by Earl Emerson
“There are four or five thousand people here in the daytime,” Diana said. “Knock out the elevators, which the alarm system does automatically, and there are only two exits, both down narrow stairwells. One of those stairwells would be reserved for firefighting. Can you picture five thousand panicky people trying to get down the other one, walking forty or fifty stories probably in the dark?”
“This place will be full of smoke as soon as somebody opens a door onto the fire floor, which you know will happen.”
“We did a prefire here a few months ago,” Diana said. “The system has backups out the ying-yang. Television cameras. Sprinklers. Fire walls. Fire pumps to assist the department in raising water to the upper levels. It even has a water tank upstairs that holds thousands of gallons for fire suppression. This wouldn’t be like Leary Way, where they didn’t even have a night watchman. They’d be tangling with the best in technology here.”
“The First-Interstate Bank building in L.A. had the best in technology, too,” Finney said. “And that fire took rotating crews and four hundred firefighters to tap. Even so, it almost got away from them. Seattle’s only got two hundred firefighters on duty at a time.”
“So we’d start out with half as many people as needed, and the rest of the city wouldn’t have any coverage at all.”
“No. The Columbia Tower wouldn’t have any coverage at all.”
They both thought about that for a moment. She said, “I read something recently about this place, but I don’t remember what. It didn’t have anything to do with what we’re talking about though.”
He took her white-gloved hand as the band began playing again, and they danced. He couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of a fire in this building. Once in the stairs, anybody who was handicapped or elderly or infirm would be in serious trouble. Seattle’s aerial ladders might reach to the sixth or seventh floor, but no higher. They didn’t have air bags for people to jump onto, and even if they did, a seventy-story jump onto an air bag would be lethal.
40. THE MAKE-OUT ARTIST
It was after one A.M. when Finney spotted Charlie Reese and his wife entering together on the heels of several Supersonics still high from a squeaker at Key Arena: Sonics, 101; Utah Jazz, 100.
Chief Reese began working the room, shaking hands with firefighters, politicians, and anyone else who might be useful. His wife seemed a reluctant participant. Finney remembered having thought when he first met the two, eighteen years before, that they were a strange couple—Reese particularly handsome and she notably unattractive in a way that she had to work at, letting the hair on a mole on her chin grow an inch long, not shaving her legs, wearing ill-fitting, unflattering clothes. Finney noticed her once at the department picnic, where she sat alone all day, immersed in a romance novel. Charlie had alluded to the murky origins of their relationship during lunch at drill school, something about a sleazy affair he’d had with her married sister before dating her. In recent years, Reese had become a stalwart churchgoer, while his wife was a self-proclaimed atheist.
Finney watched Reese circumnavigate the room and wondered what kind of reaction the chief would have when he came to Finney and Diana. He glanced at Finney’s mask. A flash of recognition crossing his features, he turned away, striding deliberately past both Finney and Diana to shake hands with one of the D-shifters from Station 6.
“That was awful blatant,” Diana said. “He always snub you like that?”
“This is the first time I’ve run into him since he screwed me over.”
“Come on. Let’s go. This thing is winding down anyway. Or do you want to stay?”
“Let’s go.”
Around the corner near the elevators the odor of roasted pumpkin from the candles in the jack-o’-lanterns was particularly pungent. They pushed the down button and waited, Diana staring at him as the music and noise spilled around the corner. He was remembering that good-night kiss she’d given him hours earlier.
Without thinking about it further, Finney leaned forward and kissed her. Her arms melted around his neck. On the descent to forty they resumed their kiss as soon as she’d punched the down button.
Outside, the fog had thickened, visibility reduced to a hundred feet.
When they pulled into the parking area near the dock, it was almost two. Finney was exhausted and knew Diana was as well. Shutting off the Jeep engine, she pulled the emergency brake and turned to him.
“You want to come in?” he asked.
“That would be nice.”
“I can barely stand.”
“You want me to carry you?”
He laughed. “No, I think I’m better off than that.”
“Because I could.”
“I know you could.”
“I had a wonderful time tonight, John.”
“So did I. Thanks for inviting me.”
Their footsteps echoed on the wooden dock, his porch light showering a halo of yellow over them in the fog as he unlocked his front door. Inside he took off his hat, cape, and sword. He turned to find the Cat in the Hat stepping into his arms, kissing him repeatedly across his face, backing him up until they both tumbled onto the couch in his living room. He hadn’t had time to turn on a light. After a moment, there was a noise in the dark and their kisses slowed and then ceased altogether.
“You have a roommate?” she asked.
“I guess I should have told you about him.”
“You guess you should have.” She sat up. “This could have been embarrassing.”
“Dimitri likes to watch. Don’t worry. He won’t say anything.”
The noise came again and Diana grew utterly still. Finney reached up and turned on a lamp. His tailless cat sat four feet away, staring at them from the seat of a wooden rocking chair that tipped back and forth slightly as the cat balanced. “Diana, meet Dimitri. Dimitri, Diana.”
She laughed, and when she flung her hat across the room toward the hat rack—a perfect landing in the shadows next to Finney’s Zorro cape—Dimitri ran for his life. Diana took off her four-fingered gloves and snuggled against him. After a while, Finney reached up and draped the afghan from the back of the couch across them. He couldn’t recall when he’d felt so contented. “Umm,” Diana said, “I don’t want to drive home in this soup.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“You don’t mind if I stay until it lifts?”
“I hope it doesn’t lift for weeks.”
She kissed him again and said, “I bet you did this all the time when you were a kid. I bet you were the make-out king in high school.”
“I was too shy for that.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“I don’t know. I was.”
“Um, hmmm.”
The knocking had been going on for some time before it turned to banging. It took Finney a few moments to awaken fully.
“Open the door. I’ve got a warrant for your arrest. John Jacob Finney! Open this door. I’ve got a warrant.”
“Oh boy,” Diana murmured, half-asleep. “What time is it?”
“Just after three.”
“Why would they . . . ?”
“Probably want to take me by surprise.”
“I’ll call a woman I know in my father’s law firm. She’ll have you out by noon.”
She might bail him out, he thought, but she couldn’t keep him out.
Finney climbed to his feet, opened the door, and confronted a man pounding the door with the heel of his palm. “Open up, you bastard! Open up in the name of the law.”
“For Christ’s sake, Gary. What the hell are you doing?”
Gary Sadler was half a six-pack on the wrong side of sober, eyes bloodshot, breath reeking of beer and cigarettes. His hair was jeweled from the fog. “Came to arrest your sorry ass,” Sadler said. “Came to take you in for arson. Whaddya think? Arson or stealing my girl. You choose.” Sadler couldn’t stand without constantly resettling his feet, as if he were in a small boat. He tried to look past Finney to see who
was with him. “That ain’t your Jeep out there, John boy. Motor’s still warm. Got a union sticker in the window. Did I interrupt something? Garyius interruptus?”
“Shut up, Gary. And go away.”
“Can’t go away. Can’t go nowhere.”
“Why not?”
“Too drunk.”
“You didn’t drive here?”
“Yeah, I did. But I ain’t driving home. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, do they?”
“What do you want?”
“Came to warn you.”
“About what?”
“Secret stuff.”
Finney felt Diana behind him, her hand on his shoulder. She gave him a peck on the cheek. “I’m going now.”
“Diana,” Sadler said, stepping back in an exaggerated gesture of gentlemanly courtesy. He stumbled and caught himself. “Didn’t mean to break up your tête-à-tête. Damn, woman. That’s some outfit. How come you never wore anything like that when we were going out?”
“We never went out,” she said, vanishing into the fog.
Finney pulled Sadler into his living room so the neighbors wouldn’t overhear. He switched on a lamp next to his bookcase. “What do you want, Gary?”
“Came to tell you something you need to know. Mind if I sit?”
“Go right ahead.”
Sadler collapsed in a heap on the floor. “I’m okay.” He put his index finger to his lips and made a shushing noise. Dimitri was sitting on top of the sofa, staring at Sadler. “That your cat?”
“Be careful. He doesn’t like lushes. Cut to the chase, Gary.”
“Got a visit from G. A. Montgomery and his little stooge, firefighter slash law enforcement officer Robert Kub. G. A. did all the talking. Said you lit that Riverside Drive fire.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if a firefighter set it, it was Jerry Monahan. Tell you why. Couple of things. You wanted that place on the dangerous buildings list. He didn’t. And he didn’t put it there. Why didn’t he put it there? He didn’t want to attract attention to it. Also, we parked on that same block two weeks before the fire. You weren’t working that day. Me and Greenleaf came back to the rig and found Jerry all dirty. When I asked what happened, he said he was messing around down by the river and fell over the bank.”
“Without going into the water?”
“Exactly our thoughts. He was inside that house. But why lie about it?”
“Why set a fire?”
“Who knows? G. A. says the phone line at the station will be tapped by the end of the week. They’re getting a court order. Even wanted me to trick you into revealing complexity in the arson.”
“Complicity?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“Told him Jerry’s crazy as a bedbug with a snootful of kerosene. Told him you might be a fuckup at a fire, but you’re no criminal. And that old woman? Hell, you were the only one in the station didn’t run when you saw her coming in for a BP.”
“Thanks for telling me, Gary.”
“You watch out for that female type just left.”
“Don’t warn me about her.”
“Oh? Somebody already warn you?” He laughed. Then he saw something across the room, something visible only from his vantage point on the floor. He crawled across the carpet and pulled a large piece of plywood from under a table—the plywood base Finney had used to build and replicate a miniature Leary Way: the buildings, the fire engines and ladder trucks, each painted with the appropriate numerals, and the firemen, with yellow helmets for the firefighters, red for lieutenants, orange for captains, white for chiefs.
“Mother of Mary,” Sadler said. “This is like something out of Gulliver’s Travels. You build this?”
“Yeah.”
“Why the hell’d you do that?”
“I was trying to understand.”
“Jesus H. I was thinking about asking you if I could stay the night, but maybe I should crawl into a cab. This is spooky.”
41. EMILY CORDIFIS
It was a modest little house in Wedgwood, a quiet neighborhood north of the University of Washington. Erected on a small hillock in a neighborhood of identical houses on similar hillocks, it consisted of a tiny living room, a tinier kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a single bath. Finney had been here so many times he knew where the girls had buried their pet turtles in the backyard.
Bill Cordifis and his bride had purchased the home the year after he’d joined the fire department, which meant they had been there thirty-five years at the time of Bill’s death. The thought precipitated a sudden picture of Bill Cordifis’s charred body, his arms stumps, the fat on his torso boiled off, his face blackened to the bone, Nomex bunking coat burned as brittle as tissue paper. Finney hated that these images of Bill’s last few minutes ambushed him everywhere: in line at the grocery store, driving on the freeway, dancing last night with Diana.
“Hello?” Emily Cordifis gazed at him like a wobbly animal that had been grazed by a car, her elegant outline blurred by the screen door. “Oh, it’s you, John. I guess I forgot you were coming. I’ve been cleaning.”
“May I come in?”
“Of course.” She unlatched the screen door and swung it open. “I don’t know where my manners are. You’ve read the report, you said?”
“I’ve read it.”
“Good. I’d like to hear your thoughts.”
She led him around the corner into the small kitchen. He set the report on the table. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Thank you, but no.”
The phone rang and she spoke over her shoulder as she moved toward it. “Have a seat. This won’t take a minute.”
Finney sat at the chrome-and-Formica kitchen table, the pale light from the window cascading in over his shoulder. The house had always been filled with the smell of coffee and nicotine, though now that Bill was gone, the odor of cigarettes had faded.
Hanging up the phone, Emily Cordifis turned to him and said, “Sure you won’t have some coffee?”
“Okay. It smells wonderful.”
Emily wore a simple black pullover and trousers that ended at mid-calf. She filled two cups and sat across from Finney, folding her hands on the tabletop. The afternoon light from the window emphasized the lines in her face.
“G. A. has been good about this. I know Bill had high regard for him. He’s answered all my questions and been patient, but for some reason I still can’t grasp what happened. Bill went here. Bill did this. I hear the words, but I can’t see the picture.”
She was lucky, Finney thought; he could see the picture.
“The bottom line is I’m to blame. I tried to get him out. I failed.”
“But you had a broken shoulder.”
“Collarbone. Doesn’t matter. I should have saved him.”
Her unblinking eyes stared at him. He could tell she was determined to be the best listener she could be, and that she’d vowed not to cry. He could tell she didn’t blame him. It was the immediate and unquestioning nature of her unspoken blessing that made it worthless to him. She gave it not as if she’d carefully considered all the opposing arguments and come down on his side, but as if she had no choice.
“To understand what happened at Leary Way, you need to understand how Seattle fights fires. You probably know most of this already, but I’ll start at the beginning.”
He told her that less than ten years earlier the department had adopted an incident command system that had been and still was in widespread use across the country. The idea was that no matter what the emergency, large or small, the structure of command for handling it would be the same. Instead of having everyone on the fire ground swamp the IC with information, division and sector commanders would be appointed so no one person had more than seven people reporting to him, optimally no more than five. The incident commander would label himself so as to distinguish that inciden
t from others taking place in the city.
Captain Vaughn called himself “Leary Command.”
“Even though they were both captains, Bill had been senior to Vaughn, and by rights could have claimed the post of IC for himself when we arrived.”
“But he didn’t do it?” Emily asked.
“No. If there was action anywhere, Bill wanted to be there. He split the crew and we went in.”
Finney had to marshal his thoughts before he continued. In contrast to his own mental health, which he realized was spiraling downward like a maple seed, each time he saw Emily he was stunned at how much more significantly recovered she was than the last time he’d seen her. He admired her strength and wanted to tell her so.
Instead, he said, “Visibility was hampered from the minute we went through the door. Bill sent one member to get a fan. Had she been allowed to set it up, the air in the building would have cleared in short order—”
“That was such a huge building. The news made it look like an airplane hangar.”
“Still, those fans would have cleared it out in a matter of minutes. They’re pretty amazing. Without fans, you’re talking about searching a building in twenty to forty minutes. With fans, in five.”
“So why did Vaughn take them down?”
“He was following rules. The rule is to not put up a fan before an engine company gets a line on the fire. Trouble was, without the fans, they couldn’t find the fire. Bill did what worked. He knew most of the folks outside telling us we couldn’t use fans were people who hadn’t crawled into a fire in years.”
“Okay. Fine. Bill made a call. Vaughn countermanded it. But if Bill had seniority, why didn’t he tell Vaughn to go fly a kite?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mentioned a woman firefighter. Bill’s said a few things over the years . . .”
“Moore is one of the best firefighters in the department. I’d put my life in her hands.”
“Would you really?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“That’s good enough for me. Can you go on?”
“The system requires a lot of people to set it up adequately, and we didn’t have them. Each incident has a base area where rigs park. One person is in charge of setting that up and making sure rigs don’t block the streets. Then there’s a staging area where firefighters and equipment are gathered and where crews wait to receive assignments. Another person is in charge of that. The fire building will have division commanders, probably four of them, and if need be, the division commanders will assign sector commanders under them.”