King Dork

Hellerman another “?” look, and said: “So why are you so sure TJA was killed by Tit?”

“It’s the patterns again,” he said, staring intently and with what seemed like loving devotion at the pill on his knee.

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“Patterns. I think Tit probably murdered TJA and disguised it as suicide. Because I’m pretty sure that’s basically how he killed your dad, and also kind of how he tried to kill you.”

He was talking about the old “knock me on the head with a tuba and blame it on the boxing” plan—I guess the connection there was the elaborate fake explanation for a murder attempt. That was a stretch, and in fact, I didn’t believe that the brass instrument scheme had been a true murder attempt.

It was just ordinary revenge, and maybe intimidation, as well.

But as for Mr. Teone’s being involved in my dad’s murder—

well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t considered this possibility. One of Amanda’s Chi-Mos panels had even depicted a devilish Mr.

Teone driving the car that had hit my dad—it was kind of obvious, in a way, if hard to fathom. But somehow, hearing Sam Hellerman say it really creeped me out. And I still couldn’t quite see how a fake suicide would fit in to the whole hit-and-run scenario, though I was sure Sam Hellerman was going to tell me, provided he could stay conscious long enough. It was a race against time.

“Could you turn that Funkadelic off ?” he said irritably.

“It’s giving me a headache.” I had put on One Nation Under a Groove after the Motorhead was finished.

I wanted to use our time wisely, so I refrained from mentioning his lack of good taste and took the Funkadelic record off. I was reaching for the Isley Brothers, but Sam Hellerman made a little cross with his index fingers, so I put on Young Loud and Snotty instead. He looked up at me with this TV-commercial “headache gone!” expression. Which I thought was kind of funny.

“See,” he finally said, slurring a little after I had shaken his shoulder to wake him up, “the problem with your dad’s death was never a lack of information. It was that there were too 310

many explanations. It was a murder, it was an accident, it was a suicide. It can’t have been all of those. And the one consistent element, the car crash, is the least likely part.”

“But the car crash definitely happened,” I said. “It was in the paper.”

“Yeah, but if you really wanted to kill someone, crashing into their parked car would be just about the worst plan possible.”

Okay, that was actually a good point. People get killed in car crashes when both cars are moving at high speed, and even then there can be survivors. You certainly couldn’t be sure that a hit-and-run on a parked car would lead to sudden death, though it happens. Plus the damage to your own car would be hard to disguise or explain. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.

Sam Hellerman then began to deliver a rambling, semi-drugged analysis of the inadequacies of the car crash as a murder method, which once again I found kind of creepy at those moments when it hit me that it was my dad’s death he was retroactively strategizing about.

“So are you saying it was an accident, then,” I said, “as per the official story? I thought your idea was that Mr. Teone did murder him.”

“See, it’s not a believable way to die in an accident, either,” said Sam Hellerman with a deep, semitranquilized sigh as Stiv Bators sang “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth.”

“There would still be all the same problems. And suicide by hit-and-run makes even less sense. And haven’t you ever wondered why your dad happened to be parked in the middle of nowhere at three a.m.?” In perfect hit- and-run position.

Yeah, I’d wondered about that.

“None of it seems like it could possibly be accidental,” he said. “That’s why I figure your dad was already dead when 311

his car was rammed, and that the person who rammed him had set it up that way.”

I’ll spare you the details of the retarded slurred Q&A whereby I finally arrived at a basic understanding of it, but Sam Hellerman’s hit-and-run scenario went more or less like this: Mr. Teone had started up the Satanic Empire operation almost as soon as he started teaching at Hillmont. For some reason, he had seen my dad as a threat and decided he had to get him out of the way. It may have been because of an official investigation my dad had been working on. Or it may have been a private matter between them. There was certainly no one better situated to cause trouble for Tit’s fledg-ling teen porn operation than a cop who had known him all his life and who had at least some knowledge of the shady activities of the past at Most Precious Blood. So he arranged to meet my dad on the Sky Vista frontage road at three a.m. under some pretense. Sam Hellerman wasn’t sure how he had actually killed him, but he “liked” the idea that he had rendered him unconscious somehow and rigged up a tailpipe/

hose/window apparatus—which is how people do commit suicide in cars on occasion. Then he had rammed the car and driven away. Sam Hellerman also speculated that perhaps Mr. Teone had written the suicide note my mom claimed to have or to have seen, leaving it in the car, or possibly arranging for it to get to my mom directly.

“But why would he go to such trouble to make it look like suicide and then confuse the issue with a faked accident?

And wouldn’t the cops have been suspicious, and wouldn’t they have been able to tell what had really happened?”

To my slight dismay, Sam Hellerman quickly popped the other pill in his mouth, gulped some bourbon, and smiled at me impishly. I knew we didn’t have long. He still seemed lucid enough but very tired and uninterested in focusing—I 312