Firetrap (2 page)

“Whatever it is, it's a load of crap!” Winston said.

Somebody else said, “You're right, Captain. If they can tie up the vice president on his way to see the mayor, it'll make national.”

“The city blew it,” Melinda said, “letting that report out without having all the facts. Then that nine-one-one call on the news. That recording: ‘Help me. Help me. Please don't leave me here. The firemen keep walking past me.' They've been playing it every half hour. It doesn't sound good.”

“It had to be a fake,” said Smollen. “No firefighter would leave a victim.”

“They got headlines, all right,” said Lieutenant Black, who'd picked up the remote and switched to the
Today
show on NBC. The same chopper pictures we'd been viewing locally were being broadcast nationally.

“Anybody read the SFD report?” I asked.

“It's not in the stations yet,” said Melinda, “but on the news yesterday they said it absolved the fire department of all wrongdoing.”

“As well it should have,” said Winston. “I was at that fire. We worked our butts off. Somebody wants to torch a place, there's not a lot you can do to stop them. This is just another…” He looked up at me and stopped.

“Go ahead. Say it.”

“This is just another case of the black community not being able to face the fact that their problems are of their own making. I'm sorry, but that's the way I feel.”

“What about that nine-one-one tape?”

“I don't know about that. I'd like to see them identify those firefighters who supposedly passed that guy up. If they exist.”

Most people in the fire department kept their thoughts on race, whatever those thoughts were, to themselves. Winston was one of the outspoken ones, and in some ways I appreciated his candor, if not his attitude. The room grew quiet. As a captain I was the ranking officer as well as the only black man in the room. “Opinions are like ass-holes,” I said. “Everyone has one.”

“Yeah, I know,” Winston said. “But you don't agree?”

“You mean, do I agree the marchers should be shot?”

“I shouldn't have said that. I mean do you think that tape is legit?”

“It sounded real to me.”

Somebody said, “Where'd that nine-one-one tape come from, anyway? Why didn't we have it the first day after the fire?”

“Maybe the dispatcher held it back from the city investigators so the fire department wouldn't look bad,” I said.

“So who was bypassing victims?”

“God only knows,” I said, although in the back of my mind I had an idea.

The most recent and inflammatory news report had been a clip from a dispatch tape reportedly made on the night of the Z Club fire, in which a man who claimed he was trapped in the fire called the 911 dispatchers on his cell phone to tell them that firemen were passing him by. Sounds of fire and even an MSA mask operating could be heard in the background. They were playing snippets of the tape on every newscast. The pleas had been heartrending, given the fact that the man had apparently died shortly thereafter. No survivors had admitted to making the call, and the phone had been found beside one of the victims on the second floor.

“Okay, they're saying we didn't try hard enough to get those people out because they were black,” said Winston. “A lot of firefighters at the Z Club were black. They're trying to make it into this huge racial thing when it wasn't.”

The worst part about the controversy for black firefighters was that when we defended the black community, we were looked on with suspicion by white firefighters, and when we stuck up for the fire department, the black community called us Uncle Toms. There was no way to win. But then, there never is.

“They just don't get it,” Winston continued. “Not everything is racial.”

I said, “That's just it. Everything
is
racial.”

“How can you say that?”

“How can you deny it?”

“Because it isn't. Take you, for instance. You're a captain in the fire department. You got that position
because
you were black. Not in spite of it. How do you figure you've been hurt by racism?”

“You got about a year to listen?”

“Don't give me that. The type of racism these people are talking about doesn't exist in Seattle. I doubt it exists anywhere in the country anymore.”

“You paint yourself black for a year and then I might give some thought to what you're saying.”

“Walk in the other man's shoes? Is that what you're telling me? Why don't you paint yourself white?”

“I've already
been
white.” The room grew quiet. One by one we focused on the TV and the vice president's motorcade heading onto the freeway. It was a little like watching the O.J. chase, excruciating in its slowness and in the inevitable knowledge that when the motorcade collided with the protesters, the outcome would be dismaying.

Twenty-five minutes later Clyde Garrison had just signed into the daybook when the bell hit, and Garrison, Kitty Acton, and I rushed out to the apparatus bay and climbed onto Engine 28. It was good to be back.

2. THE VICE PRESIDENT'S LIMO RUNS OVER A FOOT

TREY
>

Over eighty-five percent of our emergency calls in Seattle are aid calls. This one was in a neighborhood west of the station near the freeway, a few blocks off Graham Street. The house was a pink-and-white rambler on a slight embankment in a pleasant enough neighborhood. I was the first one through the door, followed in rapid succession by Garrison and Acton, lugging the aid kits. The first thing I noticed were two angry black men standing in the kitchen in Raiders jackets, looking as if they'd arrived just moments in front of us.

Our patient was in her sixties, wearing warm clothing but no jacket, the toes of her shoes wet, as if she'd traipsed across the same grass wetted by the overnight fog we'd just crossed. She was weeping so copiously she could barely see us, her raspberry-colored blouse and huge bosom streaked with tiny comets of tears.

“What's going on this morning?” I asked.

“The police sprayed me. I'm sixty-one years old, and they went and sprayed me.”

“Were you at the march?” I asked. When she didn't reply, I glanced into the kitchen, where the two brothers had been joined by two more brothers, one wearing a white bandanna on his head. He had watery eyes, too, though he wasn't as bad off as our patient.

“Motherfuckin' president's ride ran over some woman's foot,” he said. “We're going to sue that motherfucker.”

“How you going to do that? He's going to be outa town in twenty-four hours,” said one of the other men.

“Somebody's going to pay.”

“It was the
vice
president's motorcade,” said Clyde Garrison under his breath. “Not the president's.” He took a reading of our patient's blood pressure while I got a quick medical history, and Kitty began irrigating the woman's eyes with lactated ringers from our aid kit.

“Fuckin' tear gas,” said one of the men, stepping into the kitchen doorway. “My mother never even got to the demonstration.”

“The best treatment is to irrigate with water,” I said. “It usually takes about twenty minutes.”

“What do you mean, ‘irrigate'? I don't want nobody irrigating
my
mother.”

“We wash her eyes,” said Kitty.

It took just over twenty minutes before she felt better. As we left, the brother with the pepper-sprayed eyes stood in the middle of the living room blocking our exit just enough so that we had to detour around him. He stared at me as if we were about to step into the ring together and said, “If you're done, I want your funky Uncle Tom ass out of here.”

One of the older men from the kitchen said, “Hey, thanks for coming,” then turned to the man in the bandanna and said, “Shut up, DeShawn.”

“You're welcome,” I said, staring at the man in the white bandanna as if he'd been the one to thank us.

Outside, Kitty was furious. “They call us for help and then act like we're intruders. There's just no gratitude.” During the drive back to the station, Garrison and I kept our thoughts to ourselves while Kitty, a tall, slender woman with a penchant for letting little things eat at her for an entire shift, continued to rant. To make it worse, she found a broken eggshell and a yellow smear of raw egg on top of the crew cab.

When we got back to the station everybody was gathered in the beanery along with our battalion chief and a civilian woman who appeared to be half black and half Filipina. You could tell everybody in the room was being super polite because of her. It suddenly hit me where I knew her from. Her name was—

“Jamie Estevez,” said Chief Horst, looking at me, “let me introduce Captain Brown.”

She stood and reached for my hand. “I've heard good things about you, Captain.”

“You're on the news. Channel Four?”

“I
was
on four. I've signed a contract with KIRO, but I won't be there for a few months.”

Although she had never been one of my favorites, I had to admit Jamie Estevez was arguably the best-looking news reporter in the area, and whenever she showed up on TV, somebody in the station remarked on it. She had black shoulder-length hair, mocha skin, dark eyes, and a figure that several of the guys in the room were trying hard not to ogle, currently displayed to good effect in high heels, a hot pink blouse, and a navy skirt and blazer.

When Kitty Acton entered the room, she began plying Estevez with questions about the news business. Chief Horst stared at me through the general chatter that was beginning to fill the room and said, “I've brought a man to replace you for a couple of hours while we go to a meeting. Can Acton act?”

“What's going on?”

“All I know is, I have orders to skip the conference call this morning and drive you and Ms. Estevez to a meeting. They're in a hurry.”

“This isn't about the award, is it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you know what this is about?” I said, interrupting Kitty's interrogation of our guest. I might have waited for her to finish, but Kitty didn't finish anything verbal in less than half an hour; we called her Chatty Kathy.

Estevez turned to me. “Can we talk about it in the chief's car?”

3. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T TELL HIM HOW HE FIGURES INTO THIS

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

As we sat around the kitchen table at Station 28, engaging in the kind of chitchat strangers use to whittle down the time they must spend together, I tried to decide whether I'd made a mistake taking on a project that was going to bite a good chunk out of my life, both in terms of time and emotional involvement. Having arrived at Station 28 just as Engine 28 careened out onto Rainier Avenue and sped away, we'd been forced to wait almost thirty-five minutes. I'd caught a fleeting glimpse of Captain Brown as they sped off, a man with a small mustache and a chiseled profile. I hadn't been expecting him to be black, although given the circumstances, it certainly made sense. I had, in the way that I irrationally expect it of all firemen, expected him to be handsome, however, and was not disappointed.

Finally somebody said Engine 28 was returning, and a minute later Captain Brown came shambling through the door as if he owned this half of the world. Even in a room filled with confident firefighters, Captain Brown stood out as the big dog.

Except for Chief Horst, all of the men in the room were big, with thick arms and shoulders, but none were sculpted like a professional athlete until Captain Brown showed up—the kind of macho bastard I'd been falling for my whole life. His skin tone was a couple of shades lighter than mine, and his eyes were gray and bore evidence of more than one Caucasian ancestor. When he spoke, his voice was deep and rumbling, a voice that should have had a tranquilizing effect, yet I found myself nervous and unexpectedly hoping he was either gay or taken.

After we piled into the chief's Suburban, the two men sitting up front, Captain Brown turned around and said, “So what's up?”

I cleared my throat. “I've been retained by a group calling themselves the Z Club Citizens for Truth. They've asked for and received permission to set up an independent inquiry into the Z Club fire, with city funding. They've hired me to investigate the fire and write a report.”

“Because of the nine-one-one call?”

“That and other things. Nobody was happy with the official report before that call became public, but now there's even more reason for a second inquiry.”

“We've already got a number of investigations, don't we?” Captain Brown asked. “There's the fire department report. Labor and Industries is doing one. And ATF.”

“This one will be accountable only to the families of the victims.”

“Are you working for KIRO TV or for this group?”

“For the Z Club Citizens for Truth.”

“So where are we headed?”

“We're on our way to meet with the committee.”

Captain Brown turned to Chief Horst. “I don't understand why I'm here, Chief.”

“All I can say is, I got a phone call this morning from Chief Douglas. Said Ms. Estevez was showing up and we were to take you along. Arrange the manpower and be there by nine o'clock. That's all I know. We're already late. Mount Zion Baptist Church.”

“Where we'll be talking to community leaders and your big chief,” I added. “I assume they're going to give me whatever parameters they feel are necessary, and we'll proceed from there.”

“I still don't see why they need me at this meeting.”

“I've asked for an assistant from the fire department,” I said. “Somebody who knows all the players.” Horst, who had warned me not to let on that Captain Brown would be the appointed liaison, tossed me a look over his shoulder.

“You don't think they're going to try to saddle me with it, do you?” Brown asked.

“I'm sure I would look forward to working with you, too.”

“That's not what I meant. I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” I said, “and I'm sure you don't have anything to worry about.”

“Well, I'm glad I'm not going to be part of it. Good luck. This whole thing is going to be explosive. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

It was quiet for a while, our silence punctuated by the sounds of the fire department radio mounted on the dash. Chief Horst and I both knew Captain Brown had already been selected. After a bit, Horst said, “Ms. Estevez started out in radio and TV in Spokane. Isn't that right?” He peered at me in the rearview mirror.

“Something like that. How long have you been in the fire department, Captain Brown?”

“Going on fifteen years.”

“You don't look old enough.”

“You look like you just got out of high school yourself.” He turned around and faced me, and as he looked me over, I could feel my face heating up.

Probably my biggest flaw—and the reason I wasn't with somebody now—was that I gravitated toward rebels and mavericks (my high school sweetheart got kicked off the football team
and
the basketball team), iconoclasts, people my grandmother would have called dadgummed chicken thieves. It was probably the reason I was mulling over what Chief Horst had told me on the drive to Station 28. He said Brown had pissed off a lot of people downtown by not showing up to accept an award they wanted to give him for his actions at the Z Club fire. To make matters worse, there were people in the black community who interpreted his refusal of the award as support for their contention that the fire had been run badly.

The three of us remained silent for most of the drive. We were headed for the Mount Zion Baptist Church, probably the largest African-American church in the region and certainly in the city, where the pastor and deacons had been instrumental in trying to quell unrest during the past few weeks. Ironically, they'd also been instrumental in stirring up that same unrest with repeated public pronouncements that they suspected a cover-up.

Under the stoplight at 23rd and Jackson, the intersection was mobbed with people waving signs, marching, chanting, and shouting at cars. On the far corner a cluster of black males shouted angrily at passing vehicles. “You can't kill us anymore! You can't kill us anymore!” Several of the signs that people carried had large photographs of victims from the Z Club fire, mostly enlarged high school yearbook photos, grainy and sad in their blurriness. A hundred feet from the intersection a solitary police car was parked on the sidewalk outside a Starbucks coffee shop, two burly officers looking on with what I could only term feigned disinterest.

When we caught the red light and stopped, our fire department vehicle quickly became the focus of a splinter group of sign carriers, all women, stepping into the street to get a gander at the fools in the SFD Suburban. If half an hour earlier I'd been asked whether five middle-aged women in ski parkas carrying signs on sticks could have frightened the living hell out of me, I would have scoffed at the suggestion. But that's exactly what they were doing: approaching so that their signs rattled against the roof and the spittle from their shouting peppered my window, which they beckoned angrily for me to lower. They shouted at Captain Brown to lower his, too, and for a few moments I was afraid he was going to because he began fumbling with the controls, inexplicably failing at each attempt. Only after we vacated the intersection did he lower the window and then raise it, causing me to laugh nervously at the realization that he'd been toying with them. I wondered if he'd done it out of some warped sense of fun or as a defense mechanism to stall the women.

The chief and captain were both in uniform, but God only knew what the protesters thought I was doing in my pink blouse and navy blazer besides sweating.

I read as many signs as I could. “First the cops/now the firemen.” “JUSTice for the Z Club.” “What Really Happened?” And my two favorites, probably because of the misspellings: “Stop the Z Club liers.” “Give us the truth. Don't let our children die in vane.”

As we passed Fire Station 6 three blocks later, we could see where the building had been pelted by stones, vegetables, and eggs, with two windows in the garage doors broken. Somebody had spray painted something on one of the building's cream-colored outer walls, but it had been hastily painted over.

Frankly, if I'd known what a powder keg the situation was, I might not have agreed, but two weeks earlier I'd pledged my support to Miriam Beckmann, the founder of the Z Club Citizens for Truth. She convinced me that my training and my standing in the community made me uniquely qualified to head up a secondary probe, should the results of the first probe turn out to be unsatisfactory.

“Can't investigate yourself,” Miriam had said to me on the phone the night before. “And this new tape from the nine-one-one dispatchers proves it.”