The house smelled to Charlie of his childhood: industrial-strength cleanser. As ever, the place had all the warmth of a chain hotel-no framed photographs, no bowling trophies, none of the knickknacks usually found in a home. The closest the old man ever came to decorating was shelving books in alphabetical order by author.
The only thing new was unopened correspondence, stacks of it, all around. After Drummond went to bed, Charlie nosed through it. He found numerous memos from Perriman Appliances, where Drummond had been placed on long-term disability leave. Charlie also found three unpaid utility bills. Adding them to his sudden awareness that the house was freezing, he figured he’d solved the mystery of the gas man: The guy had been here to cut the old man off.
Charlie climbed upstairs. Tiptoeing past Drummond’s bedroom and to the end of the narrow corridor, he checked the thermostat.
Fifty-six.
So much for the gas man theory. On this cold night, Drummond must have lowered the heat. Charlie cranked the thermostat to seventy-five.
On the way back to the stairs, he paused at the doorway to his old room. The only remaining mementos of youth were the scale miniatures his father used to bring back from sales trips to D.C. Dust made it appear snow had fallen on the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Charlie again felt the chagrin of the birthday when he tore off the gift wrap, hoping for a PlayStation joystick, and found a Washington Monument.
His recollection was cut short by a gunshotlike crack that rippled into the night, leaving the mirrors and windows upstairs abuzz. He froze, until hearing the creak of floorboards in Drummond’s bedroom.
Drummond had gotten out of bed in response to the cold, Charlie pieced together, then heaved open his bulky, spring-loaded window, which sounded like a gunshot.
Charlie stepped into Drummond’s bedroom. In robe, pajamas, and slippers, Drummond stood at the wide- open window, gazing at the dark patch of a backyard a story below. Charlie joined him. There was nothing to see but the swing set Charlie’s mother had given him, now just three rusty legs and a rusty crossbar.
Charlie said, “It’d probably be best to shut-”
The blast, which must have been heard for miles, made it feel as if the house jumped its foundation. Cupboards banged open. Doors jumped off their hinges. Drawers flew. Glass shattered.
A mass of bluish-red flame surged up the stairs, through the door, directly at Charlie. He was burning hot before it was upon him. He thought he would be incinerated.
Drummond dove, wrapping his arms around him and propelling them both out the window.
11
The explosion left walls charred on the houses on either side of Drummond’s. Scraps of stucco and wood and metal littered the block. Burning hunks of timber fell from Drummond’s eaves and glowed in the alleys. Waves of fire made a loud, crackling meal of the rest of the house. With coats thrown over nightclothes, dozens of neighbors poured onto the sidewalks and watched, through smoke and haze and heat, as the men of Engine Company 204 slashed the flames with shafts of water.
Among the spectators were Charlie and Drummond, uninjured but for bruises from run-ins with the swing set crossbar-fortuitous, because it slowed their descent-and the frozen ground.
Charlie was the only person in the crowd not wholly fixated on the firefighters. “Maybe something was up with the gas man after all,” he said over the din.
“Oh,” said Drummond.
The firemen reduced the blaze to a few stubborn sparks, and, eventually, just steam. The house was left a blackened skeleton.
While neighbors offered Drummond their sympathies and returned home, and soot-streaked firefighters coiled their hoses, Charlie shared his concerns of foul play with Engine Company 204’s chief, a wiry man with a whisk broom of a mustache like those of his professional antecedents.
“We found the heat exchange tubing halfway up the block,” the chief said. “Ten times outta ten, that means a fuel leak caused a boiler blow. We see it all the time with these older electric ignition units, especially with seniors who forget to check the fuel valve.”
“Wouldn’t the gas man have checked the fuel valve?” Charlie asked.
“We looked into that. The gas company hasn’t got a record of any service here so far this month. Their nearest call today was way down on Bergen, at ten A.M.”
Frustration heated Charlie. “Doesn’t that make it more suspicious that the gas man was here this afternoon?”
The fireman smoothed one end of his mustache to a point. “All due respect, sir, gas men haven’t got the exclusive on white uniforms.”
Charlie turned to Drummond for corroboration. Drummond was hunched on a stoop, engulfed by an oversized, lime green down coat lent by neighbors who probably were in no rush for its return. He was watching the ribbons of steam blend into a purple sky. In his right mind he’d be distraught. His eyes showed only childlike wonder.
“If the guy were a house painter or Mister Softee or anybody else in a white uniform, it’s still strange,” Charlie said to the chief. “The way he glanced up the block, then rushed off-now that I think of it, it was like he was on the lookout for my father. Then he just disappeared onto Nostrand, which is a bunch of locked brownstones without alleys between them. There was no time for him to get inside a building. And we looked everywhere else; if there were even a manhole for him to have gone down, we’d have found it. So you have to think he had some kind of escape route.”
The chief glanced at his truck. His men were all aboard now, impatient to go. Returning his focus to Charlie, he pursed his lips. “Sir, there are set fires that go past us, sure. It takes a real professional though, and I mean a heckuva pro. Why would a guy of that caliber be in this neck of Brooklyn picking on a senior citizen?”
Charlie weighed the odds that “HumDrummond” would be the target of a professional assassin.
“I guess you’re right,” Charlie said.
The fire trucks barreled off into the darkness, and Prospect Place reverted to its usual eleven P.M. form-the occasional taxi, the odd homeward-bound drunk, talk shows flickering behind window shades. Charlie and Drummond should have been in a taxi headed to Charlie’s apartment for the night. But the gas man was stuck in Charlie’s thoughts like a sliver of glass.
Settling alongside Drummond on the stoop, he asked, “Dad, have you been playing the horses lately?”
“Do you mean gambling on horse races?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never done that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“There used to be Racing Forms around the house all the time.”
“There used to be whats around the house?”
“Racing Forms. As in the Daily Racing Form — ‘America’s Turf Authority Since 1894.’ You used to pick it up at the magazine store or the newsstand in the subway, like, every day. You couldn’t have been reading it just for your edification.”
“I suppose not.”
“I was thinking, what if you called in a bad bet, then forgot, for whatever reason, to pay up? The characters in that racket don’t take it so well when they don’t get their money-or so I’ve heard.”
“Pardon the intrusion?” came a man’s voice.
Charlie looked up to find a lanky twentysomething in a conservative, dark-blue suit and gray overcoat. He had fine features; precisely combed, wavy hair; and the earnest demeanor of a student body president. Charlie had noticed him before, among the spectators.
“My name’s Kermit Smith,” the young man continued in a smooth blend of country and urban refinement. “I’m
