by Lee Harris
I had never been in a fire-ravaged home before and the enormity of the loss stunned me. Somehow seeing one room cascading into another was almost more than I could stand. I began to think of the work that would have to go into cleaning up the mess, the moving and scrubbing, the rebuilding and the inevitable replacing of possessions, some of them surely precious.
“You OK?”
“It’s terrible,” I said.
“I know.” He walked gingerly into the kitchen and looked around. “No smell of accelerant and no flow pattern of the kind you almost always find in fires where an accelerant is used.”
“Springer said there wasn’t any.”
“I wonder what an analysis of the wood debris would show.”
“Is the floor stable?”
“Seems to be. The flames must have shot upward. It’s pretty clear the stove is the point of ignition. The area acted like a chimney, with the fire moving up to the second floor. Glad I took that undergraduate course in fire science.”
I backed out. “Think we can get upstairs?”
“If the stairs are there. Let’s give it a try.”
The stairs were almost intact. Jack went first, testing each step.
“The firemen really managed to keep the fire local,” I said. “I bet they’ll be able to rebuild. It looks like a nice house.”
“Very nice.”
At the top of the stairs Jack turned and called back for me to wait. I walked up to the top and watched him go inside a room, the doorway of which was blackened.
“You can’t get too far in,” he called. “The floor’s gone in the middle and the ceiling’s a black hole.”
I went to the door. If the kitchen was terrible, this was a calamity, a calamity I felt was very close to me. A bedroom is so personal, so intimate. I could see the charred mattress and pillow, what was left of the flowered sheets Mrs. Buckley had probably chosen with care for her summer home. Nothing had escaped the wrath of the fire here. I thought fleetingly of how sometimes it was difficult to get a fire started in our fireplace. Here, apparently, there had been no impediments. Everything had burned.
I looked up and saw the sky. The fire had burned through the ceiling and through the roof above the narrow crawl space. I remembered seeing the smoke, first from a distance, then from down the narrow street. It had been pouring out of this hole.
Now that hole was a major source of light. One window had been boarded up. Either it had exploded from the pressure of the heat or the firemen had smashed it to ventilate the room.
“If you were standing anywhere between the door and the bed, you’d have had a good shot at Buckley,” Jack said.
“And if you were a woman he was waiting for, you could have come into the room and said, ‘Keep your eyes closed, sweetheart. I’ve got a surprise for you,’ and walked up close without his turning around.”
“Hey, you’re getting pretty good at this. How many guys have you thought of popping lately?”
“Not many. But it’s a good scenario. And if you were a man, you could have walked upstairs in bare feet—everybody in Blue Harbor seems to run around without shoes—and gotten in silently.”
“Then you go downstairs, turn on the stove—”
“You turned it on before you went up,” I said. “So the burner would be hot when you got back down.”
He shot me a wary glance. “I’m starting to wonder.”
“Just logic,” I said, trying to sound breezy. “And there were probably lots of letters and newspapers around that would catch fire quickly if the burner was glowing.”
“Well, it did plenty of damage.”
We started out of the bedroom. “Did Springer say anything about robbery?” I asked.
“Not a word. You think this could have been a robbery that turned into a homicide?”
“Not really. It’s just that he seems to want us to believe that, and he hasn’t given us anything that points to robbery.”
“He doesn’t want us involved. It’s as simple as that. I think we’ve seen what we came for. What do you want to do next?”
“Isn’t it time to canvass the neighborhood? Let’s see if Ida Bloom’ll talk to us.”
8
Ida Bloom was still home and happy to have company. In two minutes we were installed at a little table in her living room, the deck being too hot to sit on at this time of day, she assured us. A pitcher of lemonade was followed by tall glasses with ice cubes, and squares of what looked like homemade cake appeared on a glass platter.
“It looks like you were expecting company,” I said, when we were seated.
“There’s always somebody,” she said. “I like to be prepared. What can I tell you?”
She was a woman in her fifties, I guessed, wearing beige cotton slacks and a bright orange cotton blouse. Her hair was graying and fell in soft curls that I took to be natural. A bit on the plump side, she was well proportioned and carried herself well.
We had explained our interest in the crime scene when we first knocked on her door, so I got started without wasting any time.
“The police seem to think this was a crime of opportunity,” I began, “someone getting off the ferry, finding an open house, going inside to rob it, and eventually killing the only person they found at home.”
“Well, if by ‘the police’ you mean Curt Springer, let me tell you Curt isn’t the swiftest man I’ve ever met. He gets something in his head and he can’t shake it out even when you point out the facts to him.”
“I think we agree with you. This looks like a case of murder followed by arson, not robbery followed by murder.”
A little smile played on her lips. “And you want to know who the usual suspects are.”
“Well, if you’ve got a list of them, I’ll certainly write them down.”
“I don’t have a list,” Mrs. Bloom said. “I’ve known the Buckleys for so many years, and Eve and I have gotten to know each other so well, that I know all the gossip but I can’t think of who would want to kill him. Whatever you’ve heard about Ken Buckley, he was a good man in most ways and he’s been a good friend to us.”
“But he had girlfriends and I’ve heard that some of his relationships came to unhappy ends.”
“That’s true.”
“And Eve stood by him through all that.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
I could feel my body tensing.
“Would you feel more comfortable if I took myself home?” Jack asked.
“Oh, no. Sit down. There’s nothing embarrassing about what I know. It’s something Eve told me some time ago when she was having a very bad couple of weeks, and I’ve always been a sympathetic ear, as she has to me. So you may as well know. Eve and Ken were married when they were fairly young, early twenties, I think. Ken comes from money. His father’s very wealthy and I don’t think he wanted his son marrying Eve, who he considered just anybody. He was wrong, let me tell you. Eve is a wonderful human being. So old Mr. Buckley insisted on a prenuptial agreement.”
“That was a long time ago for one of those,” Jack said.
“Yes, it was. But lawyers have always known about these things and there have always been agreements written up for some people. I remember an older friend of my parents, marrying after his first wife died. He wanted to protect his money from his new wife’s children and she didn’t want to be cut off when he died. So they weren’t unheard of. What Eve told me was that old Mr. Buckley was afraid she’d leave Ken and sue for a lot of money. She had to agree not to do that.”
“You mean she would get nothing if they divorced?” I asked.
“If he divorced her, she would get a large settlement. If she divorced him, there would be very little.”
“Then it literally paid her to stay with him.”
“It did, yes. That’s not to say that she stayed with him for the money. I think she really loved him and wanted a good marriage with him. Like the old nursery rhyme, ‘When h
e was good, he was very, very good.’ ”
I didn’t have to ask for the last line. “And if he died?”
“I guess the laws of New York State would take care of that. You can’t disinherit your wife, you know. You can’t leave your home to someone else. You just can’t do it.”
“Is Ken’s father still alive?” I asked.
“I believe he is. And I don’t think that prenuptial agreement was ever set aside or invalidated. I think Eve would have told me. She referred to it once or twice over the years. She hadn’t forgotten that I knew.”
“What about the children, Mrs. Bloom?”
“Ida,” she said with a smile. “Mrs. Bloom is my mother-in-law. I’m just plain Ida. The boys. They’re both in college now. They left Fire Island before Labor Day.”
“Does the name Tina Frisch mean anything to you?”
Ida pursed her lips and shook her head.
“We heard Ken was involved with a woman earlier this summer, a young lawyer.”
“Oh, the lawyer. That was nothing. She came to the house a couple of times. I don’t think there was any hanky-panky.”
“I heard she left Fire Island rather abruptly about a month ago and hasn’t been back.”
“She is back,” Ida said. “I saw her over the weekend.”
“Do you know where she was staying?”
“Let me see. It’s a little house over on—” She closed her eyes. “It’s probably the Goodwins’ house, small, needs work, but it’s fine for one person.” She wrote down an address and gave it to me.
“Did you see them together over the weekend?”
“No, I saw her on the beach. At least, I think it was her. A good-looking girl with dark hair.”
That was the same minimal description I had heard. “I guess there’s a lot of bad information going around.”
“I always notice on the late news, when someone’s arrested for some terrible crime, they talk to the neighbors and some of them think he was always getting in trouble, and some of them say what a wonderful young man he was, how helpful he was with the elderly woman next door and how he painted her house for her. I know the Buckleys. They were the best neighbors anyone could have. They didn’t let their boys make a lot of noise at night, they kept their property clean, they were warm and friendly. I know someone killed Ken. I don’t think it was a kid off the ferry looking for a house to rob. I think it was someone who wanted to kill Ken. But I don’t believe you could fill a bus with people who wanted to get rid of him. I know he wasn’t faithful to his wife and I wish he had been. She’s such a good person. But if you’re looking at old girlfriends, you won’t find a murderer. People forgive and forget. Girls know a summer romance ends on Labor Day. Especially if the boyfriend is married.”
“But if there isn’t a busful of suspects, there’s at least one.”
“Yes, there must be one.”
I waited, but she seemed to have said all she intended to.
“If anything comes to me, I’ll give you a call,” Ida Bloom said.
I finished my lemonade and we left.
—
As we started away from the house, Eve Buckley and her sister came toward us. We all stopped and I made the introductions. Mary Ellen was pulling a wagon with a suitcase on it and I realized Eve was getting ready to leave Fire Island.
“Are you going home now?” I asked.
“I have to. It’s time. The funeral is Friday and I have to get back for the wake. I just wanted to take a look at the house one last time.” She seemed drained, the reality of what had happened finally getting to her. I didn’t envy her going into that charred, waterlogged house.
“I hope things get better,” I said, a little lamely.
“Thank you. Thank you for coming by yesterday. I don’t know what will come of what you told me, but I appreciate your help.”
“Just one thing, Eve. The police seem to think the tragedy began as a robbery. Have you found anything missing?”
“A robbery?” she said, as though it were a strange question to ask. “There’s nothing to steal. This is a summer home. I don’t keep jewelry here, or silver. There’s no computer. We have a couple of old TVs and a lot of summer clothes. I imagine every house is like that. People don’t dress up on Fire Island, they dress way down.”
“That’s what I would think. But if you find anything missing, would you let me know?”
“I will. Or I’ll have Mary Ellen call.”
We said our good-byes and the two women continued toward the house.
“So we still don’t know,” Jack said. “She’s keeping her little visit to Tina Frisch to herself.”
“I have the sense of a whole web of interconnections in this case. It’s a small town and so many people know each other. Maybe Eve and Tina are involved in this together and Eve went to see her because she couldn’t chance making a phone call from her sister’s house. And maybe she just went to ask Tina whether she’d been at the scene of the fire and Tina convinced her I was crazy.”
“Or mistaken. Could be either. They hugged outside the house, didn’t they?”
“Tina could have said something kind to Eve and Eve became emotional.”
“Lots of possibilities. Where to now?”
I looked at my watch. “We still have some time. Let’s drop into the firehouse. I’d like to see where those coats are kept. And if they still have Ken Buckley’s.”
“Lead on.”
We had ridden over on trike and bicycle and I was pretty familiar now with the layout of Blue Harbor. The distances were minimal and we were at the firehouse in less than five minutes. Black and purple bunting had been draped over the front of the building and the American flag was flying at half-staff. The chief was dead.
We went inside and found two older men sitting at a table drinking coffee. They introduced themselves as Fred and Joe and invited us to join them. I declined the coffee but Jack, ever the New York cop, thrives on it.
“You folks friends of Ken?” Fred, the heavier of the two men, asked.
“We met him once,” Jack said. “We’re interested in the circumstances of his murder.”
“You’re not the only ones. Who would ever want to kill Ken Buckley? There wasn’t a nicer guy on the face of the earth.”
“Nice in what way?” I asked.
“Good to us, I can tell you. We wouldn’t have this firehouse if not for Ken. He knew where to go for money, how to build without making taxes go sky-high. This is a second home for almost everybody on the island. No one wants to be taxed out of his mind on a second home. So to get all this and hardly have to pay for it, that’s really something. Plus he donated a generous piece of change himself.”
“For the firehouse?”
“So we could have this nice extra space for ourselves right here. So we could have a decent refrigerator, a nice stove, a pool table.” Fred moved his hand in an arc, showing us all the amenities.
“Did all the firemen feel that way about him?” I asked.
The two men exchanged glances. “Let me put it to you this way,” the other one, Joe, said. “Fred and I are what is called inactive members. When you get to sixty, you have the option to be inactive. It’s reasonable, right? Age takes its toll. You can’t expect a man of sixty-five or seventy—”
“Or ninety-two,” Fred put in.
“Or ninety-two, God bless him, to breathe in smoke and carry a full-sized person down a ladder.”
“But you’re still part of the fire department.”
“We’re part of it and we love it. But there’s a little what you could call tension between us.”
“Between whom?”
“Between the active and the inactive members. Your perspective changes a little when you get older. Maybe you don’t want them to spend money for things that aren’t necessities. Maybe you think that everything new in the world isn’t necessarily good.”
“Are you telling me there were inactive members that disapproved of how Ken was runn
ing the fire department?”
“He’s telling you,” Fred said, “that there were disagreements. You ever put thirty-five guys together and have them vote unanimously?”
I couldn’t say that I had. Nor had I seen a convent of Franciscan nuns agree on very much. “Could someone in the fire department have had reason to kill him?” I was careful not to mention active or inactive.
The response was immediate and effusive. Adjectives flew like bullets. Ridiculous! Absurd! Impossible! Unthinkable! They shouted each other down to impress us with the preposterousness of what I was suggesting. A brotherhood to the end.
“Then let me ask you something else,” I said. “We know he died of a gunshot wound. Why do you suppose the killer set the house on fire?”
They looked at each other again and I tried to decipher the glance. Was there something they were hiding or did they simply have no idea?
“I couldn’t tell you why somebody would burn the house down,” Fred said. “But what I will tell you is that Ken had a reputation in this community. He was the chief. Everybody knew he was the chief. He loved being the chief. If I had to guess, I’d say whoever killed him wanted to make him a kind of martyr, make him die the way he lived. It was symbolic, is all. And that’s off the top of my head.”
Jack picked up the conversation for a few minutes, mostly just being friendly. The men said nice things about Max Margulies, who had been a fireman for about twenty years and who had also contributed generously, they wanted us to know, to the comfort of the firemen. It was too bad Max couldn’t be here for the party this year, although, come to think of it, it wasn’t much of a party.
When the conversation lagged, I said, “I have a question about the coats you wear when you go to a fire, the ones with the thick yellow stripes. Where are they usually kept?”
“You mean those heavy turnout coats OSHA makes us wear?” Joe said. “Right here in the firehouse. You have to leave all the turnout gear here because when there’s a fire, wherever you are, you come here, grab your gear, and get on the truck.”