Firetrap (23 page)

46. PHONE CALL FROM ANOTHER WOMAN

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

I've been working with Trey for six days and have grown to know his moods in a way I will never know the other subjects of our interviews, and his mood now is melancholy. It's as if he has taken off his clothing for me, emotionally and spiritually, and laid bare his soul. It is oddly endearing and even a little erotic. Nobody else's story has affected me in this way, but then, no other firefighter has affected me the way Trey Brown has, either.

We've circled the building and are standing where we started in the debris-laden parking lot on the north side of the Z Club. In front of us are four crushed cars that remain half buried under a crumbled wall. Trey has been calm while reciting his tale, and he struggles to appear unemotional. I am wrung out and feel as if I've lived through the fire with him. In the evening chill he wears his department foul-weather coat, and it makes him readily identifiable as a fire department official to passersby. A car with a single black male in it slows, and the driver gives Trey a hard look that I've seen often over the past few days. There is a lot of public disgruntlement directed at black firefighters, whom some in the community see as having been traitors to their race. A few minutes later though, another car passes and two African-American women give Trey smiles and big waves.

The community is breaking up. Last night two parked cars in mostly white neighborhoods were torched by a group of roving youths. A curfew has been instituted for all neighborhoods south of the canal. Anyone under eighteen caught on the streets after midnight will be subject to arrest. The governor and mayor have agreed on this action, and it has made national news, as have the arrests of fifty-seven young blacks over the past four nights. Although most have been released to their parents or guardians, eighteen have been charged with felony mischief and assorted misdemeanors. The local NAACP chapter vows to fight the curfew in court.

“Can you handle a few follow-up questions?” I ask.

“Go ahead.”

“Did anybody call out to you while you were in there, anybody you had to bypass?”

“Just the man by the window.”

“Do you recall his exact words?”

“ ‘Help me.'”

“Just like that? Just like the tape that was released?”

“ ‘Help me' is all I remember.”

“So he might have been the person on the cell phone to the dispatcher?”

“I didn't see a cell phone, but then, I didn't see him in the smoke, either. I just felt him. I passed him several times, so it's possible he thought he was being passed up by more than one firefighter. Are you going to write this in the report?”

“I'll have to. People in the community are particularly upset about that cell phone call. You've known this all along, haven't you, that you might be the firefighter the caller was complaining about?”

I expected him to snap at me again, to remind me once more that he wasn't the right person to help with this investigation, but he looked at me with utter sadness in his eyes and said, “Of course I have. I've replayed it all a hundred times in my mind.”

“When you got around to the back of the building, you had nothing but a blank wall in front of you, but you put up a ladder. Did you hear or see something? Or is that standard operating procedure?”

“I saw those boarded-over windows and wanted to know what was inside. Also, the cars in the parking lot didn't seem to match the Hispanics in the street who usually drive older cars or small trucks that serve double duty in their jobs. Yeah, I know that's stereotyping, but sometimes stereotypes can be useful.”

“If you hadn't had that intuition, a lot more people would have died, wouldn't they?”

“Are you trying to be a cheerleader now?”

“I know you feel bad about what you failed to do, but think about what you accomplished.”

“I don't need a cheerleader.”

“I'm not saying you do. All I'm saying is there were a lot of other people who might have spotted those doors and didn't.”

“I think about it every day.”

“You didn't want to tell me this, did you?”

“I thought I was through telling it, that's all.”

“Okay. Sure. I'm sorry if I—”

“What else do you want to know?”

“Has that ever been taught to you in training, to drop people out windows?”

“Of course not. But right now I'm sorry I didn't drop them all out.”

“Why?”

“Because every one I dropped lived. Every one I didn't get to is dead now. There were ten who died up there. Three died at the bottom of the stairs, but besides the man who was just too heavy for me to move, there were nine more somewhere inside that I never got to.”

We were both in a somber frame of mind by the time we got to his car. As we drove, we listened to the local news on the car radio. Leaders of the African-American community were suggesting the city's investigation was tainted and that the Z Club Citizens for Truth “special team,” meaning Trey Brown and myself, would tell an appreciably different story from the official one. I wasn't so sure they weren't going to be disappointed. From the beginning I'd been aware of the irony of the City of Seattle paying a citizens' group to do a study the city had already done, when the point of the second study was to rebut the first. Commissioning this study had bought Stone Carmichael a great deal of cachet in the minority community. The police chief was in trouble. The fire chief was in trouble, but Mayor Carmichael was golden. Each of the warring groups—police, fire, civilian—believed Carmichael was on their side. It was quite a trick.

We were downtown working our way through rush-hour traffic when Trey's cell phone rang. He took one hand off the steering wheel and handed it to me.

“It's
your
phone,” I said.

“I'm driving.”

“Hello,” I said.

It was a female voice, the eventuality I feared most, since I was certain Trey was having a fling with the mayor's wife, or at least flirting with the idea. “Hello? Who's this?”

“Jamie Estevez.”

“This is Carly Smith with the Seattle Fire Department.” I hoped this wasn't what I thought it was. I hoped he wasn't having an affair with a fire girl as well as the mayor's wife.

“He's right here.”

“May I speak to him?”

We hit a stoplight and Trey took the phone from me. “Hello? Yeah? How is he doing? Is he making sense?” He listened for a moment. “You get vitals?” The light changed as he flipped the phone closed and said, “I can drop you off or I can take you with me. I'd rather take you with me. It'll be quicker.”

“What's going on?”

“Engine Six has my brother again.”

“Stone?”

“My other brother. I need to make sure he's okay. Then, if you can wait, we're still on for dinner.”

“I can wait.”

47. JOHNNY BROWN, THIRTY-FOUR, SPITS OUT A COP

TREY
>

Johnny was sitting on the sideboard of Engine 6 at 20th Avenue and East Fir, a hematoma over his right eye and a swathe of cling bandages holding down a stack of 4x4s above that. Somebody had set his Environmental Defense cap on his head at a cockeyed angle he never would have chosen himself. A block away on Fir, I saw blue lights and cops and heard a bullhorn sounding off in the twilight as light rain began falling out of the evening sky.

I pulled up far enough behind Engine 6 so the officer and I could talk without Johnny hearing. My brother had diabetes and was also subject to epileptic seizure disorder, and because he frequently forgot to take either his Dilantin or his insulin or both, was prone to collapsing in the street and later waking up to what he'd once told me was a “whole new world,” usually with a crew of local firefighters standing over him. Johnny was both the bane and the hub of my mother's existence, as well as the unique link between her daily rituals and mine, and Engine 6 had picked up Johnny more times than I could remember.

Men like Johnny generally had a look you could spot: the look of a man who had not finished school because he was incapable of finishing; a man who could not read anything beyond stop signs, the occasional bus marquee, and the word
men
over a bathroom door; a man who was destined to hold down a string of menial jobs; a man who couldn't carry on a meaningful conversation about current events or anything remotely esoteric—all of which made him perfect company for my friend Rumble, who could do all of those things but eschewed most of them. Johnny's favorite topics of discourse, in order of preference, were the weather in monotonous detail, sports, and the local bus routes, which he'd memorized. Johnny was addicted to video games and squandered hours every day playing them. He split his time between my place and our mother's house, where I had set up a computer for him, and it was probably all that walking between the two houses that kept him trim. In the summer he mowed neighborhood lawns for pocket change and could often be seen wheeling a beat-up lawn mower up the sidewalks, assorted hand tools stuffed into a burlap sack slung over his shoulder and secured with an old belt I'd given him.

Lieutenant Smith was a stocky woman with a determined gait and a no-nonsense air. Years ago she'd come through a class on rudimentary fire investigation I taught, and I recalled her as both argumentative and dedicated, two qualities I would ascribe to myself as well.

“There's some sort of street thing going on in the neighborhood,” she said. “A bunch of people breaking windows to protest the Z Club fire. I guess they had the same thing in this neighborhood yesterday. The cops were going to arrest him until Ridley here told them he was your brother.” Standing ten feet away, the driver on Engine 6 gave me a head nod. “The cops said if we got hold of you, they'd let him go.”

“Thanks for calling. You want to wait here?” I said.

Johnny had been watching us with the alertness of a house pet who knows he's in trouble for violating a dictum but isn't certain what that dictum might be. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Johnny said.

“What's going on?”

“Hard to tell.”

“You got a lump on your head. What happened?”

“The man was hassling us. The fuzz, man. I spit one of them cops out.”

“You spit on one of those officers up the street?”

“Yeah, man. I spit him out.”

“Is that how you hurt your head? Spitting a cop out?”

“Naw. They threw a piece of wood at me.”

“So you bruised his nightstick with your head? Gee, I hope he doesn't sue.” Sensing mockery, my brother grew smaller, hunching himself up on the sideboard of Engine 6 until he looked like a child instead of a thirty-four-year-old. “Johnny, do you even know what this is about?”

“Gotta bring the man down. Time to bring the man down, man. No more oppression.”

“Johnny, these people out here on the street are pissed off because they think I didn't do my job. They think we let people die at the Z Club. You've been tramping the streets with people who think I'm a murderer.”

I could tell my speech struck an emotional button when his eyes watered and he tried to change the subject. “I been to the Z Club.”

“No you haven't, Johnny.”

“Have too, man.”

“I want you to stay with Mom the rest of the night. And something else. There's a woman in the car. She's nice, and she doesn't need any grief from you.”

“She with the man?”

“She's a TV reporter.”

“I'm always good to the women. You know that.”

“I know.”

“I like TV.”

“I know.”

“Gonna get me a woman someday.”

“I know you are.”

Later in the week when this crew was working again, I would take Engine 6 a pie and ice cream from Borracchini's. Johnny climbed into the backseat and we were silent during the four-block drive to my mother's house, the same house I'd lived in with my grandmother until I was four. I parked in front, opened the door for Johnny, and glanced at Estevez. “You better come in,” I said. “My mother finds out I left you out here, she'll skin me alive.”

“Sounds like
my
mother.”

48. TREY'S MOTHER'S WILD LIFE

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

While I was in the kitchen fixing spaghetti and a salad, I watched Trey's muscular shoulders as he hunched over my coffee table in the other room, arranging his schematics and the Mylar presentation he'd prepared. I thought about serving wine with the meal, but decided that would be too much. I considered candles but passed on those, too. I put a jazz album on the CD player, early Miles Davis, and saw Trey, without looking up from his work, give an appreciative little smile to himself when he recognized it.

I'm not sure what I'd been prepared for, but Trey's mother did not fulfill any of my expectations. To begin with, she used a mannered speech sprinkled with constant references to blessings and Jesus. There were pictures of Jesus on the walls and several Bibles lying about. The house was tidy but spartan, the television an old console that would require four men to move. Her house had been built in 1906, his mother told me, but had been remodeled a section at a time by Trey.

Johnny, Trey told me on the drive to my condominium in Belltown, had been a crack baby, with some fetal alcohol syndrome mixed in. “You want the whole story?”

“Well…I don't want to pry…”

“Of course you want to pry. Until I was four, I was raised by my grandmother. The week my grandmother died, my mother showed up strung out on malt liquor and crack. At the time all I knew was that there was something wrong with her and she was arguing with the official from the Department of Social and Health Services. In the middle of it she telephoned Shelby Carmichael and told him to come and get me. It wasn't until years later that I figured out he was my real father.”

“Shelby Carmichael is your biological father?”

“That's what I said.”

“Does the rest of the family know?”

“I'm not sure. It was certainly never mentioned when I was part of the Carmichael clan. I was the adopted son as far as everyone, including my father, was concerned. It was kind of scary, going off with this white guy—not that going away with my mother, who I barely knew, wouldn't have been scary. I remember I had this little suitcase with a few clothes inside, and a teddy bear under my arm. That was it.”

“How did Shelby Carmichael come to be your father?”

“When she was sixteen, my mother got a summer job as a maid at the Carmichael estate on the island. By the time she got home and started school again, she was pregnant and wouldn't tell her mother who the father was. She'd gotten straight As until then, but she dropped out of school that autumn and started hanging out with a bad crowd. Shelby Carmichael gave her ten thousand dollars, which he thought would take care of things and which my mother promptly used up on a string of low-life boyfriends and a car that one of them wrecked the first week she owned it. Fortunately for me, she didn't start in with the drugs until after I was born. It was the drugs that spurred my grandmother to kick her out of the house when I was six months old.

“When Shelby got that phone call, he picked up his lawyer and they came down to the DSHS office and saw the shape my mother was in. I don't know if he copped to being my father right there or if my mother signed some papers that released me to him or what, but he took me home, and then some time during the next year I was officially adopted and they changed my last name to Carmichael.”

“That must have been an adjustment for everyone concerned.”

“Shelby Junior took me on as a project, and I followed him around like a puppy. Kendra was a year younger than me. I took care of her the same way Shelby Junior took care of me. I remember beating up some kid who was messing with her in school and going to the principal's office for it. The odd man out was Stone, who was seven years older than me and never really accepted me. He used to tell me I was adopted because it would look good for a politician to adopt a ‘colored boy.' At that time Shelby was a state representative.”

“Was it confusing to be the only black child in a white family?”

“Not as confusing as you might think. The tough part was later, going back to the black community with my tail between my legs, accustomed to all the money and clothes and travel, and not having it anymore. It's a lot harder to be poor when you were rich once.”

“And you went to the UW?”

“On a scholarship until my junior year. We were playing Arizona. We were up by fourteen when I took a hit from behind and blew out my ACL big-time.”

“When did you reunite with your mother?”

“A year after I separated from the Carmichael family, I was walking through the old neighborhood and recognized my grandmother's house. I went up and knocked, and my mother answered. I hadn't seen her since I was four, but when we looked at each other, we both just knew. By then, she'd cleaned up her act and was working.”

“Did your mother ever tell you what happened between her and Carmichael?”

“Well, I think they had sex.”

“That's not what I meant. She was sixteen. He was her employer. There's nothing right about that.”

“The one time we spoke about it, she called it an affair. I do have to say this for him, as busy as he was, he worked hard at being a father to me. And any time he caught Stone giving me the business, he let him have it with both barrels.”

“How could your family believe you were capable of what they accused you of?”

“I still don't know. If there were doubts about my guilt, I never got to hear them, because I never got to talk to any of the family after that night.”

“Did you try?”

“About a week after my ouster I went back to the island determined to convince someone I was innocent. Renfrow was waiting for me with two thugs. They beat me up pretty good.”

“This is the Renfrow I met Saturday night?”

“The same man we saw in the photo I took from McDonald's place.”

“Why would he have somebody beat you up?”

“Maybe you forgot he was working for Harlan Overby, Echo's father.”

“Oh.”

After dinner we began to review our findings. The fire department report on the Z Club concluded that the department made small mistakes, which included some of the incoming units being on the wrong radio channel for a few minutes and an inability to get the main floor ventilated. There were miscues when Ladder 12 left Vernon Sweeting inside. Additional mistakes when his partner, McMartin, went back to look for him instead of calling a Mayday. The report stated that most of the civilian fire deaths could be attributed to the lack of windows and secondary exits on the second floor. While there had been several cell phone calls to the dispatcher from individuals trapped on the second floor, all of those calls were received after Captain Brown had already announced there were victims on the second floor and begun rescue operations. The cell phone call that had caused all the ruckus had been placed around the time crews were inside looking for Vernon Sweeting as well as civilian victims. My personal hypothesis was that it was the man Trey couldn't lift and that Trey had passed him several times, causing him to believe he was seeing multiple firefighters pass him by.

A paragraph at the end of the fire department report read:

Throughout this incident, firefighting and rescue efforts of the department were hampered by individuals harassing and at times physically restraining fire officers from effectively pursuing their tasks. The crowd quickly grew to unmanageable proportions. Had the fire ground been clear of civilians, there is every reason to believe all victims would have been retrieved from the building before the IC was forced to declare a defensive fire.

This paragraph had been criticized by black leaders and agitators because it essentially said the victims died because of the crowd outside. “Do you believe that?” I asked. “That the crowd was the reason you didn't save more people?”

“Hell, no.”

“Why not?”

“They weren't bothering us that much. One thing the IC should not have done was believe the Hispanics when they said everybody was out of the building. Fish assumed they'd been on both floors, but they'd only been on the first floor and were unaware of what was happening on the second.”

“Anything else?”

“Fish knew we were making rescues from the second floor on side C, but he didn't get a ladder up on side A until they spotted people in a window. They should have laddered it right away.”

“Why do you think they didn't?”

“I think the mob pestering them might have delayed him some. And there were two trees on fire right in front of the fire escape.”

“So the crowd did have an effect?”

“Some. But the central issue was the boarded-over windows and two blocked stairwells, one blocked by fire and the other locked by the owners.”

“So maybe we should be talking to Chester McDonald about that.”

“I don't think McDonald really owns the property. I did some tracking the other day after we called it quits. Tax on that property was paid last year by McDonald, but there's a notation at the assessor's office that it will be paid in the future by a company called Silverstar Consolidated. I can't find anything on them, but I do know the light-rail line is going to be built through that part of town, and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody isn't buying up land cheap in the belief that it's going to be worth a lot more in the future, somebody who's studied where the rail line is headed. I did some more checking and found quite a few land sales to Silverstar Consolidated in that neighborhood.”

“McDonald is still listed as the owner on the paperwork we've seen having to do with permits and fire inspections. And we talked to him ourselves. Why would he claim to own the building if he doesn't, especially in light of the minority community being up in arms about the fire?”

“What are these?” Trey asked, uncovering a stack of glossies on the coffee table, all photos of the Z Club.

“Just some photographs from the original investigation.”

When he came to the last one, he stared at it. It was a photo of the Z Club prior to the fire, workmen setting up scaffolding on the north wall, a man in the foreground, the same man we'd met Saturday night, the same man in the photo Trey had filched from Chester McDonald's place, and the man who'd had him beat up nineteen years ago: Barry Renfrow. The date on the photo was three weeks before the fire. “You had this all along?” Trey asked.

“I got the material Monday, but I didn't get a chance to look at it until last night after you and I had finished.”

“This is Renfrow. Renfrow works for Overby and for the Carmichael family. You should have shared this with me before.”

It was hard to argue. Perhaps I thought if he saw it, he'd go off on some wild conspiracy theory and neglect the rest of the interviews. Perhaps…

“You just have to be in control, don't you?” Trey said.

“What?”

“That's what this is about. You let me lay out the case for going after the building owners as if I was some sort of two-twenty conspiracy fruitcake, and all the while you were sitting on a piece of evidence that bolsters my theory. Two-twenty is fire department code for ‘crazy person.'”

“I know what a two-twenty is, and I never thought you were a fruitcake.”

“That's not what I said. I said you let me go on like I was, when all the while you had this photo.”

“I was going to show it to you.”

“When? Next summer? This is Renfrow.
This
is Renfrow,” he added, holding up the photo from his briefcase.

“I'm sorry if you think I've been hiding things.”

“I think you've been hiding things because you
have
been hiding things. I thought you wanted to get to the bottom of this.”

“We
are
getting to the bottom of this.”

“What else are you hiding?”

I knew how angry he would be if he discovered I was calling his brother, the mayor, every evening with updates. I didn't feel great about the phone calls, but I'd promised Miriam Beckmann I'd make them, Beckmann having forged a deal with Stone Carmichael when he agreed the city would finance this second investigation. She'd traded away total secrecy for solvency. We stared at each other and then eventually arrived at a truce, yet as he helped me clear the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher, a strained silence lingered. Afterward, Trey went to the living room window to look out at the western skyline. “Nice view,” he said finally.

“Yeah.”

Using the Mylar representations Trey had drawn up, we began going over the events of September 3, piecing the timeline into a coordinated whole the way I'd been piecing Trey's life together in my own mind. About an hour into it, he excused himself to use the bathroom, and while he was gone, his cell phone on the coffee table rang. I picked it up and answered without thinking. In the newsroom we were always answering each other's cell phones, unable or unwilling to let a possible news tip slip past, and he
had
asked me to answer his phone earlier.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” said a voice I would not have mistaken in a zillion years. “I must have the wrong number.”

“No, I don't think so. This is Trey Brown's phone. He'll be back in a minute.”

“Oh. Do you mind if I hold?”

“Of course not.”

“You must be Jamie Estevez.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you're working together. The two of you.”

“I guess we are.”

It was the blond goddess herself, making her daily call to lover boy.