Sunburn: A Novel(43)

But the first time Irving met Ditmars, all he knew was that an arson investigator had him in his sights.

“Shame about that fire at your Dundalk property,” Ditmars said, dropping heavily into the chair opposite Irving’s desk.

“Yeah,” Irving said. “A very sad situation.”

“No, I mean it’s a shame it doesn’t happen more often. Druggies. Scum. The kind of people you never used to see in the county, but I guess that’s changing.”

Irving thought himself a cynical man, but Arson Investigator Burton Ditmars was a new kind of hard.

“Do they know what started the fire?”

“Trash can fire. The front of the house is brick, but the addition on the back was wood. Guess I don’t have to tell you the nature of the structure. Something as small as a burning cigarette butt could have done it.”

He almost yearned to correct this arrogant man, offer up cigar. Instead: “They had smoke alarms. My places are always up to code. But it’s not on the landlord to check the batteries.”

Ditmars put his feet up on Irving’s desk, knees bent so Irving could see the tops of the shoes, which had a formidable shine. Irving could almost see his reflection in the toes.

“I got somebody you should meet,” Ditmars said. “Somebody I think you should be in business with.”

“I’m not sure—”

“That your blue Buick out front?”

His Buick. There’s no reason for Ditmars to ask about his car—unless someone saw him driving away.

Irving watched as his twin reflections nodded hesitantly, trapped in the bulbous ends of those shoes.

*

A week later, Ditmars returned, this time with a quiet African American man in khakis and a Banlon shirt. Rail-thin and sinewy, with close-cropped hair that was beginning to gray. He looked like a walking piece of jerky.

“Charles Coupay,” he said.

“Like the car?”

“Like what you get on your medical insurance, only with a ‘u.’” He smiled. “I’m talking your language, huh? I find that’s important, to speak to a man in terms he understands.”

Irving nodded. He had no idea what Coupé—Coupay—was talking about.

“That fire in your rental in Dundalk. I lost an employee.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. He wasn’t much good. But now he’s gone, taking with him all the time and energy I put into him, and I can’t be compensated for that. Ditmars, though, he told me you get a check. Because you owned the building. You owned this shitty row house with bum smoke alarms—”

“I put the alarms in. I can’t help it if they don’t replace the batteries. You know what those people do? They hear the beeping and they disconnect them.”

Coupay grinned and repeated: “Those people.”

“Tenants like that, I mean.”

“How much was the place insured for?”

“Fifty thousand,” Irving said. “But I lose the income, don’t forget. Nothing left but walls. I have to rebuild if I want to get the monthly income back. Frankly, I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

“Fifty thousand for a row house that you rented for three twenty-five a month, without utilities. And you bought it, for what—eighteen thousand, twenty thousand?”

Coupay’s numbers were eerily on point.

“Man, I’d buy all the row houses I could if I could get money back when they burned down.”

Interesting conversation to be having in front of an arson investigator, Irving thought, but said nothing.

“That young man who worked for me, he had children, living with their grandmom, thank goodness. Two kids. Daddy’s gone, Mama’s gone. Who’s going to provide for them?”

“Maybe you could start a fund or ask the church—”

“But they won’t get fifty thousand dollars, will they? I was thinking maybe the men who work for me should have life insurance. As a—what’s the word—a perquisite. I’d like to start offering life insurance policies to my workers. They’re young men, in their twenties. Couldn’t cost much. Do you understand what I want?”

Irving understood. Ditmars knew he had set the fire, Ditmars had sold him out to Coupay. Could Ditmars prove anything? Probably not. But even an investigation would be disastrous for Irving, an insurance broker suspected of setting a fire in a building he owned. He could lose his license and what would he be then? A full-time slumlord.

“It can’t always be a fire,” he said.

“It won’t be,” Coupay assured him. “Mine is a dangerous business. Employee turnover is very high.”

Irving found himself warming to the idea. These young men, trapped in a life from which they couldn’t escape—why shouldn’t someone benefit?

“You could change it up in other ways. You know what a viatical is?”

“It’s where the pope lives.” That was Ditmars. Coupay wasn’t the kind of man to lean into ignorance, to give answers when he wasn’t sure if he was right.

“Why don’t you explain the finer points?”

*

Charles Coupay, who, on paper, was a landlord not unlike Irving Lowenstein, became one of his best customers. He encouraged the young men who worked for him to get life insurance, with Coupay paying the initial premiums. Then, when they had trouble making the monthly payments, Coupay agreed to buy them back at fifty cents on the dollar. Half the time, he didn’t even have to arrange for the young men to die; the streets did it for him. And if the young men had the misfortune to suffer crippling injuries, he quietly canceled the policy. When he cashed in, he paid Irving 10 percent of whatever he made, in cash, which Irving collected at Ditmars’s house, usually on Friday nights when his wife thought he was at shul.