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Chapter 11

Overrun Nations: Greece—issued June 22, 1943

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s desire was to keep away from militaristic themes for this series of stamps. As a result, he suggested the flag theme.

August 3, 2001, at 5:43 p.m.

Though he was given the name Clarence Ebenezer Hall at birth, he preferred CE. A self-imposed loner in a crowd, he liked being around people, but he was not fond of groups. He found the act of engaging in light conversation to be tedious, hard work. As a fireman on an engine company, he found lots of time for light conversation, and his reluctance to engage caused other firemen to see him as unsociable. It was primarily for this reason that he joined the fire investigation bureau. Finally he did not have to sit around and chat as he waited for the next run.

Almost everyone saw the fire investigators as a strange breed, like CE. But those who knew CE said he was different, even in that group. People often enjoyed his wit and dry sense of humor. A little over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and of medium weight, CE had a square face with a rugged country folk hero look. When he entered a room, his presence could be felt, not in terms of his looks, power, or wealth but rather in the way he commanded the space. CE always seemed to be in control of his surroundings.

He was now an independent fire investigator who completely enjoyed his work and was in great demand. In his spare time, CE was a philatelist who used his fire-investigation skills to sniff out the history, geography, and previous owners of the stamps in his collections. He found that stamps were not just small pieces of artwork—they also had stories behind them. He was able to relax and unwind by looking up the previous owners of collections and finding out why they were sold. In his collection, he had some stamps from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal collection that were traded back in the 1930s to a New York dealer. He also had some of the infamous national park stamps that Farley had reprinted for FDR. However, CE’s real interest was his international collection, which is why he had purchased this new album.

Driving home on I-5 was always a hot and lonely drive, but CE took little side trips hunting for stamps to break the boredom. On one particularly hot and long trip, he was thinking about the international album he had just bought the evening before in Oroville. Parts of it would fit nicely into his collection. The album seemed to have almost complete, never-hinged sections from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, North Africa, and South America, with a good selection from the United States. Most of the stamps were pre-1955.

The time passed so fast that he did not notice he had entered Los Angeles County. He reached over for his phone and called his directory for any messages. The message service told him that a Chief Benjamin Franklin had called fifteen minutes before and said he had a small job if CE was in town.

Chief Benjamin Franklin had known CE since they were rookies together. Their friendship began the day they were caught in a stairway to a basement in a backdraft explosion. Their captain had twisted his knee getting off the unit and told the two rookies to take the basement. They had rushed down the stairs in the dark and did not see the smoke being drawn back under the door. Fortunately, they had not gone five steps down when explosion hurled them both back up into the alley. They laid there for a minute, trying to figure out what had happened. The force of the explosion had pushed their facemasks off. At almost the same time, they looked at each other and smiled.

“Shit! Am I alive?”

“Wow! You’re some kind of a party animal,” said CE.

“Yeah, you’re not so bad yourself,” Franklin said. And they had been friends ever since.

CE pulled up to the location the chief had given him and got out of the car. It was a warm evening, and the neighborhood kids were out in force. The house was a California bungalow, and the neighborhood was on the way down economically from middle-class professional to hourly blue collar. He walked through the police line and around the fire rig’s hose lines.

“Hi, Chief. I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

“Where have you been? Ever since you took that medical retirement and went into private investigation, nobody can find you.”

“I was up in Washington state working on a case where some guy tried to rip off his insurance company. He had a stable of prime horse-breeding stock, which he removed and replaced with broken-down horse stock. Then he piled water-reactive chemicals in the barn with the animals. He made a small hole in the roof, and all he had to do was wait for it to rain. Kind of an ingenuous plan—only the structure did not burn the way he planned. It was easy to put it together. Computers are great for looking into records. Anyway, he broke down when I showed him that we knew he had debt trouble and had the figures to prove it and that we had traced the prime horse stock to an out-of-state location.”

“All that’s real nice, but can we cut it short?” said the chief.

“My, my, somebody is a grouch today.”

“Well, I’ve got a small problem here. There’s a dead guy on the ground over there, and the house was almost gutted by the time we arrived on the scene. We knocked the fire down in about eight minutes, and we are only hitting hot spots now and then. The landlord wants to have an independent investigator’s report. He said he did not trust the tenant, and he’s mad at us for not getting here to save the building. So I guess he does not trust us either. I told him you’re the best. So the job is yours, if you want it.”

“Mind if I look around the house first?”

“That’s what you are here for.”

CE started to walk around the house. He always did his investigations in the same systematic way. As he walked around the outside, he looked for anything out of the ordinary. When he got back to the front door, he discovered what was little more than a heap of splinters with an unlocked latch still in the frame. The truckees had used their “fireman’s key” to open the door—and the axe had not left much of the door intact.

CE entered the front room, which was burned on every wall. The ceiling, however, was only burned halfway to the front door. The bedroom off the front room had the same pattern of char on the outside wall. The wall between the front room and the bedroom was burned to a crisp, with only thin pieces of wood where a wall furnace still hung by some unknown force. The floor around the furnace was still in place. But in the corner the floor was burned through, opening a three-foot hole.

CE jumped down into the hole and looked at the underside of the floor. It was burned. He climbed out and walked around the house once more, poking into this and that before he went back to find Chief Franklin.

“It looks to me like you have a clear case of arson,” CE said.

“What did you find?’

“Fire burns up, not down. The corner by the furnace is burned through, and there are char marks under the floor, as if liquid leaked through the floor before the fire started.”

“That could have been the wall furnace, if it was the source, right?” asked the chief.

“Nope. The floor around the furnace is still intact. My guess right now would be that someone placed flammable liquid in front of the furnace in a container that was allowed to leak, and the liquid ran to the lowest point—the corner.”

“Then who is the guy on the ground over there? And how long has he been there?”

“How long is easy. Have the lab guy cut some grass from under the body when they pick him up. I would also run his clothes for traces of liquid chemicals.”

“Why the grass cuttings?”

“Photosynthesis will tell you how long the body has been there. It’s like when you leave a garden hose on the grass for a long period of time and the grass underneath it turns brown. That change takes place at a given rate. So once you establish the time the body was placed there, you can compare it with the time the fire started. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going home.” CE headed for his car.

“What about a game of golf this week?”

“I’ll call and let you know, Chief.”

CE drove home to Seal Beach in the dark. As he drove down Ocean Avenue, he noticed the streetlamp in front of his house was out. Pulling into the garage, he saw the side window open. He went to the alarm pad on the wall between the house and garage and turned off the alarm. Then he went into the house, looking around carefully for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. But everything seemed okay. He went back to the car and brought in his bag and new stamp album. As he set the bag on the floor, his eyes focused on the bookcase. He noticed that one of his albums was missing. It was his international album.

“Shit! That’s my favorite album,” said CE as he reached for the phone to dial the police.

The police arrived within thirty minutes, which seemed like much longer to CE, and they were as helpful as they could be on any home robbery. They came with their jargon and forms. No, they did not think fingerprints would be found, since the house was filled with natural wood furniture and that was too grainy to leave good prints of the perpetrators. No, the album most likely would not be found. They did, however, recommend that CE go around to nearby stamp dealers and check with them. The department could not spare the manpower for one stamp album. They left CE with their forms and a pit in his stomach from the feeling that they did not believe his story of being robbed. After all, the alarm did not go off, and there was no record with the company of it going off. He made a mental note to look into how easy it was to bypass alarms.

As he grieved over the lost album, he looked over the new album from Oroville. The album was the same type and style as the missing one. He opened the album to the front page and saw for the first time a handmade page with four Deutsches Reich stamps on it. Under each stamp was a German word. The top left had the word for year, top right the word for organization, bottom left the word for travel, and the word for country was on the bottom right.

“Now why the devil would someone do that?” he asked himself.

Continuing through the album, he noticed that at the end of the stamps from each country, there were a number of pages similar to the first page—but these pages had no words under the stamps. There was only a name at the top of the page, followed by a series of numbers.

“I wonder why someone would go to all the effort to make pages like this?” CE said, talking to himself again. “Well, this is a nice little mystery I can play with.”

The next day, CE finished his reports and put them into the mail. He had remembered his first fire run and how the captain had CE fill out the report. The chief told CE to place the cause of fire in the back seat of the car as “due to smoking.”

“Captain, the driver does not smoke!’ CE pointed out.

“Rookie,” the captain replied, “some other idiot tossed the cigarette out his window, and it blew into this jerk’s back seat. The wind from the open window fanned the embers. It happens all the time.”

That was when CE realized that the causes of fires in many fire reports were attributed to smoking to save time. What was surprising was that cigarettes got the inflammatory reputation and not the matches. After all, cigarette burns on everything, from tables and shelves to floors and sofas, were testimonials to the fact that cigarettes were poor fire starters.

The case he had just put into the mail was a case in point. The fire had started in the master bedroom closet, and there were cigarette burns on almost every surface. The first engine company on the scene placed the origin of the fire as a cigarette. CE’s report to the owner’s insurance company stated that the fire started in the closet on the floor. The origin was a common white wax candle. He went on to state that the floor under the candle was not burned and that this type of candle takes forty-seven minutes to burn down—which, in CE’s opinion, explained why the family was out of the house thirty minutes before the fire started.

He also made note of the fact that a high percentage of closet fires are started by children playing with matches. It was most likely not arson, since the family dog was in the house when the fire started. Family pets are removed in most attempted arsons to collect insurance. It was his professional opinion that the fire was accidental rather than intentional and that it was started by a child or children. He recommended follow-up in the area of family counseling.

The next day, CE received a call and had to make a trip back up the state. He packed his suitcase and then looked at the international album.

Why not? Maybe I can look into some of the history of this album while I’m away, he thought as he tucked the album into his suitcase.