Fidelity (25 page)

Emily had taken a hot bath and gone to bed, then slept deeply. But now she was awake. Since Phil’s death, she had been unable to sleep past the first few hours, the sort of sleep that was simple collapse. Once she had used up that sleep, insistent problems came back into her mind. She thought for hours about the single simple problem of where Phil could have hidden the evidence about the nameless powerful man. So far the theories and guesses that had kept tumbling out of Emily’s brain were all clever, all just like Phil, and all wrong.

Before long she found herself thinking once again about Dewey Burns. There was a great deal to think about, and she had been putting the topic off for a whole day and most of the night. Dewey was Phil’s son. Dewey had a mother. How and when had Phil Kramer met her? How could Phil have gotten a young black woman pregnant when he had just married Emily?

She tried to remember what must have been happening between her and Phil twentytwo years ago, or twenty-one years ago, but she was having a terrible time bringing back the feeling. She remembered, intellectually, that they had fought sometimes when they were very young. In later years, she had learned that it was better not to point out every single thing that wasn’t as she wanted it to be. Could that have been the problem? Could they have had a fight, and Phil had gone out and decided to get quiet revenge, or maybe gone to another woman for solace? That thought hurt too much. Maybe he had been out celebrating some case that he had solved. He had gotten drunk in some nightspot and met a pretty girl. Emily could tell by looking at Dewey that his mother must have been pretty. Those big light-brown eyes and high cheekbones had not come from Phil.

What bothered Emily the most was that something should have been happening at that time between her and Phil. She should have noticed that something was wrong, but nothing had made an impression on her. It should have, but it hadn’t.

She thought at first that the sound of footsteps in the hallway was part of a dream and that she had slipped into a nightmare repetition of the way she had been awakened only one night ago. Then she recognized that the sounds were real. She sat up and watched the door open. “Emily?”

“What, Ray?”

“More trouble.”

“What is it?”

“It’s your house again. Apparently there’s a fire.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.” She threw the covers aside, slid off the bed, and walked toward the bathroom, then realized that she had stood up wearing only a T-shirt, and that she had already walked too far to retreat. She told herself it didn’t matter. It was dark in the room; he was probably already turning away before she had moved; they were both adults; it was an emergency. Then she hit on the truth: She didn’t care if Ray saw her that way.

Her house. She tugged on some clean clothes, then sat on the bed to tie her running shoes. Her house. That man must have been back, trying to find exactly the same thing she had spent the day looking for. She felt afraid, but at the same time she felt urgency. She wanted to get there and see.

She met Ray at the upstairs landing. This time she took her purse because it had Phil’s gun in it. She knew it was illegal for her to carry a gun, but she didn’t care. She followed Ray down the stairs and saw that he had his gun tonight. He must be thinking what she was thinking: Anything could be a ploy, a trick to get her out in the open. She got into Ray’s car and he drove toward her neighborhood, but neither of them spoke at first.

When they were near Emily’s street, it was hardly necessary to say anything. The sky had an orange glow, and pieces of black ash floated upward against it, swirling in the hot updraft. Emily could see a big sycamore silhouetted against the orange luminescence. Beyond it the sky seemed to brighten as rolling sheets of flame came up off the siding on the second floor, flickering around the fireproof shingles of the roof. The windows were all shattered and black smoke streamed out, but the rooms inside were bright with fire. There was a hot wall of fire beyond every window frame, as though everything had gone up at once.

Ray pulled the car to the curb. Ahead was a jam of parked fire trucks and, on the pavement, a complicated slither of hoses leading from the hydrants toward her house. Firefighters in yellow turnout coats with stripes of tape that reflected their headlights dragged more hoses, so she realized that the trucks must have arrived only a few minutes ahead of them.

She looked at Ray. “Do you think he’s here?”

“I don’t know. The firemen will be taking videos of the crowd, and probably the cars parked close enough to see. They always do that when there’s a chance of arson. I doubt that they’ll have much question about this one.”

Emily and Ray got out of the car. She stayed close to him, but she began looking in every direction except the direction of the fire. A small crowd had gathered, and she recognized a few of her neighbors standing on the sidewalk near their own houses, their faces illuminated by the fire. A few were still in bathrobes, and others dressed in what must have been the clothes they took off a few hours ago.

She scanned the crowd for a stranger who might be the man who had come into her bedroom in a ski mask, but she didn’t see anyone who frightened her. She saw the O’Connors, all seven of them lined up on their front lawn, staring up at the sparks rising on the heated air above the flames on Emily’s house. Denny had the garden hose connected to the spigot at the corner of their house. She hoped that the flying sparks didn’t ignite anybody else’s roof.

There were the Weilers on the other side, all the kids on their front steps as though they were bleachers. The parents must be on the other side or in the back yard. After a moment, she saw the Weilers’ car back out of the garage slowly and stop just above the sidewalk. It was probably a wise precaution. The fire could easily catch their garage, and this would save their car. If they planned to move anything out of their house, this might be the time.

She saw a couple of firefighters walking along the line of people on the sidewalk, and it looked to her as though one of them had a camera on a strap around his neck. This could be the one Ray had mentioned: the fireman who would take a long, careful look at who was there to watch the spectacle of her house burning down.

A woman came out of the line and spoke to the fireman for a few seconds. She pointed at Emily, and the firefighter looked over his shoulder at her. The woman hurried across the street, and Emily saw she was Margaret Santora. “Oh, my God, Emily!” she said. “We were all so afraid you didn’t get out. We were so scared. How did it happen?”

“I … was out,” said Emily. “I have no idea.”

Emily didn’t miss the way Margaret’s eyes flicked to the side to take in Ray Hall, then back to Emily’s face.

“Margaret, this is Ray Hall, one of the detectives from the agency.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Margaret said. She didn’t seem to be, and her left hand rose to the neck of her robe to pinch the sides together in an unconscious gesture. She said to Emily, “Well, I’m just glad you’re okay, that’s all. The rest of it is the insurance company’s problem.” She waited for a moment to see Emily’s reaction.

Emily had not thought about financial loss, or about insurance. She was thinking about destructive power, the heat of the flames, the malice of the man who had tried to burn her to death in her sleep.

She was distracted by the firefighter she had noticed with her neighbors. He had appeared only a few feet off. “Mrs. Kramer?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Captain Rossman. I need to talk with you for a few minutes.”

Emily was alarmed by his manner, which seemed more insistent than she would have expected. But she noticed that Ray had moved to the man’s side and a step behind, and he was nodding. “Sure,” she said. “Here?”

“Let’s go to my car.”

He halfturned and nearly bumped into Ray. “This is Ray Hall,” she said. “He’s a … colleague of mine.”

“Hello,” said Captain Rossman. He gave Ray’s hand a perfunctory shake, barely looking at him. He took Emily to a Ford Crown Victoria that looked like a police car that had been painted red, opened the door for her and got in behind the wheel.

She said, “Are you the arson investigator?”

“I’m one of them.”

“Do you know yet if it was?”

“Yes. There were accelerants in the corners of all the rooms. The first people in said it looked and smelled like the whole place was soaked.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Oh?” he said. “You expected this? Why?”

“It’s complicated. My husband owned a detective agency. He was murdered nine days ago-shot on the street. Two days ago, I had a visit here in the middle of the night from a man with a gun and a ski mask. He wanted some information that my husband supposedly had about someone.”

“What was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Who was the person the information was about?”

“I don’t know that, either. But the man in the ski mask said he’d kill me if I didn’t give it to him. I think he would have, but he got interrupted when another of our detectives showed up and scared him off. He was back last night, but the guys couldn’t catch him.”

Rossman sat scribbling in his notebook, but she was sure he had a recorder. He had reached into his coat as they had sat in the car, and his hand had come back empty. Finally he said, “You called the police?”

“Yes. They were here for hours two days ago, then again last night.”

“So there’s a police report?”

“I assume there is, or will be.” She stared at him. “Are you having trouble believing me?”

He turned in his seat to face her. “I’m sorry to give that impression. At this stage, I’m just collecting all the facts I can while they’re still fresh. The firefighters told me that the house wasn’t arranged in the usual way. The living room had furniture piled up in it, and the rest of the house was empty. Why was that?”

“I had just had a horrible experience in that house. When the man broke in the second night, I knew that whatever else happened, I didn’t intend to live there again. But I knew that it was also the most likely place to find whatever it was that my husband had hidden and that the man in the ski mask wanted. Mr. Hall and I were searching the furniture-mostly drawers and cabinets-and then moving everything to storage so that when it was gone we could search the house itself. We had already taken a couple of loads out. The furniture in the living room was going tomorrow.”

“Did anybody besides Mr. Hall know you were doing that?”

“Yes. The other people from the detective agency.” Various thoughts raced through her mind. She couldn’t mention that April had loved Phil; she couldn’t tell this man that Dewey was Phil’s son. “They were my husband’s friends, and my friends. They were working all day doing the same to the agency office.”

Rossman looked at her for a moment, but this time it was different, less distrustful. “I guess I should be the one to tell you, Mrs. Kramer. Your office had a fire tonight, too.”

Jerry Hobart walked along the street, looking over the low rooftops of smaller buildings at the office fire. Smoke from the office building looked black against the sky, but inside the blackness there were flames, appearing at first like small lightning flashes inside a dark cloud. But as he walked toward the building, the flames seemed to gain rapidly, now coming out of the roof of the building and flickering above the smoke.

The firefighters swarmed around the foot of the building, but the fire seemed to Jerry Hobart to be all above the fourth floor, where Kramer Investigations had its office. The firefighters had gone up on long ladders and broken widows to spray hoses inside, but they were mainly soaking the levels below the fire because that was all they could reach.

There seemed to be yellow raincoats moving past upper windows now and then, but Hobart supposed they were just searching for people trapped inside, and before long those firefighters were going to have to come out, too. Hobart stopped almost two blocks from the building and watched for a minute. He heard more sirens, com ing fast from somewhere behind him. The sirens weren’t police sirens, but Hobart decided it was time to go. There was no reason to see more. He walked across the street and around the corner where he had left his car, then heard the sirens grow louder. He looked over his shoulder and saw an ambulance flash by.

Hobart got into this car and drove away from the fire, and away from the direction where the fire trucks had come from. He thought about the ambulance. It was hard to guess what that meant. Old buildings were bad places to be in a fire. They were trimmed with lots of wood that had been cut, shaped, and varnished fifty or sixty years ago, and had been drying in the parched air ever since. The firemen he had seen scrambling around in the building on the upper floors had a lot of wooden beams and staircases between them and the ground. Maybe one of them had gotten hurt. Of course, the person most in danger at an arson fire was usually the arsonist. He was the one splashing gasoline around and lighting matches.

As Hobart drove away from the office building, he tried to get past his shock. It was hard for him to imagine Emily Kramer burning her husband’s detective agency. He had not anticipated it. He had intended to terrify her, to make her angry, to force her to find the evidence her husband had hidden from Theodore Forrest. But maybe Hobart had overdone it. Maybe he had induced her to kick over all of the game pieces. She might have realized that having evidence to use against a man like Theodore Forrest was worth nothing to her. All she really wanted was to be left alone, so it was possible she had taken away Jerry Hobart’s incentive to bother her. If so, she hadn’t thought it through to the next step: Hobart’s killing her for throwing away his chance.

He had to know. He drove the rented car to Winnetka, then took the 101 Freeway east toward the city. He left the freeway at Van Nuys Boulevard and drove north toward Emily Kramer’s house.

It occurred to him that the fire might not be such bad news. Maybe she had found the evidence, and now she was trying to throw him off by making him believe the evidence was burned. Then she could make whatever deal she wanted with Theodore Forrest and not worry about Jerry Hobart.