A Shred of Truth

  “Felicia is dead! That’s real. So is the rest of it.”

  “Maybe she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “A random victim? No way!”

  “By your own admission, she was in a rough neighborhood late at night. She’d been pulled in before—”

  “Pulled in? What’re you getting at?”

  “In Portland, her sheet contained recent prostitution charges from her involvement with a high-end escort service.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  But Felicia’s breathy invitation at the hotel whispered through my head.

  “With your recent studies in social psych,” Meade rattled on, “is it possible you’ve fabricated this sociopathic character as a means of not only protecting your ex-girlfriend’s honor but also protecting your heart from its very real grief by seeking a maternal replacement for her loss?”

  “Meaning, my mother.”

  The sympathy in his voice was real. “It’s been over twenty years, Aramis.”

  “I saw her. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  “I know how much you cared about her.”

  “You think I sent those e-mails to myself?” I hissed. “I don’t even know what some of them mean. ‘Thursday—a fitting day for victory over my enemies.’ What the heck is that about?”

  “Thursday,” Meade mused. “Named after the Norse god of thunder.”

  “Thor’s Day. Okay. But I don’t know who conquered Thor.”

  “Your subconscious could’ve dredged up repressed knowledge.”

  “I never would’ve written that.”

  “I can’t let friendship blur my objectivity.”

  “Explain the cuts on Felicia’s back. And the matching initials on Johnny Ray’s shoulder. You witnessed both of those wounds firsthand.”

  “That’s the one thing that doesn’t fit.”

  “Back at my place,” I said. “I have a blood-stained razor this guy left for me in an envelope. Maybe it’ll help. Would that make you believe what I’m saying?”

  “I’d like to see it. If there are any latent prints, we can search them against the AFIS database.” He clapped his hands together. “We both have a lot to think about, Aramis. I’d better let you go.”

  37

  The pressure was on. Seventy minutes till my final. With Thursday’s confrontation still three days away, I figured I might as well finish out this course and earn my credits for the semester.

  Sara and Diesel, please don’t hate me if I bomb this.

  After Freddy C’s stiff-legged exit from ER, I gave him a ride to Centennial Park en route to my brownstone. Meade was close behind, intending to collect the razor-blade evidence I had offered.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Not bad, not bad.”

  “Meade covered the cost, you know. Or talked them into comping it.”

  Freddy wore a look of panic. “I can’t pay him back.”

  “Just tell him thanks. That’ll make him happy.”

  “We in trouble? For breaking in?”

  “Is that what’s got you nervous?” I turned into the park, gliding toward the Parthenon. “Don’t worry. Trish thought we were supposed to be there all along, and she was beside herself after her dog took a chunk out of you. Sure, it looked strange that we’d parked back behind the garage. But if there’s any trouble, I’ll deal with it.”

  Freddy was ready to disembark. “Right here.”

  “Take care of yourself. Come by for coffee in the morning.”

  “I got it,” he said.

  “Got what?”

  “Evidence. You said we needed it.”

  “To build a case against the Kraftsmen, yes. What’d you get?”

  “You were talking to her, keeping her busy. So I took it from the wall.”

  “In Trish’s bedroom? I didn’t even see you do it.”

  “C for Crime-fighter,” Freddy stated.

  “Let’s see what you got.”

  From musty layers of clothing, Freddy drew out a coiled leather whip. “It’s the one. From the cave.”

  “Are there bloodstains on it?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “Well, I’m sure they can figure it out in a crime lab. I bet Chigger thought it was safer in plain sight than hidden away somewhere. I mean, how many people go into Trish’s bedroom in the first place?”

  Freddy pushed it toward me. “Give it to the detective.”

  “Okay.”

  “My payment. Tell him thanks.”

  “No.” I nudged it back. “You should do that yourself. Tell him what you told me, how Chigger put it in your hand and forced you to use it on another human being.”

  In my rearview mirror, the exchange played out between the detective and my friend from the park. There was a shaking of hands, a nodding of heads. When it ended, Freddy C carried himself a bit taller as he melted away into a copse of trees.

  “Legends and Lies: Cultural Susceptibility in a Secular Age.”

  Our project’s title filled a mobile chalkboard. Against the green background, Professor Boniface Newmann cut an imperious figure as he watched students file in. He hitched his tweed lapels over a wide-ribbed turtleneck and waited for the wall clock’s minute hand to point straight up.

  “Yes then.” He took a step forward. “If any student is late—meaning those who enter from this moment on—he or she will receive a ten-point deduction. Moreover, anyone who leaves before the last group’s presentation will suffer the same penalty. Consider yourselves fortunate for having demonstrated a degree of promptness.”

  Roll call commenced with military precision.

  “If they’re late,” Diesel muttered, “how will they know about the deduction?”

  “Seems like a contradiction. How can you even receive a deduction?”

  Sara Sevier shot the two of us a sideways glare.

  My nerves ratcheted up a few more notches when I heard the order of presentations. We were last. Fifteen minutes per group, with eight groups of three. I had a good hour and forty-five minutes to stew in my anxiety.

  Diesel slipped a drawing to me. “Professor Bones,” it read, over a cartoon sketch of a human skeleton with a tortoiseshell.

  “Leave me alone,” I mouthed.

  He let his eyelids fall, then jerked his chin as though waking up.

  “To avoid difficulties, I will be the timekeeper for each group,” Newmann was explaining, lifting an antique stopwatch. “As the designated speaker comes forward, he or she will submit the group’s written outlines, then proceed to the podium. The clock will start at that point. The group’s score will be adversely altered by any presentation lasting under fourteen minutes or over the allotted fifteen.”

  “And you think I’m a stickler,” Sara Sevier whispered to Diesel.

  Staring ahead, he said nothing. Crept a hand toward her stacked books. Poked at them till they were out of alignment with each other.

  She fidgeted. Tried to ignore them.

  From the podium, the first group’s speaker was halfway through a PowerPoint display when Sara caved, rolling her eyes and straightening the stack. Diesel gave a knowing nod that could’ve been in response to the PowerPoint but more likely to Sara’s compulsive quirk.

  When the next group’s presentation kicked off with a skit in full costumes and regalia, my mind scrambled for ways to spice up my own fifteen-minute segment.

  It kept snagging, though, on the conundrum of AX.

  What was the value of a centuries-old Masonic ring? Monetary? Sentimental? How was this person connected to my mom? What was the goal of the whole charade?

  The problem is that we don’t know the why until we know the who …

  Who then?

  I played mental hopscotch, jumping from the outrageous to the plausible.

  Athens of the South: a catering company with an obsessed young employee named Alexia—A and X. Beware the poisoned fig leaves? Yeah, right.

  Reginald Meade: a straig
ht-arrow detective. But he knew details of my long-lost inheritance. Had greed or power corrupted him? No way. I refuse to believe it.

  Anna’s Ex: AX? A messy divorce. Disgruntled husband. Domestic flare-ups. By employing Anna, had I painted a target on my chest? Seems a bit far-fetched.

  Chigger: an ominous tattoo. A jealous guitar player. An axman with an ax to grind—and a religious grindstone for the task. Certainly seems capable of it.

  Mr. Hillcrest: an arrogant, controlling parent. A zealot. Thumping his King James Bible, using an ax to clear away the so-called barren trees. A very good possibility.

  None of these suspects seemed to have a solid alibi. With an accomplice, any of them could be involved. My hopes of narrowing the list were inhibited by limited resources and dwindling time. And while investigating, I might dig up more suspects.

  For that matter, Sammie could be involved. Or Johnny Ray.

  I couldn’t trust a soul. Learned that last year, the hard way.

  What about myself?

  Perhaps my brother and the detective had hit upon the truth, poking beneath my layers of emotional protection. What if I was losing touch? Concocting alternate, safer realities? If, in fact, a hinge had come loose somewhere in my psyche, would I know it? Would I hear the parts rattling before they simply fell apart?

  “Group eight?” our professor called from the front. “Snap to it.”

  “Aramis.”

  I blinked and found Diesel waving a hand in front of me.

  “I’m fine.” I gathered up my papers. “I’m here.”

  “We’ve had some creative presentations to this point,” said Newmann. “A mix between mildly and wildly entertaining. Unfortunately, the success of most groups’ urban legends has sputtered due to ineffective means of dissemination. Perhaps group eight will reverse the trend.”

  “I’m ready, sir.”

  Professor Newmann peered over his tortoise-shell rims as I approached and turned over our trio’s project outlines. “Frankly, Mr. Black, your lethargy disappoints me.”

  I nodded at the podium. “If I may …”

  The moment my hand touched the lectern, he clicked his stopwatch with exaggerated force.

  “Legends and lies,” I began. “Does our present culture promote our susceptibility to them? We’ve seen seven groups already. They’ve worked hard, I’m sure. But I suggest we’ve been simply entertained.”

  “As your instructor, it is my job—mine alone—to make such judgments.”

  “Not meaning to be rude, Professor, but”—I gathered my notes and threw them to the floor—“I’ve come here to learn. Not to outdo the last circus act. Not to get a good grade so that Mommy and Daddy will buy me a Lexus. If this class is really about navigating our way through society’s lies, then we should be allowed to sidestep your browbeating and speak freely.”

  Mouths dropped and eyes widened around the lecture hall.

  “Browbeating,” Newmann echoed.

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, but this country was built on the exchange of ideas, and many of the religious denominations that came over here formed from the soil of protest. Thus the name Protestants.”

  Expecting a rebuke, I saw instead a bemused expression tug at the professor’s lips. He repositioned his spectacles, ran two fingers over a pasty eyebrow, and said, “For the first time this evening, I believe a student has tapped my own frustration with the spineless, amoral equivocations we see daily all around.”

  I stood in shock.

  “Proceed please, Mr. Black.”

  “Uh, thank you, sir.”

  38

  Nearly nine p.m. End of semester. And I had the full attention of the class. “Quoting a friend”—I nodded at Diesel—“here’s a pop quiz. True or false: the glam rock group Kiss once published a comic book printed in their own blood?”

  My peers rustled in their seats, hesitant to speak.

  “C’mon,” I prodded. “If this is your great show of courage in seeking out the truth, then we’re in more trouble than I thought.”

  “Amen,” agreed Professor Newmann.

  “True.”

  “We’ve got our first vote,” I said. “Anyone else?”

  The final tally ended in favor of the comic book’s authenticity.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s true. The band members agreed to the promotional gimmick and donated some of their own blood to be mixed with the comic’s red ink. A notary public confirmed the stunt with a sworn statement. That issue, which appeared in June 1977, went on to be one of Marvel’s best-selling issues of all time.”

  Gasps of disgust went up.

  “Real blood? Oooh.”

  “Snap,” one kid exclaimed. “Everything cool happened in the seventies.”

  “Yeah, you moron,” said another. “Like the Vietnam War and Watergate.”

  I raised a hand until the room had quieted. “I bring all this up for a reason. If this really is a secular, godless age, why are we so willing to idolize almost anything? When something entertains us or gains some sort of popularity, we shower it with praise—until the next big thing comes along. We sacrifice our standards. We stop thinking for ourselves. We let the media and marketers tell us what to love and to believe.”

  “All noteworthy comments,” Newmann interjected. “But tell us, Mr. Black, what was your group’s urban legend? What was it that you would have us believe?”

  “My study partners and I chose a local subject. After fine-tuning the idea, we went to multiple Web sites and Internet forums and proposed that General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate mastermind who later spearheaded the Ku Klux Klan, was born to a poor white woman and a slave boy from a local plantation. At delivery, his mother’s parents took young Nathan and drove the slave away to cover up the, uh, forceful nature of the pregnancy. Nathan grew up believing his father had abandoned him.”

  A student piped up. “You tellin’ me the leader of the KKK was half-black?”

  “That was our urban legend.”

  “Dawg, that’s a work of genius.”

  “It’s not true,” I emphasized. “But it started spreading.”

  “It is true,” said another classmate. “I read about that on Wikipedia.”

  “Students!” the professor barked.

  “Diesel gets credit for that particular entry,” I noted. “We’ll be editing it from the site after tonight, if they haven’t flagged it already. But that’s the danger, isn’t it? Once the truth’s been tampered with, it’s hard to separate out the lies.”

  My own words precipitated a dizzy rush, and I lowered my head. Both hands gripped the podium as images flitted across my closed eyelids: the riverbank … the gunshot … Mom kneeling, falling … splashing beneath the surface …

  Most of my life had centered round that one moment.

  Was I lying to myself about her reappearance? Even our legend involved an estranged mother and son. Was it another subconscious machination of mine?

  God, only you know. Help me uncover the truth.

  “Truth.” I lifted my head, took a breath. “It’s the very foundation of friendship, marriage, government, and society. By testing it, we still have some hope of seeing through the lies. Meanwhile, my group’s urban legend is floating around out there, like most of yours. Too late to call it back.”

  “Tha’s messed up.”

  “And that, my dear students, is the point.” Professor Newmann joined me at the podium and clicked his stopwatch with a flourish. Panning the class while avoiding my eyes, he clapped a bony hand against my back. “Well done, Mr. Black.”

  I thanked him. Awkwardly patted him back.

  He gritted his teeth—or did I just imagine it?

  “Prof—”

  He shook his head.

  My suspicion flared.

  “Come see me afterward,” he mumbled.

  He squared himself. “Students, your final grades will be calculated and in your boxes by the end of the week. For those wishing to receive them via
mail, please inform the office. If you prepurchased a yearbook, those will also be available.”

  Kids started shuffling around, scooping up books and supplies.

  Newmann rapped his knuckles on the lectern. “Hello, class, you have not yet been released.” He hitched his lapels and said in his reedy voice, “For years I’ve set out to instruct others and to show them the pitfalls of deviating from the truth. Some of you have already made corrections. Others have lessons still to be learned.”

  My eyes were glazing. I needed food and something to drink.

  “In these last moments, I want to express my gratitude to those of you who accepted me—no matter how begrudgingly—as your substitute. For personal reasons, I will not be returning after the summer. Godspeed.”

  If he had hoped for sympathy, he didn’t get it. A few thank-yous and good-byes, one “Peace out, Prof,” and Ward Hall 150 was empty.

  Save the two of us.

  I gathered my notes from the floor. “You’re leaving us, huh?”

  “For my own protection,” Newmann replied. “And for the sake of my ideals.”

  “You lost me.”

  “I’ve been persuaded to leave by ignoble means but persuaded nonetheless. After the verbal intimidation of one particular parent, I became victim yesterday to his escalated tactics of coercion.”

  “Mr. Hillcrest.”

  Newmann nodded.

  “What’d he do to you?”

  “It’s immaterial. The point is—”

  “No no no. This is important.”

  The professor pursed his lips, drawing deeper hollows in his gaunt cheeks. “On more than one occasion, Hillcrest warned me that his son’s scores were vital to his further education. I made it clear that my grades reflected the work of the individual students, nothing more and nothing less.”

  “So what happened yesterday?”

  “He found me at home. Roused from an afternoon nap, I was foolhardy enough to open the door without checking who was there.”

  “And he forced his way in.”