James Siegel - Deceit

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.”

“Yes… yes, of course,” she said. “Dennis had brown hair, olive eyes-just like you said. He had a little scar on his right cheek. He fell off the monkey bars when he was 5. Is it possible… Mr…?”

“Valle. Tom Valle.”

“Is it possible they’re wrong? It is, isn’t it? It’s not him? It’s someone else ?”

She took down my address.

She told me she’d send me a picture of Dennis.

She rattled off a few particulars of Dennis’s sad travesty of a marriage.

She provided me with the phone number of Dennis’s ex-wife.

She told me Dennis had won five merit badges as a Boy Scout.

I had a hard time getting her off the phone.

When Hinch came in, he asked me what I was working on.

Hinch was big-boned, broad-shouldered, a largess that had lately migrated south to his stomach. Some mornings he arrived with gray stubble still clinging to his chin. I suspected Miss Azalea wasn’t doing well.

“Following up on the crash.”

“That crash on Highway 45? Old news, isn’t it?”

“There are a few things I’m trying to clean up.”

“Like?” Hinch had made his way to the coffee brewer, which I’d generously started percolating-usually Norma’s job.

“Like there was no definite ID. Except for the man’s wallet.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I don’t know exactly. But the ME thought…”

“The who ?”

“Dr. Futillo. He was convinced…”

“Dr. Futillo ?” Hinch snorted. “He’s no medical examiner. You know anything about Dr. Futillo ?” As owner, editor in chief, and sole editorial columnist of the Littleton Journal , Hinch made it a point to know just about everything about everyone in town.

“He’s a good bowler.”

“He’s also good at prescribing OxyContin to patients who don’t actually need it. He relocated here under, let’s say, murky circumstances. I wouldn’t believe everything Dr. Futillo tells you. Especially about forensics.”

I thought Hinch was making a point. That there were two people who’d relocated to Littleton under murky circumstances, and neither one of them was remotely trustworthy.

Sheriff Swenson was right; Hinch was related to my probation officer, who’d asked me at our last meeting what I intended to do with my life, now that no paper within 3,000 miles would hire me. The answer was simple. Find a paper within 3,00 1 miles. Once my PO had a word with its editor in chief-Hinch, her cousin on her mother’s side. It wasn’t much of a paper, of course-one step up from the penny circular-but its desert location had appealed to my desire for isolation and self-scourging.

“I won’t write it unless it checks,” I said.

Which was pretty much word-for-word what Hinch had told me the day I arrived in my beat-up Miata. That he wouldn’t publish anything unless it checked.

Even if all we were talking about was the annual book sale down at the Littleton Library. It better be the right date, okay?

I’d promised I wouldn’t let him down.

Hinch stared at me for a long moment, as if credibility was something that could be visibly gauged.

“All right,” he said.

He retreated into his office and shut the door.

I’d gotten an ipod.

Norma had sold me on its myriad benefits. She’d recently begun performing lunchtime aerobics to the latest from Outkast, slipping into baggy pink Danskins and mouthing along to Andre 3000.

In a very short time, I’d fattened up my iPod with 1,032 songs. Mostly oldies-but-goodies.

The entire canon of Hendrix.

Some Jackson Browne.

Santana. Fleetwood Mac. Jethro Tull.

A few anomalies thrown in. Side by Side by Sondheim . Sinatra at Caesar’s. Judy Collins singing “Where or When.”

If you’ve never heard her rendition of that haunting Richard Rodgers tune, you’re really missing something.

I was listening to “Where or When” on the way to my car.

I was going to cover the opening of a new department store. And maybe something else.

I was focusing on the words.

Things that happened for the first time seem to be happening again…

Yes.

You always remember your first time. I overslept. I was supposed to be on a plane to Shreveport, Louisiana, to interview the family of a dead National Guardsman, one of the first casualties in Afghanistan. Back when the war on terror still had the imprimatur of a just revenge. Before we blew into Iraq after WMDs that weren’t there and unleashed holy hell. Maybe I was inherently dreading it. The knock at their door, my protestations about how sorry I was to be bothering them in their moment of grief. Their bewildered faces-because death is bewildering, a vanishing act of stunning skill; first they’re here, then they’re not. The lowered faces, the embarrassing tears, the snapshots brought out in dusty albums, opened for my respectful perusal. The childhood stories, the bedroom tour, the folded American flag sitting obtrusively on the living room mantelpiece. Maybe I was dreading it so much that I’d decided not to wake up. See. I knew the routine so well that I could write it from memory. That’s exactly what occurred to me as I gazed bleary-eyed at my alarm clock, which uncomprehendingly was hours past where it was supposed to be. Hours past where I could simply hop on a later plane, still get the interview, and make it into tomorrow’s Sunday edition. I’ll admit something. I’d fibbed before. All reporters do. Little things. Maybe I’d reconstructed a piece of dialogue that wasn’t exactly word-for-word what that political bagman had told me in that desolate downtown garage. It was close, sure, but it sounded so much better, so much more infinitely dramatic this way. Maybe, here and there, I’d described something that I hadn’t in actuality seen. I’d talked to that crack junkie outside his burned-out tenement, and yet a few particulars of his garbage-strewn, needle-littered apartment had somehow crept into the article. Why not? What was the harm? His apartment was probably garbage-strewn and needle-littered. Its inclusion in the article added texture. And if I hadn’t actually stepped inside and seen it with my own two eyes, who was to know? It hadn’t changed anything materially, had it? Of course, this would be different. This would be making something up in its entirety. Its very audacity glued me to the bed, caused me to keep staring at my clock as if the hour hand might miraculously crawl backward of its own volition. I think I wrote the article as a kind of exercise. At first I did. That’s, anyway, what I told myself. Write it for fun, I whispered, and see how it turns out. Imagine it, I told myself. Walking down a tree-lined sidewalk on a pleasantly mild Shreveport day, then up the rickety wooden steps to their front door. Mr. and Mrs. Beaumont stepping back to let me into the suffocating darkness of their living room. Imagine how they might’ve answered my questions. I had some actual info. A quick trip to Google had turned up two local articles from the Shreveport Journal. Sergeant First Class Lowell Beaumont was a high school athlete who would’ve gone on scholarship to LSU if not for those torn knee ligaments suffered in his senior year at Stonewall Jackson High. His bedroom remains filled with the echoes of the high school gridiron, with freshly polished trophies adorning both sides of his dresser bureau.