Where Nobody Dies by Carolyn Wheat Page A

than any I’d ever known. In a way, it represented all my hopes for the future. It was my future—my office, my home, my business. I’d feared for its life before I’d ever heard the name Ira Bellfield. All my anxieties about leaving my job and starting out on my own seemed to center on that one four-story building. I’d visualized it in ashes, or burglarized, or, most humiliating of all, foreclosed on, several times a day for the last six months. The fact that my fears had coalesced into a horribly realistic prospect was something even Sigmund Freud couldn’t have anticipated.
    Riordan. He was attractive. He was dangerous. He was also in danger, yet he made it clear he wanted no help from me or anyone.
    Being alone. Proud as I was of my ability to handle my caseload, my responsibilities as a homeowner, there were times I wanted to share the burden, to feel someone else’s shoulder pushing along with mine. For all Matt Riordan and I could understand each other, we were irrevocably separate, our paths wholly distinct.
    Being needed. By Matt Riordan, by Dawn Ritchie, by someone. When in hell had that become important to me?

8
    It was your basic New York City government building, old and drafty, but efforts had been made. The walls were white, the woodwork fire-engine red. The lobby was lined with lithographs of famous fires being fought from horse-drawn engines, while horrified citizens in Victorian dress looked on. There was a glass partition with FDNY and a fireman’s hat emblazoned in red. I knocked, went in, and asked for Fire Marshal Duncan Pitt.
    I don’t know why his being black surprised me. So Linda was an equal opportunity blackmailer. Or maybe, having known Button, as honest a cop as ever wore blue, I unconsciously considered corruption a white man’s disease. I tried not to let my surprise show as I sat in the wood chair, one of two in his tiny office. It was purely a working environment; every inch of the scarred desk was covered with reports. I wondered idly how many were honest and how many were doctored.
    The phone rang. As Pitt answered it, I took stock of him, trying to get a clue as to how best to conduct what I suspected would be a very difficult interview.
    Pitt was a big man, balding, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and full lips. He had a tough drill sergeant’s face and a voice to match. Yet the cut of his uniform, the perfectly trimmed hair, the almost exaggerated precision of his speech gave me a sense of a man who cared greatly for appearances.
    The only personal touch in the drab office was photographs. On the desk, pushed aside by papers, were graduation pictures of a boy and a girl, both with even-toothed smiles that probably cost a pretty penny in orthodontists’ fees. I hoped I wasn’t going to hear Pitt use them as an excuse for what he’d done.
    On the wall, there were the standard political photos I’d seen a hundred times in judges’ chambers all over the city. Photo opportunities with the candidate of the moment, displayed to demonstrate the political clout of the person doing the displaying. But the person shaking hands with Shirley Chisholm, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson wasn’t Pitt, but a light-skinned woman whose broad, buck-toothed smile seemed familiar. If she was the mother of the graduates, I thought, I was right about the orthodontics.
    â€œWell, Counselor,” Pitt began in an expansive tone that seemed to have nothing to hide, “what can I do for you?”
    â€œI represent a young man named Tito Fernandez,” I began crisply. “He’s charged with arson, second-degree. You filled out the fire marshal’s report.” I put my briefcase on my lap, opened it with a snap, and pulled out the report I’d gotten from the DA’s office. “As you can see,” I went on, showing it to him as though I were putting it into evidence in court, “it has your signature on