The firefighters swarmed around the foot of the building, but the fire seemed to Jerry Hobart to be all above the fourth floor, where Kramer Investigations had its office. The firefighters had gone up on long ladders and broken widows to spray hoses inside, but they were mainly soaking the levels below the fire because that was all they could reach.
There seemed to be yellow raincoats moving past upper windows now and then, but Hobart supposed they were just searching for people trapped inside, and before long those firefighters were going to have to come out, too. Hobart stopped almost two blocks from the building and watched for a minute. He heard more sirens, com ing fast from somewhere behind him. The sirens weren’t police sirens, but Hobart decided it was time to go. There was no reason to see more. He walked across the street and around the corner where he had left his car, then heard the sirens grow louder. He looked over his shoulder and saw an ambulance flash by.
Hobart got into this car and drove away from the fire, and away from the direction where the fire trucks had come from. He thought about the ambulance. It was hard to guess what that meant. Old buildings were bad places to be in a fire. They were trimmed with lots of wood that had been cut, shaped, and varnished fifty or sixty years ago, and had been drying in the parched air ever since. The firemen he had seen scrambling around in the building on the upper floors had a lot of wooden beams and staircases between them and the ground. Maybe one of them had gotten hurt. Of course, the person most in danger at an arson fire was usually the arsonist. He was the one splashing gasoline around and lighting matches.
As Hobart drove away from the office building, he tried to get past his shock. It was hard for him to imagine Emily Kramer burning her husband’s detective agency. He had not anticipated it. He had intended to terrify her, to make her angry, to force her to find the evidence her husband had hidden from Theodore Forrest. But maybe Hobart had overdone it. Maybe he had induced her to kick over all of the game pieces. She might have realized that having evidence to use against a man like Theodore Forrest was worth nothing to her. All she really wanted was to be left alone, so it was possible she had taken away Jerry Hobart’s incentive to bother her. If so, she hadn’t thought it through to the next step: Hobart’s killing her for throwing away his chance.
He had to know. He drove the rented car to Winnetka, then took the 101 Freeway east toward the city. He left the freeway at Van Nuys Boulevard and drove north toward Emily Kramer’s house.
It occurred to him that the fire might not be such bad news. Maybe she had found the evidence, and now she was trying to throw him off by making him believe the evidence was burned. Then she could make whatever deal she wanted with Theodore Forrest and not worry about Jerry Hobart.
Forrest would make her rich, and she would move away. What else could she do if her husband’s business was burned up? And any deal with Forrest would mean giving him the evidence. She wouldn’t ever be bothered again, and neither would Forrest. Whatever Forrest had done would be forgotten forever.
Hobart drove toward Emily Kramer’s house. When he was still several blocks away, he realized that was burning, too. The sky was bright with fire, and the flashing of lights from fire trucks and emergency vehicles. He parked on Vanowen past the intersection with the street that crossed hers. He looked up and down the street, then trotted across it to the sidewalk and walked toward the glow. As he approached on foot, he felt the odd breeze that came up around fires. A big, hot fire seemed to create its own weather, pulling in air and blowing it out in hot swirls.
When he reached Emily Kramer’s block, there was already a growing crowd of people standing around watching the firemen dragging hoses to the sides and back of the house. The roof and the upper floor where he had cornered her a couple of nights ago had burned through and collapsed into the big empty space of the living room, and now the flames were devouring splintered woodwork and broken two-by-fours and beams. The fire was burning now with such ferocity that he knew their biggest worry was that the hot sparks were being carried to the neighboring houses and yards.
Hobart paid no further attention to the fire. Instead he walked the street searching for Emily Kramer. He made his way among the gawkers, shouldering carefully past people in bathrobes and pajamas and sweatpants, making sure he gave none of them a reason to look directly at him. He kept himself between them and the glare of the fire, so their faces were illuminated and his was a dark shape that passed quickly across their vision.
Then he saw her. He kept walking as he stared at her. She was sitting in an official red car a half block from the house. She opened the passenger door and got out, then took a few steps and looked in the direction of her house. She stopped, as though she were a machine that had suddenly lost power and stalled. The sight she was staring at no longer looked much like a house, and she seemed to be trying to remember what it had looked like an hour ago.
The driver of the red car got out. He was wearing a fireman’s yellow turnout coat and carrying a clipboard. He saw Emily Kramer standing there and followed her eyes to the fire, and then stood there looking, too. It seemed to Hobart that the two of them must have been in the car doing an interview and neither of them had seen the house lately. The progress of the fire seemed to surprise them. The fireman reached into his car to retrieve his helmet, and then shut the door.
Another man got out of a car parked nearby, walked up to Emily Kramer, and put his arm around her shoulders, as though he were comforting her. Her reaction was revealing. She did not look up at the man or speak to him, and she didn’t express surprise. She simply let the man’s arm be around her, and stayed where she was, her eyes on the fire. She seemed to lean into him slightly, like a woman who was cold or tired might lean into a man she considered to be hers.
The fire had reached a kind of peak now that the big pieces of wood were bared and had fallen into a pile. The house was like a gigantic bonfire. Hobart kept moving. He kept his back to the flames as he moved along the street, then turned at the first corner to go to where he had left his rental car.
Hobart swung the car around to face the intersection with the side street so he would be able to see any vehicle driving away from the Kramer house onto the boulevard. He still wasn’t sure whether Emily Kramer had burned her house and her husband’s agency or not. If she had, she was a hell of an actress. But the fire certainly had been set, and what could that fireman talking to her in the car have been but an arson investigator? She might not know it yet, but she was under suspicion.
Hobart opened the side window of his car, lit a cigarette, and listened. Now and then, above the constant thrum of the big truck engines and the pumps, there would be shouts. The smoke coming up from the fire was still a swirl of black. The white clouds of steam had not replaced the black even now, and Jerry Hobart could tell that by the time the fire was out it wouldn’t much matter. The Kramer house was going to be a pile of charcoal.
He inhaled smoke from the cigarette and blew it slowly out into the night air. No matter what the reason for the fires, they were a problem for him, and so was the sudden appearance of this new man. Hobart had hoped that Emily Kramer was not interested in competing with him for Theodore Forrest’s money. Maybe that man she was with tonight had talked her into doing this. Trying to go eyeball-toeyeball with Hobart didn’t seem to be something she would have thought of on her own.
He put out his cigarette and found himself thinking about Valerie. He could always see Valerie’s face in his memory, even bring it back from different times of their lives. He could see her at fifteen or at twenty or at thirty, but she always seemed best to him as he had seen her last. As she broadened, her shape had the look of a woman, and the age on her face made her look smarter and softer. He hated it when she made fun of herself, saying she was old and losing her looks. It felt as though she was reminding him of his own age-the same as hers-and saying he was ugly, and at the same time telling him he was foolish and pitiful for hanging around a woman like her, instead of a newer model. He pictured her now, leaning into his car window as he prepared to drive off and leave her a few days ago.