A Killing at Cotton Hill (20 page)

I'm trying to settle my mind around the idea that somebody would do something so destructive when I hear a grumpy meow. I turn around to see Zelda stomping toward the back door, where her food dish usually sits. The fire has charred the dish and the steps it sat on. People who don't know cats may not think they can stomp, but Zelda can. She's mad as hell about the disruption in her life.

“Let me go inside and I'll get you a new dish,” I tell her. She honors that idea by finding a place on her side that needs some heavy grooming.

The floor is gritty and my boots crunch as I walk through the house to the kitchen, at the back. The paint is peeling off the cabinets from the heat of the fire, and the whole room is gray with soot. I open the cabinet and take out a cereal bowl, fill it with cat food, and start to open the back door, but the handle is seared, and won't budge. I take the bowl back through the front door and around the side and set it down in the grass near the blackened steps. Zelda walks over to it, stiff-legged and suspicious, but decides to go along with my new plan.

When I get back around front, Elvin is just pulling up. He's a barber in town as well as being head of the volunteer fire department, and he's here early so he can get on to work. He stands with his hands on his hips, his baseball hat tipped back on his head, and looks at the untouched front of the house. “You got yourself some luck,” he says. “Jesus was on your side last night.”

“Jesus and Jenny.”

He chuckles, but sobers right back up. “I need to talk to you about something,” he says.

“I know what you're going to say. Somebody set this fire.”

He looks me full on. “I'm afraid so. I've put in a call to the fire chief over at Bobtail. He wasn't in yet, but I left him a message to call me at the shop. I expect he'll want to come over and see what he can make of it.”

“I guess I can't have anybody clean up until then.”

“If I was you, I'd call my insurance company. You know, they've got these fellows who come out and investigate a suspicious fire. Might be to your advantage.”

“I'm going to take that advice. But I want you to know, I'm going to tell everybody what a first-rate job you and your crew did.”

He takes off his hat and dips his head in acknowledgment of the compliment.

When he's gone, I head back inside. Before, when I came in, I had a mission to take care of Zelda, but now I get the full effect of the fire. The smoke smell is strong, so I turn off the air-conditioning and open up the windows. The house seems strange to me without the pictures. I pass by the dining room and see that no one thought to take the Neri sculpture. That would have been a loss. But I remind myself that it
isn't
a loss; it will need careful cleaning to get the soot off it, but it's still here. I'm suddenly sorry that Loretta had to go off with Ida Ruth today. I would have liked hearing her yoo-hooing me about now.

By now it's close on to eight o'clock, still too early to call the insurance company. But I phone my nephew Tom and tell him what happened.

“I'm coming down there myself right now,” he says.

“No, you just go on with your day. I'm fine. It wasn't much damage.”

“I can cancel my appointments. I don't like the idea of you having to face that alone.”

I calm him down and tell him how I appreciate his concern, but that I'm not really alone; I've got all kinds of people on my side. He makes me promise that I'll call him tonight. If he was my own son, I couldn't feel any more pleased with that boy.

With a little time on my hands, I'm itchy to get back to Jenny's to take a closer look through my pictures to see if there's any damage that needs to be seen to right away. I couldn't quite take it all in first thing, my mind being on getting over here to assess the property. I'll feel better if I satisfy myself.

At Jenny's I pour the last cup of coffee and turn off the pot, then go through the pictures. I have nineteen of them, many of them not particularly noteworthy, a few decent prints and some line drawings. But five of them have turned out to be the kind of investment that art collectors dream about. And one of them, probably the most valuable one, is missing. It's a Wayne Thiebaud cake picture that Jeanne and I bought early on, in San Francisco, a pink and cream confection on a light green background—not one of my favorite paintings, being more Jeanne's taste. But it turns out she was right about the painting's potential; it's worth an indecent amount of money. Before Jeanne died, we put in our will to leave it to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The firemen couldn't have missed it, because it was right over the fireplace.

Before I panic, I call Jenny to ask if she might have stuck the painting somewhere else. Maybe she even recognized that it might be valuable.

“Thiebaud? I don't know anything about him. But I put all the pictures in the same place. You've had a shock. Maybe you just missed it. I'd go back through them if I were you.”

“I'll do that. And Jenny, I'd just as soon you not mention that anything is missing.”

Now I know what the fire was about. Somebody came in and took that picture and was willing to destroy all the others to cover up the theft. I'm breathless with fury, so I sit still until I can think properly about who would have done such a thing. And whether it is connected to my investigation of Dora Lee's death.

Elvin said he was going to get the fire investigator from Bobtail involved, and insurance investigators will come out eventually, but I'm too impatient to wait for them to get to it. I want to find out now if any of my neighbors saw somebody hanging around before the fire started.

The obvious place to start is with old Mrs. Summerville next door. In her nineties, Mrs. Summerville is not as spry as she was, so her daughter, Letitia, who lives with her, parks her in the front window of the house everyday so she can see everybody who comes and goes.

Letitia shows me in to talk to her mother, fussing over me as if I were an honored visitor, instead of just the man next door. I guess they don't get a lot of action, and last night my house provided them with enough to talk about for some time to come, so I'm something of a celebrity.

After I'm settled knee to knee with Mrs. Summerville, and she has told me how she and her daughter liked to have had heart attacks when they heard the fire engine stop next door, I tell her that Elvin thinks somebody set the fire.

Her hand goes to her chest and her mouth starts to work as if she's chewing on the information. “Well, I swan,” she says, in the old way of saying “I swear.” “I never thought of such a thing happening right next door. Did you ever hear of such a thing, Letitia?”

Letitia agrees that she never did.

“What I'm wondering is if either of you saw anybody outside my house yesterday evening after I left.”

“You was taking Loretta Singletary somewhere, all dressed up,” she says.

“Yes, ma'am, we went over to Frenchy's, that restaurant in Bobtail.”

“The French food with all them snails. I don't believe I could eat that.”

“Mamma, you told me you saw somebody go to Samuel's door and then walk around back,” Letitia says. I'm grateful to her for pulling the conversation back around.

“It was a boy. He was in a reddish kind of a car,” she says. “Wine-colored.”

“You said it was a Ford.” Letitia sounds impatient.

“I don't know anything about cars, but it had that thing on it that Fords have. You know what I'm talking about?”

“The medallion on the front grill?” I say.

“That's it. Medallion. Fancy name for it. I couldn't read it from here, but I know what it looks like.”

“Could you describe the boy for me?” I say, although I know she's talking about Dora Lee's car, and there's only one boy who would be driving it. Sure enough, she describes Greg, and my thoughts take a bad turn.

I ask her if she saw anyone else around, but she says after that she and Letitia ate their dinner and watched TV, so they wouldn't have seen anybody.

I make a quick tour of the other neighbors, but get nothing to show for it. Most of them were busy eating dinner or at the TV by early evening.

When I get back to my place, a big red SUV is sitting out front,
Fire Marshal—Bobtail, Texas
printed on the side in yellow letters. My front door is open, so I call out and let the fire marshal know I'm here.

Woodrow Callum is a tall man with skin the color of molasses and the erect posture and close-cropped white hair that suggests a military background. He shakes my hand with a firm grip.

“Mr. Craddock, you've got yourself a situation here,” he says in a deep baritone. I like him right off for being direct. “I found it hard to credit when Elvin called and told me he thought this fire was arson, but he was right on. Come on around back and I'll show you.”

He has a long stick with him, and when we get around back near the porch, he crouches down and pokes it under the porch to point out a couple of half-melted bottles with charred rags next to them. With my bum leg, I can't squat the way he does, so I have to get on my hands and knees to look at it.

“Unless you find it handy to keep some kerosene and rags under your porch, I think we can assume whoever did this put them there.”

“Sounds about right.”

Callum pokes at the charred rags. “Well, look at this,” he says. With the stick he brings out one of the rags, and it's only party burned, one corner seared, but intact. He brings it closer and points to it. “There's some kind of stamp here. When I get it to my lab, I may be able to make out what it says.”

“It looks like whoever did it wasn't particularly sophisticated in their methods. Am I right about that?”

He stands up and gives me a hand up. “I was just going back to my truck to get some bags to put this stuff in. Walk with me and I'll explain a few things.”

On the way to his truck, he tells me he took the job as fire marshal in Bobtail to get a little salary to supplement his retirement and to keep busy. “I retired from the army after twenty-five years and then was a fire inspector for an insurance company for another fifteen before my wife and I moved to Bobtail to be near our family.”

“So you've seen a few fires,” I say.

“Yes, sir. What you said about the person who did this not being sophisticated, is right on. Most people who set fires aren't sophisticated, and this one is about standard. It's been my assessment that people who set fires like this are desperate one way or another. They've got financial problems or a score to settle or they're covering up something, like a theft or even murder. They're not people who've thought out the business of starting the fire. They just use whatever they can pick up. They assume the fire will burn up the evidence. More often than not, that's just plain wrong.”

He opens the back of the truck and takes out some serious-looking heavy duty plastic bags with thick plastic closures.

“I think I can help out on motive.” I tell him about the art, and the one painting missing.

He looks at the pavement as I speak, nodding. “So you figure somebody set the fire to cover up the theft of your picture.”

“I'd appreciate it if you'd keep that part quiet. I'll be notifying the insurance company, and no question they're going to send somebody out to investigate. I hope that doesn't step on your toes.”

“It depends on who it is. Some of the inspectors I worked with thought they were the last word in smarts. And me being a black man didn't always sit well.”

“Even with your experience.” I say it as a fact, not a question.

“Even so. I'll give them my cooperation, but I won't lie down and play dead.”

“You let me know if you need any backup on my part.”

“You ex-military?” he says.

“Just my stint in the air force. A pretty boy just seeing enough to know I wanted to get on back home.”

We both laugh.

“I'll let you get on with it,” I say. “I have a couple of phone calls I need to make.”

The woman I reach at the insurance company is concerned when I tell her about the fire, but she's really upset when I get to the part about the Thiebaud being gone. She asks if I've filed a police report. I tell her I'll get right on that. No reason to tell her that Rodell isn't going to be a whole lot of help. I tell her the fire marshal has been here. She asks me if the painting had an alarm system, and I remind her that I pay an extra premium so I don't have to do such a thing.

She still doesn't like it. “We'll be sending somebody to investigate right away,” she says in a crisp voice. “We're going to be right on it. Somebody will call you as soon as we set something up. Is this the number where I can reach you?”

I tell her it is, and to leave a message if I'm not here.

“Can I get your cell phone number?” she says.