“What did he say?”
“Frank? He didn’t say anything. He was out of the room. But I got scared, and I woke up,” Gary Krochock said. He was still stretched out on the floor. “I’m in big trouble now. I’m in a world of trouble.”
“Frank Sinatra is dead,” Patsy said. “You’re beyond harm.”
“No, but see, that’s the difference. The Chairman of the Board is powerful even in death. That’s why I’m telling you this. He has not lost his influence. He has friends here and there. He’s going to be very, very angry that I pissed into his hat. I don’t feel that I’m safe anymore. Frank Sinatra — well, there’s someone you don’t want to have for an enemy, especially in the afterlife.”
“Take out a policy on yourself,” Mad Dog suggested.
“Too late,” the insurance agent said. “Preexisting condition.”
“What time is it?” Julie Dusenberg asked. “I probably have to go.”
“Two minutes before eleven,” Patsy said without looking at her watch.
“Turn on the news,” Agatha, Harold’s wife, said. “Saul’ll be on.”
Harold reached down for the remote on the coffee table in front of him, pressed a button, and the TV sprang to appliance-life with a miscellany of hisses and crackles.
“Channel Seven,” Saul said.
They watched an ad for Bruckner Buick, some sort of midsummer clearance sale on sedans and SUVs. Then they waited through an ad for a local house-and-garden store until at last the news, preceded by a brass fanfare, came on, with the tease headline, “Local boy dies in schoolteacher’s front yard.” Dennis Peterson, the local anchor for Channel Seven, appeared behind the news desk, his toupee a fraction of an inch off-center, and he gazed solemnly at the lens, the way he always did when he had a major story to report. “A shocking event in Five Oaks today,” he began, in his baritone voice.
“He has a big ole head,” Gary Krochock said, of Dennis Peterson. “He looks like a goddamn pedophile.”
“Why can’t they use complete sentences?” Saul asked. “Not even Tom Brokaw uses complete sentences anymore.”
Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was watching the screen, Patsy noticed. Dennis Peterson continued. “A seventeen-year-old Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman, died by his own hand this morning with a single gunshot to the head. The handgun used in the suicide belonged to the victim’s aunt, and the young man had stolen it from her. The death occurred on Whitefeather Road, in the front yard of Five Oaks high school teacher Saul Bernstein. We do not yet know why the boy had bicycled to his teacher’s house to end his life, and there are still conflicting theories and many unanswered questions about this shocking event. We have a full report by Traci McMahoney.”
“I used to teach in the high school,” Saul said quickly. “I don’t know what I do now.”
“You should be making a tape of this,” Harold muttered to Patsy. “You may need it.”
“You think so?” Patsy asked.
“That’s right, Denny,” Traci McMahoney said. She was also seated at the news desk in the studio. Patsy noticed that she was wearing a different outfit from the one she was wearing earlier this afternoon. “Tonight,” she said, “we have many more questions than answers about the tragic death of Five Oaks high schooler Gordon Himmelman.”
There was a cut to an establishing shot of Saul and Patsy’s brand-new house on Whitefeather Road, at The Uplands. Traci McMahoney’s commentary continued in a voice-over as the screen presented more shots of the house, the lawn, and finally the tree, viewed from a back-angle so that the bloodstains didn’t show. “The scene of the death was this quiet front yard in a residential area near the Wolverine Outlet Mall. The young man, Gordon Himmelman, lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. He was a troubled student, challenged academically in high school, currently a dropout, and a former member of the Cub Scouts. His mother had died several years ago in a house fire, and the boy, according to those who knew him, was known for his sense of humor and his pranks.”
“What? Cub Scouts?” Saul asked the TV. “Pranks?”
“The boy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, filled us in on some details.”
“Where’s Saul?” Gary Krochock asked from the floor. “I want to see Saul.”
The screen cut to a close-up of Gordy’s aunt. She was smiling but the smile was stoic and unconvincing. “My nephew was a wonderful boy,” she said. “Just wonderful. He didn’t have a care in the world. He could get into scrapes, okay, but this is what he was, and what he wasn’t, well, I don’t know, because this thing doesn’t make any sense, this tragedy that he did, to himself, with the gun he found that I had hidden, there’s two and two. I can’t put it together, two and two that just don’t add up. It’s still just two and two.”
“Boy, is she ugly,” Gary Krochock said. “A poltroon. She looks like someone slid into her face at second base. With cleats on.”
“That’s an awful thing to say,” Julie Dusenberg said, turning around to look. “She’s just scared.”
“And what of Gordon Himmelman’s teacher?” Traci McMahoney asked, on a voice-over again, with a medium shot on the tape of Saul looking perplexed, standing next to Patsy. “Saul Bernsteen? When we asked him for some reaction, he seemed as baffled as the victim’s aunt.”
“Hey,” Saul said. “I wasn’t baffled.”
Suddenly there was a close-up of Saul. People in Saul and Patsy’s living room started to clap. The others shushed them. “I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did,” Saul said onscreen into the microphone. “He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them.”
The camera cut back to Traci McMahoney, and then to a shot of Garfield-Fraser Middle School, where the principal was being interviewed about school violence. “Where’s the rest of me?” Saul cried.
“The police have searched for a suicide note but have so far turned up nothing to give them any insight to this terrible event,” Traci McMahoney said. “So far, we have no clues as to why the armed boy bicycled over to his teacher’s house, and we have no clues, either, concerning the motivations for his tragic suicide. The only person who had the answers to these questions cannot give us one. In an age of violence in our schools, there may in fact be no easy explanations. Those who are left grieving must still wonder over the causes tonight. Perhaps the only blessing is that this happened during the summer, during school vacation, so that Gordon Himmelman’s school friends can have time before classes begin to mourn his loss. Reporting from Whitefeather Road, this is Traci McMahoney.”
“That was totally insane,” Harold said, shaking his head and looking away from the TV screen. “Jesus. That thing about summer vacation. What the fuck was that about?”
“Maybe it just slipped out,” Saul said. Dennis Peterson had segued to another story about Derby Days in downtown Five Oaks, and then the phone started to ring.
“I thought you looked pretty good, Saul,” Karla said. “You acquitted yourself very well.” She clapped her hands several times in his direction, a form of applause. A few other people in the room also applauded. “Hear, hear,” they said.
The party broke up half an hour later.