Firetrap (14 page)

29. THE ONE-LEGGED LIAR

TREY
>

After Lieutenant Hogben left the room, Estevez looked at me and said, “Did you know any of this?”

“Just at the end. About a week before the fire, we got a memo from Franklin and his captain at the fire marshal's office stating that the address had been closed down by the building department and that any public assembly on the premises was illegal. I wrote a memo for all shifts to drive by every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights we worked to make sure nobody was there. Preferably late, when these parties would be going on.”

“The fire was on a Saturday night. Did you check it that night?”

“Not yet. The fire came in at ten-thirty. But they checked it the night before, and it was dark.”

We were back at Station 28, using the engine officer's office, Estevez sitting alongside me. Lieutenant Hogben had been bouncing around nervously in the tilting swivel chair. A pasty-faced man with a good-size belly and a uniform that looked as if he'd been wearing it ten years, he was more nervous than anybody we'd interviewed so far.

“Hogben seemed nervous,” Estevez said.

“If you did the last building inspection on a place where fourteen people died, you'd be nervous, too.”

“Do you think he did his job properly?”

“You'd have a real hard time making a case against him. The department's asking him to perform a task he's never been trained for. None of us have. He asked for help any number of times, and the fire marshal's office more or less ignored him.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Overworked. Just like us. We never saw a letter on the front of the building. Somebody took it down. My money would be on Chaps and Campbell. It would have helped if the building department had mentioned it, but we don't work that closely with them. There's no doubt in my mind that either McDonald or the two guys running the club upstairs removed the letter.”

“It's not likely anybody's going to admit they saw a letter.”

“No.”

Estevez had seemed high-strung on Friday when I got roped into this gig, and at the time I'd attributed it to nervous strain over the fact that people were rioting in the streets and she was being placed at the center of it all. Or maybe she was jittery because she'd lied to me. But even after all this time together she was tighter than a wet fiddle string. Oddly, the only time she had seemed to relax was when I was in her condo Saturday night telling her how my family had disowned me. She was relaxed around other people, but other people weren't as hard on her as I had been, and I know they weren't as sarcastic. For reasons I couldn't put my finger on, Estevez brought out the worst in me. The funny part was that I was starting to like her.

Chester McDonald lived above Seward Park in a split-level house that, in today's rising real estate climate, had to be worth a small fortune. The house was built on a knoll with a view of Lake Washington, Mercer Island, and a slice of Seward Park. I parked behind a ten-yearold Cadillac in a circular driveway, noticing bits of eggshell on the rear window of the Caddy.

The woman who answered the door was a light-skinned African-American woman around forty. She looked as though she'd been pretty once but had gained some weight in her face and midsection, her legs like sticks. She wore green polyester pants and green fuzzy slippers. After we told her who we were, she yelled, “Chester, people here to see you.”

She invited us into a large, well-kept living room and left us to our own devices. After a moment or two, an elderly man hobbled into the room on crutches, one leg missing from the knee down. He was short and shaped like a toad, his face a mass of circular growths, one of the ugliest men I'd ever met.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, sizing up Estevez and ignoring me. I had to admit, Estevez had been the highlight of the day for most of our interviewees.

She explained who we were while I used the free time and lack of supervision to wander the periphery of the room perusing photos on the walls. He'd been in the Navy. Then he'd worked for some service industry, as evidenced by a line of photos, a gas station maybe, judging by the brown uniform. The woman who answered the door was younger in the photos and clearly proud of the man she'd bagged, and he of her. There were earlier photos of McDonald with other women, all of them pretty. Rumble would have labeled him a sugar daddy. I wondered why his current woman, wife or whatever, would let him display pictures of former girlfriends so prominently on her walls.

“I'm glad you're here,” McDonald said, hobbling across the room and into a den, plopping into an old wooden swivel chair. There were more photos in there.

“I'm just so damn glad you two showed up. Our pastor was on the news with that Beckmann woman. She goes to our church, don't you know? Her cousin married our neighbor here. Always was a firebrand. I'm glad she's looking into things. Too many people blaming this on me. All I did was rent the place to those scoundrels. And here I was in and out of the hospital. You see all the problems I have without people running around egging my car. Everybody knows Chester McDonald owned the Z Club. 'Course, nobody called it that until after the fire.”

“Mr. McDonald,” I said, “The King County tax assessor's office has it on record that somebody named Silverstar Consolidated owns that property.”

“Oh, I think that was something the lawyers cooked up. I'd forgotten all about it. What I'm trying to figure out is how people can think it's my fault when some crazy nigger goes and throws a Molotov cocktail into my building. I didn't even know who he was until I saw his name in the papers.”

“So you still own the building?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They were having club parties upstairs, Mr. McDonald,” I said. “Did you know about that?”

“Chaps and Campbell are dead. I can't remember what all they told me.”

“Do you have any paperwork with their names on it?” Estevez asked.

“Paperwork?”

“A rental contract. Something in writing between you and them?”

“We done business on a handshake. They paid on time, and that was all I cared about.”

“Where'd you meet them?” I asked.

“Don't recall.”

“How long were they renting the space?”

“Now, that I would have to think on. I been in and out of the hospital so many times this year, I'm not remembering the way I should. You know we've had people out here throwing white paint in our rockery? Oil-based. Trying to mess up my things. All I know about these two guys is they changed the locks on me. Said people was stealing stuff. I raised a fuss, but what could I do?”

“Did you know the building had been condemned by the building department?” I asked.

“The fire department never told me that.”

“In the beginning the fire department didn't know, but you should have. It was the building department. You never saw the notice?”

“No, I never knew. Musta happened when I was in the hospital. I got mail I ain't opened piled from here to Timbuktu.”

“This picture,” I said, holding up a photo I'd found on his desk. “When was it taken?”

“When we first rented the place to them guys upstairs. Before they changed the locks.”

“Who's this in the background?”

“That guy there?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he worked with the guys upstairs.”

“You don't know his name?”

“I mighta met him. I don't remember names very well anymore.”

30. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE THIGH

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

On the way out of Chester McDonald's house I got a call on my cell phone from one of the Z Club Citizens for Truth members, explaining that a pair of deacons wanted to meet us in fifteen minutes at the Mount Zion church. We got into Trey's car and he began driving toward the church.

“They think we're going to drop everything and run to them whenever they have a question?” he said.

“How long could it take?”

“The point is, we're either doing this investigation or we're at their beck and call.”

“Oh, I think we can manage both.”

“Do you? This is Monday. We've been at this exactly two days, and this'll be your third meeting with them.”

“Actually, my fourth.”

“Good God.”

“You're kind of a whiner, aren't you, Trey?”

“Tell you what. You meet with them. I'll go talk to the next guy on our list.”

“I thought you wanted to do this together?”

“You're the one who went off on your own.”

“I told you how that happened. It wasn't as if I planned it that way. And stop whining.”

“I'm not whining. I'm bitching.”

Neither of us spoke as he drove. In my case, I wasn't speaking because I was so angry I could almost spit, but in his case, it was hard to tell what he was thinking. I wasn't sure he didn't grouse just to be grousing. At one point he smiled at something on the road, and I got the feeling from his erratic change of mood that he really wasn't in such a foul humor at all.

I wasn't sure how much we'd learned from Chester McDonald, though I quickly began to get the feeling most of what he told us was embellishment if not outright prevarication. His vaunted cooperation with the fire department didn't match Lieutenant Hogben's recollections. During the interview, Trey had acted disinterested and began walking around the room, casually picking up an item or a photo, motioning behind McDonald's back for me to keep him chattering—which wasn't hard, because McDonald had convinced himself we were flirting. Meanwhile Trey wandered around the room and finally snatched one of the photos from the desk.

“So what's the deal with the picture?” I said.

“What picture?”

“The picture in your right-hand trouser pocket. The one you stole off McDonald's desk.”

“Borrowed.”

“Borrowing is when you ask somebody and they give it to you. Stealing is when you just take it.”

The snapshot was still warm from his body heat when he handed it to me, a photo of the Z Club taken before the fire, Chester McDonald and three hapless young women in the foreground. “So?” I said.

“There are three people in the background, two workmen in hard hats with their backs to the camera and one man walking toward the camera. Check out the guy walking.”

The figure was blurry but looked vaguely familiar, a heavyset Caucasian male in a long black leather coat. “Who is it?”

“Remember the person I was rude to at the party Saturday night?”

“Were you rude to only one person? Oh, you're just counting the men?”

“Real funny. Barry Renfrow. What do you think he was doing at the Z Club three weeks before it burned down?”

“It resembles him, but are you sure?”

“It's Renfrow, all right.”

“Okay. Maybe it's him, I can't tell for sure. What makes you think it was three weeks before the fire?”

“The date on the side of the picture. And it's not
that
blurry.”

“Even if it is him, could it be some sort of coincidence?”

“Renfrow works for the Overby family, but he works for the Carmichaels, too. India confirmed it Saturday night when I generously offered to throw out all the freeloaders, starting with him. She said we couldn't throw him out because he still worked for Stone and her father.”

“When you showed it to him, McDonald said he didn't know who the man was. You didn't really offer to throw Renfrow out, did you?”

“I said I did.”

“You think McDonald was lying?”

“Absolutely.”

We were silent for another mile or two. It took me a while to work up my nerve, but finally I said, “I have a question, but I don't want you to be offended.”

“Shoot.”

“May I look in your personnel file at headquarters?”

“What for?”

“It's a matter of making sure there aren't any surprises when we come out with this report. Even if what we write isn't controversial, there's going to be a degree of scrutiny on both of us, and it's my standard practice to clear the decks before going into battle. I do this with all my sources. I need to know the sorts of background stories that might crop up.”

“You consider me a source?”

“I was thinking about the man who fell out of the fourteenth-floor window.”

“Bernie Withers? Who told you about him?”

“Blame it on my profession. My concern is that this will come out somewhere along the line. The papers are going to find out you're the brother of the mayor, too. None of this is going to work to our benefit.”

“I told everybody I wasn't the one for this job.”

“It's not that. I just don't want any surprises.”

“You want to look in my file, look in my file.”

“Thank you. If you'd like to tell me the story first, that might help.”

“Sure. I don't mind. We were called to a fire downtown in a condominium complex on Boren Avenue. I was working on Engine Six, where I was assigned at the time. Somehow Withers and I managed to get on the first elevator. We were going to scout the fire unit and give a report, maybe tap it with pump cans if we were lucky. As per procedure, we got off the elevator on floor twelve and hiked up the two flights to fourteen. Bernie was running, afraid the guys from Engine Twenty-five would beat us.”

“Does that happen often? Racing somebody to their fire?”

“Often enough. When we got to fourteen, we could see the light from our flashlights in the smoke, but that was all. The apartment was vacant. A string of tiny lights above the patio doors had overheated and set the wall and the drapes on fire. There was an overhead sprinkler that had gone off, so we encountered a huge spray of water along with smoke. Withers found the patio doors and slid them open. Then I heard his pump can working. He was in deeper than me, and after a moment I heard this noise and called out to him but he didn't answer. I couldn't hear his SCBA anymore, either. I was feeling my way in the smoke, and all of a sudden I was smack up against this railing that hit me in the middle of my thigh. I almost went over it. Then the smoke cleared a little, and I realized I was on the patio, looking down fourteen stories at the street. Bernie had done the same thing, only he hadn't caught himself. He was sprawled out on the sidewalk. Until the Z Club it was the worst day of my career.”

“That's horrible. Is there anything else about your background I should know?”

“Lots of things. I like children, but I don't like large dogs, bowling, long bus trips, or slow drivers who hog the passing lane. I like fried chicken and mashed potatoes, but I don't like cheese, and I'm not partial to people who spend a lot of time talking about wine.”

“I meant anything pertinent.”

“All of that is pertinent, but Bernie's the only firefighter who ever died on my watch, if that's what you want to know.”

“At the Z Club, weren't you on the side of the building where Sweeting died?”

“Okay, Bernie and Sweeting. Maybe one or two others.” When I looked at him, he said, “Just kidding.”

“You weren't involved with Sweeting at the Z Club, were you?”

“On that one, I got lucky. I was on the side of the building where we lost thirteen civilians.”