“In other words, between the time you got home and the time you went upstairs to bed, nothing unusual happened.”
“Well, yes,” Aronowitz said.
“What?” Hawes said, leaning forward.
“We made love on the terrace. That’s unusual. We usually do it upstairs in the bedroom.”
“Yes, but aside from that...”
“Nothing.”
“Mr. Aronowitz, did you happen to glance over at the Grimm house any time before you noticed the fire?”
“I guess so. We were on the terrace, and the terrace faces Grimm’s house, so I guess we looked at it occasionally. Why?”
“This was after dinner, am I correct? You were on the terrace until about ten o’clock...”
“Well, even later,” Aronowitz said. “We were listening to music until ten o’clock, but after that...”
“Yes, I understand. What I’m trying to find out is whether there were any lights showing in the Grimm house?”
“Lights? You mean...”
“At any time during the night, did you notice lights in the Grimm house?”
“Well... no. I guess not. I think the house was dark.”
“But the lights were on when you noticed the fire.”
“Yes,” Aronowitz said, and frowned.
“Thank you,” Hawes said.
“I don’t get it,” Aronowitz said. “Why would anybody turn on the lights if he was about to set a fire?”
3
Except in cases of pyromania, where the perpetrator acts without conscious motive, there are very real reasons for arson, and every cop in the world knows them by heart.
Parker had checked out Grimm’s competitors in the brisk wooden-goods trade, and expressed the opinion that none of them had sufficient motive for committing a crime as heavy as arson. Well, even if Carella respected Parker’s judgment (which he didn’t), he’d have been unwilling to accept such a sweeping acquittal. Competition was possibly the strongest motive for arson, and Carella wasn’t about to dismiss Grimm’s business rivals as suspects until he’d checked them out thoroughly himself. Nor was he willing to dismiss insurance fraud (First Comic: “Hello, Sam, I hear you had a big fire in your store last night.” Second Comic: “Shhh, that’s tomorrow night!”) or the destruction of books and records as alternate motives, even though Parker seemed convinced that Grimm was clean. As for extortion, intimidation, or revenge, those possibilities would also depend on what they could learn about Mr. Roger Grimm. For all Carella knew, Grimm may have been hobnobbing with all sorts of criminal types who’d finally decided to make things hot for him. Or maybe there were a dozen people Grimm had screwed in the past, all of whom might have been capable of setting the torch to his house, his warehouse, and also the brim of his straw hat. Carella would have to wait and see.
The remaining possible motive was that someone had set the warehouse fire in order to conceal a crime. (Have you left jimmy marks on the windows and fingerprints all over the wall safe? So what? Just bum down the joint as you’re leaving.) Curious reasoning, admittedly, since Burglary/One was punishable by a maximum of thirty and a minimum of ten, whereas Arsons/One, Two, and Three were punishable respectively by forty, twenty-five, and fifteen — but who can fathom the intricate workings of the criminal mind? And whereas the warehouse fire had probably succeeded in obliterating any evidence of theft, it was highly improbable that anyone would steal an indeterminate amount of wooden animals and then set fire to the remainder of the stock to conceal such petty pilfering. Moreover, if someone had committed a crime at the warehouse and then committed arson to conceal the crime, it was ridiculous to believe he would later burn down Grimm’s house as a cover for the initial cover. Such an elaborate smoke screen was for the comic books.
Which left pyromania.
When Carella first learned about the warehouse fire, he’d thought it might have been set by a firebug, despite the fact that two night watchmen had been drugged — pyromaniacs will rarely go to such limits. But the minute he learned of the second fire, Carella knew for certain they were not dealing with a nut. In all his experience with pyromaniacs, he had never met a single one with any real motive for setting a fire. Most of them had done it for kicks, not always but often sexually oriented. They liked to watch the flames, they liked to hear the fire engines, they liked the excitement of the crowds, they liked the tumult and the frenzy. They ranged in age from ten to a hundred and ten, they were usually loners, male or female, intellectual or half-wit, corporation executive or short-order cook. Two of the pyros he’d arrested were male alcoholics. Another was a hysterical, pregnant woman. Still another said she’d set a fire only because she was suffering menstrual cramps. All of them had picked their fire sites at random, usually because the building looked “safe” — vacant, abandoned, or in a lonely, unpatrolled neighborhood.
Most firebugs were very sad people. Carella had known only one funny firebug during all his years as a cop, and he supposed that one couldn’t have been considered a true pyromaniac at all. He was, in fact, a man Carella had locked up for Armed Robbery. When the man was released from Castleview, he called Carella at the squadroom and told him to come over to his place right away, without his gun, or else he was going to set fire to his own kid brother. His kid brother happened to be thirty-six years old, a man who himself had been in and out of jail since the time he was fifteen. His barbecue, if carried out as threatened, would have caused very little grief up at the old squadroom. So Carella told his Castleview friend to go ahead and set fire to his brother, and hung up. Naturally, the man didn’t do it. But there were many nuts in the city for which Carella worked, and not all of them were in the Police Department, and he was sure that none of them had set Grimm’s fires.
Grimm’s warehouse was on Clinton Street and Avenue L, adjacent to the waterfront docks on the River Harb. The building was made of red brick, four stories high, with a padlocked cyclone fence running completely around it. A man in his sixties, wearing a watchman’s uniform, pistol holstered at his side, was standing inside the gate as Carella pulled up in his Chevy sedan. Carella showed him his police shield, and the man took a key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the gate for him.
“You with the 87th Squad?” he asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Because they’ve already been here, you know.”
“Yes, I know that,” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella, who are you?”
“Frank Reardon,” he said.
“Do you know the men who were on duty the night of the fire, Mr. Reardon?”
“Yep. Jim Lockhart and Lenny Barnes. I know them.”
“Have you seen them since?”
“See them every night. They relieve me every night at eight o’clock on the dot.”
“They mention anything about what happened?”
“Only that somebody doped them up. Wha’d you want to look at first, Mr. Carella?”
“The basement.”
Reardon locked the gate behind them, and then led Carella across a cobblestoned courtyard to a metal fire door on the side of the building. He unlocked the door with a key from the ring on his belt, and they went inside. After the bright sunlight outdoors, the small hallway they entered seemed much dimmer than it really was. Carella followed Reardon down a dark flight of stairs that terminated abruptly in a basement still flooded with water from the broken main. Half a dozen drowned rats were floating near the furnace. The shattered pipe was one of those huge, near-indestructible cast-iron jobs. It seemed evident to Carella that the arsonist had used an explosive charge on it. It also seemed evident that he had not set his fire in the basement of the building, it being difficult for fires to burn underwater.