by James Siegel
Deceit
James Siegel
It looks like just another car crash: a head-on collision on a lonely stretch of desert highway that leaves one driver dead. But Tom Valle, the local newspaperman assigned to the story, is damned good at spotting lies. And for Valle, once a star reporter at America's most prestigious daily, this so-called accident may be just the ticket he needs to resurrect his career and get him out of the aptly named town of Littleton, California, for good. Yet as Valle eagerly starts investigating, he finds himself the only one who cares about getting the story right. As he starts checking facts, and unveiling lie after lie, he finds himself completely alone — and negotiating a dark trail of corruption, cover-ups, fraud, and murder that stretches back for decades. The more he discovers, the closer he gets to the heart of a conspiracy that threatens to destroy him. From a seedy after-hours bar in L.A. to a remote cabin in the woods to the dark corridors of a psychiatric ward, Valle is desperately seeking redemption in the truth. But, as the boy who cried wolf so many times before, will anyone believe him?
James Siegel
Deceit
Once there were two villages. One village where they always told the truth. Another village where they always lied. One day a traveler came to a fork in the road. He knew one road led to the village where they always told the truth. In this village he would find food and shelter. The other road led to the village where everyone lied. In that village he knew he’d be beaten, robbed, even killed. A man stood at the fork in this road, but the traveler didn’t know which village this man came from. The one where they always told the truth, or the one where they always lied? “You can ask me one question,” the man said. “Just one.” The traveler thought and pondered and finally he knew which question to ask. He pointed to the left road and said: “Is this the road to your village?” “Yes,” the man answered him. The traveler nodded, said thank you, and started down the road. He knew if he was addressing a man from the village where they always told the truth, then it was of course the road to the right village. And if he were addressing someone from the village of liars, then the man would have to lie and say yes as well. Whether the man was the liar or the truth-teller, he would give exactly the same answer.
ONE
I am writing this as fast as I can.
I am galloping through hostile territory like the Pony Express, because I absolutely must deliver the mail.
I’ve already taken my fair share of arrows. And though I’m clearly wounded, I’m not dead.
Not yet.
I’m trying mightily to remember everything germane.
I’m a bit shaky on the timeline, on the cause and effects. On specificity.
I am freely and honestly admitting to this. Just so when all the little editors begin flourishing their red pencils, and they will, I’ll have hopefully, if only momentarily, dulled the momentum of their onrushing venom.
I don’t blame them. I truly don’t.
I am, after all, the boy who cried wolf. Who shouted, screamed, and plastered it across two-inch headlines.
Mea culpa.
All I can tell you is that what I’m writing in this claustrophobic motel room is the absolute, unvarnished, 100 percent truth.
So help me God. Scout’s honor. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Change hope to expect.
This isn’t just my last story.
It’s my last will and testament.
Pay attention.
You are my executor.
One brief digression.
Writing my last story, I can’t help but remember my first.
I was 9.
It was snowing. Not the paltry dusting that generally passed for snow in Queens, New York. No, the sky was actually dumping snow, as if someone had loosened a giant saltshaker top up there. Icicles were being blown off our sagging gutters and straight into the brick walls of the house, where they splintered with the sound of ball meeting bat.
Schools would be closed all week.
My brother Jimmy slipped on the ice and he hit his head, I wrote on neatly lined composition paper. He is always falling down and stuff like that. He walked into a door and he got a black eye. Last week he fell down in the tub, and he burnt himself. He is really clumsy and my mom keeps telling him to watch where he’s going, but he don’t listen. He is only 6.
I brought the story into the kitchen where my mother was slumped over the table, staring into an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“Read it to me,” she slurred.
After I finished, she said: “Okay, good. I want you to memorize it. They’ll be here in an hour.”
TWO
There were no storm warnings.
No emergency disaster center urging me to board up the windows and leave town.
I can look back to that day, borrow a cliche (I apologize to my first journalism professor, who abhorred cliches as much as he abhorred the newly instituted no-fraternization-with-coeds rule), and state that with the exception of Belinda Washington turning 100, absolutely nothing that day was out of the ordinary. Ordinary, after all, was pretty much the daily state of affairs in Littleton, California-approximately 153 miles east of L.A.
Change approximately to exactly.
Two years ago I’d driven every mile of it in my last certifiably owned possession-a silver-blue Miata, purchased back when Miatas were hot shit. A case could be made that back then I was, too.
Now the Miata was ignobly dented in two separate places, with a sluggish transmission that complained loudly when asked to change gears.
On the morning in question, I was summoned into Hinch’s office and told to cover Belinda Washington’s centennial. Clearly a human-interest piece. You could safely state that every article in the Littleton Journal was a human-interest piece. It went to press only five times a week-sometimes less, if not enough local news had taken place since the previous issue. The only serious news stories that made it into the town’s paper were picked up from the AP, stories that came from places like Baghdad and Kabul, where you could almost smell the cordite emanating off the type. I perused them longingly, as if they were dirty French postcards from a long-ago era.
Belinda Washington was from a long-ago era.
You could intuit that from the wheelchair and her nearly bald pate. When I entered the dayroom of Littleton’s only senior citizen home, she was wearing a ridiculous paper tiara with the number 100 printed on it. It was obviously someone’s idea of cute. Probably not Belinda’s. She didn’t look happy as much as bewildered. I dutifully maintained my objectivity and resisted the urge to knock it off her head.
These days, I was strictly adhering to the noble tenets of my profession.
I introduced myself to the managing director of the home, a Mr. Birdwell, who was orchestrating the august occasion with the aid of a digital camera. Good. That would save me from having to snap any pictures. On the Littleton Journal, we multitasked.
I kneeled down in front of Belinda and introduced myself in a louder-than-normal voice.
“Hello, Mrs. Washington. Tom Valle from the Littleton Journal.”
“What you shouting for?” Belinda asked, grimacing. Evidently, Belinda wasn’t any fonder of patronizing reporters than she was of paper tiaras.
“Take that thing off my head,” she added.
“Gladly.” I stood up and removed the tiara, handing it to one of the male attendants who looked personally miffed that I’d intruded on their fun.
“That’s better,” Belinda said.
“Sure,” I said. “Well, happy birthday, Mrs. Washington. What’s it like to be 100 years old?”
“What you think it’s like?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“More fun turning 18.”
“That would’ve been…
what, 1920 something?”
“’22.”
“Right. Math was my worst subject.”
“Not me. I’m good at it.”
I’d expected to be interviewing a drooling apparition. So far, the only one doing any drooling was myself. One of the partygoers was kind of attractive. Auburn-haired, 30-ish, seamlessly fitted into lime green capris and precariously perched on three-inch heels. There were moments I thought my drooling days were past me-not because of my age (nudging 40) but just because everything was past me-all the good stuff, and didn’t women constitute good?
Belinda lifted a skeletal hand.
“I miss things,” she said.
For a moment, I thought she was referring to the general bane of old age, things getting past her: conversations, names, dates.
She wasn’t. She was referring to that other bane of old age.
“People have gone and died on me,” she said. And she smiled, half wistfully, but half, I think, because she was flirting with me.
The feeling was mutual. Objectivity or not, I kind of liked her.
Belinda was black, a true rarity in Littleton-Latinos yes, blacks virtually nonexistent-deep black, like ebony. This made her milky eyes pop-the palms of her hands, too, pink as cat paws.
She beckoned me with one of those gnarled, ancient hands.
I wondered what had gained me this special privilege? Probably no one ever talked to her anymore, I thought. Except to tell her to take her meds, turn out the light, or put on a stupid hat.
“People have gone and died on me,” she repeated, “but one, he came back.”
“Came back?”
“Sure. He said hey.”
“Who was that?”
“Huh? My son.”
“Your son? Really. Where did he come back from?”
“Huh? Told you. He passed on… long time ago, but he came back to say hey. He say he forgive me.”
“Oh, okay. Got you.” I was tempted to ask what she’d done that needed forgiveness, but really, what was the point? Belinda was feeling her age, after all. When I looked up, one of the attendants shrugged, as if to say, what else would you expect? The woman in capris, evidently there to visit one of the other residents, threw me a wan smile that seemed mildly encouraging.
“Looked old as me,” Belinda said.
“Your son?”
“Yeah. He looked sickly.”
I almost made the kind of wiseass comment I was given to uttering in the old days, when I hung with the kind of crowd that conversed mostly in cynicisms. Back before I became a national punch line. I almost said: considering he’s dead, sickly’s a step up.
I didn’t.
I said: “That’s too bad.”
Belinda laughed, a soft knowing laugh, that made me feel a little embarrassed, and something else.
Nervous.
“I ain’t fooling wit’ you,” Belinda said. “And I ain’t crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were crazy, Mrs. Washington.”
“Nah. But you nice.”
I changed the subject. I asked her how long she’d been a guest of the home. Where was she born? What was her secret to longevity? All the harmless questions you learn in high school journalism. I avoided asking her what family she had left, since, with the possible exception of her dead son, none had bothered to show.
After a while, I became cognizant of the smell permeating the room-stale and medicinal, like a cellar filled with moldering files. It became impossible to ignore the ugly stains in the linoleum floor, the melanoma-like cigarette burns in the lopsided card table. Mrs. Washington was wearing a polka dot dress that smelled faintly of camphor, but the rest of them were dressed in yolk-stained robes and discolored T-shirts. A man had only one sock on.
I felt like leaving.
Mr. Birdwell snapped a picture of Belinda enclosed in a gleaming thicket of wheelchairs and walkers. I stuck my hand in and said bye.
“One more,” Mr. Birdwell said. “And this time I want to see a smile on our birthday girl.”
The birthday girl ignored him-evidently she wasn’t in a smiling mood. Instead, she grabbed my hand and squeezed tight.
“Yeah, you a nice fellow,” she said.
Her skin felt ice cold.
THREE
We had a terrible accident just outside town.
That’s what Hinch’s secretary said-scratch that-his assistant, political correctness having intruded 150 miles into the California desert. Stewardesses were attendants now, secretaries were assistants, and occupying armies in the Middle East were defenders of freedom.
It’s a measure of fast approaching my second anniversary there that when Norma said we-I thought we. It was official: Tom Valle, one-time denizen of SoHo, NoHo, and assorted other fashionably abbreviated New York City neighborhoods, had become a true Littletonian.
“What kind of accident?” I asked her.
“A smashup on 45,” she said. “A goddamn fireball.”
For a dedicated churchgoer, Norma had a strange affinity for using the Lord’s name in vain. Things were either God-awful, Goddamned, God-forbidden, God help us, or God knows.
“Aww, God,” Norma said. “You kind of wonder how many people were in that car.”
The sheriff had just phoned in the news, assuming Hinch might be interested in a suitably gory car crash. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. Hinch was currently at lunch. The other feature reporter, Mary-Beth, was on ad hoc maternity leave. When she got tired of watching her unemployed husband down voluminous amounts of Lone Star beer, Mary-Beth showed up. Otherwise, no. There was an intern on summer break from Pepperdine, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Maybe I should go cover it.”
Norma, who was not the editor, but the editor’s assistant, shrugged her shoulders.
This time I took a camera.
I wasn’t fond of accidents. Some are.
The smell of blood excites them. The aura of death. Maybe the simple relief that it happened to someone else.
The problem was I felt like that someone else.
Like the unfortunate victim of a car accident. The fact that I was the driver, that I’d soberly taken hold of the wheel and steered the car straight off a cliff, didn’t do anything to alleviate the uncomfortable empathy I felt in the presence of a wreck.
Norma was right about the fireball.
The car was still smoldering. It looked like a hunk of charcoal that had somehow fallen out of the backyard grill.
One fire engine, one sheriff’s car, and one ambulance were parked by the side of the two-lane highway. Another car was conspicuously present, a forest green Sable. Its front fender was completely crumpled, a man I assumed to be the driver leaning against the side door with his head in his hands. Everyone was pretty much watching.
Sheriff Swenson called me over.
“Hey, Lucas,” he said.
I’ll explain the Lucas.
It was for Lucas McCain, the character played by Chuck Connors in The Rifleman. After The Rifleman, Chuck moved on to a series called Branded, where he played a Union soldier who’d allegedly fled from the Battle of Bull Run and was forever after branded a coward. He drifted from town to town where, despite selfless acts of heroism, someone always discovered his true identity. You might imagine that’d be hard to do in the Old West.
Not in the new west.
Sheriff Swenson had Googled me.
He couldn’t recall the character’s name in Branded, so he called me Lucas.
It was better than liar.
“Hello, sheriff.”
Sheriff Swenson didn’t look like a small-town sheriff. Maybe because he’d spent twenty years on the LAPD before absconding to Littleton with full pension. He still had the requisite square jaw, bristle cut, and physique of a gym attendant, the palpable menace that must’ve made more than one Rodney King spill his guts without Swenson ever having to pick up a stun gun.
Today he looked kind of placid.
Maybe the dancin
g flames had mesmerized him. He had that look you get after staring into a fireplace for longer than you should.
There was something worth mentioning beside the burning car. Something everyone was politely declining to acknowledge, like a homeless relative who’s somehow crashed the family reunion.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of smelling burnt human, it smells like a mix of honey, tar, and baked potato. One of the truly worst smells on earth.
“How many were in there?” I asked the sheriff.
“Oh, just make it up,” he said after a while. I imagine he was being half funny and half not. Just like with the nickname.
“Okay. But if I wanted to be factual?”
“If you wanted to be factual, the answer would be one,” he said.
I looked back at the other driver, who still had his face pressed to his hands as if he didn’t wish to see. When the body shop commented on the sorry state of his car, he’d say you should’ve seen the other guy.
“How did it happen?”
“You mean, how did the accident transpire?” the sheriff said.
“Yeah.”
“Quickly.”
“Right. But who hit who?”
“He was going south,” the sheriff said, motioning to the man covering his eyes. “He was going north,” nodding at the smoldering wreck. “Northbound car drifted into the southbound lane. At least, according to our sole witness.”
“Who’s that?”
“Our sole survivor.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
“It’d be nice.”
“Then have a nice time.”
I walked over to the crumpled Sable; the man had finally picked his head up out of his hands. He had that look-the one you see in the faces of people who’ve just juked death. Cursed with the awful knowledge of life’s ridiculous fragility. He was moving various pieces of his body in halting slow motion, as if they were made of fine, breakable china.
“Hello. Tom Valle of the Littleton Journal. Could I speak to you a minute?”
