Deceit

TWENTY-EIGHT

L.A. doesn’t have a lot of after-hour clubs like New York. L.A. wrapped up earlier. Maybe it was all that healthy living-everyone needing to be pumping their legs up on Mulholland Drive at 6 a.m.

But there was at least one after-hours club in L.A.

I followed Sam’s gray Mustang there.

Sam had denied and denied and denied, and then pretty much given up when I told him I’d be happy to send him the story in the Littleton Journal with his picture in it. I hadn’t taken his picture that morning.

He didn’t know that.

We pulled up at storefront with completely blackened windows, stuck between a Live Nude Girls strip bar and an outdoor taco stand. Both appeared long closed. So did the store, but when Sam knocked on its door, someone answered and let us in.

There seemed to be a lot of actor types in there-in that they were all various shades of beautiful and somewhat desperate-looking.

We settled into a red leather banquette that might’ve come straight out of Goodfellas. The tables were a hodgepodge of styles, art deco to fifties luncheonette.

“The owner ran props at Paramount,” Sam explained.

Sam had his request for a dirty martini countermanded by his girlfriend-Trudy, she said her name was, who instead ordered him a ginger ale with no ice.

“I don’t want to be carrying you home,” she said. “I saw you sneaking drinks at the Pinata.”

Sam meekly acquiesced.

After his ginger ale was delivered by a waitress in a black catsuit, I asked him, “Okay, who hired you?”

“Some guy.”

“Some guy. That’s it? Did the guy have a name?”

“I don’t remember. I’m not shitting you. He was just some guy who needed an actor.”

“Okay-fine. Where did you meet him?”

“He got my name from a bulletin board. On the Web. You know, you place your headshots there and lie about all the productions you’ve been in, and sometimes you get a call. Mostly extra stuff.”

“What did he say to you? This guy whose name you don’t know?”

“That he needed an actor for one day’s work. Not even a day-a morning. An out-of-town job.”

“Did you ask him what the work was? A film, a commercial?”

“Sure. He said it was live theater.”

“For one day? For one morning? Didn’t that strike you as kind of unusual?”

“Yeah.”

“But you still went?”

“He was paying me five thousand dollars.”

“That’s where you got the money?” Trudy said. “You said you sold your bar mitzvah bonds-liar.”

Sam looked suddenly sheepish. I couldn’t help feeling-just for a moment-the empathy that one liar feels for another. In another context, I might’ve bought him a drink and commiserated with him like two kindred souls.

“You know what extra work pays?” he asked me. “Two fifty a day. If you can get it. And that’s more than they’re paying me for that moronic play. This was five thousand, okay? I have bills to pay.”

“Did you drive out to Littleton with this generous benefactor? Or just meet him there?”

“I drove out myself.”

“To Highway 45?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you find there?”

He’d begun playing with a matchbook, flipping it back and forth between his middle finger and thumb-flip, flip, flip. “The car was already on fire,” he said softly.

“So, what’d you do-call 9-1-1. Flag down a passing car?”

“He said it was empty. Just a dummy in there-part of the show. I swear to God, on my mother’s life.”

“Your mother’s dead,” Trudy said flatly.

“It’s an expression. Okay, fine, I swear to God on my life…” He was staring at me in full pleading mode, as if it was very important for me to believe him. “Nobody was in there. That’s what he said. Nobody real. You think I would’ve gotten involved in any kind of…” His voice trailed off.

“Any kind of what?” his girlfriend said, looking more disgusted by the second.

“Well, you know… crime or something. The guy needed an actor and he paid me five thousand to act. That’s it.”

“He was there when you got out there?” I asked. “The man who paid you?”

Sam nodded.

“What did he look like?”

Sam took a sip of his ginger ale. “Weird. You know… like, it’s hard to put into words exactly… he had a sort of pushed-in face… No, not pushed in, just not fully pushed out… Understand what I’m saying? He had this really high voice, too. Like a girl’s…”

You’re it.

“Okay,” I said. “There’s a burning car there. And him-anyone else?”

“Not yet. He said other people would be coming-just like a regular accident. You know, the police, an ambulance-I should play it like we’d collided, me and this car, even though no one was really in there. It was just for show.”

“And you believed him?”

Sam nodded.

“I was there, Sam. Remember?”

Sam looked away, down at the floor, at the smoky throng by the bar, at the walls plastered with old Peter Max prints, scanning the room as if searching for the nearest exit.

“Remember the smell, Sam? Remember that odor coming from the car? You knew what that was, didn’t you? You knew what it meant? Who’s the dummy here, Sam?”

Sam had redirected his stare at his lonely glass of ginger ale, as if he wanted to dive in and drown. His eyes began tearing up. For the first time that night, I knew he wasn’t acting.

“I…” He picked his hands up in a gesture of hopeless remorse. “Look, I tried to believe him, okay. The guy said it was an act. I’d driven all the way out there already, he tells me no one’s in the car, then suddenly the police drive up, and an ambulance, and then you show up…”

“The other car-your car. The smashed-in Sable. Whose was it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was there when I got there. I think he drove it.”

“Okay. What about after?”

“After what?”

“After I left? After you politely answered my questions about the accident? By the way-were you improvising, or was there some kind of script you were supposed to follow?”

“He told me what to say. More or less. The basic idea of it-how the accident happened. I just riffed on it.”

“To the sheriff?”

He nodded. “And you.”

“Right. That didn’t bother you, making things up to a policeman? You weren’t concerned you might get in trouble?”

A black girl on six-inch heels had wandered over to our banquette. She reached down and hugged Trudy.

“Rudey…” she said. “You haven’t called me in a dog’s age, girl. What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Trudy said.

“I heard you’re doing the-a-ter.”

“Yeah,” Trudy said without much enthusiasm.

“With your significant other, huh?”

“He’s not as significant as you think,” Trudy said.

Sam turned to look at her with a hangdog expression of pure agony.

“Look,” Trudy said to her, “we’re engaged in something kind of private here. Promise to call you, okay?”

The girl said: “Private, huh?” giving me a glance that seemed mildly lascivious. “Okay, see ya.”

“After I left, what happened?” I asked Sam.

“Nothing. I got paid. That’s it.”

“That’s it. You didn’t ask him what the little play was about? You get called to the middle of the California desert and find a car on fire with the obvious smell of burning human being in the air, and you lie to a sheriff and a local reporter and you take your money and you don’t ask him, not even once, what the hell was going on?”

“I asked him,” Sam said, an almost whisper.

“And what did he say?”

“He said it was a reality show. Have a nice life.”

“That’s it. You didn’t ask him again?”

Sam shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t want to know. Okay?”

Like someone else, I suddenly remembered. There’d been moments, when this someone else had sat there and listened to my overheated explanations, my rationalizing away one inconsistency or another, and I thought, he knows, it’s right there on the tip of his tongue, but he will not say it. He won’t.

“So you drove back and that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Never picked up a paper or looked on the Web to see if anybody really died out there? No curiosity at all?”

He shook his head. “I told you. I wanted to forget about it.”

The first gray glimmer of morning was beginning to poke through the front window where the black paint had flecked off; it looked like a canopy of washed-out stars.

“Tell me about that place on the Web again. Where he just happened to pick you.”

“What about it?”

“How did he know you wouldn’t get out there and just turn around and leave?”

“I told you. It was a lot of money to me.”

“Yeah, you told me. But there’s a limit to what people will do, even for a lot of money. How did he know you’d go along with it?”

Trudy folded her arms and fixed him with a withering stare.

Sam shrugged.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“Sure you do. I’m asking you why he picked you. Come on, Sam. What kind of Web site are we talking about here?”

“I told you. Just an actors’ bulletin board.”

“What kind of actors?”

Sam sighed, squirmed in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for divine guidance, maybe.

“I heard about it from another actor, okay-this new Web site that helps actors, you know, who need a little extra cash…”

“Yeah?”

“Actors who are willing to act in nontraditional formats.”

“Nontraditional formats. Is that what you call it?”

“What’s he talking about?” Trudy didn’t get it; maybe she’d had to swallow a lot in this relationship, but she couldn’t digest this. Not yet.

“Tell her, Sam. Say it.”

“Well, you know…”

I said it for him. “Cons. For enough money you loaned yourself out for con jobs. That’s the only kind of acting that would pay five thousand dollars for one morning, isn’t it?”

Sam didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to.

A chill was slowly working its way up my spine, one vertebra at a time.

I turned to Trudy.

“I would watch your back if I were you.”

When Sam looked up at me with a suddenly queasy expression, I said: “The man who paid you. He might not like the fact that you’re walking around. Not anymore. Okay?”

That shock of recognition.

Confronted with something half-familiar and half-remembered.

A group of desperate Hollywood actors selling themselves to the Russian mob for cons.

Remember?

One of my stories.

Only it was one of those stories.

Currently featured on a certain online Web site courtesy of a great American newspaper that I’d almost brought to its knees.

Fodder from Valle’s prodigious canon of deceit.

Dramatically constructed. Exquisitely detailed. Rigorously recounted.

But not true.

Not true.

Not one single fucking word of it.