California Fire and Life (25 page)

“Daziatnik, it is barely furnished,” she says.

“I thought you would like to do that, Mother,” he says. “And I count on your taste. Anyway, it is yours.”

“Mine?”

“Although I have kept a room for myself. If you find that acceptable.”

She kisses him on both cheeks and then fleetingly on the mouth.

“It is acceptable to me.”

Nicky separates himself from the Two Crosses. Except for his security cell, he never sees his lieutenants. Lets them run their operations, kick in the money to him. He’s satisfied to manage the
obochek
and run his real estate investments.

And collect his furniture. He goes to his first auction with some of his new friends, just as a way to kill a cloudy January Saturday. Ends up falling in love. Not with any of the rich, svelte women he sees there, but with a George II dressing table that calls out to him,
I’m yours
.

More than that.

Calls out to him, I’m
you
.

And before he knows it, Nicky has his hand out and he’s plunking down fifteen K on a big piece of walnut.

Which he loves.

There is love that passes and love that lasts. There is love that satisfies the body and the heart, and which is passing, and there is love that nourishes the soul, and which is lasting.

The furniture is the only thing that Nicky has ever found that nourishes his soul.

At first it was a class thing.

He bought it because he
could
buy it, because the ability to pay that kind of money symbolized his triumph over the ghetto. Because the purchase of art—as opposed to cars, or horses, for instance—gave him an entrée into the world of the beautiful people. It made him not just one more real estate tycoon, but a man of culture, polish and, yes,
class
.

Nicky is too smart not to acknowledge to himself the truth of all that.

But in time—and not much time at that—it became more than a status symbol.

It became a true love.

Was it, Nicky wonders, the art itself? But that somewhat begs the question, doesn’t it? Perhaps it was the purity of effort that a work of art represents, the genuine desire to create something that is truly beautiful. A purity of effort in such contrast to a corrupt world?

Or is it the beauty itself? Could it be that simple, he wonders, that I am irresistibly drawn to possess beauty? Engaging again in cheap psychoanalysis (Ah, I
have
become an American), it is not difficult to imagine that a boy raised in poverty would wish to own beauty if he could.

It has been, let us face it, for the first thirty or so years an ugly life. The dreary flat, the hideousness of Afghanistan, the horror of the jail cells. Dirty ice, dirty snow, mud, blood, shit and filth.

He wakes up from time to time with nightmares from the war—a hateful stereotype that he finds embarrassing—and it helps to turn on the lights and sit for a while with a fine piece of art. To admire its beauty, study its form and design, to let it take him away from the images of bloated corpses, mutilated comrades, or the recurring dream of the
mujahedin
fighter hit by the flamethrower—staggering forward, on fire, literally a whirling dervish twirling in agony under the swirling flames.

It helps Nicky at such times to look at his artworks.

Other nights sleep takes him back to the jail cells, the filth-encrusted, freezing concrete floors. The stench of sweat and shit and
piss, the smell of fear. The screaming psychos, the violent sodomites, the quick deaths by homemade blades or garrotes or simple beatings. Skulls cracked against walls, heads crushed onto floors, faces beaten to mush by club-wielding guards. Not an inch of space to call one’s own. Not a moment of privacy. Not a single instance of beauty to be seen anywhere at any price.

Hell.

So to stand in one’s own house—in the clean, lovely serenity of one’s own home—and contemplate beauty in the form of art, whenever and for however long one wishes … well, it nourishes a soul in need of nourishment.

And it is passive, Nicky thinks. It is simply beauty there to be enjoyed. Once purchased it makes no other demands, has no other requirements except to be admired and enjoyed.

And it tells him that he’s risen above it all. Risen above the cramped walk-up he shared with Mother, above the dirt, cold, blood and fire of Afghanistan.
Far
above the filth and stench and cold of the prison, above the monotonous kitsch of the Two Crosses.

The cabinet tells him that he’s arrived. That he’s not even a parvenu new-money California real estate shark but a gentleman.

He starts buying books, visiting dealerships, attending more and more auctions, and it’s not long before he’s a major collector of antique English furniture. He buys, he sells, he trades—he makes a new set of friends.

He gets a new identity.

Nicky Vale—real estate mogul and collector.

The turnaround inside one generation.

He makes the new friends that come with money, and from the friends he absorbs the south coast style. Discovers the shops at South Coast Plaza and becomes a regular at Armani, Brooks Brothers, Giuducce et al. Becomes a standard figure at the good parties in Newport Beach, Corona Del Mar and Laguna. Gets himself a boat and hosts his own parties out on the blue ocean.

Daziatnik becomes Nicky, and everyone loves Nicky.

Why not? He’s charming, rich and funny and has the most wonderful taste in art. He’s handsome, he’s exotic, and inside a year he’s on the A list for the best parties on the south coast.

At one of them he meets Pamela.

Incendiary origin, opportunity and motive.

Also known as the Tripartite Proof.

Whatever it’s called, you need these three elements to prove arson by an insured in court. And if you deny a claim based on arson, you’d better be able to prove it in court.

Same with the murder, Jack thinks. To deny the life insurance claim, I need to prove that it
was
a homicide, and that Nicky had motive and opportunity.

Incendiary origin is just a fancy way of saying that someone intentionally set the fire. What you need to satisfy this one are such things as traces of accelerants, the remnants of an incendiary device, maybe a timer. You also want the indicators of a hot, fast-moving fire: big V-pattern, alligator char, deep char on the floor, crazed glass, a pour pattern.

Most important of all these is traces of accelerants, and now he has them. Dr. Bambi will come into court and testify that he found heavy traces of kerosene in the flooring and the floor joists. He’ll show the jury his charts and graphs and the jury will go back into the room believing that someone poured kerosene around that bedroom.

So Jack checks off incendiary origin and pushes it out of his mind. Opportunity—that is, did the insured have a chance to set the fire or cause to have it set? It goes a little deeper than that. The actual standard is “
exclusive
opportunity”—was the insured the only party to have access to the house during the critical time when the fire was set?

Opportunity is a tricky mother. It’s why you look to see if doors and windows were locked. It’s why you talk to neighbors to see what—and whom—they might have seen. It’s why you take recorded statements to pin the insured down to where they were at the time of the fire.

It’s elusive.

One reason being that arsonists—unless they’re
really
stupid—tend to use timing devices. For one thing, there is a matter of getting out of the place without setting yourself on fire. You pour some gasoline around and strike a match, you stand a good chance of becoming a human torch. What a lot of amateurs don’t know is that it’s the fumes
that ignite, not the liquid. So they pour the gas, step back, toss the match and then run out flaming into the night.

For another thing, a good timing device gives you the
time
to establish an alibi. You were somewhere else at the moment of ignition so you didn’t have the exclusive opportunity to set the fire.

A timing device can be very simple or very sophisticated. As simple as a series of twisted sheets tied together to form a giant wick, which gives you the chance to light it and get away by the time it hits the big pool of gas and goes PHWOOM. Or it can be a simple timer wired to strike a spark into a well of accelerant at a certain time, and that gives you even more space.

Jack’s personal all-time favorite for a sophisticated timer, though, was on the file where the couple was definitely in Las Vegas the weekend their house burned down. They had receipts and eyewitnesses for a fifty-some-odd-hour period and there were no remnants of timers found in the house.

But the fire was sure as hell of “incendiary origin” because it had all the indicators and someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make the house fire-ready. Holes had been punched in the walls to improve circulation (fire eats oxygen), windows had been left open (same) and floor samples tested positive for accelerants.

The security system was intact and there were no signs that anyone had come into the house.

So how was the fire set?

Jack puzzled over it, hell, agonized over it, for weeks. He visited the site again and again. Finally, he found a hot spot on the floor in the upstairs family room. Right below the charred remnants of the VCR.

Jack’s favorite all-time timing device: a videocassette timed to eject and tip over a burner into a pool of accelerant.

The couple got away with it, of course, but Jack was relieved to have figured it out.

Anyway, all this is to say that generally speaking, opportunity has to do with time, which often has to do with some kind of timing device.

This is true even if the insureds have hired the arson out. Jack’s experience is that this is more often the case in commercial fires, because it really takes a pro to burn a warehouse down. But there have been cases where homeowners have hired an arsonist and then gone off on vacation to establish an alibi, but Jack doesn’t think that Nicky hired this one out.

You burn up your wife
in your bed
, it’s personal.

So Jack asks himself, Did Nicky have the opportunity to go into the house, kill his wife and set the fire? Not if his mother’s story is true, but Jack thinks that Mother’s story is bullshit. Then Jack considers the question: Given opportunity, did Nicky have the
exclusive
opportunity to set the fire? Well, the doors were locked, the windows were cracked open. There were no signs of forced entry. So who besides the owner had access to the house?

But it’s tricky, it’s weak, and unless he can catch Nicky in a lie, proving the opportunity issue is going to be tough.

Which brings Jack to the subject of motive.

There are three basic motives for arson: insanity, vengeance and money.

And the greatest of these is money.

Take insanity first, though. Here you’re talking about your storied pyromaniac, that specific-type freak who is simply and hopelessly enamored of fire. The sad fact is that there is a striking coincidence between childhood sexual abuse and pyromania. There is something about the all-consuming heat that is evocative of sexuality and at the same time cleansing. It both brings up the heat and makes it go away.

This kind of fire, though, doesn’t come up much in insurance fraud anyway, because pyromaniacs tend to burn
other
people’s stuff and they tend to get caught doing it. So you pay the claim and move on.

Then there’s revenge. A little more common but still unusual, because generally people who are really pissed these days just shoot the object of their pissed-offedness. But there are white supremacist nut jobs who like to lob Molotov cocktails at synagogues, and there’s the occasional fired (no pun intended) cleaning lady who cleans the floor with charcoal starter and a match, and there’s the husband about to lose his house to the ex-wife and who burns it to the ground by way of saying “Live in
this
, bitch.’ ”

So there’s revenge, and there is something about a fire that’s cathartic, no question, but it’s not a choice that most people make.

So there’s insanity and revenge, but they both pale compared to the numero uno motive for arson—may I have the envelope please—

Money.

Money, honey.

To the tune of some $8 billion a year nationally.

Jack knows that there are about eighty-six thousand arson fires a year. That’s about one for every hour of the day and the motive for most of them is money.

Or more properly, the lack of it.

Fire makes all things new again.

A fire in nature burns off the old to make way for the new. Same thing in business—it burns off the old investment to make way for the new. It’s an ancient cycle, and the fact is that the incidence of arson directly corresponds to the economic cycle. In boom times, arson goes down. In a recession it goes up. In boom times, people buy a lot of stuff on credit because they’re making the money to service the debt. Then the recession hits, the money ain’t coming in like it was, but the debt is the same.

It’s the same thing with homes. Most people buy more house than they can afford. They buy the house when things are fat, thinking they’re going to stay fat forever. Then things get lean but the mortgage is still fat. The mortgage doesn’t go on any damn diet.

Most people walk away from the house, say goodbye to their equity and try to start over.

Others say,
like, fuck that
, and get proactive.

Let their insurance company pay off the mortgage.

It happened a lot in Orange County, Jack thinks. In the Reagan years everyone was fat. The whole economy was betting on the income. Then reality hit, and what everyone bought on credit during the Reagan years they burned down during the Bush administration. The Orange County treasurers got caught on the slide and the county went bankrupt. So the real estate market collapsed, the building trades went down the chute and the only industry that was booming was the arson business.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Nature’s eternal cycle.