Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) (13 page)

I had only acquired three loans when my mother found an envelope of cash in the trunk of the Mustang.

She said, “Explain.”

And I said, “I have a job at the yogurt store. I’ve had it for three, maybe four months now. Didn’t I tell you?”
Stupid, stupid thing to say
. She didn’t believe it, and it didn’t account for the cash anyway, but I still had to go apply for work with TCBY to cover myself.

The frozen yogurt shop was in the neighboring city, Tullahoma, and the community there didn’t yet know me. Outside my family’s ceramic business, it was my first paying job and it was awful. I didn’t know how anyone expected me to simply stand behind the counter and wait for a customer. And then once they came, it didn’t get any more entertaining. The whole of the exchange rarely moved far beyond vanilla or chocolate. I was only two weeks in and my head was shrieking with boredom.

For no other reason than to break up the monotony, I faked a robbery.

I knew I could get away with it because people trusted me. The description most often applied to me was that of an angel. My history teacher broke mid lecture to stare at me and confess, “I can’t stop myself from calling you angel face.”

He wasn’t the only one. I often heard of my angelic features. My expression was practiced innocence which inspired faith, so it was no surprise to me that in the first week of my employment with TCBY, I had been given keys to the store and the combination to the safe. As long as I held the angel mask firmly over my demonic smile, no one doubted my honesty.

I was supposed to be opening the store, but instead I picked up the phone and dialed 911. Barely keeping my voice together, I told the operator I had been threatened with a knife and had given away all the cash.

The money in the safe hadn’t been deposited in a week, so the theft was substantial. Not that I needed it, I just couldn’t abide the drudgery of serving frozen cones that day.

But after the commotion of squad cars and detectives, the tedium returned and I still had a job. And worse, I had played my distressed self so well that the manager of the store was constantly fawning over me in tears, and the police kept coming in to ensure I felt safe, treating me with such doting compassion that I felt sick with guilt for raising their emotions. When it all became too dramatic, and I had been hugged just one time too many, I threw down my heavenly mask and started laughing at the police chief.

There was no warning before the change. One week into the investigation, I was sitting in the chief’s office with him and another detective going over mug shots, and then midsentence—
swoosh
—the white robes fell off.

I looked up to them slightly crazed, started laughing at their questions, and entirely ceased to take anything seriously. It was such a drastic transformation, they looked genuinely concerned and asked if I had consumed any drugs, but I swore I hadn’t.

I was still contending I had been robbed, but I was smirking through my every response, eyes locked on them in merriment, making certain they understood it was a game where I wanted to be chased.

They asked again if I had taken any drugs but I assured them, “No, this isn’t drugs.”

“Well, it’s something.” It had to be because I was clearly deranged.

Finally, they accused me of what I’d done, and while they could see it made me happy, I wouldn’t admit it. I just smiled like a devil while insisting, “It was absolutely terrifying.” Protesting, “I don’t know why you won’t believe me.” And then wiping away nonexistent tears, “I was robbed at knife point.”

I was being an infuriating little bitch, and the saner half of me was stepping back waving away any association with the lunatic.

The police chief warned he was getting multiple search warrants. He’d start with my car, and if he didn’t find the money there, he wouldn’t stop until my boyfriend’s parents’ house was overturned.

I had my mother’s suspicions to contend with, so the money was already buried, and with thirty acres to my parents’ property, I had no fear anyone would find it. All the forged and illicitly gained documents of identification were either concealed in the roof of the barn or at Mittwede’s house, and Mittwede wasn’t my boyfriend.

The police chief’s threat to obtain warrants got a ridiculing laugh but nothing else.

He began to rage, informing me, “I will get you because I always get my suspect. Not once have I ever failed to get my suspect.” He told me about the other clever little people that thought they could outfox him and how he had trapped them, arrested them, and sent them to jail.

He was bragging and I was taunting, “Why, I think you’ve frightened me.”

He carried on to explain that I would confess, I would break, it may take him months, but he would dog my every move, pulling me out of class for questioning, asking for the details again and again until I slipped, made a mistake, and then I’d fall apart. He promised. “You will cry and I will be there when you do.”

I looked him up and down with derision. “You are going to do all that
and
make me cry?” Just what kind of super-cop did he think he was? My disbelief turned to gleeful condescension, and I was choking on my amusement to ask, “Cry? Oh god, really? Cry?
You
think you can make
me
cry?” That was so particularly, demonically funny, I fell into laughing hysterics.

I hadn’t exactly come out of Dallas unscarred. Sergiu had left his mark.

And of course the police chief was wrong, but he’d made his bold declaration before knowing about the list of investigators and the psychopath that had come before him.

The Shelbyville Police Department took the time to educate him, faxing him a newspaper article with which to confront me. I wondered who had scrawled “good luck!” in the corner.

After that, the police chief had a more modest view of his abilities. He had to settle with warning most of Tullahoma’s businesses not to hire me if I applied, but I had no intention of getting another job. Mittwede did though. He’d been searching for new employment ever since the police chief told the management of Domino’s Pizza that their driver, John Mittwede, was friends with a thieving criminal.

“You got me fired,” Mittwede said. “And because they think you’ll do it again, no one will hire me.”

That was a truly unexpected consequence. I had walked away from the crime free and uncharged, but Mittwede was being punished. I grimaced, “Sorry.”

But he wouldn’t accept it. “You can’t say you’re sorry for something you won’t admit doing.”

“I can’t?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, then, I can offer you money.”

“I bet you can. And I bet is smells like a TCBY waffle cone.”

“Some of it. But some of it smells like dirt.”

“Dirt?” Mittwede looked aghast. His next question was an accusation, “Did you rob a grave?”

“Now there’s an idea.” Before he turned any paler, I assured him, “No, I wasn’t digging into coffins. After all those threats of search warrants, I decided it would be wise to take up a discreet hobby. I call it midnight gardening.”

“Midnight gardening,” he turned the phrase around a couple times and decided he liked it.

“Mmm,” I agreed it was a nice expression. “All it takes is a shovel, a flashlight and a bag of valuables.”

Mittwede didn’t want to laugh and encourage me, but he suggested, “Why don’t you go out tonight and see if you can dig up my rent.”

The biggest prize in legitimate government-issued identification was the passport. Nothing else could top it. It was the undisputed confirmation of identity, and I wanted desperately to prove it could be fraudulently attained.

I was hovering over Mittwede this time, insisting the birth certificate had to be perfect. And by perfect I meant abused. It needed to look nineteen years old, the details plunked out with inconsistent strength on a manual typewriter, the ink saturated into the paper, and the paper needed to be discolored by age, and the edges softened with time.

We needed two pens. The mother and father could have shared one, but the doctor would have used something expensive that he kept in his shirt pocket.

It was the second time Amanda Palmer had a birth certificate created. The first time had been shortly before the yogurt incident. I had used Mittwede’s original certificate to procure a license, but looking at the forgery again, I wondered if it was good enough for Passport Services. We could have started again from nothing, imagining a whole new name, but I didn’t want to spend months aging another license. I knew it would look suspicious to apply for two IDs in the same week, so the license had to have a bit of age on it. Years would have been preferable, but I didn’t want to wait that long, so instead, I was applying for the passport after only having the license for three months.

The birth certificate was from Alabama and the license from Tennessee. The address on the form was to a dilapidated farm house I passed everyday on the back roads to campus. The place was visible from the highway, so to appease the postman, I spent a day hanging curtains in the windows and placing two ferns on the porch. Then, the front door had to be propped back into place and both it and the mailbox painted.

Everything seemed perfectly sorted.

But the application never made it far enough to be delivered.

I learned there were some differences to acquiring a passport and a license.

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.”