Lost Memory of Skin (49 page)

I’m not particularly. The Bible’s not what’s weird. It belonged to a guy I knew. I ended up with it and started reading in it by accident, you might say. Same as these papers. They’re like printed-out e-mails that I guess the guy was saving for a case. Or in case of a case. Something like that. He’s a lawyer. Or used to be a lawyer.

The Writer can see that the Kid is upset by what he’s been reading, upset and perhaps frightened.
Do you mind if I take a look?

Be my guest
, the Kid says and he gathers the sheets of paper, takes a moment to put them carefully in sequence, and hands the packet to the Writer.

As the Writer reads his eyebrows lift and he purses his lips as if to whistle. Then he does whistle.
Who is this guy, Big Daddy?

I’m pretty sure he’s the guy I know, the lawyer, since they were in his stuff. I sort of got them without his knowledge, I guess, and forgot to give them back. His name is Shyster. Actually his real name is Lawrence Somerset. Used to be some kind of big-time state politician named Larry Somerset who was on TV a lot until he got caught for being into kiddie porn and arranging over the Internet to set up a love nest for a couple of little girls supposedly being pimped by their mother. Only it was a sting and there wasn’t any mother or any little girls either. You maybe read about him in the papers or heard it on the news. It was a big deal for a while when he first got caught. Mainly because he was this big state legislator with a wife and grown kids and all, and when he opened the motel room door for what he thought was a couple of little girls but instead turned out to be the cops, he was naked or almost naked with a dildo in his hand and a kiddie porn DVD playing on the TV. Asshole probably had a hard-on too. And I thought I was stupid.

Good lord! How on earth do you know a man like that?
the Writer asks and the Kid briefly describes life beneath the Causeway, its unintended necessity and nature. He adds that he doesn’t know where the Shyster has been living since the hurricane and points out that he never liked the guy anyhow and especially doesn’t like him now after reading these e-mails which the Shyster must’ve been saving in case he needed to keep the other guy from blowing his whistle on even worse things than kiddie-dipping. The Kid calls the other guy “
the recipient
.”

The one who calls himself Doctor Hoo?

Yeah.

Let me take a wild guess. Is that
our
professor?

’Fraid so. Read the rest.

The Writer asks if there’s a reading lamp and the Kid places a kerosene lantern on the table next to his chair and lights it. A splash of orange covers the wall behind him and shadows dart around the cabin like bats. The Writer resumes reading. The two of them remain silent. When he reaches the end of the stack of e-mails, the Writer exhales loudly, passes the e-mails back to the Kid and simply says,
Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Did you know your professor friend and this guy Shyster or whatever he’s called were coconspiring pen pals?

No. But they didn’t either. Check the dates on their e-mails. They’re all from a couple years ago, back before the Shyster got busted and did time. They’re from when he could still legally use a computer for e-mailing and cruising the Internet for kids. I didn’t know the Professor back then. Or Shyster either. And since it sounds like Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo never actually met in person in real life, despite being heavy into swapping kiddie porn websites and exchanging kiddies-for-hire contact info, when they did meet in real life under the Causeway a few weeks ago it was a kind of coincidence and they didn’t know who they were meeting so they didn’t recognize each other.

Why on earth would this Shyster want to keep these e-mails? They’re disgusting.

Maybe he thought he could make a deal with the cops. Like if he turned in his pen pal they’d let him get rid of his anklet and get off parole and maybe get his old law license back. I dunno. Everybody makes deals if they can.

The Writer goes back to the e-mails and quickly scans three or four in particular, wincing as he reads. He asks the Kid what makes him think this Doctor Hoo is in fact his professor friend.

The Kid hesitates before answering, as if afraid of the answer. Finally he says,
I just know it’s him. I mean, I
believe
it’s him. Because of all that stuff in there about little buried treasures, which you can tell are in reality little kids for sex, and secret maps, which are Internet kiddie-porn sites, and the mentions of Captain Kydd, who is himself. It’s like a code. It’s not really about pirates. It’s about sex with little kids and how to find them on the Internet. And it’s like all a big joke to those two. Anyhow, the Professor sort of talked like that. Nobody else talked that way. Nobody I ever met anyway. Especially that stuff about Captain Kydd. He used the same words when he was telling me about him and the map and so on. Only I thought at first he was talking about a real secret treasure map and an actual pirate’s treasure and that there was a real island where it was buried. I even got into trying to find the treasure using this old map that he gave me that was supposedly Captain Kydd’s secret map. I thought maybe it was buried under the Causeway, which was originally an island before they paved it with concrete and built the Causeway over it. That’s how dumb I was. I even thought because his name is spelled the same as mine maybe he was related to me.

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.

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.