Deceit

by James Siegel

  Maybe it didn’t bother him because it was me who was asking him about it.

  “Isn’t there a car dealership opening you can go write about?” he said.

  Yeah, that was probably it.

  “I saw the plumber,” I said.

  Sheriff Swenson untangled his legs, which were propped up on his desk in a physical attitude of I’m in charge here. There’s something belittling about staring at the soles of someone’s boots-the whole point, I guess.

  “Did you now?” he said. “Where?”

  “At Muhammed Alley. The other night.”

  “Uh-huh. You sure about this?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “Now that I am interested in. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “He got away.”

  “Got away? What’s that mean? Did you chase him or something?”

  “No. He was just there, and then he wasn’t. When he saw me notice him, he took off.”

  “He took off. Great. And he looked pretty much like the description you gave us last time?”

  “Yeah-he’s kind of hard to miss. Have there been any others?” I asked.

  “Any other what?”

  “Break-ins.”

  He didn’t answer me. “You should’ve called me, Lucas. You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, fine. If he shows up in your bowling foursome next time, you’ll let me know, okay?”

  “Sure.” I turned to leave, then stopped. “Do you know anything about the flood?”

  “What flood?”

  “The Aurora Dam Flood. Back in the fifties.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well… did anyone who was supposed to have died in it… were they ever found later? People that were counted in the original death toll, but somehow survived?”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to say yes.

  Say something other than: “The Aurora flood was a little before my time. What the fuck would I know about it?”

  But that’s what he said.

  Just before picking up the phone, an unspoken invitation for me to leave.

  I asked Norma if John Wren had left any of his notes behind.

  When I’d asked Hinch if I could do a story on the fiftieth anniversary of the Aurora Dam Flood, he said good luck, my predecessor already tried.

  “Nope,” Norma said. “If he did, they would’ve been thrown out by now,” Norma said.

  “You sure?”

  “Ninety-nine point nine percent.” Norma was attempting to read the latest issue of Us, read admittedly being generous for a newsweekly sporting a wedding-veiled Britney Spears on its cover. Oops, she did it again-this week’s bouncy headline.

  “Well, if they weren’t thrown out, where would they be?”

  “Gawwd… can’t you let an executive assistant read her trash in peace?”

  “I’d like to, but this is an executive assistant kind of job.”

  Norma put Brittney face down. She shuffled over to the file cabinet, which doubled as the coffee percolator table and fax bin. Norma had been married to a church choir leader who’d absconded with the church organist; she’d heard they’d ordered Hymn and Hers bath towels. She was just this side of middle age now-or sometimes that side, depending on whether she was in one of her dieting and exercise phases or not. Currently she was on the South Beach Diet and doing aerobics to Andre 3000 and friends. She opened the third drawer and began rummaging around.

  “Nope,” she said. “Just empty folders, like I told you.” She’d withdrawn a handful of worn-looking manila folders that looked conspicuously bereft of anything.

  “Can I see them?”

  “There’s nothing in them, Tom.”

  “Humor me.”

  She dropped them on my laptop.

  “You know, that Spears kid is some kind of dopey.”

  The folders had various subject matters written on the tabs. Wren’s handwriting, I knew, having seen enough of his leftovers stuck in various places around my house.

  A litany of the mostly banal: World’s Biggest Hula Hoop Collection, July 4th Parade, Cow Punching Contest. They could’ve been on my assignment list for the coming year.

  There were exceptions. A folder labeled: Veteran’s story.

  This folder wasn’t empty, not entirely-when I opened it, two pictures fell out.

  The Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C.

  One was a wide shot: that black granite V that somehow manages to be achingly graceful and starkly imposing at the same time. The other was shot closer up-you could see the depressing roll call of the dead chiseled into the stone.

  That article I’d found in my house.

  Sad story.

  The traumatized vet who’d wandered into Littleton one October afternoon, staying long enough to establish that he had no known residence, no family to claim him, and a name he’d appropriated from an MIA he’d served with in the deltas of Mekong. “Who’s Eddie Bronson?” An ex-Vietnam grunt wracked with survivor’s guilt-all Wren really managed to answer before the unknown soldier was hustled out of the town gazebo and institutionalized. Wren had used the sorry incident to craft a moving little piece about the debilitating neglect faced by veterans of the war America would just as soon forget.

  “Norma, did Wren go visit the Vietnam memorial? When he did the story on that vet?”

  “Not on Hinch’s dime,” she said. “Why?”

  “He must’ve. He took some pictures.”

  “Uh-huh.” Norma had made it back to her desk and immediately reimmersed herself in the lives of the rich and silly.

  I stared at the close-up shot. Eddie Bronson clearly legible-the MIA name the vet had taken as his own, resting on a bed of black granite, even if his bones were rotting away in some tunnel in Chu Lai.

  Wren’s Vietnam vet story, while nicely written, hadn’t been exactly appreciated. This, according to Norma. For one thing, Hinch believed that small-town newspaper reporters should stick to small-town news. Mall openings, for example. For another thing, some of the debilitating neglect the vet was experiencing had come courtesy of the good people of Littleton, who hadn’t taken kindly to a disheveled and half-crazy vagrant setting up living quarters in the town gazebo and calling it home.

  This all coincided with Wren going a little half-crazy himself. Maybe all that animosity got to him. Or the Santa Anas blew through town. Or the blistering ever-present heat finally baked his brain.

  Whatever it was, his turn at serious and socially relevant reporting seemed to have given him delusions of grandeur. Mall openings were for hacks. He’d immediately submerged himself in a retrospective expose on the Aurora Dam Flood. I could tell from the date carefully written on the third folder, simply labeled: Flood. One week after the story on Eddie Bronson.

  This folder was empty.

  “You think he took them with him? Norma…?”

  “Took what?” she said, peeking out from behind Brittney’s silicone-enhanced breast.

  “His notes. His files. You think he took them with him, or did you throw them out after he left?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly operating on all cylinders at that point. Know what I mean? He locked himself in here one night and howled at the moon.”

  “He howled at the moon?”

  “Just an expression.”

  “Right. What was he doing in here?”

  “God knows. All I know is they had to call the sheriff to get him out.”

  “Okay. When did he leave town, Norma?”

  “The next day-I’m not kidding. He must’ve been embarrassed by the whole thing. God knows the man needed a change of scenery.”

  He’d gone somewhere north, I remember Norma telling me. The details were kind of hazy.

  “He leave a number, Norma?”

  “Number?”

  “Yeah. The digits you dial on the phone when you want to speak to someone. A number.”

  She leafed through her desktop Rolode
x. “Nope.” Then she cocked her head and said: “Hold on.”

  She went into Hinch’s office, where I heard the sound of drawers being opened and closed. She reappeared bearing a piece of wrinkled paper.

  “Thank you, Norma,” she said.

  “Thank you, Norma.”

  John Wren’s last known phone number. Judging by the area code, Northern California. I wrote it down on the back of one of the photos and stuck it in my wallet.

  Wren’s answering-machine message sounded like someone who was already feeling put-upon, even though he hadn’t actually been made to answer the phone.

  We’re out fishing, but if you’d like to leave a message, fine.

  “Hi, this is Tom Valle. I took your position at the Littleton Journal.” I took your house as well, I could’ve added. “I’d like to ask you about a story you were working on before you left. Could you please call me back?”

  I left my work and cell numbers.

  Then I called Anna.

  She was due to leave tomorrow. Back to Santa Monica. We were supposed to go out again and I wanted to confirm the where and when like any responsible journalist should.

  She picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “So we’re on for tonight?”

  “Of course. Didn’t we make plans?”

  “Yeah, sure. Just wanted to be sure they were still on.”

  “I would’ve called you if there was a problem.”

  “Okay. Great. So we’re still on then.” Mr. Stupid, meet Mr. Needy. “Where are we meeting again?”

  “Violetta’s. Just like we said two days ago. You do have a touch of ADD.” At least she sounded friendly when she said it.

  “Just confirming,” I said.

  “Oh, one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re ordering white wine,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that. Is your dress ruined?”

  “It’ll be fine. I use a dry cleaner that’s absolutely scorched earth on stains. If Monica Lewinsky had given them that blue frock, there never would’ve been any impeachment hearings.”

  I laughed, then immediately wondered if her reference to seminal stains had some kind of invitation inherent in it. All you had to do was ask, she’d said when I wiped at her dress.

  There was a brief silence, as if her allusion to sex had consumed all available air, then I asked her how her father was doing. I’d previously skirted this issue, thinking that when she wanted to talk about it, she would. But its absence was starting to feel conspicuous.

  “The same,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”

  “Your mom still around?”

  “Yeah. They’d divorced, though. So it’s kind of just me.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s what you do for someone you love, right? He’s my dad. I’d do anything for him. How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Your parents? Still alive?”

  “No. They’re both gone.”

  Gone. A label my father earned while I was still playing scully on the streets of Queens. He’d come back once, before the funeral, and asked me if I’d like to take a ride on the fire truck the way I used to. We’d gone around the block and parked in the shadow of St. Anthony’s church. What happened, Tommy? Sitting next to me in the cab but not really looking at me. Looking at a picture of the four of us tucked into the windshield. What happened?

  “Sisters, brothers?” Anna asked me.

  “No. I… not anymore.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I had a brother. He died. A long time ago.”

  “Oh. I’m terribly sorry. What happened?”

  “Nothing. He just died. It was an accident.”

  “Oh God. How old was he?”

  “He was 6.”

  “Jesus, that’s terrible. I guess you don’t like talking about it.”

  “No, it’s just… it’s been a long time…”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  No you don’t, I thought.

  Some things are beyond understanding.

  TWENTY

  Kara Bernstein.

  Kara Betland.

  Kara Bolinsky.

  Kara Brill.

  I used the half hour I had between showering and shaving and combing and recombing my hair and spritzing on some ancient Stetson for Men then washing it off because it smelt like old leather-the half hour between that and actually needing to leave the house-to look up Kara Bolka in the online phone directories.

  No luck.

  Not that there weren’t a generous number of Karas in California; I pictured legions of OC girls still wearing their braces, chilling at the mall or flaunting their hard bodies at the beach and in the waiting rooms of San Fernando’s porn industry. Kara Bolka sounded like a name Eastern European immigrants might give their American-born daughter. It whispered half woman and half nymph.

  Of course, it might’ve been my libido doing the whispering.

  The night hadn’t actually begun, but I was wondering how it would end. I was counting down from my last intimate encounter and contemplating whether it really was like riding a bicycle, and if we were talking ten-gear or mountain bike.

  I hadn’t completely been a sexual hermit since my arrival in Littleton. No. I’d cohabited at the Days Inn with a certain married woman who’d ventured into Muhammed Alley pretty much for the same reason I had-as a retreat. In her case, from an unfaithful husband who tended to knock her around when his golf game was off or a business deal went sour. He was in real estate, where business deals tended to unravel on a regular basis-especially in Littleton, which still boasted two half-finished resorts.

  I won’t tell you her name. It doesn’t matter. We went to the Days Inn instead of my rented home because I didn’t want her husband showing up at my front door. We went there three times, and it was satisfying only in the most rudimentary definition of the term. Like eating cooked-to-death food when you’re hungry.

  When she called my cell after our third liaison, I didn’t call her back. I discovered a message on my phone from her a week later.

  So this is it, huh? Have a nice life.

  If you were going to end an affair, those words were as good as any.

  Now I was awash in Karas, which is to say pretty much at sea.

  I left them there to meet Anna.

  Somewhere between salad and entree, between talking and flirting, between 8 o’clock and 9 o’clock, Anna mentioned John Wren.

  That she knew him.

  We’d somehow ended up on the subject of journalism again. Not just talking, either. I was pretty much proselytizing, though it might’ve been the Chianti doing most of the self-righteous babbling. I sounded the way I used to, when I was first starting out and consumed with the fever. A divinity student discussing his faith. Hadn’t I worked for the acknowledged bible of the industry?

  Slowly, sin by sin, I’d managed to subvert the very reason for a newspaper’s existence, to turn truth inside out. Like one of those Soviet moles from the thirties who burrowed their way into the heart of the British democracy. And just like Philby and company had spilled innocent blood-so did I.

  I have skirted the particulars with you; I have played coy.

  The resulting carnage from my exposure and dismissal included one brilliant, dedicated, and generally worshiped editor who did nothing much but believe in me.

  He went down with the ship.

  Or with the rat.

  I’d be pecking away at a story and I’d feel him just behind me, like a divine presence keeping tabs. He had that kind of status, had earned a special kind of reputation, even at a newspaper where journalistic luminaries were the norm.

  For some reason, he took an interest in me, saw something there worth cultivating. Maybe he simply knew a fatherless boy when he saw one. He invited me for drinks one night, and when it went okay, when I didn’t bore hi
m with a fusillade of mostly fawning questions, he invited me again. After a while we began having midnight heart-to-hearts over smelly bratwurst sandwiches in his office. We took ambling walks in Bryant Park when he felt like stretching his legs. When he’d do the rounds, I’d sense him there over my shoulder and find myself flushing, trying to will the keys to conjure up something sharp, incisive, and brilliant. Sometimes they even obliged.

  It didn’t matter.

  He had a habit of holding back enough praise to make you thirsty for more. What you wrote was mostly not bad, okay, or simply workmanlike. You were supposed to write for your readers-that great mass of news-hungry souls thirsting for truth.

  I wrote for him.

  I had a readership of one. I needed to turn okay into great.

  It was irony itself that creating a story about a dead National Guardsman named Lowell Beaumont finally did the trick.

  Of course, there’s a problem with finally getting what you’ve been thirsting for. Once praised, you need to feel it again, to have all that love and approval poured over you like champagne in the championship-starved 2004 Red Sox clubhouse.

  I kept it up for longer than should’ve been possible.

  I kept it up until it wasn’t possible.

  Until I accompanied a certain reporter for drinks, and it all blew up.

  During the course of one week, this editor, this friend, went from glorified ombudsman to vilified incompetent. It was followed weeks later by his sudden retirement.

  He should’ve known, they claimed-they mostly being all the lesser lights he’d eclipsed on the way up. He should’ve been on top of things. He should’ve been doing his job.

  His public desecration was only mildly less brutal than mine, his fall ten times greater.

  Of everything I managed to ruin-and I was pretty much a one-man wrecking crew, trashing my career, my marriage, my reputation-destroying him is the thing I’m most shamed by, the worm that continually gnaws at me, that I occasionally try to drown through serial shots of tequila.

  Sometimes it makes me dial the number of a faded country house in Putnam County and recite soundless words of contrition.

  Hello, I say, it’s me. I’m sorry.

  I can picture him there, holding that old-style black receiver in his hand, his bifocals sloped down over his prodigious nose, and I swallow the words down, ingest them whole, and they slide back into my gut and make me sick.