James Siegel - Deceit

I was running out of time.

It’s like a coming thunderstorm. You can smell it. Dead leaves begin fluttering like fans in the hands of nervous southern girls, the air turns moist, a smoky haze drifts across the sun.

A deluge was coming.

There’s something spooky about driving straight through the night and out the other side.

You join a kind of spirit world that exists only while the real world sleeps-populated by meth-fueled truckers, fleeing spouses, lonely salespeople, drunken frat kids, all trying to get somewhere before daybreak.

I wondered which category I fit into.

I’d left in the middle of the night, pasted a note on the refrigerator in case someone started to worry about me. I couldn’t imagine who that someone might be. When I got there, I would call Norma. It was going to take awhile, because I was going where I should’ve gone all along.

It had taken me some time to understand the story was there.

Follow the money , the twin deities of investigative journalism once proclaimed.

I was.

I was following the wallet.

I couldn’t help picturing a dazed and doped-up Dennis Flaherty walking out of a cornfield and asking if this were heaven.

No, Dennis.

It’s Iowa.

Somewhere in the Nevada desert I pulled over at a twenty-four-hour Stop ’n’ Shop.

It was too easy to give in to the monotonous rhythm of uninterrupted motion. My mind was beginning to ramble, lapsing into autopilot for miles at a time.

I was in dire need of a sugar fix.

I bought a pack of pink Sno Balls, ripped into them with the wrapper still half-attached.

I munched away while I leafed through a rack of retro-style postcards, all with that Technicolor look that made them seem half-painted.

Hoover Dam.

The Las Vegas Strip.

A shot of Sammy, Frank, Dino, and Lawford at the Sands.

Then a different kind of sands, in another part of Nevada.

And I suddenly remembered why I was going back to Iowa and what I’d spent the entire previous night doing. Dredging up the noxious past, the kind of thing you have to do with your nose covered and eyes half averted.

It doesn’t really help.

You can still smell the sick beds. You can still see the dying. What’s the universal sign for the noble practice of medicine? Two serpents coiled around a winged staff.

Only they were strangling it to death.

They were devouring their own.

I wouldn’t stay too long out here , Herman Wentworth said. Remember, I am a doctor.

Iowa didn’t look like Heaven.

It looked flat and brown. The air felt oppressively humid, as if it were responsible for flattening the landscape from its sheer numbing weight. Black funnel clouds blew across the horizon like tumbleweeds.

The sameness put me to sleep. You couldn’t really delineate one section of Iowa from another. Only the cities broke the stultifying monotony-they flew by in minutes. Then back to amber waves of grain without a hint of purple mountains’ majesty.

I pulled over at a rest stop to nap, and when I woke up, a boy was making faces at me outside the window.

I stared back at him until his father appeared and gave him a vicious swat across the back of his head. The boy seemed used to it; he walked back to the family car without a sound.

It took me a while to get going.

I felt disoriented and sluggish, as if I were moving in slow motion, the way I turned the steering wheel, stepped on the gas.

According to the map, I still had at least an hour to go.

I cranked the window wide open, letting the air slap me awake.

When I saw the sign for Ketchum City, I felt neither happiness or relief.

Just dread.

Mrs. Flaherty must’ve thought I was selling something.

She took awhile to answer the door, and when she did she was already telling me she wasn’t interested.

I could see why.

She had the worst trailer in a tumbledown trailer park-a salesman would’ve been sheer out of luck.

When I interrupted her to inform her who it was that was standing there, her demeanor changed from wary annoyance to genuine warmth.

“Tom,” she said, like someone who’d known me for a long time. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to Dennis,” I said.

“Why didn’t you call? You came all the way from California ,” she said, as if that were a second miracle-first getting her son back, now this.

She didn’t invite me inside. I could see she wanted to, that she knew that’s what you do when someone arrives at your front door-especially someone who’s just driven twenty-nine consecutive hours. She was embarrassed about where she lived.

“I wanted to talk to him in person, Mrs. Flaherty.”

“Why?”

She was wearing a shapeless and washed-out shift. Her legs were threaded with spider webs of inky varicose veins.

“I’m trying to find out how someone ended up in that car with Dennis’s wallet.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she said, affecting an almost coquettish tone.

“Somebody died. I’d like to know who it was.”

“Well, how’s Dennis going to know that ?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he can help me find out.”

I heard someone calling her from inside the trailer.

“Is that him?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Dennis,” she said. “Come on out. Tom Valle’s here.”

He stepped out in the doorway, tired and bleary-eyed, dressed in boxers and what used to be referred to as a wifebeater before political correctness ruined all the fun. His mother gazed at him as if he were standing there in top hat and tails.

“Who’s Tom Valle ?” he asked, as if I wasn’t right there in front of him.

“I talked to you on the phone,” I said. “Remember, Dennis? I’m a reporter.”

“Huh?”

“I called to ask you about your wallet.”

“Huh?”

“He’s still a little groggy,” Mrs. Flaherty said. “ Aren’t you, Dennis?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

“Tom. Tom Valle. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“About where you might’ve lost your wallet. About who might’ve taken it?”

“My wallet ?”

“The wallet that was stolen. That turned up in a car with a dead body.”

Dennis was still rubbing his eyes; he appeared to be listing left, like someone on a sinking ship.

“There was an accident, Dennis. A car was set on fire-someone was in it. He had your wallet on him. They thought you were dead-your mom thought you were dead. Remember?”

Mrs. Flaherty reached over and rubbed Dennis’s arm, as if making sure he was actually there and not six feet underground.

“My wallet, huh?”

It was like talking to the elderly-to Anna’s father, maybe. Someone who’s misplaced their mind.

“If you give me a minute, I’ll invite you in,” Mrs. Flaherty said.

She retreated into the trailer and I heard the clatter of things being moved from one place to another. Dennis remained in the doorway, staring down at me with a slightly puzzled expression. A man walked out of the next trailer, nodded in Dennis’s direction, then leaned against a garbage can and lit up a joint.

“You said you didn’t have your wallet in the hospital. Are you sure?”

“The hospital?”

“The VA hospital.”

“I let myself out, man.”

“They didn’t officially discharge you?”

“I let myself out.”

“Okay, Dennis.”

Mrs. Flaherty reappeared in the doorway. She’d changed into a skirt that looked twenty years too young for her.

“Come on in, Tom,” she said.