“How’d she pass?” said Ramirez.
“Cancer. The neighbors say it came quick and with a load of pain. Nothing to be done for her. Sad. Supposed to have been a nice lady and still young. The son stayed in the house for about a year or so after, but there was a mortgage that he never paid. The bank seized it about a month ago, kicked him out, cleared it of everything, and put it up for sale. Pretty good motive for arson, don’t you think?”
“You’re figuring the kid for setting the fire?” said Ramirez.
“It’s not so hard. We were wondering if you knew of any contact information or the boy’s current address.”
“You don’t really have much on him, do you?” said Ramirez. “He was angry at a bank. Who the hell isn’t angry at a bank? If the headquarters of my credit-card company ever exploded, they’d be looking at me. You have any evidence tying him to the accelerant?”
“Nope.”
“Any fiber samples or blood?”
“Nothing that survived the fire.”
“Any threatening letters to the bank, anything said to friends or relatives?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Then you don’t really have much tying Kyle Byrne to the fire, do you?”
“Well,” said Demerit, rubbing his jaw, “there is the car.”
Just then they reached the rear of the driveway, where a burnedout wreck of a sports car squatted on singed and ruined tires. The left front was still bright red, with its headlight and bumper fully intact, but the right side, closest to the house, and the whole rear end, starting with the doors and moving back, were a discolored, stinking mess of gray and black, leading to a hatchback where sheets of metal had been stripped away by fire and force.
“How long has this been there?” said Henderson.
“Wasn’t there yesterday, according to the neighbors. And it’s registered to Kyle Byrne, though the registration has lapsed and it’s overdue for inspection, which seems par for the course in the way Byrne’s life has gone lately. And then a kid on the street claimed he saw two figures running from the house. One was big enough to have been Byrne.”
“I guess you might have enough cause to pull him in at that,” said Henderson.
Demerit rubbed his jaw again, looked right at Ramirez. “Any idea where I could find him?”
“That’s why you called us down?” said Ramirez. “To get an address?”
“That was one reason. I was also wondering why a Philadelphia police detective was so interested in the Byrne boy.”
Ramirez looked at Henderson, Henderson looked at Ramirez. They could argue bitterly between themselves for hours, but throw in a third party like this Demerit, with his cheap suit and annoying jaw rubbing, like he was auditioning for the role of detective in some community-theater group, and suddenly they were a team, trying to figure out how much to hold back from this suburban stiff. Henderson gave a quick shrug to let Ramirez know it was all up to her.
Ramirez turned to Demerit. “There was a break-in at a law office. Kyle Byrne was picked up inside. Before we interrogated him, we sent a request to your office, since this was the last address he gave. But it turned out he had a valid reason to be there.”
“And what was that?” said Demerit.
“It was his father’s office.”
Demerit looked at her for a moment, turned to Henderson and then back. “I thought his father was dead. He died . . . what?” He pulled out a pad, paged through it quickly. “Fourteen years ago. And a few days before the kid’s house burns down, he has a hankering to break into his father’s old office?”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence. The office was in the process of being closed. No one pressed charges, and he was released.”
“Did he give you guys an address?”
“This one,” said Ramirez.
“What was he doing there, did he say?”
“Looking for souvenirs.”
“Is that what he said? Well, maybe that’s what he was doing here, too. But the bank had already cleaned the place out. So maybe he just got angry, lost control, maybe he burned the place down, and his car got caught in it. Maybe that explains everything.”
“You think?” said Ramirez.
“It might,” said Demerit, rubbing his jaw, “if it weren’t for the fireworks.”
Henderson and Ramirez looked at each other with a mutual puzzlement as a uniform came up to Inspector Demerit and motioned him away. They talked softly for a moment, and then Demerit came back over.
“Give me a minute, will you?” said Demerit. “The fire marshal just found something that might be of interest to the two of you.” He left them outside and followed the uniform into the bombed-out wreck that had been the Byrne house.
“Did your boy Byrne really do this?” said Henderson.
“He strike you as a kid just welling with anger, ready to throw a bomb at anything that pissed him off?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither. Best as I can tell, he doesn’t care enough about anything in this world to break a sweat, better yet to set it afire. And this was his boyhood home—”
“Taken from him by the bank.”
Ramirez sighed. “Do you remember the house where you grew up?”
“Sure I do. Parkside. I still pass it now and then and remember.”
“You care who owns it?”
“Not really.”
“Neither would he. If he wasn’t paying the mortgage, he knew it was only a matter of time. And why would he burn his car in the process?”
“Maybe it just caught on fire without him trying. Maybe he’s a fool.”
“Of course he’s a fool,” she said. “We know he’s a fool. But even a fool wouldn’t park in his own driveway if he were going to burn down his house.”
“True.”
“And what was that about the fireworks?”
“Don’t know. Maybe it was gunshots mistaken as fireworks.”
“Or maybe,” said Ramirez, “the fireworks were a cover for something else. You figure this moron will ever tell us what he knows?”
“I suppose he will when his jaw gets all itchy again.”
“Yeah, what is up with that jaw rubbing anyway?”
“He’s been watching Columbo reruns on cable.”
“Next time he starts up, I’m going to smash that jaw with my fist. That would be the end of the rubbing.”
“I’d pay to see that,” said Henderson, laughing as Demerit came out of the burned shell.