James Siegel - Deceit

“Yep.”

“You never did the work?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know ? What’s that mean?”

“I mean I don’t know. It means I forget.”

“When did he ask you to do this work? Was it around the time he locked himself in the office-around then?”

“Yeah.”

“So when were you supposed to start?”

Seth sighed. “He said he might be taking off. If I didn’t hear from him in two weeks, I should just go ahead and do it.”

“So he paid you? In advance?”

Believe it or not, it’s possible to hear someone squirm over the phone.

“Uh… yeah.”

“And you didn’t hear from him for more than two weeks? You didn’t hear from him again, ever?”

“No, guess not.”

“But you didn’t do the work? Why’s that?”

“I must’ve forgot.”

“Sure. You forgot. You were already spending the money-so why do the work? He was nuts; who was to know.”

“Sue me. I’m human.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, ever hear about throwing stones, amigo?”

It was here all along.

I’d stared right at it.

That day I came down here and retraced the plumber’s steps.

I’d moved a book aside and seen that hole in the wall.

The book with plaster dust on its jacket.

Hiroshima.

I’d thought the plumber was the one who’d smashed the wall in. It wasn’t the plumber.

It was Wren.

The night before he left. Before he headed off to the lake.

But not before he protected the story.

I’d peeked into that hole and saw what you usually see on the other side of Sheetrock in these parts. The same thing the plumber must’ve seen, then dismissed like I had.

Newspaper insulation. It’s abundant and cheap, and since you don’t exactly have to worry about blizzards in the middle of the California desert, it does the job.

Only this newspaper wasn’t cheap. It was ridiculously expensive.

It cost Wren his life.

I moved the books aside.

I stuck my hand inside the hole and gently, slowly, carefully pulled the crinkled newspaper out of the hole.

A front page of the Littleton Journal .

Lots and lots of front pages. The wall was stuffed with them.

The issue number still clearly legible in the right-hand corner.

7,513.

The one missing in the files.

The issue with “Who’s Eddie Bronson?” was 7,512.

The next issue, featuring a movie review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and a recap of the latest meeting of the local DAR Society, had been 7,514.

One issue number skipped.

What I’d discovered as I scrolled back and forth and back.

How does that happen?

Easy.

One issue went to press the night Wren locked himself in the office. One front page. This one. That’s what he’d been doing in there that night. Not breaking down. Not howling at the moon. Howling at the injustice. Trying to get the story out. Before he disappeared into the void.

He hadn’t had time to save it. But the computer automatically gave it an issue number, and when the next one went to press, it was one number higher than it should’ve been. No one would have noticed-no one was keeping count.

America’s Unknown Nuclear Disaster

The headline of the issue that never ran.

Three-inch type.

All in red.

And something more. It came complete with illustrations.

A schematic drawing. A diagram.

A fucking blueprint.

Faded, crisscrossed with lines, even a layman able to discern the shape and function of the thing being built.

The core. The fuel rods. The shell.

A real blueprint. As opposed to fake ones they’d trotted out at Lloyd Steiner’s trial.

Yes, Anna, your father did give something to Wren.

Something he must’ve held on to all those years. Hid away-a kind of legacy. For you, maybe. So you’d know who he really was. That he might’ve gone to jail, but he was never guilty. Not really. No guiltier than anyone else who’d helped build a nuclear reactor out in the desert and kept their mouth shut after it blew sky-high.

Wren’s Rule Number One.

Back up your notes for protection.

He had.

Sooner or later, he’d told Anna, someone would bring it into the light.

Literally.

Unfortunately, he’d made one mistake.

He’d anointed Seth Bishop the protector.

Seth Bishop, who, hearing neither hide nor hair of Wren for two weeks, was supposed to rip two hundred front pages of the Littleton Journal out of a wall and, even with his limited intellectual curiosity, understand that someone needed to see them. That its three-inch headlines were screaming bloody murder.

Only Seth adhered to the credo of the dedicated stoner. No need to do the work if you’ve already got the cash-no doubt already blown on some primo Panama Red and six-packs of Coors Light.

On my way out of Littleton, I heard a siren going in the opposite direction.

The sheriff on his way to make the climactic arrest, I supposed. Perpetrator and gun, nabbed red-handed.

He’d find an empty house with an empty drawer.

I made one stop before I pulled onto Highway 45.

Mrs. Weitz opened the door, then continued to stand there-all three hundred or so pounds of her.

“Is Sam home?” I asked her.

She appeared to be on the verge of lying to me, but then Sam yelled from the kitchen, asking her where the damn Yodels were , so she had no choice but to let me in.

“It’s okay,” I told her, as she moved aside, barely, to let me through. “I won’t be staying long.”

Sam was more hospitable than his wife. Though he did surreptitiously peek through both study windows before pulling the shades, wondering, I imagine, if there was about to be a major guns-drawn bust in his front yard.

“Jesus.” Sam’s first word to me. “You have no idea what they’ve been saying about you.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Is any of it true?”

“Not much.”

“Okay-good enough for me. Anything for a bowling team member. You need some help?”

“Just a little.”

“Shoot.” Then he blushed and said, “Poor choice of words.” He’d noticed the gun peeking out of my waistband.

“How long have you been trying to sell me some insurance, Sam?”

“What? Wait, come on. You mean to tell me you came all the way here for insurance ?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

I am here.

In room four of the roach motel.

Disgraced journalists check in, but they don’t check out.

I am almost done. Nearly. Just about.

Have you got it all?

Have I sufficiently illuminated? Enlightened? Made clear?

Do I need to regurgitate the whole enchilada?

What don’t you get?

What they did? What they constructed? What they cobbled together, like a movie assembled scene by scene, as if by screenwriter by committee?

What did Wren say over the phone? The faux Wren, of course, one of several in a crucial cast of players. If I had to guess, another actor hired from that Web site, and told what to say-a simple voice-over job this time.

It reads like a bad movie, he said.

Don’t you get it? Don’t you see?

It was supposed to.

That was the whole point.

It was its whole raison d’etre.

Back in New York, when I was down to borrowing the conventions of a cheap thriller:

Anagrams.

Clandestine meetings in the ruins of destroyed towns.

Con men actors.

Auto Tag.

The works.

I read them. Your canon of deceit, he said to me.

I read them.

Of course they read them. But they did more than read them. They studied them. Then they re-borrowed them, those hackneyed conventions, wove them together into a veritable masterpiece of Valle’s greatest hits.