Frank Portman - King Dork

in fact, I had little doubt—that what we were dealing with here was some kind of pedophile priest situation.

Timothy J. Anderson was a clergyman who had molested Tit and maybe others, maybe even my dad—a weird thought indeed. Tit and company had finally risen up to take some kind of elaborate revenge. Poisoned the Communion wine.

Pushed him out of a bell tower. The bastard was dead at last, thrown into the metaphorical fire, as such a man was surely going straight to hell. Tit had hated him so much that he 207

hadn’t even considered going to the funeral, but my dad had gone for some reason. To view the body, to make sure the b.

was d.? Did such things ever really happen? Presumably so: if it can be thought, it can be done.

So when Sam Hellerman called me over to the microfilm viewer, I was expecting to read an obituary from around 3/13/63 noting the death (under mysterious circumstances, perhaps) of someone by the name of Brother Timothy J.

Anderson.

“It’s a monk, right?” I said. “A dead monk. Possibly poisoned.”

Sam Hellerman stared at me.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Or a priest, a bishop, something like that.” I started to explain my theory, but he was already shaking his head.

Because here’s what he had found in the archives, or rather, what he hadn’t found: there was no obituary or death notice for anyone by the name of Timothy J. Anderson anywhere around that date.

“Priests,” he said, “are prominent members of the community. There’s no way a death like that wouldn’t be in the paper.”

I could see that he was probably right. Yet the card pretty clearly indicated a funeral in San Francisco at the time. Had the listing been suppressed because of the scandal? But if there had been a scandal, if the story was “out,” we’d have seen huge head-lines about “Altar Boy Avengers” or something. (Which is not a bad band name, as Sam Hellerman replied when I mentioned it.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is usually dark and secret and behind the scenes and only comes out after everyone involved has had years of therapy and/or Alzheimer’s.

Nonetheless, Timothy J. Anderson, whoever he had been, had clearly lived and died somehow. There were pre-208

sumably official death records other than newspapers that could be checked somewhere, though the very thought filled me with fatigue and dread.

A moment earlier everything had seemed to fit together neatly, if distastefully. Now nothing fit, but the distastefulness remained. We tried looking up Timothy J. Anderson in every local reference book we could find: no result, not even close.

Well, we could call up all the Andersons in the phone book to ask if any of them knew a Timothy J. who had died in 1963. Yeah, right.

“I’m sorry, dude,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say dude recently. “He doesn’t exist.”

CON N ECTION S

Tracking down Deanna-Fiona was going to be a snap compared to figuring out the deal with Timothy J. Anderson, and not just because she wasn’t dead. But the prospect filled me with terror because it would involve more speaking out loud than I liked even under normal circumstances, and these circumstances would not be normal. There were no listings for any Schumachers in Salthaven, Salthaven Vista, Old Mission Hills, Rancho Sans Souci, or any of the surrounding towns.

But every year Immaculate Heart Academy puts out a booklet called “Connections,” which has contact information for all the students. Hillmont has a similar thing, called “What’s the Buzz (Call a Knight!),” and as I realized after I had thought about it a bit, there was a pretty good chance that I already had a copy of last year’s edition of IHA-SV’s

“Connections” somewhere in my room.

Mrs. Teneb, my mom’s nondiminutive female actor friend, had a daughter who went there, and last year there had been 209

some talk of trying to stimulate my nonexistent social life by encouraging me to get in touch with some of the IHA-SV girls.

The pretense had been my imaginary Monty Python/Dr.

Who club and Susye Teneb’s hugely implausible claim that there was a group of geek girls who had a similar club at IHA-SV. No doubt that myth had its origin in some feeble practical joke attempt by Susye Teneb, but names had been underlined and the book solemnly received and eventually ignored, thrown in the corner with all the other junk in my room.

It took a while to dig it out, but when I did, there she was: Deanna Gabriella Schumacher, 1854 North del Norte Plaza Circle, Salthaven, with a phone number and everything. I had trouble whacking up the nerve to call, though, and I kept putting it off and making excuses for why it might be better to wait. Because this was really it. Make-or-break time for the Fiona-Deanna Deal. I wanted to know what would happen, but I was scared at the same time. The library research session had filled me with a kind of resolve, though, and I decided to give it a shot that night.

Holden Caulfield, when calling his various preppie girlfriends, would always say he planned to hang up if the parents answered. I told myself that’s what I’d do, too, even though I knew she would probably have her own phone. In the fifties, no one had their own goddam phone and all, as HC would have put it. In other words, modern communications technology and the higher standard of living had made things more convenient and less convenient at the same time.

I almost couldn’t bring myself to dial the numbers, I was so nervous, and I had no idea what I would say. I got an answering machine that said “Didi’s phone, leave me a message.” Hanging up on the machine was like Holden’s hanging up on Jane Gallagher’s highfalutin parents. I was doing okay in the grand tradition of calling up girls and not knowing 210

what to say and then hanging up without saying anything.

Mr. Schtuppe should give me extra credit or something.

The effort had taken a lot out of me, though. I was feeling a little faint and peaked. It was six-forty-five. I decided to try again in twenty minutes. I poured the rest of my Coke down the drain and poured some of my mom’s bourbon into the empty can. Because I needed some help, man.

The fourth time I tried Deanna Schumacher’s number, the answering machine message had been changed to “Look, asshole, I screen, so if you don’t leave a message there’s no way you’ll ever find out if I would have picked up.”

Off to a good start. So after the beep, I said, haltingly,

“This—this message is for Deanna Schumacher—” I pronounced it shoe-mocker. But the phone was suddenly picked up and a female voice said, “Skoo-macker.”

“Skoo-macker?” I repeated.

“Skoo-macker,” said the voice.

“Really?”

I realized the conversation was going nowhere, and I decided to suspend my disbelief about the whole Skoo-macker thing. She was the Schumacher expert around here. “This is she,” the voice was saying with charm-school precision.

“Who, may I ask, is calling?”

“Oh. This is, um um Tom Tom Henderson.” The “um um” is where I momentarily forgot who I was. I was starting to say, though with perhaps a bit less suavity than I had planned, that we had met at a party in Clearview Heights last month, when she broke in:

“Tom-Tom?” she said. “Is that Moe Henderson? Chi-Mo Henderson?”

That about covered it. So she had known who I was. Not surprising, if she knew Susye Teneb.

211

“Oh. Yes. We met at a party—”

“How nice to hear from you. What can I do for you, Tom-Tom?”

“Oh. Well, we met at a party—”

“What?” She was determined not to let me deliver the rest of my suave “we met at a party” speech. She was quite the conversationalist.