Reuben Spent Matches

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9662868-5-4
Verlag: Bernard Street Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 309 Seiten

Someone has set a fire at the Zigfield Art Museum in upper Manhattan. It's a 'locked room' kind of fire that couldn't possibly have occurred. Or could it? Wylie Nolan, assisted by attorney Max Bramble, suddenly has to reconstruct one of the most puzzling fires of his career. Meanwhile, at Wylie's office building, someone is setting fires in the ladies' room down the hall, trying to implicate Wylie's friend, attorney Miranda Yee. And on City Island, a final, more devastating fire takes one life and threatens to destroy another. Three fires: Where did they start and who caused them? When Wylie Nolan investigates a fire scene, he does so meticulously. He calls the facts as he sees them; and he notices details that nobody else sees in spent matches, burn patterns, and ashes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reuben, Shelly

Leseproben

CHAPTER 5
The room in the museum where the fire had started and ended was known as the Parlor Gallery, because it had served as a parlor for resident monsignors throughout the long heyday of Our Lady of Perpetual Frowns. On the north wall of the gallery, ornately carved sliding wood doors led to a library. Each door was three and a half feet wide by eight feet high. The Parlor Gallery itself measured twenty-two feet by eighteen feet. It had a twelve-foot ceiling, and skylights that ran along each of the room’s four walls. There were three stained glass casement windows beneath the skylights on the Fifth Avenue side. Because of these windows and the doors leading to the library, as well as the massive wood entrance doors from the corridor, there was less space for hanging pictures than might have been supposed. The main sources of illumination were the skylights and the artificial ceiling lights. The diffuse glow coming from the stained glass windows contributed more to the room’s aesthetic than to its illumination. Sarkin Zahedi—A Retrospective, was the name of the Parlor Gallery’s current exhibition. Despite the ambitious implications of the title, the show consisted of only five paintings, instead of the ten paintings the artist had originally wanted installed. Each painting was six feet wide by five feet high and displayed the artistic trademarks characteristic of Sarkin Zahedi’s work of twenty years before: thick gobs of oil paint; colors limited to browns, grays, and blacks; and clumps of fabric, straw, cotton balls, cellophane, and tissue paper attached randomly to the canvas like prehistoric insects with their feet stuck in the muck. Wylie Nolan fingered flakes of char beneath a picture frame labeled Process. There were similar black clusters under the other four frames in the gallery. Each frame bore a different bronze plaque. The titles of the pictures were: Germination, Creation, Destruction, and Chaos. Wylie rubbed his thumb and forefinger over the powdery residue of Process. Wylie Nolan was long and lean, and there was a lackadaisical gauntness about his face that suggested shoot-outs, showdowns, and gunfights at high noon. He had big ears that stuck out from his head, and dark, marble blue eyes that had the sharp, hard, almost beautiful glint of a man who’s tried to stare down the sun a few too many times without blinking. As he hunkered down in his worn jeans and battered jacket, he looked more like a trapper or hunter puzzling out the clues at a campsite, than a New York City-based private arson investigator studying the remnants of a fire. As soon as Max Bramble had hung up on Luis Cabrarra that morning, he’d called the museum’s insurer to get Wylie Nolan assigned to the case. Wylie stood up and slapped his hands against each other like dusty chalk erasers. “What time is it, Max? I forgot my watch.” Max was leaning toward a frame labeled Creation. “This is going to end up in litigation, Wylie. You know it is. I know it is. It always does.” He made a notation on his legal pad. “The artist’s insurance company is going to reimburse him for the loss of his paintings. Then they’ll turn around and subrogate against the museum. They’ll say that somehow, unspecified as to how, we were responsible for the fire. Which we probably were. Names, dates, titles. I need them all in case I have to prepare a defense.” Max made one last jab with his pencil and stared at a bronze plaque. “Sarkin Zahedi? What kind of a name is that?” “What time is it, Max?” Wylie asked again. “Ten-thirty. Why?” “The marshal who did this fire will be back in his office at eleven thirty, and I want to touch base with him.” “Why?” “To ask him how he called it.” “How do you call it?” Wylie Nolan shook his head. “It’s one of the weirdest damn fires I’ve ever seen. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the room committed suicide.” “How so?” “Take a look around,” Wylie instructed. “The area is practically spotless. The windows are clean. There’s no apparent smoke damage. No soot. No forced entry. No footprints. No burn patterns. No residue of flammable liquid. No unexplained smells. And no connecting fires from one painting to the other. All we’ve got left to tell us the story of what happened here are barely burned, empty frames and a little bit of char.” Max Bramble looked around himself. He saw a large room with highly polished parquet floors. Other than the fire damage to and directly under the five large frames on the walls, the room was immaculate. “I don’t get it.” Max said. “Who or what could have done this?” “I have a theory,” Wylie said. “What?” “A ghost did it.” “A ghost?” “Yes. One with an incendiary device. A ghost who held the flame from this device against the canvas of the first painting and waited for it to ignite. Then he went on to the next canvas, and the next and the next, until they were all gone. A ghost who then put his incendiary device back in the invisible pocket of his invisible suit, and dematerialized through the walls.” Wylie Nolan shook his head. “Weird fire.” He walked to a pew in the center of the gallery where he had put his camera bag and the bruised black leather suitcase he called his “arson kit.” The pew faced the stained glass windows overlooking Fifth Avenue, instead of the paintings, which may or may not have reflected the museum director’s opinion of the artist’s work. Inside the arson kit was Wylie’s fire investigation equipment: a dry paint brush for sweeping away ash; a large kitchen spoon to scoop up ash; a folding shovel for digging through debris; a dentist’s mirror for looking into inaccessible corners; a tape measure; a magnet; a flashlight; a small crowbar; a hammer; a screwdriver; a tin of bandages; a roll of paper towels; and a folded black tobacco pouch. Wylie flipped open the pouch and started to fill the bowl of his pipe. “These are the facts as we know them,” he said as he dug a disposable lighter out of his shirt pocket and held the flame over the tobacco. He sucked in one, two, three times. “Take notes.” Max took out his pencil. “At seven o’clock this morning, whoever-he-is arrived. What’s his name?” “Luis Cabrerra.” “Luis unlocks the door and looks around. Everything’s fine. He goes to the security room beside the entrance doors to reset the fire and intrusion alarms. While he’s doing that, at … When, Max?” Max flipped through his notes and read, “Seven-oh-two and thirty-five seconds.” “At two minutes after seven, a smoke alarm is activated. Luis checks the alarm control panel to see where it’s coming from. The panel light is on for the Parlor Gallery. Luis also makes a mental note that the lights on his security panel indicate the heat detector in the Parlor Gallery has not been activated. Are we in agreement so far on the facts?” “So far.” “Luis crosses the hall.” “Narthex.” “Gesundheit.” “No, Wylie. ‘Narthex’ is what they call the vestibule leading into the sanctuary of these old churches. This used to be a Catholic church.” “How do you know that?” “Before Mr. Zigfield hired the architects and interior designers, or even bought this place, he consulted me on liability. That’s when I learned all these things that I didn’t want to know about churches.” “Narthex.” “Right.” “Hall.” “Right.” “Okay. So, Luis goes past the entrance doors, this time to the right side of the hallway-slash-vestibule-slash-narthex, where there’s a door leading to the old rectory, which is now a museum. He crosses the rectory hallway to the staircase leading to the galleries, etcetera, on the upper floors. He runs up the stairs to the fourth floor, runs down the hall-slash-vestibule-slash-narthex…” “No, Wylie. Only the corridor leading into the sanctuary is called a narthex.” “Gesundheit.” “All of the other halls are just halls.” “He unlocks the doors to the Parlor Gallery…” “Go on.” “That’s the point.” “What’s the point?” “I can’t go on.” “What do you mean?” “I mean that if the ghost—the one with the unspecified ignition device—didn’t do it, then I don’t know who or what did start this fire.” Max smiled recklessly. “You’re joking, Wylie. Right?” Wylie’s eyes glinted. He grinned back. “I’m joking, Max. Wrong.” “But I always tell my clients that you’re a genius. That if you’d been alive at the time of the Chicago fire, you would have arrested Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. That you can figure out where any fire started.” “I don’t have a problem with where these fires, plural, started, Max. I just haven’t figured out yet why they started. Or how.” “But … but … at least you can tell me if it’s arson or not. I mean, that much should be obvious. It is arson, Wylie, isn’t it?” “I don’t know. Is it?” “You don’t know? Jeez, if you don’t know how the fire started, what am I going to tell Mr. Zigfield? Damn, I feel lousy.” “I’m the genius,” Wylie said...