Deceit

by James Siegel

  You met the doctor in a deserted field, the ruins of some frontier town that burned down.

  I’d met the army doctor in the ruins of another destroyed town. This one destroyed by flood, not fire, even if both were weapons of biblical retribution.

  Uncanny.

  How the echoes of my deceitful past kept bouncing back to me.

  Sam Savage, suddenly bringing a long-ago story to life, a trippy little piece about out-of-work actors pulling cons for cash.

  Another exclusive in the Valle retrospective, available online for anyone who likes their news unfit to print.

  And more-something I hadn’t put together before because it had been an orphan, without context. The night when I chased the plumber’s pickup and suddenly became the chased.

  When he’d tapped my bumper again and again, as if he were playing, well… tag.

  If you looked under D for dangerous fads, you’d find another Valle scoop about a previously unreported phenomenon sweeping the nation’s interstates: Auto Tag, cars tapping each other back and forth until the loser flames out like James Dean. Sprung whole from the inner recesses of my fervid and increasingly panicked imagination.

  And what do you say when you tag someone? What do you whisper?

  You’re it.

  That’s what.

  What was going on?

  Okay, be a reporter. A real one who harbors a respect for the truth and has the facility to find it. Arrange the facts, link them end to end, make a conclusion. Figure it out.

  What was real and what wasn’t?

  Sam Savage was real. He’d cried real tears over a real ginger ale as his real girlfriend-or ex-girlfriend, who knows by now-had shot real daggers at him across the table.

  And so was Herman Wentworth.

  Real.

  Later I’d dreamt about the town-the men strolling down Main Street in old-fashioned fedoras, the odor of syrup and blueberry pancakes drifting over from the Littleton Flats Cafe. I’d conjured up the town, but not him.

  He’d appeared out of the desert that day in his blue sports jacket and gleaming black shoes and he’d told me a story about passing through a small town fifty years ago on the way to San Diego.

  He was an army doctor who’d been all over the world.

  But he’d started out in Japan. A raw recruit just off the boat, who could’ve recited the freshly memorized Hippocratic oath by heart.

  The newest member of the 499th medical battalion.

  That was real, too.

  Another thing out there on the ledge that had needed to be coaxed back in.

  I’d heard of that battalion before.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The sheriff called in the morning and asked me if I wouldn’t mind coming to the station.

  I was still lying in bed, even though I should’ve already been showered, shaved, and on my way out. I had an excuse. I’d been up staring at the computer screen till 3 in the morning. Dredging up the past, reading through selected Freedom of Information Act reports-specifically, the ones that came out in 1994 and caused the head of the Department of Energy under Clinton to publicly apologize for atrocities that had happened over four decades ago.

  “Don’t you guys always say we want you to come downtown?” I asked him.

  “Technically, it’s uptown.”

  “Okay. Why do you want me to come uptown?”

  “How about this. When you get here, I’ll tell you.”

  When I entered the sheriff’s office, I nearly knocked over a female deputy carrying three cups of Starbucks coffee precariously balanced one on top of the other.

  When I apologized, she said, “You spill it, you buy it.”

  Sheriff Swenson was in his customary position, leaning back in his chair with his legs up on his desk. The person not in his customary position was sitting across from him. Hinch.

  Hinch was there.

  I didn’t tell the sheriff about the dried excrement stuck to his left boot sole. Maybe that’s what accounted for the look of vague distaste on his face as I sat down.

  “Hello, Lucas.”

  Maybe not.

  “Hello,” I said, then turned and said hi to Hinch.

  He acknowledged me with a slight shake of his head. He seemed smaller these days-as if grief were shriveling him up.

  “I thought Hinch should be here,” Sheriff Swenson said. “Given the seriousness of the situation.”

  “The seriousness of what situation? You mean, Nate getting shot?”

  “Yeah, I think getting shot is serious business. Don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great. We agree.”

  “So, what’s going on?”

  “Maybe you can tell me, Lucas.”

  I looked over at Hinch-for support, acknowledgment, a clue-but he seemed both there and not there. I turned back to the sheriff.

  “I don’t understand. I told you everything I know.”

  “Everything you know, huh?” He didn’t sound very convinced. He sounded pretty much the way he did the day I met him, when he rolled down his side window and said: liar, liar, pants on fire.

  “What exactly do you want to know that you think I haven’t told you?”

  “Well, now that you mention it. We don’t have the actual lab report on the bullet. Not yet, of course-but our resident ballistics expert is pretty sure he knows the gun it was fired from.”

  “Great. Who’s your resident ballistics expert?”

  “That would be me. It’s a small town, Lucas. We’ve got to multitask. If I had to guess-I’d say it was a Smith amp; Wesson. A.38.”

  It took me a second to understand why that sounded terribly familiar and to understand that Sheriff Swenson knew it would.

  “I went to Teddy’s,” he continued. “I asked him if he’d sold any.38s lately, and guess what? He said no. At first. Then he changed his story. It turns out he did sell a.38. Only the person he sold it to wasn’t legally able to own one. He’d served probation. But you know how Teddy is with federal gun laws.”

  I felt Hinch turning to stare at me.

  “Yeah, okay. I bought a gun. I was worried someone was following me. Apparently for good reason.”

  “Uh-huh. I might want to ask to see that gun. I might want to ask if you’d mind if I drove home with you and got it. Of course, you could say no.”

  “What are you suggesting, sheriff? That I shot at myself? That I nearly killed my intern?”

  “Now that would sound like one of your stories. That would be pretty unbelievable. All the same, I’d like to take a look at the gun. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  I was going to expound on my rights as a citizen.

  Go get a warrant, I was going to say.

  “I think we should let the sheriff have the gun.” Hinch, finally making his presence felt.

  He’d used a reassuring we: reporter and editor in it together, side by side, thick and thin, shoulders against the wheel of official meddling. Only he’d sided with the official.

  “Sure,” I said, blushing. “Fine. No problem.”

  “Thanks, Lucas,” Swenson said. “One other thing. I called that number you gave me. For Sam Savage. It’s no longer in service. The play you mentioned has closed. And the girlfriend-Trudy? She says she has no idea who I’m talking about.”

  Okay, it felt all too familiar. I was back in New York. I was frantically shoveling manure as they wrinkled their noses at the smell. Only this time I was bona fide; I was legit.

  Legitimacy isn’t about being, Tom. You either are or you’re aren’t.

  “Look, I told Sam that the person who’d hired him might not like the fact he’s walking around anymore. He’s hiding somewhere. His girlfriend’s protecting him. I’d do the same thing.”

  “You would, huh?”

  “I’m not a perp, Sheriff. I’m a reporter. I went out to cover that accident on 45. Me. Remember? You were there. Both people involved in that crash were someone else. Isn’t that funny.” I half-turned to Hinch so
that I was speaking to both of them-letting Hinch in on what I’d been up to, something, okay, I should’ve done before. “Ed Crannell’s fiction-he’s a fucking actor. Dennis Flaherty’s alive and well and doing antipsychotics in Iowa.”

  “So you say,” Swenson said.

  “Go ahead, find an Ed Crannell in Cleveland. Good luck; I tried. Then get hold of a playbill for that show. The Pier. Sam Savage-second lead-you’ll see his picture there. And then tell me how I shot at myself.”

  “I told you. I don’t think you shot at yourself. You weren’t holding the gun, were you? Of course you could’ve given it to someone else to shoot at you. Maybe he fucked up and hit the kid.”

  “Why on earth would I do something like that? Why would I want someone to shoot me? That’s fucking crazy.”

  “Yeah. Like making up fifty-six stories in the newspaper. What did your shrink think about that?”

  I was waiting for Hinch to jump in and support this reporter the way an editor’s supposed to, to tell the sheriff that he wouldn’t stand for this interrogation. That he’d refuse to sit idly by while one of his reporters was being accused of laughable things and that we were both going to stand up and walk out of there.

  There was deafening silence from his side of the room.

  “The guy jumped me,” I said. “In my own basement. Remember? I came in here to make a report and you said he was breaking into homes with a plumber’s kit. So it wasn’t just me getting burglarized, was it?”

  “Breaking and entering’s one thing,” the sheriff said. “This other stuff… faking an accident… hiring actors… and I’m not even going to get into all that other stuff…”

  I gave it a shot. I looked directly at Hinch.

  “I should’ve told you about some of this, Hinch, but I wanted to put it together first. I know it sounds a little out there, so I wanted to make sure I had it right-”

  “Let’s go get the gun, Tom,” he said softly. “Let’s all ride together to your house and get the sheriff the gun, okay?”

  Okay.

  I’ll admit right now that neither of them looked very surprised when after we all drove back to my rented house-Hinch and I in one car, the sheriff behind us in another-after the sheriff followed me upstairs and watched as I opened my bed-table drawer and stared dumbly at the spot where my gun should’ve been, after I ransacked that drawer and then the one below it, then rifled through my dresser, every one of my kitchen cabinets, my bathroom, my entire basement and every inch of my office, that the gun wasn’t there.

  It was gone.

  Hinch told me it might be a good idea if I took some time off.

  He assured me that this wasn’t in any way, shape, or form a suspension.

  No.

  It’s just that with the Nate shooting investigation pending and the sheriff’s suspicions about me-unfounded as they might be, though it would be kind of nice to know where the gun was-and with Mary-Beth willing to take up the slack, it made sense. Look at it this way, he told me. If you’re right, you got a crazy shooter looking for you. Probably a good idea to keep him away from the office.

  Of course it was a suspension. I knew a suspension when I saw one.

  I didn’t know what Hinch believed, but I knew whom he didn’t.

  It was the gun.

  The plumber must’ve stolen it, I told them-it was obvious. He’d broken into my house the day I’d caught him red-handed. Then I’d caught him trying to do it again. He must’ve gone back a third time.

  No one looked convinced.

  I started to tell Hinch the rest.

  Halfway through the first sentence, I stopped. I had to. He had the same expression as the sheriff. The same expression as the editor I’d hung out to dry. There were too many echoes of stories past. It sounded only slightly less fantastic than it did before. The actors, the bomb-throwing MD feeding me anagrams in a ruined town, even that American soldier of fortune spraying his AK-47 all over Afghanistan.

  Ask yourself. What did I have? Really?

  I needed to do it by the book. Buttoned up, double-sourced, fact checked, and stamped with the Good Reporting Seal of Approval.

  I was running out of time.

  It’s like a coming thunderstorm. You can smell it. Dead leaves begin fluttering like fans in the hands of nervous southern girls, the air turns moist, a smoky haze drifts across the sun.

  A deluge was coming.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  There’s something spooky about driving straight through the night and out the other side.

  You join a kind of spirit world that exists only while the real world sleeps-populated by meth-fueled truckers, fleeing spouses, lonely salespeople, drunken frat kids, all trying to get somewhere before daybreak.

  I wondered which category I fit into.

  I’d left in the middle of the night, pasted a note on the refrigerator in case someone started to worry about me. I couldn’t imagine who that someone might be. When I got there, I would call Norma. It was going to take awhile, because I was going where I should’ve gone all along.

  It had taken me some time to understand the story was there.

  Follow the money, the twin deities of investigative journalism once proclaimed.

  I was.

  I was following the wallet.

  I couldn’t help picturing a dazed and doped-up Dennis Flaherty walking out of a cornfield and asking if this were heaven.

  No, Dennis.

  It’s Iowa.

  Somewhere in the Nevada desert I pulled over at a twenty-four-hour Stop ’n’ Shop.

  It was too easy to give in to the monotonous rhythm of uninterrupted motion. My mind was beginning to ramble, lapsing into autopilot for miles at a time.

  I was in dire need of a sugar fix.

  I bought a pack of pink Sno Balls, ripped into them with the wrapper still half-attached.

  I munched away while I leafed through a rack of retro-style postcards, all with that Technicolor look that made them seem half-painted.

  Hoover Dam.

  The Las Vegas Strip.

  A shot of Sammy, Frank, Dino, and Lawford at the Sands.

  Then a different kind of sands, in another part of Nevada.

  And I suddenly remembered why I was going back to Iowa and what I’d spent the entire previous night doing. Dredging up the noxious past, the kind of thing you have to do with your nose covered and eyes half averted.

  It doesn’t really help.

  You can still smell the sick beds. You can still see the dying. What’s the universal sign for the noble practice of medicine? Two serpents coiled around a winged staff.

  Only they were strangling it to death.

  They were devouring their own.

  I wouldn’t stay too long out here, Herman Wentworth said. Remember, I am a doctor.

  Iowa didn’t look like Heaven.

  It looked flat and brown. The air felt oppressively humid, as if it were responsible for flattening the landscape from its sheer numbing weight. Black funnel clouds blew across the horizon like tumbleweeds.

  The sameness put me to sleep. You couldn’t really delineate one section of Iowa from another. Only the cities broke the stultifying monotony-they flew by in minutes. Then back to amber waves of grain without a hint of purple mountains’ majesty.

  I pulled over at a rest stop to nap, and when I woke up, a boy was making faces at me outside the window.

  I stared back at him until his father appeared and gave him a vicious swat across the back of his head. The boy seemed used to it; he walked back to the family car without a sound.

  It took me a while to get going.

  I felt disoriented and sluggish, as if I were moving in slow motion, the way I turned the steering wheel, stepped on the gas.

  According to the map, I still had at least an hour to go.

  I cranked the window wide open, letting the air slap me awake.

  When I saw the sign for Ketchum City, I felt neither happiness or relief.

  Just dr
ead.

  Mrs. Flaherty must’ve thought I was selling something.

  She took awhile to answer the door, and when she did she was already telling me she wasn’t interested.

  I could see why.

  She had the worst trailer in a tumbledown trailer park-a salesman would’ve been sheer out of luck.

  When I interrupted her to inform her who it was that was standing there, her demeanor changed from wary annoyance to genuine warmth.

  “Tom,” she said, like someone who’d known me for a long time. “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to Dennis,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you call? You came all the way from California,” she said, as if that were a second miracle-first getting her son back, now this.

  She didn’t invite me inside. I could see she wanted to, that she knew that’s what you do when someone arrives at your front door-especially someone who’s just driven twenty-nine consecutive hours. She was embarrassed about where she lived.

  “I wanted to talk to him in person, Mrs. Flaherty.”

  “Why?”

  She was wearing a shapeless and washed-out shift. Her legs were threaded with spider webs of inky varicose veins.

  “I’m trying to find out how someone ended up in that car with Dennis’s wallet.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she said, affecting an almost coquettish tone.

  “Somebody died. I’d like to know who it was.”

  “Well, how’s Dennis going to know that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he can help me find out.”

  I heard someone calling her from inside the trailer.

  “Is that him?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Dennis,” she said. “Come on out. Tom Valle’s here.”

  He stepped out in the doorway, tired and bleary-eyed, dressed in boxers and what used to be referred to as a wifebeater before political correctness ruined all the fun. His mother gazed at him as if he were standing there in top hat and tails.

  “Who’s Tom Valle?” he asked, as if I wasn’t right there in front of him.

  “I talked to you on the phone,” I said. “Remember, Dennis? I’m a reporter.”