King Dork (40 page)

“But couldn’t you just as easily conclude,” I said, “that if suicides didn’t get to have funerals, the fact that TJA
did
have a funeral kind of suggests that he didn’t kill himself, that he wasn’t the one who hanged himself in the gym? How do we

know for sure that TJA
was
that kid, and not some other 306

guy?” And then, thinking of Dr. Hexstrom, I added: “And

how do we know that the TJA card was even from a funeral?

It could have been from just about anything.”

“It could have been,” said Sam Hellerman. “But it wasn’t.

It was a funeral, or at least a memorial service. Even if not, though, it doesn’t really matter: a kid, a classmate of Tit’s and your dad’s at Most Precious Blood College Prep, was found

hanging in the gym. And there
was
a funeral, which Tit, according to his own note, refused to go to.” He conceded that it was possible that this kid was someone other than Timothy J. Anderson, but that it “worked out better” if they were the same person. How well it “worked out” seemed like a funny

way to decide whether something really happened or not. But we both knew that this was the sort of game we were playing.

“So it’s just a coincidence that my dad happened to be

reading a book with the same quotation as the one used at

the funeral of a classmate?” I asked, still a little dubious.

“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “it was a popular book.”

“
The Seven Storey Mountain
?”

“No,” he said. “The Bible.”

It was hard to argue with that.

I got up to turn the record over, and when I came back I

noticed that Sam Hellerman had only one painkiller left on his knee.

“For crying out loud, Hellerman.”

He pointed to the remaining pill knee. “This stuff isn’t at all bad,” he said. Lemmy was singing “Jailbait.”

I coughed. “So you were talking about TJA being a

kid. . . .”

“Oh. Right,” he said, breathing a little more heavily.

“Think about all the stuff that happened this year. Our songs freaked people out because they reminded them of real stuff 307

that happened in the past, even though we didn’t mean it that way. So your mom freaked out about ‘Thinking of Suicide?’

Mr. Teone thought the Chi-Mos’ songs were about him and

his Satanic Empire. And the same kind of thing happened

with Kyrsten Blakeney.” He took another gulp of bourbon.

“It was unintentional,” he continued. “The connections

happened in their heads. But in another way, Mr. Teone’s reaction to the Chi-Mos wasn’t at all an accident.”

I went: “?”

“I mean, there’s a nonrandom reason you have the nick-

name Chi-Mo. The kids in seventh grade gave you the name

because they associated ‘clergy’ with ‘child molester.’ And the reason for that is that there really were situations, especially in schools like the one Tit attended with CEH, where kids

were molested. It’s in the news all the time. That’s why I think there may have been a pattern. . . .” His voice trailed off.

A pattern. “Really?” I said.

“A pattern from the past re-created in the present,” he

said, after staring into space for a while. That sounded like a poorly translated fortune cookie. He was losing me. We were halfway through the final guitar solo in “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch.”

He looked a little zoned. I punched him in the arm,

which seemed to wake him up a bit.

It took some prodding and a bit of patience, but I was

eventually able to get it out of him. Sam Hellerman’s idea was that Mr. Teone’s teen porn operation had been based on a

similarly structured system at Most Precious Blood, which he had encountered as a young Tit. When he finally became a

shop teacher, and later a principal, he had set up his own organization at Hillmont along the same lines.

“So there was a retro-porn thing going on at Most

Precious Blood, too?” I asked, finding it kind of hard to pic-308

ture, given what I knew about the technology of 1963: homemade secret photography would have been more difficult

back then.

“It could have been anything illicit,” replied Sam

Hellerman. “But I’d guess it would have been sex-related in some way.” Check, I thought. It always comes back to ramoning, doesn’t it? And it squared, in a general way, with the contents of Tit’s note. If Tit had been involved, as a participant or even as a student organizer, in some kind of perverted ramoning situation at Most Precious Blood, what had my dad’s role been? I couldn’t get my mind around that question, so I shook it out of my head.

Anyhow, I could see the logic, sort of, assuming Timothy

J. Anderson
was
Tit’s dead bastard. It could account for why Tit had hated “the bastard,” and rejoiced in his death. Say Tit had been a Matt Lynch figure, and TJA one of his minions. Tit was infuriated when TJA killed himself in shame and remorse, because it endangered the operation and risked sparking some kind of investigation. Or TJA was going to expose the operation and had to be eliminated, and, as Sam Hellerman had suggested, Tit had killed him and, somehow, made it look like suicide. Or TJA had been the Matt Lynch figure, and Tit a recruit who had turned on him. Or he could have been “talent”

like Kyrsten Blakeney. Mr. Teone was clearly deranged, and he’d had to get there somehow. So, long ago, in the depraved halls of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory, a sociopath was born? I guess that was the idea.

But even if that was true in a general way, it seemed like there were a lot of possible variations. I gave Sam Hellerman another “?” look, and said: “So why are you so sure TJA was killed by Tit?”

“It’s the patterns again,” he said, staring intently and with what seemed like loving devotion at the pill on his knee.

309

“Patterns. I think Tit probably murdered TJA and disguised it as suicide. Because I’m pretty sure that’s basically how he killed your dad, and also kind of how he tried to kill you.”

He was talking about the old “knock me on the head

with a tuba and blame it on the boxing” plan—I guess the connection there was the elaborate fake explanation for a murder attempt. That was a stretch, and in fact, I didn’t believe that the brass instrument scheme had been a true murder attempt.

It was just ordinary revenge, and maybe intimidation, as well.

But as for Mr. Teone’s being involved in my dad’s murder—

well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t considered this possibility. One of Amanda’s Chi-Mos panels had even depicted a devilish Mr.

Teone driving the car that had hit my dad—it was kind of obvious, in a way, if hard to fathom. But somehow, hearing Sam Hellerman say it really creeped me out. And I still couldn’t quite see how a fake suicide would fit in to the whole hit-and-run scenario, though I was sure Sam Hellerman was going to tell me, provided he could stay conscious long enough. It was a race against time.

“Could you turn that Funkadelic off ?” he said irritably.

“It’s giving me a headache.” I had put on
One Nation Under a
Groove
after the Motorhead was finished.

I wanted to use our time wisely, so I refrained from men-

tioning his lack of good taste and took the Funkadelic record off. I was reaching for the Isley Brothers, but Sam Hellerman made a little cross with his index fingers, so I put on
Young
Loud and Snotty
instead. He looked up at me with this TV-commercial “headache gone!” expression. Which I thought

was kind of funny.

“See,” he finally said, slurring a little after I had shaken his shoulder to wake him up, “the problem with your dad’s death was never a lack of information. It was that there were too 310

many explanations. It was a murder, it was an accident, it was a suicide. It can’t have been all of those. And the one consistent element, the car crash, is the least likely part.”

“But the car crash definitely happened,” I said. “It was in the paper.”

“Yeah, but if you really wanted to kill someone, crashing

into their parked car would be just about the worst plan possible.”

Okay, that was actually a good point. People get killed in car crashes when both cars are moving at high speed, and

even then there can be survivors. You certainly couldn’t be
sure
that a hit-and-run on a parked car would lead to sudden death, though it happens. Plus the damage to your own car

would be hard to disguise or explain. I don’t know why it

hadn’t occurred to me before.

Sam Hellerman then began to deliver a rambling, semi-

drugged analysis of the inadequacies of the car crash as a murder method, which once again I found kind of creepy at

those moments when it hit me that it was my dad’s death he was retroactively strategizing about.

“So are you saying it was an accident, then,” I said, “as per the official story? I thought your idea was that Mr. Teone
did
murder him.”

“See, it’s not a believable way to die in an accident, ei-

ther,” said Sam Hellerman with a deep, semitranquilized sigh as Stiv Bators sang “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth.”

“There would still be all the same problems. And suicide by hit-and-run makes even less sense. And haven’t you ever

wondered why your dad happened to be parked in the mid-

dle of nowhere at three a.m.?” In perfect hit-and-run position.

Yeah, I’d wondered about that.

“None of it seems like it could possibly be accidental,” he said. “That’s why I figure your dad was already dead when

311

his car was rammed, and that the person who rammed him

had set it up that way.”

I’ll spare you the details of the retarded slurred Q&A whereby I finally arrived at a basic understanding of it, but Sam Hellerman’s hit-and-run scenario went more or less like this: Mr. Teone had started up the Satanic Empire operation almost as soon as he started teaching at Hillmont. For some reason, he had seen my dad as a threat and decided he had

to get him out of the way. It may have been because of an official investigation my dad had been working on. Or it may have been a private matter between them. There was certainly no one better situated to cause trouble for Tit’s fledg-ling teen porn operation than a cop who had known him all

his life and who had at least some knowledge of the shady activities of the past at Most Precious Blood. So he arranged to meet my dad on the Sky Vista frontage road at three a.m. under some pretense. Sam Hellerman wasn’t sure how he had

actually killed him, but he “liked” the idea that he had rendered him unconscious somehow and rigged up a tailpipe/

hose/window apparatus—which is how people do commit

suicide in cars on occasion. Then he had rammed the car and driven away. Sam Hellerman also speculated that perhaps

Mr. Teone had written the suicide note my mom claimed to

have or to have seen, leaving it in the car, or possibly arranging for it to get to my mom directly.

“But why would he go to such trouble to make it look

like suicide and then confuse the issue with a faked accident?

And wouldn’t the cops have been suspicious, and wouldn’t

they have been able to tell what had really happened?”

To my slight dismay, Sam Hellerman quickly popped the

other pill in his mouth, gulped some bourbon, and smiled at me impishly. I knew we didn’t have long. He still seemed lucid enough but very tired and uninterested in focusing—I

312

knew the feeling pretty well by now. He picked up the com-

puter printout about the Santa Carla corruption scandal.

“Didn’t you read this?” he said.

S H E R LO C K H E N DE RSON

Now, I’ve got to interrupt Sam Hellerman’s explanation with my own explanation. There was something I had to know,

and under the circumstances it just wasn’t possible to ask it directly. So I had a plan. Fortunately, he was on drugs, which would help. That’s one of the reasons I had agreed to let him have some painkillers, in fact.

I reached over, tapped the printout, and said: “so Fiona is back in the picture.”

His facial expression and body language were easy to

read. He sighed and slumped, looking exasperated and dis-

mayed, like he always did whenever the name Fiona was

mentioned. He liked to think he’d taken care of that situation, thrown me off the track, and he was bummed when the subject would still pop up now and again. But it was also obvious that my bringing up Fiona in the context of the

newspaper article was puzzling to him. That told me some-

thing, but there was still a piece missing.

He looked over the article with a furrowed brow and a

little growl of frustration. He couldn’t see what I was getting at. Then, eventually, his face cleared: he had figured it out. He mouthed the word “Schumacher” and nodded. Which was

frustrating. Come on, Hellerman, I thought, trying to sum-

mon as much psychic power as I had in me: don’t mouth it,

don’t mouth it. . . .

“I see,” he finally said. “Yeah. No. Those situations have nothing to do with each other. It’s a coincidence.”

313

Now it was my turn to sigh. Well, it would have been too

easy, I thought. Then, however, he added:

“It must be a different Schumacher. It’s a common name.”

Which was what I had been angling for. Saying “it’s a

common [blank]” is always Sam Hellerman’s response to an

inconvenient coincidence, I was starting to realize. But he had said “Shoe-mocker” rather than “Skoo-macker.” That

told me that he had never actually spoken to Deanna

Schumacher, and was almost certainly not in contact with

her. Which was a big relief. Unless he was wilier than even I thought, and had realized what I was up to and had deliberately mispronounced the name. I didn’t think so, though. He was too mind fogged to put on much of an act.

Mispronunciation had come through once again.