California Fire and Life Read online

  “It’s about time you made it official.”

  One reason—out of a veritable smorgasbord of reasons—that Jack hates Accidentally Bentley is that Bentley’s a lazy son of a bitch who doesn’t like to do his job. Bentley could find an accidental cause for virtually any fire. If Bentley had been at Dresden he’d have looked around the ashes and found a faulty electric-blanket control. Cuts down on paperwork and court appearances.

  As a fire investigator, Bentley makes a great fisherman.

  “Hey, Jack,” Bentley says. He’s smiling but he’s definitely pissed. “At least I didn’t get thrown out.”

  Like me, Jack thinks. He says, “That’s probably because they don’t realize you’re even there.”

  “Fuck you,” Bentley says.

  “Hop in the back.”

  The smile disappears from Bentley’s face. He’s like serious now.

  “Accidental fire, accidental death,” Bentley says. “Don’t dick around in there.”

  Jack waits until Bentley leaves before he gets out of the car.

  To go dick around in there.

  6

  Before the scene gets cold.

  Literally.

  The colder the scene, the less chance there is of finding out what happened.

  In jargon, the “C&O”—the cause and origin—of the fire.

  The C&O is important for an insurance company because there are accidents and there are accidents. If the insured negligently caused the accident then the insurance company is on the hook for the whole bill. But if it’s a faulty electric blanket, or a bad switch, or if some appliance malfunctions and sets off a spark, then the company has a shot at something called subrogation, which basically means that the insurance company pays the policyholder and then sues the manufacturer of the faulty item.

  So Jack has to dick around in there, but he thinks of it as dicking around with a purpose.

  He pops open the trunk of his car.

  What he’s got in there is a folding ladder, a couple of different flashlights, a shovel, a heavy-duty Stanley tape measure, two 35-mm Minoltas, a Sony Hi8 camcorder, a small clip-on Dictaphone, a notebook, three floodlights, three folding metal stands for the lights and a fire kit.

  The fire kit consists of yellow rubber gloves, a yellow hardhat and a pair of white paper overalls that slip over your feet like kids’ pajamas.

  The trunk is like full.

  Jack keeps all this stuff in his trunk because Jack is basically a Dalmatian—when a fire happens he’s there.

  Jack slips into the overalls and feels like some sort of geek from a cheap sci-fi movie, but it’s worth it. The first fire you inspect you don’t do it, and the soot ruins your clothes or at least totally messes up your laundry schedule.

  So he puts on the overalls.

  Likewise the hardhat, which he doesn’t really need, but Goddamn Billy will fine you a hundred bucks if he comes to a loss site and catches you without the hat. (“I don’t want any goddamn workmen’s comp claims,” he says.) Jack clips the Dictaphone inside his shirt—if you clip it outside and get it full of soot, you buy a new Dictaphone—slings the cameras over his shoulder and heads for the house.

  Which in insurance parlance is called “the risk.”

  Actually, that’s before something happens.

  After something happens it’s called “the loss.”

  When a risk becomes a loss—when what could happen does happen—is where Jack comes in.

  This is what he does for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company—he adjusts claims. He’s been adjusting claims for twelve years now, and as gigs go Jack figures it’s a decent one. He works mostly alone; no one gives him a lot of shit as long as he gets the job done, and he always gets the job done. Ergo, it’s a relatively shit-free environment.

  Some of his fellow adjusters seem to think that they take a lot of shit from the policyholders but Jack doesn’t get it. “It’s a simple job,” he’ll tell them when he’s heard enough whining. “The insurance policy is a contract. It spells out exactly what you pay for and what you don’t. What you owe, you pay. What you don’t, you don’t.”

  So there’s no reason to take any shit or dish any out.

  You don’t get personal, you don’t get emotional. Whatever you do, you don’t get involved. You do the job and the rest of the time you surf.

  This is Jack’s philosophy and it works for him. Works for Goddamn Billy, too, because whenever he gets a big fire, he assigns it to Jack. Which only makes sense because that’s what Jack did for the Sheriff’s Department before they kicked him out—he investigated fires.

  So Jack knows that the first thing you do when you investigate a house fire is you walk around the house.

  SOP—standard operating procedure—in a fire inspection: you work from the outside in. What you observe on the outside can tell you a lot about what happened on the inside.

  He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, being careful to shut it behind him because there’s that barking dog.

  Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.

  The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.

  Or former koi pond, Jack thinks.

  The pond is sodden with ashes.

  Dead koi—once gold and orange, now black with soot—float on the top.

  “Note,” Jack says into the Dictaphone. “Inquire about value of koi.”

  He walks through the garden to the house itself.

  Takes one look and thinks, Oh shit.

  7

  He’s seen the house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn’t recognized the address.

  Built back in the ’30s, it’s one of the older homes on the bluff above Dana Point—a heavy-timbered wood frame job with cedar shake walls and a shake roof.

  A damn shame, Jack thinks, because this house is one of the survivors of the old days when most of the Dana headlands was just open grass hillside. A product of the days when they really built houses.

  This house, Jack thinks, has survived hurricanes and monsoons and the Santa Ana winds that sweep these hills with firestorms. Even more remarkably, it’s survived real estate developers, hotel planners and tax boards. This sweet old lady of a house has presided over the ocean through all that, and all it takes is one woman with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette to do her in.

  Which is a shame, Jack thinks, because he’s sat on his board looking at this house from the ocean all his damn life and always thought that it was one of the coolest houses ever built.

  For one thing, it’s made of wood, not stucco or some phony adobe composite. And they didn’t use green lumber to frame it up either. In the days when they built houses, they used kiln-dried lumber. And they used real log shakes on the exterior and were content to let the ocean weather it to a color somewhere between brown and gray so that the house became a part of the seascape, like driftwood that had been washed up on the shore. And a lot of driftwood, too, because it’s a big old place for a single-story building. A big central structure flanked by two large wings set at about a thirty-degree angle toward the ocean.

  Standing there looking at it, Jack can see that the central and left sections of the house are still intact. Smoke damaged, water damaged, but otherwise they look structurally sound.

  The wing to the right—the west wing—is a different story.

  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fire started in the west wing. Generally speaking, the part of a house that suffers the most damage is where the fire started. You know this because that’s where the fire burned the longest.

  Jack steps back and photographs the house first with one camera and then the other. He has one loaded with color film and the other with black-and-white. Color is better for showing the damage, but some judges will only allow black-and-white shots in
to evidence, their theory being that color shots—especially in a fatal fire—are “prejudicially dramatic.”

  Might inflame the jury, Jack thinks.

  Jack thinks that most judges are dicks.

  A lot of adjusters just take Polaroids. Jack uses 35 mm because the images enlarge so much better, which is important if you need them as exhibits in court.

  So some bottom-feeding plaintiff’s attorney doesn’t take your shitty Polaroids and stick them up your ass.

  “Polaroids are hemorrhoids.” Another of Goddamn Billy’s pithy sayings.

  So just on the odd chance the file might end up in court, Jack’s covering all his bases. Which is why he keeps two 35s handy in the car, because it would be a waste of time to have to reload and then go take each shot again.

  He grabs shots of the whole house with each camera and then jots down a note describing each shot and giving the time and date that he took the picture. He notes that he used Minolta cameras, notes the serial numbers of both cameras, the type of film and its ASA. He speaks the same information into the tape recorder, along with any observations he may want to have for his file.

  Jack takes these notes because he knows that you think you’re going to remember what you took and why, but you won’t. You got maybe a hundred losses you’re working at any given point and you get them mixed up.

  Or as Billy Hayes poetically puts it, “It’s writ, or it’s shit.”

  Billy’s from Arizona.

  So Jack says, “Frame One, shot of house taken from south angle. August 28, 1997. West wing of house shows severe damage. Exterior walls standing but will probably have to be torn down and rebuilt. Windows blasted out. Hole in roof.”

  The easiest way to the other side of the house is through the central section, so Jack lets himself in the front door.

  Jack opens it and he’s looking straight out at the ocean like he’s going to fall into it, because there are big glass sliders with a view that stretches from Newport Beach to the right down to the Mexican islands to the left. Catalina Island straight ahead of you, Dana Strands just down to your left, and below that Dana Strand Beach.

  And miles and miles of blue ocean and sky.

  You’re talking two million bucks just for the view.

  The big glass door opens onto a deck about the size of Rhode Island. Below the deck is a sloping lawn, a rectangle of green in all this blue, and in the green there’s another rectangle of blue, which is the swimming pool.

  A brick wall borders the lawn. Trees and shrubs line the side walls, and the trees and shrubs are edged by a border of flowers. Down to the left there’s a pad with a clay tennis court.

  The view is totally killer but the house—even this main section that didn’t burn—is a fucked-up mess. Drenched with water and the all-pervading acrid stench of smoke.

  Jack takes some shots, notes the smoke and water damage on his tape and then goes out into the yard. Takes some shots from this angle and doesn’t see anything to change his mind that the fire started in the west wing, which must be the bedroom. He walks to the outside of the west wing, over to one of the windows, and carefully removes a shard of glass from the window frame.

  First thing he notices is that it’s greasy.

  There’s a thick, oily soot on the glass.

  Jack makes this observation into the tape but what he doesn’t speak into the record is what he’s thinking. What he’s thinking is that a residue on the inside of the glass can mean the presence of some kind of hydrocarbon fuel inside the house. Also, the glass is cracked into small, irregular patterns, which means it was fairly near the origin of the fire and that the fire built up fast and hot. He doesn’t say any of this, either; all he says into the tape is strictly the physical details: “Glass shows greasy, sooty residue and small-pattern crazing. Radial fracture of glass indicates that it was broken by force of fire from inside the house.”

  That’s all he says because that can’t be argued with—the evidence is the evidence. Jack won’t put his analysis or speculation on tape because if a lawsuit happens and it goes to trial, the tape will be subpoenaed, and if his voice is on there speculating on potential hydrocarbon fuel in the house, the plaintiff’s lawyer will make it sound like he was prejudiced, that he was looking for evidence of arson and therefore skipped over evidence of an accidental fire.

  He can just hear the lawyer: “You were focused on the possibility of arson from Moment One, weren’t you, Mr. Wade?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you say right here on your taped notes that you thought …”

  So it’s better to leave your thoughts out of it.

  It’s sloppy work to start thinking ahead of yourself, and anyway, there could be other explanations for the oily soot. If the wood inside the room didn’t burn completely, it might leave that kind of residue, or there could be any number of petroleum-based products in the house quite innocently.

  Still, there’s that barking dog, which is really going at it now. And the bark is not an angry bark, either, not like a dog defending its turf. It’s a scared bark, more like a whine, and Jack figures the dog must be terrified. And thirsty. And hungry.

  Shit, Jack thinks.

  He photographs the piece of glass, labels it and puts it into a plastic evidence bag he keeps in a pocket of the overalls. Then, instead of going into the house—which is what he really wants to do—he goes to look for the dog.

  8

  The dog probably got out when the firemen broke in, and it’s probably traumatized. The Vale kids will be worried about the dog, and anyway, maybe it’ll help them feel a little better to get their dog back.

  Jack kind of likes dogs.

  It’s people he’s not so crazy about.

  Nineteen years (seven with the Sheriff’s, twelve with the insurance company) of cleaning up after people’s accidents have taught him that people will do about anything. They’ll lie, steal, cheat, kill and litter. Dogs, however, have a certain sense of ethics.

  He finds the Vales’ dog hiding under the lower limbs of a jacaranda tree. It’s one of those little fru-fru dogs, a house dog, all big eyes and bark.

  “Hey, pup,” Jack says softly. “It’s all right.”

  It isn’t, but people will lie.

  The dog doesn’t care. The dog is just happy to see a human being and hear a friendly voice. It comes out from under the tree and sniffs Jack’s hand for some kind of clue as to his identity and/or intentions.

  “What’s your name?” Jack ask.

  Like the dog’s going to answer, right? Jack thinks.

  “Leo,” a voice says, and Jack about jumps out of his geeky paper overalls.

  He looks up to see an older gentleman standing across the fence. A parrot sits on his shoulder.

  “Leo,” the parrot repeats.

  Leo starts wagging his tail.

  Which is what Yorkies do for a living.

  “C’mere, Leo,” Jack says. “That’s a good dog.”

  He picks Leo up and tucks him under one arm, scratching the top of his head, and walks over to the fence.

  He can feel Leo trembling.

  There’s that thing about people resembling their pets, or vice versa? Jack always thought that applied to just dogs, but the parrot and the older gentleman kind of look like each other. They both have beaks: the parrot’s being pretty self-explanatory and the older gentleman’s nose being shaped just like the parrot’s beak. The man and the bird are like some interspecies kind of Siamese twins, except that the parrot is green with patches of bright red and yellow, and the older gentleman is mostly white.

  He has white hair and wears a white shirt and white slacks. Jack can’t see his shoes through the hedge, but he’s betting that they’re white, too.

  “I’m Howard Meissner,” the old guy says. “You must be the man from Mars.”

  “Close,” Jack says. He offers his left hand because he has Leo tucked under his right. “Jack Wade, California Fire and Life.”

  “This
is Eliot.”

  Meaning the parrot.

  Which says, “Eliot, Eliot.”

  “Pretty bird,” Jack says.

  “Pretty bird, pretty bird.”

  Jack guesses the parrot’s heard the “pretty bird” bit before.

  “A shame about Pamela,” Meissner says. “I saw the stretcher go out.”

  “Yeah.”

  Meissner’s eyes get watery.

  He reaches over the fence to pet Leo and says, “It’s all right, Leo. You did your best.”

  Jack gives him a funny look and Meissner explains, “Leo’s barking woke me up. I looked out the window and saw the flames and dialed 911.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Four forty-four.”

  “That’s pretty exact, Mr. Meissner.”

  “Digital clock,” Meissner says. “You remember things like that. I called right away. But too late.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “I’m thinking Pamela is out of the house because Leo is.”

  “Leo, Leo.”

  “Leo was outside?” Jack asks.

  “Yes.”

  “When you heard him barking?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure about that, Mr. Meissner?”

  “Pretty bird, pretty bird.”

  Meissner nods. “I saw Leo standing out there. Barking at the house. I thought Pamela …”

  “Did Leo usually sleep outside?” Jack asks.

  “No, no,” Meissner says, like dismissively.

  Jack knows it’s a stupid question. No one’s going to leave a little dog like this outside at night. He’s always seeing signs for lost Yorkies and cats, and with all the coyotes around here you know it’s like “B Company ain’t comin’ back.”

  “Coyotes,” Jack says.

  “Of course.”

  Jack asks, “Mr. Meissner, did you see the flames?”

  Meissner nods.

  “What color were they?” Jack asks.

  “Red.”

  “Brick red, light red, bright red, cherry red?”

  Meissner thinks about this for a second, then says, “Blood red. Blood red would describe it.”