Pyro (27 page)

62. ROCKY IN THE PARKING LOT

         
By six in the morning my machine had collected twenty-two messages. It took twenty minutes to listen to the first eleven and clear them. Most were from the media, including one from Tony Webber, who seemed to be under the illusion there was a bond between us. “Lieutenant Wollf. I’m guessing you probably weren’t happy about everything you read yesterday. I’m free for breakfast, so this’ll be a chance to give your side of the story. I’ll call in the morning and we can arrange a time and place.”

I erased it and moved to the next. “You and your newspaper buddies. You think you know everything.” That was all it said. I was pretty sure it was the pyromaniac.

There were a lot of ways to kill somebody with fire, and if you were trapping firefighters who were already putting themselves at risk in fairly predictable patterns, the task was that much simpler.

Apparently the newspaper coverage hadn’t pleased him any more than it had pleased me. What his gripe was, I could only guess, but then, people who set fires and jacked off in public were not easy to understand.

There was a TV truck in the parking lot, which I had to assume was there to ambush me, so instead of going out front to collect my papers, I read
The Seattle Times
and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
on the Internet.

SEATTLE FIRE LIEUTENANT REFUSES TO COOPERATE WITH MEDIA.

The
PI
was the primary offender today, as if they needed to catch up after yesterday’s greater discretion.

They made it sound as if my mother had been a linchpin in a circle of lowlifes who drank and drugged and partied and tricked and neglected their kids and did God-knows-what-else. Maybe some of that was true, but our mother had never taken drugs and never tricked, and she’d loved us right up until the morning Alfred plunged the kitchen knife into her throat.

When I’m hurt, bored, or in trouble, I clean.

I scrubbed the bathroom, mopped the kitchen floor, did three loads of laundry, articles of bedding I thought Susan and her friends might have touched the other day. I washed up and prepared a vegetable omelet, using a recipe I’d found on the Internet. I took my time with all of this, hoping the day would go faster if I slowed things down.

It was noon when I thought to turn on the television. Our local cable channel carried a crime network piped in from Atlanta. I was in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea when a big-eyed, bleach-blond news anchor named MacKenzie began speaking to an on-the-scene reporter in Seattle named Rocky. I recognized Lake Washington in the background before I realized they were broadcasting from the parking lot outside.

“Rocky. There have been new developments in Seattle over the past twenty-four hours. Tell us more about what’s going on.”

“Well, MacKenzie. There’s been one primary pyromaniac working Seattle for several weeks now. And that’s what they call them out here on the West Coast, MacKenzie—pyromaniacs. Now I looked up pyromania in the dictionary as I was preparing this piece, and it is described as an excessive desire to set fire to things. That’s certainly what’s been going on here, MacKenzie, because over the past two weeks there have been over a hundred and fifty arson fires, and even though most of those fires were caught in their incipient stages and put out by the fire department, or tapped, as they call it, some of them got going pretty good, and so far the damage estimate, including overtime for police and fire investigators, is well into the millions.”

“Rocky, there’s more than one arsonist working. Isn’t that correct?”

“That’s right, MacKenzie. They’re not sure how many. They have the primary arsonist, who’s working in the Central Area, a part of town that is mostly poor and African American. Then they have at least four other firebugs, who are thought to be copycats and have been active in other parts of the city.”

“What’s the thinking on the relationship between the primary arsonist and this fire lieutenant, Paul Wollf?”

“Well, MacKenzie, even the local reporters are finding this man, Wollf, to be something of an enigma. We do know this. He’s been in the Seattle Fire Department a little under nine years. Three years ago he became a lieutenant. MacKenzie, after that the record gets a little murky. It is said that he had the top score on the promotional register, but on the other hand, his personal relationships with his superiors have sometimes been, let me say, on shaky ground. In fact, there’s been a pretty strong rumor circulating in the fire department over the past few months that Lieutenant Wollf actually got into a fistfight with a chief and knocked him out. I haven’t been able to get any official comment on this, but it’s widely thought to be true.

“Also, local reporters have dug up some interesting information. His father was likewise a lieutenant in the fire department and lost his life in an arson fire twenty-five years ago. MacKenzie, the locals here now believe the pyromaniac working the Central Area is the same pyromaniac who set the fire in which Lieutenant Wollf’s father lost his life.”

“Rocky, you’re not suggesting Lieutenant Wollf is fighting fires set by the same man who killed his father twenty-five years ago?”

“MacKenzie, that’s exactly what a local wag suggested in one of the Seattle papers yesterday morning. And that brings us to some of the more bizarre aspects of this already bizarre case of fire-setting and murder. At this point in time we have no idea what the lieutenant or the arsonist knows about the other. We
do
know that when this lieutenant was ten years old, his mother was killed by her live-in boyfriend, and then the boyfriend was killed by Wollf’s brother in a bizarre incidence of domestic violence.”

“It is bizarre. Rocky? What does Lieutenant Wollf say about all this?”

“That’s just it, MacKenzie. At a hastily called press conference at fire department headquarters yesterday morning, Wollf refused to answer questions.”

“Rocky. We have a tape of that news conference. Let’s air that now.”

I hadn’t seen myself on a video camera since the last time I walked through a television store and wasn’t especially happy with the way I looked then. This was worse.

“It’s a sad case all around, MacKenzie, and getting sadder each time there’s another fire. Meanwhile, the men and women of the Seattle Fire Department continue to battle on valiantly.”

“Rocky, is there any chance you might speak to Wollf in the near future?”

“We’re outside his condo right now, and we’re sure going to try, MacKenzie.”

“Thank you for that update, Rocky.”

63. TESTING THE WATERS WITH A BAD BOY

         
At four-thirty I picked up the receiver when I heard Vanessa’s voice on my answering machine. She was right. I needed somebody to talk to. It was hard to believe how good it was to hear a friendly voice.

“Hey. Listen. I know you said you’d call if you wanted to talk, but I just happened to be in the neighborhood to visit my grandmother when I thought of you.”

“Vanessa. You’re not that good of a liar. You called to cheer me up, and I’m glad you did. I have to warn you, though, I’m in a pretty lousy mood.”

“After all that crap in the papers, who wouldn’t be?”

“Since you just happen to be in the neighborhood anyway, maybe you’d like to stop by for a while? I could use some company,” I said, feeling grateful I could get the words out.

“I’ll be right over. How about if I pick up some groceries and make dinner?”

“I don’t know if I feel like eating, but that sounds fine.”

She arrived at my door thirty minutes later with two grocery bags, droplets of rainwater from the drizzle outside highlighting her hair and coat like dust under a diamond polisher.

I checked to see if anybody’d followed her, then locked the door behind her.

“Expecting company?” she asked.

I grunted.

“By the way. Did you know there are news people standing in your parking lot like buzzards on a fence. I mean
birds
on a fence. Did I say buzzards?”

I laughed for the first time in two days.

She slid the bags onto the kitchen countertop. “How long have they been out there?”

“I spotted them this morning.”

“What happens when you try to get to your car?”

“I don’t.”

“No wonder you’re in such a bad mood.”

Vanessa began working on a stir-fry with chicken and rice. I stood at the sink, where I diced a tomato and chopped onions, a bell pepper, a cucumber, then washed lettuce for a salad. Neither of us spoke. She’d kicked off her shoes and lost her coat. After I cut my finger and swore, she told me to sit down. I turned on the gas fireplace and flopped on the couch in the living room near the windows to the deck. I have no idea how long I sat staring at the fireplace.

Vanessa, sensing I was in no mood for chitchat and out of reach of meaningful dialogue, kept to herself in the kitchen. That we could be together without speaking to each other for thirty minutes at a pop spoke volumes to me about our relationship, which felt as though it had progressed from casual acquaintance to the sort of deeper friendship I’d read about and seen in the movies, yet had never partaken of; certainly not with a woman.

In high school the few relationships I had with the opposite sex were with girls who wanted to be around a bad boy, one-night-stand girls, flirts I met at city dances and never saw again. Looking back on it, I must have had a certain roguish charm, swaggering about in my battered motorcycle jacket, eager to fight any local bully. I looked older than my age and began picking up adult women, usually heavy drinkers. Once, I even had to go down to the King County Public Health office to take the cure.

It was the killing of Alfred that had resurfaced to bother me the most. I’d shoved it into one of those unused recesses we all keep in the deepest part of our gray matter, where things we do not, cannot, or will not think about are kept until such time as we might drag them out into the sunshine for scrutiny.

We had lost our mother in the ugliest way possible and slain a man minutes later. My brother and I. Two skinny-ass, rail-thin, ragamuffin boys nobody in the neighborhood had ever thought two licks about had been involved in the most bizarre double-killing in a decade. We’d killed a grown man. He had killed my mother, but that never made me feel any better about what we did to him.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in a long while.

These were the events that resigned me to a life crowded with isolation.

64. THE OCCUPATION ARMY

         
Vanessa stepped into the living room. “Dinner’s ready, but you don’t look hungry.”

“Sorry.”

She sat down beside me. “It’s okay. We’ll put it in the fridge. You can have it tomorrow.”

“I’ve been thinking about the night we killed Alfred Osbourne.”

“I notice you always say ‘we,’ but the way I understand it, it was your brother who killed him.”

“He’s the one who went to jail.”

“What brought this on? “

“Unconnected dots. Connect the dots long enough and you start seeing what you’ve missed before. I’ve been trying to understand things the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been trying to understand the wrong things. I’ve been trying to understand why I am the way I am.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re saying.”

“You’ve seen me go off.”

“You mean your anger?”

“That’s part of it.”

She sat beside me on the sofa, and the closeness of her body slowed my thought processes and renewed the sexual tension I’d felt between us from the first night I saw her. “I’ve been wondering why I’m so angry all the time. I thought my problem was brain chemistry. Now I think it’s deeper. The point is, I don’t want to be walking around with all this anger. With this inability to connect.”

“Tell me what happened the morning your brother killed Alfred.”

“Well, this is what the police found when they arrived. Two boys standing in the living room in a pool of Alfred T. Osbourne’s blood. Our mother in the kitchen stabbed seven times. Five bullets in Alfred. Three in his left lung. Two in the back of his head, one fired from so close the muzzle blast set his hair on fire.

“The cops get there, and my brother’s covered in blood, my mother’s and Alfred’s and maybe a little of his own. He’s waving the pistol around. The first two cops point their guns at him. It was a bad minute or two. After they got the gun out of his hands, they cuffed him and searched us. In my pockets they found a blue see-through spinner yo-yo and twenty-five cents. In Neil’s pocket they found one of Alfred’s fingers that had been shot off when he put his hand out to fend off the attack. Neil hated him so much he was going to keep it as a souvenir. That was when Neil told them he killed Alfred.”

“So he confessed.”

“He lied.”

“What are you saying?”

“I was the one who shot Alfred.”

“What?”

“Neil took the rap for it, but I did it. I shot him once, and he looked up from my brother and said, ‘I’m going to make you eat that, you little bastard.’ Meaning the gun. Then he came around the end of the couch and I fired again. Twice. He dropped to his knees. After that, all he wanted was to get out of the apartment. He started crawling toward the door. Didn’t say anything, just changed his angle and headed for the door.

“He was crawling when I shot him in the back of the head. Remarkably, he kept on moving, so I put the gun against the back of his skull and pulled the trigger one last time. When the cops got there, my brother took the rap. I think he wanted to believe he was the one who fired the shots. Later on I found out about paraffin tests that can determine if you’ve fired a gun. But they didn’t test us.”

“That must have been terrible. Your mother, Alfred, all of it.”

I wanted to say something further, but instead of speaking I began crying. It came on so quickly I didn’t have time to head it off. It wasn’t the boohoo blubbering kind of weeping, but more the slow, teary, eyes-dribbling variety where your face falls and your brain goes numb and your limbs go weak and you don’t think it will ever stop and you don’t care who’s watching or what happens, because if this isn’t the end of the world, it’s certainly the end of
something,
and you are overwhelmed with this ineluctable sadness; you think this is perhaps the greatest sadness anybody on earth has ever tasted. Later, when you ponder it, you realize no matter what the trigger, you were really feeling sorry for yourself, for your miserable existence and for your own end, which is the last sadness any of us will ever feel and which is the underlying conceit in all gloom.

It went on for a while. For reasons I couldn’t decipher I felt no shame. Vanessa had seen me grouchy; she’d seen me in Terminator mode; and now she’d seen me crying.

Aside from the times when I sat alone in the dark watching a movie—
National Velvet
came to mind—I could not remember the last time I’d wept. I’d stopped crying over real events about the time I started using my fists at school.

For a moment or two I was afraid she was going to leave, but she shifted her weight, moved closer, and put her arm around my shoulder.

I was crying for a lot of things.

I was crying for my lost childhood. For my tortured adolescent years. For the hardness that had taken over my soul. I was crying for the eons Neil had spent in lockup, for the druggie he’d married, who might have had her own life if her stepfather hadn’t raped her. For the things that were within my grasp that I would never be able to reach. For the lives that could have been so wonderful but had gone so miserable. For my father’s ending. For all those years my mother chased the bottom of a bottle and allowed herself to be seduced by boozehounds and eventually murdered by one. For the timidity that had crept into my life, for my fear of women, for my craving for something higher and better.

Then suddenly something came over me. A sense of hope. A feeling you get when you’re being beaten senseless by the town bully and you know you at least have to try, that you can’t go down without at least trying.

I turned toward Vanessa. When you pined for an impossibility, you were destined for disappointment, and my life was full of disappointment. Once more wasn’t going to change anything. I wiped my eyes and kissed her.

She seemed surprised—no—astonished.

She pulled back and looked at me, and for a second I couldn’t decide whether she was going to slap me or call the vice squad. Instead, she kissed
me.
It wasn’t the sneaky guerrilla kiss I’d planted on her either, but more of a long-term-occupation-army kiss, one that knew it was welcome and would stick around for as long as needed, put up barracks, build roads, and buttress the economy.

The thing about a kiss that makes it so wonderful is not the touch of warm moist flesh on warm moist flesh, although that produces undeniable electricity, but the mere fact that the other person wants to do it. Wants to be there with you, has nowhere else to be other than holding you and letting you hold them. Even if the commitment is only for a moment, it’s a commitment, and more than I ever thought I would get from this woman.