California Fire and Life (32 page)

He sends good money after bad.

Scrapes up what money he can to make the loan payments but it’s never enough. Month after month the market spirals down.

He has empty condos, empty apartments. Hell, he has two aparment buildings under construction that he doesn’t have the money to complete because he’s shifted funds to pay the loans on other properties.

He starts doing more and more coke. It makes him feel better. He buys art he can’t sell and can’t afford to keep, because it makes him feel better and it keeps up appearances. He spends cash on women who six months ago would have balled him for free. He gives them coke, he gives them art. They get him hard and he feels powerful again for a few minutes.

All the while his own wife is drinking like a fish, taking pills and causing scenes at parties. (“How many people here have fucked my husband? A show of hands, please.”) They get into fights, he knocks her around. His kids start looking at him like he’s some sort of monster. He hits
them
once or twice. (“Don’t you
ever
open your mouth to me.”) He spends more and more nights away from home.

None of this escapes the attention of Tratchev, Rubinsky and Schaller.

You listen closely at night, you can hear the wolves circling.

Pam goes to rehab and comes back a raving bitch.

Sober, and the first time Nicky lays a mitt on her she goes to the authorities and lays a TRO on him.

Gets his name in the court system
.

I have stolen millions of dollars in this country, Nicky thinks. I have robbed and killed and stolen millions and this is the first
time
my name appears in court. And my
wife
does that to me.

My own
wife
.

Not for long.

Pam files for divorce.

“I told you I would kill you,” Nicky says. “I mean it.”

“I don’t care,” Pam says. “I can’t live this way.”

“If you leave, you leave the way you came. With nothing but some cheap dress on your ass.”

“I don’t think so,” Pam says. “I’ll take the children and the house and half of everything. I’ll even take your precious furniture, Nicky.”

It could happen, Nicky thinks. In this godforsaken country where a man has no rights. They’ll give the drunken bitch the kids, they’ll give her the house, they’ll launch a fishing expedition through my finances that could prove not only costly but dangerous.

It would endanger the plan.

A plan of such simple elegance, such balanced design, such perfect symmetry that it only confirms in him his own sense of genius.

Crime as artful construction.

A plan that, if it works, will achieve his goal of the turnaround in one generation.

And Pamela could stop it.

Take his dream and his identity with it.

In a particularly cruel argument one night she snaps, “My son will
not
be a gangster.”

No, he will not, Nicky thinks.

In despair, he goes to Mother.

Goes into her room in the small hours of the morning, sits on her bed and says, “Mother, I could lose—we could lose—everything.”

“You have to do something, Daziatnik.”

“What?”

“You know, Daziatnik,” she says. She takes his face into her hands. “You know what you have to do.”

Yes, I know, Nicky thinks as he lies back.

I know what I have to do.

Take back control of my organization.

Protect my family.

He’s at home, taking a walk on the lawn when it hits him. He’s looking
down at Dana Strands, he’s thinking about Great Sunsets, and the idea comes to him.

The perfect symmetry of it.

The beautiful balance.

Perfectly structured poetry, like the finest furniture.

Everything, all, in a master stroke.

He watches the sun set over Dana Strands.

More likely than not.

Is the phrase that’s running through Jack’s head as he sits in his cubicle.

More likely than not.

“More likely than not” is the phrase that applies to the standard of proof in civil cases. In criminal cases the standard of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt” and the distinction is important to Jack’s consideration of the Vale file.

If I deny the claim, Jack thinks, we will—
far
more likely than not—get sued. At the end of the trial the judge will instruct the jury as to the burden of proof, and he’ll tell the jury that the critical question is, “Is it more likely than not that Mr. Vale either set the fire or caused the fire to be set?”

That’s the way the law reads.

In reality it’s far more complicated.

The civil burden of proof is “more likely than not,” so technically, if it’s even 51 percent to 49 percent that your guy did it, the jury should come back and find for the insurance company. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but Jack knows that’s not the way it does work.

How it
does
work is that the jury is perfectly aware that arson is a crime. No matter what the judge instructs them, they are not going to apply the civil standard, “more likely than not,” as the burden of proof. They’re going to apply the criminal standard—“beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So Jack knows that if you’re going to deny a claim based on arson you had better be damn sure that you can persuade a jury that your insured set the fire or caused it to be set … 
beyond a reasonable doubt
.

So Jack asks himself, Is it more likely than not that Vale set the fire or caused it to be set?

Yes, it is more likely than not.

Beyond a reasonable doubt?

Jack takes out a piece of legal paper and a ruler and draws two straight lines down the paper, creating three columns. At the top of the columns he writes:
INCENDIARY ORIGIN, MOTIVE, OPPORTUNITY
.

Nicky’s up to his ears in debt. He’s about to lose the house. He has a balloon payment coming up and no apparent resources to pay it. He owes money to the feds and to the state. His companies are in trouble, too. He sells his beloved boat at a loss to try to get some cash. He has a bundle sunk into antique furniture, and, according to Vince Marlowe, he can’t sell the furniture he
wants
to sell. But he doesn’t even try to sell the pieces he’s
attached
to. His wife is about to divorce him and that would split his meager resources at least in half.

Motive, Jack thinks, is a dead solid lock.

So motive is a win, opportunity is a push, incendiary origin is a comer.

Unless Accidentally Bentley hangs in with his cig-in-the-vodka theory.

Jack draws a dotted line down the center of each column, then alternates plus and minus signs so that each category of proof is divided into pros and cons.

When he finishes the chart, it looks like this:

Jack thinks about the chart for a few minutes, then draws a horizontal line across the bottom, subtitles the new section
MURDER
and starts again.

Okay, Jack tells himself. Take the arson first. Start with incendiary origin. What are your three strongest points? (“The Rule of Three,” Billy says. “Always try to present your evidence in sets of three. It’s the way juries like to hear it. It’s always a minister, a priest and a rabbi in the rowboat.”)

So what are my three strongest points? Well, the positive char samples make bullshit of Bentley’s cigarette-in-the-vodka hypothesis. So that would be number one. Number two? The pour pattern—there’s no way to reconcile that with an accidental fire. Number three? Multiple points of origin. Again, inconsistent with an accidental fire.

Now, what are the points against?

The counterargument is that certain contents in the room might have burned “hot,” leaving an erroneous implication of multiple points of origin. And Bentley’s point about the fuel load is correct as far as it goes. There was a lot of stuff in the bedroom, and it’s possible that the heavy fuel load burn could explain away the other indicators of an accelerated fire.

It could provide reasonable doubt, anyway.

But not with the positive samples.

With a positive sample, Jack thinks, everything falls together.

Motive.

Dead-solid lock. The three strongest points? The balloon payment, the lack of income, the missed payments. It’s an embarrassment of riches—no reverse pun intended—and there’ll be no problem proving that Nicky had a motive to torch the house. The arguments against? There really aren’t any.

Opportunity.

Three strongest points? Locked doors and windows with no sign of forced entry, Leo the pooch outside and Derochik’s statement having Nicky coming in at 4:45.

And now Nicky has lied. You have him on tape saying he never went out, that the phone call woke him up. And I guess that just fucks you.

Arguments against? No witness to put Nicky on or near the actual fire scene. No snitch to connect him directly to the fire.

Two: Mother Russia’s alibi—but Derochik’s statement is going to shoot that down.

So, opportunity?

A tougher call, but when you put it together with incendiary origin and motive, it plays.

Move down to the murder, because it’s all connected. A jury will never believe the coincidence of a murder with an accidental fire. Conversely, they’ll never buy an accidental death with an intentional fire.

We have a combo plate here, Jack thinks.

Strongest points that Pamela Vale was murdered?

One: She was dead in time proximity to an arson.

Two: Her bloodstream showed alcohol and barbiturates, but witnesses will say that she wasn’t drinking, and someone else—probably an associate of her husband’s—picked up her Valium prescription.

Arguments against?

Primarily, there’s the ME’s conclusion of death by overdose.

Second is Bentley’s call of CO asphyxiation accelerated by acute inebriation. The alcohol reduces the amount of oxygen in the lungs, making CO poisoning rapid and deadly.

It’s possible, Jack thinks.

If
she was drinking.

And
if
there was no accelerant.

And if, Jack thinks, you hadn’t looked into Nicky’s eyes and just known that he killed his wife.

And if the arrogant bastard hadn’t lied on tape.

Jack goes in to see Goddamn Billy.

Viktor Tratchev is one
très
pissed gangster.

“Valeshin wanted to be a real estate developer,” Tratchev says to his head enforcer, an obelisk of a human specimen known simply as Bear,
“so he’s a real estate developer. Fine. What does he think, that he can just stroll in when he feels like it and be the boss again?”

Bear shrugs. Bear may not know the term “rhetorical question” but he knows one when he hears one.

Tratchev’s working himself up.

“What does he think?” Tratchev asks. “That I’m going to lie down and just
take
this shit? I’m supposed to lie down on my belly and let him
fuck
me?!”

This is pretty much exactly what he’s supposed to do, actually, according to Dani and Lev, who drop by Tratchev’s house that afternoon for a glass of tea and some browbeating.

“You’ve been shorting the
pakhan
on his share,” Dani explains.

By about 100 percent, Dani’s thinking.

“Bullshit,” Tratchev says.

“Not bullshit,” Dani insists. “What do you think, you’re playing with children here?”

“I—”

Dani holds up a hand to stop him. “Don’t add insult to injury. Keep your lies inside your mouth. Listen, Viktor, between you and me, I’ll admit that things have gotten pretty loose. So you take advantage. All right, you take advantage. Human nature. Maybe the fault then is on both sides.

“But I’m here to tell you today, Viktor Tratchev, that the free and easy days are over. The
pakhan
is the
pakhan
again. From now on, until trust is restored, we will take the payments and give you your proper share. You will run a tighter operation that doesn’t end up on the evening news. And Viktor Tratchev, if you cause any more problems, I will personally cut off your head and piss into your gasping mouth. Thank you for the tea.”