Two for the Show (4 page)

And worst-case scenario? This fake Dave wants to somehow test, somehow complete, his inhabitation of the life and soul and memories of the poor real Dave Stewartson, wherever he is. (And where
is
he?) Or he has some other reason for wanting to be seen on national television in this assumed identity—to send a message, to be known, to be discovered.

And most likely scenario? The most logical, but still stunning, explanation? Staring me in the face. Slapping me in the forehead. The outright lie that, I’m suddenly sure, will turn out to be the truth.

“Dave” is simply cornered. He has stolen someone’s identity—hook, line, and sinker—and here he is at this show, probably figuring he would never be called on. One of two thousand audience members, what are the odds? He probably figured it’s all fake and canned and staged anyway and he’d never be at risk—and suddenly he’s in the spotlight, and he puts on a great impromptu performance—as good as Wallace’s, as good as it gets.

He says it is his dog, his shutters, his past, because now it
is
. Because now it
has to be
. If it wasn’t his dog before Wallace recounted the story, it is now.

But this is national television. And someone else besides me has to know the real Dave, someone else has to recognize the blue-shuttered house and the Labrador named Reddi. Someone is going to recognize these stories and find out what happened and come after this guy . . . meaning, if Wallace can negotiate past this moment (and it looks now like he will), it will pass for us, and fighting identity theft isn’t our job.

Meaning, I don’t really care about this guy stealing someone’s identity. It doesn’t surprise me—there are all kinds of scams percolating across criminal America. Logic, and the fluent and continuing success of our own, says we are hardly the only ones out there . . .

What bothers me is that “Dave” could
expose
our scam. Catch the interest of some vigilant cop, who was enjoying Wallace the Amazing with the rest of America. Is “Dave” holding that over Wallace? Does he even realize it?

In which case, I might have to help keep this “Dave” from getting caught. I might have to make sure he preserves his fake identity, to minimize that risk.

Another charlatan that I’d need to support behind the scenes.

FOUR

Identity theft.
Setting aside, for the moment, forged signatures and siphoned bank accounts, it’s arguably the world’s most metaphysical crime, isn’t it? Because you’re not actually stealing someone’s identity—they are they, and you are you. In an absolute sense, it’s not possible to steal someone’s identity—unless the crime comes to involve DNA or plastic surgery, appropriating someone’s unique appearance or genetic code.

Their
actual
identity is never in jeopardy. It’s the world’s version of their identity, and the
proof
of that identity, that is in jeopardy. So on its surface, it’s a crime in only a very vague sense. If you say you’re someone else but never steal a dollar, apply for a job, or profit in any way from saying you’re someone else, has there even been a crime?

And, whether in the metaphysical version or narrow legalistic version of “identity,” can you steal someone’s identity completely? Is anyone that disconnected, that severed from life, from their present and their past, that someone else can come in and scoop it up?

Well, yes.

Me, for instance. I’m cut off from life. No one would know if someone took over my life; they’d only be filling a void, after all. Someone could do it to me. In a way, someone
has
done it to me. Wallace the Amazing, my employer. Reducing and virtually eliminating—carefully, professionally—my presence in the world. Giving me, at the same time, in exchange, a unique and lucrative way to earn a living. But I’m a cipher. A professional ghost. For good, sensible reasons, I have little identity of my own.

To me, identity theft is exactly the reverse of what people think it is. In the kinds of scams and frauds I was crediting to the fake “Dave,” you’re stripped of everything
but
your identity. That’s all you have left, after your credit cards and your possessions and everything else is gone. Your identity is the one thing they
can’t
make off with.

But it turns out, of course, you’re not very comfortable with just your identity. You feel naked, exposed. It’s everything
but
your identity that you’ve lost, but you feel your most vulnerable when reduced to, relying on, identity only.

I recognized for the first time—explicitly, acutely—my fear that I would be cut off from life. My fear that my one attachment, my umbilical cord, would be severed. My identity was so tenuous, so connected to Wallace’s.

Could someone do it to me?

Very soon, the world’s most unconventional detective—the geeky Internet gumshoe—is fulfilling the world’s most conventional detective role. I am tailing them—“Dave Stewartson” and “Sandi,” his “wife,” if that’s what she is. And even though they are looking alertly, I’d say professionally, behind them, around them, walking into and out of Vegas hotels and restaurants and even shops and an all-night supermarket—in one door and out another—it’s easy to follow them. Because I am invisible. No one knows me. I don’t exist. A great advantage in tailing someone.

I follow them, never getting too close. Keeping them too far ahead of me to see them in much detail—or for them to see me very clearly either. But I’m close enough to observe them spending money with vigor and determination and élan, enamored of its power, which suggests to me it’s new, which suggests to me it’s not theirs. Which leads me to suspect that Dave Stewartson—the
real
Dave Stewartson—is rich, confirming the inadequacy of my original research, or indicating that it was cleverly, purposefully misdirected. The real Dave Stewartson, it seems, was an excellent find. And the more I observe, the more I sense that these are scam artists—but not killers. They would not kill the real Dave Stewartson, I don’t think.

I was pleased to see them turning, looking behind them. It confirmed their duplicity. Something was clearly up. I followed their rented red Mustang, distinctive enough to pick out from a quarter mile back in Vegas Strip traffic—why, I could drop the tail, stop for a snack or a restroom, and find their car again fifteen minutes later. I waited in the supermarket lot while they brought out enough bags of groceries to indicate an open-ended stay. I waited in the drugstore lot, while they brought out a bagful of over-the-counter medications. I accompanied them—unbeknownst, well behind them, like a porter or guard they’re not even aware is in their employ, always in the next throng of people—into the lobby of their hotel, the preening, pompous Bellagio, its famous fountains like colorful arteries and veins of a massive soulless beast, ceaselessly nourishing its soaring pretension. It took no great detective work to realize that the bags of canned groceries and the fancy hotel room did not necessarily go neatly together. Which is perhaps why they had shifted the groceries to other bags, so the hotel staff would not see them bringing so many groceries in.

It was easiest to tail them in the casinos, where they played some high-stakes hands of poker and blackjack, enjoyed some elaborate meals accompanied by top-shelf liquor, left generous tips. One place I couldn’t accompany them was to their high-roller suite. But that told me something useful too. That they were spending money like there was no tomorrow. (In celebration, or in anticipation?) That night, a call girl went up to their suite about an hour and a half after them. I was pleased to see that—it gave my imagination something to occupy it. They were clearly intent on enjoying the fruits of Vegas while they were here. I was close enough at one point to hear a clerk ask them, quite reasonably amid all the conventioneers filling the lobby around us, if they were here for “business or pleasure?” Their backs were to me, but I could see them glance at each other—clearly unsure how to answer. The pleasure was apparent. What exactly was the business?

I waited. Vegas stakeouts are easy. Hotel lobbies, casinos, are truly all night, truly without time, so there are no dead hours, and there is action, movement, to occupy your time and your attention, to keep you awake, and you are neither noticeable nor alone while you wait. In Vegas, in fact, it’s practically a legitimate occupation to sit observing in a busy hotel lobby. Your presence, your amused observation, isn’t questioned in the least.

I’m glad I waited. At two in the morning, an hour after the hooker’s exit, “Dave” and “Sandi” came down lugging the groceries, got into their red Mustang rental, and headed out, with their careful, curious entourage—me—a cautious distance behind them.

The chain motel where they finally stopped (chain motel—I would soon become aware of the appropriateness of that term) is about ten miles from the Strip, in what some call the real Vegas, the working man’s Vegas. The Vegas that was here before and, part of me suspects, will be all that is here at some point, again.

Here, I’d be too obvious following them in, so I watched from outside the tiny motel lobby’s (fortunately) big plate glass window, looking in past the classic pink-and-blue neon
V
ACANCY
sign. The “Stewartsons” didn’t stop at the registration desk. They headed down the narrow hallway, and I slipped quickly, silently along the motel’s side lot in the dark, watching for a light to go on in one of the rooms.

There.
A light pops on. I move quickly, carefully, closer to the window. In time to see them turn the television on—a confirming shift of light through the window—though they never actually watch it, I notice.

I see Dave and Sandi unpacking some groceries, putting them on the counter, talking back and forth with one another, each going into the bathroom briefly, emerging a minute later. This is as close as I dare to get for now.

They aren’t in the motel room for long. Dave looks around it one last time, checking, before closing the door. He turns off the light but leaves the television on.

From the dark side lot, I watch them get back into the red Mustang and pull away. And for the first time in twenty-four hours, I don’t follow the Stewartsons.

Maybe it takes someone steeped in scam to recognize it. Or maybe with the clues—the “Dave” at the show, the free spending, the extra motel room—anyone would. But I know what they’ve done. It’s simple. First they took a guy’s Social Security number and credit cards, like any and every two-bit ID thief. But then it turned into something bigger, better—a much better thing than they had first thought. Because it turned out the guy was rich. Endlessly rich. And the guy was alone. And when they saw how much money he had and how alone he was, they took the next step after taking his Social Security number and credit cards—to keep a good thing going, they took him. They were already pretending to be him. They were already reestablishing purchase patterns. Perhaps they had already become him, assumed his identity entirely. It wasn’t such a very big step.

I know exactly how they did it, of course. How they found out all they did about him. Because I do the same thing. I work the same way. I utilize the same data, the same channels of information.

I’m just like them.

And I understand how alone the victim can be. How cut off and isolated. How he could have lived that way for years perhaps, could have adjusted to it, made his peace with it. Because I do that too. I’ve accepted that too. No one knows I exist. I can never be too close to anyone else; no one else can be too close to me.

I’m just like him.

So I identify with both of them, the perpetrators and the victim; I recognize them both.

And how do they know so much about him? How can they know these little details if they have erased him, buried him, if he is gone?

Because he is
not
erased or buried. He is not gone. He is being kept. He is alive. And no one is better suited to find him, to rescue him, to draw him out of his predicament and his loneliness, than the one person who knows what has happened
and
the one person who most profoundly empathizes, identifies. It is in effect, after all, rescuing myself. My doppelganger. My instant, automatic friend.

I don’t know exactly what I will find in that motel room, but I will find something—or someone. I had watched the Stewartsons head down the road, melt into the horizon, and although the prudent thing would have been to follow them, wait till they were ensconced at a restaurant or blackjack table before racing back, I had the sense they would not return too quickly. And though I operate professionally on evidence, none of us can afford to ignore the evidence of one’s gut instinct.

My need to preserve my invisibility means I have some reconnaissance, some extra steps to take, during the next few hours. I watch and wait as the motel shift changes. As the early morning manager comes on, as he chats with the desk clerk for a few minutes and circles the property once distractedly, while the relieved clerk leaves for more congenial environs. I watch as the migrant busboys and dishwashers and janitors stumble in exhausted from their late shifts to their long-term rental, shower one after another, and collapse into exhausted sleep. So that in just a couple of hours, I can map out fairly completely what rooms are occupied with whom, what rooms have me in their sight line, what rooms don’t. I know it well enough to be fairly certain I won’t even be seen, and certainly not thought about, when the desk clerk takes a bathroom break and I stride into the lobby and down the hall to the door of Room 103 with my universal keycard, the same one housekeeping and motel management use. (From the laptop in my car, I had gotten the name of the motel’s key maker through its purchase records, and the correct serial number and activation codes from the manufacturing company—then after fishing an old key out of the motel trash and networking my laptop to a portable keycard magnetizer that I bought online a couple of years ago, I activated the card pretty much the same way the desk clerk does it.) Press into the slot. Pull up. Blinking green light. It works . . .

I push open the door to Room 103.

At first blush, nothing unusual, nothing amiss. But what’s amiss is that there
is
nothing amiss. Beds still made. A closed suitcase on the end of one bed. A motel room occupied, but not occupied. I poke around in the cheap bureau drawers, slide open the flimsy closet door—nothing. I am about to leave, disappointed, mystified, when I open the bathroom door wider, only as a final, unthinking gesture before I go.