“I do.”
“Promise you’ll show?”
I did.
She named a restaurant and told me how to get there. She started to go, then spun back around, smiled a mischievous smile. “Kiss me,” she said.
I felt myself smile. “Okay, but not a movie kiss,” I said.
I watched her drive away and kept watching to make sure no one followed her. Then I inspected the house. Most of the exterior walls were in place, but the interior had been decimated. I couldn’t get down to the basement or up to the second floor, but sections of the second floor had fallen into the master bedroom. It took me less than ten minutes to figure out what had happened and how, but I interviewed one of the neighbors anyway.
CHAPTER 13
“Okay, so the attic window was open,” Kathleen said. “What does that prove?”
We were in Nellie’s Diner. Nellie’s was my kind of place, though worlds apart from the Four Seasons. The outside looked like the club car on a passenger train. Inside made you feel like you’d taken a step back into the fifties. I hadn’t been alive in the fifties, but Nellie’s was how I imagined the restaurants of the day: gleaming places filled with chrome. Vinyl booths, easy-to-clean laminate tables and countertops, and smiling, clean-cut waiters dressed in white shirts, black bow ties, and white paper hats. On the tables: plasticized menus propped against mini jukeboxes that showcased rock ’n’ roll music. Menu fare included fried onion rings, baked beans, corn bread, patty melts, club sandwiches, pork chops, pot roast, chicken pot pie, spaghetti with meatballs, and fried chicken. Drinks included cherry and vanilla Cokes, root beer fl oats, and old-fashioned milk shakes. On the bar counter under glass covers were displayed chocolate fudge brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and cherry, lemon meringue, and coconut pies. Each of the pies had at least one slice missing so the customers could see what was inside. The waiter took our orders, and I told Kathleen, “Wait a sec,” so I could hear him tell the cook. She rolled her eyes.
“One cowboy with spurs, no Tommy; a mayo club, cremated, and hold the grass!” he said.
“What on earth?” Kathleen asked.
I beamed. “It’s authentic diner talk. The ‘cowboy with spurs’ is my Western omelet with fries. ‘No Tommy’ means I don’t want ketchup. ‘Cremated’ means toast the bread. And ‘hold the grass’ means no lettuce on your club sandwich.”
“How do you know this stuff?” she asked. “And why would you want to?”
“Say it,” I said.
“Say what?”
“I’m fun.”
She looked at me until a smile played around the corners of her mouth.
“You are fun,” she said. “Now tell me why the open attic window means something, and tell me what else you think you found.”
“Okay. First of all, a fire requires three things to burn: oxygen, a fuel source, and heat. That’s called the fire triangle. An arsonist has to tamper with one or more of those elements to fake an accidental fire. For example, this fire was set at the end of January and the attic window was open. Who leaves a window open in January?”
“Maybe the firemen opened it after the fact.”
“No. The arsonist opened it to provide an oxygen source.”
On the juke in the booth across from us, Rod Stewart was singing. Maggie May had stolen his soul and that’s a pain he can do without.
“Tell me you’ve got more than the open window,” she said.
“In the basement there were at least two points of origin. Also, in the floorboards in the master bedroom, under the bed, I saw some curved edges. I found some more in the hallway, and I’d bet the stairwell was full of them.”
“So?”
“So I think someone used a circular drill bit to drill holes in all those floorboards. That’s what created the air flow to feed the fire and make it spread much faster than it should.”
“Well duh,” she said. “If a guy was traipsing all over the house, opening windows and drilling holes, especially under the bed, don’t you think Greg and Melanie would have heard him?”
“The prep work was done earlier, before they got home. They wouldn’t have noticed the open attic window or the drill holes under the bed. The steps were carpeted, so those holes were hidden. The arsonist probably broke into the basement before they got home so he wouldn’t have to chance waking them up later. I noticed the attic access doors were open, and that’s something Greg and Melanie would have noticed when they tucked the kids in for the night. So the arsonist must have waited for the family to fall asleep. Then he sneaked up the stairs and opened the attic doors and doused the carpet in the kids’ room with gasoline.”
“What? Excuse me, Columbo, but how do you know he doused the carpet?”
“I pulled some of it up and guess what I saw?”
“A stain that looks like Jesus on a tricycle?”
“No, I found char patterns.”
“Char patterns,” she said.
“When you pour a liquid accelerant on carpet, it soaks into the fibers. When it burns, it makes concentrated char patterns on the sub-floor.”
Kathleen frowned, still unconvinced. “What was all that with the neighbor guy and the color of the smoke?”
“The color of the smoke and flames tells you what’s making it burn. Wood makes a yellow flame, or a red one, with gray or brown smoke.”
“So what’s the problem? The neighbor guy said he saw a yellow flame.”
“Right, but he also said black smoke.”
“So?”
“Black smoke means gasoline.”
The waiter brought our orders and set them on the table. I tore into my omelet, but Kathleen just stared at me. Her face had turned serious.
“Donovan, all these details, this isn’t your first rodeo,” she said. “You obviously know a lot about arson. You said this guy tried to hire you a couple years ago.”
“So?”
“To kill people.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I waited for her to speak. She gave me a look like she wanted to ask me something but wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
When my daughter Kimberly was eight, she started to ask me about Santa Claus. Before she voiced her question, I looked her in the eye and said, “Don’t ever ask me anything unless you’re ready to hear the truth.” Kimberly decided not to ask. Kathleen, on the other hand, had to know.
“Have you ever done this to someone?” she asked. “Set their house on fire?”
“You should eat,” I said. “That sandwich looks terrific.”
She didn’t respond, so I looked up and saw her eyes burning a hole into my soul. “Have you?” she repeated.
I signaled the waiter and handed him a twenty. “Before you do anything else,” I said to him, “I need a roll of duct tape or sealing tape.” He nodded, took the bill, and moved double-time toward the kitchen. To Kathleen, I said, “I’ve done some terrible things. Things I hope I never have to tell you about, and yes, I’ve been trained to set fires. But no, I’ve never done it.”
“You swear?”
I swore. Happily, it was the truth. Still, I decided not to tell her how close I’d come a few times. And I was well aware that by swearing on the past I hadn’t ruled out the future.
She stared at me awhile before nodding slowly. “I believe you,” she said. “Look, I’m sure you’re a world-class shit heel. It wouldn’t even surprise me if you’d killed people for the CIA years ago, and God help me, I might even be able to live with that, depending on the circumstances. But since I started working with the kids at the burn center… well, you know.”
I did know.
Kathleen’s club sandwich had been cut into four pieces. She picked up a wedge and studied it. “What about the fire chief?” she asked. “If you’re right, that makes him wrong, and he’s the expert.”