Identity Thief (23 page)

“Just as long as your wife doesn’t know,” Randy shot back. “Or is she your wife? Have you gotten married?”

“That’s set for next month.” I rolled my eyes. “My mom wants to put what she calls a little something together for us. Naturally, she’s complaining every step of the way.”

“Naturally,” Randy agreed. “By the way, did Biff mention having a new girlfriend?”

“I don’t think anyone except Betsy would be dumb enough to get involved with him.” Realizing what I’d said, I amended, “But I guess that doesn’t say much about me, either.”

Randy laughed again, but then heaved a heavy sigh. “Let’s sit down for a moment. There’s something you need to know.”

“Uh, sure.” I acted like I had no idea what it might be.

Randy clasped his hands together in thought. He leaned forward in his chair, almost like a doctor telling a patient a serious diagnosis. “This is what I think happened. Biff disappeared after his visit to your mother’s, am I right? This was because he started stealing money online. Identity theft. I believe there was something in your mother’s mail that he used to get going.”

“That makes sense. Say, you’re pretty good.” I had to admit, I was genuinely impressed by how quickly Randy was putting it all together, albeit in a totally wrong way.

“I think he stole from the condo’s previous owner. Classic identity theft. Then he figured he had to lay low. He might even be off in the islands as we speak. And if he’s a gambler and a shitty one, he probably lost everything he stole. No wonder he’s trying to blackmail you.”

I mulled it over. “Wow, that’s an awful lot you’re hitting me with at once. But it sounds reasonable. Yes. I’ll bet you’re exactly right, Randy. What should I do?”

Randy looked at me with dead seriousness. “Nothing. Do absolutely nothing. Wait for Biff to contact you. Tell him you’ve agreed. Ask how to contact him. Then contact me.”

“Sounds good.” I lowered my head in embarrassment. “A hell of a lot better than taking my own life.”

He stood up and touched my shoulder. “You can’t help it if you’re a good man. Unlike the Biffs of this world, you have a conscience.”

“If I’m such a good man, why did I try to do the worst possible thing?”

“Because . . . because shit if I know.”

We laughed in a guy sort of way. I really did like Randy and hoped we could be friends. If, of course, a million different lies never came to the surface. Still, he and I clicked in a big way. I know it sounds dumb, but it was like we’d known each other all our lives. Like we both understood something about life that other people didn’t, and we didn’t even have to say what it was. He was older than me, not that it mattered. I’d forgotten the pleasant sensation of having a friend and being liked. Yet, at one time I was popular. Did I mention I was vice-president of my senior class in high school and at college three different fraternities invited me to pledge? What happened to that guy, who liked parties and being around people? How did I let Betsy become my universe?

Still, it was a strange feeling to genuinely want to connect to someone while at the same time wanting him to know nothing about me. It made me nervous in a new kind of way, like maybe mixing gin with bourbon. I felt better and better about meeting him while at the same time I felt worse and worse.

“I should see a shrink,” I said. “What I did—it’s not normal.” For all the lies I told him, I genuinely reached out to Randy for answers. I trusted him, the way you might trust a bartender or cab driver. I sometimes trusted people I had no real reason to trust, as if my vulnerability would conquer all my apprehensions. Of course, it never did. Despite all the things I’d done, I was like a little boy wanting to be taken care of. Usually, the closest I came to achieving this was by taking care of other people instead. But Randy genuinely cared. I knew it somehow.

“Normal shmormal,” Randy replied. “Have you seen this website called McShrink.com? Write to him. He gives people the best advice I’ve ever read.”

I was flattered. Too bad I couldn’t say thank you. “What if Biff doesn’t contact me?”

“Oh, he will. I know his type, believe me. After all, I’ve—”

“I know, you’ve been a PI for years.”

“That’s right.” As he walked to the door to leave, he added. “And under no circumstances, not a word to the cops. All they do is get in the way.”

“I agree. Not a word to the cops.”

M
Y FIRST IMPULSE WAS TO IMMEDIATELY CALL THE COPS and tell them I’d found my identity thief. But I quickly realized that the less I had to do with cops, the better. And anyway, proof could be staring them in the face and they still wouldn’t do anything. Maybe it was incompetence or indifference. But it also occurred to me that Biff’s parents had been using their influence all along to keep the case on the back burner.

I continued to worry about Sabrina when she wasn’t exasperating me. The guy who said he was me in the bank robbery clearly worked for Biff. And if she was dating this guy—despite her blithe protests to the contrary—it could mean big trouble for her. Biff was no one to mess with. And I knew Biff was still alive because not long ago, he deposited and later withdrew another ten grand from one of my accounts. Not that he used his real name, but who else would it be? And the mobster guys accused of his murder were sitting safely in jail when this happened.

It enraged me that I was so close to finding Biff, yet still so far away. I’d gotten to know Betsy’s ex—a nice but schmucky guy—but I didn’t want to come across as foaming at the mouth to catch Biff. It might raise suspicions, even with such a trusting soul as this guy was. I had to kind of hang back a little and wait for the right time to ask for more information. But it drove me crazy, keeping it all to myself. I figured it would only make Esther upset to know that I was getting ever more dirt on my fingers.

“I’ve never seen you more at peace,” Esther said, whose rose-colored glasses mistook my resigned cynicism for contentment. To outsiders, it can be a thin line between happiness and bitterness, especially when you are incapable of thinking anything bad or don’t care about the person in question. “Really, Jesse, the cloud finally has a silver lining. You’re a better human being.”

If anything had a humbling effect on me, it was pulling the plug on the desperate Linda Goldstein. Also in the back of my mind, I wondered if I’d be arrested for murder. But I couldn’t say any of this. Yet in a completely illogical way, it pissed me off that Esther didn’t know what I didn’t tell her. Something about niceness stemming from ignorance always got on my nerves. There’s something so smarmy about it.

As for Sabrina, she would blithely ask if there were any new developments with what she called the identity theft “thing,” like she was asking if we’d finished remodeling the kitchen yet. My unhappiness seemed barely to register with her, which I found deeply annoying. Once I even blurted out that she was a spoiled brat, though afterward I assured her I was only kidding.

Life is waiting for something to happen until you get so pissed off you make it happen yourself. Just as I had to figure out about Biff without any help from the cops, so did I realize I’d have to bring him to justice myself. I’d have to find him, entrap him, and
then
turn him over to law enforcement. My accountant brother and I were no longer on speaking terms. That’s where my new friend came in or should I say my only friend?

It felt strange even to say I had a friend because I’d never really made close friends with anyone. Sex with women was how I bonded with people, if you don’t count students I mentored or my patients. I suppose you’d also have to count the ones from either group I had sex with. From the time I hit puberty, I didn’t care about hanging out with other guys. And I especially did not care about people who were more naïve than their years should have made them. I supposed I was using him, but in other ways I found myself enjoying his company. He’d been screwed in some of the same ways I’d been, and despite his tepid, hesitant manner, this gave us a bond. Still, there were times I wanted to shake him and say, “Damn it, you’re alive, start acting like it.” The dope tried to kill himself, but even that seemed more an act of inertia than anything else. When in doubt, kill yourself. He was like a declawed cat that was never allowed to leave the house.

I certainly didn’t tell my new pal about Linda Goldstein, though I was able to share my rage about Biff without being judged. He had plenty reason to hate Biff, too. For once, someone really listened to me. Not the way a shrink does, always calculating what it all means to ask some amazingly insightful question, but listening because, well, he
listened
.

We’d drink—or rather, I’d drink and he’d watch—play handball, go to basketball games, or see movies that Esther had no interest in (i.e., anything with violence). Oddly, she also had no interest in my new friend. Esther barely met him for a minute and said she’d rather not have him over to the house. When I asked her why, she said he seemed needy, which she found unappealing in a man. In her universe, only women were allowed to have needs. And anyway, why did he have to “appeal” to her? It wasn’t like they were going to have an affair. I could imagine them together. Slow as a pair of turtles.

I learned to say I was going out, and Esther knew what it meant. One time, she dryly commented that she was happy I’d discovered I was gay after all these years, since I was spending so much time with my pal.

“No such luck,” I replied. “I’m going to keep fucking the daylights out of you, so you’d better get used to it.” Though in truth, after our brief second honeymoon, things had chilled between us in the bedroom. If anything, maybe Esther was gay because over time she didn’t seem to enjoy sex with me as much as tolerate it. It occurred to me that she simply didn’t like men very much.

My friend’s new wife, Melanie, was nice to me the few times I met her but accepted that guy time was guy time. I was not surprised when she turned out to be a plain-looking girl with unbecoming short hair and glasses. However, she was a nice person and presumably had a lot of money. He also could have done worse. They eloped at city hall, so there was no wedding to speak of. But, he told me, if there had been one I’d have been his best man. In spite of myself, I was touched.

His son was an unusual kid, what people called an “old soul.” While little kids often lightened an atmosphere in a room, nine-year-old Scotty—or was he ten?—had a way of making it heavier. It was as though he knew when the world was going to end but wasn’t about to tell anyone. I predicted he was either going to become a really good person or a really awful person, but would never be an average person. Scotty showed little interest in wanting to know other people and seemed to resent anyone who took his father’s attention away from him. I never became his honorary “Uncle Jesse”—or I mean, “Uncle Randy”—so there were no issues about having to drag the kid along.

After engaging in what is obnoxiously called male bonding for a little while, I decided the time was right to pin my buddy down about Biff. Assuming he honestly didn’t know where Biff was, he could still do computer shit to find him. My friend had no reason not to trust me. I arranged for a movie and drinks.

I let my pal pick the movie, and it sucked. It featured a B-list action hero who rescued his blah wife and obnoxious daughter from this insane sex slave trader. The good guy was a cop or a DA—I forgot which—and the bad guy wanted to get back at him for busting his bomb-happy brother. The hero’s wife had to put out before getting rescued. But even psycho fantasies go only so far in these kinds of movies. Naturally, the awful teenage daughter was spared only moments before she was about to lose her cherry. There was a lot of predictable cutting back and forth between the screeching daughter and the hero’s screeching car as he drove at a hundred miles an hour to the abandoned warehouse where his family members were held. After the bad guy fell to his death from a tall roof beam and a pool of blood formed around his head, the movie ended with the hero climbing into the ambulance with his wife and daughter. The daughter said something like, “I love you, Daddy,” and the hero said something like, “I love you, too.” The somber yet uplifting background music gave the cue for the closing credits. I supposed that the moral of the story was that the family that kept itself from getting sold into sex slavery was the family that stayed together.

“Wow, what a cool movie,” said my buddy, as we got up from our seats. He took an obligatory last swallow of the melted ice in what had been his medium-sized Coke.

“I loved how the bad guy bled to death.” I pretended to concur.

“Huh. I was sorry he died. He should’ve gone to prison for what he did.”

“You have a point,” I agreed, as if we were discussing some morally complex Ibsen play. “There are worse punishments than death.”

“I guess I’ll say, ‘No comment.’”

It took me a moment to realize he was referring to his suicide attempt. One more thing to blame on Biff.

“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Hey, no sweat. Really, I’m glad I’m still around.” He smiled at me in gratitude.