Fire Lover (6 page)

"Residential burglars!" John yelled into the mike. "Blue Toyota, no plates, two male Latinos, twenty to twenty-five years!"

Shit! The Toyota spotted him closing in, then it hung a U-ee, rubber smoking, and wheeled off onto a side street. But when the ugly yellow fire truck clattered after them, the Toyota whipped it around again and roared right at him.

He scarcely had time to jerk the wheel and get out of the way. His truck bounced and clattered over a curb with all kinds of gear crashing around the truck bed, and the Toyota's passenger laughed as they sped by. And flipped him off.

Nobody was scared of a fireman driving something that looked like a Tijuana taxi. Well, they didn't know this fireman. He flicked on the red lights, and the chase was on, with his overloaded rig sliding and skidding and clanging around corners, and everybody on the street wondering what in hell the fireman was up to.

"Verdugo!" he yelled into the mike, pulling out all the stops now. "They're running! Eastbound on Glenoaks! No . . . southbound now!"

"Patrol twenty-one, patrol twenty-one," the dispatcher said. "Are you in pursuit?"

It was unbelievable! A cop-style pursuit? Of burglars? By a fireman in a ratty yellow truck?

John was still afraid to officially announce a cop-style pursuit. So he said, "No! I'm not in pursuit. I'm just following. Real fast!"

Except that when he got to a busy intersection and had to pop the siren, the dispatcher heard it over the open mike and came back with, "Patrol twenty-one. Will advise Glendale PD that you're not in pursuit. Just following real fast. Riiiiiight."

The Toyota jerked a hard left into another alley, and the driver jumped on the brakes, seemingly ready to bail out.

John thought about that big knife as he chugged in behind them. He reached for the bag next to him. His .38 was unloaded, but he'd also stashed a .22 automatic in there. He grabbed both guns, but the burglars didn't bail. The Toyota took off again.

After another block or two of crazed driving the Toyota went into a wheel
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locking slide right into the Greyhound bus depot. The doors blew open and they were gone.

One guy headed for an industrial park and got away. The other hot-footed down a residential street, the asshole that had flipped him the bird, so John racked a round into the chamber of the .22 and lit out after him, with two police units, sirens howling, headed his way.

After rounding a corner, the burglar, who was in worse shape than the overweight fireman, had had enough. He made a halfhearted attempt to climb a block wall, but gave up.

It was a neighboring Burbank Police Department motor cop who got there first. He looked at the prone burglar, then at the Glendale fireman, then at the little .22 pistol in the fireman's hand, and he said in disbelief, "Is that your fire truck back there?"

"Yes," John responded. "Don't make me explain right now, 'cause I don't feel too . . ." Then he threw up. He tossed his cookies all over the burglar, who by now couldn't believe any of this shit, nor could the Burbank motor cop.

It turned out that the addicts had burgled an apartment, and their Toyota was loaded with a few thousand bucks' worth of loot. John made a self-effacing claim to his colleagues that though the pursuit was undeniably exciting, he "didn't want any attention for it."

And their answer to that was the same given by the Verdugo dispatcher: "Riiiiight."

When they gave him the Deputy Dawg horseshit again, he said, "If I was a straight police officer this caper would've been chalked up as a righteous bust." He was absolutely right. He added, "But because I'm a half-breed wanna-be I'm a target of ridicule." And he was absolutely right about that too.

The Glendale News-Press grabbed the story and published it the next day, and every fire station in the city and beyond heard about the swashbuckling fireman who ended up getting a commendation from the city council for his derring-do. The fire marshal gave him thirty merit points in his personnel file, but took back fifty for the offense of carrying a firearm in a fire department vehicle.

It was getting hard for the fire marshal to decide what to do with this guy.

John said that the next time he went to one of those cop bars, a young officer who actually seemed to get a kick out of the Glendale fireman's reputation sent the wanna-be a half-pitcher of margaritas. Now that was a bit of recognition, coming as it did from a real cop.

John Orr enjoyed it immensely, and drank the pitcher dry, and played his favorites on the jukebox: Neal Diamond and the Doors. And of course, everybody loved the Doors' signature song: "Come on baby light my fire!"

Chapter
3

During the early eighties John Orr enrolled in a few more fire-investigation courses with his firefighter colleague Don Yeager and a Glendale cop, Detective Dennis Wilson, who attended because the police were still handling the arson cases for the city of Glendale. Arson, according to the cops, was part of "the garbage detail," not like handling homicides or robberies.

There was one aspect of those training sessions that John found fascinating. It was the staged fires where furnished rooms were set alight and allowed to burn. They got to watch the ignition and progression, and to examine the aftermath. He said it was a "privilege" to observe the before and after of a fire scene, something many firefighters never got a chance to see.

When the training was finished, the fire marshal, only too aware of John's job enthusiasm, approved of his being called out after hours on unusual fires. John Orr was becoming a de facto arson investigator even though the responsibility still resided with the police department. His primary task still lay in inspecting vacant property for brush and weed abatement, and issuing citations to recalcitrant property owners, which wasn't always easy.

He said it would have been if he were a six-foot-three-inch cop in a blue uniform, carrying a six-inch Magnum, wearing mirrored shades. But no, he was just a five
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foot-nine-inch fireman in a pale blue work shirt, like a "towel guy at a car wash."

A case in point was the wealthy real
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estate broker who had been avoiding costly weed abatement by listing post office boxes on property deeds in order to hide his true address. One of his properties was an abandoned and derelict duplex apartment. Kids would hang out there and the property was window high with weeds.

The fire marshal had sent five notices, but got no response. John obtained the miscreant's home address but couldn't catch him there, so he staked out several real-estate offices that the broker owned until he spotted the guy entering one of them. He sneaked up to the door, doing, as he described, "a low crawl."

John knocked at the door, calling out. "Hellooooo! Is this Dr. Beauchamp? I have a delivery for the office manager!"

The elusive broker peeked out but couldn't see the creeping fireman, and yelled, "You have the wrong address. I am not Dr. Beauchamp."

John knocked again and said, "Well, my package has this address on it and I've been instructed to leave it here!"

The broker opened the door then, and said, "Look, buddy, I told you . . ."

But there he was, staring into the grinning face of a fireman, and not just any fireman, as he would soon discover.

"I think you're the guy I'm looking for," John said.

"He was my target" is how John later described him.

But even after all that, the "target" denied his true identity as owner of the property in fire-code violation, until John said, "Come on, gimme your identification and let's get this over with." And he stepped inside.

The target was outraged. He ordered the fireman out. The fireman refused. He shoved the fireman. The fireman shoved back.

John Orr later said, "If I was a real cop the confrontation would never have progressed. The dude woulda taken his licks."

And when the fireman picked up his radio to call for a real cop, the target said, "What're you doing?" and snatched it away. And he shoved John again, causing the radio to clatter to the floor. They wrestled and the radio was kicked outside. They crashed into the door, and it slammed shut. The target broke free and ran for his desk, jerking open a drawer, rummaging for . . .

A gun! John thought. He dove across the desk and pulled the guy's hand out. They grappled on the desktop.

And then, as John Orr later maintained, "For the first time in my entire life I threw a punch."

It turned out to be a dweeby little skittering punch, and did nothing but piss off the broker even more.

But the broker was no Bruce Lee, and John managed to get him in a choke hold and drag him out the front door and down to the ground, where he kept the guy's neck in the crook of his arm and grabbed the damaged radio with the other hand.

While John was calling for help, the broker wriggled around enough to slide his mouth down and sink his fangs into the fireman's forearm, and the fireman yelled "Yoooooowwww!" into the radio.

But the son of a bitch wouldn't let go! He just hung on like a fucking alligator, so John shouted his location and "Help!" into the radio, and threw only the second wimpy punch of his entire life, smacking the guy in the back of the head. And breaking his own finger.

By and by, the nearest engine company showed up along with a bunch of cops, and nobody was shocked to see who it was sitting there on the stoop of the real-estate office, nursing his chomped arm and broken pinkie, while the real-estate broker wheezed.

And then, to John's surprise, out of the office walked the guy's ten-year-old stepson. He'd been in one of the other rooms during the entire donnybrook, afraid to come out. The broker screamed that this wack-job fireman had come to his door demanding identification, and that when he momentarily refused because of the overbearing attitude, the fireman had hauled off and punched him in the chops! And the ten-year-old kid nodded yes, and swore to it.

The broker was quite a big shot around Glendale and had friends. He threatened to sue the city for a million bucks and did. But there was some horse trading done.

the city quashed the citation that John had written and the broker settled his million
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dollar lawsuit out of court for five hundred bucks. John Orr was informed that he'd been lucky because some of the city bigwigs had considered filing assault charges against him!

With everyone around him getting exhausted by his antics, John decided that there might be something wrong with his approach to citation writing, and maybe he needed to learn how real cops did it, so he asked permission to do ride-alongs with the Glendale police, and was told, yes yes, anything to prevent future punch-outs and lawsuits. So he rode several times with a Glendale cop who, John said, was "ferocious on the job." That cop's ferocity was irresistible and intoxicating. He almost fell in love with her.

It was during this time that Glendale hillsides were frequently being set on fire, especially near the affluent homes in Chevy Chase Canyon. Nobody ever caught anyone, but the arsons were forcing Chevy Chase property owners to do their part in brush and weed abatement.

John devised a scheme where he would phone up a brush-clearance company that would work without front money, and posing as the owner, he'd make appointments for the properties to be cleared.

He would say "Bill me, please," giving the owner's address or the P. O. box that he'd ferreted out.

And it worked, but it wasn't easy because the goddamn post office wouldn't show him the box applications as they would for a real cop. The way he solved that problem was by dating a not-so-hot
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looking letter carrier who introduced him to a postal inspector at a party, and from then on, the post office was his.

He later portrayed how he loved tracking down these miscreants and ticketing them:

The violators I dealt with were minor bandits, but their evasion tactics were better than some career criminals'. I found it challenging to conduct the "hunt" using any tracking abilities I had to find them and make the "kill"
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writing a citation or getting the hazard eliminated
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as the "trophy head." A bit like my pursuit of women during my days as a single man.

The zealousness of Glendale's fire
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prevention guy struck some of the firefighters as quite peculiar. John not only responded to all brush fires while on duty, but he'd even show up off duty. He said it was to study "fire-fighting tactics and fire behavior." And why should he worry about what a bunch of guys thought, guys who spent so much firehouse time on their backs that he felt like drawing a chalk line around the whole station.

Everyone knew that 80 percent of brush fires were set deliberately, and this was at a time when John longed for Glendale to form a real arson unit. He was doing a kind of "arson profiling," before the profiling of serial criminals by the FBI had been given much publicity. And since almost all the brush fires were roadside starts, he said he "put himself in the arsonist's car, and in the arsonist's head." He began looking at traffic patterns, searching for homes or landmarks from which a fire starter could be spotted gazing at his handiwork.