Deceit

NINE

My Miata didn’t start.

I gave it the gas, once, twice, three times.

I must’ve flooded the engine.

I got out, opened up the hood, and stared at the tangle of wires, tubes, and metal as if I knew what I was doing.

I didn’t. I couldn’t tell a carburetor from a transmission.

It doesn’t matter. That’s what you do when your car doesn’t start. You open up the hood and stare knowingly at the engine.

I was hoping one of the parts might speak to me. Over here, Tom-it’s me. I’m the culprit.

No such luck.

I was agitated, pissed off, finally on a roll and suddenly no wheels.

I was wondering where my friend Marv the Exxon owner was when I really needed him. I was going to head back into Muhammed Alley and ask Seth for a lift.

Then I didn’t have to.

A cherry red Beetle pulled into the parking lot. A woman got out, began walking in the general direction of the alley entrance, turned, and noticed me.

“Car problems?”

“That would account for the open hood,” I said, more caustically than I’d intended.

She swiveled around and continued on her way in.

“Wait a second. Yes. Car problems. Big car problems.”

She stopped and turned back toward me.

I recognized her.

I felt that little flutter. That unexpected bump in the biorhythms.

“I saw you at Belinda Washington’s birthday party,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right.” She’d stopped about five feet from me. She was wearing a skirt this time-denim, ending just above her calves. It was hard not to notice those calves were tan, toned, and gently rounded. “The reporter, right?”

“I used to be.”

“Used to be? I thought you were doing a story?”

“I was. I’m being self-deprecating.”

“You might want to leave that to someone else,” she said.

Her smile accented the soft dimple on her left cheek. I used to have one, too. My mom, in one of her sentimental moments, as opposed to her terrifyingly volcanic ones-both of them alcohol-induced with no way to predict which one she’d slide into any given day-told me God had stuck his finger in my cheek when he was done molding me. After a certain age, I couldn’t find it anymore. It just disappeared.

“My car won’t start,” I said.

“Yeah, I kind of got that.” She walked over and peeked under the hood.

It was around 8 p.m. on what had been a sizzling June day, still light enough to see but growing dimmer by the second. The kind of light that softens everything, that might’ve sent an impressionist sprinting for the canvas and brushes. That makes a woman bent over at the waist a thing of rare and numbing beauty.

Clang. Bang. Clink.

She unscrewed something, poked inside the engine.

“Your coil wire’s loose,” she said after a few minutes. “Try it now.”

I crawled into the front seat, gave it some gas.

Vroooooooooooooom.

“I guess this is what they call role reversal,” I said, once I’d extricated myself from the car and shaken her hand. “Thanks.”

“My pop was a mechanic,” she said. “He basically lived under the hood. It was the only way I could spend time with him.”

“You must’ve been paying attention.” Her hand was back by her side, but I could still feel the impression of her fingers-hot flesh and cool lacquer.

“Enough to spot a loose coil wire,” she said. “It’s really not that hard.”

At least she smiled when she said it.

“Tom Valle,” I introduced myself, cognizant that the flutter hadn’t gone away, that it was still flitting madly around my chest like a butterfly caught in a net.

“Anna Graham,” she said.

“Were you visiting someone? At the home?”

“My pop. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

Silence. I was trying to stare and not stare at the same time. The kind of thing you do your first time at a nude beach. It’s easier with sunglasses on.

“Well,” she said, “I was on my way in.”

For a moment, I was going to say, what a coincidence, me, too. I was on my way in, too. Clearly, I’d been on my way out.

“Are you… uhh…?”

“What?” She was shading her eyes against the sun’s glare, but even squinting, her eyes were wide enough to meander around in.

“Are you staying here? In Littleton?”

“Just for a few days. I live in Santa Monica.”

“Santa Monica, huh.”

“On Fifth, right off the promenade.”

“Ever had drinks at Shutters?”

“No.”

“It’s got a pretty bar.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe I’ll see you there someday.”

Her expression said maybe not.

I drove home.

When I walked through the door, I was going to turn right and head up to the bedroom to watch Nick at Nite reruns of I Love Lucy. I did love Lucy, at least maintained a true-blue affection for her. After all, Lucy, Ethel, Fred, and Ricky had babysat my brother and me through numerous afternoons when my mom was present but otherwise occupied, when she’d traded Jim, Jack, and Johnnie for Tom, Dick, and Vinny, a parade of mostly faceless men who sometimes tousled my hair on their way upstairs.

I didn’t go watch I Love Lucy. Instead I flicked on the basement light at the top of the steps and walked down. Tentatively. Making sure to stop at each step and peek.

As far as I could tell, the basement was empty this time.

I’d given it a cursory look after the assault, when I’d finally lifted myself to a wobbly semblance of standing.

He’d been kneeling halfway between the heater and the wall.

The place I’d first seen him.

Banging around with that metal thing in his hand. You could safely assume he hadn’t been fixing the boiler.

So what had he been doing?

If he was breaking and entering, why had he come down here?

I felt along the wall. There were two lopsided shelves nailed into the plaster. Some old paint cans, stiffened rags, a broken radio from the fifties sitting on top of a tattered board game. I wiped off the coating of dust. Milton Bradley’s Life. For a brief moment, I saw myself hurrying a tiny blue car around the labyrinthine road to Millionaire’s Mansion, hoarding my pile of funny money from my mother’s rheumy eyes. Not that she didn’t see things. Jimmy cheating, for instance. She always saw that. Swiping money from the bank like a little thief.

A sudden pang of dread lodged itself in the center of my chest.

I looked down where the drywall met the floor. A brown spider scurried beneath a paint can.

A jar of bottle caps.

A cracked hockey stick with the faded logo of the San Jose Sharks.

A nearly unraveled baseball.

Some old books. A biography of Edward R. Murrow. A History of the Cold War. Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam. Hiroshima by John Hersey.

Wren’s, I imagined.

There was plaster dust sitting on the cover photo of a mushroom cloud. When I pushed the books aside, I uncovered a large, ragged hole in the wall. You would’ve needed something pretty heavy to do that, I thought, trying to picture that metal thing in the plumber’s hand. The thing he’d ended up whacking me over the head with.

I peeked into the hole but saw nothing but drywall and ripped edges of newspaper insulation.

When I continued my way around the basement, I stepped on something.

Small and plastic.

I kneeled down, assaulted by the strong scent of mildew, and picked it up.

A phone-jack cover. The screw was still dangling in the hole.

Where had it come from?

There. Along the base of the wall.

The phone jack was open, red and yellow wires separated from their respective screws, reaching into the air like fingers frozen in rigor mortis.

I brought the cover over to the single naked bulb dangling from the basement ceiling. The jack was obviously unused-there was no phone down here. The cover might’ve been lying around forever, years even.

There was no dust on it.

So, okay, it hadn’t been.