The Smoke Room (6 page)

7. CADAVER IN THE CAT HOUSE

CHARLES SCOTT GHANET
was one of our regular customers, a man every firefighter in the station knew by name. In fact, at 29’s we didn’t even call him
Ghanet
but referred to him less than affectionately as Charles Scott.

Typically he called 911 somewhere between two and five
A.M
.

Our crew believed his complaints were mostly fictitious, that he called because he was a hypochondriac and because he was lonely. Viewed in one light, he was sadder than a lost orphan in a bus station. On the other hand, getting up at three in the morning because some clown needed a warm body to talk to got old fast.

Ghanet, who was sixty-eight but looked younger, routinely complained of stomach ailments, headaches, and pains in his joints and had several times hinted that he might commit suicide, a theme he abandoned after he was told the SPD automatically responded to suicide threats.

Despite our mixed feelings—and the fact that his house reeked of cats—we tried to treat Ghanet with the same courtesy and regard we gave each of our patients.

It was a Sunday night when we got the call. Charles Scott Ghanet lived near Schmitz Park in an area of dry yards and treeless avenues, in a house that was small and nondescript. When we rolled up, I got off and collected the aid and vent kits while Tronstad grabbed the Lifepak. On the sidewalk, Lieutenant Sears spoke to a Latino man in jeans and an unbuttoned plaid shirt, then filled us in as we marched up to Ghanet’s front door. “Neighbor said he’s worried. He hasn’t seen any lights for a couple of days.”

“Charles Scott didn’t call this in himself?” Tronstad asked.

“The neighbor.”

“Don’t you think this asshole might have called at noon instead of three in the morning?” Tronstad muttered. “Is this whole neighborhood retarded?”

“Settle down,” said Sears.

We banged on the barred door, and Lieutenant Sears called out loudly, “Charles Scott? Fire department! You okay? Charles?”

“Maybe he had a stroke,” said Johnson, who had a theory about everything. “My aunt had a stroke.”

Tronstad headed around the house with a flashlight, attempting to peer through the windows. Lieutenant Sears looked at Johnson and said, “Why don’t you go with him?”

“A black man peeking in windows at three in the morning? I don’t think so.”

I left Sears and Johnson glaring at each other. Together, Tronstad and I circled the house, pushing through knee-deep weeds. The blinds and drapes were pulled tight on the other side of the barred windows. Behind the house Ghanet’s fifteen-year-old pickup truck sat in the garage.

“Fuckin’ Fort Knox,” said Tronstad. “I always wondered what he’s hiding in there.”

“He got burgled once.”

“
I
got burgled once, but I don’t live in a fuckin’ vault.”

When we returned to the front door, Sears gave us a grim look.

“What?” said Tronstad.

Johnson said, “Take a peek through the mail slot.”

Switching on my medical flashlight, I propped open the mail slot with two fingers and swept the beam across familiar stacks of old newspapers six feet tall and the backside of a piano half buried by storage. A distinctive odor wafted out the slot. Without waiting to be told, I went back to the rig and retrieved the Halligan tool and flathead ax we carried for forcible entry. It took a minute to get the heavy steel door open. Inside, the smell was worse—a lot worse.

“Hey, yo,” Sears said. “Charles Scott? You in here?”

Ghanet was a pack rat, one of those old-timers who hoarded every newspaper, article of clothing, coupon, magazine, book, car battery, camera instruction booklet, and canceled check he’d ever touched.

Tronstad forged ahead, plowing through the piles of garbage as if on an Easter egg hunt, while I jumped in front of Lieutenant Sears. After the Arch Place fire Sears had treated me gingerly, thinking I’d been shaken because of the deaths. This would be my chance to prove corpses didn’t bother me.

“Jesus. I wonder where the cats are?” Tronstad said as something dark and furry shot between my legs and out into the yard. A second feline shadow followed.

It was a three-bedroom house, and if there hadn’t been garbage piled higher than our heads everywhere, we might have searched it in thirty seconds. As it was, it took our little train over a minute to reach the nook in front of the flickering television, where we usually met Ghanet. He was nowhere in sight.

Like hamsters burrowing into tall grass, we continued our search. Tronstad went into the bathroom, while Sears made his way into the master bedroom. I explored the kitchen. A minute or two later, we met in the cramped pathway Ghanet had carved in the litter between the kitchen and the living room. “He’s not in there,” I said.

“Not on the shitter,” Tronstad said.

“Back East they lost a body in a situation like this,” said Sears. “Somebody found her a year later. She’d turned into a mummy.”

“That isn’t going to happen here,” said Tronstad, with uncharacteristic resolve. “We’re not leaving until we find him.”

Tronstad was already making his way to the second bedroom. Because of the junk in disorderly rows along both walls, we couldn’t see any of the hallway, or Tronstad, but we knew from past visits that except for the master bedroom, the other bedroom doors were padlocked.

When Sears heard Tronstad forcing the bedroom door, he said, “Hey, Ted. What are you doing?”

“He might be in here.”

“The door’s locked from the outside, isn’t it?”

“Home invasion. They break in and lock him inside. We go away and he turns into a mummy. You going to leave without taking a look?”

The bedroom door burst open and Tronstad disappeared inside as if falling through a trapdoor. Sears followed, while I edged my way through the stacks. We found a neatly made queen bed, a bedside table, and a dressing stand, no disorder whatsoever. Gauging by the layers of undisturbed dust, there’d been no visitors in years. Tronstad opened the closet and pulled out a woman’s dress on a hanger, dangling a brassiere off one finger.

“This is like Miss Havisham’s,” Sears said, peering under the bed.

Tronstad exited the room. “Who’s Miss Havisham? Some patient you had when you worked at Thirty-one’s?”

“The old maid in
Great Expectations,
” I explained. “Charles Dickens. Miss Havisham wore her wedding dress until it was rotting on her.”

Tronstad stuck his head back in the doorway. “Charles fucking Dickens? You need to get a life, Juicy Fruit.”

Within seconds Tronstad had cracked the door frame on the second bedroom and was stepping inside. I followed. Unlike the first bedroom, this one was a total mess. As we looked around, the lieutenant shouted from the other end of the house. “I found him. Code green the search. I found him.”

I followed Sears’s voice to the bathroom, where the tub was stuffed with a large, swollen corpse, his head huge and bulging, as were his limbs and stomach, testicles the size of baseballs. All of his skin was black, and he looked like a blimp. “Where’s Charles Scott?” I asked.

“This
is
Charles Scott.”

“But Charles Scott isn’t black.”

“He’s been dead a few days. This is what they do sometimes. Ted searched in here. How did he miss this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Geez, he’s ripe. I’ll call for a C and C. Tronstad! We found him. Code green the search.”

Lieutenant Sears and I made our way through the junk to the front door and stepped outside into the cool night air. Sears keyed the mike on his portable radio and asked for the police and medical examiner. I took several deep breaths of clean air, but the stench seemed to have permeated my nostrils.

When the neighbor Sears had spoken to came out of a house two doors down, Sears walked over and met him. As they went inside, I climbed into the officer’s seat next to Robert Johnson. “You find him?” Johnson asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Was it bad?”

“No.”

Johnson cradled the steering wheel and stared at the empty street through the windshield, his eyes drowsy. Five minutes later I felt somebody bouncing the rig and turned around to see Tronstad standing on the tailboard with a large black plastic garbage bag in his hands. A moment later Tronstad jogged to Ghanet’s house and disappeared inside and was still in there twenty minutes later when the police car arrived. Then as Sears and the SPD officer went through the front door, Tronstad sneaked out of the back, carrying another plastic bag.

“What do you think he’s doing?” I asked, but Johnson was asleep.

Obviously we weren’t supposed to touch the dead man’s belongings, yet on two previous alarms I’d seen Tronstad remove items from dead people’s homes, in one instance four commercial pornographic tapes. He claimed he was doing the dead man a favor by removing them so his loved ones wouldn’t be shocked. On another alarm with another DOA, he hooked a small picture frame. None of the items were of much value; it was almost as if the nature of the event required him to snitch souvenirs.

Moments later, as Tronstad climbed into the crew cab, I said, “What’s in the bags?”

Tronstad peered past me toward the dark house. “The place was full of old papers. Nobody’s going to miss them.”

“Newspapers?”

“Yeah. Papers, man. It’s nothing.”

“Well, you’d better put them back anyway,” I said.

“Hey, man, don’t get your panties in a knot.”

“You guys ready?” asked Sears, climbing into the rig.

Five minutes after we got back to the station, I discovered Tronstad and Johnson arguing in the bunk room.

8. BEARER BONDS

TRONSTAD AND JOHNSON
were squared off in front of Tronstad’s clothing locker, at their feet three bulging black garbage bags. “You can’t keep this,” Johnson said, shaking his head.

“It’s just junk.”

“It’s not
your
junk. You can’t keep it.”

“Watch me.” I’d seen them bicker before, Tronstad a man who could get contentious about something as inconsequential as whether to have peas or green beans with dinner—afterward acting as if the squabble never occurred. “You just watch me.”

“It’s not right and you know it.”

“Oh, yeah? And it’s right to go bad on one alarm out of four?”

“I don’t go wrong on one out of four.”

“The hell you don’t.”

I stepped into the bathroom at the west end of the bunk room to use the urinal. Before Sears galvanized them into a posture of unity, these two had quarreled almost daily. Tonight their tone was more malicious than usual, especially Tronstad’s, as if the months of holding back had built his grievances to the point of bursting.

Even if these two didn’t, I knew we’d never quite worked together as a unit until we found ourselves united against Sears, who liked to think
he’d
brought us together through his authority and unyielding leadership. In reality our unification was a rebellion against his inflexibility. Personally, I liked him as an individual, but I stood with the others in my dislike of his stubbornness. It was always his way or the highway.

“What do you think, Gum?” Johnson was standing in the bathroom doorway watching me in the mirror, giving me the smile he used when he was furious. Lately, I was beginning to see the multiple layers of angst buried beneath his cheerful exterior. His gambling, for instance: he believed with a conviction equal to his belief in God that it was his destiny to win millions of dollars, that he would pick the right numbers and it would be handed to him, that every time he lost he was getting personally screwed out of what was rightfully his.

“What?”

“Gum? You and I have to take a stand on this. Ted needs to turn in those bags.”

“Of course he does. What’s in them?”

Johnson handed me a slip of official-looking paper about twice the size of a dollar bill, replete with intricate script and seals. The print on the front claimed it was worth a thousand dollars to the holder and that it had been authorized by the Bank of Alfalh.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Says it’s a bearer bond for a thousand bucks.”

“What’s a bearer bond?”

“I don’t know.”

Johnson and I walked into the bunk room, where Tronstad was cramming the last of the three plastic garbage bags into his clothing locker, forcing the door shut, and locking it. They barely fit. “If they’re not worth anything, what do you need them for?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Johnson. “If they’re not worth anything, what do you need them for?”

“I want to play a joke on my brother-in-law.”

“You have to tell Sears you took them,” said Johnson. “Tell him it was an accident. We’ll back you up, but we have to get these back where they belong.”

“It’s not like he’s got any relatives to inherit that junk. Some real estate speculator will buy his house from the government for a song, and then he’ll get a Dumpster and hire a crew of beaners and they’ll gut it. This stuff was headed for the scrap heap. I’m not going to hand it to Sears so he can write me up. No way, José.”

“Gum, tell him he’s gotta give it back,” said Johnson. “You know I’m right.”

“I’m beat. I have to go to bed.”

“You’re not squirming out of this, Gum,” Johnson said. “And don’t think if you go over there and go to sleep, you won’t be making a decision. It’ll be the wrong decision, but it’ll be a decision.”

I turned to Tronstad. “It says a thousand dollars. What if it’s real?”

“The Bank of Alfalh? Gimme a break. It’s play money. Trust me, man. You want me to burn one? Will that prove it to you?”

“Burn it all. That’ll prove something.”

“Tell you what. I’ll hold it, and if his family shows up, I’ll turn it over to them. They’ll throw it away, but I’ll give it to them. Does that satisfy you?”

“No way,” Johnson said. “You turn it in tonight.”

“You want me to lose my job over a bunch of junk?” Tronstad turned to me. “You’re not going along with him after what I did for you at Arch Place?”

Mention of Arch Place was like a blow to my solar plexus.

Tronstad glowered at me. His hair was black and thick, pulled into a ponytail barely legal by department standards, and his bulky eyebrows and mustache were menacing under the best light. When his deep-set eyes fixed on you, the weight of his look was almost palpable.

“We can take it back to the house in the morning,” I said. “I want to go to bed now.”

“Hey, buddy. You ain’t voting against old Tronstad, are you? You and me have an arrangement. I don’t tell on you; you don’t tell on me.” He smiled and bobbled his eyebrows comically.

“That’s dirty pool,” Johnson said. “You ain’t going to tell on Gum, and you know it. Anybody could miss a call.”

“Not the way Gum missed it.”

As far as Johnson knew, I’d been in the bathroom the night of Arch Place, but now, spurred by Tronstad’s remark, he looked at me curiously.

“Okay,” I said. “We can’t take it back tonight because we don’t want to tell Sears. You’re right. He’ll try to fire you. But we have to take it back in the morning. The three of us.”

It was disquieting that I seemed to have the power here. Of the three of us, I was the youngest by ten years and had only two years in the SFD, while Johnson had eleven and Tronstad eight. Robert Johnson had served in the Navy, where he’d once seen a man decapitated by an exploding truck tire. Ted Tronstad had done a tour in the Air Force, where he worked as a firefighter at various air fields around the world and had once witnessed a man incinerated in a jet fuel accident. I’d gone to community college. Next to theirs, my worldly experience was limited.

We went to bed, and in the morning when I walked over to the bunk room, I found Tronstad making up his bunk. Johnson was in the TV room, in front of one of the station computers, a single bearer bond on the desk next to him. Across the apparatus bay Sears was making his bunk and Chief Abbott was brushing his teeth loudly in the officers’ washroom.

“Hey, Gum,” Johnson said, smiling brightly. “There’s been a small modification to our plan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I looked up bearer bonds on the Internet. Tronstad has bonds from the Bank of Sierre Leone. From Deutsche Bank. From companies in Europe I never heard of. Mostly from the United States government. There’s a lot of stuff in those sacks.”

“A lot of stuff we’re going to give back.”

“We should think this over before we do something we’ll regret.”

“Robert . . .”

“Here. Read this. Just read this part right here.” On the computer screen, he pointed the curser to an open page of text.
“Bearer bonds and bearer certificates belong to the bearer. Possession is a hundred percent of the law with a bearer bond. Bearer bonds aren’t registered anywhere, but they can be stolen, which makes them ideal for anonymity. While the U.S. government no longer issues bearer bonds, they still honor bonds issued in earlier years. Millions of dollars’ worth of bearer bonds are outstanding.”

As Tronstad would put it, Johnson was happier than a dead pig in the sun. “We got bearer bonds in there from all over the world, but the majority are from the U.S. government. There’s no way to trace them. Those sacks might be worth a million each, Gum.”

“There’s no way a pack rat like Ghanet had that much money lying around. That’s junk paper.”

“How about four million each?” Tronstad said, when he came into the room. “I stayed up last night and counted them. Just over twelve million total.”

“Whoo-hoo,” Johnson said. “The beauty of it is that this ain’t money. It’s paper, and it ain’t stolen. I don’t know where Tronstad got those sacks. Do you?”

“We were going to make him take it back,” I said, more convinced than ever the paper was worthless. If it had been worth a few thousand, I might have believed Ghanet had squirreled it away for a rainy day. But millions? The man lived on macaroni and cheese. His truck barely ran. His TV was fuzzy on every channel.

Johnson gave me a long, slow look, as if trying to convince himself. “We were like family to Charles Scott. He would want us to have it.”

I could see they’d closed ranks and become a team, the two of them against me. They knew that I knew if I turned them in, I would be turning myself in for missing the alarm on Arch Place—and for lying about it over the course of the past three weeks. How could I get them fired over three garbage sacks full of worthless paper they thought was Aztec gold?

“You in?” Tronstad asked. “Or are you going to walk over there and cost us our jobs? Your choice, pal.”

“You just said it was worth—”

“Nothing, probably. Your choice.”

“What choice?” Lieutenant Sears opened the door from the apparatus bay in time to catch Tronstad’s last words. Despite our bad night, he looked military and shipshape.

“The choice is ice cream,” Tronstad said. “Gum owes us ice cream for his first DOA in a tub.”

Sears knew we’d been talking about something else—you could see it in the tilt of his head and his questioning brown eyes. “Is that what you guys were talking about?” Lieutenant Sears asked, looking at me.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “We were talking about . . .” Tronstad’s veins began bulging. Johnson stood up. “. . . about a surprise gift for somebody when he gets promoted.”

The lieutenant’s look softened. Rumors were flying around that he might soon be transferred to a captain’s position in the fire marshal’s office, so the lie had come easily.

Before he left, Sears, striking like a snake, snatched the bearer bond out of Johnson’s hands, then examined the gaudy colored ink and toy-money look. “This smells like cats,” he said.

You could have heard a pin hit the floor.

“I sure hope this didn’t come from where I think it came from,” Sears said. “Any time a firefighter removes something from the scene of an alarm, it’s a crime. I hope you boys know that.” He stared at us each in turn.

I could hear Johnson’s Timex ticking.

“I’ve got a safety committee meeting this morning at zero eight-thirty, and then Heather and I are heading out of town. But . . .” He held up the bond. “I’m going to keep this, and if it came from where I think it came from, somebody’s in trouble. I mean that.”

“Give it back,” said Tronstad. “You don’t have any right to take that.”

“Is it yours?”

“Well . . .”

“Then I’ll keep it.” Pausing in the doorway, Sears said, “This is potentially a serious offense.” He sniffed it again. “Oh, boy.”

“Hey,” Tronstad said. “Give it back. It’s mine. I brought it from home. Swear to God. It’s my sister’s. I gotta give it back to her this morning or she’ll be hot.” Tronstad held out his hand. They stared at each other for half a minute, and for at least part of that time I thought Sears was going to return it.

“We’ve got a four-off. If your explanation holds up in four days, I’ll apologize. Otherwise . . . you’re in a heap of trouble, buster. All of you.”

“At least keep it confidential,” said Tronstad.

“Why should I?”

“Because charges are supposed to be confidential. I ain’t saying we done anything, but if you’re thinking of writing charges . . .”

“Confidential it is.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Sears had been on his way out the door, but when I spoke he stopped and looked at me. He had heart. I had to give him that. He was hoping I wasn’t part of this. I could see it in his eyes. He liked me more than the others, probably because I was young, moldable, listened to his lessons, and tried to learn from him. “You’re going to hang, too. You know that, don’t you? If you’re part of it.”

“I’m not part of anything,” I said.

“I said, you know that, don’t you?”

“I know.”

After he left, Tronstad turned to Johnson. “If we can get it out of his locker on this four-off, he’ll never know the difference.”

“He’ll know the difference,” Johnson said.

“Maybe, but he won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“What makes you think he’s going to leave it in his locker?” I said.

“How are you going to get in?” Johnson asked. “It’s got a padlock the size of an alarm clock.”

“I can get into anything.” It was true. Tronstad routinely picked locks around the station for fun.

We wiped down the chief’s buggy and Engine 29 without talking, and then one by one the members of the oncoming shift showed up and relieved us.

Minutes later, when I went outside to the small parking area on the west side of the station, Tronstad and Johnson were waiting for me. The three black plastic bags sat at their feet. I clicked the remote key to unlock the doors on my WRX, then opened the rear hatch. I threw my gear bag inside next to my skates. “What?” I said.

“This isn’t going to work,” Tronstad said.

“It’s going to work unless you want to start throwing punches,” said Johnson, angrily. “You think one bond is bad, try to explain three sacks of them when Sears and Abbott come out to stop our fight.”