George Higgins - The rat on fire

“I don’t know him,” Proctor said. “The hell’s he got to do with this?”

“Mack’s district,” Fein said. “He’s black. Bristol Road’s in his district. He’s worried about his voters. About his voters getting hurt when they live in my building and my building burns up. One of them, who pays her rent, actually, came to him last night and said her kid was sleeping in there when the fire started in the basement and she’s worried about staying there.”

“What’d you tell him?” Proctor said.

“Same thing I told the cops,” Fein said. “I told him: ‘Look, Senator, you and me’re getting well acquainted here, and I figure I can talk straight to you. I can’t guarantee the safety of the tenants in my building as long as those tenants are in that building. Somebody set that goddamned fire. Obviously somebody got into that building and set that fire in the cellar. Now I have to hire some people to go in there and clean up the smoke and the water damage and fix whatever needs fixing. If it was somebody that came in from the outside, that probably means new locks on the doors. Maybe even a new door. If it was somebody that was already in the building, new locks aren’t going to do any good anyway because he will still be inside the building after I put the new locks on.’

“Now,” Fein said, “now I laid it on him. ‘From the cops I understand,’ I said, ‘that there was only one person in the building yesterday that anybody saw, and that was Mavis Davis’s son Alfred. He’s not supposed to be in there. He’s a bad kid, if he’s the kid I think he is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if old Alfred had something to do with that fire. What was he doing in there?’

“Mack tells me the Davis kid was resting after working all night,” Fein said. “We had some more back and forth. Finally Mack decides to threaten me. I think, Mister Fein,’ he says in his best voice, ‘I think I will have to advise my constituents to move out of your building until you can assure me that they need not fear for their safety. Of course you need not expect any rent until they can safely return to their apartments.’

“’Mister Mack,’ I said, ‘that is the best news I had all day. You tell them to move out. You tell them that the minute they move out, considering that most of them haven’t paid their rent in quite a while, those apartments are presumed vacant, and I can rent them to anybody who wants them.’

“I doubt anyone will want them, if living in them amounts to living in danger,’ he says.

“’If Alfred is out,’ I say, ‘maybe they won’t be.’ So after all of this, where we come out is that they will be out by Sunday night at the latest. And then you can go in there on Monday night and light the thing off, because Mack is right and even when they are out, nobody that will pay his rent will want to live in that building, and I will collect the insurance.

“Jerry,” Proctor said, “there are times, right? There are times when I think every man should do some time, just so he understands some things about things and does not go around doing dumb things which will get him in the can and a lot of time inside to think about them.”

“What do you mean?” Fein said.

“I mean that you have just fucked everything up, if we wait till Monday,” Proctor said. “On Monday all the tenants’re out of the building, right?”

“Right,” Fein said.

“You told the cops from the fire marshal’s office about overloads on the wiring, and how you wouldn’t be surprised if that started a fire, right?”

“Right,” Fein said. “Jesus Christ, Leo, we’re gonna make it look like a wiring overload. That’s what you told me with them rats. I got them all prepped to say that’s what it was.”

“When there’s nobody living in the building,” Proctor said, “who overloaded the wiring?”

Fein did not say anything.

“Now,” Proctor said, “you have got us in the cream where we have got to make those rats uncomfortable before the tenants pack up and get out. While their toasters and their other electrical goodies are still all plugged in to the six extension cords that come off the same outlet. Don’t we, Jerry?”

“Yeah,” Fein said.

“Everybody in that building works or goes someplace during the day,” Proctor said. “That kid being in there was a freak thing. We’re gonna light her off tomorrow morning, and hope for the best.”

When Proctor left Fein’s office with an envelope of money in his pocket, Lois smiled at him and said, “Is Jerry clear now?”

“Yup,” Proctor said. “Far as I know, at least. But he’s not in a good mood anymore.”

“According to Mavis,” Scott said to Mack in Scott’s office at the funeral home on Friday afternoon, “he never did go to work last night. I wouldn’t know myself, because I went to bed. That is what I hired Herbert and Alfred to permit me to do: go to bed. They don’t have any real duties except to sit there and drive the wagon to Boston City when some poor fellow runs out of the will to live or something. If everybody makes it through the night, Herbert and Alfred didn’t have anything to do. When somebody didn’t make it, they generally got there before he turned spoiled and got him back here in the freezer in time to chill enough for me to bother working on in the morning. But if there were no deaths, they had nothing to do.

“Mavis took the job a lot more seriously than Alfred did,” Scott said. “Which maybe shows that Alfred after all was smarter than his mother, although it sure didn’t show up so that you couldn’t miss it. Anyway,” he said, “when she got up to go to work this morning, Alfred was in bed.

“Alfred was not supposed to be in bed already when Mavis and Selene got up for school and work. When Alfred reported for work, and stayed for work, Alfred got home just in time to have breakfast with them. Then he either went to bed and slept all day so he could raise hell all night, or else he went down to the corner to do what Mavis persists in calling ‘talking to the other kids.’ I’m more inclined to think that the best he did was loafing and the worst he did involved stolen cars, but those are mere suspicions.

“Mavis woke Alfred up and asked him when he got home from work. Alfred had not been to work. Alfred never came in here last night. He told Mavis he had not felt well on the way to work, so he turned around and came home and went to bed after she had gone to sleep.

“That,” Scott said, “is bullshit, of course. Alfred just got himself distracted on the way to work at the Scott Funeral Home. It’s happened before, for hours at a time. Sometimes it’s a foxy chick, and sometimes it’s something you can drink, or smoke, or snort, or steal and sell for money. Officer Peters has also been a reason for Alfred to take a little paid vacation from the Scott Funeral Home. Alfred likes, liked, his vacations. He would use any excuse at all to take one, and Herbert would get somebody at the hospital to help him load the service wagon, and get the load down here on the gurney all by himself. Herbert never complains, of course, because every so often Herbert forgets that he’s supposed to be at work, and Alfred covers for him.

“Whether Mavis actually believed what Alfred told her,” Scott said, “I do not know and I am not going to ask. She gave him a good chewing out and told him he smelled as though he had been drinking quite a lot. He said he was upset about Selene and Peters. Then she made breakfast for herself and Selene and tried to wake Alfred up again, but couldn’t do it. So she made up her mind that she would show a little responsibility at least, and she and Selene left the building. Alfred was still sleeping.”