The Fourth Angel Page 7

  Already, a well-known television reporter was shouting out a question. “Are you suggesting that one person set all these fires?”

  Georgia flinched. Please don’t answer, she thought, looking at Lynch. It’s too early to speculate. But the commissioner was on a roll.

  “Do the math. I’m saying that there’s a possibility—and I stress, possibility—that all these extremely rare fires are related. So the answer is yes.”

  Noises of shock and concern arose from the audience. Veteran journalists excused themselves to phone their news organizations. And what if this angle doesn’t pan out? thought Georgia. Alison Simon’s statement earlier today suggested the fire might be nothing more than the work of an angry building super. The guys at the task force would think Georgia was behind this little stunt. She retreated to the bathroom, feeling sick.

  When she emerged, Sloane Michaels was standing before her, holding out a martini. He was shorter than the images Georgia had seen of him on magazine covers and television. She looked over her shoulder, assuming the drink was for someone else, then blushed when she realized it was for her.

  “I haven’t had a chance to meet you yet this evening, Marshal. My apologies. You looked like you could use a drink.” He slipped the glass into her hand.

  “Thank you,” Georgia mumbled shyly. She didn’t drink martinis. But hey, this was Sloane Michaels. You didn’t say no. And besides, right now, she needed something stiff.

  “Is what the commissioner said true? That the department thinks a serial arsonist burned down my building and killed all those people?”

  Georgia took a gulp of the martini. The olive sank to the bottom of the glass. It was the only part she wanted, but she decided against fishing it out with her fingers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Michaels, I’m…not at liberty to say.”

  “But the commissioner—”

  “Has to answer to the mayor only. I have a string of higher-ups who would roast me alive for speaking out of turn.”

  “I understand.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And I respect that.” The silver flecks in his hair and close-cropped beard sparkled under the chandelier lights. Crow’s feet at the corners of his root-beer-colored eyes, so artfully underplayed on camera, were obvious when he smiled. Still, he posed a striking presence for a man of fifty. “Is there something I can do to help, at least?”

  She thought a moment. “Actually, yes. The building super at Spring Street—what was his name?”

  The smile left his lips. “Fred Fischer, why?”

  “Did you have any problems with him? Did he ever threaten you?”

  Michaels closed his eyes and placed his right thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose. A diamond-studded college ring glistened in the light. “It’s a long, complicated story.” He sighed. “You want to walk and talk?”

  “I don’t want to drag you away from your party.”

  “Trust me, you aren’t.” He lifted his gaze to two assistants standing discreetly out of earshot and pointed to his watch. Then he ushered her out a side door to a bank of elevators. “So, you used to be a firefighter, huh?”

  “That’s right. For five and a half years.”

  From a pocket in his tux, Michaels produced an electronic key card and inserted it into a special panel in the elevator which opened to reveal a series of color-coded buttons.

  “Ever rescue anybody?” He caught her look of discomfort. “I guess that’s like asking a combat veteran about his war experiences.”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized as they stepped into the elevator. “It’s my fault. I’m just not comfortable being the FDNY poster girl. I don’t know how to speak the language.”

  “And what language is that?”

  Georgia felt the lift in her feet as the elevator plummeted forty-six stories. “Your language. The language of the people at the party. It’s like…” She searched for an analogy. “You ride in a limo, I ride on a Harley…”

  “Fathead or Evo?”

  “Huh?”

  “Personally, I prefer the Fathead engine. More torque. More throttle.”

  “You ride?” Georgia asked with amazement.

  “Every chance I get.”

  The elevator delivered them directly into a handsome suite of offices on the mezzanine level. The walls were paneled in cherry, the ceilings were high and rimmed with dentil moldings, the furniture was overstuffed leather and brocade. It had the look of old New York, despite having been built less than a year before.

  Michaels put a finger to his lips and assumed a pensive pose. “Let’s see, I’m going to guess you ride a Harley Softail Custom—”

  She reared back. “How would you—?”

  “Classic twenty-one-inch laced front wheel, solid-mounted Evo engine, thirteen-forty cc’s, modified cam…And I’ll bet it’s fire-engine red, right?”

  “I can’t afford to modify the cam, but you got the rest right. How?”

  “I figured, being a firefighter, you’re athletic. Not afraid of big machinery. If you’re going to ride, you’re not going to do it halfway. No eight-eighty-three-cc Sportster for you.”

  “Okay…”

  “Women who ride tell me they like the Softail. It’s moderately priced, so it’s within your budget. It’s a model that’s not overloaded with a lot of testosterone toys. And, for a firefighter, I figure it’s gotta be red.”

  “You’re good.”

  He winked at her. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know me yet.”

  A call came in on his cell phone, and Michaels excused himself to take it. Georgia played name-that-face with the photos of famous people on the wall of his office. There were the politicians, the movie stars, the foreign dignitaries. Michaels wore a practiced cheerfulness in all of them. Like he wanted to be somewhere else.

  On his desk—a gleaming antique mahogany—she expected to find a perfectly posed portrait of his wife. But when she looked at the desk photo now, she was struck by something far more powerful.

  The framed photo was indeed of a woman whom she guessed to be his wife. But it was an unposed shot—an enlarged snapshot, really—of Michaels and her at some kind of formal social gathering. Michaels wore a tux and looked a little more boyish and a little less gray. His wife was reed-thin with short dark hair. She was an unremarkable-looking woman in a forgettable black evening dress. Definitely not a trophy wife.

  Georgia guessed the shot was probably five or six years old. The quality was poor, and neither Michaels nor his wife looked particularly stunning in it. Yet the more Georgia looked at the picture, the more struck she was by something so deep, so personal, that she felt as if she were reading someone’s diary. For in this shot, Michaels wasn’t looking at the cameras. He was looking at his wife, with his arm wrapped so protectively around her brittle, narrow shoulders that it seemed he was holding her against a force that threatened to take her away. The vulnerability of it touched Georgia. She wondered what it felt like to be loved like that She didn’t think she’d ever know.

  “Amelia was a runner,” said Michaels, nodding to the photograph as he put down the phone. “She won medals. Now she can’t walk. My wife has MS.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Georgia averted her gaze from the photo. She didn’t want him to know the longings it spoke to in her own life. “I have a good friend with MS. He’s in that program you fund at New York Hospital.”

  Michaels sighed. “I wish money could make them better. This”—he gestured to the cherry-paneled walls around them—“is glorious. But it can’t give my wife back her legs…or all those people at Spring Street their lives.”

  Georgia asked him to tell her about Fred Fischer. “You had problems with him?”

  Michaels smiled sadly and shook his head. “He didn’t set the fire, Ms. Skeehan.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Two reasons.” Michaels walked over to his bookshelf, pulled down a gold-framed black-and-white photo of two boys, and handed it to her.

  Georgia stared at
the older figure, a lean, dark-haired youth of about twelve. “Is this you?”

  “Uh-huh. And the little guy”—he pointed to a towheaded child of about four, giggling beside him—“was my half brother, Fred.”

  “Fred Fischer was your brother?”

  Michaels retreated behind his desk and toyed with a paper clip without meeting her gaze. His voice was hoarse when he spoke. “Fred was going through some problems. I figured the super’s job might keep him straight. I didn’t even know he was in the building until I got the call yesterday to come down to the medical examiner’s office and ID his body.”

  “Oh, Mr. Michaels, I’m so sorry.” It struck Georgia suddenly how many losses the man was dealing with—his wife’s illness, his brother’s gruesome death, the guilt of all those people dying in his building. Maybe she’d been too quick to judge him earlier. Maybe deep down, they didn’t speak such a different language after all. “Were you and Fred close?”

  Michaels tossed the paper clip across his desk in disgust and tried to regain his composure. “I’d be dishonest if I didn’t tell you it was up and down.” He sighed. “Sober, Fred was a really decent man. But lately, he wasn’t sober all that often. First, it was booze. Then it turned to cocaine…”

  “Did you try to get him help?”

  Michaels nodded. “He didn’t want my help.”

  “I have a witness who says Fred threatened to burn the building down.”

  “Fred threatened lots of stuff when he was stoned.” Michaels’s face clouded over. “I know what you’re thinking, Marshal. That I’m just protecting my brother’s memory…Look, I told you there were two reasons I knew why Fred didn’t set that fire. One is ’cause he’s my brother and I know him.”

  He yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Here’s the second. I got this in the mail a few weeks ago. Fred couldn’t have written anything like this.”

  Georgia looked at the sheet. It was a mimeographed copy of a piece of lined notebook paper with an eerily familiar scrawl across the top.

  And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.

  “I don’t know if it’s related to the fire or not,” said Michaels. “But it scared me.”

  Georgia didn’t blink. Her training would never allow her to divulge that Frankel had already shown her the original of this same letter. “Do you have the envelope it came in?”

  “No. I didn’t know what I was reading until I was reading it.”

  “Any other unusual occurrences? Things missing? Employees or business associates recently threaten you? You fire someone? Evict or sue somebody?”

  “You left out ‘beat a stray dog and steal money from a blind widow.’”

  “This isn’t a character assessment, Mr. Michaels. In my experience, stuff like this happens when someone’s looking for revenge. So my question is, who’d want revenge?” Michaels sank into his chair and put his head between his hands. “No one. Except for my brother, no one was particularly pissed off at me. Hell, I don’t even know what the letter means.”

  “It means,” said Georgia, “that you’d better watch your back.”

  12

  Thursday morning. Georgia and Cambareri had already been on their first wild-goose chase of the day. Marenko had sent them out to Great Neck, Long Island, to interview a former disgruntled business partner of the late Rubi Wang. Not only had the guy already been interviewed by the NYPD’s Arson and Explosion squad right after the fire, but he had an airtight alibi: he was getting gallbladder surgery that night. A check of his credit cards, phone calls, and electronic toll bridge receipts confirmed his story.

  Cambareri thought the morning hadn’t been a total waste. They had passed his favorite Brooklyn pizzeria on their way back to Manhattan. Thursdays, the sub sandwiches were half price, and he was eagerly tearing into a meatball parmigiana now as they sat in the car.

  “This really stinks,” said Georgia, tossing the remains of a slice of pizza into a paper bag on the backseat.

  “Oh,” he said. “You shoulda had the meatballs. Lotsa garlic. Wanna bite?”

  “No, I don’t mean the food. I mean what Mac’s doing here. Do you realize we’ve got no idea what’s happening on this investigation? We don’t know if they’ve come up with any physical evidence to tie the fires together. We don’t know if they’ve found that guy in the cowboy hat who was on that warehouse surveillance tape. I put that report on Mac’s desk about Alison Simon and her boyfriend, José, and I don’t even know if he’s read it.”

  “Why youse wanna know everything?” asked Cambareri. “It’ll just get youse in trouble. Look what happened to your old partner there…”

  “Randy?” Georgia’s ears pricked up. “You know what’s eating him?”

  Cambareri licked tomato sauce off his fingers and shrugged. “Naw. I’m talking ’bout maybe six, seven years ago. Before you were on the job…He never told youse about Broph?”

  Georgia shook her head.

  “I shouldn’t tell youse neither, then.”

  “Why?”

  “Ancient history. And you know Carter—he keeps himself to himself.”

  “Was Randy in some kind of trouble? C’mon, Gene, if it’s ancient history, what’s the harm in talking about it?”

  Cambareri sighed. “Carter had this partner, Paul Brophy. And…uh…Broph liked to gamble. Got himself into a jam. Found out he could clear his debts by looking the other way on an arson job at a dress warehouse in lower Manhattan. Broph was the lead investigator—”

  “He took a bribe to label an arson accidental?” Unlike cops, fire marshals have the authority to decide if a crime has even been committed. Which means a crooked marshal, though rare, can wield a lot of unchecked power.

  “Yeah. Only Carter decided it didn’t all add up. So he went back over the evidence and started questioning his partner. When he didn’t like the answers he was getting, he took the case to the IG.” Inspector general’s office—the equivalent of police internal affairs. “Broph broke down, admitted the bribe, and got fired.”

  “Randy did the right thing.”

  Cambareri pointed to his chest. “I agree with youse. But right’s got nothing to do with it. A lotta guys think Carter shoulda tried to talk Broph outta what he was doin’ or, if he couldn’t, put in a request for a different partner. Carter broke the code of silence. Bad stuff happens when you do that.”

  Cambareri finished the last of his sub and wiped the grease from his lips. “I used to have this partner, see? Louie Frantangelo. He retired a couple of years ago. We used to go fishing on Long Island Sound together. They had sea bass three feet long out there in them days…”

  Georgia rolled her eyes. Another Cambareri story. This should take up the afternoon.

  “Louie and me, see? We get this call one day ’bout a small fire at this hotel up in Harlem. You know, not a hotel like you’d go on vacation or nothing. Like, they charge by the hour, know what I’m saying?”

  “A whorehouse,” said Georgia without interest.

  “Yeah.” Cambareri blushed. He didn’t like talking coarsely around women. He reminded her of Jimmy Gallagher in that regard. “So’s we get there and all these badges start coming outta the place.”

  “Badges?”

  “One of ’em’s a battalion chief, and he tells me, ‘You didn’t see me here.’ Me? I wanted to walk around the block, grab some coffee, and come back. But Louie, he says, ‘No, man. I got a job to do, brass or no brass.’”

  “What happened?”

  “We went in and arrested a two-bit pimp for setting a closet fire. He was out in six months—and Louie got lifted to Brooklyn. Ended up spending his days collaring street mutts who burn their old ladies’ clothes for cheating on ’em.”

  “What are you saying, Gene? That Randy and Louie Frantangelo were wrong? That we shouldn’t do our jobs?”

  “Youse are doing your job, Georgia. This”—he pointed to their stuffy
Caprice, reeking of tomato sauce and garlic—“is your job. See, maybe the department’s got good reasons for you not to know something. That superhot fire last December at that Washington Heights furniture warehouse? The locals used to run a numbers joint in the basement there. Cops and firefighters got a ten percent discount. On paydays, the cruisers and rigs would be parked two deep at the curb. And that East Tremont building? That was my friend Larry Mancuso’s job. How you think it’s gonna look for him to have to admit that a building that wasn’t supposed to be standing burned down on his watch?”

  Georgia turned and looked at Cambareri for the first time—the tomato sauce splattered across his double chin, the rumpled creases in his white polyester dress shirt, the outline of a sleeveless white T-shirt beneath. For thirty-five years, he’d been trading doughnuts, card games, and gossip with guys in every firehouse in the city. If anyone knew the department’s secrets, it was him.

  “Gene, are you saying that the building Mancuso was supposed to have ordered condemned and demolished was the site of one of the HTA fires? And another occurred at an illegal gambling haunt of cops and firefighters?”

  Cambareri waved his bearish paws in front of him. “Why youse wanna go making problems? Especially for a decent guy like Mancuso? He ain’t no Paul Brophy.”

  “I don’t want to make problems for anybody. But if the department’s covering up something—is that why the building records are missing? Because the department doesn’t want anyone to know that the East Tremont building shouldn’t have been standing? That the paperwork was bungled? Or that an illegal gambling den was frequented by cops and firefighters?”

  “I don’t know about any of that stuff.” Cambareri frowned, shaking his head vigorously like a little kid. “And I don’t want to know.”

  “What about that superhot fire in Red Hook?”

  “I’m taking youse back to Manhattan now,” he said, ignoring her question. “We’re supposed to pick up the autopsy reports from the medical examiner’s office and deliver ’em to the task force. And that’s all we’re doing, Georgia. I’m not saying no more.”