Firetrap (10 page)

20. THE NEWS LADY MEETS ANOTHER CHICKEN THIEF

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
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Earlier I'd watched a young woman, a ballet dancer with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, trying to extricate herself from a lengthy conversation with Shelby Carmichael, realizing that if she couldn't beat his footwork, nobody could. For the last half hour the patriarch of the Carmichael clan had flitted from one woman to another, gabbing, flirting, and holding forth, a proclivity I sensed was borne of a lifelong passion for the opposite sex and a need to dominate all conversations in his vicinity rather than an old man's loneliness. Kendra's father was in his mid-seventies, wrinkled like an old dog, wearing a brown suit where everyone else was in a tux or a black dinner jacket. Once he started talking to me, I could see something of Stone Carmichael in his eyes, something of Kendra in his voice and choice of words, and perhaps a bit of Trey as well—Trey no doubt having adopted a handful of the family mannerisms even if he didn't have their genes. “So, young lady,” the old man said, approaching me. “What does Trey tell you about the family these days?”

“I'm afraid I don't know him that well.”

“Haven't I seen you someplace? You're the newscaster, right?”

“That's right.”

“How would you like to come work for me?”

“I already have a job. Thank you.”

“We're building an organization that has opportunities a young woman like you could run to the bank with. Stone's not going to be mayor forever. In fact, just between you, me, and the hatbox, a dollar against a dime says he'll be our next governor.”

“There were rumors last year he was gearing up for a run at governor, but I thought he squelched those.”

“Sometimes it pays not to let the opposition in on your plans. Governor of any state, if connected in the right way—and I assure you, he will be connected in the right way—can act as a springboard to national office. How would you like to get in on the ground floor? Meet me for lunch Monday and we'll talk.”

“I'm sorry, but that won't be possible. I
have
a job.”

“This isn't a job, honey. This is a career that will let you stop reading nonsense off teleprompters and start helping a band of revolutionary thinkers move national policy in directions it hasn't moved in a long while.”

“I like reading off teleprompters. And for your information, I write mostly what's on them.”

“You know where the vice president spent last night? In one of my guest rooms. Think about living in D.C. in ten years. Maybe eight. Think about that real hard.”

“Father.” It was Stone Carmichael coming out of nowhere, clasping my elbow, walking me away through a gaggle of people near the food tables. “Let me borrow Ms. Estevez for a few moments,” he said over his shoulder. “I'll give her right back.”

“You be sure and do that, son, because I don't know when I've seen a prettier little gal.” I noticed he was staring at my bottom as we walked away.

In an alcove near the rear of the house, Stone said, “I'm glad we found another opportunity to talk, Jamie. I want to be sure you know that if we work together we can come up with a report we'll all be proud of. Last night was relatively free of street activity, but tonight I've received a report of rocks being thrown at cars outside the Paramount Theater, and the fire department tells me they've had three nuisance fires near the Convention Center. But the main thing is for you to know whichever way this comes out, you have my backing.”

“I appreciate that, Mayor.”

“Please call me Stone.”

“Stone.”

“There is one more thing.”

“Sure.”

“It concerns Trey. To be honest with you, I didn't realize he was in our fire department until yesterday, but I've talked to some people in the department about him. We both know about his participation at the Z Club fire, but there was another fire where he lost a partner under what I gather were suspicious circumstances. He didn't happen to mention that, did he?”

“This is the first I've heard of it.”

“Yes, well. Something about a fourteen-story fall. He's got a past, that's for sure, and it causes me just a little worry. I'm wondering if he's going to be a good fit for you and for the investigation. He hasn't done anything that you would call…I don't know how to put this…I guess
irrational
would be too strong a word, but has he acted strangely at all?”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

“It's probably nothing. Anyway, I'm not sure we could get him off the inquiry if we tried. He does anything…odd…I want you to call me first thing. I mean that. I don't want to take any chances on this investigation getting derailed. It's important.”

“I understand, and I assure you everything is on track.”

“What have you learned about Trey in the short time you've known him?”

It was a question I wasn't sure how or even if I should answer, and before I could reply, Kendra approached the alcove. “There you are, Jamie. I have some more people I want you to meet. By the way, what
have
you learned about Trey?” She gave her brother a disgruntled look.

“I guess the most surprising thing is that you three are related.”

“Adopted,” Stone quickly inserted. “He was adopted.”

“Adopted and then thrown out of the family,” said Kendra.

“How did that come about?” I asked.

“Listen,” Stone said, as he left the alcove, “you might want to avoid the old man. He gets a little grabby after that first glass of wine. He'll probably offer you a job. That's his standard MO, but there's usually no job. At heart he's just an old chicken thief.”

“I figured that much out.”

“About Trey being excommunicated from our family?” Kendra said after Stone had left. “See if Trey feels like telling you. I don't want to talk out of school.”

“I gather it's a little touchy?”

“It's a lot touchy. But it was a long time ago, and I hope most of us are willing to forget it, at least for tonight.”

Over the course of the next hour, Kendra shuffled me from one group to another, making introductions, smoothing out the small talk whenever it flagged, displaying a down-to-earth quality I liked. I could tell she wanted me to like Trey, and I could tell also that it was a major life event for her to see him again. Later I spotted Trey engrossed in a conversation with India Carmichael, Stone Carmichael's wife, a conversation so intense and obviously personal I was afraid to interrupt.

21. SEEING HOW THE SISTERS TURNED OUT, OR BURNING CASH FOR HEAT

TREY
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It was spooky being reintroduced to this stratum of society after so many years away, to be consorting once again with the sort of wealthy folk whose idea of a bad year was finding the family stock down a quarter of a point or adding a stroke to their golf handicap. I remembered as a child having senators and their families over for Sunday dinner, vacationing with the children of old money and sometimes even the local nouveau riche. Taking a week off to jet to New York City to shop for school clothes and view the latest plays, museums, and operas—all of the latter was my adopted mother's way of exposing us, or me in particular, to culture. It was wonderful knowing anything that could be purchased was within our grasp, whether it was the latest dirt bike or a small plane like the one Shelby Junior received when he turned seventeen, or tailored suits that cost more than the average dockworker made in a week. Knowing any legal trouble we got into could be smoothed over with the aid of America's brightest and best-paid attorneys, knowing that if we got caught shoplifting or speeding or kicking a dog, we would be coddled by professionals and excused by experts. I hadn't thought of myself as spoiled or even particularly privileged. Not at the time, anyway.

Because until the time I was four I'd lived in poverty with my grandmother, and because I'd been the only black kid around the Carmichaels and thus automatically experienced their cushy world somewhat differently, I had a different take on things than my siblings. Yet for the most part I adapted readily enough to their patterns of ease, overconsumption, and entitlement.

Being a Carmichael was knowing you would never want for the best table at the trendiest restaurant, that any travel you could dream up was as close as a phone call to the family travel agent, that a job paying obscene amounts of money was waiting for you after graduation no matter what your grades or how many young women you'd knocked up—Shelby Junior had knocked up two that I knew of. It meant having a family chef. It meant having ski instructors who were former Swiss National Ski Team members. Spending three weeks every August in the San Juans on an island your family once owned pretty much in its entirety.

A kindhearted woman in the main, my adoptive mother felt compelled to ever so gently point out the differences between Carmichaels and middle-class America. Her attitude left a lasting impression I did not quickly shed after rejoining the rest of society. African-American culture was never talked about in the Carmichael household, but I'd had clues, lots of them, from their pronouncements on white culture. According to Helen Carmichael, the common man was to be pitied for his obsessions with cheap baubles, sex, expensive toys he couldn't afford, drugs, big ugly four-wheel-drive trucks, and obscenely large television sets that dominated tastelessly decorated houses. It didn't occur to me until years later that deep down she was afraid I would eventually return to my poverty-stricken roots and embarrass the family, which of course in her mind is exactly what happened in the end.

My mother would have been the first to deny she was an elitist, but she made it abundantly clear what the attitude of a Carmichael should be. We were separate. We were better. We were special. The rest of the world was playing catch-up but never could or would equal our elite prestige.

Of course, having been adopted, I had to dismiss a fair portion of reality in order to buy into this worldview, but nevertheless, until I was fourteen, buy into it I did. After that, I decided the advantages of being a Carmichael outweighed the sin of snobbery, and when I did have qualms, I let Kendra voice them instead of stepping up to the plate myself. Kendra fought my mother tooth and nail—never a mother and daughter who fought more than those two—from before I entered the family when Kendra was three until the day I left when she was sixteen.

I knew that after a few years of dips the Carmichael clan had increased its wealth substantially since I was booted out, that before entering politics with the promise to be the voice of the common man, Stone had worked first as a corporate lawyer and then as a CEO for a series of family-controlled companies. And that, had I remained in the family, I would have worked there, too, regarding a captain's pay in the fire department as pocket change. No true Carmichael would ever have considered a career in the fire service. Only peasants risked their lives for monetary gain. A Carmichael male might expose himself to danger, but he would do it climbing a mountain for charity, racing a car that cost as much as your average house, flying a private jet, or pursuing any number of the other activities peculiar to people wealthy enough to burn cash for heat.

What made my renewed proximity to all this money and exclusivity frightening was the fact that I knew I could once again adapt to it in a heartbeat, and the recognition of that weakness made me almost physically ill.

If I sucked up to the family in the appropriate fashion, there was a chance I could be forgiven and accepted back into the fold. I could have an income of six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars a year, plus substantial bonuses, instead of my puny captain's pay, settling back into the fold that had ejected me like a hacking, humped-up dog getting rid of a chicken bone in its throat. But then, there was revenge in my soul, too—I could feel it heating my brain like a fever—and a Mercedes-Benz full of money wasn't going to quench that primal need for blood. Stone knew me well enough to realize what I was feeling, and it was part and parcel of why he was kissing my butt tonight. He and I both knew if they took me back in, sooner or later I'd fling a goober into their collective faces. Or a brick. Or a report on the Z Club fire that would be disastrous for his city administration. I knew him well enough to know he was afraid of me.

I knew Stone might be here and that it was almost a certainty his wife, who was one of the organizers, would be here, but the thought of running into Kendra simply hadn't occurred to me. I was glad to see her but was also watchful and leery, trying to deduce what she was thinking. Since she hadn't reached out to contact me in nineteen years, I had to believe she thought I was guilty of the crimes of which I'd been accused. But once we began talking, she was the same little sister I'd fought to protect in school, the same unaffected soul with the same teary blue eyes that I'd last seen weeping on the family island all those years ago, sweet, sensitive, and a bit ingenuous.

And then we met the looming, bombastic authority figure of my youth, the master of resolve, our father, who had grown jowls since I last saw him, and who was pontificating to a group of men using all the bluff and bluster that had been his stock-in-trade. I'd thought about this moment for almost twenty years, but the emotion I'd counted on was not the emotion that overwhelmed me as we came face-to-face.

Here was the father who'd drummed me out of the family with the finality of a hanging judge, but instead of a hateful man he was the saddest human I'd seen in a long while, a man who in his life had seldom tried to do right simply for the sake of doing right, and who, when he finally lifted his hand in charity by adopting me, found everything unraveling in one ugly episode. I'd always dreamed of a dramatic showdown where I came out triumphant and vindicated, where I somehow not only gained a consummate revenge for the evil visited on me but was also welcomed back into the family in a manner that made twenty years of exile almost worthwhile. But in the end we made small talk and I left.

I caught a glimpse of India, who, in the brief moments I saw her, appeared to be even more beautiful than the scattered photos I'd seen of her over the years. Moments after she disappeared, my gut was filled with yearning. But then, that had always been India's magic over the male species and her transcendence over the female: Her ability to make men ache for her.

As we worked our way through the party, trying to meet, greet, and then sideslip the African-American community leaders who wanted to give us advice, pump us for information, or lecture us on what they thought was wrong with the fire department and the city, I couldn't keep my thoughts from wandering back to India. I recalled how on that last horrible night everybody had congregated in the living room in the big house, and how they wouldn't let me see Echo. Though the room had been full of people who knew me well and supposedly, until that night, loved me, nobody had taken up the cudgel in my behalf: Neither of my adoptive parents, nor India, nor even my little sister, Kendra. The worst part came when I tried to stand up for myself.

As I thought about that night, I had an epiphany of the sort that doesn't seem possible because it's so late in coming and yet so painfully obvious. I realized with a shock that since leaving the Carmichael family I'd had relationships with African-American women, Hispanic women, Asians, and a Native American woman I nearly asked to marry me, but never anybody white. Now as I mulled it over, it was so obvious as to why that was the case, I couldn't believe it hadn't hit me before.

When I approached India, she stiffened momentarily, then quickly recovered her trademark composure, stepping forward to kiss the air next to my cheek as if we were casual acquaintances from the tennis club. “Trey. It's been a while.”

“Yes, it has.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn't expect to see you again.”

“Don't worry. I have a ticket and a date and everything. I've already spoken to Kendra and Father and Stone, and so far nobody's called the police. Although I think they might be poisoning a batch of Gruyère cheese puffs in the back room.”

“I didn't mean it that way.”

“No, I guess you probably didn't.”

We conversed warily about everything but what was uppermost in my mind and probably in hers, too, and then when the interruptions became too frequent, we retreated to the small herb garden outside the patio doors on the first floor. It was there in that warren of relative privacy that her demeanor softened, and I began to get the feeling she had no more forgotten the best parts of that last summer than I had.

“I guess I should warn you. Echo's somewhere on the premises with her husband. John's a little unpredictable.”

“I was hoping you would be here. I wanted to see you again. But I wasn't looking forward to running into her.”

“No, I wouldn't think you would be.”

“She lied about me. You know that, don't you?”

“I don't know anything.”

“Does she ever talk about it?”

“Never.”

“How is she?”

“They're getting by. They've got two boys, same as Stone and me. It's a challenge with John, and she's completely absorbed in her music. She always has been. I think she'll be okay seeing you, Trey. It was a long time ago.”

“The question is, will I be okay seeing her.”

“What is that look? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I'm just wondering why you didn't stand up for me that night. I've been wondering for nineteen years, and now I'm standing here talking with you, I can't help myself. Why didn't you tell your father where we'd been?”

“I wasn't your alibi, Trey. I couldn't account for the time when it happened. I couldn't get you out of it.”

“You mean all you could do was embarrass yourself if you tried to defend me.”

“Yes.”

“You must have known I couldn't possibly have done what they said.”

“It was between you and my little sister, and I had to take her word over yours. Besides, you don't want to drag all that up. Not here. Let's talk about pleasant things. How's your job going?”

“Sure. That's pleasant. Let's see. Four weeks ago I was at a fire where fourteen people burned to death. I got burned myself, and now I'm being asked to investigate the conduct of the fire department at the fire in an effort to stop the longest series of marches and rioting this city's seen in decades. I just tonight insulted the woman I work with, so she probably won't be speaking to me next week, and now because of my job I'm running into the five or six people in my life I never wanted to see again and who never wanted to see me again, and we're all pretending it's hunky-dory. Work is going fine.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way about me.”

“I didn't mean you. I've thought about you a lot over the years. And forgive my sarcastic answer to your question. I'm bad that way.”

“You were sarcastic as a kid, too.”

“It happens to be a family trait. My real mother has it. So how are you doing?”

“How am I doing? I have two kids I love to death and a husband who works too hard and wants to be president of the United States. Honestly. President of the United States.”

India's sister, Echo, didn't take my unexpected reintroduction with the same equanimity India had—which because of our history, I expected. But then, she'd never been in the same league with her older sister when it came to public appearances or glossing over the disagreeable aspects of life. Echo more or less stuttered, “Trey? Is that you?” then began going on and on about some avant-garde music project she was involved in. Oddly enough, India had evolved into a more mature version of her eighteen-year-old self, while Echo had journeyed out of her teens in the opposite direction, her hair dyed black and cut in irregular notches, her ears and other visible soft tissue filled with metal studs, her arms and the side of her neck peppered with tattoos. She was more gangly than she had been as a teen, walking across the room after we spoke as if she had a rock in her shoe.