James Siegel: Deceit

I was sitting on that waxy paper that is used to cover every doctor’s examination table in America, and trying mightily not to smell the ammonia. It was a scent I forever associated with childhood falls. Only it was my brother Jimmy who was always falling.

Never me.

“Yeah, well, all in all, I’d say you got off pretty easy,” Dr. Futillo said.

“You mean compared to the average person assaulted by a stranger in their basement?”

“You talk to the sheriff about that?”

Yeah. I’d talked to the sheriff about that.

Sheriff Swenson had listened to my story of assault very much like a certain editor had listened to my increasingly outlandish exclusives during my imploding days in New York. With a tired and deflated look of disbelief. Tap dancing at Auschwitz -that’s how I’d described it later to my court-appointed therapist. On my way to the gas chambers, but soft-shoeing all the harder.

“Now, Lucas,” Sheriff Swenson said. “You looking to make the front page?”

Okay. I’d expected a little skepticism. But I was standing in the sheriff’s office with a clearly tattooed forearm and a darkening bruise on the left side of my head.

“I’m looking to make a complaint . Aren’t you supposed to do that when you’ve been assaulted?”

“Well, sure. You want to look through our mug book of homicidal plumbers?”

“That’s funny. It is. But I’m thinking maybe he wasn’t actually a plumber. Just a suspicion.”

“Right. Well, what do you think he was doing? Stealing your copper wiring?”

“I don’t know. I asked him what company he worked for and he slugged me. We never got to the specifics of his visit.”

“Too bad. The fact is… Lucas…”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” I said.

“You do? Tell me something, would you? Why’d Hinch hire you again?”

“Believe it or not, I used to be a good reporter.”

“Really? I thought it was because he’s related to your PO. I stand corrected.”

Ordinarily, I might not have minded.

That’s the thing about doing penance, as the court-appointed therapist, Dr. Payne-yeah, his real name-repeatedly drummed into me. You had to learn to accept your moral failures. That meant accepting reminders of it. It meant turning the other cheek and saying: go ahead-slug me again.

Only I’d already been hit today- twice , by someone who probably had a lot more to atone for than me. I was going to verbally swing back, to stand up for myself, when Swenson disarmed me.

“What I was going to say, Lucas… is that we’ve had a number of home break-ins lately. Apparently he carries a plumber’s kit in case he gets surprised, or a neighbor sees him strolling in. He uses it to stash whatever he walks out with. You’re not the first complaint. I was just making sure-given your past history-that you were being on the up-and-up with me. You understand?”

Sure, I understood.

I told Dr. Futillo about the burglaries.

“Apparently we have some breaking and entering going on in the neighborhood.”

“You’re lucky your skull didn’t get broken,” he said.

It occurred to me that this was the second time in two days someone was being told they were lucky when they didn’t feel that way. Ed Crannell, and me.

“Has the body been sent back?”

“ What body?”

“Dennis Flaherty’s body. Was it sent back to his mother in Iowa?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely.”

“I looked up a sex offenders’ Web site.”

“Huh?” Dr. Futillo looked like someone who’d been told an intimate secret he’d rather not have been made privy to.

“The National Sex Offender Public Registry-a kind of Pedophile Central. I thought maybe our friend’s castration was court-ordered.”

“Well, was it?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t listed there.”

“Funny thing,” Dr. Futillo said, “about our friend.”

I’ve already mentioned that two things happened.

Two separate things that made me sit up and keep going instead of roll over and slip back into sleep. Which was pretty much what I’d been doing in Littleton for the past year, and two thirds.

The first was being assaulted in my own basement.

This was the second.

“What funny thing?” I said. “His castration?”

“Oh yeah, that . But something else. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say our deceased was black.”

“Huh? I thought you said he was Caucasian . White.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what it looked like on his license.”

“So?”

“His thigh bones. Longer, and thicker at the joints. A signature of the African American race.”

“You sure about that?”

“Well, I saw it on Forensic Files.”

“What?”

“I saw it on Forensic Files. On Court TV. You never watch that show?”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say our deceased was black. Only he didn’t know any better. He was a village MD playing forensic investigator, which made him only slightly more qualified than the village idiot.

“I spoke to his mother,” I said. “She didn’t sound very black. Besides, unless I’m crazy, Flaherty’s an Irish name.”

“Okay,” Dr. Futillo said.

“Okay?”

“Bones don’t lie, my friend.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you just told me your entire expertise in this area comes from TV.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.”

Funny. For just a second, I heard myself. Sitting in the office of a truly prestigious newspaper, the kind of newspaper you sweat and bleed to merely have the chance to work for, and calmly and with a perfectly straight face stating this to that weary editor sitting across from me.

Fine, don’t believe me.

It worked for a while.

The town of Littleton, California, is known for two things.

Sonny Rolph, a B-actor from the fifties, was born there.

And it’s known for the Aurora Dam Flood, which, in a curious kind of colloquial contraction, the locals simply refer to as that damn flood .

It didn’t actually happen in Littleton, but in its tiny sister town, Littleton Flats, situated some twenty-three miles down the road. In the 1950s, they erected the Aurora Dam on the nearby Aurora River, renowned for its grade three rapids and its unpleasant muddy color. The dam was built by contractors who may or may not have gotten the job through generous kickbacks to the state. What’s fairly certain is that they built the dam with shoddy workmanship and egregious errors of engineering judgment. It was later termed-by an independent government commission set up to apportion blame-as an accident ready to happen.

It happened.

Three days of rain in April of 1954 swelled the river to historic heights, filled the dam to heretofore unknown levels, and caused the flawed cement walls to come tumbling down.

Littleton Flats was below sea level and directly in the water’s path. It ceased to exist.

The death toll was put at 892, amended from 893 when they found a 3-year-old girl downriver and still alive.

I knew about this only because I’d scrolled through the microfilm of the Littleton Journal when Hinch first hired me but gave me nothing to do. The fact that the back issues were still on microfilm and not computer disks gave me a hard clue that I wasn’t in the big leagues anymore.

A lot of people in town at least knew somebody who knew somebody else who’d perished in that damn flood . It was an understandably sore subject for them, something I discovered when I tried to interest Hinch in a retrospective piece on its fiftieth anniversary.

“We tried that before,” he said. “Your predecessor, anyway.”