California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “A Mr. Azmekian?” Jack asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Kazzy Azmekian?”

  “No,” she says. “I think it was Kazimir.”

  Jack sits there while she recites a litany of various claims Jack has turned down for the past seven years. It’s like the old lady is reading off his freaking inventory.

  And the only way, Jack thinks, that Paul Gordon could go trolling for these clients is that he’s had access to all my files.

  Jack hears Olivia saying, “So Mr. Gordon wants me to join in this suit against you. He even offered me shares in the Westview,” Olivia says.

  “In the what?”

  “In the Westview Company, my dear. Very confidentially, of course.”

  What the hell?

  “What did you tell him?” Jack asks.

  Olivia looks up from her knitting.

  “I told him to go fuck himself. Cookie?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’d like a cookie,” Jack says.

  Her blue eyes look at him very seriously.

  “I know a scam when I see one,” she says. “Sugar—your favorite.”

  “A great cookie.”

  “Now, about my spoons …”

  99

  “So?” Letty asks.

  “So what?” Tony says.

  Still doing the Snitch Hop.

  Kid’s dressed up in the official Vietnamese gangsta uniform—black Levi’s, black high-tops. Black leather jacket, and it’s what, 70 degrees out? Black leather jacket in August …

  Letty doesn’t feel like it. “You called me.”

  “Tranh and Do.”

  “No kidding.”

  Tony whispers, “They were doing a job for some Russians.”

  “Okay,” Letty says. Like this is telling her something.

  “No,” Tony says, “they were doing a job for some Russians.”

  Which gets Letty’s attention in a hurry.

  “How did they get hooked up with the ROC?”

  “Maybe we do some cars …” Tony says.

  “Is that right?”

  “Anyway,” he says, like he’s not here to engage in bigger issues, “Tranh and Do were running an errand for the Russians. These two guys came and said they needed some guys and a truck.”

  “For what?”

  “Boost a truck, pick some stuff up at a house, take it somewhere, lose the truck.”

  “What stuff?” Letty asks. “What house? Take it where?”

  Tony says, “They talk with my boys, they call later and leave an address.”

  “What address?”

  “Thirty-seven Bluffside Drive.”

  Which rocks Letty.

  The night Pamela is murdered, two missing Vietnamese gang-bangers are taking “stuff” out of the house.

  Tony says, “So they lift a truck. From Paladin Unpainted Furniture. Go over there that night, they don’t come back. Now you know everything I know, so lighten up on me.”

  “What two guys?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid whines. “Two new guys, not the usual guys.”

  “You got usual guys?”

  “We got guys who bring cars,” Tony says. “We got guys come for the money. These were not the guys.”

  “Would you recognize these guys if you saw pictures?”

  Tony shakes his head. “No way, lady. No fucking way do I give up these guys. You don’t have enough weight make me do that.”

  “Describe them.”

  “Tall skinny guy. Big fat guy. No style.”

  “Have you seen them since?”

  Tony shakes his head.

  Too fast, too hard, Letty thinks.

  “Heard from them since?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie to me, you little shit.”

  “I’m not lying!”

  “And don’t whine, either,” she says. “It annoys me. What did they say to you, ‘Keep your stupid fucking mouth shut’?”

  “Something like that,” Tony mumbles. “Don’t tell Uncle Nguyen.”

  “Do they know I’ve been bringing the heat on you?”

  “They know,” the kid says, resentful. “Everyone knows.”

  “You’re in a tough spot.”

  “You put me there.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Letty says. “Come on in. Bring me those guys.”

  Tony thinks about it for a second. “See how it plays,” he says.

  “Yeah, see how it plays,” Letty says.

  The kid already knows how it’s going to play. How it’s going to play is this gash is about to get whacked, is how it’s going to play.

  So he says, “Give me a couple of minutes’ head start. I don’t want to be seen with no cop.”

  “Out here?” Letty laughs.

  There’s nothing out here but hills, dry grass and rocks.

  “Out anywhere,” Tony says. He heads back down the trail.

  Letty’s mind is racing. She has the Tranh and Do disappearance hooked in with Pamela’s death and the fire. She has Nicky Vale connected somehow with ROC. She has a truckload of stuff leaving the Vale house the night of the fire.

  She’s deep into these thoughts as she walks back.

  She has her head down.

  She’s dead.

  Because the hitter is just standing there waiting for her.

  She has her head down, she’s thinking things through, and the only reason she looks up is that she catches a glint of something metal even though there is nothing metal out there.

  She looks up and sees the gun barrel and a glimpse of a face on a body.

  She spins to the ground, dropping hard on the dry red dirt. Lands awkwardly and she can feel her shoulder dislocate when she hits. But she has her weapon out and she can see the guy’s arm try to follow her down so she aims to the right of the arm and punches out two rounds WHAM WHAM and then two more WHAM WHAM and the first two take him in the chest and the next two in the head, so that guy is over.

  But then another figure charges toward her.

  Letty yells, “Forget him, he’s dead!” and she grips her weapon hard, trying to steady it if she needs to fire her last rounds, but then the horizon starts doing goofy flip-flops and she sees the blue sky and thanks Madre María she’s alive and then it all goes black.

  Last thing she hears is this guy bellowing, “Fuck you, bish!”

  But he’s running away.

  Letty lies in the dirt, her shoulder muscle down around her elbow, and it motherfucking hurts.

  But she figures that pain is a good thing, given the alternative.

  100

  Jack’s watching TV.

  He’s sitting down in front of two monitors hooked to VCRs and running two tapes side by side.

  The Vale home movies of Pamela showing off the furniture, and the tape he made of the Vales’ burned and blackened bedroom.

  Very weird, watching them simultaneously.

  Almost like watching Pamela’s ghost—beautiful, sexy, alive—walk around the ashes of her bedroom. Watch her point out the chairs, the card table, the desk … the bed. Or where they were. Where she was.

  Because he burned them and he burned her.

  No, he didn’t, Jack thinks.

  He sure as hell burned her.

  But he wouldn’t burn the furniture.

  No more than Olivia Hathaway would dump her spoons.

  Nobody burns what they love, Jack thinks.

  Not while there’s a chance that they can still have it.

  Except me.

  I burn what I love and then scatter the ashes.

  What was it I said to Letty? Pintale?

  Get out.

  What was that bird? A mythical bird that rose from the ashes. The phoenix.

  Like Letty and me.

  Like Pamela on the tape.

  Like Nicky’s precious furniture.

  Show me, Pam.

  Show me how Nicky’s precious antique furniture rose from these ashes. Show me what I’m missing, Pamela’s gho
st.

  Pam’s trying to tell you something.

  The fire is trying to tell you something.

  The fire’s running smack like, Listen up, dummy. I’m trying to give it to you but you’re too stupid to see it. I left it all there for you. You speak fluent fire, right? You’re the Dalmatian. You the man.

  So read me.

  He runs the tapes three times before he sees it.

  The heat shadows.

  Pam’s showing off the cabinet, “a rare bombé-based red-lacquered and japanned bureau-cabinet from about 1730 … A very rare piece.”

  Jack freeze-frames both tapes.

  There it is.

  He compares where Pam is pointing to the same place on the wall of the fire scene tape.

  The heat shadow is the wrong shape.

  He rewinds and looks at it again.

  No question about it. The paler shape—the “heat shadow” on the wall—is smaller and lower than what it should be if the bureau-cabinet had shielded the wall from the heat.

  It’s the wrong shadow.

  The wrong ghost.

  It’s the shape of the writing desk.

  Jack rewinds to Pam describing the writing desk.

  Freeze-frames both tapes.

  Again compares what Pam is pointing out to the heat shadow on the wall.

  The wrong shape.

  It’s the shape of the cabinet.

  You screwed up, Nicky.

  And thank you, Pam.

  And thank you, fire.

  And thank you, Olivia Hathaway.

  101

  First thing he sees is the parrot.

  It looks like it’s just moving along the top of the hedge and then Jack realizes that it’s sitting on the shoulder of Mr. Meissner’s white shirt.

  “Eliot!” Jack says.

  “Eliot. Eliot. Pretty bird.”

  Meissner stops and looks over the hedge.

  “It’s the space man,” he says. “Where’s your space suit today?”

  “Jack Wade. California Fire and Life.”

  “I remember, Mr. Wade.”

  “Jack.”

  “Jack,” Meissner says. “What can Eliot do for you?”

  “Chess pieces,” Jack says. “You said something about chess pieces, moving in and moving out. I thought you meant the kids.”

  “Them, too,” Meissner says.

  “But you meant something else.”

  Meissner nods. “The truck. With the chess piece on it. The knight. Stuff coming in and out half the night.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Furniture,” Meissner says.

  “Did you see who—”

  “Two Asian boys, two big white guys, Nicky.”

  “Pretty bird.”

  “Yes, you’re a pretty bird, Eliot,” Meissner says. The wind ruffles the bird’s feathers and it’s digging into Meissner’s shoulder to stay on. “Is this important?”

  “Could be.”

  “Something to do with Pamela’s death?” Meissner asks.

  “I think so.”

  Meissner looks off toward the water. When he looks back he says, “She was a lovely girl. A sweet girl. With problems, but a sweet girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you need me to testify …”

  “No,” Jack says quickly. “I won’t need you to testify. Has anyone else interviewed you about this?”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else about it?”

  “The parrot,” Meissner says. “But I don’t think he’s listening, do you?”

  Jack shrugs.

  “Mr. Meissner,” he says. “Don’t tell anyone what you’ve told me. Not police, not lawyers, no one. If anyone asks you what you saw that night, all you say is that you heard the dog and you saw the flames. It’s very important.”

  “But I want to help.”

  “You’ve helped.”

  Because now I know just what happened.

  Nicky swapped the furniture. Brought in a truck, moved some cheap shit in and took the good stuff out.

  But one of his boys screwed up.

  Put the desk where the bureau was supposed to be and vice versa.

  So Nicky still has his precious furniture.

  Half a million bucks on the hoof.

  Two million when you count the claim.

  Add that to the rest of the claim, you’ve got the sum total of the money that Nicky paid back to revive his financial standing.

  “Thank you, Mr. Meissner.”

  “For nothing.”

  “For everything.” Jack walks back toward the car.

  Nicky has the furniture.

  So what?

  The heat shadow “evidence” on the tapes will just get dismissed as corrupted. Or Nicky will claim that he “forgot” that he moved the furniture around before the fire.

  Yeah, but you have an eyewitness who will testify that he saw the furniture coming in and out.

  But you can’t use him because the second you name him they’ll kill him.

  So what are you going to do?

  He drives to Laguna.

  Ten minutes later he hands a brass cabinet handle to Marlowe.

  Marlowe looks at it for at least a second and a half before he says, “Fake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “One, I’m not Helen Keller,” Marlowe says. “Two, I’m not Forrest Gump. Three, I’ve been selling the real thing for approaching hmmmmnn years and I can tell you that this is not the brass from a Georgian cabinet door. Next?”

  A claw handle foot.

  “May I saw?” Marlowe asks.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Marlowe takes a wood saw and makes two angled incisions into the wood, cutting a wedge out. He shines his lamp into the wedge and says, “This was made perhaps a month ago, maybe two. What else do you have for me?”

  A copper hasp.

  “Eighteenth century?”

  “Perhaps in a former life.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know what to tell you,” Marlowe says. “Look, I know every piece in Nicky Vale’s collection. I verified most of them for him. Others, Christ, I bid against him but he had deeper pockets. I don’t know where you got these tchotchkes, but the furniture in Nicky’s house was the real thing. These are the work of a master copier, I’d say.”

  “Any names come to mind?”

  “George Scollins,” Marlowe says. “The best. He has a studio way out in the boonies, up in Laguna Canyon. Does great restorations, fantastic copies.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Can be,” Marlowe says. “There’s a difference between a copy and a counterfeit. It all depends on how it’s labeled. A lot of people want antique furniture style without the age. So they buy a Scollins. Or they want a piece of furniture that doesn’t exist anymore, so they get Scollins to copy it from a picture. Or they want a rare piece without the rare price tag, so they buy a Scollins. If they pass it off as real to their friends, it’s tacky but legal. If they try to auction it as original, that’s fraud.”

  Or if they burn it and try to sell it to their insurance company as the real thing …

  “You have Scollins’s address?” Jack asks.

  102

  Way out in the boonies is no shit, Jack thinks as he drives on a windy dirt road up one of the dozens of side canyons that stretch out like fingers from Laguna Canyon.

  Tucked away inside a little grove of trees, the Scollins place is more like the Scollins places, a number of little one- and two-story buildings tacked together on the sloped landscape.

  Or they were, anyway.

  Because when Jack gets closer he knows he’s not going to get a chance to talk to George Scollins. Because now what you have are a bunch of little burned-out shells gripping the slope.

  Hell of a view, though.

  Jack gets out of the car, he feels like he’s on the top of the world. He can see all across the dry, brown hills, and the ocean is like a rectang
le of pure blue.

  From this angle the water looks almost vertical.

  Nice place to live.

  He goes into the Scollins house.

  To go dick around in there.

  Place still smells of turpentine and shellac and a host of other carbon-based chemicals that must have made a hell of a fuel load.

  The fire would have gone up fast and hot.

  Ravenous alligator.

  Small cinder block house full of wood.

  When the fire broke out, it became an oven.

  And a mess. It looks like Scollins lived his work. The metal bed frame sits by the wall, and there are remnants of furniture pieces scattered all over the floor. Heat shadows on the walls.

  Jack finds the probable point of origin.

  An electrical baseboard heater.

  An easy call by the scorching and char around it.

  Not to mention the remnants of what look to be cleaning rags.

  Accelerant splatter at the base of the heater.

  Why would the heat be on in the middle of summer?

  Classic Teddy Kuhl.

  Jack gets on his phone, calls the Sheriff’s Department.

  “Fire Investigation, please.”

  “One moment.”

  I need a little luck here, he thinks.

  He gets it. Guy gets on and it’s not Bentley.

  “Hi,” Jack says. “John Morici, Pacific Mutual Insurance. Hey, you guys had a fire recently in Laguna Canyon, the Scollins residence?”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  Guy gets back on and says, “I’m showing that to be Farmer’s Insurance.”

  “We have the Life,” Jack says. He plays a hunch. “I’m behind on my files and my boss is all over my ass. Can you just give me a C&O so I can release a payment?”

  “Hold on.”

  Jack holds on.

  “Yeah,” the guy says. “It was ruled Accidental. Let me see, pile of rags by the heater.”

  “So, Accidental Death?”

  “You got it.”

  “Hey, who was the investigator?”

  “Uhhh, that would be Deputy Bentley.”

  Yeah, that would be.

  He’s just clicked off when the phone chirps again.

  “Yeah?” Jack asks.

  It’s Goddamn Billy.

  “Jack—”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m fired.”

  “It’s not that,” Billy says. “It’s Letty del Rio.”

  There’s been a shooting.