Deceived

by James Scott Bell

  He went to his bed, fell on it, and waited.

  Ten minutes later, the headache started to subside. But the nightmare remained. A bad dream named Gordon Slezak.

  He needed to call Arty. He was the best friend Mac had now. He got his phone and hit the speed dial.

  It went to voicemail.

  “Need to talk to you,” Mac said. “Call me.”

  When she got back to the apartment building, Rocky wished for once that she did believe in prayer. Because this would be a good time to get some help from above.

  She hoped Boyd would be sober and remorseful. That had happened before. Then maybe she could reason with him. They could split up like responsible adults.

  Would she ever consider getting back together with him?

  It wasn’t like she had a lot of prospects.

  Her record in the boyfriend department was not exactly stellar. In high school she had been asked out twice. Once by Carl Day, who was into theater and who cancelled at the last minute for a reason Rocky never understood. It had something to do, so Carl said, with his tropical fish and walking like an Egyptian. What The Bangles had to do with aquatic life was never explained.

  No doubt, Rocky would later reflect, it was the worst excuse ever made up by an overly creative type.

  The other one who asked her out was Nicholas Grimes, a science whiz who looked like it, and who needed arm candy for the prom. Rocky was a junior and Grimes a senior and apparently the pool of senior fishettes had run dry.

  After Nicholas got turned down by three other juniors, or so Rocky was told later, he landed on her.

  At first her father refused to pay for a new dress, but he finally relented under her brother Arty’s single-minded campaign on her behalf. Their mother had died eight years earlier, and Arty did his best to offer Rocky the advice their mother might have given her about what a guy liked. It basically boiled down to, Be yourself and don’t worry.

  She worried. And then got angry when Nicholas spent the first half of the prom with his science buddies talking about the relative merits of the Apple Macintosh versus the IBM Peanut.

  No dancing.

  When they finally got around to it, the dancing was ludicrous. Nicholas Grimes knew calculators. He did not know choreography. Rocky enjoyed dancing. But the more she got into it, the more Nicholas seemed to distance himself.

  Nicholas asked Rocky if she could find a ride home. There was something going on at one of the other guys’ house, and he had to go with them right away. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I had fun.”

  So much for romantic high school memories.

  After that, she could count her boyfriends on the fingers of one hand. None lasted more than a few months.

  Except Boyd. Coming after a gap of three years, he lasted longer because she thought he was her last, best hope.

  Kind of wrong about that, weren’t you, girl? Rocky unlocked the apartment door. She closed the door and waited for Boyd to respond to the sound.

  No response.

  Where was he?

  She listened but heard nothing. Not even the sound of his heavy breathing.

  Maybe Boyd had decided to avoid a scene and taken off. Good. That was probably the best thing all around.

  Her things. Now was the time. Pack again and get out. Before he came back and they had to go through a whole ordeal.

  She went to the bedroom, looked on the bed. Her stuff wasn’t there. No clothes, no suitcase.

  She looked around.

  Nothing around the room.

  She looked through the dresser drawers.

  All her stuff was gone.

  He’d taken everything.

  Just to be sure, she searched the apartment. Maybe he’d packed and put the suitcase somewhere inside. But it wasn’t there.

  Maybe he put it by her car, which was parked in the back.

  She took the stairs and went out the back of the complex, out to where her parking space was.

  The back window of her car was smashed. Her ancient Volvo, which she named Sputtering Sue, was now as scarred as her owner.

  Rocky caught a whiff of smoke. Not like someone barbecuing on their balcony. More like someone burning leaves.

  Though here in the Los Feliz district, burning leaves was illegal.

  She saw smoke coming from around the corner, where the Dumpsters were. Something told her there was a connection.

  When she got there, another tenant, an old woman whose name Rocky didn’t know, was rattling her walker.

  “Who did this?” the old woman shouted. Her voice was like a nail scraping the Dumpster’s shell.

  Rocky didn’t answer. She looked inside, saw the last bits of flame dying down, the charred remains of clothes, the unmistakable remnant of her suitcase.

  “You know who did this, don’t you?” the old woman said. “Let me tell you, there’s going to be hell to pay. I won’t stand for it. Hell to pay!”

  As she emptied the saddlebag, a state of calm came over Liz. It surprised and pleased her. It was like something she’d once heard about, a Zen moment. In the midst of the most horrendous trouble, people were able to stay focused and peaceful.

  In control.

  It was exhilarating. As she worked, part of her was observing the whole thing, as if outside herself.

  That had happened once before that she could remember. She was ten, and they were making fun of her like always. In the school cafeteria. She had mashed potatoes and gravy and red Jell-O and green beans. She was sitting alone, of course, nobody ever sat with her, but she had a highly developed sense of awareness. She could tell when people were making fun of her and getting ready to do things. Like throw dirt clods at her, which was one of their favorite pastimes when she walked home from school.

  This day there was a little group of them, all boys. Laughing and pointing at her. Turning heads back to each other for a fresh insult.

  She pretended not to see, but out of the corner of her eye she could. Her peripheral vision was acute. Maybe because she had to use it so much to protect herself.

  And then one of them sauntered up to her table. Cal Sensenbrenner. The athletic one. Stocky, built, fastest runner in school. He said, “Hey, Lazy Lizzie, your daddy in jail again?”

  “No.” But he was.

  “I heard he was in jail and drunk and he peed his pants.”

  “Did not!”

  “Maybe he could come to career day. I wanna be a jailbird someday.”

  She didn’t say anything. She looked down at her food.

  “Answer me,” he said and pushed her.

  An explosion went off in her head. Nobody does that to me. Nobody, nobody, nobody.

  She threw the tray. It got most of him. The rest ended up on the floor and on some shoes and on a couple of the other kids. They started swearing at her.

  Cal swore loudest, picked up some Jell-O in his hands and mashed it in her face while everybody started cheering. While she was crying, Miss Brainerd waddled over and told Cal to cut it out and he cussed at Miss Brainerd.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Elizabeth,” Miss Brainerd said. “You broke the rules, you sure did.”

  Liz wanted to cuss, too, but instead she held her tongue and looked at the mess she made, and it seemed beautiful to her. Reds and greens and browns, like a finger painting. It was beautiful because she had done it. She had made trouble and stopped stupid Cal’s face from having that stupid smile.

  Now, feeling in control with two dead bodies near, Liz’s movements were fast and sure.

  Arty’s body lay far enough away that no one could see it or her from the path. The biker had managed to get himself good and dead in an out-of-the-way spot, too. It was to her advantage, if she moved quickly.

  She put the four sacks next to each other on the ground. Then she checked the other saddlebag. It was empty.

  The dead biker wore a leather jacket. He wasn’t going to miss it. His ashen-faced, blank-eyed stare looked somehow shocked at his own conditi
on.

  Liz started working the jacket off the inflexible body. That’s why they call it a stiff, she thought. That’s what Arty will be like in a couple of hours.

  At that moment a jolt of regret and a little fear zinged through her. The jolt had a voice, and the voice said, Give this up. Don’t do this thing. Go back and call the police and tell them everything that happened. It was an accident, see, and this elaborate plan you’re coming up with has too many holes in it, don’t do this thing . . .

  “Shut up,” she said out loud. That surprised her. What did she think she was doing? Responding to some real voice? No, pack it away. Put aside any idea that you’re guilty here of anything. You are not. You deserve this.

  But Arty didn’t deserve what he got. He was a good guy, deep down. He didn’t know what he was getting when he proposed to you. You played him, offered your body at just the right time, withheld it after that until he was mad to have you.

  But Arty had brought this whole thing on himself. He should not have changed. He shouldn’t have traded in what made him a man and a success. People like that didn’t survive in this world. They ended up like this biker — and Arty.

  She flipped the biker onto his stomach and got the other sleeve off.

  From there it was no problem to pack the sacks in the jacket.

  She began to feel better. No voice now, oh, maybe just a whisper, but it was overtaken by a sense of — what was it? — flow. Being carried along on a wave but also causing that wave. Surfing on an ocean of her own making.

  Her mind was buzzing and alive.

  Wait . . . Fingerprints.

  That thought brought her up short. All that CSI stuff. She knew what she’d touched. She took some dirt in her hands and spit on it. She had a red bandana in her back pocket. She spread the mud around on the saddlebags, especially the metal parts, and wiped those places down.

  Footprints.

  It was mostly rock around here, just a little dirt where the body was. No problem there. She used the jewel-stuffed jacket to smooth over the prints her hiking boots made and backed away onto rock again.

  She laughed. She was going to get away with it. At least the carrying-off part. That much was a high. The best she’d felt in years.

  Control was intoxicating. Bring it on, more and more.

  And keep moving.

  Because somebody may happen along and spoil everything.

  “He did what?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, Geena. Last thing I need today is an accident.”

  Rocky and Geena were heading into Silver Lake, Geena driving.

  “Well then, tell me,” Geena said.

  “Let’s wait until — ”

  “He set your clothes on fire? And you want me to wait? Here’s a red light.”

  Geena stopped. The white dome of the Angelus Temple was just to the right. Rocky remembered something about it. Some woman evangelist had set it up in the 1920s, and here it still was.

  “Smashed my car window, too,” Rocky said. “I’ll leave it there for Exhibit A.” She’d call in a report later. Now she just wanted to be away from the place, away from the vicinity of Boyd Martin.

  The one thing he didn’t get was her kit from the trunk. Her tools of the trade, which included a mini tape recorder, camera, binoculars, lock-pick set, and her nanocam in sunglasses. Her secret weapon. She could do so much with those, and they actually looked good on her.

  Also, her laptop from the apartment. With these things, at least, she was still in business.

  Geena said nothing. Rocky was looking straight ahead but she could see, from the corner of her eye, the unmistakable dropping of the jaw.

  “I don’t believe this,” Geena said.

  “If you’ll just relax,” Rocky said, “I’ll go over the whole thing in gory detail. Let’s go to Franco’s.” The bar near the freeway.

  The light turned green, but Geena didn’t move the car. “What if we go see Swami T instead?”

  “If you mention any more swamis, I swear — ”

  The angry blare of a car horn cut her off. Geena gunned through the intersection.

  Rocky held on for dear life.

  Liz thought she must have gone at least a football field away from the dead biker. She came to a grove of knotty oak trees, the kind that used to be all over this end of the valley until they started mowing them down for houses.

  But the Packers — what Pack Canyon residents liked to call themselves, Liz found out, and without any apology to Green Bay — put up a major stink when developers started getting too close. They won battle after zoning battle, and Liz could kiss them because this was all land she could use now.

  There were lots of places to choose from, including a little creek bed. Here the water trickled by through a long trough of weeds.

  No, too mushy. She needed something with more cover.

  Maybe she’d have to dig a hole.

  Just get this over with. Somebody was going to find Arty, and she’d have to cook up some story about why she wasn’t with him. Shouldn’t be too hard, but who needed the trouble?

  Trouble is for losers, her mother had told her. Trouble was something you didn’t need to keep. There was always a way out of trouble, and money was usually the quickest way. If you had plenty of it, you might not be able to keep trouble from kicking you, but you could make sure the foot didn’t stay in where the sun don’t shine.

  Speaking of where the sun don’t shine, there it was. The spot. An actual hole in the hill. More of a bowl-shaped impression, like a dent on a car door.

  But it was almost the exact size of the bundle she held, and there was plenty of dry stuff to put over it.

  The location was perfect, too. This was not a place people would come by casually. It was not on any trail and there was nothing to draw foot traffic. She didn’t even give it a second thought. This was the spot.

  In ten minutes the stuff was hidden. She took a step back and made sure she could identify the place. Like in that movie with Morgan Freeman, where he gets out of prison and finds a rock the other prisoner had put money under.

  Then it was time to move to the next part of the whole plan. It was unfolding to her, step by step.

  The muted light of Franco’s Bar & Grill was just what Rocky needed. No one could see her face clearly when the lights were low.

  In the booth, Geena said, “You really do need to see Swami T.”

  “Oh please,” Rocky said.

  “Really.”

  “Is Swami T any relation to Mr. T?”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  “I think it’s silly to pay a guy two hundred bucks to listen to him talk like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the guy that owns the Quickie Mart on The Simpsons.”

  “You are so Western. So either-or. Resistant. That’s the word.”

  “Geena, the guy is bilking you and everybody else. He’s sitting around in a lotus position, spouting clichés the way Paris Hilton spews text messages. You really believe what some twenty-year-old says about the universe?”

  “He was enlightened from a very young age.”

  “That claptrap on his website? Who verifies those things?”

  “You have to have faith. If you want to be enlightened you — ”

  “Babe, my ex-boyfriend smashed my car and set fire to my clothes. I got enough enlightenment to last me a long time. I see things. Maybe that’s my problem.”

  A young server, a model boy wanting Hollywood stardom, came to the table. He smiled perfectly white piano keys at them and asked what they’d like to drink.

  Rocky watched Geena flash her pearlies right back at him. Never one to turn away from a flirtatious smile, Geena. Got her into a boatload of trouble that she never seemed to learn from. Not even Swami T could educate her. Fat lot of good he must be. If there was a swami union, Rocky would report him.

  Geena ordered a microbrew of some kind. Rocky opened her mouth with the word C
uervo poised on her tongue. She rolled it around a second, then thought of Boyd and his alcohol-stale breath and swollen eyes.

  “A 7UP,” Rocky said.

  Model boy said he’d be right back.

  “We’ll be right here,” Geena said.

  “Smooth,” Rocky said. “You learn that from Swami Whatsisname?”

  “You need some of his wisdom now,” Geena said.

  Rocky looked at her and wondered how they’d become such good friends in the first place. Geena Melinda Carter, blond and blue-eyed, as if yanked from the beach at Santa Monica. In fact, she was from Providence, Rhode Island.

  And Roxanne Julie Towne, red of hair, much to her mother’s chagrin. Mom loved Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago and gave her daughter that middle name probably in the hopes that her hair would become golden. In fact, it was like bricks. So was her personality, Rocky was often told.

  Another thing: Julie Christie never had the left side of her face mauled by a dog. Never had deep blue scars embedded in her skin. Never drew the stares of little kids wondering why half her face looked stapled.

  “Thing is,” Rocky said, “I would love it if one of these guys just once had the bead on something, you know?”

  “But you’ve got to give it a chance. You never do.”

  “How much of a chance?”

  The server came back with the beer and 7UP on a round tray. He placed a couple of square white napkins on the table, then the drinks on the napkins. “Can I bring you anything off the menu?” he said.

  “Are you on the menu?” Geena said.

  The Ken doll-look-alike blinked. “Not at the moment. Can I tell you about our specials?”

  “That’s okay,” Geena said. “You can come back later.”

  The server smiled weakly, then walked away.

  “Gay,” Geena said. “Wouldn’t you know it? Aren’t there any straight guys left in this stupid town?”

  “I know of one,” Rocky said. “One I’d like to forget.” She took a sip of her bubbly. “Now good, old reliable 7UP. You know what you’re going to get. With men it’s a crapshoot. You don’t know what you’re getting with men or swamis named T or even Jesus Christ himself.”