Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  “Were you friends?”

  “Not so you would notice. He hung with a pretty tough crowd. Having attorneys ask him to join in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city must have been a dream come true.”

  “You don’t really believe that?”

  “You didn’t see his eyes light up when he talked about it?”

  “He lost his girlfriend.”

  “I don’t doubt he feels bad about that, but that doesn’t change the fact that if things go well, he’ll probably end up with a good chunk of change.”

  “I’d forgotten there were rescues from the A side of the building. Ten victims, I believe. That’s the side he went out. His girlfriend must have died at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “If I’d remembered that staircase, she’d be alive. It was tough facing him knowing that.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Whatever you meant, I felt like crap looking into his eyes and knowing if I’d given one simple order his girlfriend would be alive.”

  “It was dark. There were doors with no knobs on the outside and they were painted the same color as the wall. It was years since you’d been inside. Others at the fire had inspected it, too, but none of them remembered the doors. You’d already been working fifteen hours. You can’t expect miracles. It wasn’t your fault. Besides, nobody in the Seattle Fire Department had ever done anything quite like what you did at the Z Club. I’ve heard that over and over.”

  We were halfway across the Mercer Island floating bridge when I said, “Do you think Fish hasn’t been showing up for work because he doesn’t want to talk to us?”

  “I think his daughter’s sick.”

  “Or maybe it has something to do with your snide comments about his promotion.”

  “You want me to leave that out of the conversation today?”

  “That would be nice.” Trey grinned. A moment later, I added, “Do you think he’s planning to retire?”

  “My guess is somebody who presides over a fire where fourteen people died doesn’t want to hang around any longer than necessary.”

  “I hope you don’t feel that way. That the rest of your career is tainted?”

  “What? Do you have a blank space in your notes where my story is supposed to go? Your obsessive-compulsive nature beginning to get the best of you?”

  “I’m not obsessive-compulsive.”

  “Why are all your paragraphs numbered?”

  “I do that for…okay, maybe I’m a little—”

  “Why does the inside of your purse look like it just passed a military inspection. Why are all the CDs in your car in alphabetical order?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Chief Fish lived on the east side of Mercer Island in a plush neighborhood of homes on big lots, most with views of the Cascade Mountains, which had not received their first dusting of snow yet this year. Below, we could see a slash of Lake Washington and a hill across the East Channel dotted with housing and commercial property. Fish’s house was sprawling, two and a half stories with a three-car garage and a workshop. The yard was low maintenance, beauty bark and junipers.

  “You been here before?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You going to be good?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, I mean it. Because I don’t want this to turn into a wrestling match.”

  “You’re in charge.”

  Chief Fish met us at his front door, looking just as slight and vitamin-deficient in civilian clothes as he had in the oversize white chief’s shirt I’d seen him in on Friday. His hair was limp but his handshake was warm and friendly. “Beautiful home,” I said.

  Fish looked around the yard and said, “I had to take out most of the garden. Joyce did the yard work, but I couldn’t keep it up after she was gone.”

  We went inside, where he seated us in a sumptuous living room overlooking the Cascades. There’d been a riot in the Central District late last night, and Fish wanted to talk about it. Trey told him a series of gangs had been running through parts of the Central Area throwing rocks, breaking windows, spray painting slogans onto the walls of businesses and city properties. Eighteen youths were arrested, scores more injured in conflicts with police, a Honda dealership looted. There’d been talk of a curfew, but it hadn’t yet been instituted.

  “I heard Medic One’s vehicle had rocks thrown at it while they were treating a cop on Cherry,” said Fish.

  “I heard that, too. Somebody threw eggs at Engine Twenty-eight, but that’s becoming an everyday occurrence.”

  Fish said, “Maybe they should egg it themselves at roll call just to confuse the natives.”

  Trey didn’t respond. It might have been Fish’s reference to “natives.” Some people were supersensitive to word choices like that, though I didn’t have a handle on whether Trey was one of them.

  After an uncomfortable silence, Trey said, “Last night around midnight, Engine Twenty-eight went out on a false alarm and somebody threw rocks at them. Garretson chased some kid two blocks through backyards, and when he finally collared him, the kid wanted to fight. He was about thirteen. A bunch of the neighbors heard the commotion and came out in their pajamas. Garretson said he thought they were going to beat the hell out of him. While this was going on, some other kid broke the windshield and one of the side windows on the engine with a baseball bat.”

  “Jesus,” said Fish.

  “Maybe we should get this moving,” I said. “I don’t want to take up any more of your day than we have to, Chief Fish.”

  “Sure. Why not? I’ve got my notes here, so I know where we left off. I’ve been thinking about this since we spoke, and what it boils down to was we had three different operations going on at the Z Club. The first was fighting the fire. The second was a series of rescues: the Hispanic kids, which turned out to be bogus, the partygoers on the second floor, ten of whom came out the window on the A side and twenty or so on C, and then the attempted rescue of Vernon Sweeting. The third operation was the handling of the patients. The multiple casualty incident.

  “What happened after Captain Brown here put up the ladder on the C side and started making rescues was that we got word Ladder Twelve had left Sweeting inside. Right away we organized a group to back them up and sent crews in on A. I wasn’t comfortable with that, because the fire was going pretty good, but in the end it didn’t matter, because the rescue team came right back out. It was just too hot. I still wonder what happened that caused us to lose a man. I’ve talked to Acting Lieutenant Rudolph at length. You come out of a building with your crew, you count heads.

  “At twenty-three seventeen hours we declared it a defensive fire for the second time. I sure as hell didn’t want to do it since Sweeting was in there and there was the possibility of making more rescues, but I wasn’t about to lose more firefighters, either. When I got word from Captain Brown that he’d been forced out of the second floor, I knew it was time. We set up monitors and every ladder pipe we could get and did our damnedest to drown the thing. We didn’t have any hope of getting more people out by then. We knew it had ceased being a rescue situation and turned into a body recovery. Between the medical group and all the units we were calling in for the fire, we had half the city on site. We drowned it pretty good, but in a building that old, there are lots of hidden spaces.

  “We declared a tapped fire at zero three hundred hours. Started taking bodies out at zero five hundred. I had one group climbing through the rubble marking dangerous spots and bodies with glow sticks and ribbon, and another group removing the corpses under the supervision of the police department and our fire investigators.

  “By that time we had newspeople from all over the city. They were beginning to show up from the national news outlets, too, stringers for NPR and ABC and all of them. It turned into a three-ring circus. You get that many dead at a fire scene…it’s just…well…I had three firefighters assaulted that night. That’s where it started, really, I think. All this anger we’re seeing. I
t started at the fire, and it’s never really gone away. Anyhow, that’s my statement. Questions?”

  “I have one,” I said. “If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?”

  “I wouldn’t come to work.”

  Trey laughed and it broke the tension, causing Chief Fish to smile at his own lame joke. I said, “How about the dispatch tape from the man on the cell phone saying firefighters were bypassing him?”

  “I’m willing to bet that was somebody who was so panicked he didn’t know what he was seeing. Either that or he actually got rescued and now isn’t coming forward to acknowledge the fact. You know the cell phone was stolen, so they can’t trace it to the owner.”

  “Chief?” I said, after we’d all been silent a few seconds. “How much of the manpower used on Vernon Sweeting was diverted from the rescues on the second floor?”

  “I know what you’re getting at, but we had ten people looking for Sweeting, and while they were inside, they would have brought out any civilians they found, too. But they didn’t find any civilians. And they didn’t find Sweeting, either. Besides, the whole thing folded up inside of a few minutes. In fact, I have the timeline right here. The log of the dispatch tapes. The Mayday was called at twenty-two forty-seven hours, and the rescue group was withdrawn at twenty-two fifty-seven hours. Barely ten minutes.”

  “The thing of it is, Chief,” I said, “you have one company making rescues and two or three companies searching for Sweeting.”

  “And?”

  “And Vernon Sweeting was white. The victims on the second floor were black.”

  Fish turned to Trey Brown and for a few moments it was as if I ceased to exist, all their years of working together in a violent and dangerous profession providing them a bond I was not part of. “Is that how they’re looking at it?” Fish asked. “Is that really how the black community is seeing this?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “But they know we don’t operate that way, don’t they?”

  “They don’t know anything,” Trey said. “Not now.”

  On the drive back into Seattle, Trey and I were quiet until we drove into the tunnel that extended from the west end of the floating bridge. Inside the tunnel, I said, “Didn’t he have ten men looking for Sweeting and only you and two helpers to drag out twenty some victims?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “To start off with, we were on the back side, sure, pulling people out, but I’m not so certain more firefighters back there would have made much difference. They put a ladder up to one other window, and all they got was flame. And the rest of the windows couldn’t be laddered because of parked cars. We had people breaking into vehicles and trying to roll them away so we could get another ladder up, but it took…”

  “What? Manpower?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And all the manpower was on the other side of the building?”

  “I still don’t think we would have saved anybody else. That’s just my opinion.”

  A few minutes later Trey suggested stopping for lunch at Borracchini’s, a long-standing family-owned bakery and deli, a reminder of when this area was mostly Italian-American and known as Garlic Gulch. We ordered from the deli and took a small round table in a corner of the crowded shop. Within minutes I’d picked a fight about whether the Republicans had an effective national political strategy. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon how you looked at it, he got a call on his cell phone and went outside to talk privately. I had the feeling it was India Carmichael. Call it intuition.

  40. IT’S STILL IN MY LOCKER IF YOU WANT TO SEE IT

  CAPTAIN FRANK ZIMMER, ENGINE 13, C SHIFT>

  I hope you don’t mind if I smoke, because I really don’t think well without a pipe in my hands. The guys say it’s Freudian, but they say that about everything I do. As I was saying, we’re going to miss Chief Fish. It took a while to figure him out. He’s always been kind of an odd duck. Even back when he was a firefighter, the old guys tell me he never quite fit in. He admitted once he barely knew his wife when she was alive, that he spent all his spare time in the basement shop and he’d never met half of her friends and didn’t pay attention to the other half. All I know is he treated us like kings. He worked here almost five years, and I don’t think I saw him angry once.

  As far as the Z Club goes, Engine 28 was out of service when the call came in, so Engine 33 was first in and we were second. Engine 30 showed up behind us. First thing, he had us mask up and go through the doorway on side A. We went in, but there was too much smoke to see much, and Voepel and I got tangled up in all this wire. Must have fallen out of the ceiling, is all we could figure. That was scary, because for a few minutes we were really tangled. We were looking for this Mexican girl who, it turned out, was outside the whole time.

  Ladder 12 was in there with us, and that was when Vernon Sweeting went missing. We left the building first, so I don’t have any idea how that happened.

  After the first search, we were assigned to set up two lines on the A side. It took us a while to stretch the lines and get water to them.

  It was about then that Fish asked me to do a three-sixty of the building. So I go around to side D, where Engine 33 is. Engine 30 has come in behind them and is setting up. Three guys are on Engine 33’s line. They’re in the foyer of the building, and the whole thing is orange. They’ve got their line on straight stream, and nothing the line hits seems to have any effect. We know the arsonist used Molotov cocktails, and we know he threw at least one on the main floor through the front door, because Marshal 5 found the telltale char pattern on the floor afterward. Man, it was really burning. I went around to the C side, and at that time—I think Engine 28 was just arriving—it was all dark back there. Just a row of cars parked up alongside the building. No windows that I could see. Hardly any smoke.

  When I get back to the A side, there’s these two trees on fire on the parking strip next to the building, but my guys are getting water on them. And I’m hearing some civilian saying there are people inside. We ask them how they know, and they say they just know. No reason. Well, we’d just established that there wasn’t anybody inside. Right about then McMartin comes out the front door alone. I think, like a lot of firefighters in that position, he couldn’t quite believe he’d really lost his partner.

  So flame is coming out of the lower windows along the street on side A, and we’re pouring water through them when some guy up on the second floor flags us down. Turns out there are people inside after all, but they’re on the second floor. We put up a ladder and take ten victims out the window. That was when Voepel and I thought we’d better take a line through the window and look for more victims.

  We get the line up, and you know how much work it is to take a charged line up a ladder. Me and Voepel go through the window, which puts us in this little room, and we open the door, and it is just nothing but this really hot black smoke and fire. Melted my helmet shield. It’s still in my locker if you want to see it.

  We were only up there a few minutes before the chief made us come back down.

  Losing Sweeting goofed us all up. Sweeting…Jesus.

  41. WHEN YOU READ PEOPLE LIKE I READ PEOPLE

  VINCENT TULLEY, Z CLUB FIRE WITNESS—NOW DECEASED>

  It’s Friday night, and I’m getting ready to take Barney Fife for a walk when I spot a man loitering across the street in front of the old dance hall on the corner. Sensing trouble, I grab my cell phone and give the cat a little pat before hooking up Barney’s leash. It is a beautiful night, and if I’m heedful, we can get back before the start of the Frontline piece they’re doing on airline safety.

  Sure enough, down on the corner the young man continues to loiter in front of the old dance hall. Barney’s watering a maple tree, and then I look up and the guy’s talking to some kid on the front steps of the dance hall. I don’t know what this guy’s game is, but I didn’t work the ferries for thirty-f
ive years without cultivating the ability to read strangers at a glance. In my sixty-two years I’ve witnessed several crimes and been to court to testify against people twice, so I’m always on the alert for nut jobs.

  Barney’s doing his business, and all of a sudden there’s a fire across the street, by golly, right in front of the young man, who just stands and looks at the flames, and then pulls out a cell phone and starts waving it around.

  Except, when I get closer, it’s not a cell phone after all. I’m pretty sure it’s a gun. Probably a toy. I have a sense about these things. So I get on my cell and call 911 and finally get put through to fire, and they ask me a bunch of questions, and by this time he is walking away, and I’m thinking, What the bejesus. You’re a witness. Get back and do your civic duty.

  You let people get away with the little stuff, next thing you know they’re up to their eyeballs in the big stuff. I don’t let people cut in front of me in checkout lines, and I don’t let people talk during the opera, and I’m not planning to let this young man get away without giving a full report to the fire department.

  So Barney Fife and I do a quick jog-trot across the street and intercept him in a spot where it’s particularly dark because not all the streetlamps are working, even though I sent in a complete list of the outages in our neighborhood more than six months ago. I catch him quickly because his pants are halfway down to his knees, like they wear them these days, and hobbled like that, he can barely walk, holding up his trousers with one hand.

  I find it best to get right to the point with malefactors. If you’re as tall as I am, you stand close, too, because that intimidates them. Especially the young, who are easily intimidated by my deep basso voice.

  “Hey you, mister. You’ve committed a crime leaving the scene,” I say.

  “Fuck you!” he says.

  “Go back and make it right. You can’t just walk away.”

  “Watch me, motherfucker.”

  “That’s just…you know, that kind of talk…that’s just not necessary.”