King Dork (41 page)

I put on
All American Boy
and looked at Sam Hellerman, who was staring off into space and speaking kind of quietly but still seemed mostly in control of his faculties.

“The Santa Carla police department had just gone

through an embarrassing controversy that involved at least one suicide. They would have wanted to avoid bad publicity from yet another one.”

According to Sam Hellerman, the cops would have

wanted to cover up the suicide angle and treat the death publicly as an accident or possible vehicular homicide. They may or may not have actually believed the suicide story, though the fact that there was a suicide note that had convinced the widow would have made it more plausible. But whether they

believed it or not, they had judged it to be in their interests to keep it quiet and had taken advantage of Mr. Teone’s setup.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that Mr.

Teone arranged the fake suicide, knowing that the cops would want to cover it up;
and
, on top of that, he added a phony car 314

crash, knowing that the cops would prefer that scenario and run with it, instead of investigating it as a murder?”

“Or the cops did the hit-and-run themselves,” said Sam

Hellerman. “But it works out better—”

“—if it was Teone,” I said, finishing his sentence.

“Right.”

Of course, I knew something that Sam Hellerman didn’t:

Mr. Teone may have had some help from an accomplice in

the county coroner’s office. Melvin Schumacher had known

my dad, and his daughter’s going to Catholic school proba-

bly indicated that he had a Catholic background. Maybe he

had even been a student at MPB himself.

In view of this, it seemed to me that the suicide angle

needlessly complicated things—if Mr. Teone had wanted to

murder my dad, and Melvin Schumacher was willing to help

him cover it up, there would have been no need for another layer of subterfuge. I was more than ready to believe that my dad’s suicide was all in my mom’s head. But Sam Hellerman

was trying to fit everything into a single storyline without leaving anything out, so he had to fit the suicide theme in somewhere. And, I had to admit, his story had a kind of sym-metry, with a faked suicide at either end.

At any rate, it was possible, though not certain, that

Melvin Schumacher had been involved in my dad’s murder.

And now, circumstances had arranged themselves in such a

way that I was getting weekly blow jobs from his daughter.

Life is weird.

Let me put it this way: some of it seemed like a bit of a

stretch. Sam Hellerman seemed utterly confident in his theory, but then, he always seemed u. c. As Sam Hellerman

would say, it “worked out” better if Mr. Teone was behind it all, but that didn’t mean it really happened that way. My dad 315

could have been murdered by anybody, not necessarily the

guy who wrote the
Catcher
code and whose illicit activities were exposed by our retarded rock band. And despite all this energetic and ingenious reasoning, it was still possible that the whole thing had been a fluke accident after all. There was no evidence for any of what Sam Hellerman was proposing.

When I mentioned this, Sam Hellerman rolled his half-

closed eyes.

“Oh no,” he said. “That’s the way it happened.” Then, re-

alizing that I was still skeptical, he groaned and summoned what was left of his strength.

“Look at it this way: what year did your dad die?”

“O-nine, o-six, nine-three,” I said automatically.

“And what can you tell me about Mr. Teone’s car?”

I saw what he was getting at: he was saying Mr. Teone

had had to buy his celebrated Geo Prizm in 1993 to replace the one he had smashed up by ramming into my dad. That

seemed like reaching, even for Sam Hellerman. He could

have bought the car used anytime after 1993. I regarded him dubiously but went along with it.

“What did he do with the smashed-up car?” I asked.

“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “if you were a metal-shop

teacher, and you needed to get rid of an incriminating car, what would
you
do?”

“The Hillmont Knight?” I said, catching on, but still

doubtful.

“ ‘Presentated to HHS by the Class of ’94,’ ” he quoted, as smug as it’s possible to be when you’re about to slip into a coma. “He turned the evidence into a class project. Much better than pushing it in the reservoir.” He was right: Hillmont High Center Court was the last place anyone would look.

I shuddered a little at the image of Hillmont’s drama hip-

pies leaning casually against what might have been my dad’s 316

murder weapon. Hell, I’d even climbed on it, and swung from its crankshaft lance once or twice. I suddenly realized that, if Sam Hellerman was right, Mr. Teone’s constant references to his ’93 Geo Prizm might have been more sinister than goofy.

There was one bit of evidence Sam Hellerman hadn’t

covered, and I was pretty sure he did have a little theory about it that he had just forgotten to mention: the card for the Happy Day Dry Cleaners that had been stuck between

the pages of
The Seven Storey Mountain
along with the TJA card. Maybe something to do with the bloodstains in
Catcher,
CEH 1960? That was just a guess. I started to ask Sam

Hellerman about this but I noticed that he had finally slipped off. I stared at the wall for a while.

“Hellerman,” I finally said, in the direction of his coma-

tose little form. “That is so . . .” I searched for the word.

“. . . retarded.” But then I said, “I don’t know, Hellerman,” because I really didn’t.

I put on
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
and lay back on the bed, more or less alone with my

thoughts, which under the circumstances didn’t have a lot to do with the English countryside of yesteryear.

DU NG EON S I N TH E AI R

Any way you sliced it, I was going to have a lot to think about over the Christmas break.

Despite Sam Hellerman’s confidence, I knew there were

other ways to work it out. Presumably there is an actual story, one that really happened, behind the Tit-CEH-TJA nexus revealed by Tit’s note and Matthew 3:9–11, though I’d be willing to bet that if so, it would end up seeming to make even less sense. Life is stupid that way.

317

It occurred to me that we had worked it out in much the

same way we would have worked out the details of a partic-

ularly elaborate band. And the whole story, especially the complicated, multiply deceptive murder scheme, was

Hellerman through and through. I mean, if Sam Hellerman

were a loopy associate principal–pornographer who wanted

to get rid of a cop he had known since childhood, that was exactly the sort of plan
he
would have come up with. That didn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Teone would have come up

with the same plan.

Of course, if Mr. Teone really had murdered my dad, I

wanted to know. But I was just starting to realize why I was so unsatisfied with Hellermanian theories on this matter: in the end, I didn’t want my relationship with my dad to be about Mr. Teone, or substitution ciphers, or broods of vipers, or pornography, or police corruption, or any of that stuff. And in reality, it wasn’t about any of those things, though it’s easy to forget that when you’re trying to solve codes and piece together an explanation out of scraps of paper and notes in the margins of books. I’m not a good detective, and I don’t even really want to be one. The only part of it that matters is that I miss my dad and wish he weren’t dead. And that I love making out with Celeste Fletcher and hope to be able to do it again one day. Family values and ramoning. That’s reality.

Now, Sam Hellerman had said I was “hung up on”

Matthew 3:9–11, and he wasn’t wrong, though it took a lot of thinking before I figured out why. It wasn’t only because the passage kind of creeped me out and kept popping up. And it wasn’t only because the brood of vipers kept reminding me of Rye Hell and the
Catcher
cult. I think it was also because it was something real, a piece of a book people had been reading for thousands of years, a part of the world that existed independ-318

ently from any of our conjectures. It was because my dad had probably read that quote, probably thought about it, probably wondered, as I had done, what it meant and how it applied to his life and the world. And he had read
The Seven Storey
Mountain
and may have wondered why the
SSM
guy had chosen it for his epigraph. In a way, it put my dad in a picture made up of things that weren’t entirely imaginary or theoretical. It allowed me to imagine myself in his place in the past.

And those opportunities were pretty rare.

Even if every other element of Sam Hellerman’s theory

turned out to be right, Timothy J. Anderson’s relationship to my dad and Tit and the
Seven Storey Mountain
guy could still have been random, unconnected to the rest of the story. And for some reason I found the randomness more satisfying. I

imagined my dad, engrossed in
The Seven Storey Mountain,
perhaps attending church with his family. He notices the memorial card, if that’s what it was, for someone he has never heard of, on a table, in a pew, or in a missal or hymnal. He stops dead, struck by the coincidence that it uses the same quote as his book’s epigraph. He sits there thinking, “Wow, this is spooky and weird,” clips the quote off the rest of the card, and keeps it to use as a bookmark. Or he’s intrigued by it and starts his own little investigation into Timothy J. Anderson, trying to learn who he was and why his card and his book share the same

quotation. That’s what I would have done. That’s what I
had
done. The thought came closer to bringing my dad “back to

life” than anything else I had ever thought of.

And that road of reasoning leads to an entirely different

way of looking at it, which is that all of these elements are random and not really connected to each other in any particular way, except to the degree that Sam Hellerman and I tried to make them make sense by coming up with a storyline to

tie them together.

319

Like this: there were two kids in the sixties who were into
The Catcher in the Rye
and who used to write notes to each other in code, often about weird or off-the-wall things, and boast about how they messed around with girls. And one of

their classmates had hanged himself in the gymnasium. And

one of them used to read a lot of books, and at some point acquired a memorial card, if that’s what it was, for a totally unrelated guy named Timothy J. Anderson and used it as a

bookmark. And when they grew up, one of them became a

cop, while the other became a loopy associate principal with a kind of perverted and illegal way of getting his jollies and earning extra cash on the side. These things happen.

Honestly, I can’t decide. One day I look at it one way,

and the next I’ll think that’s nuts and start looking at it another way. Maybe I just haven’t hit on the right explanation yet. Or maybe there is no explanation. Around and around, it can drive a person crazy.

There certainly are a lot of avenues for further investigation. I should probably go through my mom’s stuff and try to find the supposed suicide note, despite Amanda’s plausible conclusion that it doesn’t actually exist. Learning a little more about my mom and her relationship with my dad would probably go a long way toward clearing up some of the confusion.

I’m not totally sold on that, however. My mom is sad, distant, goofy, mysterious, and beautiful, and part of me feels like I’d prefer to leave her that way. I’m pretty sure we will always fail to understand each other completely. And I know I wouldn’t like it if investigating her caused her to fade even more from view, which is what basically happened when I tried to investigate my dad. Anyway, you can’t spend
all
your time digging through other people’s stuff to try to shed light on your own concerns. Sometimes you just want to switch to obsessing

about semihot girls and working on your band for a while.

320

As I mentioned, Sam Hellerman had written “killed by

Tit?” in the margin of the reverse-exposure printout about the hanged kid who may or may not have been Timothy J.

Anderson. Thinking it over, it occurred to me that if, decades from now, some kids were to discover this sheet of paper

stuck in a book somewhere, it could lead to a whole new

wheel-spinning investigation with God only knows how

many twists and turns and coincidences and mistaken as-

sumptions and imposed meanings and ingenious errors and

peripheral connections to various episodes involving messing around with a variety of hot and semihot girls. Randomly generated dungeons in the air, passed from generation to generation. In the spirit of continuing this grand tradition, I located Little Big Tom’s most retarded-looking counterculture book,
Revolution for the Hell of It
(by Free—that’s supposed to be the guy’s name, I kid you not. Jacket photo by Richard Avedon).

Supposedly the author of this book got five years in prison for writing it. Which seems a bit lenient if you ask me. The guy who wrote
The Doors of Perception
got off way easier, though, especially since the worst band in the history of the world, the Doors, named themselves after it. He has a lot to answer for.

I picked up a pen, intending to underline a suitably

bizarre section, and maybe compose an off-the-wall message in code based upon it. I found, however, that the book was all marked up already. There was one underlined passage,

near the beginning, that said that five-sided objects were evil and proposed measuring the Pentagon to figure out how

many hippies it would take to make it less evil by forming a big, smelly circle around it. And in the margin someone, presumably a young, idealistic, right-on Little Big Tom, had pa-thetically written “Yes!” I kid you not. Well, there was nothing I could add—you can’t improve on perfection. I put my pen