Third man out

5

Rutka slid up the stairs backwards on his seat, pushing himself upward with the good foot. On the second floor he pulled himself upright and hobbled into a dim bedroom with drawn shades that had been a teen-aged girl's in the early seventies and had been frozen in time: orange shag throw rug; pink chenille bedspread with a heap of stuffed animals on the pillows; a stack of Carole King records; an Osmond Brothers poster on the wall; some group photos showing the Handbag High cheerleaders hoisting their pom-poms and thrusting up their breasts with military precision.

"Your sister's room?"

"You are good."

Rutka unzipped the belly of a stuffed hippopotamus and pulled out a set of three keys. "Now you know where a set of keys is, in case I'm not here."

Down the hall, he unlocked the attic door with two of the keys and we climbed up, him on his seat. The wall of dry heat that hit us when we got to the top felt like a visit to Khartoum. I helped support Rutka and we bent low so as not to have our skulls pierced by roofing nails. Past the piles of old furniture and boxes labeled "XMAS" and "GRANDMA," at what I took to be the rear of the attic if my orientation was correct, was an old World War II-vintage desk.

A light bulb on a wire dangled overhead. Heaps of old Cityscapes and Queerscreeds were on the floor off to one side, and on the other stood a two-drawer metal filing cabinet. The heat was awful under the uninsulated shingled roof, and Rutka switched on a box floor fan that just blew the hot air around; I tried to remember the Arab word for the madness caused by this type of wind.

Rutka used a third key on his chain to unlock the file cabinet. Down below a phone began to ring, but Rutka gestured to never mind. "The machine will pick it up." He perched on the edge of the desk and said, "This is it. The famous files."

I slid open the top drawer. It was jam-packed with file folders arranged alphabetically by outee.

"The ones with the red tags have already been done," he said.

"I'd have expected an up-to-date guy like you, John, to be computerized."

"My financial resources are not unlimited, despite what I'm paying you. I'll stay here while you look through them. You'll probably have some questions."

We were both sweating now from the heat. The main effect of the fan was to dry the sweat on our body surfaces and blow occasional droplets onto the stack of files I spread out on the desk. My neck itched and we both stank. Rutka seated himself on an old kitchen chair next to the desk and made notes in the margins of a file he retrieved from a desktop box labeled "CURRENT" while I spread out the A's.

"What's that?" Rutka said, listening.

I heard it too, the sound of glass breaking, a bottle or jar smashing.

We listened.

"I'll check," I said.

Before I even made it to the stairwell, a smoke alarm down below began to wail. I hurtled down to the second floor, and even faster to the first, where dark smoke was boiling into the kitchen. Out on the back porch, flames, fed by what smelled like gasoline, were roaring up from the floor. The glider cushions were ablaze, and even the M amp;M's, drenched by the blazing fluid, were melting and popping in the billowing fire and smoke.

I grabbed the canister fire extinguisher by the kitchen door, yanked the release handle, and directed the hose at the conflagration.

White foam shot out with enough force to make me bobble the awkward tube, but I regained my aim and sprayed the glider and floor repeatedly with the retardant chemical. The flames vanished in spots, only to spring up again when I shifted my aim.

Hacking and gasping and weeping from the smoke, I doused the area with chemical until the fire was extinguished. I found a phone in the kitchen, dialed 911, and asked for the Handbag Fire Department to come out and make sure the fire was out. Then I examined the damage.

Rutka, having made his way down from the attic, appeared in the hallway leading to the kitchen and peered at me with a look of horror.

"Oh, Jesus, what happened? What blew up? Oh, God, now what!"

"I hate to tell you."

"What? What happened?"

"There's a hole in the back porch screen, and there's broken glass on the porch floor. It looks as if it was done deliberately with a Molotov cocktail."

He fell against the doorsill. "Oh, God. I did it. Now I really did it!"

"It looks that way."

The smoke alarms were still wailing and I got up on a chair to disengage the one in the kitchen. I was about to head upstairs to shut off the alarm there when sirens sounded out on the street. I thought of something and sped back out to the porch and snatched up Rutka's hot revolver with a towel and handed them both to him to hide. He flung them into the oven and slammed the door shut as I went on up to disengage the second-floor alarm. When I came back, a police cruiser was parked outside, lights flashing, and Rutka was opening the front door for a Handbag patrolman who looked dimly familiar. He caught my glance and blinked. Then a fire engine roared up in a manner that might have successfully intimidated a small blaze into extinction. As the rescuers barged in, Rutka directed them to the rear of the house.

To me, Rutka said, "Maybe you'd better lock the attic door."

He passed me the keys and I moved up the stairs quickly. I secured the attic and was headed back down when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror at the end of the hall. My face was sooty and my hair was a tropical rainforest. I dashed into the not-so-fastidiously-kept bathroom and washed the grime off my face as well as I could, drying off with one of the rancid towels heaped on the floor by the shower. I dumped the stale water from a grimy glass on a shelf by the sink and gulped tapwater from it, salve for my dehydrated throat and insides.

Back downstairs, the firefighters had declared the blaze extinguished, but for safety's sake they were wetting down the smoky and charred area of the porch with a fluid from their own canister. Rutka was speaking with the fireman in charge and explaining what had happened.

"That's what it looks like to me," the fireman said disgustedly. "I'm going out to call the fire marshal right now. Don't touch anything out there. They'll need to check the place out for what they can find."

"I won't touch it."

"You can air the place out-set up some fans. Nobody saw it happen?"

"We were upstairs," Rutka said. "We heard the bang and my friend here ran down and put the fire out. I've got a wounded foot."

The fireman looked down and shook his head. "You were lucky. You were just darn lucky somebody was here."

Rutka looked at his foot and said, "I know."

"You ought to call your insurance man," the fireman said. "The damage should be covered."

The Handbag police patrolman who had come flying up Elmwood Place just ahead of the fire engine had been entering and exiting the house busily throughout the activities of the past fifteen minutes, and now he returned and was listening intently to our conversation. "OCTAVIO T. REED," read the nametag on his uniform. He had slicked-back dark hair, and liquid brown eyes in a broad face that was bunched up now in a kind of quizzical squint. His shoulders were slumped forward almost disconsolately, it seemed. I remembered now where I knew him from: we'd met at the Watering Hole and spent half a night together at my Morton Avenue apartment in 1975 or '76, after which, I thought I recalled, he said he had to get back to his recent bride in Handbag.

While the fireman went on talking to Rutka about insurance and cleanup matters, Reed beckoned and I followed him outside.

"Long time no see," I said.

He glanced around nervously. "I don't go out anymore. I've got kids in school and I'm a police officer and-you know."

"How long has it been?"

"It was July of nineteen seventy-six," he said. "You're one of the ones I like to remember."

"It's pretty clear to me, too. I don't go out anymore either. I've got a boyfriend. I met him not long after I met you."

He looked at me wistfully. "All that time."

"Are you still married?"

"Sure."

"Is it a good marriage? I mean otherwise."

"Yeah," he said. "That's the trouble."

The firemen were coming out now and starting to pack up their pumper. Reed looked around and said, "Are you still a P.I.? I've seen your name in the paper."

"I am."

His look darkened. "You're not working for this Rutka, are you?"

"As of today, I am. On account of what happened last night-the shooting. He hired me."

"Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, but I hate to see you get involved with this guy. I was just out going around the neighborhood trying to turn up anybody who saw anything at the time the fire started, and I got one. There's an old lady over on Maplewood Place whose bathroom window looks out on Rutka's backyard here. She says she saw somebody go through the backyard and up behind Rutka's garage before the alarm sounded and the fire department got here. She says it was Eddie Sandifer."

"She saw him herself? She's sure it was Sandifer?"

"That's what she says."

"Interesting." "Be careful of those two."

"I've been being careful of them, but maybe not careful enough." end user