Dirty Fire (17 page)

There was a pointed silence, and I understood Cieloczki had made an astute guess about my choice of self-medication.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and hated the defensive tone in my own voice.

“Go home and go to bed,” Gil repeated. “Anything comes up that we need tonight, I have your home number.”

• • •

I left Stateville in the gathering dusk. Sundown moves quickly in the early springtime, feinting with an orange-red skyscape that is spectacular in its brevity, then falling back with the speed of an electric lamp suddenly switched off.

I drove north, the display a panorama over my left shoulder. Before the dark red disk drowned itself somewhere over the far side of the horizon, it had flared on the windshields of the oncoming traffic and tinged the cars in my rearview mirror with the color of flame. By the time I reached the outskirts of Lake Tower, the stars were bright pinpoints in the inky blackness of the cosmos.

I pulled into the parking lot of a Seven-Eleven and stopped near a pay phone bolted to the outside wall.

Three youths, all in the pseudo-gangbanger costumes made by Hilfiger and marketed extensively to the children of the affluent, looked at me like I was trespassing. They smoked with an inexpert awkwardness they no doubt hoped passed for style and moved down the curb as I stepped to the telephone. One looked back at me over his shoulder with a dead-eye expression that may have been meant as a challenge. None of them was more than fifteen years of age, and their aura of nonspecific hostility made me feel very old.

The coins rattled loudly as I thumbed them into the slot and punched in a number I had called enough to remember without effort.

The phone rang at the other end once, twice. Then a familiar voice said “Yeah?” in my ear.

I had noticed the car in my rearview mirror just after I had pulled away from the prison grounds. It had kept pace on the drive north, closing up when the highway became thick with rush-hour commuters and falling back casually when the traffic thinned. The car was now parked well back from the blue-white circle carved into the dark by the streetlamp. It was too dark to see the two men in the front seats, but I could still recognize the shape of the vehicle.

“Your people still use Fords on surveillance, Ronnie?” I asked, turning my body away from the street.

There was a moment of dead air on the line.

“This who I think it is?” Ron Santori asked, careful to sound nonchalant.

“I want to know if you’ve got a tail on me,” I said. “Two men, green Taurus, front license plate masked by a muddy smear. Which is just a little odd, since the rest of the car looks so nice and clean.”

“Why would
I
have you followed?” Santori’s voice sounded calm, mildly puzzled, reasonable. “I know where you’ve been. Hell, I called down there to get you cleared to visit our sick friend.”

I shifted the phone to my other hand. “By the way, he said to say hello.”

Again, a pause.

“Who did?” Santori asked, bemusement in his voice.

“Our ‘friend.’ He said you helped him out with a tax problem last year.”

“He must have me confused with somebody else,” the FBI agent said. “I’ve never met the gentleman. Not in person.”

I turned, trying to make it look casual. The car that had followed me into Lake Tower was no longer parked at the curb. It was nowhere in sight now, a fact that did little to ease my growing awareness that I was no longer sure of what role I had been assigned to play.

“They seem to have driven away,” I said. “What do you make of that?”

Santori sighed. “Maybe you’re just a little overwrought, my friend. But if you’re sure you’re being followed, get me a plate number and we’ll do what we can about it.”

“Then you’re not having me tailed?” I asked, again. “Not even, say, for my own good?”

“A lot of people drive a Taurus, Davey,” he said, using my name for the first time. “It’s a very popular car.” Then he hung up.

As I pulled away from the convenience store, the three teens were standing together in their hip-hop finery under the bright sodium lights. One of them, possibly the same boy whose unspoken challenge had greeted me a few minutes earlier, watched me leave. He had the body attitude of someone nothing could really touch, someone convinced that life held no surprises except those for which he was already equipped.

He was wrong, and I knew it. Still, I envied him.

• • •

Once again, I left the lights off when I entered my apartment—but this time, not because I considered it soothing.

For a moment, I stood stiffly against the wall next to the door, but there was no sound except for the hum of the refrigerator’s compressor. A square of blue-white from the streetlamps outside, bisected into two distinct rectangles by the window frame through which it entered, lighted my way into the small bedroom where I spent my nights alone.

I put my hand under the folded underwear and rolled socks in the top drawer of my dresser and felt for the towel-wrapped bundle I had put there months before. It was heavy in my hand as I lifted it out and unwrapped the contents.

The leather smelled lightly of oil, and was worn smooth at the side loops where it threaded onto my belt. I unsnapped the thumb break and slid the stainless steel of a Smith and Wesson automatic from the holster I had worn during my time on the police force. As always, the compact weapon felt solid and warm in my hand.

I ejected the empty magazine and worked the action to lock the slide back. Then I thumbed round after round into the clip, pushing the shiny brass-and-silver hollowpoint cartridges in until the magazine was full. I pressed it into the pistol, and with my thumb released the catch that freed the slide to snap forward. The automatic, now fully loaded and with a powerful Silvertip cartridge chambered, was noticeably heavier in my hand.

On the nightstand was a bottle of vodka and a tumbler. I reached for it with my free hand.

No. Not tonight. Not until all this is finished, one way or another.

When I finally slept that night, my gun was on the nightstand and for a long while my mind would not surrender to sleep. Suspicions writhed and coiled back upon themselves.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of spiderwebs and fiery skies like the reflection of cities burning in the distance. I saw Ellen as she was when I first met her, and when I tried to go to her I realized my hands and legs were shackled. In the midst of it all, I could hear the low rasp of Sam Lichtman’s voice speaking the same sentence, over and over. I could not discern the words.

But in the way one possesses certainty during dreams, I knew the convict was speaking of trust and secrets and betrayal.

It might have been a nightmare; asleep or awake, I could no longer tell the difference.

Despite the demands of an arson investigation, Gil Cieloczki still had a fire department to run. It was a fact that was brought home to him each time he returned to his office, the excitement of the chase slapped down by a nagging sense of guilt. Fires still ignited, alarms still rang. Firefighters still expected paychecks and, in general, the bureaucratic beast still demanded to be fed.

A large part of his job, Gil had told me in a rueful voice, was to stalk the beast of management routine that roams every organizational jungle. It was a quarry as wily as it was prolific, and throughout our investigation it left its spoor in ever-mounting piles on his desk.

During the two-and-a-half weeks since the fire chief had taken over the Levinstein investigation, Jesús Martinez had doubled up on his normal duties as line lieutenant. From my temporary desk outside, I had watched Martinez trying gamely to fill the administrative gap left by his boss’s preoccupation with arson and murder.

But even the best efforts of Gil’s right-hand subordinate only slowed the pace at which the work backed up, taunting and daunting the fire chief whenever he found a spare minute to stop by his own office.

It was there that I had reached him when I called from Stateville; he was still there hours later, thanking God for an understanding spouse at home alone.

The clock on his desk read 10:26; Kay would be watching the late news, then tuning in to the Letterman show. It was a ritual they usually shared, and that both of them had missed for much of the past month. Outside, through his office window, the night sky twinkled with stars. Gil mentally sighed and pulled another clipped sheaf of reports from the still-considerable stack of his in-basket.

Underneath was a videotape cassette.

Gil frowned and picked it up. There was no label or anything else to identify its contents. He riffled through the other papers in the box, looking for an accompanying memorandum or note. There was nothing, and Gil’s sense of puzzlement grew.

A tall, thin figure passed in the hallway outside his open office door, then doubled back.

“Working late, Gil?” Talmadge Evans stood in the doorway. He was in his shirtsleeves and carried a paper cup of coffee from the vending machine just off the center’s public lobby. “Remember, we’re management. We don’t get overtime for these kinds of hours.”

“A cup of coffee would help,” Cieloczki jibed. “But some penny-pinching bureaucrat on an economy drive ordered it all locked up after five o’clock. I think it was
you
.”

Evans laughed and gestured with the paper cup he held.

“Well, I’ve been punished,” he replied. “This is hot and it’s black, and it only cost me fifty cents. But I can’t call it ‘coffee.’ Not with a straight face.”

“This keeps up, I’ll start carrying a Thermos,” Gil said.

Evans looked at his watch. “Well, don’t stay too late,” he told the firefighter. “There’s better places to spend an evening.” The city manager nodded and turned toward his own office on the second floor. Gil could hear his footsteps echo in the deserted hallway. It was a lonely sound, almost heartbreaking in its solitary isolation.

Gil knew a little about Talmadge Evans’s personal life. The city manager’s wife of twenty-seven years had died a short time after Cieloczki had come to Lake Tower. It was common knowledge around the Municipal Center that Evans’s subsequent remarriage three years later, to a significantly younger woman from a socially prominent family, had been less than successful.

By all accounts, the city manager had buried that—and whatever other disappointments he kept locked away from gossip and innuendo—under the mountain of work that his job faithfully provided. It was a dedication or an obsession or simply a substitution that Gil found he both understood and dreaded.

There, but for Kay, go I,
he thought to himself.

He sat still for a moment, looking at the papers on his desk. Then he abruptly picked up his phone and dialed.

Kay answered on the second ring.

“I’ve been thinking a little popcorn might taste pretty good,” he said. “Particularly if somebody’s sharing it with me.”

Kay laughed.

“Okay,” she said. “But
I get to hold the bowl.”

• • •

Gil left the Municipal Center by the side entrance, the one closest to the parking lot. Under his arm was the remaining content of his in-box, scooped up in a sense of duty or guilt as he left. The hard plastic of the videocassette pressed into his arm.

As he crossed the parking lot to where he had left his car, Gil saw that he and Evans had not been alone in burning the late-night oil.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” Robert Johns Nederlander said, his keys in his hand. He stood in the section of the lot reserved for the personal automobiles of police personnel, next to a black Lincoln Navigator that flared expensively in the reflected gleam of the overhead lighting. The slot was marked with the words
RESERVED FOR DIRECTOR - PUBLIC SAFETY
.

“Beautiful car,” Gil countered in sincere admiration. It was a beautiful machine, large and muscular, yet graceful in its design.

Nederlander ran a hand over the vehicle’s smooth lines. He smiled with satisfaction.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Best damn car I ever had. This winter, all the snow and cold? I’d just drop her into four-wheel drive and plow through without a hitch. She’s a hungry beast—hell, filling the tank sets me back fifty bucks. But she handles great and the suspension’s soft as a baby’s hindside. You ought to get one for yourself, Gil.”

“Couldn’t even afford the gas,” Gil chided. It was common knowledge that Nederlander was a frequent visitor to the gasoline pumps behind the Municipal Center, the ones installed to fuel vehicles assigned to police, Public Works and other departments.

Nederlander looked at Gil and shook his head, though whether in sympathy or in disgust the firefighter could not tell.

“You’re a department head, and that means you’re on twenty-four-hour call,” Nederlander said. “When your phone rings in the middle of the night, you have to use your personal vehicle, right? Why do you think they give each of us our own fuel account code?”

“My luck, I’d be in trouble,” Gil said, sorry he had started the conversation. “It’s safer for me just to eat the cost myself, out-of-pocket.”

“They don’t give you points for being dumb around this place,” Nederlander retorted. “When I first started here, it was standard practice to check out a city car, fill it up and siphon the gas into your own car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The hell I am. It was the only way to make up for what you paid out of your own pocket. Now we get to fill up our damn cars at the Municipal Center. Consider it a perk of your job.”

“I’d prefer a pay raise,” Cieloczki grinned. “How about it, boss?” He held up the papers he carried, the videocassette on top. “After all, I
am
taking all this work home with me.”

“Talk to Evans,” Nederlander responded, and his expression lost all measure of good humor. “The murder today in Chicago. The Butenkova woman. This is going way beyond an arson case. Are you certain you feel equipped to continue supervising it?”

Cieloczki pretended not to notice the chill in Nederlander’s voice.

“I think so,” he said, careful to keep all challenge from his voice. “We have good cooperation from the different jurisdictions involved. And our local team is continuing to develop what we feel are some solid leads of our own.”

Nederlander was silent for a moment, his eyes closely examining Gil’s face. Then he nodded and turned abruptly to his vehicle.

“Keep me informed,” he said without turning.

“I’ll be sure to do that,” he said. “See you, Bob. Drive carefully.”

“You, too,” Nederlander replied.

Later, when he reflected on the events that were already careening out of control, Gil Cieloczki would remember the comment.

It had sounded, he would tell me, almost like a warning.