California Fire and Life (20 page)

“This is why I’ve always loved you, Jack.”

“Do it the old way,” Jack says. “Then do it the new way. Do it till you’re satisfied. But do it.”

Whatever it is.

Letty’s at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which because of its time and location is generally known by the sobriquet “Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch.”

This is not the kind of meeting Letty’s used to. She’s used to night meetings in church basements, meetings with broken cookies and greasy coffee and stories about blowing the rent on beer and bourbon benders.

She’s not used to a meeting in broad daylight in a “togetherness space” on a pier in a marina, but that’s where the ladies go to share their experience, strength and hope and that’s where Pam went to do it with them, and that’s why Letty’s there.

Thinking,
The ladies are gorgeous
. I mean for a bunch of drunks these babes are put together. Whatever boozy fat they put on in their sinful days these girls worked off on the treadmills and exercise bikes and spinners. Skin glowing with health, eyes bright, hair shiny, full and sexy. If AA ever wanted to do an infomercial, they’d shoot it at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting.

Even women who weren’t alcoholics would go out and get hammered so they could come to the meetings and look like these ladies.

What twelve little steps and a few hundred thousand spare dollars can’t do, Letty thinks.

Anyway, she’s there, and the ladies aren’t drinking greasy coffee—they’re sipping Frappuccinos (decaf, low-fat milk) out of clear-plastic go-cups. There are a few guys there, not your nine-to-five types, but real estate brokers and insurance salesmen and other men who can take the middle of the afternoon off to share their experience, strength and hope and maybe get lucky, and as fortune and solid planning would have it there’s a Holiday Inn within a hot five-minute walk of the meeting. There are so many pickups happening at this meeting that it could be called Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch and the Men Who Lust After Them, Letty thinks.

Quit being such a bitch, she tells herself.

It’s not their fault they’re rich and you’re not.

They’re gorgeous and you’re not.

Get over it.

And get over Jack Wade. Twelve years is too long a time to be carrying a torch. Your arm gets tired. Twelve years and the son of a bitch never even called. Never would have called. You never would have seen him again if you didn’t need his help, and you’re such a bitch that you’d use him like that.

But the truth is she has been carrying a torch for twelve years. She’s had a few boyfriends but nothing serious because in the back of her head—in the back of her soul—she’s holding out for something she lost.

Jack.

Jack lost his soul and took yours with it.

So you’re pushing forty and you have no husband and no kids and no life outside busting skells.

And it isn’t these ladies’ fault.

It’s your own.

So get over it, girl.

So she sits and listens to the preamble and to the speaker and it’s the same stuff everywhere: if you’re a drunk you’re a drunk; no matter what the view is, it turns to shit. She makes small talk with a couple of the ladies during the break, and when the meeting resumes and the chairperson asks if anyone wants to speak, Letty waits for a few people to talk about what’s going on with them and then she raises her hand.

My name is Letty. Hi, Letty—blah, blah, blah …

“I’m here,” she says, “to ask if any of you knew my sister Pam. She died three nights ago and they say she’d been drinking. She was about five-eight, black hair, purple eyes. I know she used to hit this meeting—I don’t know what other meetings she used to go to but I’m hoping you can help me.”

Amidst the
Oh my Gods
and
Not Pams
and a couple of sudden sobs, about five hands shoot up.

Turns out they can help her.

Pam was sober that night, Letty says.

She and Jack are sitting at an outside table at Pirets, beside the main entrance to South Coast Plaza.

“She was at a meeting that night,” Letty says between sips of her iced tea. She picks up the glass and the paper napkin blows away in the hot, dry Santa Ana wind. “She was sober then. The meeting broke up at 9:30, then she went out for coffee. With eight other women. She was sober
then
.”

“That doesn’t mean,” Jack says, “that she was sober at four the next morning.”

Jack’s drinking a Coke. The good folks at Pirets had to search long and hard to find a soda that didn’t have the word Diet in front of it. They got it done, though.

“She told her AA friends she was scared,” Letty says. “Scared that Nicky was going to kill her. They told her to call the cops. They begged her to stay with them; she said it would just postpone things.”

Jack says, “So she went home and the fear and anxiety drove her to the bottle.”

“After Nicky left, she didn’t keep any booze in the house.”

“She bought a bottle of vodka—”

“I checked every liquor store on her route home,” Letty says. “I talked with everyone who worked that night. Nobody remembers her.”

“You’re good.”

“I’m motivated.”

“Forget about it,” Jack says.

“Forget about what?” she asks.

She knows just what he’s talking about.

“About getting custody of the kids,” Jack says.

“If I get him convicted of murder …”

Jack shakes his head. “You’re a long way from there. Say it
is
an arson—how did Pam die? Ng’s got it as an OD. Say you can
make
the next step, say it’s murder. You have nothing puts Nicky there. Say you somehow manage to cross
that
bridge—I don’t know how, but say you do—say you get Nicky convicted of murdering Pam … Mother Russia is still the declared guardian. Mother gets the kids.”

“She was in on it.”

“She provided an alibi,” Jack says.

“So they’ll take the kids from her.”

“No, they won’t,” Jack says. “Besides which, the murder conviction isn’t going to happen. Even if you could develop enough information to embarrass Bentley into moving off his call, or enough that the Sheriff’s would have to reopen. Or enough to get the DA interested.”

It’s a long shot. A long shot to get a criminal investigation, a longer shot to get them to charge, a regular NBA three-pointer to get a conviction, because the evidence is getting colder every day.

And Letty knows all this, she just doesn’t want to
know
it yet.

No, Nicky and Mother Russia keep the kids.

Nicky gets away with murder.

“So what are you going to do?” Letty asks. “Drop it?”

“No,” Jack says. “I’m going to do my job. I’m going to investigate the claim. I’m going to see if Nicky Vale had the motive and opportunity to set the fire and kill his wife. If I find sufficient evidence, I’ll deny the claim.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“The worst that happens to Nicky is he doesn’t get
paid
for killing her?”

“I’m sorry.”

“But it works for you, huh, Jack? You don’t care what happens to the kids. All you care about is that the claim doesn’t get paid, right?”

“That’s my job,” Jack says.

It’s not all I care about—it’s all I can do.

Letty gets up, says, “Same old Jack.”

“Same old Jack.”

“Well, same-old Jack,” she says. “I’d like to tell you to go to hell, but you’re the only chance I have. If you deny the claim, maybe Nicky will sue you for bad faith. Then maybe there’ll be a jury verdict that says that Nicky killed Pam. A family court judge would have to take ‘judicial notice’ of that verdict in a custody hearing.”

“That’s a
very
long shot.”

“So do your job, Jack,” she says.

Like he’d do anything else.

She tosses her napkin down on the table.

“And get a life,” she says.

Right, Letty, Jack thinks. Tell me to get a life.

As you walk out, take it with you.

Dinesh Adjati takes one of Jack’s samples, a small piece of charred wood, and scrapes a fragment into a glass flask. He adds 50 milliliters of pentane to the flask, then pours the whole mess through some filter paper into a clean flask.

The result is a clear liquid.

He repeats this procedure for all of Jack’s samples, labeling and placing the flasks in a metal rack as he goes through them.

A robotic machine then caps each flask, inserts a syringe needle into each, withdraws a cubic millimeter of liquid and lines up the samples to go through the gas chromatograph.

One of the allegedly dirty samples goes through first.

The sample gets shot into an injection port which is pressurized at
about 60 pounds per square inch of helium gas and heated to 275°C, which vaporizes the liquid. The helium chases the sample vapor into the core of the gas chromatograph.

This is a capillary tube, about 60 meters long and one-quarter of a millimeter in diameter. The inside of it is coated with methyl silicone, a thick viscous liquid. (Here’s how Dinesh explains methyl silicone to juries. He says, “If you put methyl silicone in a jar, and tip the jar upside down, and come back a day later, perhaps half of the liquid will have flowed to the bottom of the jar. If you come back another day later, probably most of it will be at the bottom. That’s how thick this stuff is.”)

The capillary tube (a.k.a. the GC column) starts out at room temperature, so the sample condenses into a liquid again, but the column is gradually heated inside an oven that houses it to 200°C. The effect of all this is that the sample will gradually vaporize again and start a migration down the capillary tube.

Different chemicals make this trip at different speeds, separating from each other as a result. Some of the chemicals dissolve inside the silicone and take a long time to migrate down the tube. Other chemicals race through it lickety-split.

But, one after the other, the chemicals will emerge, each time registering a blip on the computer screen. The height of the blip indicates how much of that chemical is present. At the end of the process, you’re looking at a forest of blips or peaks of various heights, which together form a recognizable pattern called the gas chromatogram.

The way Dinesh explains this concept to juries is to talk about cookie recipes. “Look,” he’ll say, “a recipe might call for a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of sugar. That’s the composition of that particular cookie dough, if you will—it has cinnamon and sugar in certain defined intensities. Gasoline, kerosene, napalm—any of the accelerants you’re testing for—are like cookie dough in this respect: they’re made of many different substances, each present in different amounts.”

All the substances present in any given mixture will produce a unique and predictable gas chromatogram, a characteristic “signature” of a given mixture.

Dinesh watches as the samples start to sign in.

He starts getting a little ripple at around five minutes. At ten a modest peak. The trace drops way down, then gives him a little hill at twelve minutes. At fifteen the peak goes Himalayan. Shoots up like a rocket. Down again at fifteen minutes, ten seconds. Up again at seventeen. Big
peak at eighteen, and then it starts to settle. Modest peaks at twenty, which gradually settle down. At about twenty-eight minutes it’s flat again.

Dinesh watches this on a graph.

The sample signs in.

It signs in “Kerosene.”

For his next magic trick, he’ll analyze the sample through a gas chromatograph with a special instrument, a mass spectrometer, attached to the back.

What happens is that the gases flow out of the GC column into a vacuum port, which sucks them into the mass spectrometer. The mass spec is a steel cylinder about four inches in diameter and two feet long. It has a glass port so you can see inside the guts, which basically consist of vacuum devices, steel plates, cylinders, wires, ceramic tubes and turbo-pumps which are whirring at about 100,000 rpm.

In the center of all this is a glowing filament which bombards the chemical vapors with electrons, breaking them into electrically charged molecule-sized chunks, or ions. In a microsecond these ions are weighed; in a nanosecond they’re counted.

The size and number of these ions produce a characteristic “fragment signature.”

(Dinesh explains it to juries like this: “Suppose you throw a flowerpot on the sidewalk. It will shatter into random pieces. It will break into different sizes and different numbers of pieces every time. No two fragments will be alike. But a molecule is a different kind of flowerpot—one with predetermined grooves, if you will. Every time you shatter it, it will break into exactly the same size and number of fragments. Each substance has its own unique, predictable fragment signature.”)

Now the computer automatically compares the fragment signatures against the NIST (National Institute of Standards) mass spectral library profiles of certain substances and comes up with a match.

Kerosene.

Which almost every analyst in the country would call a definitive match. Not Dinesh. Not with a GC-mass spec, not with all those plasticizers out there gumming up the works.

So Dinesh takes the samples and runs them through a GC × GC.

“Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography” is the technical term. Dinesh doesn’t think of it that way. He thinks of it as looking into chemical mixtures through a Hubble telescope.

It starts off simply enough. Dinesh runs the sample through a gas
chromatograph. Same process: the samples are vaporized and shot through a capillary filled with methyl silicone, where they separate into about two hundred groups of chemicals.

Instead of stopping there, or running them through a mass spec, Dinesh shoots them through an interface device into a second gas chromatographic column. See, each peak comes out of the first column for about ten seconds. Every three seconds, a little heater inside the oven is mechanically rotated. It has a slot in it which rotates over the column. It locally heats the column, which drives all the chemicals in that area out. As soon as they get beyond that “hot zone,” they come to the unheated “cold zone” and get sucked right back into the methyl silicone. This forms a sharp chemical pulse. This pulse is swept along a short length of column—about fifty millimeters—and eventually is launched down the tube by the heated zone into the second GC column.