Deceived

by James Scott Bell

  He was grateful, too. There was a God.

  Why wasn’t Arty answering or returning her calls?

  Rocky snapped her phone shut and breathed a small curse. She needed money, and Arty had always been good for a loan, because she always paid him back. She always managed to find more work. She always scraped by.

  Sure, there were plenty of lean times. Like now. The past year had been the worst so far. But Arty was always there to help. Even though they hadn’t been as close in recent years, Arty was the rock of the family.

  Older by two years, Arty had been her protector when they were kids. If he ever heard anybody making fun of her face, he went after the kid like the Tasmanian Devil in those cartoons.

  It didn’t matter if the kid was older. She remembered when one eighth grader, a big kid who played on the flag football team at Arty’s school, called her “freak face.” It was summer and she and Arty were walking back from the park. Arty was teaching her how to play softball. She must have been ten at the time.

  It was a hot day, and they stopped at the 7-Eleven. Arty bought them both Slurpees. As they were walking out, the big kid came in with a skinny friend and almost bumped into them.

  The big kid said, “Watch it,” and then threw in a word Rocky thought only applied to a mean woman. But the kid had called Arty that.

  Arty said, “You watch it.”

  The big kid looked down and sneered, then looked at Rocky. “You and freak face better get out of here,” he said.

  At which point Arty shoved his Slurpee into the kid’s face. Before the kid could even sputter, Arty was all over him, getting him in a headlock, pulling him to the ground, pummeling him with both hands.

  The skinny kid just stood there, like he was watching two dogs fight and was afraid to get bit.

  The man behind the counter shouted something that sounded like, “You stop that!” and ran around to pull Arty off. Arty wouldn’t be pulled. He kept the fists flying. Another man, who had been browsing the magazine rack, came over to help. The two men finally subdued Arty.

  The big kid was crying. “You’re dead!” he said through sobs.

  But Rocky couldn’t remember ever seeing the kid again.

  She did remember Arty walking her home and not saying anything about it, except that the kid shouldn’t have told him to watch it. What he didn’t say but that she knew to be true, was that he had done it for her.

  She wished they’d been closer these last few years, but there was that woman in the way. The one he was blind about.

  Liz. Elizabeth. Little Southern Belle. The way she’d squeak her voice, as if she could twist any man around her little finger. It drove Rocky crazy.

  Liz, the woman who had come between her and Arty.

  Jealousy was probably a factor, too. Rocky hated to admit it, but she felt it and it was strong.

  Geena came back in with hot tea. “You know what I feel like?” she asked.

  Rocky said, “Tell me.”

  “I feel lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in going out and buying lottery tickets?”

  Geena looked dead serious. “Aligned with the right spheres,” she said. “And if you stick close to me, it could rub off. We’ll go to the Mashed Potato, and you’ll get lucky.”

  Rocky picked up a teacup. “You want to my philosophy of luck? It’s all random. Arbitrary. It’s like Darwin said.”

  “The evolution guy?”

  “It’s all a roll of the dice,” Rocky said. “Mutations happen by pure chance. You get dealt a hand, and you can’t draw any more cards.”

  “But we have the power to change our lives,” Geena said. “Through visualization and — ”

  “You think visualization changes anything? You think the woman on the freeway who gets taken out by a drunk driver could have changed that by putting a different picture in her mind?”

  Geena said nothing.

  Rocky shook her head. “Random,” she said and raised her cup. “Cheers.”

  5:17 p.m.

  “Are you feeling well enough to give us a statement?” the young deputy sheriff asked. He was tall and lanky. His uniform hung loose on his frame.

  “I don’t know,” Liz said. She held her head, now with a large bandage on it. The medics were just pulling out of the small lot at the entrance to Pack Park. They had her sitting on a hard bench, and her head was absolutely splitting.

  She really didn’t know if she could talk.

  But she was glad this guy, this hiker, happened along. A lucky break, really. He would make a nice witness to her distress. He seemed just the sort of guy you’d want at a time like this.

  He was a bit pudgy, hair thinning, didn’t have a wedding band. He wasn’t going to be dating any models. And judging from the way he talked, a little too eager to please. He was definitely of the malleable variety of male. A doofus.

  Liz knew all about that kind. When she’d first arrived in LA, she found one early on. Went hunting for just the right one and found the hunting grounds — Beverly Hills, to be exact — teeming with possibilities.

  Her head really hurt, though. The things you have to do.

  The doofus — What was his name? Ted? — talked in the way doofuses do. A little too fast, a little too much. She filed that information away. Maybe he’d do other things for her.

  “Maybe you should talk to her tomorrow,” Ted said to the deputy. He had refused to leave her side. Liz got the impression the deputy was annoyed.

  “If I can just get a few facts out of the way,” the deputy said. Liz thought he looked a little like Christian Bale. Not bad.

  “I don’t think — ” Ted started to say.

  “It’s all right,” Liz said. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  The deputy had a clipboard box with a form on top and was ready to write. There was ample illumination from a light post near the bench.

  “Can you just tell me, briefly, what happened to you and your husband?” he asked.

  “We were hiking,” Liz said. “And we fell. Really, I was falling and Arty tried to . . .” Liz put a sob in her throat.

  “Just take your time, ma’am.”

  Ma’am? She didn’t like being called that. Not one bit. Ma’am was what you called the old frump in the checkout line, rifling through her coupons.

  “How did you fall?” the deputy asked.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t watching where I was going. I was being kind of reckless. I don’t know why. I was just happy to be outside on a hike with my husband. He was always so serious about things. Always so serious . . .”

  She choked her words off again.

  “Is this necessary?” Ted said.

  “Please, sir,” the deputy said. “If she doesn’t want to go on — ”

  “No,” Liz said. “I have to. For Arty. You have to know what kind of man he was. I slipped over the edge and he reached for me. I reached for him and grabbed his shirt. But he wasn’t balanced, I guess, and he went down. Over me.”

  She cleared her throat.

  “You’re doing good,” Ted said.

  Liz nodded. “I went after him. I hit my head and blacked out, I guess. Oh Arty!”

  She put her head in her hands.

  “Let me,” Ted said. “Take my statement now.”

  The deputy paused, nodded.

  “I was hiking along and enjoying myself when I heard this woman, Ms. Towne, call for help. I saw her on the trail and saw she was hurt and called 911. I had her sit and wait and went to see about the guy. I climbed down and saw he was dead. I just can’t tell you how strong she’s trying to be.”

  “I can see that,” the deputy said.

  “I want to be with Arty,” Liz said. “We can’t leave him there.”

  “No, ma’am. They’re sending a team to get him. We’ll take it from here.”

  Liz jumped up from the bench and started walking back toward the hills.

  “Ma’am?” the deputy said.
>
  Liz cried, “Arty!”

  6:42 p.m.

  Mac thought he’d take a chance and catch Arty at home. He had left three voice mails but still wasn’t getting a call back.

  Maybe there was something wrong with the phone.

  Or maybe there was something wrong at the house.

  It was no secret to anyone at church that Arty’s wife was not exactly down with his Christianity. She’d shown up with him at a couple of Sunday afternoon potlucks and was nice enough. But she was obviously strained.

  He tried to talk to her once over a piece of Mrs. Axelrod’s lemon cake. His impression was that she didn’t want anybody to get too close to her. He thought at the time she might just be shy.

  But according to Arty, it wasn’t shyness at all. She had a resistance, Arty called it, and he asked Mac to pray for her.

  He prayed for her now, as he drove his pickup around the curves of Circle Road, passing the little white church on his right.

  He thought about the first time he met Arty.

  Mac and Pastor Jon were fixing a flooded bathroom on a hot afternoon. It was a Saturday, and the place needed cleanup before the service the following morning. They’d rented a snake and were cleaning out some mean things in the depths of the porcelain abyss.

  “Does this mess remind you of anything?” Pastor Jon had asked.

  Mac laughed. “My past life?”

  “Exactly,” Jon said. “How ugly sin is, and how Jesus cleans us out. But not like this. Not on hands and knees with a lot of hard work. With Jesus, it’s instantaneous.”

  Jon liked to use everyday events and items in his sermon illustrations. Mac figured he was trying a new one out.

  “The Bible says God looks at us as righteous when he sees us through Jesus,” Jon said. “The fancy name for it is imputed righteousness. It’s like an accounting. The books are cleared when you’re in Christ.”

  Mac picked up a crescent wrench. “How about this?” he said. “Can you make up a Bible illustration with a crescent wrench?”

  “The love of God grips you,” Jon said. “And turns you around.”

  “Man, you’re quick,” Mac said. “Were you this quick when you were playing ball?”

  Jon was about to answer when they heard a knock.

  There was a guy standing at the open door, and he said, “Is there a minister around?”

  That was how Mac first got to know Arty Towne.

  Later, Mac would realize Jesus had performed a miracle in that bathroom. Only it had nothing to do with a backed-up toilet.

  It had to do with regenerating another sinner.

  Turned out Arty Towne was a guy full of questions. What good is religion when there’s so much suffering? Why did Jesus have to die? How can we know the Bible is true? Why are there so many nutty Christians?

  He also talked about making money. He made a lot of it, but in some kind of way he was starting to question. He wasn’t specific about it, but it was there just the same.

  Pastor Jon let him ask all he wanted, and the three of them sat inside the church for four hours, talking, reading the Bible.

  A little after five, Arty Towne received Christ in the Pack Canyon Community Church.

  Since then, Arty and Mac had become close. An unlikely pair. Arthur Towne, with a university education and a great job and a wife. And Daniel Patrick MacDonald, high-school dropout, wounded vet, ex-con.

  The only thing they shared was a Savior, but that was enough to start. Along the way, they found they both loved good Mexican food and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Mac told Arty that while he was in the joint, listening to the voice of Vin Scully on the radio on hot summer evenings kept him sane.

  Arty told Mac that radio sportscaster Vin Scully’s voice was etched like audio gold into his childhood memories, because of the ’88 Kirk Gibson homer in Game One of the World Series. They laughed and reminisced about that. They’d both seen that game on TV.

  Gibson, limping to the plate, barely able to move, Dodgers down a run in the bottom of the ninth. Eckersley on the mound. The most feared reliever in baseball. Two outs, a man on. Gibson fights the count to three and two.

  And then the shot heard round the world.

  Mac remembered Scully saying, In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened. For a time after that, Mac thought everything in his life would be okay. If the Dodgers could beat the A’s and Eckersley in the ninth, an out-of-whack vet could get his act together against the curves and sliders life was throwing at him.

  Arty told Mac he remembered those words from Scully, too, and that they made him want to go out and conquer the world. Made him think anything was possible if you believed enough.

  Their friendship was forged out of Jesus, baseball, and good eats. How could you get more American than that? Mac thought it made perfect sense. The amazing part for Mac was that Arty turned to him for Bible teaching. In the three months since Arty became a Chris tian, they’d been through almost the whole New Testament together.

  The lights were out at Arty’s place when Mac pulled into the drive way. There were no streetlights in this part of the canyon. The night seemed extra dark. LA haze in the sky obscured the stars. He went to the door and knocked.

  No answer.

  Sure. They could be anywhere. Movie. Dinner.

  But for some reason, Mac didn’t think so.

  For some reason, he thought somebody was in trouble.

  Headlights broke through the darkness.

  Who is that? Rocky thought. And why is he standing in front of Arty’s house?

  She checked the number. 871. And she knew it was Feather Lane — a street name she always found strange. But this was Pack Canyon. They did things differently here, and she didn’t much like it.

  A few weeks ago, there’d been a shooting. The Daily News ran it on the front page. A biker shot another biker at a biker bar. It was Wild West time.

  The guy looked like trouble, whoever he was. Broad shoulders and a hard expression as he squinted into the lights.

  She thought about backing up and driving away. She didn’t like Pack Canyon. She thought maybe she’d come back another time. But she had come all this way, and it was just one guy, and maybe he was a friend of Arty’s or something.

  If she needed to give him a swift kick, she would.

  She stopped the car but kept the engine idling. She got out and stood behind the door.

  “Is Arty home?” she said.

  The guy started down the steps. He wore blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and black jacket. He wasn’t bad looking, either. But then, neither was Boyd. Just get that thought out of your mind right now, Roxanne, you idiot.

  “No,” the guy said. “I’ve been trying to reach him.”

  She felt better when he said that. His voice was at least friendly. Still, she was ready to jump in the car and gun it if she had to.

  “You’re a friend of Arty’s?” she asked.

  “A good friend,” he said. He was at the door now. “Daniel MacDonald. People call me Mac.”

  “Oh yeah, Arty mentioned you,” Rocky said. “I’m his sister.”

  “Rocky? Glad to know you.” He stuck out his hand. “I was wondering when we’d meet.”

  “Uh-huh.” She shook his hand. “So any idea where he might be?”

  “No,” Mac said. “I’ve left a couple messages for him. Maybe he’s out with Liz.”

  “Great.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Nice meeting you,” Rocky said. She started to get back in the car.

  Mac said, “Don’t you want to wait?”

  “Maybe I’ll come back in a while.”

  “I was thinking of grabbing a burrito, if you want to wait with somebody.”

  She was hungry, and a burrito sounded good. Any kind of Mexican food sounded good. But she only had two dollars on her. And she wasn’t exactly ready to socialize with a stranger.

  “Thanks anyway,” she said.

  H
e said, “Are you sure? It’s about time we got to know each other. Arty’s sister and his bud. Besides which, I’m buying.”

  She hesitated, another refusal on her tongue. But it stayed there. Arty’s friend. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to get close to her brother again. This was a start.

  Besides, she noticed her stomach was playing mariachi music. “You talked me into it.”

  7:03 p.m.

  Liz made herself cry over her husband’s body, even though it was in a zipped-up coroner’s bag. She got the tears flowing as it was shoved into the back of a van, where it would be sent downtown.

  So they said. They seemed as unconcerned about it as if it were a sack of laundry. She guessed that must be the way it is when you handle a lot of dead bodies. Just another day at the office.

  Arty didn’t deserve that. She’d grant him that much. It made it a little easier to cry.

  They were still near the parking lot, she and this guy named Ted, and the detective from the LA County Sheriff ’s office. A woman named Moss. She wore a brown suit with a white blouse, and she had a six-point star on the left side of her belt. She was about forty-five years old. Wheat-colored hair with tight curls that looked like they did pushups. She was throwing around a little too much authority to suit Liz.

  “Once more, Mrs. Towne,” Detective Moss said. “And this will be all for tonight.”

  “I hope so,” Ted Gillespie said.

  Moss turned to him. “I believe a deputy took your statement. Is that correct, Sir?”

  “Yeah — ”

  “Then we’ll be in touch. Thanks for all you’ve done.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “I’d prefer to speak with Mrs. Towne alone for just a moment, if you don’t mind.”

  Ted glanced at Liz. He had a lost-puppy look. “But somebody needs to take her home,” he said.

  “I can drive,” Liz said.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Moss said. “Thanks again.”

  Ted shuffled his feet but didn’t move in any direction. Then he said to Liz, “Can I check on you tomorrow?”

  “No need,” Liz said.

  “But I want to.”

  “Thank you. I need a few days.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gillespie.” Moss gently pushed his arm and got him started off toward his car. He didn’t move very fast. Like a dinghy against the current. Resistant.