Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  “What about the time on the boat?” asks Elaine.

  By now I am in tears. I know what she’s referring to and so does Kendra, but I had no way of realizing Echo had blabbed to her parents about the incident. Weeks earlier we’d been out on the boat looking at starfish on the bottom, maybe twenty feet down, when I took hold of the gunwale and started rocking the dory. Kendra thought it was funny because she was used to my humor and she was a good swimmer and we were all in suits, but Echo began crying, and even when I stopped rocking, she wouldn’t stop. Her crying grew hysterical and was, I thought, out of proportion to what I’d done, and I knew Kendra thought so, too. After that I tried to treat her like the delicate flower she apparently was, but the damage had been done, and the story of my malfeasance had spread. “I admit I might have gone too far, but I was just teasing.”

  “She said she cried for hours.”

  “So what? I didn’t rape her.”

  “Let’s get this over with before we change our minds and have him jailed.” Overby turns to Shelby. “I still don’t understand why you adopted this black bastard.”

  “Let me handle this, Harlan. Son, we’ve made a deal, and in order to stay out of jail, you’re going to agree to this. You’ll go upstairs and pack whatever you can carry, and then you’ll leave the house. You’ll leave the house and you’ll leave the family.”

  “And go back to the house in Seattle?” I ask.

  “No. Don’t ever go back there. Just leave and don’t come back. Ever. We don’t want to see you again.”

  “I do,” said Kendra, weeping.

  “If you think I did this, call the police. Because I didn’t.”

  “You don’t want that,” Stone says. “Trust me. You don’t want the police involved.”

  “You’re getting a good deal here,” Father says. “Don’t throw it away, son. It’s the best offer you can hope for. It wasn’t easy, but we’ve convinced the Overbys not to press charges. We’ll keep this inside the families. The stipulation is that you have to leave. Pack your belongings and move out. Tonight. Whatever you can carry. Anything else, we’ll give to charity. Trey, you’ve shamed me and your mother, and you’ve done damage to a young woman who deserves only the best from this family. You’ve disgraced us all.”

  “Give me a polygraph. Give us all polygraph tests.” India looks up, aware for the first time that she might get dragged into this. Stone doesn’t look too happy about the prospect of polygraphs either, but I figure it’s because he can’t wait to see me thrown out of the house. He’s wanted me out of the family since the night I was brought into it.

  “You little shit,” says Harlan. “You don’t deserve the cost of a polygraph. You should be tied up and gagged and peed on like the rabid dog that you are.”

  The house grows quiet. Finally my father steps in front of me, touches my shoulder and says, “I’ve lost two sons this summer. I don’t know why you did this or what you thought you were accomplishing, but I gave you the world and in one night you’ve thrown it away. Maybe you should be in prison, but I’m not going to let you do that to your mother or to me. You’re leaving tonight. That’s your legacy. No jail time. That’s my gift to you. Good-bye, son.”

  “Trey!” Kendra says, running to me and hugging my arm. “I’m so…it’s just…”

  Kendra is still crying as I go up to my room and pack a bag. Strangely, I can’t get myself to pack anything important; it’s as if taking essential items will make this more concrete and trivial items will diminish the reality. I grab underwear, a pair of basketball shoes, two pairs of pants and a jacket. I have a small collection of gold eagles various family members and friends of the family have bestowed on me over the years at Christmas and on birthdays, maybe eight hundred dollars all told, and I slide these into a side pocket of the satchel. I tuck two books in on top of the clothing and zip the bag closed. Outside my bedroom door, my mother slips me four hundred-dollar bills, avoiding my eyes while she mumbles, “Good-bye, Trey.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen I pick up the keys to the Mustang I’ve been driving for the past year, but Stone snatches them out of my hand. “Uh-uh. The car stays. Just what you can carry.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t know, Trey. Just get out of our house.”

  “Jesus, Stone. You know I didn’t do it.” I am so scared I can no longer fight back. I feel as if somebody has injected my brain with Novocain.

  “If you didn’t do it, who did?”

  “I don’t know, but you know I couldn’t have.”

  “Bullshit. We’ve been expecting something like this out of you for years.”

  33. COUNTING THE COCKROACHES IN ESTEVEZ’S PURSE

  TREY>

  I caught up with a fuming Estevez in front of an apartment house just off Rainier Avenue maybe six or eight blocks north of Station 28. I’d been missing in action for almost three hours and had finally connected with her via cell phone.

  “Where the hell…”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I’ve been leaving messages for the last hour.”

  “I…uh…”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know how to take the messages off your cell phone?”

  “They showed me, but I forgot.”

  “Is that the best you can come up with?”

  “I had a meeting. What have you been up to?”

  “Me? I had a wonderful lunch downtown while reading your personnel file.”

  “I hope you didn’t get any mayonnaise on it. Mayonnaise turns brown and stains paper.”

  “Your account of the man falling out of the building was confirmed by the official reports.”

  “Thank you for believing me.”

  “I believed you. I just needed to get all the facts straight and make sure there weren’t any contrary opinions floating around.”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  “One of the victims lives upstairs and is expecting us. His name is Luke Roberts.”

  It was easy enough to tell by the absence of small talk as we traipsed up two flights of stairs that Estevez was furious with me. Estevez worked the metal rapper in the center of the door while I stood back and thought about the contrast between her dusky good looks and India Carmichael’s pale beauty, trying to figure out why the contrast had even occurred to me. They were both intelligent, though their patterns of behavior were polar opposites. Estevez was a talker, full of nervous energy, and all her emotions played out on her face like some kind of movie. India preferred to let others do most of the palavering, was cool and less willing to mix it up with anybody who aggravated her; in fact her face rarely gave away any of her feelings. Estevez’s coffee-colored skin was so dark and smooth and spotless, you wanted to run your fingertips over it just to see if it was real. I hadn’t asked, but suspected that just as I was the result of a white father and a black mother, she was Hispanic and black.

  Luke Roberts was a small African-American man in his early twenties, already balding, nervous at seeing me. Estevez said, “This is my partner, Captain Brown of the Seattle Fire Department.”

  Roberts invited us in, knocking piles of rumpled clothing off two chairs so we’d have a place to sit. There was a hole in the living room wall, a missing kitchen light, a carpet that needed shampooing, and walls that needed scrubbing. I counted five single shoes thrown in the hallway, along with socks and underwear. It was the sort of apartment where I might have counseled young firefighters not to leave their helmets lying around lest they pick up hitchhiking cockroaches, though when Estevez set her bag on the floor, I said nothing. If anyone could benefit from a cockroach in her purse, it was Estevez.

  When we were seated, she said, “Captain Brown is most likely the individual who got you out of the club.”

  “You dropped me out the window?”

  “If you got out on the north side second floor, that would have been me. I dropped a number of people out that window.”

  “Oh, man! I been meani
ng to thank you. Man, if you hadn’t grabbed my ass, I’d still be in there.” He leaped across the room and pumped my hand. “Me and my cousin Karl decided we’d go to this club. Supposed to be a happenin’ place. Word got around they were going to be open on the weekend, so we got dressed up and went on down.

  “I still can’t hardly believe he’s gone. Karl and me did everything together. Hell, he was living here, paying half the rent. Now I’m going to come up short this month. I’m hoping we get this lawsuit going and I can get me some money out of the old man who owns the place. What’s his name? Freddy something?”

  “I forget,” Estevez said.

  “Right. We got lawyers working on it anyway.”

  “You suing the fire department?” I asked.

  “They’re going to look into it this week. I think you guys are the greatest. I mean, sure, I had a couple of sprained ankles after that fire, but I’m alive. It weren’t for you guys, I’d be with Karl. Still, if the department did something wrong, I deserve the money, don’t you think?”

  “What happened when you got inside?” Estevez asked.

  “Me and Karl paid up. Fifteen bucks a head. Then we went up them stairs, but there weren’t many people there yet. It was just after ten, and we were told the place didn’t start hopping until midnight. So we were just hanging. At the top of the stairs you turned into this huge old hall, must have been a playhouse at one time. They had electronic music and a DJ, spinning lights. We were just getting ready to go over and talk to some fine-looking bitches when somebody yelled fire. No shit. Just like in the movies. They yelled fire and Karl and me turned around and this big sheet of black smoke had already filled the doorway and began filling the hall. It was moving, man.

  “We thought about running back down the way we come in, but a couple of dudes in front of us tried that and came right back coughing their fool heads off. They were only in the smoke a few seconds before they’d turned around. Karl started heading for the stage. I guess he figured there was an exit back there or something. Time we got halfway across the big open dance floor, so much smoke had come in we couldn’t see the stage. And if there were any doors anywhere, we couldn’t see them, either. I turned around, thinking once more maybe we should head out the way we’d come in, ’cept I couldn’t see anything but a bunch of people running from this smoke. So now we’re maybe a minute into it and we haven’t moved thirty feet.”

  “How many people were inside when the fire broke out?” I asked.

  “The TV said fifty. I didn’t stop to count, but there were a lot of people, more than fifty. I still hadn’t got myself a good breath of smoke, but everybody who had was coughing, and a couple of dudes was standing in the middle of the floor puking. So Karl says, ‘This way,’ and heads up these stairs past all these seats. I held my breath until we were on the level above the dance floor. Then all of a sudden Karl was gone. He was there one second and the next second I was by myself. I couldn’t hold my breath no longer, so I took a big gulp of this hot smoke I’d been feeling all on my face. That’s the last thing I remember, man, until I woke up outside.”

  “Where outside?” Estevez asked.

  “Actually, I was on top of this fat chick on this car. I kind of looked up wondering what the hell happened, because all I could remember was we were getting ready to go to the Z Club, and then this fat chick is saying ‘Get off me! Who you? Get your ass off me!’ I couldn’t move. I was dazed. Finally these two firemen came and picked me up off the car. Got the chick, too, who was still yelling at me. Carried us over in the dark, where they had all these medics and people. Next thing I know I’m in the hospital. Whole thing, from the time we walked through the door until I was in the hospital, couldn’t have been thirty minutes. We never even spoke to anybody in the club. I didn’t find out until the next day Karl was dead. That’s no shit. I came home in the morning expecting him to be here, but he wasn’t.”

  “You see any firefighters inside?”

  “Just the guy put me out that window. I guess that was you.”

  “No other firefighters?”

  “Not until I was out in that parking lot.”

  As he walked us to the door, Roberts gave me an apologetic look. “It’s just the lawyers, man. I gotta do what they say. The Z Club committee people got people looking into that fire. They’re going to dig out the truth.”

  “That’s what I heard,” I said.

  Estevez and I went downstairs, where I walked her to my car. “You didn’t tell him who we were?”

  “I just told him I was with the news.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “What do you mean, how’d I get here. I took a cab. How do you think I got here?”

  “I was just trying to make conversation.”

  Once we were in my car, she said, “Do you recall Roberts from that night?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re the one who saved him?”

  “I was the only one lowering people out windows. I remember this woman…”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought maybe you were in the mood to talk finally.”

  “I was feeling around for bodies, and this woman grabbed me around the neck. She knew she was going to die if she didn’t get out. I was bending over, and I guess she heard me and grabbed me around the neck, pulled my face piece off. I tried to get her to let go so I could get over to the window, but she was fighting me. Hey. I don’t want to see this in print.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I tried to pull her arms off me, but she had that biblical strength people get when they’re in a panic. So I head-butted her with my helmet. It was the only thing I could do.”

  “What happened?”

  “She let go and I dragged her to the window. The ladder was full, so I lowered her out by her arms and dropped her like the others. I remember finding this big guy in the smoke right after that. I have a feeling the big guy might have been Roberts’s cousin.”

  34. WATCHING TOO MUCH TELEVISION AGAIN

  JAMIE ESTEVEZ>

  “You were a hero. In fact, just about everybody in the department mentions it. Whatever else you were before that fire, you’re a hero now.”

  “If a civilian with no equipment and no training had run up that ladder and made those rescues, he would have been a hero,” Trey said. “I was only doing my job.”

  I didn’t want to argue with him, but I couldn’t see anybody else accomplishing what he’d accomplished, certainly not a civilian. As a reporter, I’d been in training fires with the Spokane Fire Department, and it was impossible to describe how terrifying it was to be wearing all that heavy gear so that your mobility was restricted, or to know how hot and confusing it actually was inside a fire building until you’d been there.

  Once in the confines of Trey’s car, I smelled traces of a woman’s perfume, a fragrance that definitely hadn’t been there earlier. Another woman had been in his car. I was certain of it. I’d smelled that fragrance only one other time in my life—on Stone Carmichael’s wife Saturday night. Why is it that men always think they’re getting away with something when they’re fooling around with somebody else’s wife? My boyfriend out of college cheated on me, and even though he swore it hadn’t happened and tried the standard male defense of insisting I was crazy, I knew inside twenty-four hours I was right. It was the first but not the last time I’d run up against the fact that where women are concerned, all men have the capacity to become morons.

  “I don’t know what your history with the mayor’s wife is, but if you’re planning to do anything her husband doesn’t know about, you’re playing with fire.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m just going to say my peace, and then I’ll be quiet. If you’re doing anything that could bring the mayor’s wrath down on you, I want you to stop.”

  “What I do and who I do it with are none of your business.”

  “It’s very much my business if you c
ompromise this investigation by acting stupid.” I watched him for a few moments while he stared at the raindrops splattering against the windshield. It had been cloudy all day, but this was the first rain.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Just remember, plenty of men have been killed fooling with other men’s wives.” He gave me a look like I was crazy—classic guilty male behavior! Then, as if he hadn’t already convinced me I was right, he looked away from me, shaking his head and chuckling under his breath in a manner that infuriated me. My guts were churning all out of proportion to the offense, and I was forced to admit to myself that my anger was a product of personal jealousy rather than concern for the investigation. This man was doing more than accusing me of being crazy. He was actually making me crazy.

  Half an hour later after we went downtown to the fire marshal’s office to study the inspection history for the Z Club, I said, “Would you like to have dinner? I mean, maybe we should continue this. There are other people we might interview tonight. They’re all in the stations until tomorrow morning, right?”

  “I’ve got someplace I need to be.”

  There it was. I’d invited him to dinner and he turned me down practically before I had the words out of my mouth. Of course he had things to do. He had people to meet and friends to take care of, women to have affairs with, while I was the workaholic who spent weeknights languishing alone in my condo trying not to watch too much television.

  35. FIGHTING FOR YOUR SANITY, LOSING YOUR TEETH

  TREY, NINETEEN YEARS AGO>

  I spent the two loneliest days of my life in a seedy motel in Georgetown across the street from a concrete factory. When I wasn’t watching truckers and hookers passing in and out of the adjoining units, I was watching television, surviving on crackers, canned tomato juice, and old sitcoms. I called on an attorney in an office not far from the motel and was given a list of options, none of which offered the salvation I was looking for. He kept telling me a rape conviction could put me away for quite a while. I called my football coach, who believed my story and graciously offered to let me sleep on his couch until my affairs were settled.