Deceit

FIFTEEN

I was driving, then I wasn’t.

The engine went dead, and the car lurched to the side of the street like the victim of a stroke.

I was pissed off on two counts.

No car and no air-conditioning.

It was wicked hot.

On the other hand, at least I had a chance. Something about a loose coil wire, Anna had said. I had a clue.

I lifted up the sizzling hood and looked inside with a vague sense of hope. I zeroed in on the place I’d seen Anna poking around. Sure enough, there it was-a loose wire hanging out of the fuselage.

I managed to reconnect it. I was about to shut the hood when I noticed the words written on my transmission cover. I believe it’s a transmission cover.

Someone’s finger had traced the letters through the built-up grime.

It was an SN. Screen name, for those of you who haven’t yet joined the Internet generation.

AOL: Kkraab.

Anna had left me the modern equivalent of her phone number.

I thought that was kind of cute. Okay, more than that.

I’m not going to pretend casual indifference. I hadn’t had a woman I liked like me for a while. It had been a long time between watering holes-a bedouin expression.

I was parched.

When I got back home, I tried it out. I signed onto AOL, where I was known as Starreport, a screen moniker I’d taken before Ken Starr spent 80 million taxpayer dollars investigating oral sex. Also before my own actions made a derivation of star reporter farcical in the extreme.

I’d never bothered to change it.

The profile for Kkraab read as follows:

Name: Anna Graham.

Location: The State of Confusion and occasional Kkrabbiness.

Gender: Guess.

Marital Status: Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Hobbies and Interests: I play the conundrums.

Occupation: Yes.

Her personal quote was a song lyric from one Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan: You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.

It was hard to resist a profile like that-especially her homage to one of the seminal songs of the twentieth century, a personal favorite of mine already safely ensconced in my iPod.

I checked to see if Kkraab was currently online. She wasn’t.

I sent her an e-mail.

At least, I attempted to. I tried to strike the right balance between casual friendliness and raging lust. To do so in a manner that seemed remotely intelligent and witty.

I was stuck on Hello.

Like I said, it had been awhile. I used to be able to manufacture flirtatious banter with no trouble at all. Of course, that was back when I was manufacturing news stories. Perhaps they went hand in hand, creating fiction about other people or myself. Isn’t that what people do in the gloom of bars-make up personas they hope will get someone else to like them?

Now that I wasn’t making things up anymore, I was finding it difficult to construct a complete sentence to Anna.

I managed.

Hello, Anna, I wrote.

Good thing my coil wire came loose again or it might’ve been awhile before I saw your message.

I briefly considered whether that might’ve occurred to Anna as well and if she might’ve loosened it on purpose. No-believing that for one instant was the height of hubris.

I was hoping I would run into you again. I was considering driving to Santa Monica and taking a seat on the Third Street Promenade until you passed by. Are you still in town? If so, I’d love to buy you a drink. Or an island. Whatever it takes.

After I sent it, I thought it smacked of desperation.

Too late. There might be a way to cancel a sent e-mail, but I didn’t know it.

It reminded me of high school. Blabbing something into the phone and instantly regretting it.

Then again, maybe she was desperate, too.

There was a lot of desperation going around these days.

BOWLING NIGHT.

Muhammed Alley was unusually crowded. Unusually noisy, too-even for a bowling alley. For some reason the women’s league had been forced to switch nights.

Sam began the evening by propositioning me about buying life insurance again. I declined again.

Seth was another matter. He was acting weirdly hyper-a 2-year-old in dire need of Ritalin. Every time he threw a strike, he gave an impromptu rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out”-the guttural choral part. Ooho-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, accompanied by a series of Lil’ Kim-like pelvic thrusts.

Some of the women bowling four lanes down froze in mid-throw to watch him, as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were witnessing.

I questioned Marv about my car problems.

“Coil wire, huh? Bring it in and I’ll take a look,” he said. “Gratis.”

“Thanks.”

“No problemo.”

Marv was famously low-key, the kind of person who might actually watch grass grow and get a kick out of it. A demeanor you’d want at the other end of a suicide hotline. If I ever contemplated offing myself again, I’d call Marv.

Now I was contemplating other things.

The accident investigation was going nowhere. When Sheriff Swenson returned my call-after several days-he’d greeted my news about Cleveland having no record of Ed Crannell with a barely suppressed yawn. It was an accident, he reminded me. Meaning, who cared about finding Ed Crannell?

There was also the intriguing but ultimately unfathomable note from Benjy.

And there was Anna.

She’d actually gotten back to me.

I’ll take the island, she wrote. Palm trees and warm water preferable. While you’re shopping, I’ll take a cosmo.

It was kind of pathetic how happy I was to receive three lines. As if she’d whispered the three little words. I immediately e-mailed her back. We were meeting tomorrow night at Violetta’s Emporium, the only decent Italian restaurant in town.

I was surprised to realize I was feeling magnanimous and even happy-at least hopeful. But then, happiness is reality divided by expectations, and expectations had clearly risen.

When I noticed Seth being confronted by two pissed-off men, I was initially ready to offer them a beer.

Something had evidently escaped my attention. I was scoring tonight; I was contemplating scoring tomorrow night. Two men were yelling at Seth for some unknown reason.

“Let’s take a walk outside,” one of them was saying.

Seth was resisting that suggestion.

“Go fuck yourselves,” he exclaimed. He was holding his bowling ball in his right hand, swinging it loosely up and down as if considering using it as a weapon.

Sam was attempting to intercede.

“Let’s all calm down, shall we?”

“Keep out of it, fatty,” one of the men said. “Fuckwit here insulted our ladies.”

Insulted?

Then I understood. Seth had been doing the dog thing and one of the women objected. Seth’s impromptu wailings sounded like the epithets construction workers hurl at passing women in New York. Seth could’ve simply told them they were mistaken, that his yells of jubilation weren’t directed at anyone but the universe.

This was Seth.

“Those bow-wows?” he asked. “You ought to put a muzzle on them.”

That was all it took for one of the men to shove Seth into the ball retrieval. He came back swinging.

As I sprang up to play peacemaker, I could see BJ lumbering out from behind the bar. It appeared he had a Louisville Slugger in his hand. This had all the makings of an ugly incident-a banner headline across tomorrow’s Littleton Journal.

“Hey fellas,” I said. “This is a bowling alley.”

“Thanks, asshole,” the bigger one muttered without actually looking at me. “I thought it was the public library.”

Seth had awkwardly swung his ball in the direction of the bigger man’s head and badly missed. His momentum had carried him sideways into the scoring table. It occurred to me that five or six beers had probably taken their toll on Seth’s general equilibrium. Bowling ball or no bowling ball, he was a sitting duck.

The man smashed Seth in the side of the face. Seth went down hard. A woman screamed from somewhere in the alley-probably not one of the women who’d sent these two idiots out to defend her honor.

I managed to grab the closer one’s arm-he might’ve been physically less imposing than his friend, but I still felt a generous amount of muscle beneath his bowling shirt.

He jerked around to confront me, his right hand back and balled into a fist. I felt a crackling jolt of adrenaline, similar to the effect I used to get from the stepped-on coke I’d begun inhaling during my last excruciating days in New York. I ducked as his fist skittered over my left ear. Everyone seemed to be surging to our alley, mostly just to gawk, but some of them looking as if they had an old-fashioned barroom brawl in mind.

Crack!

BJ’s baseball bat slammed down on the scoring table, sending one and a half Miller High Lifes flying into the air.

A generous amount landed on the seriously pissed-off man I was holding on to for dear life.

Some of it got in his eyes; he cursed, squinted, then covered his face with his free hand. I used his momentary blindness to trap him in a semblance of a bear hug-more Yogi Bear than grizzly.

Seth had made it back to an upright position, frozen in a boxing stance of dubious merit. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something.

Maybe for the man holding the baseball bat over his head.

“You don’t want to be doing that here,” BJ said in a remarkably calm voice.

No one ventured a counter-opinion, including the man I was hugging like a long-lost friend.

I smelled a mixture of sweat and aftershave. I slowly let go. Aside from stepping back and flashing me a halfway murderous look, he made no effort to resume hostilities.

Seth was still bobbing and weaving.

“He was woofing at my girl,” Seth’s attacker said, obviously feeling a need to explain. It might’ve been his appearance-Jerry Springer miscreant, “Why I Can’t Stop Beating People Up”-a mostly shaven head with a Judas Priest tattoo garishly displayed on his right forearm.

“He was just woofing,” I said. “Honestly. That’s him. He gets boisterous.”

Seth didn’t look appreciative of my effort to defend him. It was possible he didn’t know what boisterous meant and was wondering if I was accusing him of something embarrassing.

“There you go,” BJ said, still holding the forty-ounce bat at chest level. “No harm, no foul,” switching sports in an effort to reach for the appropriate idiom. “I think you tough guys should call it a night.”

I believed his tough guys comment was sarcastic.

“Hey,” Sam said, “why don’t we all shake hands?”

He was trying to be civilized about it; maybe after we all made up, he was going to try to sell them some life insurance.

“C’mon,” he said, seemingly undeterred that no one had taken him up on his suggestion. “What do you say?”

Not much. The guy who’d punched Seth in the face snorted derisively, turned his back, and simply strolled away.

Sam flushed and turned to the other guy, tendering his slightly wilting olive branch. Still no takers. The guy shook his head as if Sam were a moron child, then followed his buddy down the lane.

It was about then that I saw him.

I was watching the two guys make their way down the alley, to collect the ladies Seth had grievously offended, I suppose. A few men patted them on the shoulders, whispered words of encouragement at their retreating backs.

I knew one of them.

The last time I saw this person, he was holding a plumbing tool in his hand. Or not a plumbing tool. Maybe just something to punch a hole in the wall and pry off a phone-jack cover. Staring at me with those muted features, as if he’d somehow missed his final trimester as a fetus. I could swear he was smiling.

I felt slightly nauseated.

I didn’t step forward, or step back, or yell police.

I turned to Seth as if eliciting silent support. When I turned back, the plumber was gone.

I know. It sounds as if I were hallucinating.

I wasn’t.

He was there, then he wasn’t there, just long enough to smile in my direction and disappear.

I hustled over to a table where two middle-aged couples in matching bowling shirts were snacking on greasy fries and chili dogs.

“The guy who was just standing here-did you see where he went?” I asked them.

They looked wary. Also confused. What guy who was just where, their faces said.

“Who?” One of the women finally asked.

“The man who was standing by your table…”

“You mean the man you were fighting with?” the woman said. “He’s over there.”

“No. Not him. The guy who whispered something to him when he walked by.”

“Whispered something to who?” one of the men asked. He looked kind of eager for me to take BJ’s suggestion and leave the bowling alley. Or at least leave them alone.

“Look, I’m a reporter for the paper here… I just want to know who that guy…”

“We don’t know what guy you’re talking about.” The woman again, looking almost sorry for me.

I stopped, scanned the alley. Most people had resumed bowling after the night’s entertainment break, something they would talk to their coworkers about over morning coffee. And then he picked up a bowling ball and…

I dashed into the men’s bathroom. A high school kid was busy admiring his tongue ring in the mirror. That’s it.

When I finally made it outside, the plumber wasn’t there, either.

Just the remnants of my bowling team.

Seth was telling Sam and Marv how he was going to get even with the pussy who’d sucker-punched him in the face.

Just you wait, he promised. It’s a done deal.