by James Siegel
Too late to stop it, of course.
Something happens when you hit the brakes in a car doing sixty. You can safely assume that’s how fast Dennis Flaherty’s car was traveling on a mostly deserted highway in the early a.m.
It’s simple physics.
When you jam the brakes of a car traveling that fast, the tires can’t help but skid. Dry pavement, wet pavement, it doesn’t really matter. Somewhere it will leave little particles of rubber adhering to the road.
That was the something I noticed was missing.
Skid marks.
There wasn’t a single skid mark on the road.
EIGHT
I lie, therefore I am.
I’d discovered those words carved into my desk with a Swiss army penknife one day back in New York.
I assumed a Swiss army penknife had done the damage, because one of my fellow reporters had once shown it to me. It was his lucky talisman, he told me. It had gotten him through two wars and a near kidnapping in Tikrit.
Lately, he’d begun reading my copy with avid interest. He asked me for drinks one night and marveled at my sources. At my knack for being at the center of things. At my nose for the story.
He asked me fawning questions about my obvious alacrity at ferreting out the truth.
It was only later that I realized that he might’ve bought more drinks than I could count, but they were all my drinks. His vodka-Grey Goose, straight up-had sat untouched exactly where he’d placed it.
One of us did have a real alacrity for ferreting out the truth, but it wasn’t me.
I lie, therefore I am.
Guilty as charged.
After I reread my notes, wishing for once I’d developed an affinity for tape recorders, I drove to Muhammed Alley. I ordered a margarita-no salt-from BJ’s cousin, who tended bar on nights BJ stayed home and played dad. BJ apparently had four children from three different women, none of whom he’d ever married.
It was a little like the old days, I thought.
If you went back. Way back, to the old, old days.
When I’d first fallen in love. When I’d first bowed to the deities of Woodward and Bernstein. When I’d offered them up daily sacrifices, including my every waking hour, forswearing anything resembling a social life. When I’d pounded the pavement like I pounded the keys on my Mac-with a desperation born of true-blue obsession.
Those days.
When I believed I did have a nose for the story-I might’ve been the only one who did-that I could sniff them out like a customs dog. Someone would say something offhand-a state congressman, a mayor’s aide, a police official-and alarms would go off. Only I could hear them; they were at a pitch unknown to ordinary working hacks. I’d feverishly start digging, looking for something hidden and odious, never meant to see the light of day.
Most of the time, all you found was mud. Murky and insubstantial. You couldn’t sling it without two-sourced and verifiable proof.
There were exceptions, of course. Occasional investigations that actually uncovered something half-interesting. Nothing major, nothing incendiary enough to burn a hole into the public consciousness, but worthy enough to land me somewhere north of page 10.
On those mornings, when I perused my byline with awe and gratitude and even humility, I thought it was just possible I was on the side of the angels.
I was hearing alarms again.
Someone had tripped the wire, set off the circuitry, and jarring bells were going off in my head.
Seth stopped by.
“What’s shaking?” he said, hopping up on the next stool.
Me, I wanted to say. I’m shaking, rattling, and rolling.
“Working on a story,” I said.
“That’s funny. It looks like you’re working on a margarita. Heh-heh.”
I kind of liked Seth, in the way one fuckup feels genuine empathy for another, but tonight I felt this, well… distance between us. Wasn’t I back in the saddle, and wasn’t he still stuck in the mud?
“I need ten,” I said to him.
“Barking up the wrong tree, amigo,” he said. “I’m tapped out. Honest.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Oh.” He looked embarrassed, momentarily he did, and I suddenly felt kind of rotten for relegating a bowling team member to the ranks of the annoying and superfluous-even one with a noticeable mullet.
“Okay,” he said, sliding off the stool with feigned indifference. “That’s cool.”
“Buy you a drink when I finish,” I said.
“No problem.”
The question was, finish what?
I asked BJ’s cousin for a pen. I used my napkin to jot things down-basically everything I knew.
I was in the Acropolis Diner playing connect-the-dots again.
What has no testicles, no skid marks, and two races?
Got me.
I even threw in the assault in the basement for good measure-scribbled it there at the bottom of the napkin as a kind of addendum.
Still no clue.
Or many clues, but no answers.
Or simply random incidences.
Which would make them coincidences.
I doodled in the margins. I drew lines from one thing to another. I Etch A Sketched.
I drew two cars and blackened one till it disappeared.
I wrote down their names. Ed Crannell and Dennis Flaherty-who might or might not have been a black man.
I’d start with him, I decided.
The dead man.
When Seth came back and asked for his drink-7 and 7, a leftover from high school days, I imagined, when Seth was still hot shit and maybe the future even looked promising-I stared at him with what must’ve been a curiously blank expression.
“My drink, man. Did you or did you not offer me a cocktail?”
“Oh, sure. Just order it. I gotta run.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Writing an obituary,” I said.
That’s how I began.
Stuffed in a cluttered cubicle preparing obits for still-living, breathing people-mostly famous ones, of course-chiseling their headstones for that time when they’d be needed. The hardest part was remembering the right tense, to relegate legions of the still upright to the recent past.
Is into was. Doing into did. Living into lived.
My first professional lies.
NINE
My Miata didn’t start.
I gave it the gas, once, twice, three times.
I must’ve flooded the engine.
I got out, opened up the hood, and stared at the tangle of wires, tubes, and metal as if I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t. I couldn’t tell a carburetor from a transmission.
It doesn’t matter. That’s what you do when your car doesn’t start. You open up the hood and stare knowingly at the engine.
I was hoping one of the parts might speak to me. Over here, Tom-it’s me. I’m the culprit.
No such luck.
I was agitated, pissed off, finally on a roll and suddenly no wheels.
I was wondering where my friend Marv the Exxon owner was when I really needed him. I was going to head back into Muhammed Alley and ask Seth for a lift.
Then I didn’t have to.
A cherry red Beetle pulled into the parking lot. A woman got out, began walking in the general direction of the alley entrance, turned, and noticed me.
“Car problems?”
“That would account for the open hood,” I said, more caustically than I’d intended.
She swiveled around and continued on her way in.
“Wait a second. Yes. Car problems. Big car problems.”
She stopped and turned back toward me.
I recognized her.
I felt that little flutter. That unexpected bump in the biorhythms.
“I saw you at Belinda Washington’s birthday party,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right.” She’d stopped about five feet from me. She was wearing a skirt this ti
me-denim, ending just above her calves. It was hard not to notice those calves were tan, toned, and gently rounded. “The reporter, right?”
“I used to be.”
“Used to be? I thought you were doing a story?”
“I was. I’m being self-deprecating.”
“You might want to leave that to someone else,” she said.
Her smile accented the soft dimple on her left cheek. I used to have one, too. My mom, in one of her sentimental moments, as opposed to her terrifyingly volcanic ones-both of them alcohol-induced with no way to predict which one she’d slide into any given day-told me God had stuck his finger in my cheek when he was done molding me. After a certain age, I couldn’t find it anymore. It just disappeared.
“My car won’t start,” I said.
“Yeah, I kind of got that.” She walked over and peeked under the hood.
It was around 8 p.m. on what had been a sizzling June day, still light enough to see but growing dimmer by the second. The kind of light that softens everything, that might’ve sent an impressionist sprinting for the canvas and brushes. That makes a woman bent over at the waist a thing of rare and numbing beauty.
Clang. Bang. Clink.
She unscrewed something, poked inside the engine.
“Your coil wire’s loose,” she said after a few minutes. “Try it now.”
I crawled into the front seat, gave it some gas.
Vroooooooooooooom.
“I guess this is what they call role reversal,” I said, once I’d extricated myself from the car and shaken her hand. “Thanks.”
“My pop was a mechanic,” she said. “He basically lived under the hood. It was the only way I could spend time with him.”
“You must’ve been paying attention.” Her hand was back by her side, but I could still feel the impression of her fingers-hot flesh and cool lacquer.
“Enough to spot a loose coil wire,” she said. “It’s really not that hard.”
At least she smiled when she said it.
“Tom Valle,” I introduced myself, cognizant that the flutter hadn’t gone away, that it was still flitting madly around my chest like a butterfly caught in a net.
“Anna Graham,” she said.
“Were you visiting someone? At the home?”
“My pop. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
Silence. I was trying to stare and not stare at the same time. The kind of thing you do your first time at a nude beach. It’s easier with sunglasses on.
“Well,” she said, “I was on my way in.”
For a moment, I was going to say, what a coincidence, me, too. I was on my way in, too. Clearly, I’d been on my way out.
“Are you… uhh…?”
“What?” She was shading her eyes against the sun’s glare, but even squinting, her eyes were wide enough to meander around in.
“Are you staying here? In Littleton?”
“Just for a few days. I live in Santa Monica.”
“Santa Monica, huh.”
“On Fifth, right off the promenade.”
“Ever had drinks at Shutters?”
“No.”
“It’s got a pretty bar.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I’ll see you there someday.”
Her expression said maybe not.
I drove home.
When I walked through the door, I was going to turn right and head up to the bedroom to watch Nick at Nite reruns of I Love Lucy. I did love Lucy, at least maintained a true-blue affection for her. After all, Lucy, Ethel, Fred, and Ricky had babysat my brother and me through numerous afternoons when my mom was present but otherwise occupied, when she’d traded Jim, Jack, and Johnnie for Tom, Dick, and Vinny, a parade of mostly faceless men who sometimes tousled my hair on their way upstairs.
I didn’t go watch I Love Lucy. Instead I flicked on the basement light at the top of the steps and walked down. Tentatively. Making sure to stop at each step and peek.
As far as I could tell, the basement was empty this time.
I’d given it a cursory look after the assault, when I’d finally lifted myself to a wobbly semblance of standing.
He’d been kneeling halfway between the heater and the wall.
The place I’d first seen him.
Banging around with that metal thing in his hand. You could safely assume he hadn’t been fixing the boiler.
So what had he been doing?
If he was breaking and entering, why had he come down here?
I felt along the wall. There were two lopsided shelves nailed into the plaster. Some old paint cans, stiffened rags, a broken radio from the fifties sitting on top of a tattered board game. I wiped off the coating of dust. Milton Bradley’s Life. For a brief moment, I saw myself hurrying a tiny blue car around the labyrinthine road to Millionaire’s Mansion, hoarding my pile of funny money from my mother’s rheumy eyes. Not that she didn’t see things. Jimmy cheating, for instance. She always saw that. Swiping money from the bank like a little thief.
A sudden pang of dread lodged itself in the center of my chest.
I looked down where the drywall met the floor. A brown spider scurried beneath a paint can.
A jar of bottle caps.
A cracked hockey stick with the faded logo of the San Jose Sharks.
A nearly unraveled baseball.
Some old books. A biography of Edward R. Murrow. A History of the Cold War. Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam. Hiroshima by John Hersey.
Wren’s, I imagined.
There was plaster dust sitting on the cover photo of a mushroom cloud. When I pushed the books aside, I uncovered a large, ragged hole in the wall. You would’ve needed something pretty heavy to do that, I thought, trying to picture that metal thing in the plumber’s hand. The thing he’d ended up whacking me over the head with.
I peeked into the hole but saw nothing but drywall and ripped edges of newspaper insulation.
When I continued my way around the basement, I stepped on something.
Small and plastic.
I kneeled down, assaulted by the strong scent of mildew, and picked it up.
A phone-jack cover. The screw was still dangling in the hole.
Where had it come from?
There. Along the base of the wall.
The phone jack was open, red and yellow wires separated from their respective screws, reaching into the air like fingers frozen in rigor mortis.
I brought the cover over to the single naked bulb dangling from the basement ceiling. The jack was obviously unused-there was no phone down here. The cover might’ve been lying around forever, years even.
There was no dust on it.
So, okay, it hadn’t been.
TEN
This time Mrs. Flaherty was warier.
“What do you want now?” she asked.
“I’m investigating the accident,” I told her.
“Investigating?”
“That’s right. I’m beginning to think it didn’t happen the way they said it did.”
“Who said? I don’t understand.”
“The other driver. I don’t think it happened the way he described it.”
“You think he’s lying?”
“Maybe he’s confused. Or he thinks the accident was his fault, so he made things up.”
“They told me Dennis drove into the wrong lane.”
“Yeah. That’s what the other driver said.”
No, I realized. The other driver had said Dennis drifted into the wrong lane.
I suddenly understood.
His depression, his drinking…
Mrs. Flaherty thought Dennis had done it on purpose-steered his car into oncoming traffic in a moment of suicidal clarity.
“You don’t believe him? This other driver-what was his name, Earl?” she asked.
“Ed. Ed Crannell.”
“You don’t believe him?”
�
�Maybe not.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said softly. “My son’s dead.”
I heard what sounded like sobbing.
I waited. It was 8:32 a.m. Norma hadn’t come in yet. The office of the Littleton Journal was a simple storefront sandwiched between Foo Yang Chinese takeout and Ted’s Guns amp; Ammo, which offered Michael Moore targets with every purchased handgun.
“Mrs. Flaherty? Can you describe Dennis for me?”
“What?”
“Can you describe your son?”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t biracial, was he?”
“Biwhat?”
“I mean, Dennis was Caucasian. White, right?”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m just trying to…”
“What are you saying?”
“Just clarifying things…”
“The police said it was Dennis. I buried him.”
“Of course. Five-foot-nine, brown hair, olive eyes. That’s your son, Dennis?”
“Why’d you ask if he was negro?”
“Look, forget I even…”
“You think it wasn’t him, is that it?”
“No…”
“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You think it might’ve been someone else. A negro. He was all burned up… black.” She wasn’t asking anymore; she was stating. Hope had infused her voice with the sudden fervor of the true believer.
I should’ve stopped her, of course. Right there. I should’ve said that wasn’t my point at all, no, I was merely getting his description in the interest of journalistic accuracy.
Maybe the words journalistic accuracy were legally banned from my vocabulary. There was that catch in her throat to contend with. That thrilling willingness to swallow something whole. I’d heard that seductive sound before-around the table at editorial roundups, where I’d offer stories for approval amid the sweet buzzing of acolytes.
Understand and forgive. It was like blowing smoke in the face of a nicotine addict.
“Just supposing,” I said to Mrs. Flaherty, “that someone robbed Dennis? What if someone stole his car, his wallet? The body was unrecognizable. I’m just trying to be 100 percent sure here.”
