Deceit

FORTY-EIGHT

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 exposé 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.

Why?

What was he doing there that night?

He’d been evicted from the premises, then gone and holed himself up somewhere to work on the story.

What was the story?

I think I knew.

It was a story about MIAs helping one another out.

Purely for bureaucratic purposes.

Those MIAs up on that granite wall-their records remain open in the VA system as long as their bodies remain missing. They’d helped out a few MIAs from a different kind of a national disaster. Unknowingly, of course. They’d given them their names. The disappeared from Littleton Flats-where it wasn’t a dam that blew sky-high that Sunday morning.

No.

You might want to get yourself a Geiger counter, Mr. Wren.

I still hadn’t really looked at where I was.

If I had, I would’ve noted that it resembled a padded cell minus the padding. I would’ve been aware that Rainey hadn’t come back in a jiffy, that one minute had become two, then three, and four and five.

Time needed to register.

Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick and suddenly it was fifteen minutes after Rainey left. Suddenly I was sitting on the hard metal bench, which folded down from the wall. I was in a room you didn’t want to spend too much time in.

I wasn’t collecting accolades as I showed off for the crowd.

I was staring at my surroundings. I was reading what various incarcerated people had knifed into the wall.

I am a man of constant sorrows, someone had scrawled.

Call God collect.

I am MIA from the world.

And this:

Greetings from Kara Bolka.

Even as I stood up and walked the four feet to the door-it had a small grill in it like the door outside the elevator-even before I turned the knob, I began to sense that it might not open. That doors can open and doors can close and sometimes open doors can become closed ones.

I grasped the knob and turned.

Locked tight.

I put some wrist into it. Nothing.

I pushed against the door as if making sure that it was really, truly locked. I tapped on it, politely at first, as if it might be a misunderstanding, just a technical glitch, and Rainey would come running over in one minute to open it up and apologize.

After a while, I started pounding on it.

“Hey! Hey, Rainey! What’s going on here?”

Sometimes when you shout a question out loud, you already know the answer. It’s mere formality. What are you doing? you yell when someone pulls a gun on you in a dark and scuzzy part of town. You know what they’re doing. They’re preparing to shoot you.

“Hey, c’mon! Open the damn door. What is this?” I shouted, with the rising panic of someone trapped between floors.

It took ten minutes for Rainey to show up.

Long enough to have bloodied my knuckles and to be dripping in sweat. To have put numerous scuff marks on the bottom of the door where I’d tried to kick it open.

Rainey wasn’t smiling anymore. He wasn’t letting me out, either.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said.

“You know what you’re doing? I’m a cop.”

“Yeah, I’m a cop too. I’m the fucking chief of police.”

Okay, charade up.

“Okay, fine. I’m a journalist.”

“You don’t say?”

“My name is Tom Valle. I’m from the Littleton Journal. Sometimes reporters have to lie a little to get the story. You can’t lock us up for that. Otherwise we’d all be in jail. Look, just let me out, and we’ll forget about this…”

“Lie a little? That’s a lie right there. That’s a whopper.”

Someone had been talking to him.

“Look, you’re breaking the law here. You’re aiding and abetting the wrong people. Right here-right in this fucking hospital.” Sometimes the first time you know you’re really scared is when you hear it in your own voice. Up till then, you think you’re doing okay-you’re in control, you’re going to get out of this.

“Wrong people, right. That’s good. That’s funny. Why don’t you just be cool, okay? Why don’t you sit back down?”

“Rainey, let me out of here. I’m a reporter, for god’s sake. There’s something criminal going on here.”

“Yeah. You’re right about that.”

“I’m not the criminal.”

“Yeah, you’re the cop. You’re Detective Wolfe.”

“You wouldn’t have let me in if I told you I was a reporter.”

“Well, now that you put it that way…”

“You’re going to let me out?”

“No.”

He was taking orders. This was a military hospital and he was taking orders.

“Look, you can’t just lock me up. This is fucking nuts. I have rights…” It was a tired refrain, something he probably heard a hundred times a day. It was like every prison on earth. No one’s guilty. No one belongs there. It’s all a mistake.

“Rights, huh,” Rainey said. “I got the right to some peace and fucking quiet. So sit down, and shut the fuck up.”

I screamed something. I’m not sure what it was-something with lots of four-letter words in it.

I managed to stop screaming just long enough to hear someone whispering.

Out there-out where Rainey was.

He’d ducked away to the left of the grill-I could hear a conversation going on. I couldn’t make out the words.

“Hey! Hey! Who’s that? Who you talking to, Rainey? Hey!”

More footsteps. The sound of cart wheels rolling on tile.

The doorknob jiggled, turned.

I instinctively backed away, edged closer to the wall.

Rainey and two orderlies in blue scrubs. They’d obviously been picked for their size and not their bedside manners. One of them had a syringe in his left hand.

“What’s that?” I said.

“What’s it look like?” Rainey said.

“I’m not taking a shot.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

“You’re committing a crime, don’t you get it? You’re going to jail.”

“Nah, I’m going home. After we put you to bed.”

“I’m not taking a shot.”

“You’re agitated, dude. Agitated people make me agitated.”

The orderly with the syringe in his hand looked Samoan, like one of those NFL fullbacks with a last name you can’t pronounce. He smiled and said, “Come here.”

“No thanks. I’m fine right here. Thanks anyway.”

“Look, man,” he said with weary exasperation. “We can do it hard or easy.”

“Okay-easy. Let me out of here, and I’ll go easy on you. Promise. On all of you. I understand. You’re taking orders. I get it. You’re orderlies; orderlies take orders. I’m not a patient. I’m a reporter. I’m doing a story.”

“Better spell my name right, bro,” the Samoan said. “It’s got eleven letters.”

“Name? Hey, I won’t mention your name. Just let me walk out of here and it’s all copacetic. It’s all cool.”

“You really want this?” Rainey said. “You want to be hog-tied, straitjacketed, fucked up? You want the whole shit storm?”

“Okay, fine, you win,” I said.

There was a slight space between the Samoan and the door, a crack of daylight a good running back might blow through like a category 4 hurricane.

“Can I roll up my own sleeve?” I said.

I hadn’t played football since childhood-three-on-three street ball where you had to keep one eye open for darting cars. I’d been considered shifty back then, a good thing on 167th Street even if it was a not-so-good thing later on in the newsroom.

I tried to look relaxed, resigned to my fate.

It’s hard to do with every muscle in your body quivering in alarm.

Agitated people made them agitated. Relaxed people made them relaxed. See. Rainey was already leaning back against the wall. The other orderly was leaving, no longer needed-gone. The Samoan folded his arms, like a patient husband waiting for his wife to vacate the dressing room so he can go home and watch the game.

“Which arm you guys want?” I asked.

“Your choice, bro,” the Samoan said.

“I’ll go left,” I said, “since I’m a righty,” starting to methodically roll up my sleeve.

One, two, three.

One, two, three.

Get off my old man’s apple tree…

Straight from 167th Street, Queens.

I ran to daylight.

Surprising them just enough to slip past the Samoan’s attempt at an arm tackle.

Fast enough to burst through the open door and into the hallway.

Cool enough to blow past a doctor/orderly/patient without stopping to register which.

Run, Forrest, run…

I might’ve made it. Really.

All the way to the elevator and down to the ground floor where I could’ve made a scene, could’ve said can you believe what these guys are trying to do to me, can you, where Major DeCola would’ve sent them scurrying back up the psych ward.

I might’ve, but I ran into a brick wall.

It was human.

THE SAMOAN MUST’VE GIVEN ME THE SHOT AFTER ALL.

When I woke, coughed, sputtered, opened my eyes, and looked, I was staring into a mirror. A funhouse mirror, where your reflection blurs like a rained-on watercolor, distorted enough to make you feel uncomfortably queasy.

My reflection was smiling at me, even though I was pretty certain I wasn’t smiling back.

That made me even queasier.

“Hello,” I said, my voice sounding as if it were coming through a bad cell phone connection. “Hello. Who are you?”

“You asked me that already,” the reflection said. “I’m a plumber, remember? I’m doing routine maintenance.” The same whistling falsetto I’d heard in my basement that day. Like a girl, Sam said.

He was still smiling at me.

You can’t touch me, that smile said. Can’t… can’t… can’t…

I couldn’t touch him.

I was lying down. My legs and arms were strapped tight.

“You followed us to that gas station,” I said, still in that strange, faraway voice. “You tracked my credit card receipts and you followed us.”

He laughed. “Credit card?” He shook his head. “Now that wouldn’t have been very efficient,” he said.

“You knew where we were? How?”

“You’re an investigative reporter. Figure it out.”

Like a dream.

“Why am I tied down?” I said.

“Oh, that,” he said. “You were resisting treatment.”

A birth defect, I thought, looking at his face. I’d imagined it was an accident-a horrible smashup where they couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It wasn’t. He had no scars. It was a malfunction in the manufacturing process. He’d come out this way.

“You were there at the gas station. I can’t figure it out,” I said.

“No?”

He put his hand by his ear and pantomimed something. We were playing charades.

Okay. Of course.

“My cell,” I said. “You used my cell phone.”

“I can’t comment. I mean, is this off the record? I wouldn’t want to be quoted or anything.”

“You triangulated my signal.”

They could do that now-satellites able to pinpoint your location to within six inches. You don’t have to be using your phone, either-it just has to be on. That’s how he was able to be right there. To follow us on the highway, then creep up to the gas station where we’d fallen asleep.

“You killed the clerk,” I said. “You cut out Dennis’s tongue.”

“Wow. When you put it like that, it sounds kind of mean.”

“Why? I was asleep. Why didn’t you just kill me?”

He giggled, said nothing.

“What do you want? What are you going to do with me?”

“I’m a plumber. Not a psych.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Of course not.”

“I know about Kara Bolka. I know about the 499th medical battalion. I know what happened to Littleton Flats.”

“Hell of a story, ain’t it?”

“If I know, if I figured it out, someone else will. Don’t you people get that? It won’t be just me. You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled. It’s all over the fucking floor.”

“That’s what plumbers do. We fix leaks.”

“I’m the leak,” I said. Needles and pins. There were needles and pins in my legs. “You’re fixing me.”

“Don’t worry. No bill for my services,” he said.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

“My face? Why? What’s wrong with my face?”

“It isn’t there.”

“Oh, that. Took too many left hooks.”

“That’s not from boxing.”

“Okay, you got me. That’s what I tell women in bars.”

“Do they believe you?”

“Never.”

“What happened to your face?”

“I was in an accident.”

“There aren’t any scars.”

“It was an accident of birth.”

“Where? Where did the accident take place?”

“In a hospital.”

“Which hospital?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be even with my brain swimming in drugs, knowing the answer.

“This one. It wasn’t always a VA hospital.”

“No. It was a research hospital,” I said. “For the DOE. I know what kind of research, too. You were here. Another resident of Kara Bolka.”

“Kara Bolka,” he repeated. “Ahhh. That was just their nickname for it. The docs. A kind of a joke, really. We weren’t residents of Kara Bolka. We were its refugees. We lived like rats in its shadow. It was our bogey-place. It’s the story they told us to keep us scared.”

“Yes. But who was the bogeyman? Bogey-places have bogeymen.”

He smiled. “I think you met him.”

“Yeah. Someone else did too. Only she didn’t know it at the time. She was 3.”

“The little girl,” he whispered. “Bailey.”

Believe in fairy tales? Ever read one as an adult? Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you.

Fairy tales can be read two ways.

“Bailey saw things the way a little girl would,” I said.

My voice sounded like radio static.

“Rescue workers in white hazard suits looked like something else. They looked like robots with no faces. The noise their radiation detectors made sounded like a language-clicking away at one another like dolphins. Doctors with surgical masks became aliens without mouths. Their MASH unit looked like a spaceship. She remembered a bright blue light-he had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank God for the we are not alone crowd, huh?”

“Why?”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why didn’t Bailey become another refugee? Why wasn’t she carted off like the others-like Benjy? Why wasn’t she locked away in Kara Bolka?”

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born yet.”

“You were born after it happened. Here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your mother-what happened to her?”

“What do you think happened to her?” he said. “Neutrons and gamma rays happened to her. She was microwaved. I’m what came out of the oven.” He laughed again, but this time, it sounded thin and bitter.

“But you…?”

“What?”

“You’re doing their dirty work.”

“I am their dirty work. Besides, my job opportunities were kind of limited. Call me an honorary trustee who graduated to bigger and better things. And listen, you can’t beat government pensions.”

“Which part of the government? The DOE?”

“Let’s just say a part that doesn’t appear in their directory.”

“You became their hired killer. Their plumber. Even after what they did?”

“Learn your history. You know who the worst guards in the Nazi camps were? The most brutal? Not the Nazis. The kapos-the Jews given their very own rubber truncheons.”

“You weren’t being threatened with the gas chamber.”

“No, just with the top floor of this hospital. That was enough. Besides, they didn’t destroy Littleton Flats. The ghost in the machine did.”

“I’m not talking about Littleton Flats. I’m talking about what they did to Benjamin. What they did to you.”

That eerie falsetto. The Italians called it something else, of course.

Castrato.

“They mutilated you. When you were a baby. Just like they did to Benjamin. They castrated both of you.”

That smile again-you could see it for what it was now. Sneer first, and it won’t hurt as much when they sneer back.

“See this?” He pointed to his face. “Sure you do. Take a good look at it. They thought one of these was enough. They were protecting the gene pool. Hard to blame them.”

I thought his expression was saying something else. Look what they did to me. Look.

“How many survived?” I asked him. “Benjamin, your mom. How many made it out that day?”

“Sorry. I told you. I wasn’t born yet.”

“When the hospital turned VA, they gave them legends,” I said. “The children that survived. The names of MIA vets around the same age. They needed to account for them being wards of the VA-to absorb them into the system. Benjamin Washington became Benjamin Briscoe. He was lucky-he got to keep his first name. And there was one other survivor, wasn’t there? At least one. The one who wandered into Littleton three years ago and went to sleep in the town gazebo. That’s what Wren found out when he went to Washington-why he came back and began to ask questions about the flood.”

“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “Let me check the list and see if you’re on it. I’ll get back to you.”

“I made copies of everything I have. Everything I know. It’s with the right people.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, looking almost bored. “I don’t think the right people answer your calls.”

“A story’s a story.”

“And you’re a real storyteller. Only your stories aren’t real. They come with grain of salt included. Pound of salt, if we’re being honest. Of course, we’re not. Being honest, I mean. You didn’t make copies of anything. The right people? Even the National Enquirer won’t take your calls.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t make copies of anything. No one will believe me. So you can let me go.”

He didn’t bother answering me.

“My legs are going numb. Can you loosen the straps?”

“You have a note from your doctor?”

“Please.”

“Practicing medicine without a license is a crime.”

My dentist once went a little overboard with the gas. Not that pleasant floating sensation-more like I was floating right out of the stratosphere, where the air’s too thin to breathe. It felt like that. The plumber would say something, but it took a while for the words to actually appear. They needed to travel all the way to Mars.

They’d pumped Benjy with the same stuff.

All that mumbling around the psych ward. Maybe he’d mumbled about explosions and floods and doctors wielding scalpels. About his real last name being Washington and him never setting foot in Vietnam. It didn’t matter. It was all sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.

Get used to it.

When I tried to ask the plumber what was going to happen now-would I live or die or maybe live a kind of walking death like Benjy-I couldn’t form the words. They came out garbled. I felt like giggling.

I was in the same room I’d been in before. I noticed that now.

There was a place on the wall reserved for me. I could post my own letter from Kara Bolka. I am MIA from the world. Call God collect.

This was the worst part of the psych ward.

The place they put the hopeless ones, the ones who don’t even get plastic spoons.

Don’t listen to anything he says-that’s what they’d tell the orderlies. He lies. He’ll say anything. He’ll tell you he’s a reporter; he’ll babble about nuclear reactors and eight hundred dead and horrible coverups and Kara Bolka. What’s Kara Bolka, you say? Who knows? The ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies. They say he killed a gas-station clerk. That he shot a 19-year-old kid in Littleton, California. He cut out poor Dennis’s tongue.

It sounded like a good story. If someone told me a story like that, I would pitch it to Hinch. I’d write it up.

I would.