California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “There’s some indication that she might have been drinking,” Jack says.

  “Won’t you come in?” she asks.

  Now that I’ve paid admission, Jack thinks.

  The inside of the house is a museum.

  No DO NOT TOUCH signs, Jack thinks, but they’re not needed. You just know, like, DO NOT TOUCH. The place is immaculate. The floors and furniture shine. No dust would dare settle.

  Dark, too, like a museum.

  Dark-stained hardwood floors with Persian carpets. Oak doors, moldings and window frames.

  Big old dark fireplace.

  In contrast, the living room furniture is white.

  White sofa, white wingback chairs.

  White like a challenge white. White like nobody spills here, or dribbles, or drops. White, like a statement that life can be clean if everyone just maintains discipline and pays attention and tries.

  Furniture, Jack thinks, as ethic.

  Nicky motions for Jack to sit down on the sofa.

  Jack tries to sit without leaving an indentation.

  “You have a beautiful home,” Jack says.

  “My son bought it for me,” she says.

  “You’ve been to the house?” Nicky says.

  “Just for a preliminary look.”

  “Is it a total loss?” Nicky asks.

  “Most of the structure is still there,” Jack says, “although there’s a lot of smoke and water damage. I’m afraid the west wing is going to have to be torn down.”

  “Since the coroner called,” Nicky says, “I’ve been trying to steel my nerves to go over there and see … And of course the children are terribly upset.”

  “Sure.”

  Nicky waits for what he feels is a decent interval, then asks, “How do we proceed with the claim?”

  Like, we’ve done our sensitive moment, let’s get down to business.

  Jack runs it down for him.

  The life insurance claim is simple. Jack requests a death certificate from the county and once he gets it, bang, he writes a draft for $250,000. The fire claim is a little more complicated because you’re looking at three different “coverages” under the policy.

  Coverage A is for the structure itself. Jack needs to examine the house in detail and come up with an estimate of what it’s going to cost to rebuild. Coverage B is for personal property—furniture, appliances, clothing—and Nicky will need to fill out a Personal Property Inventory Form, to tell the company what he lost in the fire.

  “I see you also have a bunch of special endorsements added to your Coverage B,” Jack says.

  Which is a humongo understatement, Jack thinks. Special endorsements to the tune of three-quarters of a million bucks.

  And nice fat premiums for California Fire and Life.

  The perpetual circle jerk, Jack thinks.

  “My furniture,” Nicky says. “I collect eighteenth-century English. Mostly George II and III. I collect, I sell, I buy. I’m afraid the bulk of my collection was in the west wing. Is there …?”

  Jack shakes his head.

  Nicky winces.

  Jack says, “I’ll need to have you complete a PPIF—Personal Property Inventory Form—so we can sort out what’s destroyed and what isn’t. There’s no hurry on that, of course.”

  “I have a videotape,” Nicky says.

  “You do?”

  “Just a couple of months before the fire,” Nicky says, “Pamela and I decided we should finally follow our agent’s advice and videotape the house and our belongings. Would that be helpful?”

  Yeah, that would be helpful, Jack thinks.

  “Sure,” Jack says. “Where is the tape?”

  “Here at Mother’s,” Nicky answers.

  Then Nicky says, “You mentioned a third coverage.”

  “Coverage D,” Jack says. “Additional Living Expenses. That’s for any expenses you incur while you’re out of your home. Rent, restaurant bills, that sort of thing, until you get settled. I can also write drafts from that coverage to give you an advance on your personal property so you can buy clothes … toys for the kids …”

  “How thoughtful,” Nicky says.

  “You have plenty of insurance,” Jack says.

  Mother says, “Nicky and the children will be staying here until the house is rebuilt.”

  “That’s great,” Jack says.

  “I’m charging them $2,000 a month in room and board.”

  Those deep blues look at him like it’s a challenge, like she’s daring him to say something. Something along the order, Jack thinks, of what kind of mother charges rent to her widowed son and her homeless grandchildren?

  Jack says, “Actually, $2,000 is a little low. For instance, if Nicky were to rent an equivalent home, we would pay for that.”

  “Daziatnik is staying here,” she says.

  “Of course he can stay where he wants,” Jack says. “I’m just saying that wherever he decides to stay, we’ll pay the rent.”

  She says, “After all, why should I subsidize the insurance company?”

  “No reason,” Jack says. “In fact, I can issue an advance of $25,000 on your Coverage D,” Jack says.

  “When?” Nicky asks.

  “Now.”

  (Another Billyism: Get an advance in their hands. Pronto. People been burned out of their home, get some clothes on their backs. Kids lose their home, at least they can get some goddamn toys to play with. They feel better.)

  And if they lose their mom, Billy?

  Well, I can bring them their dog.

  Silence. Mother has just figured out that she’s lost face by winning a battle she didn’t need to fight, and she doesn’t like it.

  So while she’s pissed off anyway, Jack says, “I’m going to need to get a recorded statement. It doesn’t have to be today.”

  “A recorded statement?” Nicky asks. “Why?”

  “Routine with any fire,” Jack says.

  One of Goddamn Billy’s rules in this cynical world: Take a statement as soon as you can. Get their story on the record so they can’t walk away from it. If they’re not involved with the fire, it doesn’t matter; if they are … well, Billy’s right again. Get a statement. Get it in detail. Get it early.

  (Another Billyism: If you’re planning on getting in a fight with someone, it’s a good idea to first get their feet stuck in concrete.)

  Nicky’s looking at him with his charming smile.

  “Did you bring a tape recorder?” he asks.

  You bet.

  20

  “This is Jack Wade from California Fire and Life,” Jack says into the tape recorder. “The date is August 28, 1997. The time is 1:15 p.m. I am taking a recorded statement from Mr. Nicky Vale and his mother, Mrs. Valeshin. I am making this record with the full knowledge and permission of both Mr. Vale and Mrs. Valeshin. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” Nicky says.

  “Correct.”

  “And will you validate the date and time for me?”

  “It is correct as stated,” Nicky says.

  “Then we can proceed,” Jack says. “If at any time I turn off the tape, I will make a note for the record of the time we go off record and the time we resume. Now, could you each state and spell your full legal names for me?”

  It’s a delicate thing, taking a recorded statement. On the one hand, you have to observe the formalities so you get a useful record that will stand up in court. On the other hand, it’s not a sworn statement or a legal proceeding, so you have to walk a fine line between the formal and the casual. So after they state and spell their names, Jack flips back into talk show mode and says, “Mr. Vale—”

  “Nicky.”

  “Nicky, why don’t you start by giving me a little background on yourself?”

  Because Jack knows that the first thing you do is get the subject talking. About anything, it doesn’t matter. The idea is to get them into the habit of responding to your questions and just plain talking. Also you learn something right off t
he bat: if your guy balks at talking about himself, he’s going to balk at everything else and then you have to wonder what he’s protecting.

  There’s a more cynical reason. Jack knows it like every other investigator knows it—the more a subject talks the more chance he has to lie. To fuck up, give inconsistencies, lie on the record. Get his feet stuck in the concrete.

  Most people hang themselves.

  It’s a basic truth that Jack knows: if you’re dragged out of your bed by the cops at four in the morning and they want to talk to you about the Kennedy assassination, the Lindbergh kidnapping or aiding and abetting freaking Pontius Pilate, what you do is you keep your fucking mouth shut. Doesn’t matter if they ask you your height, your favorite color or what you had for breakfast that morning, you keep your fucking mouth shut. If they ask you if night is darker than day, or whether up is higher than down, you keep your fucking mouth shut.

  There are four words, and only four words, you can say.

  I want my lawyer.

  When your lawyer gets there he’ll give you some sage advice.

  He’ll tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut.

  And if you do that, if you follow that sage advice, you will in all probability leave the police station a free man.

  There are usually three reasons people talk.

  One, they’re scared.

  Nicky Vale isn’t scared.

  Two, they’re stupid.

  Nicky Vale isn’t stupid.

  Three, they’re arrogant.

  Bingo.

  Nicky Vale starts talking about himself.

  He was born in St. Petersburg, which was Leningrad when he was born but now is St. Petersburg again. This name thing matters like shit to Nicky Vale, because it wasn’t any more giggles being a Jew in Leningrad than it was being a Jew in St. Petersburg.

  You can change your name as often as you want (“I should know, right?” Nicky adds), but you can’t change your spots, and those Bolshevik bastards are the same and will always be the same. Czarist, Bolshevik, Stalinist or glasnostnik, it’s all the same because they’re still and always anti-Semites.

  “We have served,” Nicky observes, “as an indispensable factor knitting the Russian social fabric. We have done them an enormous favor: over the centuries of conflict we have provided a unifying focus of hatred.”

  So Nicky grows up as an outsider. Excluded from sports clubs, social clubs and the Young Communist League, young Nicky lives in a physical and social ghetto.

  “What we had,” Nicky says, “is what those Bolshevik bastards will never have: a legitimate culture. We had God, we had literature, we had music, we had art. We had an immutable past, Jack, that could not change and did not change with the tides of political purges and the shifting sands of doctrine. What makes a Jew is the Jewish past. So they excluded us. Excluded us from what?”

  Well, not the army.

  Nicky gets drafted. Greetings, Jewboy, here’s hoping you get smacked.

  So if you think it’s fun being Jewish in Leningrad, try being a Russian Jew in Afghanistan. They hate you twice. They can’t figure out if they hate you more for being a Russian or for being a Jew. It’s like hatred squared or cubed or something.

  Nicky doesn’t help matters.

  “I was stupid,” Nicky says. “I wore a Star of David on a chain around my neck. For what? So in case I’m captured they can torture me twice as long? But when you’re young …”

  Nicky survives his tour in mullah-land.

  Comes home to what?

  The same old crap.

  So what he wants is out.

  “Glasnost comes,” Nicky says, “and the bastards try to curry favor by opening the gates to release people they don’t want in the first place.”

  The hypocrisy is stunning to Nicky but all right with him. While the gate is open he’s determined to walk through it. Mother wants to go to Israel but Nicky …

  “Well, I have seen my war,” Nicky says. “I’ve seen enough of people being blown up. And Israel, well, to be frank …”

  Young Nicky has other ideas. Young Nicky has heard of the land of dreams, the land of golden sands and golden hair. The land where a young man with no money and no background and little formal education—but energy, smarts and determination—can still make a splash. Young Nicky wants to go to California.

  They have some family here. Some cousins who made the escape and live in L.A. and are doing all right. They give Nicky a gig driving town cars on the airport run. A couple of years of this, Nicky buys his own car. Then two, then three. Then a used-car lot, then a parts wholesale business. Then he goes in with several partners and buys an old apartment building. Fixes it up and sells it. Buys another. Then another. Now he has a fleet of cars, two used-car lots and his parts business.

  Leverages them to buy an apartment complex in Newport Beach. Converts them to condos and makes a killing. Leaves his money on the table, so to speak, and buys another. Pretty soon he’s in the crazy ’80s real estate market. Sometimes buying commercial property and selling it on the same day. Gets into development, buying raw land and developing town houses, condos, country clubs.

  Orange County is booming and Nicky with it.

  “The only problem with Americans?” Nicky says. “You don’t appreciate what you have here. Every time I hear an American running this country down I laugh.”

  He’s booming and blooming, enough to get into a sideline which is his true love.

  Art.

  Paintings, sculpture, fine furniture.

  Especially fine furniture.

  “It is, to use a hackneyed phrase, the craftsmanship,” Nicky says. “In those days they cared about quality. About the quality of the wood, the quality of the workmanship. Attention to the smallest detail. Devotion to the aesthetic of the whole. They built furniture to be useful, to be beautiful and to last. They didn’t just throw it together, destined for the trash heap or the yard sale.

  “And there is something about wood, isn’t there? Do you know what I mean? For the sacrifice of a beautiful tree something beautiful should be created. To see those fine grains of mahogany and walnut shaped into something exquisite and lasting. And something that you use every day—a chair, a cabinet, a bed—you have a relationship with the wood, with the woodworker, with the designer. You become part of the continuum of history. Can you understand that, Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  He really can. It’s why he spends half his free time sanding old wooden longboards in his garage.

  “So when I made my fortune,” Nicky says, “I indulged my passion. I bought Georgian furniture. Some I sold, some I traded, most I kept to fill my home. To create a space around me that fed my soul. That’s my story, Jack: Russian Jew turned California cabbie turned English gentleman. Only, as they say, in America. Only in California.”

  “Why only in California?”

  “Come on, you know.” Nicky laughs. “It is truly the land of dreams. That’s why people come here. They say it’s the weather, but it’s really the atmosphere, if you will. In California you are unhooked from time and place. You can untie yourself from the bonds of history, nationality, culture. You can free yourself from what you are to become what you want to be. Whatever you want to be. No one will stop you, scorn you, criticize you—because everyone else is doing the same thing. Everyone breathing the same ether but from our own individual clouds. Endlessly floating, shifting and changing shape. Sometimes two clouds drift together, then apart and then together again. Your own life is what you want it to be. Like a cloud, it is what you imagine.”

  Nicky stops and then laughs at himself.

  “So,” he says, “if a Russian Jew wants the sunshine and the freedom and the ocean and the beaches and to be an English country gentleman all at the same time, in California he simply loads his house full of expensive furniture and creates his own reality.… So much of it gone now. Gone in the fire.”

  Not to mention your wife, Jack thinks.

  Which, i
n fact, you don’t mention.

  But the fire, Jack says. Not to be offensive, but please tell me where you were the night of the fire.

  Now that we’re, you know, chatting.

  21

  Here, Nicky tells him like it’s simplicity itself.

  I was here.

  And he shrugs, like fate is an inexplicable thing.

  “And thank God,” Mother says, “the children were here.”

  “When did you pick the children up?” Jack asks.

  “About 3 o’clock,” Nicky says.

  “Was that the usual arrangement?”

  “There was no usual arrangement, strictly speaking,” Nicky says. “Sometime middle to late afternoon.”

  “And were you here from 3 o’clock on?”

  “No,” Nicky says. “I believe we went out to dinner around 6 or 6:30.”

  “Where?”

  “How is that relevant?”

  Jack shrugs. “I don’t know at this point what’s relevant and what isn’t.”

  “We went to the Harbor House. The kids like that you can have breakfast all day. They had pancakes.” He adds, “I’m sorry, I don’t recall what I had.”

  With just a whiff of sarcasm.

  “What time did you get home?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “It was closer to 8:45,” Mother says.

  “Eight forty-five, then,” Nicky says.

  “Big pancakes,” says Jack.

  “They are, in fact,” Nicky says. “You should try them.”

  “I eat breakfast there almost every Saturday.”

  “Then you know.”

  “I’m a Denver omelet guy myself.”

  Nicky says, “We went for a walk after dinner. Down around the harbor.”

  “What did you do after you got home?”

  Nicky says, “I’m afraid we watched television. The children are, after all, Americans.”

  “Do you recall—”

  “No,” Nicky says. “The shows are all the same to me. I suppose you could ask the children.”

  Not me, Jack thinks. Even I couldn’t ask two little kids, Do you recall what you were watching the night your mommy died? I’m hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore.

  “What time did you put the kids to bed?”

  Nicky looks to his mother.