Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

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  “Right behind the door here?” he asked, peering into the smoke room.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can I borrow your light?”

  I detached the small department-issued flashlight from my bunking coat and handed it to him. He poked around in the concrete room longer than I would have, considering it was still full of smoke, then emerged, ever the stoic, refusing to gasp for air, pretending he was tougher than snot. Maybe he was.

  Hours later, after the lights were out in the bunk room and Johnson and I were lying in the darkness, Johnson’s voice floated from the other end of the room, “Gum? You awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think we did the right thing?”

  “I don’t know. I’m really worried about it. Tronstad blackmailed me into lying.”

  “He sure did. But what choice did we have?”

  “We could go over and tell Sears right now.”

  “But it was an accident, right?”

  “Ten minutes in the smoke room? I don’t think so.”

  “We better stick to the story we told. Otherwise they’re going to want to know why we lied. Tronstad’s right. A guy’s going to have a heart attack, he’s going to have it. What difference is there if he has it tonight or tomorrow night? Hell, we gave him the best care anybody could give, didn’t we?

  Gum?”

  “Ten minutes in the smoke room for a guy with a heart condition is not the best care in the world, Robert.”

  I thought about it for a couple of hours that night and eventually fell into a fitful sleep, waking at five, only to relive the night’s events for another two hours. In the morning the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried an article in the second section. Seattle Fire Battalion Chief Succumbs on Drill Court.

  After the oncoming shift relieved us that morning, the three of us congregated on the west side of the station, where Johnson patted his 114

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  new Cadillac SRX as if it were a horse. “What the heck. Paula and I can afford this.”

  “I’m nervous as a three-legged dog in the pound,” I said, borrowing one of Tronstad’s sayings.

  “You saw the paper,” snapped Tronstad. “Fucker had a heart attack. Shit happens.”

  “I’m praying,” said Johnson, solemnly. “I think we should all pray for him. And we should pray for ourselves.”

  “What are we praying for?” Tronstad said, flippantly.

  “That maybe the FBI doesn’t come around and want to know what we did with those bearer bonds,” I said. “Or that the medical examiner doesn’t decide Abbott died of smoke inhalation instead of a heart attack. Or that the medical examiner doesn’t find that bond on Abbott and turn it over to the cops.”

  “Jesus. Where is the bond?” Johnson asked. “Where’s the bond Abbott had?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shit,” said Tronstad.

  “I’m praying,” Johnson said. “For Abbott’s family and for our families. I know the Lord is looking down on us, and I know he’s going to give us guidance so we’ll know to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing,” I said, “would have been to sit down on those steps last night when Abbott asked us to go into the smoke room and wait for union representation.”

  “Let’s all just put our trust in the Lord Jesus,” Johnson said.

  “The Lord helps them who help themselves,” said Tronstad, heading for his new truck.

  17. IF HE ONLY HAD A HEART

  W SUNDAY E VENING I was doing laundry when somebody knocked at the front door.

  Iola blew in past me and moved from room to room in rapid strides.

  “You’ve got another woman, right?”

  “How could I have another woman? You show up whenever you want. I’m always alone.”

  “Where were you yesterday? And last week?”

  “Sometimes I have places to go.”

  “For days on end?”

  After racing through my house and finding no one but me, she approached slowly, a drowsy look in her amazing blue eyes, a look I’d seen before. At times like this she was like a dog in heat. Tonight, though, I had other business on my mind. I’d taken my mother up to Snoqualmie Pass for a hike to Franklin Falls, which was one of the shortest and easiest hikes in the Cascades, intersecting the historical Snoqualmie wagon trail and ending at the base of a seventy-foot waterfall after only one mile. I worried that it would be too much for her and tried to talk her into a movie instead, but my mother was determined to ignore her illness until it struck her down—she was more than determined. On the drive home from Denny Creek she had been so ill, we’d stopped in North Bend and spent an hour in the McDonald’s while she rested and sipped from a paper cup of ice water.

  “There’s no point in being alive unless you stretch your limits,”

  she said.

  Throughout the weekend, I worried about my mother and about how Chief Abbott died. I’d promised Tronstad I’d go along with his story, but only to get him helping with the CPR. Later, I began to think maybe I was more culpable than I’d imagined. On the other hand, everybody knew 116

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  Abbott thought there was something wrong with his heart and had called the paramedics on himself twice in the past eighteen months. Maybe everything would be okay. Or maybe I was fooling myself. Hard to know, because since the bonds showed up, I’d become a virtuoso at fooling myself.

  Iola wore jeans and a sleeveless sweater vest, her auburn hair loose and windblown. We were going to have sex. She knew it and I knew it. When we kissed, her skin smelled of onions and pipe smoke, the latter probably from her father. We ended up making love in the dark on the couch without bothering to close the living-room drapes. This was just the sort of licentiousness that made Iola exciting to me. Afterward, we lay cheek to cheek, our perspiring bellies stuck together. I said, “My battalion chief died Friday.”

  Her voice was mocking. “That was so great, Iola. You’re fantastic in the sack. Oh, why, thank you, Gum. So are you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is that why you were gone all weekend? Because your chief died?”

  “If you would ever let me phone you, I could have told you I’d be gone.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Up at the pass. Hiking.” The one time I mentioned my mother she’d ridiculed me—this from a woman who lived with her father and still called him Daddy.

  She didn’t want to hear about me or my problems. What she wanted was a roll in the hay and to have that be the end of it. Once in a while she would grumble about goings on at her work or complain about a driver on the road or some cretin of a cashier she’d run into, but she didn’t want to hear about my problems. Not today. Or the last time we met. Nor the next time.

  Iola pushed me off and began dressing, balancing on one foot while she put on her panties, then her jeans, leaving her top for last, not looking directly at me but well aware I was watching.

  “By the way,” she said. “You didn’t get a visit from anybody, did you?”

  “Who would that be?”

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  “Oh, nobody.”

  Though she’d obviously gotten wind of the fact her stepdaughter had been to see me, we were going to ignore it the way we ignored so many other aspects of our relationship.

  “You want to stay? I haven’t had dinner. There’s that place up on California Avenue—”

  “You know I’m not going out with you, sweetie. Besides, I only came over because I thought maybe you were sick or something. Don’t look like that. You know I care, don’t you, darling?” She kissed the top of my head and was out the door before I could gather my wits. Her precipitous exits always annoyed me, but tonight more so than ever. Tonight was the one night I needed somebody to be with me, and for some crackbrained reason I had thought Iola might be that person. F O R R E A S O N S N O
B O DY seemed able to elucidate—but probably because Seattle’s mayor was scheduled to leave for a vacation in Mexico on Tuesday—the department funeral for Russell Louis Abbott took place on Monday at noon. A bagpipe team from Canada showed up, along with fire crews from our and a dozen other departments, an honor guard, and hundreds of firefighters in their black wool dress uniforms. Monday coincidentally happened to also be our next working shift. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the firehouse in the morning was that neither of my coworkers had returned their new vehicles to the dealer. In addition, Johnson was still wearing his five-thousand-dollar watch. “Geez, Gum,” he said. “What if they ask one of us to say something at the funeral?”

  “For years he treated us like dirt,” said Tronstad. “I’m not going to lie and say I’m sorry he’s tits up.”

  “Ted, you can’t attend a funeral with that attitude,” Johnson said.

  “Today’s the day you have to dig deep and go to the wizard and ask for a heart.”

  Tronstad laughed. “That was a good one.”

  The ceremony was slated for noon, but we were tapped out of service 118

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  at eight thirty so we could help handle the minutiae that precede any fire department funeral. Sears was to be one of the orators, as well as a pallbearer. We helped a team of officers from the chief ’s union who came by to drape the Battalion 7 Suburban and Engine 29 with black bunting. We were given black armbands and black tape to place across our badges. Tronstad disappeared for long periods that morning, using an old firefighter’s trick to get out of work, sitting on the crapper reading a magazine. Midmorning I heard Tronstad talking to Lieutenant Sears. “So what was the official ruling on the cause of death?”

  “I haven’t seen the report, but from what I gather, he died of smoke inhalation. They’re assuming he went into the smoke and had a syncopal episode. Kirsten says he’s had a couple of episodes in the past year. Apparently he didn’t want the department to know. They figure he fainted and his body closed the door when he fell against it. After that he just took in too much smoke.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Kirsten’s inconsolable.”

  “Nothing sadder than a bunch of rugrats without a father,” said Tronstad. “It’s not like she’s Miss America or anything. They’re never going to have another father. I mean, who would marry a blimp like her?”

  “Jesus, Ted. Give it a rest.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  We got to the church an hour early and took up the slack time chatting with other Seattle firefighters as they arrived, some on rigs, some in private vehicles, all in class-A uniforms with uniform hats, looking sharp in the crisp October air.

  I’d always thought Abbott was a pompous buffoon, but listening to one speaker after another tell heartwarming narratives about his career and good deeds, I wanted to cry. Despite eight kids of his own, he’d been part of the Big Brother program, had worked at the Rotary, had volunteered at his children’s schools, and was an assistant football coach at the local junior high. The list of accolades and accomplishments went on and on. I was stunned when Robert Johnson approached the podium and told a series of touching vignettes about Abbott. Tronstad remained next

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  to me on the church pew, maintaining a military bearing throughout the service, his face expressionless. When he bumped into Kirsten in the foyer after the service, surrounded by her kids, he kissed her on the cheek and whispered something in her ear that made her weep. Sears went to the cemetery in Bellevue with the cortege while Johnson, Tronstad, and I took Engine 29 back to the station and removed the black bunting. Later, Tronstad said, “You guys see what she did?”

  “What?” Johnson asked.

  “Kissed me on the friggin’ lips.”

  “Come on, Tronstad,” I said. “Give her a break.”

  “On the lips!”

  For supper that night Johnson prepared spaghetti and meatballs, a tossed salad, and garlic bread on the side. Sears tended to paperwork in his office while the interim chief went downtown to a meeting. Tronstad hid out on the other side of the apparatus bay, in the firefighters’ bunk room, playing video games on the Internet. I did a light workout in the basement—lifted some weights and rode the exercycle—unable to stop thinking about the blue floor mat Chief Abbott had brought in for his situps, marked, Private property. R. Abbott. The rest of his belongings had been gathered up Saturday morning and packed off to his widow, but we’d be looking at that mat in the basement for years. At dinner we were a crew again, the four of us: Sears, Johnson, Tronstad, and myself. We ate in front of the evening news, waiting for funeral shots on each of the local channels.

  After dinner, Sears pulled the Sierre Leone bank bond out of his breast pocket and said, “We need to talk about this. There was only the one, right, guys?”

  Tronstad came around the table, took the bond from Sears, and held it to the light. “Yeah. This is the one I found on my boot that night. You see on the news where they’ve been tearing apart Ghanet’s house? The cops might want to know about this.”

  “They might want to know how it got in Chief Abbott’s bunking-coat pocket, too, huh? Because that’s where I found it.”

  “What?”

  “This is the bond I left in my drawer the other day. How did Abbott 120

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  get it?” We all shrugged. Tronstad did the thing he always did with his eyebrows, raising and lowering them in rapid succession. The officers’ desk drawers didn’t have locks, so Abbott had no doubt been in Sears’s drawer looking for something else and discovered it, then started putting two and two together. “Did Abbott talk to you guys about this?”

  “Heck, no,” Tronstad blurted. “It’s weird that he had it, though. Don’t you think?”

  After he’d looked at us each in turn, Sears said, “Okay. I promised I would talk to you.” Sears stood up and walked to the doorway. “You first, Robert.”

  “What?” Tronstad asked. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking Robert into my office to ask some questions. Then I’m going to ask you the same questions. And then Gum.”

  “I thought you were going to talk to us all at once. We don’t have any secrets, do we, guys? What are you trying to do, Lieut? Turn this into an interrogation?”

  “My office.” Sears cocked his head at Johnson and marched down the corridor, his back and shoulders ramrod stiff.

  Tronstad whispered, “He wants to get three different versions so he can compare. It’s an old cop trick. Look, Gum, just say what we agreed on. No more, no less. We stick to the story, we’ll be copacetic. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  The truth was, I couldn’t remember what we’d agreed on. All I knew was that I’d contributed to Abbott’s death, that I was covering up evidence in a criminal investigation, and that I had over twelve million dollars’ worth of stolen bearer bonds salted away. 18. UNTIL I OPENED MY BIG MOUTH

  W WHILE WE WAITED in the beanery, Tronstad told a story I’d heard before about the afternoon he had sex with a woman in his recruit school—a woman who was now a captain and who by the looks of things would end up a battalion chief. Tronstad related in loving detail how they’d been studying for the midterm at her house and how he took hold of her and kissed her and then had sex with her on the kitchen floor. As far as anybody knew, the captain was an unabashed lesbian. Johnson joked she’d been straight until she met Tronstad. All in all, if you were a woman, you wanted to avoid Tronstad. Not only would he do everything in his considerable power to seduce you—

  and maybe turn you into a lesbian—but he would brag about it to his friends for years afterward. No liaison was spared, not fiancées, ex-wives, or the babysitter he claims he screwed in sixth grade. Everything was a conquest with bragging rights.

  When Johnson came out of the lieutenant’s office, he wore his standard smiley face, his che
eks hard and shiny as rocks in a creek. Looking at the potpourri of pain, triumph, and resolution in his eyes, I had a hard time figuring out what might have transpired.

  Tronstad went in next, rushing down the corridor as if he couldn’t wait, a prizefighter catapulted into the center of the ring by fury and adrenaline. After the door closed on them, I turned to Robert. “What’d you say?”

  “We prayed.”

  “You what?”

  He grinned. “We prayed for Abbott’s family. The lieut’s not a bad guy when you get to know him.”

  “What’d you tell him about the bond?”

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  “He’s not any smarter now than when I went in.” Maybe not, but he was still a heck of a lot smarter than Johnson. Or Tronstad. Or probably me. Even if Robert hadn’t told him anything, I knew Sears would puzzle this out before he was finished.

  Tronstad’s interview lasted less than a minute. Just before the door burst open, we heard Tronstad’s voice, loud and petulant. “You know what your problem is? You’ve never been sued for defamation of character! That’s your problem. Well, hang on to your hat, Lieutenant, because I’ll be seeing my attorney in the morning.”

  “I will get to the bottom of this,” Sears yelled.