The rat on fire

29

“According to Mavis,” Scott said to Mack in Scott’s office at the funeral home on Friday afternoon, “he never did go to work last night. I wouldn’t know myself, because I went to bed. That is what I hired Herbert and Alfred to permit me to do: go to bed. They don’t have any real duties except to sit there and drive the wagon to Boston City when some poor fellow runs out of the will to live or something. If everybody makes it through the night, Herbert and Alfred didn’t have anything to do. When somebody didn’t make it, they generally got there before he turned spoiled and got him back here in the freezer in time to chill enough for me to bother working on in the morning. But if there were no deaths, they had nothing to do.

“Mavis took the job a lot more seriously than Alfred did,” Scott said. “Which maybe shows that Alfred after all was smarter than his mother, although it sure didn’t show up so that you couldn’t miss it. Anyway,” he said, “when she got up to go to work this morning, Alfred was in bed.

“Alfred was not supposed to be in bed already when Mavis and Selene got up for school and work. When Alfred reported for work, and stayed for work, Alfred got home just in time to have breakfast with them. Then he either went to bed and slept all day so he could raise hell all night, or else he went down to the corner to do what Mavis persists in calling ‘talking to the other kids.’ I’m more inclined to think that the best he did was loafing and the worst he did involved stolen cars, but those are mere suspicions.

“Mavis woke Alfred up and asked him when he got home from work. Alfred had not been to work. Alfred never came in here last night. He told Mavis he had not felt well on the way to work, so he turned around and came home and went to bed after she had gone to sleep.

“That,” Scott said, “is bullshit, of course. Alfred just got himself distracted on the way to work at the Scott Funeral Home. It’s happened before, for hours at a time. Sometimes it’s a foxy chick, and sometimes it’s something you can drink, or smoke, or snort, or steal and sell for money. Officer Peters has also been a reason for Alfred to take a little paid vacation from the Scott Funeral Home. Alfred likes, liked, his vacations. He would use any excuse at all to take one, and Herbert would get somebody at the hospital to help him load the service wagon, and get the load down here on the gurney all by himself. Herbert never complains, of course, because every so often Herbert forgets that he’s supposed to be at work, and Alfred covers for him.

“Whether Mavis actually believed what Alfred told her,” Scott said, “I do not know and I am not going to ask. She gave him a good chewing out and told him he smelled as though he had been drinking quite a lot. He said he was upset about Selene and Peters. Then she made breakfast for herself and Selene and tried to wake Alfred up again, but couldn’t do it. So she made up her mind that she would show a little responsibility at least, and she and Selene left the building. Alfred was still sleeping.”

“Apparently everybody else left the building, too,” Mack said.

“Sure,” Scott said. “The people who do this kind of thing make a few plans at least. They know it’s one thing to torch a building, but it’s quite another thing to burn somebody to death. Insurance fraud is fairly minor, next to murder. The trouble is, they had too much faith in the regularity of Alfred’s habits. Alfred wasn’t regular in anything. If they’d only called me up, I could’ve filled them in.”

“Was he badly burned?” Mack said.

“He was scarcely burned at all,” Scott said. “Apparently when the fire started, the smoke and the noise and the heat woke him up. He got out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants, and went to the door. He opened it, but the flames were in the hallway by then. I say this because his jeans were scorched on the front and he had some minor burns on his stomach. He didn’t have a shirt on.

“He went to the kitchen window on the fire escape,” Scott said. “Now there were people who saw this, because they’d already sounded two alarms and the third was going off. The people on the ground, the firemen and the cops and the news people, saw him at the window. Until that instant they thought there was nobody in the building, because they’d gone through it pretty well, banging on doors and getting no answers. When Alfred slept one off, he slept well.

“Alfred got the window open. Even if he’d had the presence of mind to shut the door to the hall, the door had burned through, because there were flames in back of him. The people on the ground said he got the window open and got out on the fire escape and the fire came right after him.”

“There must have been a draft by then,” Mack said.

“Of course,” Scott said. “The people said the whole damned thing was just a sheet of flame. Alfred got on the fire escape. The bolts let go – I suppose it hadn’t been tested in fifty years, which would not surprise me – and down he went, fire escape and all. It was the fall that killed him.”

“Three stories is not a bad drop,” Mack said.

“It is if you’re the guy that’s dropping,” Scott said. “Anyway, that’s all I know. Except that for the next couple nights, Alfred will be at the Scott Funeral Home.”

“Poor Mavis,” Mack said.

“Poor Mavis, hell,” Scott said. “She’s had a hard life before this. She’ll make it through this one. What I want to know is what you’re going to do.”

“I’ve already done it,” Mack said. “The Attorney General said he appreciated my call, and that the investigation was already well under way.”