Dirty Fire Read online

  But I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Mother Teresa to summon me in dreams. Whatever game Lichtman was playing, it was the only one I had.

  I pulled my Pontiac into an empty slot next to a rust-dappled Ford Mustang and cut the ignition. In the sudden silence, the darkness felt larger—unnaturally loud, in its own way. It might have been laughing, though whether in sympathy or scorn I could not decide.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if I was losing my mind.

  Near my building’s doorway, a pinpoint of light moved like a red-orange firefly. It glowed brightly for an instant before fading, and the smell of tobacco merged with the other scents of the city night. As I neared the entrance, a black man of medium height watched me approach. He was wearing an expensive sports jacket under an authentic Burberry coat. He pitched a thin cheroot onto the crabgrass and pushed himself away from the cement block wall.

  “You must be the last person on earth who hasn’t bought an answering machine,” the man said, the irritation obvious in his voice. “No cell phone, not even a pager. How the hell is anybody supposed to get in touch with you?”

  “Len Washburn,” I said, and my voice was tight in my throat. “How’s the book coming?”

  Washburn grunted. “Huh. Ain’t no book—not much of one, that is—as long as you keep pretending you weren’t tossed in the middle of some deep dogshit.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said, flatly. “No comment.”

  “That’s what I mean.” Washburn said, a disgusted look on his face. “C’mon, Davey—bribery charge, my ass. I know, and you know that I know, that you were set up. You just have to tell me how.”

  His voice dropped. “Look, Nederlander and his little rat pack can’t go on like this forever. There are too many stories about the…uh, extracurricular activities your little police department is involved in. And I know the Feds are looking at what’s going on in Lake Tower.”

  I half turned to walk away, and the writer grabbed my arm.

  “Man, I’m on your side!” Washburn said, and there was frustration in his tone. “This town isn’t the squeaky-clean little ‘burb it wants everybody to think. I’ve talked to your so-called mayor and some of the other rubber-stamping gentlemen on your City Council. They just refer me to Evans, and your city manager acts as if he’s never heard of police corruption.”

  He looked into my face, seeking a response that could not come.

  “Help me with this, Davey,” he said. It did not sound like a request. “I guarantee you’ll come out looking like one of the good guys. Hell, I’ll make you the hero if you want. We can end all this, man. I just need the facts, and you can give them to me.”

  I stood motionless, as if trying to pretend I wasn’t tempted by the writer’s words. Then my eyes fell deliberately to the hand that still held my upper arm. Slowly, they rose to Washburn’s face. Whatever the black man saw in them was enough to make him release his grip.

  As I closed the door to the unlighted foyer, I heard the parting comment from the writer. It was pitched softly, almost gently, and I was not sure it was meant for me to hear.

  “Start using your head, Davey,” Len Washburn advised, not without compassion, “for something more than a target.”

  • • •

  The night walked me to my door, and accepted my invitation to come inside. I did not bother to turn on any lights in the small apartment I had called home for the past five months. I had long since discovered that the dark was a courteous guest; it obscured the shortcomings, large and small alike, of my present situation.

  In my previous incarnation as a cop, I had known this building as one of the faceless cement-block motels that rented by the hour. It was the kind of place where fresh sheets cost extra; the clientele, with other priorities in mind, had seldom considered the expense necessary. A series of high-profile vice raids had shuttered the building for a time. More recently, a new owner had seen the profit potential in the near hopeless and started charging by the week.

  The apartment itself reflected the same fiscal philosophy. Concrete-block walls, inexpertly painted in institutional grays; a refrigerator, randomly dappled with brown rust spots; flimsy chipboard sets of drawers scarred with the char marks of old cigarettes. A television, its unplugged cord trailing on the floor like a thin black tail.

  I had added little to the ambiance, or lack thereof. Near the bath lay several large cardboard boxes, one of them ripped open at the top to reveal a jumble of socks and other carelessly packed clothes.

  Books—mainly hardcover, a conceit my finances had already forced me to reconsider—littered the room, dog-eared or butterfly-spread; the latest was a James Lee Burke novel, untouched since I had lost the ability to focus on anything but my own problems. A crumpled wrapper from a fast-food outlet gave a splash of garish color to a Formica countertop, nondescript except for the chips and scratches.

  The only real order I had brought to the room was in the stacks of newspaper clippings and photocopied documents, arranged by subject and each marked in red. A pile of minicassette tapes, each of them also carefully labeled, teetered precariously next to a pocket-sized tape recorder and spare batteries.

  Such was my contribution to the room’s feng shui—that, and in the bottle of vodka on the low coffee table. The bottle was neatly aligned with the single glass tumbler and precisely an arm’s reach from the sitz-pocked sofa.

  It wasn’t much of a home, but neither was I the kind of tenant landlords care to seek out.

  Aside from a few odd jobs and the infrequent wager based on insider tips, I was existing on an oversight. When the government had moved to seize my assets, my bank had, immediately and automatically, frozen my modest checking account and canceled the Visa card it had issued. I had been shocked, almost to paralysis, and then outraged. What saved me was that rage, a modicum of luck, and the cop-knowledge of how the system can be worked when one faces ruin.

  It had taken an additional day for the government’s notice to reach Atlanta, home of the megabank that carried a MasterCard I had seldom used. Their bad timing was my salvation, at least temporarily. By the time that card could be canceled, I had already maxed it out with a last-minute cash advance.

  The crisp new hundred-dollar bills fit awkwardly into my wallet. At the time, the thick sheaf of currency had provided a comforting bulk. Now, despite a concerted effort at fiscal conservation, not many remained.

  I tried not to think about a future that was, at best, uncertain. Four or five drinks helped, were sufficient to coax a kind of sleep; it was not quite enough to choke off the dreams. I had not yet encountered the volume of alcohol that did that.

  The Cubs were playing an early-season game in San Diego, and I half listened to the game on the radio. They were, of course, already struggling. As a kid, I had bought into the perennial optimism of wait-until-next-year; but next year had been a long time coming, and I was wondering if I should rethink yet another of my allegiances. I was pouring my second vodka of the evening when the telephone on the wall rang, discordant as a brick through glass. I let it ring a half-dozen times.

  “You’re late with the money order,” Ellen said. “It wasn’t in the mail.”

  Amid the emotions that rose in me at that moment, I was relieved to find I still had enough residual decency to include shame.

  “Davey?” her voice said in my ear. She no longer pretended tears as she had so often, back when all this had begun; she was not even angry any more. Her voice sounded only annoyed, peevish at an undeserved inconvenience.

  “I’m sorry, Ellen,” I said, finally.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Mail one. Fix this.” Her voice hung for an instant, and in the silence I knew she was struggling to keep from saying something else. “I’ll wait until the end of the week. But then I’ll have to talk to Don.”

  Don was the lawyer who had represented her during the divorce. He had done well by his client, all things considered.

  “I’ll work somethin
g out.”

  “You’ve been found innocent. Why are you still broke?”

  “The charges were dismissed,” I corrected her stiffly. “The IRS doesn’t think it’s the same thing.”

  “They sent a letter to my manager,” she said. “He called me in and wanted to know why I am being investigated. It was embarrassing, Davey. Really, I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  “Then tell him the truth,” I said. “Tell him your ex-cop ex-husband was accused of taking a bribe, and the government is afraid he didn’t pay taxes on all that illegal income. Tell him they’re looking at every dime to see how I hid all my payoffs over the years. Or how’s this—you can tell him they seem to be doing it just because they can.”

  “I’m barely getting by on my salary week to week,” she said as if she had not heard my words. “Davey, I’m sorry for you—really, I am. But all this has to end, Davey. Whatever you’re involved in, whatever you’ve done. Stop. Give it up, now.”

  “I didn’t do anything either, Ellen. Not what they said I did.”

  “Then why?” she asked. “Our bank accounts are still frozen; why? You can’t get a decent job-– why? Tell me, Davey. What is it, exactly, that you want?”

  “I want my life back, Ellen. I even want us back.”

  “Face the facts, Davey:; your life was never really that great. We weren’t, either. So what is it you really want?”

  I had no answer that either of us could accept. So I stayed silent. For a long moment, I stood with my forehead pressed against the cool wall—listening to the sound of my own breathing and hearing hers over the line.

  When she finally spoke, the anger was gone from her voice. What replaced it was thoughtful, almost calculated; she had come to a decision, and I had no illusions that my own welfare factored highly in her choice. But as they always did at times like that, her words sounded tender.

  “Davey, Davey,” she said. “Why did you let this happen to us?”

  Before I could think of a reply, she had hung up.

  April 16

  Chapter 4

  Terry Posson spread her fingers wide over the sheet of paper laying flat on the desk. Abruptly, she closed her hand, crumpling the paper into a loose ball. With a single gesture that may have been frustration, the policewoman launched it at the brimming wastebasket across the conference room.

  It flew past my head, rimmed off a paper cup—one of a dozen stained with the dregs of the morning’s coffee—and fell to the floor.

  Gil Cieloczki leaned to the side and picked up the paper ball. Without turning in his chair, he caught my eye and arched his eyebrows minutely. It was the act of a co-conspirator. I closed an eye, the one out of view of the others at the table, in a slow wink.

  I wondered if I somehow had been transported back to the third grade.

  “Take it easy, Posson,” a voice growled, and it was not the classroom monitor. “Let’s try to get through this in a professional manner.”

  The owner of the voice was Robert Johns Nederlander, whose official title was Director of Public Safety for the Municipality of Lake Tower. He tapped a gold pen against his own legal-sized pad. I was familiar with the make of pen, but only from a respectful distance. When I had been a detective here, with a desk less than twenty feet from this very conference room, it would have taken the better part of my weekly paycheck to buy one like it.

  In my current circumstances, it exceeded my net worth by an uncomfortable margin. Like so much else in Lake Tower, it was beyond my reach. And maybe even my grasp.

  It appeared likely to remain so, if my former supervisor had any say in the matter. When Cieloczki had arrived with me in tow, Nederlander had glared at me with an expression that combined equal measures of disbelief and outrage. Before he could speak, Gil had waved me to a chair at the far corner of the table. The firefighter had then moved to Nederlander, and the two men spoke in low voices: Cieloczki’s, reasonable but firm; Nederlander’s, tight-lipped and cold.

  For a tense moment, it was by no means certain that Nederlander would remain in the room. His eyes flickered between Cieloczki and me; he appeared to be weighing options, all of them unsatisfactory. Then he made his decision and settled pointedly in the conference room chair. He did not acknowledge my presence. The two plainclothes cops flanking Nederlander followed his lead: in the previous twenty minutes, they had addressed every comment to Cieloczki alone.

  “So in a nutshell, here’s what two months of arson investigation has bought the fine citizens of Lake Tower,” said Posson, frustration heavy in her voice. “We have two dead people: Stanley Avron Levinstein, 66, and Kathleen Morris Levinstein, 59. Married thirty-one years, no children. Upstanding citizens; nothing in the incident files except for a couple of ten-fourteen calls—that’s a possible prowler report, Gil—and the most recent of those was three years ago. Members of B’nai Abraham Temple: that’s the big one over in Highland Park.”

  “Place got written up in the Beacon last year,” Mel Bird offered. “Sends more cash to Israel than any other synagogue in the country.” Bird was junior to Posson on the investigation. Like his partner, he was physically short but with the body of an offensive guard and an underlying impatient energy.

  “Levinstein probably could have financed a kibbutz or two on his own—I guess the construction supplies business did okay for him,” Terry continued. “Semi-retired, which his brother—he’s running the business now, has been for a couple of years—his brother said that meant he could show up at the office or not. Usually didn’t, at least not in the past year or so.”

  Nederlander shook his head and looked at Gil. “You have copies of the interviews we did. We talked with people from the temple, the business, the neighbors—”

  Bird interrupted. “And that was a waste of time, doing a door-to-door with people in that tax bracket. Most of the time, you can’t even see the house next door through the trees and stone walls. Nobody exactly drops by to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  He fell silent as Nederlander fixed him with a stony eye.

  “We have worked this investigation by the book,” the police chief said, and his tone did not invite comment. “The case files are extensive. They have to be, or we’d be derelict. Every lead that we’ve developed has been followed.”

  “What it all adds up to is that Levinstein was just an ordinary citizen, if your ordinary citizen happens to have a house the insurance company says was worth about four-and-a-half-million bucks,” Posson said. “That’s about par for the area, of course.”

  “So no leads,” I broke in. “Nothing to follow up on.”

  “Nothing I can put a finger on,” Posson agreed before remembering that I was unofficially a nonperson. She slid another sheaf of papers, clipped together with a heavy metal clasp, from the thick folder.

  “Okay, physical evidence—based on the State Police forensic report, Stanley was shot in the head with a .38 caliber weapon,” Posson said. “No casing recovered at the scene. But that could mean the gun was a revolver, or it was an automatic but the shooter took the brass away with him.”

  “Or we just couldn’t find the damn thing in the ashes,” Nederlander frowned. He held up a hand, waving off the objections from the two detectives. “Not likely, but possible. We all know what the crime scene looked like.”

  Cieloczki thumbed through several pages and tapped on one of the neatly typed items. “You have the bullet, though. Ballistics?”

  “Got the slug. Need a weapon to match it to,” Bird replied.

  “Anyway, Levinstein’s body was charred pretty badly,” Terry Posson said. “But at least we have a body for him. There’s luck for you—seems that when an outside wall collapsed, the body was close enough to get a partial coverage. The ME was able to get blood gas. Negative on carbon monoxide. That, and no soot in the lungs or airway, lead to the conclusion that he was dead before the fire started.”

  “Of course,” Bird interjected, “that conclusion may have been influenced a little by the fact th
at Levinstein had taken a bullet to his brains.”

  Terry Posson sat back in her chair and looked around the room. “Yeah. Well, that’s a wealth of information compared to what we know about the wife. Listen to what the ME wrote here.”

  She flipped to the photocopied medical examiner’s report and recited in a singsong voice. “‘Determining the exact cause and time of death for Mrs. Levinstein is somewhat more difficult. The body was reduced to a portion of skull, a long tooth and a long bone. These artifacts’—that’s what he calls them, artifacts—‘are insufficient for determination of proper forensic conclusions.’ Helpful, isn’t it?”

  “So here’s our best scenario,” Nederlander said to Gil. “Person or persons unknown enter the Levinstein house—could have broken in, could have been a home invasion kind of thing. Hell, maybe all they had to do was knock on the door. Once in, they confront either Mr. or Mrs. Levinstein, or both of ‘em. They make demands, probably rough them up. Somewhere along the line they shoot Levinstein. My guess is they shoot the woman, too. They take whatever they were after, or whatever they found. And then they torch the house to destroy any evidence.”

  Nederlander blew out a long breath. “It’s a nice theory. The problem, Gil, is that it doesn’t give us anyplace to go. That’s the same problem every other theory has right now. As a murder investigation, we’re at a standstill. We’re catching hell in the newspapers—worse, I’ve got the city manager climbing all over my backside. The biggest murder case this city has ever had. And we don’t even have a decent motive, let alone a suspect.”

  Nederlander locked eyes with Cieloczki.