Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  Carter slumped further on the bench without answering.

  “Freezer won, by the way,” said Georgia.

  He looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You told me yourself, he’s a patient man. He wins by wearing down the opposition, finding the chink in his enemy’s armor and burrowing in. Well, he beat you, Randy. He beat us. Because you’re quitting, and the way I feel right now about a decision I’ve got to make, I’ll probably end up quitting, too.”

  That got his attention. He straightened. “What’s going on?”

  Georgia told him about her conversation with Rick DeAngelo. “If I do nothing, there’s a good chance Louie Buscanti will kill Freezer tonight.”

  Carter brightened for a moment, then his face clouded over as he worked through the implications. “You figure if you let Buscanti do the deed, then you’ll end up feeling like I do—that you’re no better than the criminals—is that it?”

  “That’s about the gist,” said Georgia. “But telling’s no good, either,” she reasoned. “The Feds will put Freezer in the witness protection program. He’ll get a new name, a new state, and a new chance to kill.”

  Carter rubbed his eyes and rose from the bench. They were both getting cold. “I was going to walk you over to Ladder Seventeen tonight,” he admitted. “It just seemed like the right place to tell you. Now, I don’t know where to go or what to do.”

  “I know what you can’t do,” said Georgia. “You can’t quit. I need you on this.”

  “I don’t have any answers,” he said. “The only choice I made was to make that tape public. And it was the wrong one.”

  Georgia suddenly remembered the tape Nathan Reese gave her this morning. It was still in her handbag. She pulled it out and showed it to him.

  “Before Reese died today, he gave me this. It’s a copy of the Glickstein tape.”

  Carter’s eyes widened. “I thought that was gone.”

  “I think Reese basically had to steal it off Krause to get it.”

  “That still won’t do us any good,” said Carter. “Look at all the trouble I got the department in making that other tape public.”

  “Maybe the problem was,” said Georgia, “we didn’t make it public enough.” She turned to him. “You’ve got a lot of good contacts in the district attorney’s office. Have you told any of them about the tape?”

  “Negative,” he said. “I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. That’s why I sent it to Connelly. He could honestly say he didn’t know who gave him the tape.”

  “What if you called a couple of your contacts in the D.A.’s office now and told them how the Feds and the U. S. Attorney have been playing fast and loose with McLaughlin?”

  He shrugged. “They’d be ticked off. But not enough to go head-to-head with the Feds over it. McLaughlin would still probably end up under someone’s protection.”

  “Would he? If the press knew what he’d done? If the New York Times and the Post and the Daily News heard the Glickstein tape, too? Wouldn’t the political pressure on the D.A.’s office be overwhelming?”

  “Everyone would know we did it,” Carter argued.

  “Knowing and proving are two different things, Randy. If Freezer taught me anything, he taught me that. Reese was an FBI agent and he gave me the tape, fair and square. There’s no breach of security on our part by showing it to the D.A. As for the press, well, who’s to say how a copy of it ended up in some reporter’s hands?”

  Carter nodded. He could see the logic. And the irony of it as well: Freezer might survive. But he’d be ruined by a chink in his own armor. He loved to show off, whether it was his John Constable oil painting, his lemon yellow Porsche, his affair with an FBI agent’s daughter, or his ability to kill and get away with it. Now, his bragging would be his undoing.

  “I got a friend in the D.A.’s organized crime unit,” said Carter. “This would be right up his alley.” Carter pulled out his cell phone. Georgia put a hand over his.

  “You can’t take this step and then quit, you know,” she told him. “We’re going to catch heat on this—maybe for months. You leave and—”

  “I’ll stay, girl,” he promised her. “I’ll take the charges and stay.” He smiled. “I want to be in that courtroom as a marshal when Michael McLaughlin goes down.”

  49

  Michael McLaughlin was indicted on two counts of first-degree arson and two counts of felony murder in the deaths of Captain Joseph Russo and firefighter Tony Fuentes. That was all anyone could get him on, but it was enough.

  The Feds, embarrassed by Krause’s feckless policing of both his family and his informants, distanced themselves from McLaughlin. In court, he wore two-thousand-dollar Brioni suits, handpainted silk ties and a steady smirk, but it didn’t sway public opinion. Daily, he was raked across the newspaper headlines as a thug who killed firefighters. Even the other inmates at Riker’s, where he was being held without bail, treated him with contempt. Georgia had a sense he wasn’t going to weasel out of prison this time. He must have begun to feel the same way, for as December wore on, she noticed that the smirk became less pronounced and he’d developed a noticeable twitch in his right eye.

  Brennan knew Georgia and Carter were behind what had happened, but after the mayor praised the FDNY for its “excellent police work” in building a case against McLaughlin, even Brennan recognized that shining a spotlight on the leak would have been counterproductive. Neither Georgia nor Carter received any administrative charges.

  “I had a feeling you’d do something like this,” said Rick DeAngelo right after McLaughlin’s arrest. He called her up one evening. She feigned ignorance.

  “Come on, Gee Gee, I know you tipped off the press. And it’s okay. That’s just the way you are. You can’t stay sore at people. Not even me.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “Does that mean I can’t come up and see Richie?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” said Georgia. If Rick knew her, then she also knew him. His intentions were in the right place. Follow-through was another matter. “He’ll visit Richie once,” Margaret grumbled when she heard about Rick’s request. “Once and never again.” Her mother felt the entire visit would set Richie up for disappointment. Marenko, surprisingly, felt just the opposite.

  “Now that he’s out of trouble, I think the boy should see him.”

  “But what if my mother’s right?”

  “I think Richie needs to find that out for himself,” said Marenko. “And I think you need to separate your anger from Richie’s need to know his dad.”

  And so Rick came up the following Sunday. He and Richie went out for pizza. When Richie returned, he informed his mother that he’d invited Rick to take him to the Scouts’ race-car derby the following Friday night. Behind the child’s back, Margaret mouthed the word “Once.” Georgia hoped her mother was wrong.

  Doug Hanlon got out of the hospital a week before Christmas. The fire department assigned him to a desk job, which he hated, for the next six months. But Seamus was assured that if Doug showed himself to be psychologically fit, he could go back to full duty after that. Before Tony Fuentes’s death, Tony had been building a bunk bed for his two oldest daughters. Doug vowed to finish the bed by Christmas. Seamus said that working on that bed had done more to restore Doug than anything else since the fire.

  The men at Ladder Seventeen and Engine Twelve were eternally grateful to Nathan Reese for his selfless act that spared their lives. They asked Georgia to find out his parents’ address. She got the address—in Bakersfield, California—from Scott Nelson. The firefighters wrote the parents a letter and sent FDNY T-shirts and an honorary helmet as a thank-you. They received no reply. Georgia also sent a letter and got no reply. She wondered if the family was too grief-stricken to respond. At first, she thought about letting it go. But she had a phone number as well as an address. So one night she called. Nathan’s sister answered. Her voice, initially so kind, took on a stiff tone when she heard Georgia’s name.
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  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “My family appreciates your letter and the firefighters’ tokens of appreciation. But they would rather you not contact them again.”

  Georgia was confused. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No, of course not,” said the woman. “But…your father’s death was a very upsetting chapter in their lives.”

  Georgia paused. She had no idea what the woman was talking about.

  “You are George Skeehan’s daughter, aren’t you?” asked the woman.

  “Yes, but how do you…?”

  “My brother told you, didn’t he?”

  “Told me what?”

  “My family had a convenience store in Astoria, Queens, nineteen years ago,” said the woman. “Nathan was just a little boy at the time. It was a terrible, terrible accident. He didn’t mean any harm.”

  Georgia’s heart felt like it had stopped beating. “Rysovsky,” she murmured. “His name was Nathan Rysovsky.”

  “My parents chose to Americanize it after they made a fresh start in California.”

  “But that fire…” Georgia stammered,“…my father’s fire…a man named McLaughlin set it—not Nathan.”

  “My brother set the fire,” said the woman. “I saw him do it. That man—he took money from my parents, yes. But he didn’t set the fire. It was my brother. He was playing with matches. He didn’t mean to burn anything. And it changed him forever. He was never the same. After that, he locked himself in his room all the time. Computers became his life. I don’t think he ever lived down the guilt.”

  Reese’s words echoed in Georgia’s head: No more dead firefighters.

  “We are very sorry for your loss,” the sister continued. “Please understand that it is too painful for my family to say more.”

  “Thank you,” said Georgia woodenly. The woman hung up the phone. She saw the words on Sully’s phone pad now: R @ 10:30 A.M. She had thought McLaughlin had written those words. She had thought “R” was Rick. Maybe the “R” was for someone else—someone who knew about Rick DeAngelo and had scribbled his number on top of the note to throw off the trail.

  The next day, on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, Georgia paid a visit to Riker’s Island. Michael McLaughlin didn’t seem the least surprised to see her. He seated himself on the other side of a Plexiglas partition and picked up the phone.

  “I bet I know why you’re here,” he mumbled into the receiver. “And it’s not to wish me Merry Christmas, either.” The Irish lilt was gone. His voice had a sandpaper edge to it, despite his attempts at humor.

  “Did you?” Georgia asked. They both knew what the question referred to. There was no need to elaborate.

  “What makes you think I’d tell you if I did?”

  She stared straight at him. “Because I saved your miserable life and you know it.”

  He tossed off a small laugh, but he couldn’t hide the twitch in his eye. “You can’t pin it on me, you know. There’s no one who’ll back up the story.”

  “I’m not looking for backup. This is you and me, Mike,” said Georgia. “You can cop to it or not. Like you say, they can’t pin it on you. And besides, you’re going down for two murders, anyway. One way or another, this won’t change things.”

  He stared at her, a slightly bemused expression on his face, but he didn’t answer.

  “Look,” said Georgia. “When Doug Hanlon was holding a gun to your head that day in the stable, you said you didn’t do it. Was that fear talking? Or was that the truth?”

  “You won’t believe me, whatever I say.”

  “Try me.”

  “I know who did it, and it wasn’t me.”

  “It was Nathan Reese, wasn’t it?”

  He locked eyes with her from the other side of the glass. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. His expression said it all.

  “Which means,” said Georgia. “That you had no reason to kill Cullen Thomas. Or Jamie Sullivan. Neither of them could pin my father’s murder on you.”

  McLaughlin still didn’t answer. Georgia felt her stomach tighten. The implications began to fall into place. She wanted to close her eyes to them, but she couldn’t. McLaughlin had boasted about a fire he’d never set—probably to score points with his underworld friends. Roberta Kelly had overheard the boast, believed it, and fed the information to her brother, Cullen, who regurgitated it to the D.A. in exchange for a lenient sentence on an unrelated assault charge. She could see the logic in that. Still, something didn’t make sense.

  “Nathan Reese was a six-year-old boy when he set that fire,” said Georgia. “It was an accident—a mistake—just as Brophy and Sullivan originally stated in their report. Yet Cullen Thomas and Jamie Sullivan are dead.”

  “I got nothing to do with that,” said McLaughlin.

  “But you do,” said Georgia. It was starting to fall into place. “You knew Nathan Reese was Rysovsky. You found out the same way Cullen Thomas found out. Once Cullen fingered you to Carter, the D.A. started looking into my father’s death. And Rysovsky’s name came up. You and Cullen both knew that if the FBI found out that Nathan Reese had set that fire, they’d dismiss him. It wouldn’t matter that he’d only been a little kid at the time. A firefighter had died. So Cullen Thomas tried to blackmail Reese. But it backfired.”

  “Reese pushed Thomas out a window,” said McLaughlin. “I had nothing to do with it. Knowing Reese, it was probably another stupid mistake.”

  “Perhaps,” said Georgia. “But you knew you had Reese by the cojones after that, didn’t you? You figured you could blackmail him for the rest of his life—if not for my father’s death, then for Cullen Thomas’s murder. Then when I started asking around about Brophy’s assault on you, Jamie Sullivan started doing a little digging and found out about Nathan Reese. That’s who he had the appointment with at the FBI: Reese. Nathan knew he couldn’t get out of this without admitting he’d killed Cullen Thomas, so he killed Sully and set the fire to make it look like you did it—to get you off his back. And he scribbled Rick’s phone number on Sully’s notepad to get me off the case.”

  McLaughlin said nothing for a long moment. Then he smiled one of his blank-eyed smiles. “You see, lass? There are no sinners and saints. We’re all one and the same. Good intentions, bad intentions—they don’t mean shit in the end.”

  Georgia pressed a knuckle to her forehead. She didn’t want to accept that. It was easier to accept that Freezer had murdered her father than to accept that all this violence stemmed from the desperation of an otherwise ordinary man. “At least Nathan Reese saved some people at the end of his life—at a fire I know you set,” Georgia shot back. “Who have you ever saved, huh?”

  “Myself,” said McLaughlin with a shrug. “That’s all we ever save, lass—ourselves. The rest is an illusion.”

  “I hope you rot in prison,” said Georgia.

  “It’s not over yet,” said McLaughlin. But the confidence was gone from his voice. As Georgia got up to leave, she saw his eye twitch and the smirk disappear as he was led away. She had a sense that even Michael McLaughlin knew it was, indeed, over.

  And yet his words haunted her as she drove back over the Hazen Street causeway from Riker’s Island into Queens. She had hoped that putting Michael McLaughlin away would help her make peace with some of the anger and heartache over the loss of her father. She wanted closure. But in the end, there had been none. Nathan Reese had made a horrible childhood mistake that haunted him for the rest of his life and cost the lives of two other men. He was not a bad man, but he had done some bad things. McLaughlin, Georgia realized, was at least partly right. Life was never clean and simple. It was always a negotiation between the best and worst impulses inside us. She had to learn to accept that—in Nathan Reese, in Rick DeAngelo and in herself. She had to move on.

  For a brief moment, as she pondered this, she had the sense that her father was sitting beside her in the car. She swore she could smell his Old Spice aftershave and hear the tune he always whistled. The
lyrics came back to her now. It was an old song from a group called The Flying Machine. It was popular when her parents first met, around 1969: “Smile a little smile for me, Rosemarie.” Marie was her middle name. She always loved when he whistled it.

  It was getting dark by the time Georgia arrived back home. Tonight was Richie’s race-car derby. Georgia searched the block for the beat-up Ford Rick had driven up in a week and a half ago. It had his name and business on the side. It would be easy to spot. But she didn’t see it.

  Her stomach began a slow somersault. She wondered if her mother would greet her with an “I-told-you-so.” She worried that Richie would be in tears. Instead, she heard commotion from the kitchen when she opened the front door. Richie was in his Cub Scout uniform, putting the final touches on his race car. Margaret was pouring soda. And someone else was in the kitchen as well. Georgia walked in to find Marenko seated at the kitchen table, wolfing down a chicken sandwich her mother had made for him. He was wearing a white shirt that he’d unbuttoned at the neck. A striped tie had been discarded on the table beside him. He looked like he’d just come from work. Georgia gave the three of them a puzzled look.

  “Where’s Rick?” she asked.

  “Car trouble,” said Margaret, tossing out the words in that disgusted tone that suggested the only thing wrong with Rick’s car was the man driving it.

  “He’s driving up tomorrow,” said Richie with a shrug. He didn’t seem too disappointed. Georgia had Marenko to thank for that and she gave him a grateful look.

  “I thought you couldn’t take him,” she said. “I thought you had to work.”

  “I asked Rudy to cover for me for a few hours,” said Marenko. Rudy Hoaglund was another supervising fire marshal at Manhattan base. “I’ll pay him back Sunday night by coming in early.” He chucked Richie on the shoulder. “We’ll just have to make this short and sweet, right, Sport? ’Cause I gotta go right back to work when this is over.”