Authors: Earl Emerson
43. THE DEATH ROOM
Finney was driving his father’s 1948 Universal pickup truck, the same vehicle he’d borrowed as a teenager, the truck he’d parked on the West Seattle golf course on so many frustrating Friday nights with Sally Morrison. After high school Sally, still a virgin, went on to Western Washington University in Bellingham. Rumor had it that she’d married a podiatrist in San Bernardino and had two kids, a Great Dane, and an artificial hip. Finney had dated only two girls in high school, a statistic that had caused his older brother to label him a “social retard.”
With the mist-covered Lake Union to his left, he drove past Gas Works Park to Thirty-sixth and then to Leary Way. The fog was slowly crawling up from the lake, the streets dark enough now that alert drivers had turned on their headlights. The area was a mixture of residential and industrial blocks.
The ruins on Leary Way were much as the fire department had left them, the fire ground encircled with fence poles anchored in concrete blocks and holding up Cyclone fencing that well-wishers had decorated with flowers, cards, handwritten notes, and along one section, teddy bears and stuffed animals.
Little had been removed from the scene. The day after the fire Bill’s body was taken away, and then two days later the melted junction box G. A. said had caused the fire was dug out of the wall and taken downtown where it was displayed for months atop G. A.’s desk. The rubble from the fire had been pushed into piles along the remains of the interior walls. In some spots the rubble had sunk into what remained of the basement, so that it looked like an enormous swimming pool filled with sludge.
Finney came here only at night and found it looked sinister in a way that the actual fire in June had not. He rolled to a stop in a cul-de-sac, parking the old pale green pickup on the north edge of the ruins, where Engine 35 had parked that night. Over the summer, a fast-growing thicket of blackberries had woven their way into the fencing and formed a screen that obscured his parking spot from motorists.
Finney stepped into his fire department coveralls, put on a pair of Ranger Firemaster rubber boots he’d worn for years on Ladder 1, a helmet with a lamp on the front that he’d bought at Safety and Supply, and made his way through a wing in the Cyclone fencing into the labyrinth. Twenty feet inside the fence, he lifted a set of charred planks and removed a D-handle shovel and a long, steel bar. He put on a pair of work gloves and carried the tools along a well-trod path in the rubble.
He entered from the north and walked through the remains of the first three rooms, heaps of bricks, mortar, and broken boards forming irregular igloos of trash.
The crew of Engine 35 had reported the hottest part of the fire had been in the room Finney was now working in, sixty to eighty feet inside the northwest doorway. Wind had blown the flames through the complex, and then, later, through the high windows into the adjoining warehouse.
Finney scrutinized the area at his feet in the dim light from his helmet and began shoveling. A week ago he’d worked until almost three in the morning, had cleared three-quarters of the room.
Tonight he scooped up the rest, using the bar to lever out the larger chunks. Finney turned his handheld flashlight on and began searching for burn patterns on the floor. Pawing through the pile behind him, he thought he detected the faint aroma of gasoline on two boards. Oddly, when gasoline was used as an accelerant, the odor oftentimes remained long after the structure burned, especially if it had seeped into cracks in the floor or woodwork. Had they used dogs during the initial investigation, they might have found this, but G. A. Montgomery had nixed the idea of using another agency’s accelerant-sniffing dogs—Seattle had none of its own.
It was the second time he’d found the odor of gasoline. Last month he’d detected it in a room adjoining this one. It was possible the gas had been in a container that melted in the heat, that the odor had been produced after the fire started, not before, but Finney didn’t think so. Still, his findings would never hold up in a court.
G. A. would say Finney had spilled the gas himself.
Minutes later Finney found himself in the room where Bill Cordifis died. The room had been scoured down to the floor. Anything he wanted to learn from it was either in the official report or in the sixteen-foot-high debris pile they’d built alongside it, and he’d already sifted through that piece by piece. In the process he had moved it thirty feet to one side. It had taken over a month, and he’d found dozens of artifacts, including the melted remains of a drum set, a wristwatch, parts from an electric guitar, components from a sound system, and one heat-congealed condom still in its foil wrapper.
He’d been here many times since June. He knew it was a fluke the wall had trapped Bill instead of him. He also knew that had their fates been reversed, Bill wouldn’t have had the strength to chop through the wall, that the two of them would have died here together. He looked down. His hands were trembling.
Until Leary Way he’d never been afraid of death. He’d always thought of it as an event somewhere in the distant future, an event he didn’t need to contemplate. These days, he pondered death constantly. Bill’s death. His father’s death. His mother’s. The deaths of everyone he knew or had known or ever would know. It wasn’t healthy, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.
What made this gloomy meditation so ruinous was that Finney had also discovered he no longer believed in God. Heaven, he now surmised, was a human invention to alleviate the universal fear of death. He’d become convinced on a visceral level that when you were dead, you simply ceased to exist, that in some ways it must be like a very deep sleep.
A deep sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice? he concluded. He hadn’t indulged in genuine all-night wake-up-and-wonder-where-you-are sleep for half a year.
The band room was clear now, just four walls, or what was left of four walls, a rectangular patch of flooring. In spots the linoleum was intact. On the north side of the room there had been a corridor, and it was along this corridor that much of the smoke and flame from the initial fire had traveled, gradually eating into the north wall, weakening it until it collapsed on them.
Tonight Finney was determined to retrace his escape route from the room.
It was only the second time he’d had the gumption to attempt this.
It took a while to find the place where he’d hacked through the wall with his service axe; most of the wall was gone now, either destroyed by fire or dismantled by work crews. Once again, he marveled at how it was narrower than he remembered.
He’d squirmed through the wall and turned right, found himself wedged up against a large diesel motor. He’d turned back past the exit hole and gone through a doorway into a room that was approximately twenty-five by forty and shaped in the form of an
L
so that, given the machinery on the floor and the smoke, it was easy enough to see how he’d become disoriented.
He’d been here when Reese and Kub opened the door on the east side of the building, when the fresh air from their entrance fed the overhead gases and caused them to ignite. Had they come in quickly and sealed the door behind them, there would have been little change in the atmosphere, but they left it open, so that gallons of cool air supplied the starving fire with the oxygen it had been craving.
Had he not had his face pressed to the floor in an effort to suck up every last lungful of good air, he would have been burned alive.
Eventually, he’d made his way out of that room via a doorway at the south end. It was cooler in the next room, and he’d stood up for the sake of speed, keeping the wall to his right. It was here that he counted his footsteps from the PASS device, having returned to the point at which he’d started.
Twenty-eight paces.
He remembered that much.
Retracing his path, he made the count again—twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight—and found himself stepping across a pile of one-inch steel pipes under the debris.
The pipes were ten feet long, eighty or a hundred of them. He had no idea why they’d been stored in the corridor. They had made a horrible racket just as he met up with Reese and Kub, a hundred steel pipes weighing hundreds of pounds falling to the floor.
It was clear that had he been a few feet farther back, the pipes would have killed him.
He met Charlie Reese and Robert Kub, gave them directions, or thought he did, then proceeded along the corridor, at the end of which he was later found muttering to himself, making no attempt whatsoever to exit the building.
Now at the entrance to the building, he turned around and retraced the route Chief Reese and Robert Kub had taken. According to their report, they searched one small office before proceeding west along the corridor. Stepping it off, Finney calculated they traveled eighteen paces into the building before they met him.
Finney remembered telling them to listen for the PASS device, which other firefighters later reported hearing as they shot water into the interior. He remembered telling them about the hole he’d chopped. He remembered repeating the number twenty-eight. He remembered it, but even as his memories replayed that night, he didn’t know if they were dreams or memories.
The pair said they’d explored for as long as the heat allowed, and by accounts of independent observers, they were inside ten or eleven minutes after Finney met them.
Finney placed himself at the spot in the corridor where he’d met Reese and Kub. To his left was another, smaller corridor. Kub had told him it was where they’d spent most of their search-time before being chased out of the building.
But the corridor to the left had had a steel gate across it. Finney knew that, because he’d run up against the gate himself on his way out. Others had spoken of it during the cleanup. Finney had seen the gate in a stack of debris in the parking lot, but he’d never examined it.
It was dark now, cooler, visibility down to a quarter mile. A boat horn sounded off in the Lake Washington Ship Canal. The cold fog penetrated his clothing.
It took twenty-five minutes to free the wrought-iron gate and drag it clear. On the left side were heavy hinges; on the right a latch and a locking throw bolt that had been cut through, probably with a circular saw. Had it been sawn through before or during the fire, the newly sliced end would have been discolored by heat and smoke. But it hadn’t been cut during the fire—it was shiny.
During the fire it had been locked.
Which meant the only avenue Reese and Kub could possibly have explored was the corridor Finney had come down.
They must have gone past the chirping PASS device and the exit hole he’d chopped. How long could they have lasted that deep in the building? It was possible they’d passed the device, each thinking the chirping was coming from his partner’s PASS. One of the troubles with the PASS was that it gave off so many false alarms, people didn’t pay attention. In any large group of working firefighters at least one of their devices was sure to be sounding off, which was the primary reason so many people broke the rules and didn’t switch them on at all.
It was thoroughly dark when Finney hid his tools. He was opening the pickup’s door when he spotted a young woman in blue jeans and a yellow raincoat stealthily threading a bouquet of asters through the Cyclone fence. “Oh,” she said, startled.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m with the fire department.”
“These flowers—it’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Are you . . . ?”
“Just doing some work.”
“I was here that night visiting my friend up the hill. The guy who died? I heard he got all burned?”
Finney nodded.
“Was he a pretty nice guy?”
“About the most decent human being I’ve ever known.”
“Wow.”
44. THE CREAKING OF CEDAR LOGS
When he sat down to examine the papers Emily Cordifis had given him, Finney heard the subtle creaking of the cedar logs under the floorboards, evidence that a large craft had plied the east side of the lake while he was in the shower.
Visiting Leary Way was invariably an ugly booster shot to the melancholy and sorrow he’d been nursing since June, and it was worse coming on top of his visit to Emily. He wouldn’t eat anything tonight and would be lucky to sleep. Hell, he didn’t need food or sleep. What he needed was absolution.
Purring, Dimitri jumped up on the recliner as Finney spilled the contents of Emily’s envelope into his lap. Finney saw his own phone number on the back of a receipt for a pair of hunting boots. Bill wasn’t in the habit of memorizing phone numbers. He knew Bill jotted messages to himself on just about anything that came to hand. Finney knew of one occasion when there was so much scribbling on the back of his paycheck that the bank refused to accept it. For a couple of weeks in May, Bill had been coming over to help on the remodeling of the houseboat, but he couldn’t recall the last time they’d spoken on the phone.
He found an outline of a battalion-wide drill Bill had been organizing, a simulated mass-casualty bus accident in the Metro bus tunnel deep under Seattle’s downtown streets. Teenagers from the SFD’s cadet program had been slated to wear moulages and pretend to be injured. It was heartbreaking to see Bill’s diligently prepared notes for a drill that never took place, the names and phone numbers of all the people he’d never called back.
On a piece of junk mail Finney found a large four-digit number scrawled across the top, along with a series of what appeared to be phone numbers down the right side. Six names, a phone number alongside each of the first three:
Montgomery
Balitnikoff
Monahan
Stillman
Kub?
Finney?
Staring at the tall digits at the top of the page he knew he was looking at the street number of the Leary Way complex—4400. There was no street name, just the number, the digits highlighted and underlined, adorned with curlicues and squiggles as if Bill had stared at and played with them for a good long while.
Flipping the page over, Finney saw that it was a solicitation from a refinancing lender in Reno, Nevada, the envelope postmarked June 3. Leary Way had occurred on the morning of June 9. They’d been at work all day on the eighth, so he’d probably opened the mail and used it for scratch paper on the seventh.
Montgomery, Balitnikoff, Monahan, Kub, Finney. Cordifis had hunted and fished every year with Montgomery and Balitnikoff. He’d known Jerry Monahan before they got into the department during a phase when he and Emily had entertained the notion of joining the Church of Latter-Day Saints; and they had been firefighters together twenty-five years earlier on a now-defunct Engine 19. There was no telling how well Bill had known Kub.
There were three Finneys in the department. Finney’s father worked with Cordifis when they were both lieutenants together at Station 18 in the heart of Ballard—Bill on Ladder 8, Gil Finney on Engine 18. Bill had been one of Tony’s instructors when Tony came through drill school. And, of course, John had worked with him eighteen years on Ladder 1.
Had Bill Cordifis known there was going to be a fire on Leary Way? Why else would he have written down the address? Or had the number on the paper been a coincidence? If so, it was a hell of a coincidence. And what connection did the six names have to the Leary Way address?
Finney was asleep in the chair when a light tapping at the front door woke him. At first he thought he was having a heart attack, but then he realized Dimitri had stretched out on his chest, eighteen pounds of purring weight. “Come on,” he said, lifting the cat off his torso. “Up you go.”
Finney opened the door and slowly accustomed his eyes to the blinding sunlight off the lake.
“There someone here? I thought I heard you talking to someone.” It was a woman’s voice, a husky sound from an individual who’d never smoked but who’d been hit in the throat with a baseball when she was thirteen.
“The cat. I was talking to the cat.”
“Did I wake you?” Diana asked. “I called last night and then again this morning. When you didn’t answer I thought . . .”
“Maybe I was in the slammer?”
“I thought I should check.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“Come in. God, I must look like hell.”
“You look . . .”
“Like something that’s been sitting at the bottom of Santa’s sack all summer?”
Diana laughed. He liked that she laughed at his jokes. “I admire men with rumpled hair and only one sock,” she said affectionately. Finney looked down at his feet. He had two socks on. She was kidding him. Diana walked into the interior of the houseboat and stood with her back to him. She wore blue jeans and a light blue fleece vest over a T-shirt, a baseball cap over a ponytail. The chill air off the lake blew into the houseboat and mingled with the fragrance of her perfume. He opened the drapes, and the sunlight made him wince.
“Sorry to bust in on you like this,” she said.
“I’m glad you came.”
“I wanted to explain about Gary.”
“Don’t even think about it. He was drunk.” Still, he was curious about her and Gary. Had they had a relationship? It seemed hard to believe, since by his own admission Gary specialized in women he referred to as trailer-park trash, but you never knew.
“He’s got this thing about me. We went to some movies together. The Seattle Film Festival this last spring. I usually have tickets for the festival, but this year I didn’t and he did. He told me he’d been planning to see most of those movies with his sister, but she finked out on him and went back to Minnesota to be with her ex-boyfriend. He asked me if I’d go with him.”
“You don’t have to explain any of this.”
“I want things to be out on the table with us from the start.”
Despite Friday night he hadn’t thought of the two of them in terms of
us
. Until now. That prospect sent a whisper of hope into his life. Her proximity also sent a low shot of voltage down his spine. He was going to have to get used to that voltage because it seemed to return every time she did.
“He had a horrible crush on me. Not that I gave him any encouragement. As far as I knew, we were just friends who both happened to like films. One night after this Brazilian comedy he started coming on to me. I told him no, and then we had a wrestling match that ended with him on his back on the floor. I ever tell you I had four years of judo?”
“No, but thanks for the warning.”
“That’s when he started driving through my neighborhood on Capitol Hill at all hours. I thought I was rid of him until the other night.”
“Gary’s a jerk.”
“Now he claims he’s trying to bring me to Jesus.” The phone began ringing. When Finney didn’t budge, she said, “You should answer it.”
He didn’t. He didn’t want anything to spoil these minutes with her. It was his brother, Tony, speaking on the answering machine. “John? Pick up if you’re there. I’ve been callin’ all night. I left a message. Damn it, John, where are you? I hope you’re out gettin’ some tail, ’cause it might be your last. There are all sorts of rumors. You need to stop asking people about Leary Way. You were lookin’ nuts before, but now with this rumor that you’ll be arrested . . . Damn it, you’re my brother. I know you didn’t do this. There’s even talk that you’ve been committing arson for years and the old man was covering for you. John, take my advice and stop askin’ questions. Give me a call when you get this message. I love you, guy.”
Finney collapsed into the recliner he’d spent the night in. The sudden movement frightened Dimitri, who scampered out of the room.
“What’s going on?” Diana said. “What’s changed since Friday?”
“You don’t want any part of this.”
“Yes, I do. I want to help.” She knelt on the floor in front of him and took one of his hands between hers. “I mean that.”
Reluctantly, Finney told her about his excavations at Leary Way, about the gasoline odors he’d detected, his belief that it was an arson, not an accidental fire, about his inability to explain Reese and Kub’s failure to find Bill Cordifis. Before he knew it, he was showing her Cordifis’s note.
“I guess I don’t get it,” she said.
“Look at the number at the top of the page.” She looked again at the note and her brow furrowed. “Forty-four hundred. Isn’t that the street number that came in for Leary Way? This was written before . . . well, obviously it was written before the fire. Are you sure this is Bill’s handwriting?”
“Yes.”
“So Bill knew something about Leary Way before it happened?”
“He must have.”
“But surely he didn’t think it was going to burn down? He would have told somebody.”
“Not if he didn’t really believe it. Think about it. You have some friends who you trust implicitly, and somehow you come up with the idea they’re going to set a fire. Would you believe it?”
“You mean those names are the friends?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Your name’s on the list.”
“I know it.”
“I wouldn’t believe it. You’re right. He probably didn’t believe it until it happened. So . . . was it a coincidence he died there? Do you think? You don’t think somebody pushed that wall over on you guys, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did they know he knew?”
“He got in a screaming match with Oscar Stillman right before we went back in the second time.”
“Stillman’s name is on the list.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s tell somebody.”
“Who’s going to believe us? No. Don’t answer that. I know who. Nobody. Besides, the minute I mention any of this out loud, G. A. will arrest me.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s on the list.”
She came around the chair and began massaging Finney’s shoulders at the base of his neck, working her thumbs and fingers deep into his trapezius. “Buddy, you are tight as a banjo string. Why don’t we go do something? Take our minds off this for a little while. Take me out in a kayak? I’ve been dying to try it.”
“Are you kidding? They’re probably on their way to arrest me right now.”
She leaned over and looked upside down into his face, her gray eyes inches from his. “Come on. I bet you can launch a kayak right from the dock outside.”
“Closer than that.”