Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) Page 14

  At the Driver’s License Service Center, there’s the issue of time. People were waiting and you were expected to walk out of the center with a license on the same day. But the most desirable aspect of this arrangement was you got to stand in front of the agent and keep their attention diverted with how absolutely sweet and charming you were. Being the very essence of innocence, your birth certificate was obviously as genuine as you were.

  Passport Services were far away and only saw a face on a photograph. Charm didn’t play into it. And those bastards were also highly trained to spot fraud. They had lots of time to keep passing the forms along until someone called bullshit.

  The letter in the newly painted mailbox was asking for more proof to support my application. But they weren’t getting anything else from me, and I wasn’t sticking around for them to build a case. There was nothing to do but walk away and ignore it.

  “The only concern,” I told Mittwede, “is they have my picture.”

  “Only concern,” he repeated. Pretty soon he had his arms wrapped around his guts and was rocking himself. He was certain, “We’re going to be arrested.”

  “Nah.”

  “Oh, we are so fucked.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Calm down. If the worst happens, only I will be arrested.”

  “They’ll know I helped.”

  “I don’t break. They will never learn.”

  “They’ll figure it out.”

  “How?”

  “Who else do you hang out with?”

  Well, there was that. I didn’t seem to have any other friends.

  A few days later, I arrived at his house to smell burning plastic and electronics. It was early afternoon and a plume of black smoke was rising from the field behind the garage. When I saw the printer and computer melting in a bonfire, I said, “Glad to see you’re keeping it together. I don’t imagine this will draw anyone’s attention.”

  “I was losing it yesterday knowing every cop in five surrounding counties knows your face because you drive like a tornado, but this morning I go to pay for breakfast and there, right there at the Kroger check-out, staring me in the face is a national magazine with your picture on the cover. Counterfeit Countess, it said. In great big, bold type: Counterfeit! Countess! Counterfeit,” he reiterated, “a word interchangeable with forgery and often associated with arrest.”

  Ah, yes. Patrice had called from Austin and warned me she had sold the story to Woman’s World magazine.

  “Last sentence?” Mittwede asked. “You know what it is?’

  “No, I’ve not seen it.”

  “Tanya says, ‘I’m going to grow up and be a con artist.’”

  It had struck me as pretty funny when I said it, but Mittwede had better delivery. I think it was the hysteria.

  He was saying, “I remember that story. That was like a year and a half ago. You didn’t tell me you were that girl, the Dallas Countess. I already knew the story but I read it again, and I know all the cops have read it again, too. And now your picture is with Passport Services and at the check-out counter. You think federal agents don’t buy groceries? You’re fucking crazy. We’re going to be arrested.”

  “You maybe need to take a Valium.”

  “I threw them all in the fire!”

  ~~~~~~

  Coming out sixteen months after my return home, Patrice had warned the article might be a little disruptive to my life, but I wasn’t worried. It was Woman’s World, not Time or Newsweek. Who read Woman’s World?

  Apparently everyone when you recognize the picture as a fellow student. I walked onto campus having the magazine thrust in my hand and asked for autographs.

  “Are you serious?” Who asks for autographs?

  About two hundred people do. But I was too mortified by the attention to respond.

  After a week, I returned. The interest had died down to just the few women who would ask, “Why did you do it?”

  And I would explain, “I was bored,” but I knew this was an answer they couldn’t understand.

  I also had the attention of my male classmates. They would stare when they thought I was unaware, drifting off into a daze until the teacher called them all back with, “If only I were as interesting as Tanya.” And then most of them needed to shift the car keys in their pants pockets.

  That went on for weeks. In the library, an older student struck up a friendly chat that ended when he gave me a book by the Marquis de Sade and said, “I read the Woman’s World article. You might like this. My number is in the front.”

  I sat slack-jawed at the library table wondering if the words really were arranged in the order I was seeing. Give enough monkeys typewriters and they’ll write Shakespeare, they said. Well this monkey had banged out something evil. It was a struggle to read, but I got a few pages in, started skimming and flipping and then read the scene where the Marquis filled a couple of women’s vaginas with boiling water.

  My brain skidded out. I was rambling silently in my head, “He poured boiling water in them. He poured boiling water into them. The water was boiling. It specifically said boiling. I think that would kill someone. That would definitely kill someone. I’m pretty certain those women died. That’s … that’s … I don’t know what that is.”

  But somebody thought I would like it.

  His interest felt sinister, but I wrote it off thinking it was just another unusual attempt by the older men to grab my attention. One of them must have heard I liked to charge horses because he gave me a gift wrapped riding crop.

  He was so confident when he presented it to me, and I loved getting gifts, even from people I seldom spoke with. I was all smiles until I got the paper off and then I was livid. My voice was outraged, “I have never hit my horse. Never. She goes fast because she wants to.”

  “You don’t understand …”

  “No, you don’t understand: you don’t hit animals. If the only way you have to communicate with them is through violence, then you’re too stupid to be out of the trees.”

  It was a high stance to take when there were so few humans I could relate to. Mittwede had let his paranoia chase him to Atlanta and he wasn’t coming back until, “I know that magazine is so long gone you can’t even find a copy on the bottom of a bird cage.”

  Changing Focus

  I had plenty of acquaintances and admirers, but Mittwede was my only friend, and I’d scared him off to Georgia. There were so few people I actually liked, and even fewer that were completely comfortable with me, so I knew if I got another, I would have to take better care of them. They would need to be protected from my antics.

  And I already had someone’s attention.

  At first he unnerved me. His interest was fixed and intense, his eyes steady. And he didn’t care if I caught him staring, he wouldn’t look away. Six-foot-two and built like a Greek statue, he was hard to overlook. He was large, muscular, and perfectly formed, and this made him daunting, but there was something else unsettling about him, something too charming and powerful.

  The only reason he wasn’t outright frightening was because absolutely everyone on campus, and everyone in Tullahoma, seemed to know him, and they all genuinely adored him.

  After four years away, he’d just returned home from the Marine Corps and people were excited to see him. Every time I saw him, another half dozen people would have spotted him and they’d race to him, calling, “Ed, oh my god, you’re back.”

  Small crowds were constantly forming around him.

  I was keeping my distance but I was watching, and he’d talk to his innumerable friends but stare at me. The same scene played out repeatedly in the library, the cafeteria, and the theater, and then finally off campus at a pizza parlor.

  He was clear of the table, sitting in the center of the restaurant, holding court. The chairs around him were never empty but his audience kept changing. It was appealing because he wasn’t arrogant in the least. He was laughing an
d sincere, and it was plainly evident he was loved and people wanted to be near him, but he still made me nervous.

  The place was crowded. Several groups were standing, and people were packed so tight together they were forced to shift to allow others to pass through. If you entered the scrum, you were completely at the mercy of where they directed you, and they funneled me to Ed.

  Stepping past him, I felt his hands on my hips and then I was in his lap.

  The move had been effortless. After an exchange of smiles, we said nothing. I just relaxed against his chest and he wrapped an arm around my waist, then we sat for several minutes without speaking. It felt perfectly natural, even right, to be there.

  Finally, he said, “We should go for a ride. I have a second helmet on my bike.”

  I loved to charge, and Ed rode like he was late for the battle. The highway was full of bends yet the speedometer was buried, and the engine was still able to kick up speed in the straights. The wind was battering him harder than me, and I had to keep my face hidden behind his back. When we finally turned onto the back roads, I thought he would slow to a cruise, but he would only brake to a hundred to take the curves. We were leaning so low that if I had dared let go of him, I could have run my farthest hand over the asphalt.

  There was no doubt in my mind we were going to die, and it was going to be spectacularly gory. I was certain the fire department would have to be called to wash away the trail of blood, and our skin would probably be splayed across the barbed wire fences that lined the road. I was just hoping that when the flesh was ripped off my bones, I would already be gone.

  I had just turned seventeen and thought it was a pity I would perish so young, and without having proved a passport could be attained with a forged birth certificate too.

  As Ed swerved around one curve, I remembered I had never gone back to Nashville to finish a half completed bank loan, and on another curve, I wished I had told Mittwede where all the money was buried.

  The hour-long ride gave me a chance to reflect on my activities and my first year of college. I’d not taken it very seriously. I’d not proved to anyone that I was smart, or made grades that supported the designation of genius. I’d skipped class, failed history, and convinced Mittwede to do an instructional video for communications class titled How to Make Bathtub Barbiturates.

  I wasn’t a good student and I wasn’t a good friend. I’d lost Mittwede his job and his future prospects, then, before he could be suspended from college for violating the code of ethics, I’d forced him to flee to Atlanta for fear of being charged with felony forgery.

  If at any time in the past year I’d been particularly clever, it had only been with bank managers, Social Security agents, and licensing officials, and that wasn’t the sort of thing my family would inscribe on my headstone.

  It would probably just read: Here lies Tanya. She could be charming.

  I wouldn’t need a very big space because I doubted they’d be able to scrape up much of what remained, and a lot of me would probably be buried with Ed.

  We were going to go out as one indistinguishable smear of blood, gore and bike parts on an old country road, killed by a combination of speed and testosterone, loose gravel, and maybe even a wandering farm animal.

  By the time the ride was over, I’d envisioned fifty types of death, confronted my destructive nature, regretted the harm done to Mittwede as well as my wasted potential, then accepted my fate along with my mortality, and was left too exhausted to feel any further fear.

  I stepped off Ed’s bike at the pizza parlor and started stumbling around the parking lot, struggling to get the helmet off but too weak from repeated adrenaline attacks to manage it. I was pretty certain I had lost a couple of my senses on the ride. Sight and sound seemed to be limited to the helmet.

  The sense of touch returned when Ed tore back the Velcro strap under my chin and I was finally able to free myself from the headpiece.

  Ed was laughing.

  I had just enough composure left to be defensive. “I’ve never ridden on a bike before.”

  He said, “I know. I had to compensate on the curves because you were fighting it.”

  “It was terrifying.”

  “But you liked it.” He was smiling because he knew it was true.

  It took a moment for me to realize, “It was…” I couldn’t admit erotic, so said instead, “…amazing.”

  “Do you want to do it again?”

  “Oh my god, yes. But faster.”

  ~~~~~~

  I was so completely possessed with Ed, I forgot all about the birth certificates and Social Security numbers. The allure of banks and fraudulent loans lost its dominant place in my mind. And it was no longer so important to procure that last elusive piece of genuine federally recognized identification when Ed could move me so much further than Passport Services.

  I could barely remember a thing I had been doing before meeting him, and everything I had done shortly after turning sixteen was so distant as to be another lifetime; so I was particularly taken aback to get the letter from the United States Navy telling me the date I needed to show up to ship-out for basic training.

  That had been a crazy Saturday. I couldn’t quite recall what had possessed me to run off and join the Navy, but I’d taken the tests, passed the exams, and sworn the oath before noon.

  The recruiting agent had been incredibly helpful, telling me I didn’t need parental permission if I enrolled in the Delayed Entry Program. Being sixteen, I could spend the next year finishing high school, or in my case, accumulating college credits, and I wouldn’t have to worry about basic training until six months before I turned eighteen.

  I called the same recruiting agent and told him a lot had happened in the last eighteen months, and, “Regarding this whole Navy business, I’ve changed my mind.”

  He laughed before realizing it wasn’t a joke. “You can’t change your mind. You already signed and swore an oath. You are a United States soldier. Let me make this clear: You will be arrested by the military police and thrown in the brig if you fail to show up.”

  Oh.

  Ed was staring at me aghast. “You did what?”

  “I was bored one weekend and joined the Navy.”

  “How could you forget?”

  “Well, I didn’t so much forget as not think about it again.”

  “They will arrest you.”

  “I guess I won’t be bored that weekend.”

  “Tanya?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you understand this is serious?”

  “I suspected it was.”

  Then the certified letter arrived telling me to turn myself in. The recruiting agent had been calling me Mario Andretti because of the number of speeding tickets I had acquired, and he warned the next time I was pulled over, I’d be taken into custody.

  That could happen at any moment. The cops had me on the side of the road at least once a month. I’d charm my way out of most of the tickets and laugh my way into the rest. I was just one point away from losing my license but even so, I couldn’t drive the speed limit. Ed knew this. He said, “They won’t make you serve if you get married.”

  It was a strange way to propose, but I loved that it wasn’t sentimental or emotional.

  Four months before my eighteenth birthday, two months after I should have shipped off to the Navy, Ed and I had a big church wedding.

  It made not the slightest bit of difference to the Navy, but by the time they found us again in Memphis, they had given up. They sent a letter dismissing me of all obligations, but also warned I was not eligible to enter any of the other services. I was glad to hear it, too, because I still had a problem with boredom and there was no telling what I might get up to.

  The Castle

  From the very beginning, Ed was warned against me.

  “She’s trouble,” was the general opinion, as was, “You’re going to regret it.”

  “She’s a bit of a rogue,” was the affectionate version of “S
he’s an unrepentant criminal.” And, “There’s something wrong with her,” was the polite way of saying, “She’s fucking crazy.”

  Most people that loved Ed feared I would do something that would either result in his arrest or his death.

  But Ed’s psychology professor had a more specific concern. “She will do it again,” he said. “Once a runaway, always a runaway.” It was a certainty. “Maybe not tomorrow or even this year, but she’ll encounter some stress she doesn’t want to face and then,” snap, “she’ll be gone. Why? Because she’s a runaway and that’s what runaways do.”

  The same professor had me as a student the previous year so he felt confident saying, “She’s not stable. Oh, she’s intelligent, but once you cross over 150 IQ, there is guaranteed psychosis. And what you’ve got in Tanya is over 170 with a history of psychotic behavior.” He was shaking his head, “I wouldn’t do it.”

  Ed had also tested well over the safety threshold, but the madness wasn’t the same.

  We had been married for six years when Ed demanded, “Do you know the difference between neurotics and psychotics?” He answered before I could speak, “Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics move into them.”

  And there was no denying I’d made an unholy mess of the place either, but he’d invited me in and then locked all the doors. The invitation alone was foolish, but it became downright stupid when he took the keys and left.

  Nearly everyone he knew tried to warn him, “She is up to something. She’s not the type you can leave alone and expect to behave.”

  I even tried to threaten him, “You keep ignoring me and we’re both going to regret it.”

  But he didn’t believe any of it. He was a counselor at a wilderness program for juvenile delinquents and he loved his work. It was where he most wanted to be. He would spend weeks in the woods, and then come home for two days to recuperate. He spent most of the two days sleeping and the rest of it meeting with other counselors to discuss the week.