Vertical Burn (13 page)

28. WHATEVER DOESN’T MAKE YOU STRONGER KILLS YOU

When Finney had left the conference room, Monahan was talking to another short-timer from Ladder 7 about investing in Asian markets, as if Monahan had any money to invest. He was still broke from importing two hundred kangaroos in a scheme to sell meat and hides. It turned out nobody wanted to eat a kangaroo, and after he had all two hundred of them in pens on acreage he’d paid too much for, he discovered he didn’t have the heart to slaughter one anyway.

Monahan emerged from the conference room, took half a minute to get his bearings, then came downstairs and ducked into a public lavatory next to the Garden Room restaurant. When he still hadn’t come out after several minutes, Finney knew he was in for a vigil. In the crapper at the station, Monahan often finished books, paid bills, made phone calls, wrote letters—and had been tardy for more than one alarm after his legs went to sleep.

“John?” Kub was suddenly beside Finney again, whispering. “I didn’t want to talk in front of Diana.”

Eyeballing the rest room door, Finney said, “What?”

“You know I can’t act as your inside man.”

“Why not? I’m getting crucified.”

“I will tell you this. In a few days G. A.’ll show photos to that old woman.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Well enough to ID you. In a few days.”

“He thinks I did it, why doesn’t he just arrest me?”

“G. A. doesn’t work that way. He likes to play. That’s to your advantage if you use the time.”

“I don’t see any advantages here.”

“The other morning he went to Riverside Drive and wrote down license numbers of people who routinely drive to work past there. He thinks he has somebody who might ID you. Course, it won’t be as good as the old woman. You were there that morning, weren’t you?”

“An anonymous caller asked me to meet him. Then he never showed up.”

Kub took a deep breath and exhaled. “Christ, John. How did you get into this mess?”

“Forget it. I don’t need your help.”

“I wish I could help.”

“Yeah, I wish you could, too.”

A few minutes later Jerry Monahan rushed out the side door of the lobby.

Finney didn’t catch him until he was at the corner of Fifth and Seneca, catercornered to the YWCA. Monahan was walking briskly, talking to himself, his hands in the pockets of his baggy, corduroy trousers. Under the cloudy sky his skin was gray, the smile lines around his eyes crinkled against the breeze that channeled down between the buildings.

When Monahan smiled, he tried to make it mechanical, but there was a warmth to his smile that he couldn’t conceal.

“How are you?”

“I’m being framed for arson, that’s how I am.”

“What?” Monahan seemed incredulous.

“To start with, that house is not on the dangerous buildings list.”

“Of course it’s not. It burned down.”

“It never was on the list.”

“Sure it was. I put it on myself.” Monahan smiled a concerned smile as if he’d just discovered Finney was mildly retarded and realized he had to be more diplomatic. “What makes you think it wasn’t on the list?”

“Weren’t you listening inside? Caldwell said it wasn’t on the list.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you add that house like you said you would?”

“Well, I guess . . . Hmmmm. Now I’m getting confused. I don’t know what happened.”

“I’m not buying that.”

“Okay, I screwed up. I’m no virgin. It must have slipped my mind.”

“If it slipped your mind, why did you say you put it on the list?”

“I have a lot on my mind these days. My Elevator-in-a-Can is almost finished. I have a deadline—My wife says I’d forget my suspenders if they weren’t attached to my belt.” He smiled, striving to be cordial.

Was it possible he actually thought he’d added it to the list? Finney didn’t think so. There was something else, too. Last Tuesday, Monahan had been far too excited about the department becoming tied up with all those alarms. It was as if he had known about it in advance.

“Jerry, you’re screwing with me.”

Monahan shoveled his hands into his trousers pockets and said, “What are you talking about?”

“You made that call Sunday night. You told me to meet you.”

“What on earth are you—”

“You know where I was that morning, and you know why.”

Like a crime victim trying to flee a robbery attempt, Monahan turned and began walking quickly up the street.

Finney followed and grabbed his arm. “Talk to me, Jerry.”

“Geez-Louise, what do you
want
?”

“You took my coat out of my locker, didn’t you?”

“Your coat? Now it’s your
coat
? I thought you were talking about the dangerous buildings list?”

“You took my coat, didn’t you?”

“Go get some help,” Monahan said flatly. “Everybody said you were going to crack up after Leary Way, and now you have.”

“There’s a conspiracy, Jerry. You’re involved. That house was involved.”

Monahan looked at him intensely and said, “Don’t try to tell me about conspiracies. I’m an expert on conspiracies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought there were conspiracies against me, when I found out later there weren’t. Always when things go wrong, it feels better to believe people made it that way. It feels better to think you’re not small and insignificant and wandering around an aimless universe like a bug that can have a big shoe snuff out its life at any moment. If there’s a conspiracy and it’s centered on you, then you’re not insignificant. Somebody’s watching. Somebody’s paying attention. It’s the conspiracy syndrome. I grew out of it. You will, too, John. And don’t accuse me again, understand? I hear this once more, I’m going to the department, and after that I’m going to court to get a restraining order.”

Monahan gave him one last mournful look, and walked to the corner, where he turned back. “They say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ That’s not true. When trials come along, they make you weaker. The next trial comes along,
it
kills you. Listen to me. Get help.”

PART THREE

29. TWO MEN NOT FIGHTING OVER THE REMOTE CONTROL

His night at Station 26 had been bad enough that Finney was numbing himself with Katie Couric on the NBC morning show. He had tossed and turned until four
A.M
., when a heroin addict from one of the local biker gangs OD’ed in a cramped one-story apartment directly across the street from the station. By the time Engine 26’s crew walked through the door, his pals had, adhering to street legend, stripped him and packed him in a bathtub filled with cold water and ice cubes. Finding a slow pulse but no respirations, Finney and Lieutenant Sadler fished him out of the tub and bag-masked him in a puddle of water on the floor. When the medics came, they tied him to a stretcher and shot Narcan into his veins. As usual with Narcan, he bounced back in seconds, cursing all involved for “fucking up” his high.

Finney wished he had somebody to talk this over with. He knew he had been surly and self-pitying in those weeks following Leary Way, growling at people who wanted to console him, going so far as to denounce God and the church to the department chaplain when he visited, making certain everyone knew he wanted to be alone.

For five months he had been alone.

What he’d known all along but seemed powerless to change was how Leary Way had turned him into the supreme egoist. He’d become a self-centered jerk, and what was worse, he didn’t know how to change.

After making a few phone calls, he realized he couldn’t confide in those he didn’t trust, and he didn’t trust the few he could confide in. Thomas Baxter, who was riding Ladder 1 with Finney the night of Leary Way, had turned to Jesus and now seemed to be breathing rarefied air from another planet. Finney didn’t know whether his conversion was a form of self-hypnosis or a true immersion in spirituality, but whichever, it had propelled Baxter out of Finney’s reach.

Finney was closer to his father now than he’d ever been, but he didn’t want to put any more rocks on the wagon his father was pulling. His brother was supportive on the surface but continued to throw darts at him in small ways. His mother did not willingly take on problems, and rarely expressed an opinion that wasn’t on lease from her husband. In the last five months he’d grown distant from all of his other friends.

There was no one else.

The doorbell rang, and as he scuffed his feet across the carpet, his loose wool socks becoming snug as condoms, he glimpsed himself in the mirror—unshaven, disheveled, eyes bloodshot.

His father was on the dock, nonchalantly puffing away on a cigarette.

Gil Finney was small, wiry, his face weathered from forty years of inhaling unfiltered cigarettes and Dumpster fires. Six months of cancer and a lifetime of quarreling with strangers about right-hand turn lanes and parking spots had given him a drawn look, as if he were made out of wire. He’d been showing up unbidden lately, a routine Finney had become rather fond of.

“Hey, John. Everything skookem?”

“Yeah, fine. Come in.”

“I know you guys worked yesterday, but I thought you might want to shoot the breeze. I been up since five.”

“Me, too. How’re you doing?”

“Not so bad. God, last week I thought I was dying.” He laughed and then coughed. Then laughed again. For reasons unfathomable to Finney, his father, who’d never seen much humor in life, now found hilarious almost everything having to do with death, particularly his own. For months he’d been unnerving people with jokes about coffins and cemeteries and had even threatened to play a gag on his pallbearers, who would all be chiefs, by having his casket weighted with six hundred pounds of lead. “Make their fat asses do some real work,” he said, laughing until the phlegm rattled in his lungs with a wet, evil sound.

Using two fingers and a thumb, Gil Finney expertly flicked his cigarette stub onto the surface of the lake, where it sizzled for a fraction of a second and went out. A gull swooped down and swallowed it.

Sixty-two years of age, his father had lately become overly solicitous of the welfare of others, something Tony had once, after a couple of beers, theorized was a stunt to get people to think about him. Finney preferred to believe his father’s illness had actually transformed him into a better human being, just as Leary Way had in many ways transformed Finney into a lesser human being. Or so he reasoned.

Finney and his father had endured many years when they were barely speaking, and one where they didn’t speak at all, but time and circumstance had pretty much crayoned over the bad memories. These days Finney was glad for the visits and found, despite his own egocentrism, his father was often in his thoughts.

Gil Finney wore faded khaki slacks, deck shoes, and an old SFD windbreaker zipped to the neck. His wife, Finney’s mother, had bought him a goose-down, Eddie Bauer ski jacket, but he preferred the worn and the familiar.

After stepping jauntily through the front door, Gil Finney sank onto the leather sofa, picked up the remote control, and, with the speed of a startled cat running across a piano keyboard, began flipping through channels. “What do you hear about making lieutenant, young man?”

Finney had hoped somebody else would be there to face the heartache in his father’s eyes when he found out, but apparently, his old man’s connections to the department notwithstanding, nobody had had the temerity to spill it. Now that they were in the same room together, he realized he couldn’t do it either. At least not now. “All we can do is wait.”

“Whatcha doin’ now? Looks like you’re lazing around the house like a three-dollar chippy.”

“I would never ask for more than two dollars.”

“What? You have a bad shift at Twenty-six’s?” The TV remote in one hand, an issue of
Kayaker
magazine in the other, Gil Finney turned and looked at his son. His steel-gray, ball-bearing eyes squinted out from under caterpillar eyebrows. “Hey, you know what I just realized the other day? Reese was one of my boots. I remember him now. He used to walk around like he had his underwear on backwards.” He laughed, and the phlegm danced deep in his lungs.

“I know. I came in with him.”

“Thought I was going to have to pink-slip the little bastard, but then he had his first fire and didn’t stain his shorts too bad, so I let him alone. Hey, somebody said they saw you with Diana Moore.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d stay away from women in the department. Women are genetic cowards. I told you that, didn’t I?”

“I’ve heard your theory.”

Gil Finney’s bigotry had grown worse since his retirement. Finney guessed that all those years of being forced to pretend he was fair made him feel as if he had decades of hypocrisy to make up for. These days he rarely spoke of the department without bad-mouthing minorities, his most virulent harangues reserved for women.

“They aren’t tough enough,” he said. “They can’t help it. They’re bred to protect the nest. They hide with the young. God made ’em that way. It’s the rooster who’s out there fighting. It takes a cock to be a firefighter. And not a strap-on plastic cock.”

Before his retirement, the old man had followed all the political dictates of a fire department in one of the most liberal cities on the coast, but privately he’d always believed the department of forty years ago was the only department worth saving—all white, all male.

“Maybe I should go down and rattle little Charlie’s cage for you. There’s no reason you couldn’t be a lieutenant before the day is out.”

Finney tried to sound casual. “I’d rather you didn’t, Dad.”

“You know I want to see this happen before it’s too late.”

“I know you do.”

“By God, both you boys are going to end up battalion chiefs. Didja know Tony’s already studying for the chief’s test?” Finney knew it was another of Tony’s falsehoods, but he had no intention of exposing him. “You’re number one on the list. You’ll be number one on the captain’s list when you take that. This is what I’ve dreamed for you, John. You and Tony both. Ever since you were little. Remember when I used to take you down to Ten’s and you used to scramble over Ladder One? ‘Daddy, I be fireman.’ ” He sat back on the couch and reminisced silently for a few moments. “Believe me, John, a straight-arrow like you will fly through the ranks.”

Fire department culture was odd, Finney thought.
Getting in,
they called it, an expression that typified how most firefighters felt about the job.

They were
in
.

Everybody else was
out
.

As a child, he’d been fascinated by the sense of danger, the sirens, the smell of smoke off his father’s hair and clothing when he came home from work, the soot in his ears, the stories he told, the rough-and-tumble men who joked with him when his father took him to the station, the absurd confidence and astonishing resourcefulness with which they and his father attacked anything even remotely resembling an emergency.

Finney had been a sensitive boy, easily offended by his father’s careless remarks. He’d tried college; his grades had been good but he’d lacked a goal. He’d worked on the assembly line at Boeing and then at Puget Sound Paint, where he was bumped from one of the road crews to the front office after only nine months. He wanted to think of it as a lark when he applied for the SFD, but it turned out to be more.

“I got something for you off the news last night,” his father said, holding a videotape aloft. “You know a man named Patterson Cole?”

“He owned Leary Way.”

“Check it out.”

A cheesy local gossip program had done a piece on Patterson Cole’s ongoing divorce proceedings. The eighty-three-year-old Cole had been entangled in a much-publicized breakup with a woman forty-eight years his junior who’d been a waitress at Hooters when they met. She was disputing their prenuptial agreement, claiming she’d been coerced into signing it under false pretenses. Cole countered that she’d been married and divorced four times but told him she’d never been married at all, that she told him she wanted children when it turned out she couldn’t conceive and knew it.

There was film footage of the couple in less litigious times, Cole, an unremarkable octogenarian, stooped, withered, his hair stringy and unkempt, invariably in a dark suit and red tie; his cartoon wife a head taller, massively blond, massively busty, in high heels and tight skirts. In most pictures she clutched a cliché toy poodle, the dog’s collar matching her outfit. Cartoons, both of them.

She claimed Cole had tried to kill her by pushing her off the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Tower, that he’d had her Mercedes torched, twice tried to poison her dog, sicced private investigators on her, bugged her phone, slapped her, and even tried to bribe her mother to marry him so he would be her ex-husband and stepfather at the same time, anything to upset her and ruin her life.

If even a fraction of what his wife was accusing him of was true, he was a reprobate, and Finney knew reprobates were capable of a lot of things, not the least of which was arson. As the show concluded, Finney got up to remove the tape.

“Your buddy is next.”

“My buddy?”

Looking as sure of himself as a matador who’d just stabbed the bull, the chief of the fire department, Charlie Reese, was giving a short statement about Riverside Drive: “I’ve been working closely with my fire investigation team, and we’ve identified the culprit in the Riverside Drive arson. As soon as we’re finished tying up some loose ends, we’ll make an arrest.” Reese fended off all questions, then added, “I can only say we were as surprised as you will be.”

His father shut off the tape and began changing channels. “What does he mean by that?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You must have heard something on the grapevine.”

Finney shrugged.

“Reese—what a little shit!” his father said. “In the old days we would have made short work of him. You been to the Downtowner. Went in there on a bed fire once. Wrapped the mattress up in a tarp, me and a guy named Coghill, an old gummer. Had a heart attack about two years ago. Halfway down the hallway the tarp came unwound, and the mattress popped out like a spring and bounced off the wall. Fire and smoke everywhere. Coghill hauled that mattress by one corner and pitched it out a window. I think we were on the fourth floor. It caught some oxygen and flamed up like a meteor on the way down, landed on Chief Ballantine’s car. Coghill and I just about died laughing. Chief Ballantine. Remember him? Used to write charges on people if their boots weren’t polished? He’s living in Mexico now with some little señorita.” His father looked at Finney and held the look for a few seconds.

Ballantine had died of brain cancer a few months after retiring. Finney wondered if his father was purposely rewriting history or he’d actually forgotten. Maybe the cancer was eating away at his brain.

On his way out, Finney’s father kissed him on the cheek, a throwback to a routine he’d abandoned when Finney was three but which had become standard operating procedure since the illness. Fists like talons, his father gripped his arms and said, “John, you took a big hit. You sat on the sidelines until your head cleared, and by golly you got back in the game. I’ve known a lot of good men who couldn’t have done as much. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You’re a good man, John. You’re going to make a fine officer.”

“Thanks.”

After his father had climbed the wooden steps to the parking lot, Finney followed a gust of cool lake air back into the living room and stared out the window at the water. His father was so small and frail these days, and so lonely. Come to think of it, so was he, lonely.