In the Night Room

“Tim?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure.”

“The obituary in the Ledger ran only two days ago. What, you saw it online, I guess?”

“Something like that.”

“The Ledger couldn’t say much about how Bill died. Of course, I won’t be able to be much more specific in the online newsletter. You do get those, don’t you?”

Tim assured Finnegan that he received his online newsletter, without mentioning that he always deleted it unread.

“Well, you want to know about old Wild Bill. Well, it was pretty bad. He was in this bar downtown, Izzy’s. A lot of lawyers hang out there, because it’s near the Federal Building and the courthouse. This is about one, two in the morning, Friday night. Leland Rose comes up to Bill and says, ‘I believe you’re messing around with my wife.’ Leland Rose is some fancy financial adviser, big office downtown. Bill tells him he’s crazy, and he completely denies having anything to do with this guy’s wife, who by the way is of the trophy variety and pure trouble from top to bottom.

“So they get into an argument and by and by this Leland Rose, this pillar of society, pulls out a gun. Before anybody can stop him, he takes a shot at Bill. Even though he’s about two feet away, he misses Bill completely, only Bill doesn’t know it. He thinks he was shot! He throws a punch at Rose and knocks him out cold. Then he falls down, too. This is pure Bill Byrne. He’s at least as drunk as Rose, and he imagines he’s wounded, which is because in his fall, he smashed the hell out of one of his elbows. Bill got up to about three hundred pounds there toward the end.

“An ambulance shows up and takes both of them to Shady Mount Hospital. They’re strapped onto gurneys. This whole time, Bill is carrying on, trying to get at Rose, who’s still out. They get to Shady Mount and unload Bill first, only he’s rolling around so much that they actually drop him, and that’s the last straw. Poof! Whammo! Massive heart attack, huge heart attack, a heart explosion. No way they could revive him.”

“So he died drunk, on a gurney outside the emergency entrance of Shady Mount.”

“Actually, at that point he wasn’t on the gurney.”

“Was Rose right? Was Byrne having an affair with his wife?”

“That fat little Irishman was always screwing someone else’s wife. Women ate him up, don’t ask me why.”

Tim thought of Phoorow and had the sudden desire to stop talking to Chester Finnegan.

“I was just remembering that day you and I drove up to Random Lake,” Finnegan said. “Remember? Boy, that was one of the best days of my life. Did Turner come with us? Yes, he did, because Dicky Stockwell pushed him off the pier, remember?”

Tim not only failed to remember the great excursion to Random Lake, he had no idea who Turner and Dicky Stockwell were. Unchecked, Finnegan could fill another hour with golden moments only he remembered, and Tim began making noises indicative of the conversation’s end.

Then he remembered that Finnegan could, for once and all, banish the specter that had shimmered into view. “I suppose Byrne was on your newsletter list.”

“Naturally.”

“So you have his e-mail address.”

“Not that I’ll ever use it anymore.”

“Could you please tell me what it was, Ches?”

“Why would you want a thing like that?”

“It has to do with my work,” he said. “I’m ruling out some possibilities.”

“Oh, I see,” said Finnegan. “Hold on, I’ll get my database. . . . All right, here we are. Wild Bill’s e-mail address was Byrne, capital B, 615 at aol.com.”

“Ah,” Tim said. “Yes. Well. How unusual.”

“Not really,” Finnegan told him. “A lot of AOL addresses are like that.”

The specter had come shimmering back into view, and Bill Byrne, who had died of not being shot to death, had a fairness issue on his chest. Besides that, Bill felt lost.

“Ches, if I give you the first part of some e-mail addresses, can you see if they are in your database?”

“You mean the names, right?”

“I’m just testing something out here.”

“Hey, if I help you, I expect a cut of your royalties!”

“Talk to my agent,” Tim said. He went to his e-mail screen. “How about Huffy? Do you have a Huffy? Capital H?”

“I don’t even have to look for that one—Bob Huffman. Huffy at verizon.net. Nice guy. Cancer got him about three months ago. Had two remissions, and then it went nuclear on him. This is a dangerous age, my friend.”

Tim remembered Bob Huffman, a lanky red-haired boy who looked as if he would remain sixteen forever. “Is there a Presten?” He spelled it.

“Presten at mindspring.com, sure. That’s Paul Resten. You have to remember him. Strange story. Paul died right around New Year’s. Gunshot wound. Poor guy, he was an innocent bystander in a liquor store holdup, wrong place, wrong time. Paul was a very successful guy! Every year, he gave a generous contribution to the school.”

The remark contained a quantity of reproach, but Finnegan’s attention had shifted to another point.

“These e-mail addresses are all for dead people, Tim. What’s going on?”

“Someone must be messing with my head. In the past few days, I got some e-mail that was supposedly sent by these people.”

“I’d call that obscene,” Finnegan said. “Using our classmates’ names like that.”

“I just figured out another one,” Tim said. “Rudderless must be Les Rudder. Don’t tell me he’s dead, too.”

“Les died in a car crash on September 11, 2001. I’m not surprised you never heard about that one. Anyone else?”

“Loumay, nayrm, kalicokitty, and someone called Cyrax.”

“I know two of those right off, but let me look up. . . . Okay. This guy’s a real bastard, whoever he is. Kalicokitty was Katie Finucan, year behind us, remember? Cutest little thing you ever saw. God, I used to have the hots for Katie Finucan. Better not let my wife hear me say that, hey? Katie died in a fire last February. She was visiting her grandkids in New Jersey, and no one knows what happened. Everyone got out but her. Smoke inhalation, I’d say, but hey, I was in the insurance business, what do I know?”

Tim was appalled by the ease with which death had moved through the ranks of his classmates at a mediocre little Catholic school in Millhaven.

“Okay, same deal goes for loumay and nayrm, Lou Mayer and Mike Ryan. Ryan died in Ireland last year, and Lou Mayer drowned in a sailing accident off Cape Cod.”

“Oh, Christ,” Tim said.

“I hear he was a lousy sailor. What was that last name?”

“Cyrax.”

“He doesn’t seem to be here. Nope. So maybe that one’s real.”

“He said he wanted to be my guide.”

“That’s your joker, right there.” Finnegan’s voice rose. “Here’s the guy who’s sending you this crap. It has to be someone we went to school with. Who else would know about these people? He’s picking the names of people you cared about.”

Except I didn’t, Tim thought. “That crossed my mind, too.”

“There has to be someone who can pin down this creep.”

“I know a couple of people who might be able to do something,” Tim said. “Thank you for your help.”

Now his computer seemed like a hostile entity, exuding toxins as it crouched atop his desk. If Cyrax was sending him e-mails using the Internet names of dead classmates because Cyrax had been a classmate himself, how did he know about Philip Footler? No one in Tim’s life was familiar with both his life in high school and his Vietnam tour. The one and only intersection on earth of Bill Byrne and Phoorow was Timothy Underhill.