Deceit

by James Siegel

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of "Derailed" comes an explosive new thriller about a disgraced journalist who stumbles upon an unimaginable conspiracy--but will anyone believe him?

Release date: August 9, 2006

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

ONE

I am writing this as fast as I can.

I am galloping through hostile territory like the Pony Express, because I absolutely must deliver the mail.

I’ve already taken my fair share of arrows. And though I’m clearly wounded, I’m not dead.

Not yet.

I’m trying mightily to remember everything germane.

I’m a bit shaky on the timeline, on the cause and effects. On specificity.

I am freely and honestly admitting to this. Just so when all the little editors begin flourishing their red pencils, and they will, I’ll have hopefully, if only momentarily, dulled the momentum of their onrushing venom.

I don’t blame them. I truly don’t.

I am, after all, the boy who cried wolf. Who shouted, screamed, and plastered it across two-inch headlines.

Mea culpa.

All I can tell you is that what I’m writing in this claustrophobic motel room is the absolute, unvarnished, 100 percent truth.

So help me God. Scout’s honor. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Change hope to expect.

This isn’t just my last story.

It’s my last will and testament.

Pay attention.

You are my executor.

ONE BRIEF DIGRESSION.

Writing my last story, I can’t help but remember my first.

I was 9.

It was snowing. Not the paltry dusting that generally passed for snow in Queens, New York. No, the sky was actually dumping snow, as if someone had loosened a giant saltshaker top up there. Icicles were being blown off our sagging gutters and straight into the brick walls of the house, where they splintered with the sound of ball meeting bat.

Schools would be closed all week.

My brother Jimmy slipped on the ice and he hit his head, I wrote on neatly lined composition paper. He is always falling down and stuff like that. He walked into a door and he got a black eye. Last week he fell down in the tub, and he burnt himself. He is really clumsy and my mom keeps telling him to watch where he’s going, but he don’t listen. He is only 6.

I brought the story into the kitchen where my mother was slumped over the table, staring into an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“Read it to me,” she slurred.

After I finished, she said: “Okay, good. I want you to memorize it. They’ll be here in an hour.”

TWO

There were no storm warnings.

No emergency disaster center urging me to board up the windows and leave town.

I can look back to that day, borrow a cliché (I apologize to my first journalism professor, who abhorred clichés as much as he abhorred the newly instituted no-fraternization-with-coeds rule), and state that with the exception of Belinda Washington turning 100, absolutely nothing that day was out of the ordinary. Ordinary, after all, was pretty much the daily state of affairs in Littleton, California—approximately 153 miles east of L.A.

Change approximately to exactly.

Two years ago I’d driven every mile of it in my last certifiably owned possession—a silver-blue Miata, purchased back when Miatas were hot shit. A case could be made that back then I was, too.

Now the Miata was ignobly dented in two separate places, with a sluggish transmission that complained loudly when asked to change gears.

On the morning in question, I was summoned into Hinch’s office and told to cover Belinda Washington’s centennial. Clearly a human-interest piece. You could safely state that every article in the Littleton Journal was a human-interest piece. It went to press only five times a week—sometimes less, if not enough local news had taken place since the previous issue. The only serious news stories that made it into the town’s paper were picked up from the AP, stories that came from places like Baghdad and Kabul, where you could almost smell the cordite emanating off the type. I perused them longingly, as if they were dirty French postcards from a long-ago era.

Belinda Washington was from a long-ago era.

You could intuit that from the wheelchair and her nearly bald pate. When I entered the dayroom of Littleton’s only senior citizen home, she was wearing a ridiculous paper tiara with the number 100 printed on it. It was obviously someone’s idea of cute. Probably not Belinda’s. She didn’t look happy as much as bewildered. I dutifully maintained my objectivity and resisted the urge to knock it off her head.

These days, I was strictly adhering to the noble tenets of my profession.

I introduced myself to the managing director of the home, a Mr. Birdwell, who was orchestrating the august occasion with the aid of a digital camera. Good. That would save me from having to snap any pictures. On the Littleton Journal, we multitasked.

I kneeled down in front of Belinda and introduced myself in a louder-than-normal voice.

“Hello, Mrs. Washington. Tom Valle from the Littleton Journal.”

“What you shouting for?” Belinda asked, grimacing. Evidently, Belinda wasn’t any fonder of patronizing reporters than she was of paper tiaras.

“Take that thing off my head,” she added.

“Gladly.” I stood up and removed the tiara, handing it to one of the male attendants who looked personally miffed that I’d intruded on their fun.

“That’s better,” Belinda said.

“Sure,” I said. “Well, happy birthday, Mrs. Washington. What’s it like to be 100 years old?”

“What you think it’s like?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“More fun turning 18.”

“That would’ve been . . . what, 1920 something?”

“’22.”

“Right. Math was my worst subject.”

“Not me. I’m good at it.”

I’d expected to be interviewing a drooling apparition. So far, the only one doing any drooling was myself. One of the partygoers was kind of attractive. Auburn-haired, 30-ish, seamlessly fitted into lime green capris and precariously perched on three-inch heels. There were moments I thought my drooling days were past me—not because of my age (nudging 40) but just because everything was past me—all the good stuff, and didn’t women constitute good?

Belinda lifted a skeletal hand.

“I miss things,” she said.

For a moment, I thought she was referring to the general bane of old age, things getting past her: conversations, names, dates.

She wasn’t. She was referring to that other bane of old age.

“People have gone and died on me,” she said. And she smiled, half wistfully, but half, I think, because she was flirting with me.

The feeling was mutual. Objectivity or not, I kind of liked her.

Belinda was black, a true rarity in Littleton—Latinos yes, blacks virtually nonexistent—deep black, like ebony. This made her milky eyes pop—the palms of her hands, too, pink as cat paws.

She beckoned me with one of those gnarled, ancient hands.

I wondered what had gained me this special privilege? Probably no one ever talked to her anymore, I thought. Except to tell her to take her meds, turn out the light, or put on a stupid hat.

“People have gone and died on me,” she repeated, “but one, he came back.”

“Came back?”

“Sure. He said hey.”

“Who was that?”

“Huh? My son.”

“Your son? Really. Where did he come back from?”

“Huh? Told you. He passed on . . . long time ago, but he came back to say hey. He say he forgive me.”

“Oh, okay. Got you.” I was tempted to ask what she’d done that needed forgiveness, but really, what was the point? Belinda was feeling her age, after all. When I looked up, one of the attendants shrugged, as if to say, what else would you expect? The woman in capris, evidently there to visit one of the other residents, threw me a wan smile that seemed mildly encouraging.

“Looked old as me,” Belinda said.

“Your son?”

“Yeah. He looked sickly.”

I almost made the kind of wiseass comment I was given to uttering in the old days, when I hung with the kind of crowd that conversed mostly in cynicisms. Back before I became a national punch line. I almost said: considering he’s dead, sickly’s a step up.

I didn’t.

I said: “That’s too bad.”

Belinda laughed, a soft knowing laugh, that made me feel a little embarrassed, and something else.

Nervous.

“I ain’t fooling wit’ you,” Belinda said. “And I ain’t crazy.”

“I didn’t say you were crazy, Mrs. Washington.”

“Nah. But you nice.”

I changed the subject. I asked her how long she’d been a guest of the home. Where was she born? What was her secret to longevity? All the harmless questions you learn in high school journalism. I avoided asking her what family she had left, since, with the possible exception of her dead son, none had bothered to show.

After a while, I became cognizant of the smell permeating the room—stale and medicinal, like a cellar filled with moldering files. It became impossible to ignore the ugly stains in the linoleum floor, the melanoma-like cigarette burns in the lopsided card table. Mrs. Washington was wearing a polka dot dress that smelled faintly of camphor, but the rest of them were dressed in yolk-stained robes and discolored T-shirts. A man had only one sock on.

I felt like leaving.

Mr. Birdwell snapped a picture of Belinda enclosed in a gleaming thicket of wheelchairs and walkers. I stuck my hand in and said bye.

“One more,” Mr. Birdwell said. “And this time I want to see a smile on our birthday girl.”

The birthday girl ignored him—evidently she wasn’t in a smiling mood. Instead, she grabbed my hand and squeezed tight.

“Yeah, you a nice fellow,” she said.

Her skin felt ice cold.

THREE

We had a terrible accident just outside town.

That’s what Hinch’s secretary said—scratch that—his assistant, political correctness having intruded 150 miles into the California desert. Stewardesses were attendants now, secretaries were assistants, and occupying armies in the Middle East were defenders of freedom.

It’s a measure of fast approaching my second anniversary there that when Norma said we—I thought we. It was official: Tom Valle, one-time denizen of SoHo, NoHo, and assorted other fashionably abbreviated New York City neighborhoods, had become a true Littletonian.

“What kind of accident?” I asked her.

“A smashup on 45,” she said. “A goddamn fireball.”

For a dedicated churchgoer, Norma had a strange affinity for using the Lord’s name in vain. Things were either God-awful, Goddamned, God-forbidden, God help us, or God knows.

“Aww, God,” Norma said. “You kind of wonder how many people were in that car.”

The sheriff had just phoned in the news, assuming Hinch might be interested in a suitably gory car crash. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. Hinch was currently at lunch. The other feature reporter, Mary-Beth, was on ad hoc maternity leave. When she got tired of watching her unemployed husband down voluminous amounts of Lone Star beer, Mary-Beth showed up. Otherwise, no. There was an intern on summer break from Pepperdine, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Maybe I should go cover it.”

Norma, who was not the editor, but the editor’s assistant, shrugged her shoulders.

This time I took a camera.

I WASN’T FOND OF ACCIDENTS. SOME ARE.

The smell of blood excites them. The aura of death. Maybe the simple relief that it happened to someone else.

The problem was I felt like that someone else.

Like the unfortunate victim of a car accident. The fact that I was the driver, that I’d soberly taken hold of the wheel and steered the car straight off a cliff, didn’t do anything to alleviate the uncomfortable empathy I felt in the presence of a wreck.

Norma was right about the fireball.

The car was still smoldering. It looked like a hunk of charcoal that had somehow fallen out of the backyard grill.

One fire engine, one sheriff’s car, and one ambulance were parked by the side of the two-lane highway. Another car was conspicuously present, a forest green Sable. Its front fender was completely crumpled, a man I assumed to be the driver leaning against the side door with his head in his hands. Everyone was pretty much watching.

Sheriff Swenson called me over.

“Hey, Lucas,” he said.

I’ll explain the Lucas.

It was for Lucas McCain, the character played by Chuck Connors in The Rifleman. After The Rifleman, Chuck moved on to a series called Branded, where he played a Union soldier who’d allegedly fled from the Battle of Bull Run and was forever after branded a coward. He drifted from town to town where, despite selfless acts of heroism, someone always discovered his true identity. You might imagine that’d be hard to do in the Old West.

Not in the new west.

Sheriff Swenson had Googled me.

He couldn’t recall the character’s name in Branded, so he called me Lucas.

It was better than liar.

“Hello, sheriff.”

Sheriff Swenson didn’t look like a small-town sheriff. Maybe because he’d spent twenty years on the LAPD before absconding to Littleton with full pension. He still had the requisite square jaw, bristle cut, and physique of a gym attendant, the palpable menace that must’ve made more than one Rodney King spill his guts without Swenson ever having to pick up a stun gun.

Today he looked kind of placid.

Maybe the dancing flames had mesmerized him. He had that look you get after staring into a fireplace for longer than you should.

There was something worth mentioning beside the burning car. Something everyone was politely declining to acknowledge, like a homeless relative who’s somehow crashed the family reunion.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of smelling burnt human, it smells like a mix of honey, tar, and baked potato. One of the truly worst smells on earth.

“How many were in there?” I asked the sheriff.

“Oh, just make it up,” he said after a while. I imagine he was being half funny and half not. Just like with the nickname.

“Okay. But if I wanted to be factual?”

“If you wanted to be factual, the answer would be one,” he said.

I looked back at the other driver, who still had his face pressed to his hands as if he didn’t wish to see. When the body shop commented on the sorry state of his car, he’d say you should’ve seen the other guy.

“How did it happen?”

“You mean, how did the accident transpire?” the sheriff said.

“Yeah.”

“Quickly.”

“Right. But who hit who?”

“He was going south,” the sheriff said, motioning to the man covering his eyes. “He was going north,” nodding at the smoldering wreck. “Northbound car drifted into the southbound lane. At least, according to our sole witness.”

“Who’s that?”

“Our sole survivor.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“It’d be nice.”

“Then have a nice time.”

I walked over to the crumpled Sable; the man had finally picked his head up out of his hands. He had that look—the one you see in the faces of people who’ve just juked death. Cursed with the awful knowledge of life’s ridiculous fragility. He was moving various pieces of his body in halting slow motion, as if they were made of fine, breakable china.

“Hello. Tom Valle of the Littleton Journal. Could I speak to you a minute?”

“Huh?”

“I’m from the newspaper. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“Newspaper?”

I’d said nothing to dissipate that dazed look of his.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t really feel like talking. I’m . . . you know . . .”

Yes, I knew. But there were other tenets of my profession, which were maybe less than noble. The one, for instance, that says you have to get the story. Even when that story involved the kind of personal disasters that made up most of the news these days. You know what I’m talking about: murdered wives, missing babies, beheaded hostages—there were a lot of those going around.

It’s pretty simple. Even when someone doesn’t feel like talking, you have to feel like asking.

“I understand he drifted into your lane,” I said.

He nodded.

“And then, uh . . . what’s your name, sir . . . slowly, so I don’t misspell anything.”

“Crannell. Edward Crannell. Two Ls.”

I dutifully scribbled it down. I’d always forgone the tape recorder for the more tactile sensation of writing notes. Maybe I had an instinctual abhorrence of tape’s permanence—even at the beginning, long before I began taking liberties.

“Where are you from again, Mr. Crannell?” An old technique; ask a question as if they’ve already given you the answer.

“Cleveland,” he said.

“The one in Ohio?”

He nodded.

“Long way from home.”

“I’m in sales. Pharmaceuticals.”

“Rented car then, I guess?”

He grimaced as if that fact had just occurred to him; maybe he’d rolled the dice and forgone the accident insurance.

“So he came right at you, just drifted into your lane. That’s what happened?” This area of Highway 45 was devoid of a single curve—it had the unrelieved monotony of a ruler-drawn line.

Crannell nodded.

“I beeped the horn at the last second. He jammed on the brakes. . . . I guess he couldn’t get out of the way.” He looked down in the general vicinity of his dust-covered shoes and slowly shook his head. “Jesus . . .”

“Have they checked you out, Mr. Crannell? Are you okay?”

He nodded. “I was wearing my seat belt. They said I was lucky.”

“Oh yeah.”

Swenson was poking around the wreck. Fine black cinders hovered in the air like gnats. The fire had mostly burnt itself out—it looked like the fire engine had sprayed it with anti-incendiary foam.

“Any idea why he did that? Why he drifted into the wrong lane? Did he fall asleep, maybe?”

Crannell seemed to ponder this for a moment, then shook his head no. “Don’t think so. I really can’t tell you.”

“Okay. Well, thank you.”

I walked a few feet away and snapped some pictures. Black car, purple sky, white-shirted sheriff, green cactus. If the Littleton Journal published in color, it really would’ve been something.

On the other hand, black-and-white was probably more appropriate. When I saw it on the front page of the Littleton Journal the next day, it seemed to capture the immutable contrast between life and death.

FOUR

I’d joined a bowling league.

It was kind of by accident. The town’s bowling alley, Muhammed Alley—it was owned by a failed middleweight named BJ who thought the name was hysterical—doubled as the town’s best bar.

I don’t mean it had a nice decor, had an interesting snack menu, or was frequented by hot-looking women.

I mean it was badly lit, sparsely filled, and in need of fumigation. It smelled like used bowling shoes.

When I first came to Littleton, I was in fugitive mode. I wasn’t seeking company; I was consciously avoiding it.

For a while, I managed to do a fairly good job of that at Muhammed Alley.

BJ doubled as the bartender, and unlike the general image of small-town barkeeps, he was blessed with no perceptible curiosity. Other than asking me what I wanted and quoting the bill—three margaritas, no salt, came to $14.95—it took several visits before he uttered an excess word.

That word—or two words, actually—was nice play, spoken only in my general direction, the result of center fielder Steve Finley making a tumbling circus catch in center field.

I was perfectly content with the lack of social interaction. I drank in the loneliness like I drank in the tequila—in small, bitter sips.

After a while, company found me.

One of the two insurance men in town—Sam Weitz, a transplanted New Englander with an obese wife suffering from type 2 diabetes—started drinking more or less the same time as I did. Generally late evening, when most everyone else was headed home to their families.

Not us.

Unlike BJ, Sam was imbued with curiosity. Maybe you get used to asking lots of personal questions in the insurance business. He struck up a conversation and stubbornly kept it going, even when confronted with my mostly monosyllabic answers.

One thing led to another.

Being that we were drinking in a bowling alley, one night he actually suggested bowling.

I was on my third margarita, already floating in that pleasant state I call purple haze, in honor of Hendrix, one of my musical idols. After all—doesn’t enough alcohol let you kiss the sky?

I must’ve mumbled okay.

I bowled a ridiculous 120 that night—making generous use of both gutters. Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed hurling a heavy ball down a wooden alley, sending pins scattering in all directions—at least a few of them. I saw a kind of life metaphor in those flattened pins, how they reset just like that, virtually daring you to knock them down again. There was a lesson there about pluck and resilience, which I thought I might make use of.

Eventually, we were joined by Seth Bishop, self-confessed town hell-raiser—at least back in high school, where he was voted least likely to succeed, a prophecy that turned out to be pretty much on the money, since he nowadays subsisted on welfare and occasional Sheetrock jobs.

The local Exxon owner—Marv Riskin—rounded out our foursome.

After a while, we joined a league—Tuesday nights at 8.

One night Sheriff Swenson made an appearance, noticed I was keeping score, and told the league president to check the card for accuracy.

When Seth asked me what that was about, I told him I’d run into a little ethics problem in my last newspaper job.

“Boned your secretary?” he asked, kind of hopefully.

“Something like that.”

TONIGHT WE WERE PLAYING A TEAM COMPRISED OF LITTLETON’S LONE chiropractor, one of its two dentists, a doctor, and an accountant. No Indian chief.

Near the end of his second Bud, the doctor started talking about the body from the car.

They’d brought him the accident victim so he could fill out the death certificate. There was no coroner in Littleton, which made him the de facto ME.

“He was charred pretty good,” the doctor said. “I don’t get to see a lot of burn victims. Not like that.”

“Thanks for sharing, doc,” Seth said.

“Some of his insides were intact,” the doctor continued, undeterred. “Not a pretty sight.”

“Can you change the subject, for fuck’s sake,” Seth said. “What about a nice 18-year-old girl who OD’d? Don’t you have any of those?”

The doctor didn’t seem to get the joke. When he began describing in great detail what a burned liver looked like—apparently like four-day-old pâté—Seth leaned in and said:

“Let me ask you something, doc. Is it true what they say about doctors? I mean do you get, what’s the word . . . immune to naked pussy after a while? It doesn’t do anything to you anymore?”

Sam, who was preparing to bowl, stopped to wait for the doctor’s answer. It appeared as if he was busy conjuring up images of naked pudenda being lasciviously displayed for the doctor’s enjoyment. Back home he had a 280-pound wife gorging on cream-filled Yodels.

“That’s an ignorant question,” the doctor said.

Calling Seth ignorant wasn’t really going to offend him. “I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

“Have they ID’d him yet?” I asked the doctor. I was nursing a Coors Light, having figured out that tequila and getting the ball to travel down the center of the lane were mutually exclusive. The headline of my story was:

Unidentified Man Dies in Flaming Car Crash

The doctor said: “Yeah. They found his license.”

“It didn’t burn up?”

“He had some kind of metallic card in his wallet that acted like insulation. They were able to make out his name.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Dennis something. White, 36, from Iowa.”

“Iowa? That’s funny.”

The doctor squinted at me. “What’s funny about it? It’s a state, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s a state. I was just ruminating on the great cosmic plan. A man from Iowa runs head-on into a salesman from Cleveland on a highway in California. It’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”

“Actually, no.”

Sam had rolled a seven, and now was edgily eyeing a difficult two-one split. He took a deep breath, sashayed into his delivery, and sent the ball straight down the middle, missing all three pins.

“There is something funny, though,” the doctor said.

“Other than that roll?” I’d dutifully recorded Sam’s score. It was crunch time; we were twenty pins behind with only five frames to go.

“He was castrated.”

“Huh? Who?”

“The deceased.”

“You mean in the accident?”

The doctor lifted his Bud, took a long sip.

“Nope,” he said. He slid out of the seat—not without some difficulty since he was a good thirty pounds overweight—and rummaged through the rack for his ball.

“What do you mean?” I had to shout a little to make myself heard over the din of the alley, but it was like trying to speak through a raging thunderstorm.

The doctor lifted a finger to me: wait.

He bowled a strike, then went into a victory dance that reminded me of the Freddy, a spastic-looking step from the sixties I’d caught on an old American Bandstand clip. After he settled back into his seat and meticulously penciled in an X, he said: “I mean, he was castrated.”

“When?”

“How do I know? Some time ago, I guess. It was done surgically.”

Seth must’ve overheard us.

“He had no balls?” Seth asked.

The doctor shook his head. “You want to say it louder. The people in the back of the alley didn’t hear you.”

“HE HAD NO BALLS?” Seth shouted. “That ought to do it.”

“You’ve got a problem, son,” the doctor said.

“You have no idea, pop.”

I tried to tally up what number beer Seth was on—I guessed seven. Not to mention the Panama R. . .