Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  DeGreco looked over at the younger detective when he said that, about the other four. I caught a glimpse of the look he gave the younger detective, that distorted angel. It was a look that clearly said, Not now. I guess he figured there was no room in that light for any additional sorrow.

  What time did you put your son in his crib? DeGreco asked.

  We put him down about eight, Harlan said. And my wife fed him again around eleven when he woke up crying. I changed him when she was done feeding him and put him back into his crib and we sang to him for about ten minutes or so. Then we went to bed. He was okay when we went to sleep, Harlan said. We could hear him over the monitor.

  So, DeGreco said, at around eleven-thirty everything was fine, and you didn’t hear anything strange before your wife went in to feed him at three this morning?

  We were asleep, Harlan told him. No, we didn’t hear anything.

  Do you have smoke detectors in your house? DeGreco asked.

  Of course, Harlan said. I just nodded. There’s even one in Samuel’s room. It never went off.

  The doctor came back with a prescription for the pain in my arms, and DeGreco thanked us and told us he’d be in touch. He left with the younger detective who had never been an angel, not really.

  • • •

  Before Samuel was taken from us, Harlan and I used to take him for walks every night. I was on maternity leave from my job at the insurance company where we both worked. The plan had been that after Samuel was in pre-school, I’d start back with limited hours, until he was in school. Harlan had to go to work every day, but when he got home we’d both take walks with our son.

  Sometimes we’d just walk around our neighborhood. Our neighbors would stop weeding their gardens or mowing their lawns and come over and smile at Samuel and ask how we were making out. We got all kinds of advice. Some of our neighbors were considerably older. As I said, some had kids in college already.

  Those walks were important to us. We wanted our son to know from early on how important it is not to forget the world that’s around us. We wanted him to form a desire to get to know it. Knowledge, we thought, is the way to love, and we wanted Samuel to love this world.

  Sometimes we’d strap Samuel in his carrier and strap the carrier in the back seat of the Honda and drive twenty minutes or so to one of those parks with some actual woods, with wood chip walking paths where people walk their dogs and some go jogging. If you go at the right time, when there aren’t a lot of people there, and you take one of the longer walking paths, you can get far enough into the woods to imagine you’re not in a park in a city, but in the forest. Harlan and I loved to take those paths and get as deep into the woods as we could, where we couldn’t hear the traffic sounds from the nearby interstate. We’d listen to the birds and imitate their sounds and Samuel would smile at the strange sounds coming from his parents’ mouths.

  There were deer there, and several times we saw them from a distance, chewing on leaves or just standing in the mottled light. Every time we saw them, whichever one of us had Samuel on our back would turn around and the other would point to the deer and whisper to Samuel, saying, Look at the deer. Samuel always made the same sound when he saw deer, the sound a slow-draining sink makes as it finishes draining but with a vowel sound in it, a long u sound gurgling with the water down the drain.

  Once, Samuel made that sound behind us. When I turned around to ask what he was saying, I saw two deer not four feet away from us, crossing the path. Samuel made his deer sound again and the two deer stopped and looked at us. I whispered to Harlan not to move, and we stood there as still as we could while Samuel went on making his deer sound and the deer stood frozen on the path. Then one of the deer sniffed at the air and Samuel made his deer sound again and the deer turned toward us and took a couple of steps. The deer was looking at Samuel, her ears shifting every time Samuel made his deer sound. She took another step towards us. She couldn’t have been more than a foot away. Her black nose looked like it was carved out of onyx, but it moved as she sniffed the air for the smell of our child, who was smiling and making his deer sound and holding out his little hands for the deer. If it hadn’t been for some kids coming down the path scaring the deer, I believe the deer would have let Samuel touch her. It was really something.

  Samuel loved the woods, and it seemed the woods loved him. Harlan and I would sit out there until the light started to fade, talking about the future and making bird sounds and chipmunk sounds for Samuel. The world seemed so safe, somehow, in those woods. We haven’t been back there since Samuel was taken from us. Sometimes, even the sounds of the wrens and robins and cardinals around our home drive me to tears.

  • • •

  Since Samuel’s death I’ve taken up painting again. Back in college I used to paint. It’s how I met Harlan. He was a model for a life studies class I took. It was a joke with us, that after I bagged Harlan, after he was mine to touch and hold, I didn’t need to paint him anymore. The real reason I stopped was time. First, my job. Breaking in as an insurance adjuster at even a decent-sized company requires more time than just a nine to five schedule. Once we were both settled in our jobs, Harlan and I started talking about having a family and set out to get me pregnant with Samuel. And after Samuel was born, of course, all my time was devoted to him.

  Life gets in the way of what we see ourselves as never giving up. We fool ourselves, though, tell ourselves we’ll get back to whatever it is. In my case, I never threw away my artist’s supplies, or put them out on the lawn with other things we never used anymore to sell for cheap to neighbors or couples driving by who slow and stop and park just up the street and walk back to see what they can get for what little they have.

  Two weeks after the funeral, after they placed the small casket with what was left of Samuel into the ground, I started painting again. Finally I had the time. There was no way I was ready to go back to work, no way I’d be ready for some time. Harlan and I weren’t walking together when he got home in the evenings. We sat in front of the television and barely spoke. He’d order in pizza or Chinese, and we’d watch Vanna turn letters over or Judge Stone talk to his black and white of Mel Torme or make some bad pun based on some strange case brought before him. Game shows or silly comedies, nothing where anything of consequence would happen. There’s no room in our lives for any more of that.

  During the days I paint. I started with several small canvases, but before anything was finished I’d stretched three large canvases and started in on those as well. It’s a series I’m working on. The first one I finished is actually one of the larger ones, a canvas four feet by six. The whole canvas is engulfed in flames, but it’s not Samuel I’ve painted. Samuel is nowhere in this canvas. There’s the vague hint of some kind of structure being enveloped by the fire. Maybe it’s the Heinz plant. I worked on that fire, the one a few years back that shut down the plant. I headed the team that walked through the burned out plant looking for the cause of the fire. Maybe that’s what I’ve painted. The fire that was there before I was. That’s what I told Harlan. It’s the fire at the Heinz plant.

  Harlan’s not sure it’s a good thing, what I’m painting. He hasn’t come in to look at the canvases since I showed him the first one, the fire at the Heinz plant. He noticed the other canvases, the various beginnings of conflagrations. Maybe it seemed like the whole room was on fire. I guess it was too much for him. Though I’d like to know what he would think of that first canvas now. I’ve worked on it since he saw it and walked out of the room without a word. In the right corner of the canvas, headed in towards the center, is a figure barely discernible, wrapped in flames as it is. I’m not sure, but it could be a deer, a deer on fire running toward the center of the blaze, as if at the center there could be some kind of salvation. What would Harlan say if he saw this burning deer? What do I want him to say?

  The Detective Questions His Methods

  Don’t take it too
personal, kid, DeGreco tells me.

  But I’ve been to the corner diner downtown at six in the morning and seen the retired cops staring into their coffee, mumbling about this or that case, how all they needed was one little slip-up, some bit of physical evidence, or even an eyewitness who hadn’t been drunk or high at just the wrong time. I’ve seen firsthand what an unsolved case can do. And the cases those lost souls mutter about the most, the ones that wake them at three in the morning and won’t let them back to sleep, that leave those little tics in the muscles of their faces, the one thing those cases all have in common is they involve children.

  I’ve seen DeGreco’s face already developing a twitch, and DeGreco’s seen it all. Hell, he’s nearly a legend.

  When I was brought in to the Captain’s office and told I’d be working with DeGreco, I almost asked if he was still alive, I’d heard so much about the guy. So you know if it’s getting to DeGreco it’s got to be bad.

  Don’t take it personal, he says. Good advice, if impossible. I mean, when babies are going up in flames one after another all over town and we don’t have clue number one, how do you not take that personal?

  Maybe it was bad luck, my getting assigned to work with DeGreco. The only reason I’m on this case is because they had to give a case like this to him. He is a legend, after all. Me, I’d just as soon be tracking stolen vehicles than looking for the sicko who’s going around setting fire to babies. This is just too weird. And the people I’ve had to talk to for this case already. I could write a book.

  Yesterday was a bad one. One of the worst so far. DeGreco and I got the call a little after 3 AM. We had just pulled in to the Big Boy out by the mall and placed an order for a couple of coffees and a Danish for me and, for DeGreco, his usual, a fried egg sandwich. Not that it’s on the menu at Big Boy. But DeGreco, remember, is a legend. For him, they make things up special. His fried egg sandwich, for instance, isn’t just a fried egg between two slices of bread. No. It’s more complicated than that.

  That’s one of his lines, actually. We’ll be working on a case and I’ll come up with what I figure has got to be the answer and, without thinking, if I thought about it I’d know enough to keep my mouth shut, I’ll tell DeGreco what I’ve come up with and he’ll just smile that odd smile of his and shake his head so slightly if you weren’t paying close attention you wouldn’t even see it and say, It’s more complicated, kid. I’ve only been working with DeGreco a little more than half a year, and I’ve already heard that phrase enough it sometimes wakes me in the middle of the night.

  A DeGreco fried egg sandwich is a complex melding of flavors and textures. First, the bread has to be sour dough rye, and it has to be grilled, in butter. The fried egg itself is actually two fried eggs, and the yolks have to have been broken just about 30 seconds before taking them out of the skillet and setting them on the bread, along with a slice of cheddar cheese and a slice of provolone, and two slices of bacon, crispy. Of course there’s the mayo and the brown mustard which have to be laid down before the eggs.

  DeGreco is precise in his instructions. He needs things he can control, things he can have some say over, to be just so, and to be just so every time. There ain’t much in this world you can count on, kid, DeGreco likes to say as he holds his fried egg sandwich up and prepares to take a bite. What you can count on, he says, make it something you like.

  He’d only gotten two bites down when the call came in over the radio. They don’t use numbers for these calls anymore. No number seemed enough, so they just come on the air and ask for DeGreco and, when he answers, the dispatcher, usually Elaine, just says, Another fire in the crib, and gives us the address. With yesterday’s, there have been five so far. Five babies burned to char in their cribs, while the cribs themselves had minimal damage and nothing else in the rooms where the babies were sleeping was touched by the fire at all. Two of the babies burned in their cribs in the same room the parents were asleep in, the crib not more than six feet from the bed where the mother and father slept.

  The lab reports have been just as strange, just as puzzling, just as frustrating, as the crime scenes. You’d think for a baby to burn like that there’d have to be some kind of accelerant used that would leave traces on the blackened little corpse, but with each of the four the lab work has come up empty. No gasoline, no turpentine, no lighter fluid, none of the usual suspects, as they say. No evidence that anything was poured over the babies to help them burn, and nothing was found in the rooms where the bodies were that could have been used to start a fire. How can these babies just be burning up like this?

  Nothing about these cases makes any sense. If a baby were set on fire, you’d expect it to make some noise over something like that wouldn’t you? You’d expect it to be crying like there’s no tomorrow. At several of the crime scenes, the parents had monitors set up. You know, one is left in the room where the baby is and the other the mother or father carries around while they do chores or just get a little rest. They can hear their baby when it moves around or cries out, that’s the thing, and if the baby started crying they would hear it and head in to see what needed to be done. Certainly, if their baby were burning alive on the other end they’d hear something.

  But in each case, no one heard any sounds to suggest anything was wrong. They just found the charred bodies in the morning still smoldering, still smoking in the rooms with smoke detectors, placed on the ceilings often right over the cribs, that never beeped at all. How can a baby burn to death and not only not be heard but not set off the smoke detector that should have woken anyone in the house no matter how sound a sleeper they may be? Don’t even get me started on the ones who burned up in the rooms with the parents not six feet away.

  DeGreco told me to drive. He wanted to finish his sandwich. My Danish, I guess he figured, wasn’t anything special. It could wait. Driving, I let myself hope this would be the time the perp screwed up and left us something we could nail him with.

  I didn’t, of course, say that. If I had, DeGreco would have ripped me a new one.

  First, for the hoping. Hope is not one of DeGreco’s lines. Hard work, he likes to say, is the only remedy for hope.

  Hope, DeGreco has said, likes to lie on the couch and tell his wife, a small woman who is always nervous and flinches at her husband’s slightest motion, to For crissakes get up off your fat ass and get me a beer. It was late when DeGreco told me that and he’d thrown back a number of shots and was beginning to feel the whiskey kick in.

  When he’s really feeling the whiskey, he recites poetry. Yeats is one of his favorites, it seems. Several times I’ve heard him yell “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” He usually doesn’t get any further than this cause the crowd in the bar we hang out in after work doesn’t want to hear poetry. They’ll give him a couple of lines just cause he’s DeGreco, and a legend, but that’s all they’ll stomach.

  The second reason he’d have ripped me a new one if I’d said out loud what I was thinking is that he hates all the shorthand terminology everyone gets off of Law and Order or one of the CSI series. I’ve learned not to say perp, for instance, around DeGreco. It seems such language is too imprecise for his tastes. We need, I’ve heard him say to other detectives, to get back to calling things what they are. We need a vocabulary, he says, that’s up to what the world gives us to name.

  Everyone nods when DeGreco goes off like this, but we all keep using the lingo as soon as we’re out of earshot from him. For us mere mortals, we find it’s enough. Only a god, one detective said after getting the language lecture from DeGreco, should feel the need to know the exact one and only name of everything. Of course he said this after DeGreco had left the room. We all nodded. Though I wanted to ask him, What about Adam and the story of him naming the things in the garden? I didn’t. After all, I wanted to agree with him, certainly with the sentiment of his statement. DeGreco can come off as pompous.


  DeGreco swallowed what was left of the fried egg sandwich as I pulled into the driveway behind the ambulance. The paramedics had already been in the house and were packing things up. There was no body with them. The older medic motioned with his head, inside. They had not moved the baby, or what was left of it, from the crib. They had to wait for us. They knew the routine. If the victim’s alive, then he or she is a patient. If the victim’s dead, then the body, in all its accouterments, is evidence and part of a crime scene and belongs to us. Another one for you, the medic who motioned to the house said as we headed for the porch.

  Inside, we could hear a woman weeping and a man with a face that could’ve gotten anyone lost pointed us down the hall when DeGreco asked, Where’s the body, sir?

  DeGreco put his hand on the man’s shoulder as we passed and whispered something in his ear. The man, the baby’s father of course, did not go with us into the room but headed off toward the front part of the house. DeGreco watched him go before stepping into the room. Poor guy, he said.

  I had the camera. It was only the two of us, and DeGreco was the legend, not me, so I snapped whatever he indicated. If anyone else had been in the room with us, they’d have thought I was just the photographer. As luck would have it, the kid wasn’t going to be giving anyone an estimation of my value any time soon.

  After taking in the undisturbed room, it was picture after picture, from every possible angle, of the crib and the body in it. The viewfinder was a godsend. Without it, I might have lost it after the first few pictures. The illusion of some sort of distance from the reality of what was still smoldering in that crib was all that kept me clicking photo after photo until DeGreco was satisfied we had enough.

  Notice anything? DeGreco asked. This was his way of telling me, Stop taking pictures and start looking.

  I let the camera hang over my stomach and looked around at the room I had just viewed through that little window on the camera. This time I was in the room, and it was just me and DeGreco and this smoking little corpse in the crib. Except for the occasional sound of a woman weeping that made its way down the hall to this room that was obviously the nursery of a kid who was very loved, the world at that moment could have been without sound. DeGreco had asked me a question and everything was about seeing something. Despite the fact I would’ve given everything I had in this world to have noticed, as DeGreco put it, something, this room, as far as I could tell, was just like the other four the two of us had stood alone in, me taking pictures to DeGreco’s instructions.