Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Maya had a suspect by the time he reached the bureau, and she laid the man out for him across the conference table in the order that built the case.
“Former city inspector,” she said. “Redevelopment office, fifteen years, until they thinned the department two winters back and put him out with a handshake and half a pension. He sat in the room for every one of these disputes. He read the files. He knew which projects were dying before the owners did. And here is the part that woke me up.” She spread a second folder.
“Property access. Master keys, lockbox codes, walk-through permissions that never got revoked when they let him go. Four of the five buildings, he could have walked into any night he pleased, and nobody would have logged him doing it.”
Bastien read the pages. Employment history.
Financial records gone thin and then thinner after the layoff.
A map with the man's old routes overlaid on the fire sites, and the overlap was ugly and clean.
For the first time in the whole investigation a single human being stood at the center of the thing, connected to the properties, the disputes, and the grievance all at once.
“It is compelling,” he said, and meant it.
“But.” Maya watched his face. “You have got a but. You always get very still right before the but.”
“But it is compelling,” he said again. “Every piece of it lines up. It lines up beautifully.” He set the folder down. “I have learned to be careful of a thing that lines up beautifully. That is all. Show me the man before I decide what he is.”
He almost reached for a different kind of help before he went.
He stood on the bureau steps with his phone in his hand and thought about calling Maman one more time, or sending word to the court, or asking any of the old powers to look at the man and tell him what walked under his skin.
He put the phone away. He already knew what they would say.
No one had found magic in any of it, and their not finding it had stopped meaning anything to him.
It did not mean the magic was not there.
It only meant he had not yet found where it was hiding, and no fresh pair of eyes on a former inspector was going to change that.
He went to see the man himself that afternoon, in a rented half of a double out past Gentilly where the pension had left him.
The former inspector answered the door in a cardigan with a crossword folded under his arm, and he knew Bastien's name, and he made coffee neither of them drank while the box fan turned the humid air around the little front room.
The conversation was cordial to the point of sadness.
The man did not lawyer up, did not bluster, did not perform the wounded innocence of the guilty.
He answered every question and asked several of his own, and when Bastien finally set the fire sites in front of him and watched his face, what came into it was not fear.
It was a slow, sick understanding of what he was being asked, and then a grief that had nothing to do with the fires and everything to do with a life that had already been taken apart once by the same city now sending a man to his door.
He talked about the layoff. He talked about his wife, who had left during it, and the crossword he did to fill the mornings, and the fact that he still drove past two of those buildings out of habit because his body did not know yet that the job was gone.
Bastien left unconvinced, and unsettled by his own lack of conviction.
Everything the evidence promised, the man's life delivered.
Motive, access, knowledge, bitterness. And underneath all of it the man read true, and the case read too clean, and the two facts would not sit down together in Bastien's chest. He had spent two hundred years learning the difference between a guilty man holding still and an innocent one who had simply stopped expecting good news.
This one was the second kind. He would have bet the ring under his floor on it, and he could not have told Maya a single reason why that would hold up in any room but his own.
He was still turning it over when he got home, and Delphine took one look at him and named it before he had his coat off.
“You are somewhere else,” she said. “You have been somewhere else since you walked in.” She did not make it an accusation.
She crossed the room and worked the coat off his shoulders herself.
“Come out with me. Just an hour. The notebook will still be here, and the arsonist will still be an arsonist, and I would like one walk with the man I live with before you disappear back into all of it.”
He almost said no. He felt the no rise up out of habit, the reflex of a man with a board full of fire and a suspect who did not fit, and he caught it before it reached his mouth.
A month ago the no would have come out and he would not have noticed it leave.
He looked at her standing there with her hand out, asking him for an hour, and he understood that she was teaching him a thing he had needed to learn for longer than she had been alive.
He closed the notebook. “Yes.”
The Quarter had cooled into its evening, the light going amber along the iron, the day-heat lifting off the flagstones as they walked.
He kept her hand in his and let the case go for the length of a few blocks, and the city opened around them, generous the moment he stopped hunting it.
A saxophone worked a slow number from a doorway on Royal.
A praline cart sweetened the corner. The other city moved through the crowds as it always did, and he let his eye touch it without stopping.
A fortune-teller under a lamp had the real sight and was wasting it on tourists.
A pair of Marcelline's young ones leaned in a carriageway, newly turned and still delighted by it, and dipped their heads to him as he passed.
A small house-spirit no bigger than a cat sat in a shop window among the antiques, guarding a clock it had guarded since the clock was new.
They came up on a florist near the corner of Chartres, the buckets set out on the banquette for the evening trade, and the smell of it reached the street before they did.
Delphine stopped between one step and the next.
She did not go under. She only stopped, her hand tightening in his, her face turning toward the white lilies stacked in their cool green water.
“You always bought flowers on Fridays,” she said softly.
“Did I.” He kept his voice easy.
“Every Friday. Not for my birthday, not to apologize, not for any reason at all. Just Fridays.” She smiled at the lilies, somewhere far away and entirely happy.
“I asked you once why Fridays. And you said flowers did not need a reason. You said a reason made it a transaction.” Her thumb moved over his knuckles.
“You said routines were what made people feel loved. The same small thing, over and over, so a person never had to wonder.”
He had said exactly that, in a kitchen with a green door, a hundred years and more ago.
He stood on Chartres Street in the lily-smell and let her hand him his own words back, and this time the memory came without smoke and without collapse, only a warmth that surfaced in her and spilled over onto him.
It lasted under a minute. Then she blinked and laughed at herself and let him steer her on toward the river, and he carried the moment carefully the rest of the walk, because he had begun to understand that these were the ones worth keeping, the small warm ones that cost her nothing and gave her back a piece of a life.
He would write it down later. For now he only held it, and held her hand, and let the evening be an evening.
They walked the rest of the way down toward the river with the lilies at their backs and the last of the light going copper on the water.
A brass band was tuning somewhere off Decatur, and the smell of the evening came up warm and green off the levee, and he did not think about the fires or the former inspector or the wall of his board waiting at home.
He thought about a hundred years of Fridays, and the woman on his arm who had just handed one of them back to him, and how a man could stand in the middle of an unsolved case with a city burning around him and still, for the length of a single ordinary walk, be entirely and simply happy.
At home he did write it down, the lilies and the Fridays and the thing he had said about routines, on the growing right-hand side of a notebook that told a life.
Then he stood in front of the board and made himself look at the left-hand side, at the former inspector he had spent the day trying and failing to believe in.
On paper the man fit. He fit almost too well, every joint of the case sliding home around him, motive and access and a wounded life, and that was exactly the trouble.
Cases did not usually close this neatly.
This one had closed with a made thing's precision, and Bastien stood there in the lamplight and could not shake the sense that he was looking at a costume somebody had hung very carefully on a very convenient hook.
He did not know what the costume hid. He only knew, in the old bone-deep way he trusted past all his evidence, that they were missing the man who mattered, and that the one asleep in Gentilly with his crossword was going to have his ruined life ruined a second time for nothing.
The phone rang before he could carry the thought any further. Maya, and he knew from the first breath of her voice that the ground had moved again.
“We have got another one,” she said. “Different neighborhood, out toward the lake, going up right now.” A pause, and a note in it he had not heard from her before, close to fear.
“Durand. I put a car on your inspector this afternoon. The second you left him I had eyes on that house, front and back, all evening. He has not moved. He is sitting in his front room with the fan on and the crossword in his lap, and my people watched him the whole time this fire was being set.” The line crackled.
“He could not have done it. The one man everything pointed at, and he could not have done it.”
Bastien was already reaching for his coat, and the cold clean certainty was already spreading in him, the one he had been carrying all day and had not wanted to be right about.
He drove out toward the lake through a city gone soft and blue with evening, past a levee where a drowned man walked his nightly length of the batture and lifted no hand to anyone, and he came up on the new fire with the trucks already throwing their red light against the low clouds.
He stood at the tape and watched the firefighters fight it, the water arcing up into the dark and the roof letting go in a rush of sparks, and one thought stood in him and would not move.
Whoever was doing this had just watched the city hand him the perfect suspect, and had lit a sixth fire for no other reason than to take that suspect away.
They had not eliminated a lead tonight. Someone had eliminated it for them, cleanly, on purpose, and the message underneath it was plain enough to turn his stomach.
The real one was still out there, watching the investigation that watched the city, and he was not finished, and he wanted them to know it.