Frank Portman - King Dork

What about Sam Hellerman? Well, he had sold me out, it’s true, and the whole thing was a bit embarrassing. But if it hadn’t been for his devil-head machinations, none of the making out in my life would have happened at all. None of it.

I couldn’t be too mad at him. In fact, I thought I really should try to give him some kind of thank-you gift. Plus, we had to keep the band together, at least till we sold our first million records. Only then could we move on to competing solo careers and sniping at each other about our shared women and sleazy escapades in the music press, till we eventually recon-cile around the time I record the third in a celebrated series of albums about having writer’s block.

The maddening part was that I probably would never end up knowing how many of the results of his plans had been intended and how many had been because things went awry. Or how much he knew, or what he was planning for the future. I could talk to him about it, but I’d never know for sure if he was being completely honest. Plus, he clearly still had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and I didn’t really want the subject to come up. I didn’t want him to know about Deanna Schumacher, either, just in case he might tell Celeste Fletcher about her. I certainly didn’t want those two knowing about each other. God, no.

295

* * *

I almost forgot Sam Hellerman’s other envelope in all the excitement. Eventually, though, I retrieved it from under the pillow and took a look.

In the envelope were two neatly folded pieces of paper.

The first was a reverse-exposure printout from the library’s microfilm machine. Clearly, Sam Hellerman had resumed the Tit investigation while I had been out. The article reported that in early March 1963, a student had been discovered hanging by the neck from a rope in the gymnasium of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory in San Francisco. An apparent suicide. The student was not named in the article, but it seemed a good bet that his name had been Timothy J.

Anderson. In the margin, Sam Hellerman had written, “Killed by Tit?” It was an intriguing notion, though I couldn’t see where he got that.

Most Precious Blood College Preparatory. Man, I prided myself on coming up with good names for bands and titles and such, but compared to the Catholic church, I was a rank amateur. Most Precious Blood—probably the best name ever, for a school or a band.

The other page was a computer printout of another, more recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, dated nearly a year before my dad’s death. It was about a scandal and shake-up in the Santa Carla city and county govern-ments. The details were cursory, but it appeared to be some kind of corruption scandal. The entire board of supervisors, the chief of police, and several other unnamed officials had had to resign; a few had been indicted, and, interestingly, there had even been a couple of suicides, including a Santa Carla policeman. I didn’t see how it could be linked to Timothy J. Anderson, but I guessed Sam Hellerman saw some kind of connection between this story and my dad’s 296

death. Perhaps my dad had been involved in the scandal in some way and his suicide was delayed but similar to that of the cop mentioned in the article? If so, it was weird that this was the first time I’d heard of the Santa Carla corruption scandal, as I’d read dozens of articles concerning his death from the time and none of them had mentioned it. But of course, in those articles it had been reported as an accident rather than a suicide. Since my mom was the only person who thought it had been a suicide, as far as I could tell, I couldn’t quite put my finger on precisely how they might be connected outside my mom’s weird mind.

The most interesting bit to me, though, was the fact that the article quoted a county official named Melvin Schumacher.

The quote itself was bland and contentless, something about

“respecting the process and seeing it through,” but the speaker was Deanna Schumacher’s father, clearly.

Now, I’d known that her dad had worked with the county coroner’s office, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me. The question was, how much did Sam Hellerman know about that situation?

Supposedly, he knew nothing about it. Deanna Schumacher had been chosen strictly for her appearance, for the superficial resemblance of her yearbook photo to the Celeste Fletcher

“Fiona,” and presented to me as Fiona to throw me off Celeste Fletcher’s scent. As far as I knew, that was as far as it went. Sam Hellerman had no idea that I had struck up an illicit, blow-job-oriented relationship with her; he still believed that I believed that Deanna Schumacher was Fiona and that she was living in Florida with her suddenly transferred, non-CEH-associated father. But, as so often where Sam Hellerman is concerned, I had a few doubts. Was Deanna Schumacher more deeply involved in Sam Hellerman’s schemes than I knew? I had assumed that she had been chosen after the fact, on the basis of her resemblance to “Fiona.” But looking at the name “Melvin 297

Schumacher” in the article printout, another thought occurred to me: perhaps Celeste Fletcher’s Fiona outfit had been deliberately designed to make her look like Deanna Schumacher, rather than the other way around. And Sam Hellerman had had a plan, going all the way back to the Baby Batter Weeks at the beginning of the year, before Dud Chart, before the party, that involved bringing Deanna Schumacher into my world.

It sounded crazy in my head when I thought about it.

Before the Catcher code, before my mom’s “Thinking of Suicide?” freak-out, there had been no reason for Sam Hellerman to be particularly concerned about CEH-related issues. The problem went beyond CEH, though. Now that circumstances had arranged themselves so that my life involved making out secretly with both Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, with Sam Hellerman’s role ambiguous, the question took on some urgency. How I proceeded with D. S. and C. F.

would in some ways depend on what Sam Hellerman knew and when he knew it. And what he planned to do about it.

So the real question concerning that second article was what Sam Hellerman was trying to tell me with it. Was he trying to tell me something about CEH and Tit and Timothy J. Anderson, or was he trying to tell me something about Deanna Schumacher? I started to rack my brains for a way to find out without his realizing that I knew there was anything to find out.

F I R EC RAC KE R

There was a pay phone down the hall in the hospital, and I used it to call Sam Hellerman shortly after I had opened the second envelope. He seemed pretty pleased with himself.

“You mean you haven’t been able to figure it out?” he 298

said, when I’d as much as told him I hadn’t been able to figure it out. “It all makes sense if you look at it a certain way,”

he added. Well, I doubted that very much. But he said we could get together to discuss it when I got out of the hospital. I tried to come up with a way to get him to talk about Deanna Schumacher without actually mentioning her myself, but I couldn’t manage it. The best I could do was:

“So, when you say it all adds up, you mean Timothy J.

Anderson and Tit and my dad and the Catcher code and Matthew chapter Three verse nine?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, with that “no duh” inflection where you make “yeah” into two syllables, kind of swooping down on the last one.

“Hey, how about that Celeste Fletcher,” I said, after a pause, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“She’s a firecracker,” said Sam Hellerman.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Really?” I said. I guess there are guys who can sound cool saying that a girl is a firecracker, but Sam Hellerman isn’t one of them. Anyway, that exhausted my material, so I said