by Loretta Ross
“Oh, um, right on.” Billy offered Death a nervous handshake. “Pleased to meet you. I’m, um, I’m sorry about your loss.”
“Thank you. And this is my girlfriend, Wren Morgan.”
“Ma’am. Um, I’ll just go let Cap know you’re here.”
He made a nervous escape from the room and Death raised his eyebrow questioningly at Elgar. “Kid’s a boot. He’s, ah, he’s a truckee.”
Death nodded. “Randy’s replacement.”
“Yeah.”
“Make sure he knows he has a lot to live up to.”
“Oh, we have. Believe me, we have.”
Cap came in and warmly greeted them. He ushered them to seats at the kitchen table and offered them coffee. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Is this a social call or was there something you needed?”
Death and Wren exchanged a glance, then he took the carefully folded newspaper clipping from his pocket.
“We’ve come across something else that’s a bit weird.”
“Something else? There wasn’t already enough about this that was weird for you?”
Death handed him the clipping and Cap took it, nodding. “Yeah, fire safety day. We do those every once in a while. This was the last one that Bogie … the hell?”
“That clipping was on Randy’s wall. I have a copy at home, but I’d never really looked that close. Wren noticed it.”
“Noticed what?” Elgar asked.
“Bogie’s badge,” Cap answered. “In the picture, he’s wearing the badge with the wrong number on it.”
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking and thinking about what could have happened and I was just wondering if there was any way that, um—”
“You’re wondering if I’ve lost my marbles and if the wrong badge is the one I brought you.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to phrase it exactly like that, but, kind of. Yeah.”
“Come on.”
Cap got up and led the way into the vehicle bay. A few feet from the kitchen door the wall was decorated with framed photographs—groups of 41’s firefighters posing beside their rigs. He found one of Randy and Tanner, lifted it down, and offered it to Death. Wren stood on tiptoe, trying to see over his shoulder, and he put his arm around her and held the picture low so they both could see it.
Randy’s badge number, in this picture, was 4103.
“Let’s go in my office,” Cap said. “I’ve got all his paperwork in there. You can see for yourself that his badge number is 4103.”
“I’m sorry,” Death said. “It’s not that I doubt you, it’s just—”
“You want to know what’s going on. So do I. Come on with me, I’ve got an idea.”
Cap led the way into his office, waved them toward chairs, and settled himself behind his desk. He took out his phone, searched for a number, and hit call.
“Hey, Miriam? This is Jonathan Cairn with the fire department. I have something to ask you. Do you remember late last summer when we did that fire safety day at your school? Yeah, just after the start of the school year. Just before we lost one of our men. Fireman Bogart, yes. You took some pictures before we left … that’s right. Do you have any that have Bogie in them? His brother is here and he’d really like to have copies of those, if it would be possible. Yes? Wonderful. Listen, if you could just email them to me, I can print them out for him here.”
He spoke for a few more moments, thanked the woman on the other end of the phone, and hung up. “Miriam Drake is one of the counselors at Ridgewood Elementary, where we had that fire safety day. She was taking a lot of pictures, too, for the school yearbook.”
He had a PC sitting on his desk. He checked it, nodded, and turned the screen so they could all three see it. The browser was open to an email account and it showed a whole series of new messages, all with attachments, from [email protected]. Cap started with the first one on the list and they studied their way through the pictures. Most of the early shots were from too far away to make out Randy’s badge number, but then they came to a series of posed pictures of Randy standing beside one or two children.
“And in these, it shows his badge as 4103,” Death agreed.
“All the little girls had crushes on him,” Wren noted with a smile. Cap clicked open another attachment and she frowned. “This is the same picture as the one in the paper.”
“Is it?” Death asked. “No, it looks different.”
“The angle is a little different. It was taken at the same time, though. Or almost the same time. See, it’s got the same children in the same poses. There’s the little girl with long hair standing to his left and the little boy in the dinosaur T-shirt on his right side. Can you zoom in on his badge?” Cap did as she asked and they all sat in silence and stared at the picture. His badge read 4103, just as it should have. It was only in the newspaper picture that it was wrong.
_____
“Why am I mad at you?”
Maria Vasquez, dusting the contents of the living room curio cabinet, glanced over her shoulder in concern. Mister Grey wasn’t speaking to her, though. He was addressing his wife, Alaina, a tiny, elegant woman with dark hair and dark eyes. His voice was soft, confused rather than angry, and Alaina gently pushed a lock of gray hair back from his temple.
“Sweetheart, you’re not mad. You’re only confused. You had a stroke, do you remember that? It’s made things foggy for you, but you’re getting better. You’re going to be fine.”
Her voice was tender and it occurred to Maria that it was not just Andrew Grey whose personality had been changed by the sudden illness that nearly killed him.
Alaina was a trophy wife, like the four Mrs. Greys before her; a small-town beauty queen from the wrong side of the tracks who married a middle-aged playboy. Until a year ago, Maria would have bet that the marriage was more of a business venture for her than a labor of love. Andrew Grey had been, at best, a difficult man to live with, but he’d covered her in silks and jewels and put her older brother through medical school.
“Are you sure I’m not mad at you? I feel like I’m so angry. All you cared about was money.”
“All I care about is you. I promise you. Maria?”
Maria turned at the summons.
“I think it’s time for Mr. Grey’s sedative. Get it for him, won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maria bobbed a curtsey before she left. As someone who’d been very poor before she was wealthy, Mrs. Grey was hyper aware of social status and quick to take offense at any perceived slight.
Going up the stairs to fetch the medicine, Maria passed the Greys’ oversized wedding portrait. Their tenth anniversary was coming up in less than two week’s time. The past ten years had aged Andrew. His hair was completely gray now, where it had only been gray at the temples on his wedding day. Maria turned the corner at the landing, halfway up the stairs. A bow window pierced the wall here, the shelf in front of it filled with potted plants. Beyond the greenery, the front facade of the Einstadt Brewery peeked at her from across the street, black smoke stains still rising from the broken windows.
_____
“I didn’t do a lot to that picture.”
Death had tracked down the newspaper photographer who’d taken the pictures of the Ridgewood Elementary fire safety day. Ralph Duror was a slight, thin, man in his early thirties, with bright eyes behind thick glasses and early onset male pattern baldness. Duror studied the clipping Death handed him, then opened an expensive laptop and searched through the files for a few minutes. “Ridgewood, right? About ten months ago?”
“Ten months and a couple of weeks.”
“Right. Okay, here’s the original of that shot.”
He spun the computer around so Death could study it.
“I cleaned it up a bit,” the photographer said. “There was a lot of wind that day and the little girl’s hair was just all over the place.” In the original of the picture, strands of the little girl’s long hair were blowing across the front of Randy’s uniform.
<
br /> “Can you zoom in on his badge?”
Duror did. The badge number appeared to be 4183, but if you looked closely you could tell that the middle line on the “8” was only a strand of dark hair. Randy pointed out the discrepancy and Duror brought the two pictures up side-by-side.
“Crap. You’re right. I guess I didn’t look that close and just thought the number was an eight. We’d have been on deadline, too. It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?”
“No, probably not.” Death fiddled with the folded clipping, not wanting to go into too much detail. “Just a curiosity I wanted to get cleared up.”
Duror tapped the screen. “You know, that firefighter died in a fire just about a week after that.” He pulled the laptop back and sorted through his files again. “I covered that, too.” He turned the screen back toward Death. “Got some great shots.” Death leaned in to study a screen full of thumbnails.
“So, what’s your interest?” the photographer asked. “Did you know this guy?”
“Yeah, you could say that. He was my little brother.”
“Oh.” The man paused and made a visible effort to adjust his expression from enthused to sympathetic. Death got halfway down the page and his breath caught in his throat.
“This picture, here. Can you pull that up?”
“Yeah, sure.” Duror brought it up. “Oh, that was my favorite. The composition and the way it brought out the pathos of …” he glanced up and colored. “Never mind. Anyway, the editor didn’t want to use it. If you’d like, I can print you out a copy.”
“Could you do that? That would be great.”
Duror hit the print button, left the desk for a minute, and came back with a fresh, glossy 8x10. Death stared down at it, mind whirling.
It was a picture of a firefighter’s helmet lying on the Einstadt Brewery parking lot. Three firefighters stood looking down at it with bleak expressions. One man had tear tracks down his face. The hat badge was upside down, but clearly visible. The number on it was 4183.
_____
Randy’s bedroom was immaculate, but Wren was pretty sure that was Annie Tanner’s doing. From the looks of the clothes packed into his closet, the youngest Bogart had never thrown anything away. She held up a paint-spattered black T-shirt that was almost more hole than shirt, shook her head in sad amusement, and added it to a trash bag at her feet. Death was at the newspaper office talking to the photographer who took the picture of Randy with the wrong badge. She had offered to stay behind and sort Randy’s clothes out. It was a task that didn’t require Death’s input and one she didn’t want him to have to face.
Back home in East Bledsoe Ferry, Wren liked to visit yard sales late on Saturday afternoons, when they were closing up. She could often get whatever clothes were left over for next to nothing. Then she’d sort them, wash and mend them, and, when she was done, donate them to local thrift shops. This was a familiar job for her, but still a melancholy one. She shared a common bond with Randy.
They both loved the same man.
The clothes that still had wear in them went into cartons. She set aside a couple of tattered garments that she suspected had sentimental value—a St. Louis Cardinals World Series T-shirt from 1982 and a black-and-gold high school baseball jersey. Things too worn to be useful went into the bag, along with all underwear in any condition. There were things that were suitable to donate to charity and things that were not suitable to donate to charity and used underwear was pretty near the top of the unsuitable list.
The trash bag made it out to the curb just ahead of a lumbering garbage truck. She taped the cartons closed, marked “Salvation Army” on them in black marker, and stacked them in a corner. She thought about going ahead and taking them so they’d be gone when Death returned, but she didn’t know where the nearest Salvation Army store was and she wasn’t confident enough with city driving to go look for one.
The drawer in the nightstand yielded a package of cold medicine, a box of condoms, a couple of girlie magazines, and a well-read copy of Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. There was a small box on top of the nightstand with the flaps folded closed. Wren opened it and found what must have been the smaller contents of Randy’s locker at the fire station. It contained a wallet, a set of keys, a tin of shoe polish, a small sewing kit, and a cell phone with the charger wrapped around it. She glanced through the wallet and smiled at Randy’s spectacularly bad driver’s license photo. The license also showed his full real name, Baranduin Phileas Bogart, and she’d bet he’d hated having to show it. Whatever tactic Death had used to have only his middle initial on his license, he hadn’t shared it with his little brother.
The cell was dead, but it occurred to Wren that it could easily contain pictures or information that should be saved. She plugged it in, sat down on the edge of the bed, and powered it up.
It was a smartphone, but the model was one she was unfamiliar with and she had to fiddle with it for several minutes just to get the screen unlocked. When she did, icons came up for new email and text messages and missed phone calls. Most of the calls and texts were from shortly after Randy’s death and were from the same people. Wren scanned through them and was glad that she’d found them instead of Death, because they were heartbreaking.
“Dude! Heard someone from 41 was down. What happened?”
“tv sed fyrfytr dyd! ru ok?”
“Bogie ru there?”
“tell me its not true”
With tears in her eyes, she deleted them until she was left with a string of automated text messages reminding Randy that he was overdue to have his teeth cleaned. She copied the number to her own phone and called it.
“Dr. Weableau’s office.”
“Hi, I’m calling about one of your patients, Baranduin Bogart? You might have him in your files as ‘Randy’.”
“Of course.” The receptionist was an older woman with a soft, Southern accent. “I knew Randy well. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, um, I was just calling to let you know that he’s deceased. Your office has been sending reminders to his cell phone about having his teeth cleaned.”
“I am so sorry! Those things are programmed in and I just never thought to go in and cancel it. I’ll take care of that right now.”
“Thank you. It’s not a problem. I just don’t want his brother to see it.”
“Of course not. Poor, dear, Death! We thought we’d lost him, too, didn’t we? I’m so glad that wasn’t the case.”
“Me too. So how long have you known the boys?”
“Oh, ever since they were bitty things. Heavens! We worked on their momma’s teeth when she was just carrying Death. Couldn’t believe it when she told me what she was gonna name that poor baby, though knowing her it wasn’t really a surprise.”
“What was she like?”
“You didn’t know her?” The woman’s voice took on a slightly suspicious tone. “Who am I speaking to? I thought you must be Death’s wife … Madeline?”
“Death and Madeline are divorced. My name is Wren Morgan. Death’s mine now.”
The receptionist laughed suddenly. “You say that fierce.”
“I mean it that way,” Wren acknowledged, smiling at the phone.
“Good girl. Well, to answer your question, Adele Bogart was a free spirit and a bit of an eccentric. If she’d been born twenty years earlier, she’d have been running around barefoot at Woodstock with flowers in her hair. And Liam Bogart was very staid and respectable—a rookie cop and the son of a fire captain and one of the city’s first lady DA’s. But they were so in love. They were just goofy with it. He never could refuse that woman anything.”
“I’d guessed that by the fact that their sons were named Death and Baranduin,” Wren said. “I wish I could have met them.”
“Oh, sweetie. So do I. It killed me, hearing that little Randy was gone.”
seven
The broad expanse of asphalt, baking under the hot sun, sent heat shimmers radiating back toward the pale blue, cloudl
ess sky. The smell of tar in the air reminded Death of other summer days on other tarmacs—the airfield at Langley Air Force Base, the pathways at Six Flags over St. Louis, running laps on the high school track.
Any of them would have been preferable to this place. He leaned against his Jeep, the metal hot through his T-shirt, and tried breathing exercises to drive the spots from before his eyes. The sensation of being short of breath was a familiar one now, but he didn’t know this time if it was caused by the hot, humid summer air in his damaged lungs or by the band that seemed to be constricting his heart.
Before him stood the old Brewmaster’s Widow. He was standing in the parking lot where the paramedics had tried to save his brother. He held up the pictures that Duror had printed out for him, mentally placing the firefighters and their rigs in the spaces they had occupied.
Here was the door where the firefighters had entered. The same door from which Rowdy Tanner had emerged with Randy’s body across his shoulders. The paramedics had taken his burden and laid Randy down here. Forty-one’s engine and squad were there, 27’s farther down. The ALS backed in here to load Randy for his last ride to the ER, leaving behind a helmet that was not his.
Death didn’t know what he’d expected to accomplish by coming here. There was nothing left now. It was just an expanse of broken asphalt, a few sad tufts of scraggly weeds poking through here and there. He crouched down on the spot where Randy’s body had laid, bowed his head and closed his eyes, as if somehow that would help him feel close to his brother again. When his grandparents died and his parents were killed, he had felt as if they were walking around beside him, especially during the time leading up to the funerals, but also for months afterward. Even now, sometimes, often when he was at his lowest points, he would get a sense of presence, as if one or another of them had entered the room. He’d think he heard the echo of his father’s laughter, or catch a faint scent like the ghost of his mother’s perfume.
With Randy, that had never happened. Not once.
So caught up was Death in his thoughts that he didn’t hear the quiet motor pulling up beside him. A slamming car door pulled him from his reverie just before a strange man spoke.