Frank Portman - King Dork

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 dismayed, 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 something, 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 summon 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.”

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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.

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 probably 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, realizing 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 hippies 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.