, Jack thinks.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I remember you going belly-up on the stand.”

  Bentley grabs him by the shirt. Jack grabs back. The two deputies move in to separate them, so they have a real little scrum going when Letty comes around the corner.

  “Jack, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Hey, Jack,” Bentley says, “maybe you can beat a confession out of him.”

  “You don’t do your job—”

  “I told you not to dick around—”

  “Jack—”

  “—with shit you don’t know any—”

  “—you dumb, lazy—”

  “Jack.”

  Letty takes him by the elbow and walks him up against the wall. “What are you doing?” she asks.

  Jack takes a deep breath. “I came to try to get him to back off his report.”

  She gives him a quizzical look.

  “The fire was an arson,” he says.

  “Oh, you two are together on this, huh?” Bentley says. “What are you, Jack, doing her again?”

  Jack starts for him but Letty stands in his way.

  “Let him go,” Bentley says.

  Letty says, “Like you want me to.”

  “And you was told to stay out of this, del Rio,” Bentley says.

  “She was my sister.”

  “She was stoned and drunk and she torched herself,” Bentley says.

  Jack says, “If you’d do your fucking job for once—”

  “Get out of here!” Bentley yells. He’s straightening out his shirt and patting his hair back into place.

  “He’s leaving,” Letty says. She holds a hand up to the two deputies who are about to escort Jack from the building. She keeps her hand on his elbow as she walks him down the hall. They can both hear Bentley yelling, “You’re an asshole, Jack!”

  “He might have something there,” Letty says.

  “Probably.”

  “Probably,” Letty chuckles. Then says, “Arson?”

  “I won’t be sure until the sample tests, but …,” Jack says. Then he asks, “Could Pam have done that, Letty? Could she have been so down she’d take herself out and the house along with her?”

  “Pam would never have killed herself.”

  “How—”

  “The kids,” Letty says. “She never would have left the kids.”

  “She was very drunk.”

  Letty shakes her head. “He killed he
r, Jack.”

  “Letty …”

  “He killed her,” she says. Then, “You’d better get out of here.”

  He gets into his car and drives off. When she gets back into the office Bentley asks her, “So how’s the old boyfriend?”

  “Shut up, you dumb lazy fuck,” Letty says.

  46

  Dinesh Adjati looks like Bambi.

  Not the older Bambi, Jack thinks—the one who kicks the rival buck’s ass at the end of the movie—but the younger Bambi, Thumper’s little buddy.

  Dinesh has these big, brown Bambi eyes and long eyelashes and he’s slender and has brown skin. However, he also has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, so to the extent that he resembles Bambi, he’s Doctor Bambi.

  Dinesh works for an outfit called Disaster Inc.

  Disaster Inc. is the company you call when something goes very wrong.

  You want to know why a train wreck happened, a bridge collapsed, a bus plunged into a river or a fire happened, you call Disaster Inc. Any catastrophe, they’ll tell you why it happened.

  Disaster Inc. gives its clients a Disaster of the Month calendar every year but Jack’s never known anyone sick enough to actually have it on his wall. The calendar features slick Technicolor glossies of that month’s featured disaster along with a daily chronicle of past human tragedies like “Hindenburg Explodes,” “Chicago School Fire” and a mock-up of “Vesuvius Erupts,” which Goddamn Billy amended to read “Vesuvius Erupts and Disaster Inc. Not There to Bill for It.”

  Disaster Inc. has done some very serious billing in the ’90s because the decade has been chock-full of disasters. In California alone you had the ’93 fires—Malibu, Laguna, Sherman Oaks—and the good citizens of those towns wanted to know what caused the fires to spread so quickly and burn down so many homes.

  Then the Mother of All Disasters hit—the Northridge earthquake. It took thirty seconds of January 17, 1994, to drain a third of Cal Fire and Life’s reserves and make the owners of Disaster Inc. rich men.

  Dinesh got one whomper of a bonus, because he’s the fire guy at Disaster and he billed a lot of hours figuring out the cause of fires that broke out in the aftermath of the quake. A lot of people didn’t have earthquake insurance but they did have fire insurance, so a lot of buildings went up in spontaneous combustion that day.

  Jack himself knew a lot of insurance claims guys who had figured out how to get total earthquake coverage for a buck sixty-five: you set a gallon of gas on top of your furnace and when the shaking starts—Abracadabra, KABOOM—earthquake coverage.

  But most people hadn’t figured that out and so were running around pouring accelerants all over their rubble and that’s why Dinesh Adjati is twenty-eight years old and has a Porsche, a house in Laguna and a condo in Big Bear.

  Jack loves Dinesh, though.

  He loves Dinesh because Dr. Bambi works his ass off, gets it right and makes a wonderful witness. He just turns those fawn eyes on the jury and explains the most complicated chemical analyses to them in plain-old American English and they eat him with a spoon.

  Anyway, Jack drives straight from the Vale house to Disaster’s lab in Newport Beach overlooking the greenway.

  He gets a Most Favored Client pass right into Dinesh’s lab, where Dr. Bambi is wearing a flameproof smock and a masked helmet and appears to be torturing a pickup truck with a blowtorch.

  Dinesh turns it off, flips up the mask and shakes Jack’s hand.

  “A libel suit against a TV show,” he explains. “I’m working for the plaintiff.”

  Jack tells him that he has a trunk full of samples in the car.

  “Can you run the samples for me?” he asks. “Double pronto?”

  “Somebody wanted something to burn?”

  “Someone to burn.”

  Dinesh makes a face. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Nasty.”

  “I need it quick, Dinesh.”

  “Today?”

  “Cool,” Jack says. “And I might need you to testify down the road.”

  “Well,” Dinesh says, “I have good news and bad news.”

  “Tell.”

  “The good news is that I can get it to you today,” Dinesh says. “I’ll have to put a crew of techs on it and bill you accordingly, but you’ll get it today and you’ll get it right.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news,” Dinesh says, “is that I’m not completely confident that I can testify.”

  Say what?

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not completely confident,” Dinesh repeats, “that a gas chromatograph—or even a GC with a mass spectrometer—can accurately determine traces of accelerants.”

  Jack feels the floor sinking under him.

  “We’ve always used the GC-mass spec,” he says. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “We live in a plastic society,” Dinesh says. “In more than just the symbolic sense. The modern home is just chock-full of plastic products, every one of which—when they burn—produces thousands of chemicals that can be confused with hydrocarbons, with accelerants. For example, your basic GC-mass spec reveals about two hundred chemicals in kerosene.”

  “So?”

  “So I’ve been working with something that shows two thousand.”

  “Two thousand?”

  Jack asks.

  “Yeah,” Dinesh says. “Let’s say that’s a little more effective at sorting out the chemical sheep from the chemical goats.”

  Jack asks, “More expensive?”

  Dinesh smiles. “The only thing more expensive than good science is bad science. Let me just say that I don’t think I could get up in front of a jury anymore and swear under oath to the absolute accuracy of a GC, even with a mass-spec chaser.”

  “And with your new process, you could.”

  “It’s not new,” Dinesh says. “I’ve been testing it for months. Something called a GC × GC. Or two-dimensional gas chromatograph, if you prefer. Maybe now is the time to trot it out.”

  “Do it.”

  “It’s going to cost.”

  “How much?”

  “Run you about another ten grand.”

  Do it anyway, Jack thinks. You don’t want to get hit for a few million on a bad faith suit and then say, Yeah, but I saved ten thou on the testing.

  “Do it,” Jack says.

  “This is why I’ve always loved you, Jack.”

  “Do it the old way,” Jack says. “Then do it the new way. Do it till you’re satisfied. But do it.”

  Whatever it is.

  47

  Letty’s at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which because of its time and location is generally known by the sobriquet “Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch.”

  This is not the kind of meeting Letty’s used to. She’s used to night meetings in church basements, meetings with broken cookies and greasy coffee and stories about blowing the rent on beer and bourbon benders.

  She’s not used to a meeting in broad daylight in a “togetherness space” on a pier in a marina, but that’s where the ladies go to share their experience, strength and hope and that’s where Pam went to do it with them, and that’s why Letty’s there.

  Thinking, The ladies are gorgeous. I mean for a bunch of drunks these babes are put together. Whatever boozy fat they put on in their sinful days these girls worked off on the treadmills and exercise bikes and spinners. Skin glowing with health, eyes bright, hair shiny, full and sexy. If AA ever wanted to do an infomercial, they’d shoot it at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting.

  Even women who weren’t alcoholics would go out and get hammered so they could come to the meetings and look like these ladies.

  What twelve little steps and a few hundred thousand spare dollars can’t do, Letty thinks.

  Anyway, she’s there, and the ladies aren’t drinking greasy coffee—they’re sipping Frappuccinos (decaf, low-fat milk) out of clear-plast
ic go-cups. There are a few guys there, not your nine-to-five types, but real estate brokers and insurance salesmen and other men who can take the middle of the afternoon off to share their experience, strength and hope and maybe get lucky, and as fortune and solid planning would have it there’s a Holiday Inn within a hot five-minute walk of the meeting. There are so many pickups happening at this meeting that it could be called Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch and the Men Who Lust After Them, Letty thinks.

  Quit being such a bitch, she tells herself.

  It’s not their fault they’re rich and you’re not.

  They’re gorgeous and you’re not.

  Get over it.

  And get over Jack Wade. Twelve years is too long a time to be carrying a torch. Your arm gets tired. Twelve years and the son of a bitch never even called. Never would have called. You never would have seen him again if you didn’t need his help, and you’re such a bitch that you’d use him like that.

  But the truth is she has been carrying a torch for twelve years. She’s had a few boyfriends but nothing serious because in the back of her head—in the back of her soul—she’s holding out for something she lost.

  Jack.

  Jack lost his soul and took yours with it.

  So you’re pushing forty and you have no husband and no kids and no life outside busting skells.

  And it isn’t these ladies’ fault.

  It’s your own.

  So get over it, girl.

  So she sits and listens to the preamble and to the speaker and it’s the same stuff everywhere: if you’re a drunk you’re a drunk; no matter what the view is, it turns to shit. She makes small talk with a couple of the ladies during the break, and when the meeting resumes and the chairperson asks if anyone wants to speak, Letty waits for a few people to talk about what’s going on with them and then she raises her hand.

  My name is Letty. Hi, Letty—blah, blah, blah …

  “I’m here,” she says, “to ask if any of you knew my sister Pam. She died three nights ago and they say she’d been drinking. She was about five-eight, black hair, purple eyes. I know she used to hit this meeting—I don’t know what other meetings she used to go to but I’m hoping you can help me.”

  Amidst the Oh my Gods and Not Pams and a couple of sudden sobs, about five hands shoot up.