PART VII. SATURDAY
CHAPTER 27
Brunswick, Georgia, smelled. At first Infante tried to chalk it up to his own imagination, his reflexive dislike for the deep-fried South-with-a-capital-S. Baltimore had been enough of a culture shock when he moved there in his early twenties, although he had gotten used to it, even come to prefer it. A police could live on his salary and overtime in Baltimore, unlike Long Island. Maybe money went further still down here, but he couldn’t see making that transition. There was no getting around it, Brunswick flat-out stank.
The waitress at the Waffle House must have seen the way his nose was puckered when he came in from outside.
“Pehpermeal,” she said in a low tone, as if offering the password to a secret club.
“Pepper mill?” He was really having a hard time understanding the people down here, despite how slowly they spoke.
“Peh. Per. Meal,” she repeated. “That’s what you smell. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it fast.”
“I’m not going to have time to get used to anything here.” He gave her his best smile. He loved women who brought him food. Even when they were plain and unattractive, like this dumpy, pockmarked girl, he loved them.
It had been almost ten when he got into Brunswick the night before, too dark and too late to visit the neighborhood where Penelope Jackson and her boyfriend had lived. But he’d cruised the block this morning, on his way to this meeting with the local fire inspector. Reynolds Street, at least the particular block where Tony Dunham had lived and died, looked kind of scrappy. It was on its way either up or down. Then again, much of Brunswick looked that way to Kevin, as if it were sliding into despair or picking itself back up after a long slump. Not for me, he thought, regarding the town from the bubble of the Chevy Charisma that Alamo Rent-a-Car had provided. But when he got closer to the water and felt the soft, sweet breeze and remembered how spring had yet to get started up in Baltimore, he began to get the point. There was a gentleness to the weather here, and the people, too. He respected it-in the weather.
“Oh, it was assuredly an accident,” said the inspector from the local fire department, a man named Wayne Tolliver, who met Infante for a cup of coffee at the end of his breakfast, just as Infante had timed it. He didn’t like to conduct business while eating, and he was glad that he had given himself wholeheartedly to this particular meal, a satisfying spread of eggs, sausage, and grits. “She was in the front room, watching television, and he was in the bedroom, smoking and drinking. He fell asleep, knocked the ashtray on a little rug next to the bed, and the place”-he threw his hands open, as if tossing an invisible wad of confetti-“went up.”
“What did she do?”
“The smoke alarms weren’t working.” Tolliver made a face. He was a round-faced man, pink-cheeked and kind-looking, probably not as old as his freckled bald head made him look. “People think we’re overly concerned, telling them to change batteries when they change their clocks every six months, but it’s better’n never . Anyway, it was Christmas Eve, cold for these parts, and she had a space heater going where she was. The TV was in an old Florida room, didn’t have any central heating. By the time she noticed the smoke, it was too late. She told us she went to the door but felt it first, like you’re supposed to, and saw it was hot to the touch. She said she banged on it, screamed his name, then called 911. Windows were nailed shut-a violation on the landlord’s part, to be sure, but the fellow probably never had a fighting chance, drunk as he was. My guess is that he was dead from smoke inhalation, or on his way there, before she even realized what was going on.”
“And that was that.”
Tolliver picked up the judgment in Infante’s voice. “No accelerants. Only one point of origin, the rug. We looked at her. We looked at her real close. Here’s the thing that sold me-she didn’t take nary a thing out of that room. It went up with all her clothes, whatever jewelry she owned, and it’s not like he had any money to leave her. Quite the opposite. He had an annuity that stopped with his death, so she lost whatever income he provided.”
“An annuity?” The lawyer up in York had said that Stan Dunham purchased one after selling the farm, so that fit. But he also said the man didn’t have any living relatives.
“A policy that paid him a monthly sum, for up to ten years. You know when ballplayers get those big salaries? They’re underwritten by annuities. Bigger ones than this, of course. It wasn’t a lot-judging by their lifestyle, it was just enough to get the two of them fucked up, regular. They were partyers, those two. You think they’d have grown out of that behavior, at their ages-he was in his fifties-but some people never do.”
There was a whiff of sorrow in that statement, as if Tolliver had some personal experience on this front, a loved one who had never grown up and caused him some heartache. But Infante wasn’t here to talk about Tolliver.
“What else did you learn about the two of them?”
“It was a…familiar address to our brothers in blue. Noise complaints. Suspected domestic violence, but those calls came from the neighbors, not from her, and they said they were never sure who was getting the worst of it. She was a hellcat, one of those hillbilly gals out of the hollows of North Carolina.”
Everything was relative. If this guy was calling someone a hillbilly, she must have been really low-rent-rope belt, Daisy Dukes, the full Elly May Clampett.
“How long had she lived at the Reynolds Street address?”
“Not sure. She didn’t appear on any of the official documents-the lease, the utility bills. That was all in his name. He’d been there five years or so. He drove trucks, but not regular for any one company. The way the neighbors tell it, he met her on the road and brought her back. He wasn’t much, but he always managed to have a woman around. She was the third one, the neighbors.”
“Did you do a tox screen on him?”
Another insulted look. “Yes. And it was consistent with being dead drunk, with an Ambien behind it, and nothing more. Guy was like a lot of truckers-he relied on pills to stay awake, to make his days, and then he needed help to calm down when he was home. He had just come back from a job the day before.”
“Still…”
“Look, I get where you’re trying to go with this. But I know fires. Allow me that much? An upended ashtray on a cheap cotton rug. If she’da set that fire, do you know how calculating she’d have to be, how calm? Oh, it’s easy enough to throw a lit cigarette on the rug, but she’s got to be sure he won’t wake up, right? She has to stand there, watch the fire get under way, wait until it’s the inferno that she’s going to call in. If it doesn’t catch, she can’t throw another one down, because we’ll pick up on that. Right? She’s got to hope the neighbors don’t see anything-”
“It was Christmas Eve. How many were home?”
Tolliver steamed past that. “I’ve met the woman. She didn’t have the wiles to pull that off. Firefighters had to hold her back from going into the house.”
But she had the presence of mind not to go into the bedroom when the door was hot to the touch.
Again Tolliver picked up on what Infante didn’t say. “People can be real calm and composed in an emergency. Self-protection kicks in. She saved herself, but when she realized he was in there, that he was really gone, she went crazy. I’ve listened to the 911 call. She was scared.” Skeered. And people made fun of Infante’s alleged New York accent, which was actually pretty mild, a shadow of the real thing.