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
“Later” and hung up.
Life feels a little easier when you don’t have to make your own schedule. I didn’t have to worry about calling Deanna Schumacher till Thursday, which was a relief. Wednesday, Celeste Fletcher’s “safe” day, was right around the corner, though. I was due to be released Thursday, so that meant I’d have to call from the pay phone in the hall. Even though I didn’t find calling Celeste Fletcher quite as scary as calling Deanna Schumacher, I was still pretty nervous about it.
Maybe you never get used to calling girls on the phone.
I stalled and avoided it for a while, but eventually I got up the nerve to go out to the hall and call from the pay phone.
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“Oh, thank God!” she said, when she realized it was me.
I kid you not. “Oh, thank God.” Could anyone be so happy to hear from me that they would spontaneously burst into a prayer of thanks? Sounds dubious, I know. She said she hadn’t been sure I would call her, showing just how little she really understood me and what I was all about. That was okay—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of her being able to understand me that easily anyway.
Our phone conversation was quite long, considering that my half of it was on a pay phone in the hallway of a hospital floor surrounded by angry fellow convalescents who thought I was taking too long and didn’t much like what they were hearing me say. It resembled the phone-side scene at the Henderson-Tucci household a bit, in other words, and it was not the first time I’d noted similarities between my house and a sanitarium, I can tell you that.
I knew there was one thing we would have to cover eventually, so I got it out of the way near the beginning. I assured her I wasn’t going to tell anyone about us or our activities, past, present, or (and here I knew I was taking an optimistic leap) future. We’d just pretend we hardly knew each other.