Deceit

FIFTY-FIVE

I am here.

In room four of the roach motel.

Disgraced journalists check in, but they don’t check out.

I am almost done. Nearly. Just about.

Have you got it all?

Have I sufficiently illuminated? Enlightened? Made clear?

Do I need to regurgitate the whole enchilada?

What don’t you get?

What they did? What they constructed? What they cobbled together, like a movie assembled scene by scene, as if by screenwriter by committee?

What did Wren say over the phone? The faux Wren, of course, one of several in a crucial cast of players. If I had to guess, another actor hired from that Web site, and told what to say-a simple voice-over job this time.

It reads like a bad movie, he said.

Don’t you get it? Don’t you see?

It was supposed to.

That was the whole point.

It was its whole raison d’etre.

Back in New York, when I was down to borrowing the conventions of a cheap thriller:

Anagrams.

Clandestine meetings in the ruins of destroyed towns.

Con men actors.

Auto Tag.

The works.

I read them. Your canon of deceit, he said to me.

I read them.

Of course they read them. But they did more than read them. They studied them. Then they re-borrowed them, those hackneyed conventions, wove them together into a veritable masterpiece of Valle’s greatest hits.

Remember how he’d goaded me over the phone-never went five minutes without reminding me what a disgrace I’d been. How I’d dishonored an entire profession. How I’d set journalism back fifty years.

Fifty years exactly.

All the way back to 1954.

Why?

Why goad? Why needle? Why prod?

Why was he such a font of useful information?

It was part of the script.

They told me about Lloyd Steiner.

They sent Anna Graham into Belinda’s birthday party, then into the parking lot of Muhammed Alley, where she scrawled that anagram into my fuselage.

Kara Bolka, my muse, my siren.

And the plumber. When I first woke up, strapped down and shot up.

How helpful was he? What a chatterbox. What a blabbermouth.

Why?

You still don’t grasp it?

They were trying to hide something, you say? Weren’t they?

Yes.

And no.

You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled, I told the plumber that day.

He hadn’t disagreed with me.

He couldn’t.

Plumbers fix leaks, sure.

But sometimes, they do exactly the opposite. They flush those old and leaky pipes; they send all that rotten water shooting out at a hundred miles an hour. They cleanse the system.

You can only keep a secret so long, Wren had told Anna, and then you can’t.

It’s a fact.

Two people can keep a secret, someone once said, if one of them is dead.

One of them was. Wren. He was dead. And Eddie Bronson-him too, I imagined. Not to mention that poor gas-station clerk, who was simply caught in the crossfire, metaphorically speaking.

And Benjy Washington.

Who’d flown the coop and headed back to Littleton.

Which must’ve sent them all into a dither.

He’d made it into the nursing home. He’d seen his mom. He’d called the sheriff’s office. Who else had he talked to? Who else had he sat down with and told the story to?

First Bronson flies the coop. Now him.

Where would it end?

After all, Wren might be as dead as a doornail, but they were still scared stiff of him. Scared of a corpse.

Why?

Because he’d told Anna, plain as day:

The story was protected.

The story. The secret.

Protected.

The story was someplace they couldn’t get to it.

But somewhere someone else could. The story would be brought into the light.

What did he mean?

They’d ripped his house apart to find out. They’d ripped his cabin apart.

They’d sent the plumber back into my house three times after Benjy made it back to Littleton.

Here’s the irony.

If they’d really ripped his house apart, taken that Sheetrock by the hands and pulled the walls down, they would’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

Nestled there behind the Sheetrock. The story Wren had painstakingly pursued and put together and paginated in the dead of night, too paranoid by then to share it with someone like Hinch. He didn’t know whom to trust anymore. Littleton loco, and for good reason.

Only they didn’t rip his house apart.

The sword of Damocles was still hanging over their heads.

Wren had put it there.

What’s a plumber to do?

Easy.

You set up a Web site for desperate actors who, if they aren’t willing to kill for a part, won’t care if you do.

You send the biggest liar in the universe out to Highway 45 to cover an accident.

You play Auto Tag with him on a desert road.

You send a doctor on a house call to a dead town.

You make sure a dreamy-looking girl named anagram bats her eyes at him in the parking lot of Muhammed Alley.

You direct him to Fifth Street, just off the promenade.

You goad.

You needle.

You prod.

You steal his gun and shoot someone with it.

You lock him in a mental ward and throw away the key.

But just for a while-just long enough to blacken his veracity that much more.

Then you put that key in poor Dennis’s hands and you set him free.

Now do you understand?

Now do you see?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a secret comes out.

It does not matter.

As long as you control how.