Dirty Fire (26 page)

There were not a lot of neighborhoods in Lake Tower that one could call a slum, let alone a site known nationwide as an environmental dead zone. But there was one: the Stannard Munitions complex, an abandoned hulk of flaking masonry and ground-cast concrete that occupied ten overgrown acres on the western city limits.

At the peak of the Vietnam War, even inefficient, outdated plants like Stannard Munitions could be flogged for the last government dollar they could bring. But when Vietnam had finally bled down enough to make marginal production sites like Stannard obsolete, there was no reprieve. Less than two years after Tet showed there was no light at the end of the tunnel, Stannard also was dark and abandoned.

A commitment to cost savings by the plant’s last environmental manager—who was also its first—helped ensure it would stay that way. Reflecting the unconcealed viewpoint of his management, the engineer considered out-shipping even the most toxic manufacturing by-products as an unnecessary expense. What was not dumped outright on a far corner of the site was sealed into steel drums and stacked along a back wall.

Inevitably, they leaked.

Seven years after it closed, Stannard was placed on the waiting list for massive Superfund environmental cleanup, where today it still remained. Not surprisingly, that fact that discouraged prospective developers.

But the building, surrounded by a shiny chain-link fence the EPA had installed, had not remained entirely empty. Chain-link fencing is easy to climb and easier to cut through, even by people too dazed or too desperate to read warning signs.

That was why Donald Lundeen and Josie Clark, his partner-of-the-month, were gingerly stepping through the soggy, debris-strewn labyrinth at about the same time Gil Cieloczki was telling me of Sam Lichtman’s death. In the Lake Tower Sanitation Department, checking out the Stannard Munitions property was a regular, if distasteful and potentially dangerous, routine.

Clark wore reinforced waders. Lundeen, who had two years more experience, preferred the heavy steel-shanked boots he had purchased—with his own funds—from a retired firefighter. They both wore Class IV full-face respirators and Tyvek coveralls, which were mandatory fashion accessories for visits to Stannard.

As always, they had spread out to a five-yard interval—the better to cover ground quickly. The two Health workers were hoping to wrap up the chore before dark. Already, their room-by-room canvass of the massive building had taken almost two hours.

Neither had found anything out of the ordinary, a fact that depressed Lundeen. That was not out of the ordinary, either; everything about the Stannard property depressed him. He occasionally wondered if depression might be one side effect of the chemicals here. He doubted it; any reaction to this place other than depression was what would have been unnatural.

He could understand the broken bottles, most of them pints of inexpensive whiskeys and fortified wines. Alcoholism is a disease, he knew, and a progressively degenerative one at best.
By the time you get down to drinking this stuff,
he thought to himself, noting the off-brand labels on the broken bottles,
it’s definitely any-port-in-a-storm time.

The broken needles and smashed glass crack vials were considerably more depressing. Still, Lundeen had to admit that the concept of using whatever means possible to escape a reality that defined this place as “shelter” had an undeniable, logical appeal. In a bleak sort of way, of course.

Then there were the condoms.

Lundeen had long ago accepted that there was often a wide gulf between love and sex. As a health worker, he had often seen the much closer relationship between sex and commerce played out on the streets.

But to do it here, amid the rats and the human excrement and the lingering substances that in some sectors could raise blisters—Lundeen just shook his head in near despair.

Once, a fellow health worker had suggested that perhaps the condoms had been used to transport drugs. Lundeen had, for a while, found even
that
notion almost cheering. Just about anything was better then the other images evoked by the pitiful latex spoor.

All these things were bad. But there was something worse—something that completely perplexed him and would utterly depress him for days. It was the toys. For Lundeen, worst of all were the child’s toys they would occasionally find as they picked their way through places like this.

“How,” he would ask whomever was his partner on days such as these, “how can anybody take their kids into a…a goddam vile
hole
like that?” He would obsess on the subject, embellishing the actuality of what he had seen with mental images that bordered on the grotesque.

And Don Lundeen had an imagination that was vivid, to say the least. That was the main reason his partners seldom lasted more than one thirty-day assignment cycle—that, and Lundeen’s habit of drifting ever deeper into his bleak musings.

Josie Clark was now on Day 22 and no longer saw a benefit in maintaining even the appearance of a chummy relationship.

“Don! Yo, Lun-
deen
—hey, shake it out your ass, alright?” Josie was standing at the far wall, leaning one work-gloved hand against the crumbling red bricks.

At this rate,
she thought, sourly,
we’ll have to come back to this rat hole tomorrow.

Josie watched her coworker trudge sadly through the muck and assorted trash. She sighed; Don Lundeen wasn’t a bad guy—he was just a walking argument for mandatory lithium therapy.

“Let’s try to pick up the pace, okay?” she suggested, as mildly as she could manage. It still came out sounding like a rebuke. Lundeen nodded, and through the plastic faceplate she saw the expression in his eyes. Josie Clark recognized the signs, and she shook her head violently.

“Don, I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I’ve been working with you less than a month, and I’m spending half my pay on Valium and St. John’s wort. You’re not just a depressed guy; you’re a
carrier
.”

They walked down a windowless corridor and turned a corner. This was once the assembly area of the plant where even a frugal management recognized the essential value of light.

In its heyday, the place had been a beehive of activity. Vehicles pulled trains of low carts into the room. They entered from one side filled with brass casings packed with propellant, or steel-and-lead projectiles filled with a smorgasbord of lethalities. The cart-trains left filled with artillery shells, ready to be loaded on trucks for shipment. Here, rows upon rows of industrial windows had once filled the high walls.

No longer. Would-be fastball pitchers, practicing with chunks of brick, had shattered most of the lower glass panes long years before; BB-gun marksmen had taken out the rest. An army of glaziers could work for a week and still not fill all the sharp-edged holes.

But at least it was bright here. The late-afternoon sunlight poured into the room, a blinding glare that dazzled the eyes of the two workers. Josie shielded her eyes, squinting in the unaccustomed brightness. Don looked away, scanning the far end of the cavernous room.

Which was probably why Don noticed it first.

He squinted, trying to see clearly through the glare off his plastic faceplate.

“Josie—you see that?” From behind the respirator, his voice came out flat and otherworldly.

It was a burned-out car. The tires had flamed and burst, and the vehicle squatted on its rims in the center of an irregular burn ring. Somebody had pulled it into the building through one of the old shipping entrances and torched it. On the muck-covered floor, a second, larger set of tire tracks led out the same way.

They approached the car, interested but not surprised. This was not the first burned-out hulk they had found in the Stannard complex. Most of them were old beaters or had been stripped for whatever parts could be easily sold.

This one looks like it was fairly new before it caught fire,
Lundeen thought.
Not stripped—not even the tires were pulled. That’s odd.
Aside from the damage when the tank blew, the vehicle appeared relatively intact, though he noticed that no license plates hung on the blackened bumpers.

Then Josie Clark stooped and peered intently through the cracked, soot-coated window. She stiffened, and her eyes opened wide behind her faceplate.

“Don,” he heard her shout to him, “I think there’s a
guy
in there.”

Lundeen stepped closer. He saw the car was a Ford, a Taurus that might once have been painted green. He cupped his hands against the passenger window and pressed his face close to the heat-crazed glass.

Up until then, he sincerely believed his dreams—both asleep and awake—were already populated by the worst the Stannard had to offer.

As he looked inside at the blackened figure slumped forward stiffly against the charred steering wheel, he realized how wrong he had been.

The harsh fluorescent lighting in the police department made my eyes burn, and the chronic headache it fueled pounded in my temples. I felt drained, very close to defeat.

I was sitting at Terry’s desk again; this time, the piles of paper, files and assorted detritus seemed to me too wearying to contemplate, yet alone delve.

Lichtman’s death had not been unexpected, but he had been the one constant on which I had fallen back every time the case hit a dead end. I still had no clear picture of his motives, even now, and I held to no illusions that Lichtman was acting from pure benevolence.

But the question of how much, if anything, anyone owed Sam Lichtman was a moot point now; those ledger books had been cleared and sealed to mortal eyes forever. There would be no more answers from him.

Finish the job quickly, Kay had said. But whenever a door looked as if it might lead to an answer, someone slammed it shut, violently. I looked again at the case files I had pulled from the safe. They provided no answers—only more questions, more bloodstained squares in a patchwork of violence that I still could not force into a coherent picture.

The missing artwork was the key, of that I was certain. Stan and Kathleen Levinstein had acquired it, and both died as a result. Rebecca Hunt had faked insurance documentation on it, and that had ensured her death. Sonnenberg had tried to steal it from the Levinsteins, and for his troubles had been incinerated by a gasoline bomb. The two Russians at his apartment wanted it; one of them was now dead, along with the County cop named Erlich. The other Russian had been ready to kill Posson and Bird to find it and had almost succeeded on both counts.

He was still out there, along with God knew how many others willing to kill and maim over a collection of damnable artwork—and I was running out of leads to follow.

I thought about calling the Travers woman again and wondered why.

I had tried to reach her several times throughout the day only to listen to the ringing of an unanswered telephone. The phones were either still off the hook or, like me, she had no answering machine.

I found the thought somehow intriguing. When she wasn’t seducing the random artist, did she live in an enforced isolation that was both curse and comfort? Was it to deny outsiders one more way to admit themselves, easily and indiscriminately, to her life? She had mentioned being estranged from her husband; was this her method of holding him away, of denying him the opportunity for either reconciliation or recrimination?

Or did she simply prefer to ignore her ringing telephone, seeing it as an uncouth electronic challenge to her own sense of privacy and of self?

I suddenly smiled, realizing just how tired I was. I had busily constructed a complex picture of Ms. Marita Travers. It was a picture that revealed more about myself than about a woman I had met only once. Of the mores or motivations of Marita Travers, I had no clue.

That was, however, an easy lapse to remedy. Gil was still in his office, and that meant that Chaz was still outside Kay Cieloczki’s house. I had a choice: if I left now, I could take over the watchdog job for the hour or so until Gil called it a night.

Or I had time to satisfy a certain curiosity before it became yet another obsession.

I checked my watch: a few minutes past eight thirty. It was still early, and the Travers’s address was only slightly out of my way.

Later, when it was all over and the paper-pushers had taken over, the bureaucrats wrote a postmortem. With twenty-twenty hindsight, one of the questions they raised involved the whereabouts of Nederlander on the final day of the Levinstein case.

How, the authors wondered—with no effort to contain their sarcasm—could a police chief simply not show up for duty one morning without raising an alarm, or at least a few eyebrows?

One answer was that he—or at least, his car—had been seen that very day, parked near the Lake Tower Municipal Center. Not just seen, but the image logged and recorded on the digital surveillance system that had installed throughout the Municipal Center the year before.

One of the “Big Brother” cameras was mounted on an exterior corner of the building so as to command the street outside. There, at ten frames per minute, it dutifully recorded a vehicle that had parked for hours down the street.

It was a shiny black Lincoln Navigator, and subsequent digital enhancement of the license plates showed the vehicle was registered to one Robert J. Nederlander.

• • •

He must have been watching all day, waiting for his quarry to make the move he now knew must come soon. It was not the most exciting way to spend a day, but at least his car was large and comfortable. The CD player must have been a particularly welcome distraction from what was otherwise a most boring experience.

Once, in the early afternoon when he had spotted Talmadge Evans leaving the building on foot, he had left the Navigator where it was parked on the corner opposite the Municipal Center, and risked following on foot.

According to the surveillance camera that captured his image, Evans had walked down the street to a small coffee shop; a burly man, who is seen only from the back, left the Navigator and followed. The city manager had spent fifteen minutes there, then returned to his office. He had not reappeared the rest of the day.

Finally, shortly before eight thirty, the recording showed Evans crossing the parking lot to his own car and pulling away.

If Evans noticed the big black vehicle following him at a discrete distance, he gave no sign.