policyholder and then sues the manufacturer of the faulty item.
So Jack has to dick around in there, but he thinks of it as dicking around with a purpose.
He pops open the trunk of his car.
What he's got in there is a folding ladder, a couple of different flashlights, a shovel, a heavy-duty Stanley tape measure, two 35-mm Minoltas, a Sony Hi8 camcorder, a small clip-on Dictaphone, a notebook, three floodlights, three folding metal stands for the lights, and a fire kit.
The fire kit consists of yellow rubber gloves, a yellow hardhat, and a pair of white paper overalls that slip over your feet like kids' pajamas.
The trunk is like full.
Jack keeps all this stuff in his trunk because Jack is basically a Dalmatian — when a fire happens he's there.
Jack slips into the overalls and feels like some sort of geek from a cheap sci-fi movie, but it's worth it. The first fire you inspect you don't do it, and the soot ruins your clothes or at least totally messes up your laundry schedule.
So he puts on the overalls.
Likewise the hardhat, which he doesn't really need, but Goddamn Billy will fine you a hundred bucks if he comes to a loss site and catches you without the hat. ('I don't want any goddamn workmen's comp claims,' he says.) Jack clips the Dictaphone inside his shirt — if you clip it outside and get it full of soot, you buy a new Dictaphone — slings the cameras over his shoulder and heads for the house.
Which in insurance parlance is called 'the risk.'
Actually, that's before something happens.
After something happens it's called 'the loss.'
When a risk becomes a loss — when what could happen does happen — is where Jack comes in.
This is what he does for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company — he adjusts claims. He's been adjusting claims for twelve years now, and as gigs go Jack figures it's a decent one. He works mostly alone; no one gives him a lot of shit as long as he gets the job done, and he always gets the job done. Ergo, it's a relatively shit- free environment.
Some of his fellow adjusters seem to think that they take a lot of shit from the policyholders but Jack doesn't get it. 'It's a simple job,' he'll tell them when he's heard enough whining. 'The insurance policy is a contract. It spells out exactly what you pay for and what you don't. What you owe, you pay. What you don't, you don't.'
So there's no reason to take any shit or dish any out.
You don't get personal, you don't get emotional. Whatever you do, you don't get involved. You do the job and the rest of the time you surf.
This is Jack's philosophy and it works for him. Works for Goddamn Billy, too, because whenever he gets a big fire, he assigns it to Jack. Which only makes sense because that's what Jack did for the Sheriff's Department before they kicked him out — he investigated fires.
So Jack knows that the first thing you do when you investigate a house fire is you walk around the house.
SOP — standard operating procedure — in a fire inspection: you work from the outside in. What you observe on the outside can tell you a lot about what happened on the inside.
He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, being careful to shut it behind him because there's that barking dog.
Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.
The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.
Or former koi pond, Jack thinks.
The pond is sodden with ashes.
Dead koi — once gold and orange, now black with soot — float on the top.
'Note,' Jack says into the Dictaphone. 'Inquire about value of koi.'
He walks through the garden to the house itself. Takes one look and thinks, Oh shit.
7
He's seen the house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn't recognized the address.
Built back in the '30s, it's one of the older homes on the bluff above Dana Point — a heavy-timbered wood frame job with cedar shake walls and a shake roof.
A damn shame, Jack thinks, because this house is one of the survivors of the old days when most of the Dana headlands was just open grass hillside. A product of the days when they really built houses.
This house, Jack thinks, has survived hurricanes and monsoons and the Santa Ana winds that sweep these hills with firestorms. Even more remarkably, it's survived real estate developers, hotel planners, and tax boards. This sweet old lady of a house has presided over the ocean through all that, and all it takes is one woman with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette to do her in.
Which is a shame, Jack thinks, because he's sat on his board looking at this house from the ocean all his damn life and always thought that it was one of the coolest houses ever built.
For one thing, it's made of wood, not stucco or some phony adobe composite. And they didn't use green lumber to frame it up either. In the days when they built houses, they used kiln-dried lumber. And they used real log shakes on the exterior and were content to let the ocean weather it to a color somewhere between brown and gray so that the house became a part of the seascape, like driftwood that had been washed up on the shore. And a lot of driftwood, too, because it's a big old place for a single-story building. A big central structure flanked by two large wings set at about a thirty-degree angle toward the ocean.
Standing there looking at it, Jack can see that the central and left sections of the house are still intact. Smoke damaged, water damaged, but otherwise they look structurally sound.
The wing to the right — the west wing — is a different story.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fire started in the west wing. Generally speaking, the part of a house that suffers the most damage is where the fire started. You know this because that's where the fire burned the longest.
Jack steps back and photographs the house first with one camera and then the other. He has one loaded with color film and the other with black-and-white. Color is better for showing the damage, but some judges will only allow black-and-white shots into evidence, their theory being that color shots — especially in a fatal fire — are 'prejudicially dramatic.'
Might inflame the jury, Jack thinks.
Jack thinks that most judges are dicks.
A lot of adjusters just take Polaroids. Jack uses 35 mm because the images enlarge so much better, which is important if you need them as exhibits in court.
So some bottom-feeding plaintiff's attorney doesn't take your shitty Polaroids and stick them up your ass.
'Polaroids are hemorrhoids.' Another of Goddamn Billy's pithy sayings.
So just on the odd chance the file might end up in court, Jack's covering all his bases. Which is why he keeps two 35s handy in the car, because it would be a waste of time to have to reload and then go take each shot again.
He grabs shots of the whole house with each camera and then jots down a note describing each shot and giving the time and date that he took the picture. He notes that he used Minolta cameras, notes the serial numbers of both cameras, the type of film and its ASA. He speaks the same information into the tape recorder, along with any observations he may want to have for his file.
Jack takes these notes because he knows that you think you're going to remember what you took and why, but you won't. You got maybe a hundred losses you're working at any given point and you get them mixed up.
Or as Billy Hayes poetically puts it, 'It's writ, or it's shit.'
