California Fire and Life (2 page)

California fire and life.

Jack Wade sits on an old Hobie longboard.

Riding swells that refuse to become waves, he’s watching a wisp of black smoke rise over the other side of the big rock at Dana Head. Smoke’s reaching up into the pale August sky like a Buddhist prayer.

Jack’s so into the smoke that he doesn’t feel the wave come up behind him like a fat Dick Dale guitar riff. It’s a big humping reef break that slams him to the bottom then rolls him. Keeps rolling him and won’t let him up—it’s like,
That’s what you get when you don’t pay attention, Jack. You get to eat sand and breathe water
—and Jack’s about out of breath when the wave finally spits him out onto the shore.

He’s on all fours, sucking for air, when he hears his beeper go off up on the beach where he left his towel. He scampers up the sand, grabs the beeper and checks the number, although he’s already pretty sure who it’s going to be.

California Fire and Life.

The woman’s dead.

Jack knows this even before he gets to the house because when he calls in it’s Goddamn Billy. Six-thirty in the morning and Goddamn Billy’s already in the office.

Goddamn Billy tells him there’s a fire and a fatality.

Jack hustles up the hundred and twenty steps from Dana Strand Beach to the parking lot, takes a quick shower at the bathhouse then changes into the work clothes he keeps in the backseat of his ’66 Mustang. His work clothes consist of a Lands’ End white button-down oxford, Lands’ End khaki trousers, Lands’ End moccasins and an Eddie Bauer tie that Jack keeps preknotted so he can just slip it on like a noose.

Jack hasn’t been inside a clothing store in about twelve years.

He owns three ties, five Lands’ End white button-down shirts, two pairs of Lands’ End khaki trousers, two Lands’ End guaranteed-not-to-wrinkle-even-if-you-run-it-through-your-car-engine blue blazers (a rotation deal: one in the dry cleaners, one on his back) and the one pair of Lands’ End moccasins.

Sunday night he does laundry.

Washes the five shirts and two pairs of trousers and hangs them out to unwrinkle. Preknots the three ties and he’s ready for the workweek, which means that he’s in the water a little before dawn, surfs until 6:30, showers at the beach, changes into his work clothes, loops the tie around his neck, gets into his car, pops in an old Challengers tape and races to the offices of California Fire and Life.

He’s been doing this for coming up to twelve years.

Not this morning, though.

This morning, propelled by Billy’s call, he races to the loss site—37 Bluffside Drive, just down the road above Dana Strand Beach.

It takes him maybe ten minutes. He’s pulling around on the circular driveway—his wheels on the gravel sound like the undertow in the trench at high tide—and hasn’t even fully stopped before Brian Bentley walks over and taps on the passenger-side window.

Brian “Accidentally” Bentley is the Sheriff’s Department fire investigator. Which is another reason Jack knows there’s been a fatal fire,
because the Sheriff’s Department is there. Otherwise it would be an inspector from the Fire Department, and Jack wouldn’t be looking at Bentley’s fat face.

Or his wavy red hair turning freaking
orange
with age.

Jack leans over and winds down the window.

Bentley sticks his red face in and says, “You got here quick, Jack. What, you carrying the fire
and
the life?”

“Yup.”

“Good,” Bentley says. “The double whammy.”

Jack and Bentley hate each other.

That old thing about if, say, Jack was on fire, Bentley wouldn’t piss on him to put it out? If Jack was on fire, Bentley would drink gasoline so he could piss on Jack.

“Croaker in the bedroom,” Bentley says. “They had to scrape her off the springs.”

“The wife?” asks Jack.

“We don’t have a positive yet,” Bentley says. “But it’s an adult female.”

“Pamela Vale, age thirty-four,” Jack says. Goddamn Billy gave him the specs over the phone.

“Name rings a bell,” Bentley says.

“Save the Strands,” Jack says.

“What the what?”

“Save the Strands,” Jack says. “She’s been in the papers. She and her husband are big fund-raisers for Save the Strands.”

A community group fighting the Great Sunsets Ltd. corporation to prevent them from putting a condo complex on Dana Strands, the last undeveloped stretch of the south coast.

Dana Strands, Jack’s beloved Dana Strands, a swatch of grass and trees that sits high on a bluff above Dana Strand Beach. Years ago, it was a trailer park, and then that failed, and then nature reclaimed it and grew over and around it, and is still holding on to it against all the forces of progress.

Just holding on, Jack thinks.

“Whatever,” Bentley says.

Jack says, “There’s a husband and two kids.”

“We’re looking for them.”

“Shit.”

“They ain’t in the house,” Bentley says. “I mean we’re looking for
notification
purposes. How’d you get here so soon?”

“Billy picked it off the scanner, ran the address, had it waiting for me when I got in.”

“You insurance bastards,” Bentley says. “You just can’t wait to get in there and start chiseling, can you?”

Jack hears a little dog barking from somewhere behind the house.

It bothers him.

“You name a cause?” Jack asks.

Bentley shakes his head and laughs this laugh he has, which sounds more like steam coming out of a radiator. He says, “
Just
get out your checkbook, Jack.”

“You mind if I go in and have a look?” Jack asks.

“Yeah, I do mind,” Bentley says. “Except I can’t stop you, right?”

“Right.”

It’s in the insurance contract. If you have a loss and you make a claim, the insurance company gets to inspect the loss.

“So knock yourself out,” Bentley says. He leans way in, trying to get into Jack’s face. “Only—Jack? Don’t bust chops here. I pull the pin in two weeks. I plan to spend my retirement annoying bass on Lake Havasu, not giving depositions. What you got here is you got a woman drinking vodka and smoking, and she passes out, spills the booze, drops the cigarette and barbecues herself, and that’s what you got here.”

“You’re retiring, Bentley?” Jack asks.

“Thirty years.”

“It’s about time you made it official.”

One reason—out of a veritable smorgasbord of reasons—that Jack hates Accidentally Bentley is that Bentley’s a lazy son of a bitch who doesn’t like to do his job. Bentley could find an accidental cause for virtually
any
fire. If Bentley had been at Dresden he’d have looked around the ashes and found a faulty electric-blanket control. Cuts down on paperwork and court appearances.

As a fire investigator, Bentley makes a great fisherman.

“Hey, Jack,” Bentley says. He’s smiling but he’s definitely pissed. “At least
I
didn’t get
thrown
out.”

Like me, Jack thinks. He says, “That’s probably because they don’t realize you’re even there.”

“Fuck you,” Bentley says.

“Hop in the back.”

The smile disappears from Bentley’s face. He’s like
serious
now.

“Accidental fire, accidental death,” Bentley says. “Don’t dick around in there.”

Jack waits until Bentley leaves before he gets out of the car.

To go dick around in there.

Before the scene gets cold.

Literally.

The colder the scene, the less chance there is of finding out what happened.

In jargon, the “C&O”—the cause and origin—of the fire.

The C&O is important for an insurance company because there are accidents and there are
accidents
. If the insured negligently caused the accident then the insurance company is on the hook for the whole bill. But if it’s a faulty electric blanket, or a bad switch, or if some appliance malfunctions and sets off a spark, then the company has a shot at something called subrogation, which basically means that the insurance company pays the policyholder and then sues the manufacturer of the faulty item.

So Jack has to dick around in there, but he thinks of it as dicking around with a purpose.

He pops open the trunk of his car.

What he’s got in there is a folding ladder, a couple of different flashlights, a shovel, a heavy-duty Stanley tape measure, two 35-mm Minoltas, a Sony Hi8 camcorder, a small clip-on Dictaphone, a notebook, three floodlights, three folding metal stands for the lights and a fire kit.

The fire kit consists of yellow rubber gloves, a yellow hardhat and a pair of white paper overalls that slip over your feet like kids’ pajamas.

The trunk is like
full
.

Jack keeps all this stuff in his trunk because Jack is basically a Dalmatian—when a fire happens he’s there.

Jack slips into the overalls and feels like some sort of geek from a cheap sci-fi movie, but it’s worth it. The first fire you inspect you don’t do it, and the soot ruins your clothes or at least totally messes up your laundry schedule.

So he puts on the overalls.

Likewise the hardhat, which he doesn’t really need, but Goddamn
Billy will fine you a hundred bucks if he comes to a loss site and catches you without the hat. (“I don’t want any goddamn workmen’s comp claims,” he says.) Jack clips the Dictaphone inside his shirt—if you clip it outside and get it full of soot, you buy a new Dictaphone—slings the cameras over his shoulder and heads for the house.

Which in insurance parlance is called “the risk.”

Actually, that’s
before
something happens.

After
something happens it’s called “the loss.”

When a risk becomes a loss—when what could happen
does
happen—is where Jack comes in.

This is what he does for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company—he adjusts claims. He’s been adjusting claims for twelve years now, and as gigs go Jack figures it’s a decent one. He works mostly alone; no one gives him a lot of shit as long as he gets the job done, and he always gets the job done.
Ergo
, it’s a relatively shit-free environment.

Some of his fellow adjusters seem to think that they take a lot of shit from the policyholders but Jack doesn’t get it. “It’s a simple job,” he’ll tell them when he’s heard enough whining. “The insurance policy is a contract. It spells out exactly what you pay for and what you don’t. What you owe, you pay. What you don’t, you don’t.”

So there’s no reason to take any shit or dish any out.

You don’t get personal, you don’t get emotional.
Whatever
you do, you don’t get
involved
. You do the job and the rest of the time you surf.

This is Jack’s philosophy and it works for him. Works for Goddamn Billy, too, because whenever he gets a big fire, he assigns it to Jack. Which only makes sense because that’s what Jack did for the Sheriff’s Department before they kicked him out—he investigated fires.

So Jack knows that the first thing you do when you investigate a house fire is you walk around the house.

SOP—standard operating procedure—in a fire inspection: you work from the outside in. What you observe on the outside can tell you a lot about what happened on the inside.

He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, being careful to shut it behind him because there’s that barking dog.

Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.

The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.

Or
former
koi pond, Jack thinks.

The pond is sodden with ashes.

Dead koi—once gold and orange, now black with soot—float on the top.

“Note,” Jack says into the Dictaphone. “Inquire about value of koi.”

He walks through the garden to the house itself.

Takes one look and thinks,
Oh shit
.

He’s seen the house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn’t recognized the address.

Built back in the ’30s, it’s one of the older homes on the bluff above Dana Point—a heavy-timbered wood frame job with cedar shake walls and a shake roof.

A damn shame, Jack thinks, because this house is one of the survivors of the old days when most of the Dana headlands was just open grass hillside. A product of the days when they really
built
houses.

This house, Jack thinks, has survived hurricanes and monsoons and the Santa Ana winds that sweep these hills with firestorms. Even more remarkably, it’s survived real estate developers, hotel planners and tax boards. This sweet old lady of a house has presided over the ocean through all that, and all it takes is one woman with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette to do her in.

Which
is
a shame, Jack thinks, because he’s sat on his board looking at this house from the ocean all his damn life and always thought that it was one of the coolest houses ever built.

For one thing, it’s made of wood, not stucco or some phony adobe composite. And they didn’t use green lumber to frame it up either. In the days when they
built
houses, they used kiln-dried lumber. And they used real log shakes on the exterior and were content to let the ocean weather it to a color somewhere between brown and gray so that the house became a part of the seascape, like driftwood that had been washed up on the shore. And a lot of driftwood, too, because it’s a big old place for a single-story building. A big central structure flanked by two large wings set at about a thirty-degree angle toward the ocean.

Standing there looking at it, Jack can see that the central and left
sections of the house are still intact. Smoke damaged, water damaged, but otherwise they look structurally sound.

The wing to the right—the west wing—is a different story.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fire started in the west wing. Generally speaking, the part of a house that suffers the most damage is where the fire started. You know this because that’s where the fire burned the longest.