California Fire and Life (7 page)

He organizes the class. Decides someone better do that in a hurry before fifteen men go through like a herd of elephants and trample the evidence. So Jack’s like, “First thing we do is a walk around the exterior and everyone take notes. Ferri, start taking pictures. Garcia, how about doing a diagram? Krantz and Stewart, canvass the neighbors. Myers, interview the owners and get it on tape …”

Some of the guys stand there looking at Jack like,
Who made you God?

Jack says, “Hey, guys, I ain’t flunking this course.”

So let’s get after it.

Four in the morning, they’re back in the dorm talking it over.

Fuse box fire is what they come up with.

Overloaded circuit breaker.

They have heavy char around the fuse box and the worst heat damage in the area directly above the box. A big V-pattern with its base as wide as the fuse box.

A no-brainer as far as that goes.

The guys that did the dig-out report no pour patterns on the concrete slab. No spalling, no signs of accelerant.

Owners were home at the time of the fire.

Neighbors report nothing unusual.

Burn patterns consistent with source.

Materials burned and not burned consistent with HRRs.

They’re ready to go in: a Class C Fire—Accidental Fire of Electrical Origin.

“I don’t think so,” Jack says.

To groans from fourteen exhausted men.

“The fuck you mean you don’t think so?” Ferri asks. He’s like, annoyed.

“I mean I don’t think so,” Jack says. “I think this is an incendiary fire.”

“Fuckin’ Wade,” seems to be the general opinion. “Don’t be an asshole … Wade, don’t be such a pain …” A firestorm, as it were, of protest. Which Ferri leads: “Look, we’ve been working this for fifteen-plus hours. We’re beat. Don’t come in here with your cop bullshit and try to make an overloaded fuse box into a federal case.”

“Someone tampered with the circuit breaker,” Jack says. “The plastic sheathing on the calibration screw is missing.”

“Far as I’m concerned, Wade,” Ferri says, “the only sheathing that was missing was what your father forgot when he knocked up your mother.”

Jack says, “Calibration screws
always
have plastic sheathing on them. Where is it?”

“It melted off.”

“It wouldn’t melt off,” Jack says. “It would melt
on
. There’s no sign of that. Someone recalibrated the circuit breaker. To do that they had to break the sheath off the calibration screw. I’d look at the owners.”

“We looked at the owners,” Krantz said. “They looked all right to us.”

“Did you call the mortgage company?” Jack asks.

“No,” Krantz says.

“Why not?”

“We were looking at a fuse box fire …”

“Are the owners employed?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you check with the employers?”

“No …”

“Shit,” Jack says. Like he’s going to bust Krantz one.

“I’m
sorry,”
Krantz says.

“Don’t be
sorry,”
Jack says. “Do your fucking job.”

“Chill out,” Ferri says.

“You chill out,” Jack says. “These assholes had a job to do and—”

“Look, hotshot,” Ferri says. “Just because you want to show off—”

“Explain the missing sheathing, Ferri,” Jack says. “Anybody?”

No takers.

“Let’s vote,” Ferri says.

Knowing it’s 14 to 1.

“Vote my ass,” Jack says.

“What are you, the dictator here?”

“I’m right.”

Your basic awkward silence. Finally, one of the guys—the guy Jack had pulled from the concrete tower—says, “Shit, Jack, you’d
better
be right.”

They write up the report. Electrical fire, deliberately caused by tampering with the circuit breaker.

Jack walks into the classroom with the weight of the whole class on his shoulders. Six weeks of eighteen-hour days times fourteen men—that’s a lot of heat.

Captain Sparky walks in and picks up the report from the desk. Stands reading it as fifteen guys grip. Sparky looks up from the report and asks, “Are you
sure
this is what you want to go with?”

Jack says, “We’re sure, sir.”

“I’ll give you another chance,” Sparky offers. “Go out for an hour, reconsider and redo.”

Jack’s like,
Shit
. I walked the whole freaking class off a cliff. And now Sparky, of all people, is throwing us a rope. All we have to do is reach up and grab it.

Ferri raises his hand.

“Yes?” Sparky says.

Ferri’s got balls, Ferri’s a man. He points to the report and says, “That’s our conclusion, sir. We’ll stand with it.”

Sparky shrugs.

Like, suit yourselves, losers.

Says, “Well, I gave you a chance.”

Takes a red pen and starts slashing the report.

Jack feels like shit. Feels thirteen pairs of eyes burning into his back. Ferri looks over and shrugs. Like, win some, lose some.

Ferri’s a man.

Sparky finishes the massacre, looks up and says, “I never thought you’d get the sheath.”

Just like Captain Sparky, Jack thinks—you have the right answer and he tries to sell you the wrong one. Just so he can flunk your collective ass.

“Class dismissed,” Sparky says. “Good job, gentlemen.”

Graduation ceremony tomorrow. Try to dress like grown-ups.

Fire school.

What a ride.

All of which is to say that when it comes to fire, Jack knows what he’s doing. Which is why Goddamn Billy’s not concerned when Jack comes into his office with a dog under his arm.

Actually,
out
into his office, because Billy’s sitting out beside the giant saguaro he had imported from south Arizona.

It’s a Billy kind of a day, Jack thinks—hot, dry and windy. Kind of day that reminds you that Southern California is basically a desert with a few tenacious grasses, overirrigation and a freaking army of gifted and dedicated Mexican and Japanese gardeners.

“So?” Billy asks.

“Smoking in bed,” Jack says. “I was just starting to set up the file.”

“Save you the trouble,” Billy says. He hands Jack a folder.

Jack instantly turns to the Declarations Page. The “Dec Page” is a one-sheet detailing the types and amounts of the insurance coverage.

A million-five on the house.

No surprise there. It’s a large, elegantly crafted house overlooking the ocean. The mil and a half is just for the structure. The lot is probably another mil, at least.

$750,000 on the personal property.

The max, Jack thinks. You can insure your personal property at a
value up to half of the insurance on the structure. If you have personal property worth more than that, you need to get special endorsements, which Vale sure as hell did.

“Holy shit,” Jack says.

$500,000 in special endorsements.

What the hell did he have in the house? Jack asks himself. To come up with $1,250,000 in personal property? And how much of it was in the west wing?

“When did the underwriters start smoking crack?” Jack asks.

“Be nice.”

“These endorsements are
very
whacked,” Jack says.

“It’s California.” Billy shrugs. Which is to say, of course it’s whacked—
everything
is whacked. “How much of this stuff is destroyed?”

“Don’t know,” Jack says. “I haven’t been in the house yet.”

“Why not?”

“I found their dog outside,” Jack says. “I thought I’d better get it back to them first.”

Billy hears that the dog was outside and raises a significant eyebrow.

Sucks on his cig for a second then says, “It got out when the firemen came in?”

Jack shakes his head. “No soot, no smoke. Fur wasn’t singed.”

Because dogs are usually heroes. Fire breaks out, they don’t run, they
stick
.

“The dog was outside before the fire,” Jack says.

“Don’t go off half-cocked,” Billy warns.

“I’m fully cocked,” Jack says. “I figure Mrs. Vale let the dog out to do its thing and forgot about it. She was hammered. Anyway, I want to get it to the kids.”

“Well, you’ll have your chance,” Billy says. “Vale called a half-hour ago.”

Say what?

“You’re kidding,” Jack says.

“He wants you to come over.”

“Now?”
Jack asks. “His wife has been dead for what, six hours, and he wants to start adjusting his claim?”

Billy snuffs out the cigarette on the rocks. The butt joins its dead brothers in an arc around Billy’s feet.

“They’re separated,” Billy says. “Maybe he’s not all that torn up.”

He gives Jack the address in Monarch Bay and strikes another match.

Then says, “And—Jack? Get a statement.”

Like he has to tell him.

Billy knows that most other adjusters would just take the Sheriff’s statement, attach it to their reports and start adjusting the claim.

Not Jack.

You give a big file to Jack Wade, he’ll work it to death.

Billy figures this is because Jack doesn’t have a wife, or kids, or even a girlfriend. He doesn’t have to be home for dinner, or to the school for a ballet recital, or even out on a date. Jack doesn’t even have an ex-wife, so he doesn’t have his every other weekend or three weeks in the summer with the kids, or I-have-to-get-to-Johnny’s-soccer-game-or-he’ll-end-up-back-in-therapy time demands.

What Jack does have is his job, a couple of old surfboards and his car.

Jack has no life.

He fits the Vale file like a custom-made boot.

Jack’s walking back through the lobby when Carol, the receptionist, calls and tells him that Olivia Hathaway is here to see him.

“Tell her I’m not in,” Jack says.

Olivia Hathaway is all he needs right now.

“She saw your car in employee parking,” the receptionist says. Jack sighs, “Do you have a meeting room?”

“One-seventeen,” the receptionist says. “She requested it. It’s her favorite.”

“She likes the painting of the sailboat,” Jack says. “Can you look after this dog for a few minutes?”

“What’s its name?”

“Leo.”

Five minutes later Jack’s sitting in a small room across the table from Olivia Hathaway.

Olivia Hathaway.

She’s a tiny woman, eighty-four years of age, with beautiful white hair, a handsomely chiseled face and sparkling blue eyes.

Today she’s wearing an elegant white dress.

“It’s about my spoons,” she says.

Jack already knows this. He’s been dealing with Olivia Hathaway’s spoons for over three years now.

Here’s the story on Olivia Hathaway’s spoons.

Three years ago Jack gets a theft file. An eighty-one-year-old widow by the name of Olivia Hathaway has had a burglary at her little house in Anaheim. Jack goes out there and she’s waiting for him in the kitchen with tea and freshly baked sugar cookies.

She won’t discuss the loss until Jack has had two cups of tea, three cookies, told her his entire genealogy and received a report on what each of Olivia’s nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren is doing. Now, Jack has five other loss reports to do that day, but he figures she’s a charming, lonely old lady so he’s okay with spending the extra time.

When she finally gets down to it, it turns out that the only thing that has been stolen is her collection of spoons.

Which is weird, Jack thinks, but he’s looking out the window at a gigantic model of the Matterhorn replete with fake snow, the Crystal Cathedral and a gigantic pair of mouse ears on a billboard, so, like, what’s weird?

Olivia’s just had an appraisal done (“I’m not going to live forever, you know, Jack, and there’s a matter of a will”) and the spoons are worth about $6,000. At this point, Olivia gets a little weepy because four of the spoons are sterling silver, handed down from her great-grandmother in Dingwall, Scotland. She excuses herself to get a tissue and then comes back in and asks Jack if there’s anything that he can do to help recover her spoons.

Jack explains that he isn’t the police, but that he will contact them to get a report, and that all he can really do, sadly, is reimburse her for the loss.

Olivia understands.

Jack just feels like shit for her, goes back to the office and calls Anaheim PD for the loss report, and the desk sergeant just laughs like hell and hangs up.

So Jack punches Olivia Hathaway in on the PLR (Prior Loss Report, pronounced “pillar”) system and finds that Olivia Hathaway’s spoons have been “stolen” fourteen times while insured with thirteen different insurance companies. They have, in fact, been stolen once a year since Mr. Hathaway’s death.

Olivia’s spoons are what’s known in the insurance business as 3S, Social Security Supplement.

The amazing thing is that thirteen out of thirteen prior insurance companies have paid the claim.

Jack gets on the phone and calls number eleven, Fidelity Mutual, and it turns out that an old buddy named Mel Bornstein handled the claim.

“Did you do a PLR?” Jack asks.

“Yup.”

“And you saw the priors?”

“Yup.”

“Why did you pay?”

Mel laughs like hell and hangs up.

Jack tracks down adjusters number nine, ten and thirteen, and they’re each pretty much in helpless hysterics when they hang up the phone.

Three long years later Jack understands why they paid an obviously phony claim.

But he doesn’t back then. Back then he’s in a quandary. He knows what he should do: by law, in fact, he’s obligated to report the fraud to the NICB (National Insurance Crime Bureau), cancel her policy and deny the claim. But he just can’t bring himself to turn her in and leave her without insurance (What if there was a fire? What if someone slipped and fell on her sidewalk? What if there was a real burglary?), so he just decides to deny the claim and forget about it.

Right.

Two days after he sends her the denial letter she shows up at the office. They have the same conversation roughly twice a month for the next three years. She doesn’t write letters, she doesn’t go over his head, she doesn’t complain to the Department of Insurance, she doesn’t sue. She just keeps coming back, and back, and back, and they always have the same conversation.