James Siegel - Deceit

No more.

The motel’s deserted. It’s down to me.

It’s what you do before a siege.

You clear the area.

You isolate the target before you go in.

I was still a free man.

I still had time.

Until they matched my prints; as someone who’d been on probation, they were on file. Until Detective Wolfe convinced some assistant-assistant DA that you didn’t really need all that much evidence when you were dealing with a convicted liar.

Maybe you didn’t.

Even though someone once calculated we lie a hundred times a day. To our bosses, employees, clients, spouses, kids, citizens, policemen, bill collectors, relatives, friends. To caseworkers from Children’s Protective Services. And to ourselves. And after we lie to ourselves that there’s a god, we go and lie to him, too.

Some lies are bigger than others.

The lie they’d told Benjamin. The lie they’d told Belinda.

The lie they made Lloyd Steiner tell.

I knew all about big lies.

Benjamin’s records were down on four just like Rainey said. The nurse down there was kind enough to hand them over to me after I trotted out my Detective Wolfe imitation again and requested them.

There was a problem with Benjamin Washington’s records, of course.

They didn’t say Benjamin Washington .

Rainey was right about that. They said Benjamin Lee Briscoe .

Born 1948. Vietnam vet. Charlie Company. Served in the Mekong delta from 1966 to 1968.

Something was whispering to me.

I sat down on a hard plastic chair and stared at the wall. The nurses used it as a kind of bulletin board. There were notices for apartment rentals, cake sales, dogs up for adoption, babysitters, even birth notices.

Birth notices.

The opposite of which are what? Death notices. Obituaries.

I reached into my back pocket. I pulled out my wallet and searched through the back fold where I’d slipped John Wren’s phone number a few weeks ago.

I’d scrawled it on the back of something.

A picture of the Vietnam memorial.

Black polished granite with an endless river of names frozen in stone.

I had to squint before I finally saw his name. Eddie Bronson wasn’t the only name on that wall.

A little further down, stuck between Joseph Britt and James Bribly .

Hello.

Benjamin Lee Briscoe .

That’s why the name had seemed familiar.

When I’d found Eddie Bronson’s name that day in the Littleton Journal , it was surrounded by other names. I’d stared at the picture one night in drunken reverence, a onetime obit writer contemplating the saddest obit of them all.

Benjamin Washington had died fifty years ago in a flood.

But he’d been reborn.

Just like the disoriented vet who’d wandered into the town gazebo that day.

He’d been reborn, too.

“Who’s Eddie Bronson?” Wren had titled his article.

Then Wren had gone to Washington and found out.

Eddie Bronson was MIA, was fertilizer in some Vietnamese rice paddy. The crazy vet who’d set up shop in the town gazebo had taken his name. He must’ve been suffering survivor’s guilt . That’s all. Not uncommon to take the name of a dead buddy when for some reason you’re still breathing, when your life has turned to shit. When the fog of war has followed you around like some black cloud.

Except…

He might’ve had survivor’s guilt, but it wasn’t Vietnam that he’d survived. Something worse.

They’d hustled him off to an institution .

When I handed the records back to the nurse, I asked her about this one.

This institution.

Did the hospital always belong to the VA? Or was it something else before that?

How’d you know? she asked. Yeah, it used to be a research hospital. Back in the forties and fifties. Run by the medical division of the DOE . It had a children’s wing specializing in rare cancers.

Did she remember what was it called?

Marymount , she said.

Marymount Central.

Thank you, I said.

I went to say good-bye to Dennis.

He wasn’t there.

“He threw a fit,” the soldier said. “They took him back up to the cuckoo ward.” He was obviously happy to have the room to himself again. “He went nuts. Check that-he’s already nuts.”

“Someone cut out his tongue,” I said. “That can kind of upset you.”

I should’ve taken off right then. I was armed and dangerous, loaded with combustible knowledge, and I should’ve run.

But Dennis was lying in a hospital unable to form words anymore, and just like with Nate the Skate, it was my fault.

I’d put him in harm’s way.

So I went back upstairs, took the elevator to the penthouse, and buzzed the intercom.

When Rainey saw me, he smiled.

Which should’ve been my first clue.

Maybe I was disoriented-I hadn’t slept much lately-and when I did, I spent most of the time being chased around by blue giants and 80-year-old doctors. In my dreams and waking nightmares, I knew they were the same person now.

“Why, hello there, Detective Wolfe,” Rainey said.

I didn’t pick up on the tone. That mocking singsong quality.

“I understand they’ve brought Dennis back up here,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“I need to see him,” I said.

“Sure thing. No problem.”

He opened the door.

“I’ll stick you in a room somewhere while I go get him. That sound all right to you, detective?”

It sounded fine. I was going to say good-bye to Dennis. I was going to go to one last place and wrap this thing up and go win a Pulitzer Prize.

“Hope you don’t mind the decor,” he said, after assuring me he’d be back with Dennis in a jiffy.

I didn’t mind the decor. I didn’t notice it.

I was admiring my connect-the-dots drawing.

Look, everybody.

I was holding it up for the whole diner to ooh and ahh over, my dad and my mom and my editor and my PO and Dr. Payne and the reporter who’d knifed I lie, therefore I am into my desk. Benjy and Belinda and Nate the Skate and Norma and Hinch. Them too. I was emerging from a dark cave and bathing in the glow of the resurrection.

It wasn’t completely filled in.

Enough of it was.

Let me take you from dot to dot.

John Wren had found a disoriented and traumatized Vietnam vet sleeping in the town gazebo. Eddie Bronson -that’s what he said his name was.

Dot one.

At some point Wren had gone to Washington and discovered something puzzling. Eddie Bronson was a Vietnam corpse. MIA. He was up there on that wall. People were incapable of dying twice.

Dot two.

So who was this Eddie Bronson? Obviously a vet suffering from some kind of survivor’s guilt. Someone disoriented enough to take someone else’s name and forget his own. Forget his family, his past. But not the way home.

No.

Of all the town gazebos in America, he’d bedded down in that one. He’d called it home.

Why?

Because it felt that way.

Close enough, at least.

Once upon a time, he’d lived just twenty-three miles down the road in a town that no longer existed.

In Littleton Flats. Wren would’ve found that out.

Dot three.

But everyone in Littleton Flats that day had died .

Everyone.

Including Benjamin Washington.

Unless they hadn’t.

Wren had begun his expose on the Aurora Dam Flood.

Discovered things.

Gotten all excited. Then gone off the deep end- Littleton loco . That’s what they said. Locked himself in the offices of the Littleton Journal one night and wouldn’t come out.