He paused to headbang slightly, and to sing “the ace of spades” a couple times under his breath, but stopped when he saw me giving him a rather desperate “mercy, please, I beg of you” look.
“Okay,” he said, after taking a little sip of bourbon.
“Starting with that Bible quote you’re so hung up on. Why did the mountain monk have the same quotation in his book that Timothy J. Anderson had on his funeral card? You had 305
guessed that the connection might be that they were both monks or clergymen. But they had something else in common, too—they were kids. I mean the mountain story guy was writing about his childhood; Timothy J. Anderson died while still a kid. And that quotation really suits a kid’s funeral as much as an I-was-a-teenaged-monk book.”
Clearly, Sam Hellerman hadn’t actually read The Seven Storey Mountain, but I could see his point. “God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Matthew 3:9–11 did sound like something you might want to quote at a kid’s funeral.
The Catholic Church, he added, had had a pretty strict antisuicide policy, especially at that time. Adults who killed themselves weren’t allowed to have Catholic burials. Kids sometimes were, depending on their age, according to his research, though, of course, we didn’t know the hanged kid’s exact age.
“They were changing all the rules around at that time,” he said, pointing to the date, 1963, “including the rules about who got to have funerals and all that.” I hadn’t realized you had to earn the right to have a funeral by dying in the proper manner—it never ends, does it? But of course, a taboo like that doesn’t disappear just because they change the wording of something in Rome. Sam Hellerman thought that might be a reason why, even if there had been a funeral, as there appeared to have been, they might not have been eager to draw attention to it by publishing an obituary. “That’s assuming everyone believed it was a suicide, whether or not it really was.”
“But couldn’t you just as easily conclude,” I said, “that if suicides didn’t get to have funerals, the fact that TJA did have a funeral kind of suggests that he didn’t kill himself, that he wasn’t the one who hanged himself in the gym? How do we know for sure that TJA was that kid, and not some other 306
guy?” And then, thinking of Dr. Hexstrom, I added: “And how do we know that the TJA card was even from a funeral?
It could have been from just about anything.”
“It could have been,” said Sam Hellerman. “But it wasn’t.
It was a funeral, or at least a memorial service. Even if not, though, it doesn’t really matter: a kid, a classmate of Tit’s and your dad’s at Most Precious Blood College Prep, was found hanging in the gym. And there was a funeral, which Tit, according to his own note, refused to go to.” He conceded that it was possible that this kid was someone other than Timothy J. Anderson, but that it “worked out better” if they were the same person. How well it “worked out” seemed like a funny way to decide whether something really happened or not. But we both knew that this was the sort of game we were playing.
“So it’s just a coincidence that my dad happened to be reading a book with the same quotation as the one used at the funeral of a classmate?” I asked, still a little dubious.
“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “it was a popular book.”
“The Seven Storey Mountain?”
“No,” he said. “The Bible.”
It was hard to argue with that.
I got up to turn the record over, and when I came back I noticed that Sam Hellerman had only one painkiller left on his knee.
“For crying out loud, Hellerman.”
He pointed to the remaining pill knee. “This stuff isn’t at all bad,” he said. Lemmy was singing “Jailbait.”
I coughed. “So you were talking about TJA being a kid. . . .”
“Oh. Right,” he said, breathing a little more heavily.
“Think about all the stuff that happened this year. Our songs freaked people out because they reminded them of real stuff 307
that happened in the past, even though we didn’t mean it that way. So your mom freaked out about ‘Thinking of Suicide?’
Mr. Teone thought the Chi-Mos’ songs were about him and his Satanic Empire. And the same kind of thing happened with Kyrsten Blakeney.” He took another gulp of bourbon.
“It was unintentional,” he continued. “The connections happened in their heads. But in another way, Mr. Teone’s reaction to the Chi-Mos wasn’t at all an accident.”
I went: “?”
“I mean, there’s a nonrandom reason you have the nickname Chi-Mo. The kids in seventh grade gave you the name because they associated ‘clergy’ with ‘child molester.’ And the reason for that is that there really were situations, especially in schools like the one Tit attended with CEH, where kids were molested. It’s in the news all the time. That’s why I think there may have been a pattern. . . .” His voice trailed off.
A pattern. “Really?” I said.
“A pattern from the past re-created in the present,” he said, after staring into space for a while. That sounded like a poorly translated fortune cookie. He was losing me. We were halfway through the final guitar solo in “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch.”
He looked a little zoned. I punched him in the arm, which seemed to wake him up a bit.
It took some prodding and a bit of patience, but I was eventually able to get it out of him. Sam Hellerman’s idea was that Mr. Teone’s teen porn operation had been based on a similarly structured system at Most Precious Blood, which he had encountered as a young Tit. When he finally became a shop teacher, and later a principal, he had set up his own organization at Hillmont along the same lines.
“So there was a retro-porn thing going on at Most Precious Blood, too?” I asked, finding it kind of hard to pic-308
ture, given what I knew about the technology of 1963: homemade secret photography would have been more difficult back then.
“It could have been anything illicit,” replied Sam Hellerman. “But I’d guess it would have been sex-related in some way.” Check, I thought. It always comes back to ramoning, doesn’t it? And it squared, in a general way, with the contents of Tit’s note. If Tit had been involved, as a participant or even as a student organizer, in some kind of perverted ramoning situation at Most Precious Blood, what had my dad’s role been? I couldn’t get my mind around that question, so I shook it out of my head.
Anyhow, I could see the logic, sort of, assuming Timothy J. Anderson was Tit’s dead bastard. It could account for why Tit had hated “the bastard,” and rejoiced in his death. Say Tit had been a Matt Lynch figure, and TJA one of his minions. Tit was infuriated when TJA killed himself in shame and remorse, because it endangered the operation and risked sparking some kind of investigation. Or TJA was going to expose the operation and had to be eliminated, and, as Sam Hellerman had suggested, Tit had killed him and, somehow, made it look like suicide. Or TJA had been the Matt Lynch figure, and Tit a recruit who had turned on him. Or he could have been “talent”
like Kyrsten Blakeney. Mr. Teone was clearly deranged, and he’d had to get there somehow. So, long ago, in the depraved halls of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory, a sociopath was born? I guess that was the idea.
But even if that was true in a general way, it seemed like there were a lot of possible variations. I gave Sam 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.