Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

Nicky has the furniture.

So what?

The heat shadow "evidence" on the tapes will just get dismissed as corrupted. Or Nicky will claim that he "forgot" that he moved the furniture around before the fire.

Yeah, but you have an eyewitness who will testify that he saw the furniture coming in and out.

But you can't use him because the second you name him they'll kill him.

So what are you going to do?

He drives to Laguna.

Ten minutes later he hands a brass cabinet handle to Marlowe.

Marlowe looks at it for at least a second and a half before he says, "Fake."

"How do you know?"

"One, I'm not Helen Keller," Marlowe says. "Two, I'm not Forrest Gump. Three, I've been selling the real thing for approaching hmmmmnn years and I can tell you that this is not the brass from a Georgian cabinet door. Next?"

A claw handle foot.

"May I saw?" Marlowe asks.

"Knock yourself out."

Marlowe takes a wood saw and makes two angled incisions into the wood, cutting a wedge out. He shines his lamp into the wedge and says, "This was made perhaps a month ago, maybe two. What else do you have for me?"

A copper hasp.

"Eighteenth century?"

"Perhaps in a former life."

"So?"

"So I don't know what to tell you," Marlowe says. "Look, I know every piece in Nicky Vale's collection. I verified most of them for him. Others, Christ, I bid against him but he had deeper pockets. I don't know where you got these tchotchkes, but the furniture in Nicky's house was the real thing. These are the work of a master copier, I'd say."

"Any names come to mind?"

"George Scollins," Marlowe says. "The best. He has a studio way out in the boonies, up in Laguna Canyon. Does great restorations, fantastic copies."

"Is that legal?"

"Can be," Marlowe says. "There's a difference between a copy and a counterfeit. It all depends on how it's labeled. A lot of people want antique furniture style without the age. So they buy a Scollins. Or they want a piece of furniture that doesn't exist anymore, so they get Scollins to copy it from a picture. Or they want a rare piece without the rare price tag, so they buy a Scollins. If they pass it off as real to their friends, it's tacky but legal. If they try to auction it as original, that's fraud."

Or if they burn it and try to sell it to their insurance company as the real thing…

"You have Scollins's address?" Jack asks.

Way out in the boonies is no shit, Jack thinks as he drives on a windy dirt road up one of the dozens of side canyons that stretch out like fingers from Laguna Canyon.

Tucked away inside a little grove of trees, the Scollins place is more like the Scollins places, a number of little one-and two-story buildings tacked together on the sloped landscape.

Or they were, anyway.

Because when Jack gets closer he knows he's not going to get a chance to talk to George Scollins. Because now what you have are a bunch of little burned-out shells gripping the slope.

Hell of a view, though.

Jack gets out of the car, he feels like he's on the top of the world. He can see all across the dry, brown hills, and the ocean is like a rectangle of pure blue.

From this angle the water looks almost vertical.

Nice place to live.

He goes into the Scollins house.

To go dick around in there.

Place still smells of turpentine and shellac and a host of other carbon-based chemicals that must have made a hell of a fuel load.

The fire would have gone up fast and hot.

Ravenous alligator.

Small cinder block house full of wood.

When the fire broke out, it became an oven.

And a mess. It looks like Scollins lived his work. The metal bed frame sits by the wall, and there are remnants of furniture pieces scattered all over the floor. Heat shadows on the walls.

Jack finds the probable point of origin.

An electrical baseboard heater.

An easy call by the scorching and char around it.

Not to mention the remnants of what look to be cleaning rags.

Accelerant splatter at the base of the heater.

Why would the heat be on in the middle of summer?

Classic Teddy Kuhl.

Jack gets on his phone, calls the Sheriff's Department.

"Fire Investigation, please."

"One moment."

I need a little luck here, he thinks.

He gets it. Guy gets on and it's not Bentley.

"Hi," Jack says. "John Morici, Pacific Mutual Insurance. Hey, you guys had a fire recently in Laguna Canyon, the Scollins residence?"

"Hold on a sec."

Guy gets back on and says, "I'm showing that to be Farmer's Insurance."

"We have the Life," Jack says. He plays a hunch. "I'm behind on my files and my boss is all over my ass. Can you just give me a C amp;O so I can release a payment?"

"Hold on."

Jack holds on.

"Yeah," the guy says. "It was ruled Accidental. Let me see, pile of rags by the heater."

"So, Accidental Death?"

"You got it."

"Hey, who was the investigator?"

"Uhhh, that would be Deputy Bentley."

Yeah, that would be.

He's just clicked off when the phone chirps again.

"Yeah?" Jack asks.

It's Goddamn Billy.

"Jack-"

"Yeah, I know. I'm fired."

"It's not that," Billy says. "It's Letty del Rio."

There's been a shooting.

She's sitting up on the examining table.

She looks exhausted and weak, but she's alive and Jack is so damn grateful for that he could kiss God on the lips.

"What happened?" he asks her.

"I got stupid," she says. "I went to meet a snitch alone and I wasn't paying attention and they set me up."

"Letty…"

"I'm all right," she says.

"Your arm?"

"It's fucked up but they fixed it," she says. "I'll be out of here this afternoon."

"Stay here," Jack says. "Take it easy."

She looks at him and there are tears in her eyes.

"One of them's dead," she says.

"You okay with that?"

"I'm not crazy about it," Letty says, "but I'm not eating myself up, either."

"They have an ID?"

"No."

But Jack sees there's this weird little look on her face.

"What?" Jack asks.

She tells him what the Vietnamese kid told her about Tranh and Do and the Vale house.

"They're dead," Jack says.

"How do you know?"

"I don't, but I do," Jack says. "Nicky took the real furniture out. Substituted it with cheap fakes. The guy who made the furniture is dead. The kids who dropped it off and picked up the real furniture are dead, too."

"And Pam."

"And Pam."

"Jack, I can reopen now…"

Voice starting to fade, she's a few moments from the Enchanted Forest.

"Okay," Jack says.

"You stay out of this now."

"Okay."

"Promise?" she asks. "Because these are dangerous people…"

"Promise."

"S'good." She closes her eyes. Murmurs, "Funny thing, Jack. I'm about out, and I hear the other guy? The driver? In the Caddy? He called me a 'bish.' Is that weird or what? I guess I am, though, huh? A real ball-busting bish."

She's out.

Jack squeezes her hand and leaves.

So angry that it feels like every square inch of his skin is on fire.

Flashover.

Jack pulls up across the street from a trashed-out bungalow on a cul-de-sac up in Modjeska Canyon. The house was white once; now it's a sort of whitish with brown patches where the paint has worn off.

Place needs a paint job bad, Jack thinks. But he figures it isn't likely to get one, because there's garbage strewn all across the rickety front porch, including four biker types drinking beer with their feet up on the porch railing.

Some freakin' heavy metal noise some assholes might call rock 'n' roll blasts from the stereo inside.