The Bright Spot Read online

  “Do you have the tracking number of your complaint?”

  “I carried it around for a while, but I lost it. I tried calling three or four times, but the wait was always so long I gave up, and then I sort of forgot about it. I never had much need for it.”

  “Do you have any other identification—anything with your name on it?”

  “Not here. We just sort of moved in together not so long ago. Everything like that is at my old place. Do you need it?” Without actually getting up, I tried to look reluctantly willing to rise from my chair and make the journey if I absolutely had to. I wanted to be a law-abiding citizen, but it was also Sunday, and I wanted to take my shoes off.

  They traded a look. I had no doubt what I’d just told the cops was perfectly plausible to them. Maybe too perfectly. But they’d had enough for today, especially since their next move would be to ride over to some loser’s room and read his mail for evidence of the great dog-shit conspiracy.

  “How about you just stay away from that particular trashcan in the future, Mr. ...?”

  “Tedowski. Okay. Be glad to.” I gave them a nowwasn’t-that-easy? smile. Pushing my luck again. They’d gotten interested because I was sporting a phony name. Just because I’d tossed them a new one to chew on didn’t mean I was out of the woods yet. There was still the parting question, the Columbo move, though I never met a cop yet half as smart as Peter Falk. You could see Murphy waiting to pop it like an after-dinner mint.

  We all stood up. I kept Buck tucked under my arm. If the question turned out to be a tough one, I could always put him down and buy myself a moment or two to come up with an answer.

  But the parting question didn’t turn out to be for me, but for Lu. Murphy turned to her. “What about you, L’il Lu? You have any light to shed on this business?”

  Of course. I should’ve known. Everybody knew L’il Lu around here—went to school with her, ran with somebody she dated, knew her mama, something . Murphy was probably one of a long line of guys who’d dated her and carried a torch. She looked him right in the eye. “Dick never told me anything about it. Other than the day it happened. We just laughed about it. I walk the dog sometimes too, you know. I could’ve put some of the shit in that can.”

  Murphy didn’t care about shit. What was it Kennemeyer said?— What did you know and when did you know it? “So you knew his name wasn’t Nicholas Bainbridge?”

  “Of course. Dick Tedowski. Sometimes I call him Ted. That’s what his mother called him and his father— Big Ted and Little Ted.”

  “Is that right. Everybody down at the corner seems to think his name is Nick.”

  “The stage name’s good publicity for the virtual we’re in. Billy and the Big Guy. You should check it out.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “You got any more of those cards, Dick?” she asked me, and I passed them out as we shuffled toward the door.

  Everybody seemed to know everybody was lying in some way or other, but nobody minded it particularly, not yet. As long as Mr. Casual was happy and L’il Lu wasn’t going to rat me out.

  When the two cops finally squeezed their fat butts out the door, Lu and I went back to the kitchen. I started making coffee, and she sat down at the table. We made a little small talk about her gig in Philly as I worked. “Is there something I should know about you?” she asked when I turned on the machine and sat down. She didn’t seem as mad as I’d thought she’d be.

  “I wouldn’t say that. It’s nothing bad. It’s nothing you need to know. Thanks for the help. You were great. I’d like to stick with the name Nicholas Bainbridge, if you don’t mind.”

  I figured she would mind, but she thought about it. She could think of a dozen good reasons why someone might want to lose an old name, take on a new one. It happened all the time. She believed in live-and-let-live. It was the neighborhood religion. “All right. But no more cops, Nick. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She laughed. “Dick Tedowski. Jesus, Nick, is that all you could come up with? I had trouble playing it straight.”

  “ ‘Big Ted and Little Ted’? I just about lost it. You should’ve seen the look on Lawson’s face when I handed him a card.”

  “Who’s Lawson?”

  “The white guy?”

  “His name’s Jackson.”

  “Lawson must be a stage name.”

  We laughed and laughed. We were hilarious. We brought the house down. We could hardly stop laughing. But when we did, the coffee machine’s dying gurgles filled the silence, and Lu jumped up, busying herself getting the cups, waiting, pouring. She was thinking what I was thinking, I’m sure: This keeping secrets thing wasn’t going to work.

  “Where did you go today anyway?” she asked when she sat back down.

  “I rode out to Llewellyn to see a guy named Edmund Kennemeyer, who used to know James Dumfries.”

  “You’re still hung up on that?”

  “He interests me.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Not a whole lot. He turned cagey on me. Scared. Which makes me think there’s a whole lot more to this than somebody wanting to see his old girlfriend dump him again.”

  “Of course there is.” She gave me a look. She wasn’t just stating an opinion. She knew something. More importantly, she might be persuaded to tell.

  “You finally going to tell me what it is?” I asked.

  “You finally going to tell me your name? You finally going to tell me what the old man said to you that’s got you hauling out to Llewellyn on your day off? How the hell did you get there anyway?”

  “I rode the bus.”

  “I thought they killed all those routes.”

  “They tried. They chopped them up into little pieces, but they’re still crawling around looking for a place to die. Since we’re putting all our questions on the table, Lu, I’ve got one we can start with. How’d I come to get chosen for this job in the first place? You look enough like Galatea Ritsa to be her sister, and maybe that’s a coincidence. But I look enough like James Dumfries to be him. So how did we conveniently come to be working at the same shop?”

  She nodded, a little smile on her face. Lu liked to bargain. “How about I tell you what you want to know, and you tell me what I want to know—starting with your name, for example?”

  “I thought you were okay with not knowing.”

  “I am. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to know. How badly do you want to know about the Salvador job?”

  “They’re totally different things.”

  “I’m not denying that. But that’s not really relevant here. I’m proposing a swap—your confession for mine.” There was something sad and scared around the corners of that smile. It was time. She was telling me in so many words she wanted to confess, and I suppose I did too.

  But I added a clause of my own: “You have to promise never to tell my name to anyone, and never, ever use it yourself, even joking around, even if we’re alone. I never want to hear it, okay?”

  She was a little stunned at my intensity. I was too. I’d never even considered the possibility of telling anyone my real name since I sent it to its final reward a few years back. “Okay,” she said. “I promise. So what is it? What’s the big secret?”

  “You first.”

  She shrugged, took a deep breath. I had the idea she had thought about what she was going to say. Plenty of times. “We were at the same shop because I came looking for you. You were the reason I took a job there. You’d registered your photo with the Guild under the name of Nicholas Bainbridge. Salvador found you in a look-alike search, same way he found me. You’d just started with ReCreation. Salvador hired me first, and I was sent to check you out, to see if you were right for the job. Salvador said he knew one of the ReCreation backers and could call in a favor to get me hired, but Wally took a shine to me, and I didn’t need his help. You know the rest. I checked you out. I thought you were perfect for the job.”

  “And why did Salvador trust you so much?
”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “I was sleeping with him.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yeah. Oh. I didn’t even know you, Nick. I thought ... Hell, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was doing this job, going to make some big money, get out of here. There’s only one thing that didn’t go the way it was supposed to go. I was supposed to recruit you, get you on board, and when the job was over, split with Salvador. I told him that part was off, that I’d fallen for you, and I was sticking with you. That’s why we didn’t get any money, Nick. He was pissed. He was supposed to get the money and the girl, and all he got was the money, so he kept it all for himself.”

  “And I get the girl.”

  “If you want her.”

  “Course I want her. You told me you’d never met with the real Salvador, that it was all virtual.”

  “I lied. I didn’t want to go into it. I didn’t think it mattered. It was over. The minute you and me got together, it was over.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. When were you going to tell me your real name?”

  “Never.”

  “You promised.”

  “I know. I know.” I pointed to the terminal. “I’ll spell it for you. Do a Guild search on it.”

  She gave me a puzzled look but complied. I spelled it. It’s not that hard to spell, but people get it wrong all the time. She hit Search. When the results came up, it took her a moment, then a light dawned.

  “You understand?” I asked her.

  “Perfectly.”

  Here’s what she understood:

  There were my credits, one flop after another. Not just flops. “Disastrous” was the overall theme. I, however, was always the “one bright spot,” the consummate professional who didn’t seem to know what a stinker he was in and acted his little heart out. This never got me anywhere because even if a virtual was okay, if I was in it, it went down. It got worse in the details. Even the ones with big names and hype died if my name was in the credits. Careers ended wherever I went. Good writers wrote garbage. Big companies went bust. A brilliant editor went into rehab mid-edit. And there I was, still standing through it all, the story hacked to pieces all around me, the bright spot.

  The one truly good thing I was ever in was sued for copyright infringement after running one week. All copies were ordered destroyed. You should read the reviews. The best week you’ve ever read in your life, my life anyway. I was the brightest spot, the next whoever who’d finally broken an endless run of bad luck. Reviewers yucked it up so big that when the suit was filed, they had to yuck it up again about what a bright spot I was. More like a black hole. A blight spot. I was the kiss of death. Don’t you see a light when you die? That was me. The Bright Spot.

  Nobody would hire somebody with a resumé like that, unless they wanted to lose money, and The Producers had already ruined that gag for anybody else. My only hope as an actor was to change my name and make sure that no one—and I mean no one—would ever guess I was the same guy who cursed everything he touched. Still doubt it? I didn’t just doom virtuals. I once played Puck in a Shakespeare-in-the-Park gig in its centennial year. Its last year, as it turned out. Big surprise. Even the Bard couldn’t dodge the Bright Spot. The reviewer called me magical.

  There was an old movie actor named Kevin Bacon, a favorite of mine, famous for being in everything with everybody. I was like that, only the opposite. I was famous for being the nobody whose competent, professional, even brilliant work always came to nothing and went nowhere.

  Nicholas Bainbridge, however—I hear that boy’s a rising star.

  Call me Nick.

  “It says here you’re dead,” Lu said.

  “And still walking. Imagine.”

  “Oh, baby,” she said, and put her arms around me. Nothing ever felt so good.

  We held each other for a while, relieved of the lies we’d been lugging around, as if our wonderful life couldn’t survive setting them down. I wasn’t crazy about revealing my glorious past. I wasn’t crazy about knowing she’d screwed Salvador. I was crazy about getting the girl though. I was crazy about her. And I didn’t doubt for a minute she believed her love for me cost us the payoff— which told me she must be pretty crazy about me too. You might be thinking, It’s only money, but that only tells me you’ve never been poor.

  But I doubted she had it right. I had a hunch we didn’t get paid because the deal went bad, and that James Dumfries, dead or alive, was the one who could tell us how. But we didn’t talk about any of that yet. We made love instead, until it was good and dark, and we were about as contented as two humans could be.

  JUST A NAME

  8

  I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

  —RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Long Goodbye

  ABOUT THE TIME THE MOON CAME UP, WE SAT UP IN bed and finished telling each other the rest of the story, with none of the pieces held back, and for the first time we tried to make sense of it together. What was it Jim and Galatea were up to? What happened when we played them? What was supposed to happen? What was it the old man wanted me to do? Buck woke up, said nuts to both of us, and went into the kitchen to sleep.

  Lu was pretty sure there was more to it on Salvador’s end than just stealing the old man’s money. Sometimes Salvador acted like it wasn’t about money Dumfries had but something valuable Salvador was going to get out of the deal. She overheard what sounded like negotiations, like he planned on having something to sell. But what? She never could figure it out.

  I told her about my weird conversation with Kennemeyer, and we spread the photos out on the bed and pored over them. “What’s that woman in the background?” Lu asked. “What’s that thing she’s got on?” There was an out-of-focus woman, bent slightly at the waist, holding or pushing something outside the frame. She had some sort of blurry white hat or scarf on her head.

  “A nurse or something. It’s some kind of home, I’m guessing. There must be a million of them. He doesn’t look too good, does he?”

  She studied the old man’s face. “He looks like Dell on a long night. You think that’s the meds?”

  “Got to be. If he was going to go for a scam like this, he’d have to be well lubricated. He looked different, though, when he came up to me. Smart. A bit nuts. But he wasn’t doped up, more like the opposite. Bright-eyed as could be. And spontaneous. Now, something I’ve been wondering—if he’s trying to change history, and that’s the whole reason he’s doing this, you’d think he would know what he was going to say, that he’d have a little speech all ready. But it wasn’t like that. It seemed to be something he just decided to do on the spot.”

  “Maybe he’s senile, like Jesse said.”

  “Maybe. Could you do me a favor? Could you not call Salvador Jesse?”

  She searched my eyes. “Sure, I can do that. Would it help if I called him ‘that fucking asshole’?”

  “No. Too personal. Just stick with Salvador.”

  “Okay.”

  We looked back at the old man’s picture. The bleary-eyed fellow there was a dead end. Lu pointed at the diner shots. “Salvador was real proud of the bullshit he’d fed Dumfries, the little touches that made it convincing. He wouldn’t tell me anything about where and how he’d met up with Dumfries to feed him this line, or how he’d gotten those tapes, but he couldn’t resist talking about the line itself, how well he’d played the old guy, and how clever he was for creating such a beautiful scam out of a couple of crummy recordings and a little bit of information—like the woman’s name. He got the old guy into a series of conversations about time travel and what he’d do if he had a second chance, and when the time was right, he dropped Galatea’s name, and Dumfries practically did all the work himself, told him things he shouldn’t have told him, and he wasn’t about to tell me. Once, Je—Salvador—sorry—said, ‘When I found the place, it all came together, like a flash of inspiration.�
� ”

  She hammed up the line a little to show me what an arrogant jerk Salvador was, but I didn’t encourage the show-and-tell. “So what’s your point?”

  “Forget about Salvador, okay? That’s my mistake. My point is that the diner—the real one—must be where Salvador took Dumfries to do the time-travel routine. It mattered where they did it—the place in the recordings. He arranged for the old man to take a car trip too. He was taking him somewhere. My guess is this diner still exists—the real one—and that’s where Dumfries thought he was using a time machine.”

  “Right. Salvador took him to the right place, so the time travel wouldn’t be such a stretch. So we’re looking for a diner in DC that was also there forty years ago?”

  “That’s my guess. But it wouldn’t even have to be a diner anymore.”

  “That’ll make it easy to find. Even if we can find it, all we’ll know is where Jim and Galatea were forty years ago, without knowing what they were doing there. And maybe we’ll know where Salvador and Dumfries were a couple of months ago, but that doesn’t put us any closer to where they are now. What I can’t figure out is how he got the old man to believe any of this stuff. How was he supposed to know about Galatea Ritsa? And have access to a time machine? The old guy didn’t seem that far gone.”

  “Salvador told him he was a spook—Homeland Security. James Dumfries would be no stranger to spooks. Sometimes I wonder if the old man actually believed him or was just playing along because he was bored or crazy or something. I hate to sound like our beloved Billy, but I keep thinking my character is the key to the whole thing. We know who these two guys are— Kennemeyer and Dumfries. But who is Galatea Ritsa?”

  “Clinton never heard of her. I haven’t been able to find out anything about her except the same thing Salvador apparently saw—struck by a car while jogging. It’s like she didn’t exist before that or after. Just saying her name made Kennemeyer jumpy as a cat.”

  “Maybe they weren’t doing what it looked like they were doing. Maybe this whole breakup scene was smoke. Because if that was all it was about, what’s Kennemeyer got to do with anything? Was he driving the car that hit her? Was he the other man? Why not just tell the woman to skip tomorrow’s jog? It doesn’t make any sense.”