House on Fire

40

At a few minutes after one o’clock I pulled up to the used record store on Mass. Ave. in Central Square. The place was cluttered with signs advertising vinyl new and used, current records, reissues, CDs, VHS, eight-tracks. Everything retro except Victrolas. Albums in the display window by Black Sabbath and Pure Prairie League. Otis Redding was on the loudspeaker, sittin’ on the dock of the bay.

I walked in, past milk crates full of one-dollar LPs, a wall of used cassette tapes. In the back of the shop, I found Gabe opening a box of LPs.

He spun when he saw me. “Hey, Uncle Nick, everything okay?”

“Can you take lunch?”

“Let me ask my boss.” Gabe, who was seventeen, had gotten tall and scrawny, with a mop of black curly hair. For the last year he’d been living in the third floor of a three-decker on Putnam Avenue in a part of the city called Cambridgeport. He went off to talk to a chubby, bearded, and bespectacled guy about ten years older. Then he came back and said, “Half an hour long enough?”

“Let’s do it.” Together we walked out of the store.

The Chinese place next door where we liked to go was closed for renovations, so Gabe said, “You mind going to a vegan place?”

“No problem.” I’d felt like having a hamburger, but I had a feeling I would end up having a tempeh burger. “How goes the writing?” Gabe was a terrifically talented graphic artist and novelist. He wanted to make a living writing graphic novels but realized it wasn’t easy, so he worked uncomplainingly at the record store to support himself. College, he had decided, was not for him.

His mother wasn’t supporting him. I think she wanted him to try to support himself, fail at it, and return home, realizing how hard the world was out there. And then, she probably figured, he’d beg to go to college.

“I’m almost done with a book,” he said.

“When do I get to see it?”

“When I’m ready to send it to publishers. Not before.”

I remembered his mother nagging him for spending too much time on his graphic novel work. Once he’d gotten into trouble at his private boys’ school in DC for some graphic novel he’d written and illustrated that made fun of teachers and administrators. He was really good.

He was wearing a black-and-white ringer T-shirt for the Blinders, with red barbed wire around the name. “What happened to Slipknot?” Slipknot was a heavy metal band that Gabe used to love when he was in high school.

“Nothing happened to Slipknot. I’m just into these guys more.”

“Are they heavy metal too?”

He scoffed. “They’re British. Political punk rock. They’re awesome.”

“Okay.”

We ended up at Veggie Annex, which featured acai bowls and carioca smoothies. Not my kind of place, but we barely had time to eat anyway, so I didn’t. “Uncle Nick,” Gabe said, scarfing down his acai bowl, “I need to make more money somehow. Rent in Cambridge is insane.”

“Why don’t you live with Nana?” His grandmother, my mother, had a condo in Newton.

“Nah. I’d just get in the way.”

“You wouldn’t. She loves you, you know that.”

“I know. It’s just... living with your grandmother, you know?”

I didn’t pursue it any further. “You need money?” His mother would be furious if she knew I’d offered him a loan.

“Yeah, but not from you.”

I respected that. “Could you take a second job?” I hoped he wasn’t asking to work for me. He and Dorothy for some reason didn’t get along. Having him around my office could be a problem.

“Yeah, I was thinking about how you’re doing work for some big pharmaceutical company, and I decided I want to be a human guinea pig,” he announced. I’d told him over the phone what case I was working, but with Gabe you never knew what penetrated.

“What does that mean?”

“Like, one of the guys in the shop was telling me that the Harvard Business School has lab-based studies in human behavior, and they pay you for it. Or there’s research studies at Harvard Med that pay you thousands of dollars for spending a couple of weeks in a hospital taking some drug or some placebo or something. For, like, getting endoscopies or colonoscopies.”

“You would voluntarily have a colonoscopy?”

“If I got paid enough, yeah, sure.”

I shook my head. Then I told him about my conversation with my father, his grandfather, how Victor Heller wanted to see him.

“I’d kinda like to see him, but Mom won’t let me.”

“Do you want me to talk to your mother about it?”

He nodded. “She’s already so weird about me not living at home in DC. Yeah, could you?”

“I will.”

“Thanks. She listens to you.”

“No problem.”

“Where’s the jail, like upstate New York somewhere?”

“Near Albany. About three hours and change from Boston. You can drive, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t have a car.”

“You can borrow one of mine.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“The Defender?”

“You don’t want to drive the Defender for six hours on the highway going sixty or seventy. It’s gonna be awfully loud inside.”

I walked Gabe back to the record store after half an hour, my head somewhere else. He’d given me an idea, and I needed to get back to the office right away to act on it.