Deceit

by James Siegel

  What d’ya mean, not right for the part… you tell them…

  When he came out-his name was Sam Savage, according to the playbill-he was with two other members of the cast, a man and a woman. I was half-turned to the wall, undecided whether to go up and confront him or wait back for a while.

  I waited.

  They slipped out the door where the man waved good-bye. That left Sam with the lithe blond actress; they sauntered down the sidewalk hand in hand.

  I followed them, trying to keep a respectable distance. Maybe half a block or so.

  If you’ve never followed anyone, it’s harder than it looks.

  They weren’t just a moving target-they kept stopping too, peeking into one window or another, mostly her. He would separate from her, wander away, and sometimes turn around and stare back in my direction.

  I tried to mirror them, to anticipate, to stop, turn, and hope that when I turned back, they’d still be there.

  They turned right on Santa Monica and walked up to Seventh.

  The whole time, as I followed and ducked and covered, I kept asking myself one question. Like a mantra. Hoping that if I mumbled it long enough, I might figure things out.

  I was starting to connect the dots-here and there beginning to draw very shaky lines from one thing to another. But it was like that dream I had-every time I looked at the half-finished picture, it had disappeared like Littleton Flats itself.

  They ducked into a bar on Seventh.

  The Pinata.

  I didn’t have to walk inside to know what it looked like. Frozen margaritas with little pink umbrellas, plastic table tents with sombreros on them, wooden bowls of chips and salsa. I waited outside, listening to the strains of Los Lobos as people wandered in and out.

  Finally, I pushed the door open and walked inside.

  It was loud and packed.

  She was sitting alone at the bar. The actress. Sipping a gargantuan frozen margarita, the kind you could only dream about at Muhammed Alley.

  Where was he? Bathroom?

  I walked to the end of the bar farthest away from her, managed to squeeze myself in next to a group of five very drunk women, and ordered an Excellente, the house specialty according to the drink menu, a margarita made with Cuervo Gold, peach liqueur, and a secret ingredient they refused to divulge upon pain of death.

  I was halfway through my Excellente when I spotted him.

  I’d been staring at him for a while before I knew who it was. There was the actress-already starting on margarita number two. There was the fashionably decked-out couple sitting next to her-he with shaven head and sunglasses, she with tan, silicone-enhanced breasts. There was the waiter taking their order. It wasn’t until the waiter closed his pad, smiled, and leaned down to whisper something into her ear that I knew it was him.

  Why not?

  He was an actor. In an off-off-off-Broadway theater. Which meant he was also a real estate hawker, a telephone sales solicitor, a parking lot valet. Or a waiter. After the curtain went down, he simply traded one costume for another.

  I was starting to feel the margarita. Good.

  It was helping to dull the fear.

  I was sucking the last remnants of my second one when the lights suddenly began flickering on and off, on and off, on and off.

  Closing time.

  The five girls disappeared.

  Not the blond actress.

  He came out from the back, apron off, and whisked her off her stool.

  I took the opportunity to slink out of the bar, making sure to stand several yards away from the front entrance.

  They didn’t make sidewalks like they used to; this one was swaying like a rope bridge in a gale.

  The two of them came out the door and walked right past me without exhibiting the slightest recognition.

  I was just an audience member. Someone sitting out there in the dark.

  I became bolder with that realization, tailing them by mere feet. Stumbling after them like a third wheel.

  They turned the corner, and five seconds later I followed.

  Which is when an odd thing happened.

  I was greeted by empty sidewalk.

  Nothing.

  There was a car illegally parked on Fifth, but when I peeked through the window, no one was sitting in it.

  I felt the panic of walking into a dark and unfamiliar room when you have no idea where the light switch is.

  When you lose something, retrace your steps.

  I staggered back to the corner-looking for a doorway I might’ve missed. Somewhere they might’ve ducked inside.

  I felt his forearm smashing into my lower back before I actually saw him. Then I was on my knees, staring straight into very blurry pavement.

  “Okay, motherfucker, why are you following us?”

  My lower back was on fire. When I tried to get to my feet, he pressed his knuckles into my shoulders and shoved me back down. I felt his hot spittle spray against my neck.

  “Answerme, asshole!”

  “I had a follow-up question,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “There was something I forgot to ask you.” I could see the girl now. They must’ve been hiding behind the quaint, retro lamppost, waiting for me to come sauntering by.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m talking about the story.”

  “What story? Who the hell are you?”

  “I want to get up.” I was this close to throwing up. Too many Excellentes.

  He hesitated, then said: “Okay. But slowly, right, chief?”

  I managed to push myself up to a standing position without falling over. My left pants knee was ripped and bloody.

  When I turned and looked at him, I saw someone who’d simply been taking on a role before-that of the tough, streetwise hombre-but who now looked pretty much like an actor uncertain of his lines. For one thing, he’d stepped back as I turned around, a physical surrender of previously hard-won territory.

  Maybe he’d recognized me.

  “Hey there, Ed,” I said.

  He didn’t answer me.

  “He’s not Ed,” his girlfriend said, looking wary and spooked. “He’s Sam. You obviously have the wrong person. We thought you were trying to mug us. So we’ll just continue on our way home, okay?”

  “I know his name’s not Ed,” I said. “But he played someone named Ed. You remember, don’t you? A pharmaceutical salesman named Edward Crannell. On a highway outside Littleton.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  L.A. doesn’t have a lot of after-hour clubs like New York. L.A. wrapped up earlier. Maybe it was all that healthy living-everyone needing to be pumping their legs up on Mulholland Drive at 6 a.m.

  But there was at least one after-hours club in L.A.

  I followed Sam’s gray Mustang there.

  Sam had denied and denied and denied, and then pretty much given up when I told him I’d be happy to send him the story in the Littleton Journal with his picture in it. I hadn’t taken his picture that morning.

  He didn’t know that.

  We pulled up at storefront with completely blackened windows, stuck between a Live Nude Girls strip bar and an outdoor taco stand. Both appeared long closed. So did the store, but when Sam knocked on its door, someone answered and let us in.

  There seemed to be a lot of actor types in there-in that they were all various shades of beautiful and somewhat desperate-looking.

  We settled into a red leather banquette that might’ve come straight out of Goodfellas. The tables were a hodgepodge of styles, art deco to fifties luncheonette.

  “The owner ran props at Paramount,” Sam explained.

  Sam had his request for a dirty martini countermanded by his girlfriend-Trudy, she said her name was, who instead ordered him a ginger ale with no ice.

  “I don’t want to be carrying you home,” she said. “I saw you sneaking drinks at the Pinata.”

  Sam meekly acquiesced.

  After his gi
nger ale was delivered by a waitress in a black catsuit, I asked him, “Okay, who hired you?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Some guy. That’s it? Did the guy have a name?”

  “I don’t remember. I’m not shitting you. He was just some guy who needed an actor.”

  “Okay-fine. Where did you meet him?”

  “He got my name from a bulletin board. On the Web. You know, you place your headshots there and lie about all the productions you’ve been in, and sometimes you get a call. Mostly extra stuff.”

  “What did he say to you? This guy whose name you don’t know?”

  “That he needed an actor for one day’s work. Not even a day-a morning. An out-of-town job.”

  “Did you ask him what the work was? A film, a commercial?”

  “Sure. He said it was live theater.”

  “For one day? For one morning? Didn’t that strike you as kind of unusual?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you still went?”

  “He was paying me five thousand dollars.”

  “That’s where you got the money?” Trudy said. “You said you sold your bar mitzvah bonds-liar.”

  Sam looked suddenly sheepish. I couldn’t help feeling-just for a moment-the empathy that one liar feels for another. In another context, I might’ve bought him a drink and commiserated with him like two kindred souls.

  “You know what extra work pays?” he asked me. “Two fifty a day. If you can get it. And that’s more than they’re paying me for that moronic play. This was five thousand, okay? I have bills to pay.”

  “Did you drive out to Littleton with this generous benefactor? Or just meet him there?”

  “I drove out myself.”

  “To Highway 45?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what did you find there?”

  He’d begun playing with a matchbook, flipping it back and forth between his middle finger and thumb-flip, flip, flip. “The car was already on fire,” he said softly.

  “So, what’d you do-call 9-1-1. Flag down a passing car?”

  “He said it was empty. Just a dummy in there-part of the show. I swear to God, on my mother’s life.”

  “Your mother’s dead,” Trudy said flatly.

  “It’s an expression. Okay, fine, I swear to God on my life…” He was staring at me in full pleading mode, as if it was very important for me to believe him. “Nobody was in there. That’s what he said. Nobody real. You think I would’ve gotten involved in any kind of…” His voice trailed off.

  “Any kind of what?” his girlfriend said, looking more disgusted by the second.

  “Well, you know… crime or something. The guy needed an actor and he paid me five thousand to act. That’s it.”

  “He was there when you got out there?” I asked. “The man who paid you?”

  Sam nodded.

  “What did he look like?”

  Sam took a sip of his ginger ale. “Weird. You know… like, it’s hard to put into words exactly… he had a sort of pushed-in face… No, not pushed in, just not fully pushed out… Understand what I’m saying? He had this really high voice, too. Like a girl’s…”

  You’re it.

  “Okay,” I said. “There’s a burning car there. And him-anyone else?”

  “Not yet. He said other people would be coming-just like a regular accident. You know, the police, an ambulance-I should play it like we’d collided, me and this car, even though no one was really in there. It was just for show.”

  “And you believed him?”

  Sam nodded.

  “I was there, Sam. Remember?”

  Sam looked away, down at the floor, at the smoky throng by the bar, at the walls plastered with old Peter Max prints, scanning the room as if searching for the nearest exit.

  “Remember the smell, Sam? Remember that odor coming from the car? You knew what that was, didn’t you? You knew what it meant? Who’s the dummy here, Sam?”

  Sam had redirected his stare at his lonely glass of ginger ale, as if he wanted to dive in and drown. His eyes began tearing up. For the first time that night, I knew he wasn’t acting.

  “I…” He picked his hands up in a gesture of hopeless remorse. “Look, I tried to believe him, okay. The guy said it was an act. I’d driven all the way out there already, he tells me no one’s in the car, then suddenly the police drive up, and an ambulance, and then you show up…”

  “The other car-your car. The smashed-in Sable. Whose was it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was there when I got there. I think he drove it.”

  “Okay. What about after?”

  “After what?”

  “After I left? After you politely answered my questions about the accident? By the way-were you improvising, or was there some kind of script you were supposed to follow?”

  “He told me what to say. More or less. The basic idea of it-how the accident happened. I just riffed on it.”

  “To the sheriff?”

  He nodded. “And you.”

  “Right. That didn’t bother you, making things up to a policeman? You weren’t concerned you might get in trouble?”

  A black girl on six-inch heels had wandered over to our banquette. She reached down and hugged Trudy.

  “Rudey…” she said. “You haven’t called me in a dog’s age, girl. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing much,” Trudy said.

  “I heard you’re doing the-a-ter.”

  “Yeah,” Trudy said without much enthusiasm.

  “With your significant other, huh?”

  “He’s not as significant as you think,” Trudy said.

  Sam turned to look at her with a hangdog expression of pure agony.

  “Look,” Trudy said to her, “we’re engaged in something kind of private here. Promise to call you, okay?”

  The girl said: “Private, huh?” giving me a glance that seemed mildly lascivious. “Okay, see ya.”

  “After I left, what happened?” I asked Sam.

  “Nothing. I got paid. That’s it.”

  “That’s it. You didn’t ask him what the little play was about? You get called to the middle of the California desert and find a car on fire with the obvious smell of burning human being in the air, and you lie to a sheriff and a local reporter and you take your money and you don’t ask him, not even once, what the hell was going on?”

  “I asked him,” Sam said, an almost whisper.

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said it was a reality show. Have a nice life.”

  “That’s it. You didn’t ask him again?”

  Sam shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t want to know. Okay?”

  Like someone else, I suddenly remembered. There’d been moments, when this someone else had sat there and listened to my overheated explanations, my rationalizing away one inconsistency or another, and I thought, he knows, it’s right there on the tip of his tongue, but he will not say it. He won’t.

  “So you drove back and that’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never picked up a paper or looked on the Web to see if anybody really died out there? No curiosity at all?”

  He shook his head. “I told you. I wanted to forget about it.”

  The first gray glimmer of morning was beginning to poke through the front window where the black paint had flecked off; it looked like a canopy of washed-out stars.

  “Tell me about that place on the Web again. Where he just happened to pick you.”

  “What about it?”

  “How did he know you wouldn’t get out there and just turn around and leave?”

  “I told you. It was a lot of money to me.”

  “Yeah, you told me. But there’s a limit to what people will do, even for a lot of money. How did he know you’d go along with it?”

  Trudy folded her arms and fixed him with a withering stare.

  Sam shrugged.

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

&n
bsp; “Sure you do. I’m asking you why he picked you. Come on, Sam. What kind of Web site are we talking about here?”

  “I told you. Just an actors’ bulletin board.”

  “What kind of actors?”

  Sam sighed, squirmed in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for divine guidance, maybe.

  “I heard about it from another actor, okay-this new Web site that helps actors, you know, who need a little extra cash…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Actors who are willing to act in nontraditional formats.”

  “Nontraditional formats. Is that what you call it?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Trudy didn’t get it; maybe she’d had to swallow a lot in this relationship, but she couldn’t digest this. Not yet.

  “Tell her, Sam. Say it.”

  “Well, you know…”

  I said it for him. “Cons. For enough money you loaned yourself out for con jobs. That’s the only kind of acting that would pay five thousand dollars for one morning, isn’t it?”

  Sam didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to.

  A chill was slowly working its way up my spine, one vertebra at a time.

  I turned to Trudy.

  “I would watch your back if I were you.”

  When Sam looked up at me with a suddenly queasy expression, I said: “The man who paid you. He might not like the fact that you’re walking around. Not anymore. Okay?”

  That shock of recognition.

  Confronted with something half-familiar and half-remembered.

  A group of desperate Hollywood actors selling themselves to the Russian mob for cons.

  Remember?

  One of my stories.

  Only it was one of those stories.

  Currently featured on a certain online Web site courtesy of a great American newspaper that I’d almost brought to its knees.

  Fodder from Valle’s prodigious canon of deceit.

  Dramatically constructed. Exquisitely detailed. Rigorously recounted.

  But not true.

  Not true.

  Not one single fucking word of it.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I can hear helicopters outside my motel room.

  They sound military. If I had to guess, I’d say Black Hawks, buzzing low in formation, out on a search-and-destroy.