by John Lutz
He checked to make sure nothing was behind him, then steered the Granada back out into the street and accelerated, watching the speedometer now with a wary eye.
At the corner of Almer’s street, he heard more sirens and had to stop so a bright yellow fire engine could swing wide and make the turn. The fire truck was followed by a police car. Then a bright yellow hook and ladder unit.
Then Nudger.
When he was halfway down the block, he saw a cluster of emergency vehicles with flashing lights. There were knots of onlookers on the sidewalk. A dark pall of smoke changed the morning to twilight on the block and carried the acrid, chemical smell of man-made materials burning.
How Nudger’s mood could swing. The dread from his nightmares rushed back into his mind as he parked the Granada, climbed out, and walked toward the nearest group of onlookers held back by a uniformed cop.
The uniform looked annoyed and glared at Nudger as if he were another gawker come to further complicate matters.
Nudger stared at Loren Almer’s house, which was burning as fiercely as if it were made of wax. Then at the ambulance parked nearby with its back doors hanging open.
The house was making a hearty crackling sound. Several fire hoses were trained on the flames, one of them blasting water through a window, another arcing to cascade more water through a gaping hole in the roof. Hoses were also trained on the roofs of the houses on either side of Almer’s. The fate of Almer’s house wasn’t in doubt; it was going to be a total loss, and now the department’s job was to contain the fire and keep it from spreading.
Smoke and cinders were stinging Nudger’s eyes and making them water. As he wiped at them with his knuckles, he saw two white-uniformed paramedics roll a wheeled gurney into sight around the back of the ambulance with its gaping doors. They weren’t being particularly gentle as they bounced the gurney down over the curb and wheeled it in a tight U-turn so they could shove it into the back of the ambulance.
Nudger’s stomach twitched as he saw why there was no need to be gentle. A dark body bag, zipped all the way up and containing an obviously distorted human form, was strapped to the gurney.
“Poor Mr. Almer!” a woman onlooker said as the gurney’s carriage and wheels folded up and it was pushed roughly into the back of the ambulance.
One of the paramedics slammed the doors and tested the handles to make sure the latches were set. Then he climbed in behind the ambulance’s steering wheel while his partner got in on the passenger’s side.
The driver turned the vehicle around in the driveway of a nearby house on the other side of the street, being careful to stay on the pavement and not make ruts in the lawn. Then the ambulance glided slowly past. Lights and siren were unnecessary, though for some reason the ambulance’s headlights were glowing, as if it were the vanguard of a premature funeral procession. It turned the corner with slow and silent dignity and passed from sight.
“Poor Mr. Almer!” the woman said again.
“Poor us,” said a man, “if those flames spread to the other houses.”
Poor Nudger trudged back to his car, feeling sorry for the determined, grieving father who was now dead.
Chapter Ten
It didn’t take the arson guys much time to figure this one out,” Hammersmith said to Nudger, later that day in his office at the Third District station house. “The fire that burned down Almer’s house and killed him was accidental.”
Nudger stared out the window at the breeze skittering brown dried leaves over the surface of the parking lot. “How can they be so sure so soon?”
“Because it was so simple. The fire started with one of those cheap lamps that will only take lightbulbs of sixty watts or less. Like a lot of people, Almer ignored the warning sticker attached right there in plain sight on the socket. He had a hundred-watt bulb in the lamp. It melted the wiring, dropped sparks on some newspaper or a doily under the lamp, then the fire spread.”
“Is Arson absolutely sure?”
“That the fire spread? Yeah, whole house burned down.”
The day and his mood had changed and Nudger was in no frame of mind for Hammersmith’s dark humor. He stared again out the window.
“Don’t get petulant, Nudge. You know arson investigators can pinpoint the source of a fire. There isn’t the slightest doubt about this one. Almer must have gone to bed and left the lamp on, and it did just what the manufacturer warns about if you don’t follow instructions—it started a fire.”
“He’s the second person to die in that family in a little over a month.”
“Maybe he wanted to die,” Hammersmith said.
“What? We talking suicide here?”
“Only in a way. Almer was despondent over his daughter’s death—she was all he had. It could be that he couldn’t stand the grief, wasn’t thinking straight, and had a subconscious desire to join her in death.”
Nudger knew such a thing was possible, but it didn’t seem to fit the facts here. “So he did himself in by going to bed and leaving the lamp on?”
“I didn’t mean that, and you know it, Nudge. But suppose Almer woke up, smelled something burning, and could have stopped what was happening before it became a major fire. Only he didn’t stop it; he accepted it. Sort of suicide by negligence and apathy.”
“Paralyzed by grief, huh?” Nudger was skeptical.
“Exactly,” Hammersmith said. “Sometimes people lose their will to live, and they die before they stop breathing. They kill themselves physically by not acting to prevent their death. Those things happen now and then, and the police or fire department never hears of them. And in this case maybe Almer just thought the hell with it and stayed in bed, maybe even let himself drop back to sleep hoping he’d never wake up.” Hammersmith sank his chin into his collar, making his fleshy jowls wobble. “Could be, Nudge.”
“Could,” Nudger admitted.
“But as you know,” Hammersmith said, “we here in law enforcement deal not so much with ’could be’s’ as with ’did happens.’ ” He picked up a pencil from his desk and began rotating its already sharp point in a little red plastic sharpener.
Nudger thought that might be a hint and stood up.
Hammersmith didn’t urge him to stay. On the other hand, he hadn’t threatened to light one of his noxious green cigars.
“I was at the fire because I was on my way to talk with Almer this morning,” Nudger said, “to see if he knew about his daughter’s six-figure life insurance policy, with her fiance as the beneficiary. If he did know, I wonder what he thought about it.”
“Doesn’t matter now what he thought,” Hammersmith said. He used the pencil to busy himself making notations on a sheet of lined paper on his desk. The pencil’s point was so sharp now that it couldn’t take the pressure and the lead broke. Hammersmith began sharpening it again. “You suppose Almer was insured?” he asked, without looking up.
“Could be,” Nudger said.
Hammersmith began making notations again, this time being more gentle with the pencil.
“I think I’ll drive over to the hospital and fill Lacy Tumulty in on what’s happened, find out how she’s doing,” Nudger said.
“Good idea. Tell her ’lo.”
Hammersmith didn’t say anything else. Nudger got tired of listening to the pencil’s sharp point scratch across paper and left the office.
As he started to push open the door from the booking area to outside, he decided to phone Lacy and see if she wanted him to bring anything. He used the pay phone near the door and called the hospital, then followed recorded instructions and punched in the extension number of Lacy’s room.
Her “Hello” sounded hoarse and dispirited.
Nudger identified himself and said he was on his way over, could he bring her anything.
“Some Fuchsia Number Two,” she said immediately.
Nudger had expected her to ask for a comb or magazine, something simple. “What’s Fuchsia Number Two? A pencil? Makeup?”
“No.�
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“Art supplies? What are you doing, painting?”
“It isn’t a color ... or rather it’s the identifying color of the incense.”
Nudger was baffled. “You want me to bring you some incense?”
“Medicine. Listen, Nudger, write down this address.” He dutifully wrote on the back of one of his business cards as she read off an address on Grand Avenue. “That’s the office of Dr. Cushnion,” she said. “He’s my aromatherapist.”
“Aromawhat?”
“He’s a doctor, Nudger, sort of. Aromatherapy is a branch of medicine. Fuchsia Number Two permeates the room and alleviates pain when it’s burned near a patient.”
Nudger had actually heard of aromatherapy and didn’t have much faith in it. He was slow to come around to such things. The CB radio had come and gone before he’d obtained one. He hadn’t yet surfed the Internet. He might catch up with New Age sometime in his old age. “What about Dr. Ryker? He’s in the branch of medicine that operated on your legs. Would he approve?”
“He already did. Just shrugged and said he didn’t think it would do any harm. He knows about aromatherapy. Everyone knows about it but you, Nudger.”
“Wouldn’t you rather just have a Cosmopolitan?”
“Fuchsia Number Two, Nudger.” She abruptly hung up.
The infirm could be testy.
Chapter Eleven
Nudger knocked softly, then pushed the door all the way open and entered Lacy’s hospital room.
She was propped up in bed, watching the local news on the TV that was angled out from the wall on an enameled steel support. She looked better despite the fact that both her legs were swathed in bandages from the knees down.
“Catching up on the outside world?” Nudger asked with a smile.
Lacy looked away from the TV and over at him. “Yeah, but it seems the same things happen every day. There’s a fire or a police raid, then a car accident, then a reason to run the tape of a fire, police raid or car accident that happened some other time. Then it turns out there’s a new medical study or wonder drug, or that a medical study’s turned out to be wrong and a wonder drug doesn’t work.”
“You forgot sports and weather,” Nudger said, placing the paper bag with Fuchsia Number Two, the aromathera-peutic incense Lacy had requested, on the table near the bed. He’d had no trouble getting the supposedly potent incense. The pleasant, middle-aged woman who was Dr. Cushnion’s assistant and receptionist recognized Lacy’s name and asked how she was doing. Nudger told her fine, trying not to breathe too deeply. There was a brass incense burner shaped like an elephant on the woman’s desk, emitting wisps of dark smoke and a sweet, cloying odor reminiscent of incinerated garbage.
“Oh, right,” Lacy said, “sports and weather, the lighter side of the news. The home team won or lost, some team’s moving to a different city or not, some athlete got suspended, and there’s a crucial game coming up. And it’ll be partly sunny but might rain.”
“You’ve been in here too long.”
“That’s surer than the weather.” Lacy emitted a low, almost animal growl. “I’m going nuts in here, and television’s driving me even crazier!”
“Why do you watch it?”
“Why do people pick at scabs?”
Nudger thought that was a fair enough explanation.
Lacy pulled what looked like a tiny, thin glass vase from the paper bag, and some pencil-thin sticks coated with a thick, rough-textured substance. The sticks were about a foot long and reminded Nudger of what he and the other kids in his neighborhood had called punk many years ago, slow-burning chemical sticks that kept a glowing ember for up to half an hour and were used to light firecrackers. “There are matches in that drawer,” Lacy said.
Nudger opened the drawer and found a book of matches with a medical supplier’s logo on it. Lacy had placed one of the incense sticks in the thin glass holder. She waited silently, and Nudger struck a match and held it to the tip of the Fuchsia Number Two medicinal incense. The end of the coated stick began to burn with very little smoke but a pleasant, scorched cinnamon scent.
Lacy tilted back her head and breathed in deeply. “Sometimes,” she said wistfully, “I wish I still did drugs.”
“You find enough other ways to get into trouble,” Nudger told her.
“Not just me, Nudger. TV news is full of folks who find themselves in trouble. The fire on Channel Seven tonight was interesting. Loren Almer’s house burned down.”
“Not to mention Loren Almer himself.”
“Really? The news said he was in serious condition.”
“They don’t always check their facts,” Nudger said. “He’s dead.”
She looked dumbfounded for a moment. “Well, that is serious.”
Nudger told her about his conversation with Hammersmith, about the fire and Almer’s death, and what the arson investigators had determined.
“Sounds like accidental death, all right,” she said, when he was finished.
“Is that what you think?”
“Arson investigators can read the ruins of a fire like witch doctors read bones. They can tell where and how a fire started.”
“Do you think Almer’s death so soon after his daughter’s was coincidental?” Nudger continued to press.
Lacy curled her upper lip the way only she could, looking like a precocious ten-year-old. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll never find out. I’m not going to think about Almer or his daughter anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Figure it out. They’re both dead, Nudger. Which means there’s nobody left to pay our fee. Which means the investigation’s over.”
Nudger couldn’t fault her logic.
“That’s the way I do business, anyway,” she said defensively, though he hadn’t disagreed with her. “No fee, no services rendered. We aren’t television detectives who don’t have to eat between cases.” She was certainly down on television.
He suddenly realized his eyelids felt heavy. “That stuff’s making me sleepy,” he said, nodding toward the smoldering incense.
“S’pose to,” Lacy said, yawning. “Makes you sleepy while it dulls the pain.”
“Does it really work?” he asked. Her yawn set him off and he yawned, opening his mouth so wide it hurt his jaw. “I mean, does it actually ease your pain?”
“ ’Course it does. It was even on the TV news last night.”
Nudger went to Loren Almer’s memorial service a week later. There’d been no funeral. Almer had requested that he be cremated.
After the service, on the sidewalk outside the church, Nudger saw Brad Millman. He thought about going over and talking with Millman, then decided against it. Instead he watched while Millman got into a blue Ford Taurus with a young blonde woman and drove away.
At the end of the next week, Ollie Bostwick phoned Nudger and told him that Loren Almer’s life had been insured for fifty thousand dollars. His daughter Betty was named as primary beneficiary, as he hadn’t bothered to revise the policy at the time of his own death. Since Betty had preceded her father in death, the settlement check was sent to the secondary beneficiary, a cancer research institute in Arkansas. Almer’s father and grandfather had died of cancer, and he’d been wary of the disease and sympathetic to its victims.
“So Millman doesn’t benefit at all from Almer’s death,” Nudger said into the receiver.
“That’s right. He would only have benefited if Almer had died before Betty.” Bostwick paused. “A settlement check on Betty Almer’s policy has been sent to Millman. I don’t like it, Nudger, but the company has no choice.”
“Does that mean you’re suspending your investigation?”
“Sure. The claim’s been paid, so now there’s nothing to investigate.”
Nudger was reminded of his conversation with Lacy two weeks ago; loose ends were being tied. It was the kind of closure that only death could bring.
A second after Nudger had hung up on Bostwick, the phone jangled and he snatched up th
e receiver and said hello.
“You must have been waiting for me to call, Nudger.” Lacy’s voice. She’d been out of the hospital for a while and was walking with the aid of crutches. “Want to meet someplace tonight for a birthday drink?”
“It’s your birthday?” Nudger asked.
“Uh-huh. Yours, too, more or less. I’m a Sagittarius and you’re a Virgo, Nudger, which means there’s a kind of astrological linkage.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Nope. That’s what my astrologer tells me. So we better stick together. You can have part of my birthday.”
That sounded ominous to Nudger and he chose not to explore it. He didn’t believe in astrology, but it made him nervous.
“You there, Nudger?”
“I’m still here. I’ve already had my birthday this year. With me it’s an annual event, and one’s enough.”
“It’ll be December soon, Nudger. Better not pass up this opportunity. Time for this year’s birthdays is running out.”
He’d forgotten it was mid-November, along with December, the time of his deepest loneliness. Thanksgiving and Christmas. Melancholy Nudger, lost among the sales and scams and decorated trees that could burst into flames as you slept. Most of the holidays he spent alone in his apartment with his artificial tree that opened like an umbrella and was fireproof. Christmas day with Claudia helped, but she was melancholy, too, during the holidays, so both of them had to be careful.
“You and Claudia still got it on?” Lacy asked, with the kind of intuition he’d come to expect of her.
“Still,” Nudger confirmed.
“Does that mean you continue to think of me like you would your little sister?”
“More like my daughter,” Nudger said. Feeling old, old. Almost December! “If I had a daughter, I’d like her to be like you, Lacy, only not so much so.”
“Why, I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, though I’ll have to turn it over in my mind and figure out what you meant. One trouble with it is, it means you don’t think of me erotically.”