I was still two blocks away when I came to a police barricade, but I could already see her building. It was mostly untouched, except for the upper right quarter of it, where Miss B lived. That part was streaked by black scorch marks and still steaming slightly. It looked soggy. The street outside was filled with puddles and fire trucks.I left the safety of the Malibu, and as I got closer, I had this sense that whatever had been used on Miss B’s apartment was different from what razed my bungalow. First off, the building was structurally sound. There were no pieces of it scattered hither and yon, as there had been with my place. For that matter, none of the surrounding buildings appeared to have been touched— there were no blown-out windows. I also didn’t hear any car alarms.It looked more like any of the number of slum- building fires I had written about: the cause of the fire always turned out to be a shorted-out space heater, an oven someone had left open for warmth, a cigarette igniting a couch, or something similarly banal.I was now directly across the street from the building.
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