The Philatelist. D.H. Coop

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.