The Writer says, So it wasn’t a suicide after all! Wow! That explains a lot.
Like what?
Like how the cops knew where to look for his body. The quick official designation of his death as a suicide. The way he was chained to the steering wheel and accelerator. Et cetera.
Suddenly, having revealed to the Writer the Professor’s account of his approaching death and seeing how easily the Writer accepts it as the truth, the Kid no longer believes it himself. There’s a big difference between knowing something is true and believing it’s true and the Kid doesn’t want to be a believer. They were bike locks, he points out again. Not chains. Bike locks are cool. Chains are definitely uncool.
The Writer cocks an eyebrow and stares at the Kid. You think he was trying to tell us something?
Maybe. Yeah. That the suicide is a phony. Maybe he was trying to tell us he didn’t really kill himself, someone else did it. So his wife and anybody with a suspicious nature wouldn’t buy the Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo kiddie-porn and suicide story, which he figured was gonna come out and is why the Shyster was saving those e-mails. The Professor must’ve known it was coming. Like he says on the DVD. But when you think about it, it’s like he went to too much trouble to make his so-called suicide look phony.
What do you mean, too much trouble?
If these super-spies and all are so good at killing people who they don’t trust anymore, they oughta be able to fake a suicide without clamping the guy to his car with bike locks and driving it into a canal, right? I mean, he’s such a fat guy they could’ve made him run on a treadmill or up and down a beach dune until he had a heart attack and died and they could just leave him there. They coulda pushed him off a bridge if they wanted to fake his suicide. Drop him off a boat in the Gulf. There’s a hundred different ways to make it look like a suicide without also making it look like a murder. If that’s what you want. The only one who wanted it to look like a murder was the Professor. But he also wanted to make it look like a suicide. He needed it both ways, or nobody’d believe his story. The murdered ex-spy cancels out the child-molester professor. And vice versa. They both disappear. Like that snake slithering into the swamp.
And we end up not knowing which one he really was.
Maybe he was both, the Kid says. Maybe neither. He was supposedly a genius, remember. And he liked playing games with people.
What’re you going to do with that DVD?
Take it to the wife. Like I said I would.
Tomorrow?
Yeah, I guess so.
I’ll drive you there. I’ll cancel my flight back and take you to the Professor’s wife.
You’re not gonna write about this, are you?
God, no!
Where you gonna stay the night?
I’ll rent myself a houseboat so I can write about sleeping in a houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp instead.
Research.
Yep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE ANSWERS the Kid’s light knock on the door she opens it only a crack at first, as if expecting someone she doesn’t want to speak to: another reporter or a nosy neighbor faking concern and offering condolences and a casserole; or a police officer with more of her husband’s “effects” as they call his clothing and the contents of his pockets and car. Her skin is chalky white and dry and she has large dark circles under her green eyes. She doesn’t appear to have been crying, but she looks haggard and exhausted as if she hasn’t slept for days. Her shoulders are slumped and her hands, even though both are clamped to the edge of the door, tremble visibly.
She pushes the door open a few more inches and peers out at the Kid and the big bearded white-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts standing behind him and asks them what they want. Something about the small young man with the military buzz cut is familiar to her. Did he do some yard work for them? He looks like the kind of young unskilled white man who does yard work for people in neighborhoods like this. Or maybe he’s selling magazine subscriptions and the older man behind him is his supervisor who’s training him.
The Kid asks if she’s the wife. He can’t remember her actual name — the only time he saw it was on her typed good-bye note that she taped to the refrigerator and the Professor barely mentioned her by name, just referred to her as my wife. To the Kid therefore she’s the Wife so that’s what he calls her.
She says yes and asks them again what they want, a little less confrontational now than the first time. She opens the door farther. She’s starting to remember that she met the young man briefly at the library once, but is unsure of the circumstances or when — recently no doubt. Possibly she interviewed him for an afterschool job but did not hire him. But if she met him at the library and it was about a job she never gave him, why would he seek her out at home?
Oddly — at least it strikes her as odd — she likes his looks, especially compared to the looks of everyone else she’s had to talk to lately: she likes the angle of his cocked head and the way he stands at an opposing angle with all his weight on one foot like a watchful bird. He seems slightly bored and a little annoyed with having to stand here at the door. He doesn’t appear to want anything from her. She likes that too. Everyone else has wanted something from her — information about her husband mainly, his disappearance and death — and has tried to conceal that fact with false expressions of sympathy and insincere offers of comfort and help: neighbors, friends and colleagues from the library and from her husband’s university, the several reporters who called on her, the police. Even her mother. If there’s anything I can do…, Don’t be afraid to call on us…, I know how hard this must be for you, ma’am, but. ..
She knows what people thought of her husband when he was alive — he was not a popular or particularly admired man to anyone except his wife and his children — and she knows what they think of him now that he’s committed suicide and abandoned that loving wife and those well-behaved pretty children, the only people who knew him and did not think he was odd and ugly and arrogant. But he is or rather was a very intelligent man, people always note that. A genius.
But nobody likes a genius. Especially one who is obese and eccentric. And she knows — because of the way he killed himself and because he was a fat weird opinionated genius — that everyone thinks the Professor had secrets, dark secrets, probably secrets of a sexual nature. People who are neither fat nor geniuses always think fat people who are geniuses have strange secret sex lives. And because she was married to him and bore him two children, people probably believe that she too has, or rather had, a strange secret sex life. She senses the presence of that belief especially now in friends and colleagues as much as in strangers. Even in her mother. It’s one of the reasons she was hesitant about leaving the children with her mother while she dealt with the aftermath of her husband’s disappearance and death. But her mother had said, Please, dear, please let me help by taking care of the children for a few days. You have enough to handle, Lord knows, and with me they’ll be more protected from the… from the facts of the situation.