Pyro (25 page)

57. A SHED IN THE RED

         
Kerrigan’s homestead was west of town on a flat piece of land just off the highway, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island to the north, foothills with wind-battled misshapen trees to the south.

The locals up here fished the strait in small boats, and every once in a while one of them got lost in the fog or dropped a motor and blew out to sea.

Mrs. Kerrigan greeted us at the door of a modular home. The years had thinned her limbs like stick taffy and given her a watermelon middle. A man in his seventies with kindly eyes appeared behind her.

“Bill Kerrigan,” he said, giving me the death grip so many retirees used on the young. “You couldn’t be anyone but Neil Wollf’s son. You’re the spitting image of your old man.”

“And this is your wife?” Mrs. Kerrigan asked.

“This is my friend, Vanessa Pennington.”

“I’m Grace. Vanessa, why don’t we go off to the kitchen and let the men talk?”

“I’d like that,” Vanessa said, though I knew she wanted to hear our conversation.

When we were alone, Kerrigan turned back to me. “He was a wonderful man, your father. He had a way of talking to a man like he was the only person in the world who counted. He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

“There was
one.
”

Kerrigan was a tall, vigorous man with well-defined features and pink skin that complemented his swept-back white hair. He sat in a recliner that featured a pair of reading glasses perched on one arm, while I sank into a couch across from him. “You’re bigger than your father. Hell, you’re bigger than most people. You play ball?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s a pity. What’d you do in school?”

“Mostly I fought and got kicked out.”

“You couldn’t have fought
much.
There aren’t too many people dumb enough to take on somebody your size.”

“I got my growth late. I took some lickings before that.”

“Tell me, what brings you up here?”

“I believe the arsonist who killed my father is working again.”

Kerrigan gave me the kind of eyeballing people give you when they’re trying to decide whether you’re bonkers. “What makes you say that?”

“The Shasta cans are back. Plus, he told me.”

“He told you? What do you mean, he told you?”

“It’s a long story.”

Kerrigan mulled it over. You thought about it, it
did
sound preposterous.

“I was hoping you’d tell me about the night my father died.”

“At the time we hadn’t lost a firefighter in quite a few years, so it shocked us.” Kerrigan looked out the window wistfully. I could see the emotion welling up in his eyes. My father’s death had been the seminal event in this man’s career, just as it had been the seminal event in my life, though I couldn’t recall the emotion the way he did. “Your mother, Emma? At the memorial service she lost all the strength in her legs. She got so weak, she practically had to be carried. Watching her about tore my heart out. I never seen anybody suffer so much.”

“She suffered for a long time.”

“What a damn shame,” he said, shaking his head. “I hate to hear that. Anyway, this arsonist started working, and before we knew it we had copycats. We figured about six of ’em. Are you in FIU? Is that why you’re here?”

“No, sir. I’m on Three Truck. I’m here because he killed my father and he’s in our district, playing cat and mouse. Getting closer all the time. Last week he booby-trapped a house so the roof would cave in. Two of my guys almost got killed.”

“Jesus. That don’t sound good.”

“No, sir.”

“What it boils down to is they start fires because they like to. Pyromaniacs. They’re weak personalities, ineffectual in the real world, the kind of people who get laughed at. Screwups who blame their problems on others.”

“Can you tell me about the night my father died?”

“It was wintertime . . . God, I remember you both at the memorial service. Were you the older one?”

“The little guy.”

“Sure. You kept taking off your clip-on tie. A woman kept putting it back on.”

“That would have been my grandmother.”

“The night your pop died, Engine Seven had maybe twelve, fourteen calls. Running from one to the next. He used matches or a cigarette lighter. He had a tendency to set two or three small fires in a vicinity. While we were fighting those, he’d wander off and set more. Mostly he worked the Central District. Once in a while Capitol Hill. He left these Shasta diet black cherry cans. One night your father left his crew while they were working a ‘shed in the red’ on Thirtieth and Pike. The crew figured he was scouting for more fires. Maybe ten minutes later somebody spotted smoke a block away. Your father still hadn’t come back, but Engine Seven took the run anyway. It was close enough, they figured your father would see the rig. It turned out to be a basement fire in a little crackerbox house.”

“Twenty-ninth and Pike, right off Union?”

“That’s the place. It was coming out the windows by the time they spotted it. You couldn’t even see the floor. Shit piled to the ceiling. The old lady lived there was a pack rat.”

“You ever figure out how my father got in that basement?”

“Nobody ever did. Engine Thirty was helping with the overhaul, dragging smoldering material out. Mattresses. Furniture. He’d been missing about an hour when Stanley Bumstead began wading around down there. Bumstead found your dad all curled up into a ball with his back to the wall like somebody waiting for a bus.”

Kerrigan’s eyes began to water over. I was touched by how much of this he’d taken personally. I wished he’d come around when we were kids. It would have meant a lot to know this gentle and thoughtful man had been mourning our father.

Kerrigan sat upright. “We hoped he went fast. It’s always hard to know for sure. I guess the fire was rolling around in there for a good little while. I think he realized he wasn’t getting out and just went over to the corner and sat down.”

The thought of my father panicking in that tiny basement chilled me to the quick. You get lost. You get burned. You panic. No way around that. I actually began to go into shock thinking about it. I wanted to tell Kerrigan to stop talking, that I thought I was going down, but I didn’t do either one. The last time I felt this woozy I’d been hit in the back of the skull with a hardball by Billy Winston. Tenth grade.

“I’ve talked to firefighters who came close to burning to death. Both of them went into a sleeplike state, so I don’t think after the beginning he was hurting much.”

I figured this last was a fiction Kerrigan had been telling himself over the years to make himself feel better.

For twenty-five years I’d wondered about my father’s last minutes. By the time I was eight, Neil had instilled in me a legend of our father as the city’s biggest hero. Then, between ourselves, we propagated a religion of hatred, vowing revenge against the pyromaniac.

Pyromaniac. I was six when I learned the meaning of that word.

58. HE’S GOING TO DIE ANYWAY

         
“Was my father wearing a mask?” I asked Kerrigan.

“Naw. We had them on the rigs, but you were a sissy if you went for a mask before you’d taken your share of smoke. The second-in group might use them after the first crew knocked the fire down. The thinking was, the extra forty or fifty seconds it would take to put your mask on would let the fire grow too big. Of course, what they found out later was that you go in there without a mask, choking and puking, you weren’t going to put out much fire. You took that extra minute to put your mask on, then you could breathe and think and the fire went right out. It turned out being macho was the worst thing to do, but none of us knew that back then.”

“Did you ever think maybe he surprised the firebug as he was starting a fire and got blindsided?”

“There was no way to know one way or t’other. We took pictures of the crowds. We interrogated several young males but never got anywhere.”

I told him about the cross-dresser I’d chased. I told him the story of the second man in the alley. I told him our pyro said my father fell into a basement window well after getting into a fight with another fireman. “Is there any possibility he’s telling the truth?”

“Whoa now. You’re not thinking a fireman pushed your father in?”

“That’s what our suspect told me.”

“The only firefighters in civvies would have been in fire investigation. Myself and a few others, and most of us had been downtown until after they found the body.”

“Who else was around from FIU that night?”

“Dan Traffic. Carl Whitney. Steve Slaughter.”

“Lieutenant Slaughter?”

“Steve, yeah. He was there.”

“You know where these other guys are?”

“Traffic is dead. He had a heart attack six months after he retired. Whitney is living in Europe. He got pissed off at the federal government and left the country. Slaughter’s still around. Isn’t he something?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Whooo. Of all the unfinished business in my life, that’s the thing I’d give my left nut to have turn out different. Your father.”

“Did Steve know my father?”

“Hasn’t he told you any of this?”

“No, sir.”

“Your father was Steve’s first officer. Your old man nursed him through his probation up at Twenty-five’s. He worshiped your old man. You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

Kerrigan stared at the floor. “So this cross-dresser gives you some song and dance. Do you have any reason to believe him?”

“At the time, he thought I was going to kill him.”

“Were you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re going to spoil the rest of your life for some asshole’s going to die anyway?”

“We’re all going to die anyway. It’s just a matter of how and when.”

Kerrigan remained silent for a moment. “If he thought you were going to kill him, he might have been making up stories.”

“Maybe.”

“Whatever you think, there’s nobody your father could have been fighting that night except the arsonist.”

On the way out the door, Bill said, “I meant to tell you how sorry I was to hear about your mother. That was a bad way to end. I thought about you boys when it happened. I know that was a long time ago, but I
am
sorry.”

“Thanks.”

It wasn’t until almost two hours later when we were sunning ourselves on the windswept deck of the Bainbridge ferry that Vanessa said, “Do you mind if I ask about your mother?”

“I don’t mind. Actually, I’d like to tell somebody. I never have.”

59. I WASN’T ALWAYS THE NICE GUY
YOU SEE IN FRONT OF YOU TODAY

         
Vanessa looked at me with stark expectation in her gray-blue eyes. It was true I’d never told anyone this story before, and a part of me wondered why I was telling her now.

“My mother was raised by the Captain Queeg of fathers. She eloped at seventeen basically to get out of the house. That marriage lasted four months. Our father, her second husband, had not been the love of her life so much as a second ticket out of the house, which she’d been forced to move back into after her first marriage failed. She didn’t really fall in love with our father until a few years later. He knew she didn’t love him when they got married, but he’d been determined to win her over. And he did. The only thing he wouldn’t do for her was quit the fire department.

“After a year of marriage my brother, Neil, came along. Three years later I was born. When my father was at work, my mother didn’t like being alone at night with two babies in the house. She didn’t like the stories our father brought home about crispy critters or the guys he worked with or the things he’d seen. I remember a dog we used to have named Gibbs who got hit by a car when our dad was at work, and I remember my mother crying like a baby over it for days.

“Not long after my father made lieutenant, an arsonist began setting fires in the Central District. At one of the fires, my father got trapped in a house and died. My mother fell apart. It was just like Gibbs getting hit by the car all over again, only this time she didn’t stop crying for a year. These days they would call it clinical depression. About a year after my father died, our mother began drinking. She just . . . when my father died, something broke inside her.

“She loved Neil and me, but she couldn’t cope and couldn’t take care of us the way she should have. My brother and I got into trouble. We used to steal stuff. Neil got a BB gun and he must have broken out every car windshield in a radius of two miles. In the end, our mother fell in with this man named Alfred T. Osbourne. Alfred lived with us maybe six weeks before he got into one last drunken fight with my mother and ended up killing her.”

“Oh, no.”

“There’s more. If you lived in town you might remember the thirteen-year-old who got sent up for murdering his mother’s lover?”

“It doesn’t sound familiar.”

“I was ten. The thirteen-year-old was my brother.”

“Oh, no,” she said again. “But this man killed your mother. Surely it was justifiable.”

“Neil ended up with a court-appointed attorney who drank. It’s a long story.”

“So you went to live with your grandfather?”

“Right. He was a disciplinarian, and I was the kid raised by wolves. We didn’t get along.”

“What happened to you?”

“I became a firefighter, rescued a famous movie star, met her granddaughter, and we took trips.” I grinned.

“No, really.”

“I lived with my grandfather and grandmother for a few months. Then I lived with my uncle Elmo, where I lasted until I was almost twelve. Back to my grandparents for a month. I got passed around like a bad cold. I guess I deserved it. I was a jackass. I used to steal things. I guess what I’m saying is I wasn’t always the nice guy you see in front of you today.”

She laughed at my lame joke.