The Writer scratches his bristly beard and continues to peruse the e-mails, as if looking for something to argue against the Kid’s conclusions. He doesn’t want to find himself trapped in dark self-designed delusions: he’s all too familiar with his affection for bad news and conspiracies. It’s had a negative effect on his career. After a moment he asks the Kid if he thinks the person who told the police where to find the Professor’s body was Big Daddy. The Shyster.
The Kid says no, the Shyster wouldn’t have known where to send the cops unless the Professor tipped him off in advance where he was going to drown himself. Which he wouldn’t have been able to do via e-mail since the Shyster can’t go online anymore due to being a convicted sex offender. Plus the Kid is pretty sure that when the Professor met the Shyster in person down under the Causeway he had no way of knowing he was actually meeting Big Daddy. Any more than the Shyster knew he was meeting Doctor Hoo. No, it had to be somebody else who called the cops.
Who?
Yeah, Hoo. Could’ve been Doctor Hoo himself, assuming he was definitely gonna kill himself then and there. So maybe he made a last-minute 911 call or mailed a tape to the cops or a letter scheduled to arrive a few days after he did the deed.
The Kid goes silent for a moment. The Writer asks if he has anything to drink and the Kid says sure and gets up and digs two cans of beer out of the cooler, apologizing for their not being very cold. He forgot to buy more ice from Cat earlier. The Kid sits on the edge of his cot again and goes back to stroking Annie’s forehead. Without looking up he says, Or else it was somebody else. Somebody not Big Daddy or Doctor Hoo. Somebody who bike-locked him to his van and then drove the van into the canal. Somebody who wanted the Professor’s body discovered and ID’d and declared a suicide.
The Writer looks him over carefully. You know something I don’t know?
Sort of. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. You’re probably gonna write about it.
The Writer shakes his head. No way I’ll write about it.
Yeah? Why not?
Who’d want to read it? Kiddie porn and child molesters, pedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people. I have to make a living. The stuff I write is designed strictly to make people want to spend money on hotels and airlines that advertise in my employers’ magazines. Believe me, this is not a story likely to be welcomed by the Calusa County Chamber of Commerce or the local tourist board. They’d probably pay me not to write it.
Throughout this conversation, throughout the entire afternoon, the Kid has felt himself warming to the Writer, feeling less and less suspicious of his motives and intentions, enjoying the man’s company, not because the Writer is amusing or especially friendly like Dolores or even interesting in a challenging way like Cat but because the Writer’s jumpy ongoing attention makes him feel less alone in the world. Even before the Professor disappeared, from the moment that he turned over the DVD of their interview and paid him to deliver it to his wife Gloria the Kid has felt unaccountably lonely. Up to this point the Kid has rarely felt loneliness — he had been merely one of those people who later, after it comes out that he’s an assassin or a terrorist, is described in puzzlement by people who knew him as a “loner,” a quiet solitary boring person who seemed to have no family or friends going all the way back to childhood, someone who was incapable of committing the act that made him however briefly the center of the known universe. And with the Professor’s DVD in hand and ten thousand dollars in his duffel the Kid has unexpectedly gone from being a mere loner to someone desperately lonely, as if for the first time in his life he’s potentially the center of the known universe only nobody knows it yet.
It’s because the Kid possesses information that no one else has. And he’s starting to believe that if he shares it with the Writer it will give him the feeling of actually being at the center of the universe which will in turn end his loneliness, at least until everyone else has the same information. Maybe then he’ll have to come up with something else that only he possesses and find someone else like the Writer to share it with. But for now he decides to tell the Writer about the DVD in which the Professor aka Doctor Hoo predicts his own assassination by secret government agents who will stage his death as a suicide caused by the threat of imminent public exposure of a shocking sexual scandal.
He begins with the dark and stormy night of Hurricane George after the Professor picked him and Annie and Einstein up at the flooded encampment under the Causeway and brought them to his house. He adds in passing that the Professor’s wife had just left him and had gone to her mother’s with their two kids. He doesn’t mention her note taped to the refrigerator door.
So you were alone with him. Did he try anything? Anything… sexual, I mean.
The Kid laughs at that and says that the Professor’s only interest in him was for testing out some dumb theory he had about making homeless convicted sex offenders into sexually normal people. It had something to do with organizing them into little committees and voting on how to run the camp under the Causeway and various aspects of personal hygiene and the Kid and the other men living there had more or less gone along with it for a while until the hurricane hit.
It takes the Kid fewer than five minutes to summarize the content of his interview with the Professor, partly because he neglects to include in his account anything about the ten thousand dollars. Though from the beginning it must have been a part of the Professor’s plan, taking the money is more about the Kid than the Professor and it still slightly embarrasses him. He merely says that he was charged with the responsibility of getting the DVD of the interview into the hands of the Professor’s estranged wife so that she will believe that he did not kill himself and the sexual scandal was bullshit.
To the Kid’s surprise the Writer who he thought was the skeptical type, being a writer and all, easily believes his brief description of what the Professor said in the interview. He buys into the Professor’s account of why he will be murdered and who will do the murdering. He believes that it will be made to look like a suicide and that information about the Professor’s involvement in a sexual scandal probably involving pedophilia, child pornography, and child prostitution, though false, is about to be made public. The Writer believes all this because he believes in conspiracies and that in fact there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of secret government operatives with supernatural competence, double and triple agents, spies and moles working outside the law. And apparently for many years the Professor was one of these operatives — he was a certified genius after all — and must have been about to go off the reservation as they say in the movies and perhaps write a tell-all book or turn a stash of secret documents over to a blogger or testify to a congressional committee and reveal all the heinous deeds committed for decades by agencies that we don’t even know exist. The Professor had become a threat to national security and was therefore dispensable.