Identity Thief Read online

  She would not look at me. “I—I saw them once. Like I said, it was nothing. Biff sort of played with him a little. It was like tickling. He barely touched Scotty’s you-know. I swear. It was probably just an accident. Biff was drunk.”

  “You knew?” Now I was convinced I really would kill her.

  “I . . . Look, Biff had a lot of money. He could give me—I mean, he could give Scotty things you couldn’t. I was doing what was best.”

  I pushed Betsy from the side. She fell onto the lawn and reached for a garden stone. She hit me in the stomach with the rock, right where my scar was from the shooting. It hurt like hell. Then she scratched my cheeks with her fingernails. I tried to hold her down, but she bit my hand. In the chaos of the fight, I caught a glimpse of Sequoia getting out of the car, presumably to break us up.

  As if Betsy had magical powers to conjure up her wishes, seemingly out of nowhere a police car with a glaring, spinning, red siren drove up to the house. It was too soon for the cops to have responded to some nosy neighbor reporting a domestic disturbance; I hoped against hope that Betsy had done something, and they were there for her.

  Two officers got out of the car and walked to the porch. I could see my mom ducking her head down in Sequoia’s car.

  “You!” One of the officers pointed his finger at me. “Come with us. Right now.”

  “She started it, officer,” Sequoia said loyally. “He was only trying to defend himself.”

  “You fuck!” Betsy lunged at Sequoia, but the other officer held her back.

  “We’re not here for your dumb-ass domestic squabble,” the first officer said. “This is something else.” He looked at me like I knew exactly what he meant, though I tried to play dumb.

  “Like what? Am I under arrest?”

  “I’ll call a lawyer,” Sequoia said.

  “Sir,” said the officer calmly, “I promise you it is in your best interests to cooperate.”

  As I drove off with the two officers, I could see my mother’s middle finger subtly extended above the car seat she was hiding under.

  WE WERE BACK IN MY HOME CITY, to make yet another fresh start, with new names intended to keep me from further identity theft. We did not formally petition to change our names, as that would’ve left a paper trail. But one of the FBI agents I’d been dealing with said, “Abracadabra,” and there we were with passports and driver’s licenses that had our new names: Randall and Valerie Van Sant. We also had new social security numbers, though I couldn’t remember the last time I had to use my old one. Sabrina refused to change her name. The idea frightened her for some reason, and she started to cry. We never mentioned it again.

  Of course what I knew that nobody else knew was that I needed to move like a bat out of hell for technically killing Linda Goldstein. Dr. Jesse Falcon had to more or less die as well.

  I took out a license to become a private investigator. This was surprisingly easy to do. I had no interest in finding someone’s second cousin twice removed, I only wanted to find my identity thief. I knew this was the only way to go about it, since law enforcement had been no help. There was strong reason to believe the thief was right there in my hometown, or at least had been, given that stupid bank robbery. So there I was, Randall Van Sant, PI. I decided to stop contacting the cops or the FBI. Nothing came of it except more psychic damage to me. I also closed all of my accounts under the name of Jesse Falcon.

  In order for no one to take me for Dr. Jesse Falcon, I dyed my hair, got it cut differently, and wore tinted contacts. I should also mention that I got a little plastic surgery. I was pleased with how I’d been aging, thanks very much, but I figured it would never hurt to look younger if I didn’t want to be recognized. So I got a facelift. (While they were at it, I had them throw in a tummy tuck.) Esther and Sabrina insisted I looked the same, though I knew perfectly well that I looked quite different.

  With Esther’s help, I bought all new clothes that signaled a different style of dressing and a different kind of person. I even changed my cologne. If anyone from my old university thought they recognized me, I easily could deny it.

  Esther could’ve kept working as an interior designer. Instead she decided to go back to school and study French. Like a good Girl Scout, she kept trying to call me by my new name—even with a French accent. But finally she gave in to my protests and called me by my real name unless other people besides Sabrina were around. The truth was, we’d never made a lot of friends, and despite our plans to start doing so, day by day it never happened.

  Besides, it’s hard to make boring small talk when all you can think about is your fucking identity thief.

  We settled on a narrow tri-story in an upscale neighborhood. As proof that she was done with interior design, Esther proclaimed that she would hire someone else to decorate our new home. Needless to say, the poor designer ended up being more like her assistant.

  Before moving away, I had to tell my patients I was retiring. Most of them took it well. In fact, that super-obnoxious male patient waxed poetic for the full fifty minutes about how much we had done what he considered “connecting.” I realized that underneath all his posturing, I probably was the only person who talked to him. Contrarily, the sad and nutty male patient I saw right after him claimed that I was abandoning him like everyone else had always done, especially now when we were making what he considered to be progress. I supposed that meant there was a minute a day in which he didn’t think about destroying the world.

  Thus did I bid adieu to the world of Shrinkdom. No more Linda Goldsteins, no more inferiority complexes, no more superiority complexes, no more boring life stories, no more bitchy mothers and clueless fathers, no more obnoxious conference speakers who began their speeches by bragging, “I don’t need a mic.”

  Truthfully, I don’t even remember why I decided to become a psychologist. Probably I heard it paid well. I can’t recall ever having a strong motivation to want to help people solve their problems. Which, by the way, seldom, if ever, happened in my experience. Most people loved their problems more than anything. There was this website I heard about called McShrink, in which people got the kind of straightforward advice I would’ve wanted to give people: get off your ass and do something about it. But that’s not what I got trained to do. I got trained to listen. The only problem was, most people didn’t say much worth listening to.

  Esther cried with joy at seeing Sabrina again as she realized she could see her all the time. Sabrina wasn’t angry with me anymore, but her evasiveness kept me wondering what she was hiding. She said she was on a sabbatical from her teaching job but wouldn’t get specific about what she was doing.

  “It wouldn’t mean anything to you, Dad,” she told me.

  Yet she apparently didn’t tell Esther, either. “Give her some space,” Esther told me. “She’s been through a lot.”

  I assume this meant the bank robbery, unless it meant the elusive ex-boyfriend Cole Colton.

  As soon as we were reasonably settled in and the bandages were removed from my face, I was off to the bank that had been robbed. Or should I say that Randall Van Sant, PI, was off to the bank.

  “I’ve been hired to locate a missing person,” I explained to the bank officer, a woman who bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Linda Goldstein. It was as though I was now in the Twilight Zone and would be haunted by her everywhere I went.

  “Who are you looking for?” asked the bank officer, offering me a seat in her cubicle.

  “His name is Dr. Jesse Falcon.”

  The bank officer did a double take, scrutinizing me carefully from her desk. “The police have been here many times on Dr. Falcon’s behalf. There seems to have been—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “Identity theft. Now it appears he’s missing. The real Dr. Falcon, that is. And let’s say some people are concerned it might all be connected.”

  “Then why aren’t the police involved?”

  I winked at her. “The police? Give me a break.”

  She
winked back, which I found faintly revolting. “Between you and me, I feel the same way. Unfortunately, the teller who waited on the man who said he was Dr. Falcon was killed during the robbery.”

  “How tragic.” I thought, I hit the jackpot; he really was here.

  The bank officer sighed. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it. We still haven’t recovered. But another teller did see him up close. Let me get Luanna for you.”

  I saw the bank officer and Luanna exchange a few urgent words, then they both came back over to me.

  “My name is Luanna.” She smiled efficiently. “How may I help you?” The bank officer seated us both and took her place behind her desk, as if a chaperone on a blind date.

  “Well, Luanna, it would appear that Dr. Jesse Falcon is missing.”

  “You mean that nice man who got shot in the bank robbery?”

  I quickly exchanged meaningful glances with the bank officer; obviously Luanna knew nothing about the identity theft.

  “Yes, that’s the man.” I nodded sadly before adding, “However, we need to make sure. Please, describe him for me, Luanna.”

  “Oh, absolutely. Every last detail of that day is burned into my memory. How could I ever forget it?”

  I took out a pad and pencil from my jacket pocket. “Tragedy does that, I’m afraid. Now, what did he look like? About how old was he? Was he tall, short? What color hair?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t really that tall or short. You know, in between. Kind of regular hair. I can’t think of the exact color. He was probably like thirty or so. But cute, you know? An expensive blue suit. Like you’d feel safe taking him home to meet your parents.”

  “Thank you, I see. Anything else?” Oh, please, please, let her remember something else.

  Luanna shrugged. “Not that I can think of.”

  Just my luck to get help from an airhead. Gee, when had this happened to me before? How about for my entire life?

  “Thank you for all your help.” I stood up to take my leave. “Here’s my card if you think of anything else.” My new PO Box and cell phone number were on the card.

  “Oh, wait,” Luanna said suddenly. “I thought of something else.”

  My heart practically burst into song. “What’s that?”

  “There was this woman. Very pretty. With beautiful long hair. They were flirting, even during the robbery. I could tell. I mean, you know when people are flirting. They kept looking at each other in, you know, that kind of way.” She scrunched her nose.

  I took out a picture of Sabrina from my wallet. “Was this the woman?”

  Luanna studied it carefully. “Maybe,” she decided. “It kind of looks like her. The woman in the bank was prettier. Maybe this is a bad picture of her.”

  I almost blurted out that no one was prettier than my Sabrina but kept my emotions in check, piling on the thanks some more before leaving. “Thank you again. You’ve been a lot of help.” As I thought about it, Luanna had done me some good. The flirty girl might well have been Sabrina, and the guy claiming to be me would’ve been exactly Sabrina’s type. A nothing.

  All I had to do was find out who this guy was and probably my own daughter could tell me at least something about him, if not everything. When you’re a parent and a shrink, it doesn’t take much to add two and two. My daughter had a crush on my identity thief. There was an obvious down side, but the upside was she could lead him right into Papa’s hand.

  I made sure I met with Sabrina without Esther around to tell me to go easy on our precious baby. She had an art studio in an old factory district, so I met her there that very same day.

  The studio was creaky and messy, as I imagined most artist studios were. It was near an elevated freeway exit, and there was a constant roar of cars in the background, which I would have found distracting. Still, it was quite spacious, with high ceilings. Jeremy, my ex-bulldog, lay restfully on a dog cushion in the corner. He barked a little when I came in and quickly fell asleep. He didn’t seem to remember me. Or maybe he didn’t care.

  Sabrina was high atop a ladder and endearingly attired in overalls, which, like her face, featured messy dots of paint. She protected her hair by stuffing it inside a baseball cap. Sabrina was working on this enormous, wall-sized canvas that reminded me of why I had so little feeling for art. The canvas had a solid black background with these splatters of white on top. Climbing down the ladder, she explained to me that she would keep splattering on the white until the painting was fifty/fifty black and white. It would be given the ingenious title, Composition #11. For my benefit, she slid out several earlier wall-sized pieces, all of which looked the same to me.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “They’re not all the same, you know. The splatter patterns vary. That’s the whole point. Nothing is ever the same as something else, even when you think it is.”

  I thought about how much I disagreed with this. As far as I was concerned, everyone and everything was one great big blah. Okay, with a few exceptions, but that was the general idea. I supposed that was what art was for—to try to make everything seem nicer or more interesting than it was. Assuming you could relate to it.

  “Huh. I never thought of it that way before, princess.” I stood back and squinted in mock fascination for the piece. “Is this what your sabbatical is for?” Lord help the patrons of her university if it was.

  “Sort of.” She critically studied a tiny section of the painting and splattered more white on it. “It’s hard to explain.” She quickly added, “If you don’t know much about art.” She climbed back up her ladder, paintbrush in hand.

  “Sabrina, I’m here to talk about that bank robbery.”

  “Uh,huh. I’m listening.”

  “It doesn’t seem to upset you anymore.”

  “When I’m painting, Dad, nothing upsets me.” Deftly balanced on the ladder, she dunked her brush into her can of paint and struck it at the canvas with a firm determination in her wrist, as one might swat a fly.

  “I remember you mentioned some guy. You thought he was handsome.” I hoped to go to my grave without ever saying the word “cute.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Even though you were scared out of your mind, you said you noticed some guy.”

  She set her paintbrush in the can of paint. “Yes, I think I’m remembering now. The thing is, I’ve blotted out a lot that happened.”

  “Sabrina, are you involved with this young man?”

  She looked down at me, grinning; there was a spot of white paint on her nose. “Dad, I don’t get it. What if I was? I’m not. But what if I was? Do I have to tell you about every guy I date? Really, your Sabrina is all grown up now. Daddy’s little girl has known a number of men in the good old-fashioned Biblical sense, and it didn’t exactly start happening the day before yesterday.”

  “Believe it or not, young lady, at your age I did not spend my evenings eating cookies and milk, though, of course, the dinosaurs made for some bad times. I know that people have sex. I was a shrink, remember? When you said that Cole Colton person was the love of your life, I didn’t think you were doing pinkie hugs.”

  It made me quite uncomfortable to think that my daughter fucked around like a whore. If I’d had a patient who was a virgin—if anyone over eighteen was still a virgin—I would tell her to go out and get laid. Hell, I might’ve even done her myself. But I could barely stomach the thought of my daughter having sex, let alone casual sex. I wanted to beat up any man who so much as touched her. If she got married and wanted a kid, I’d encourage her to consider artificial insemination.

  “‘Cole Colton?’ You don’t even remember his name. It was Colton Cole.”

  “I know that.” I said quickly. “I was making light of it all. You know, as if I’d said, ‘Doe, John.’”

  “There was nothing funny about our relationship. Colton called me the other day. He wanted to get back together. It took everything I had to tell him no. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

  Something in me had changed be
cause I had to resist the urge to reply, Yes, I can tell you’re devastated. Or maybe, How the fuck was I supposed to know how you felt about anything when you never say what’s happening to you?

  “Do you want to talk about it, Princess?” I properly furrowed my brow in concern.

  “No, I’m fine now.” She made rapid brush strokes with her white paint.

  “Anyway, I know you’re all grown up, sweetheart. That’s why I don’t pay your bills anymore. I want to know about that one guy from the bank.”

  She climbed down the ladder. “Why? Is he really my long lost brother?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “When you’re adopted, you wonder about these things. I saw this old movie once where this guy was jealous of his twin sister’s boyfriend, and then it turned out that they were both adopted, and—”

  “I hate it when you talk about being adopted. Don’t you know your mother and I never think of you that way?”

  She sat herself on the ladder and cupped her hand to her chin. “A friend of mine in college said that I was lucky. Because non-adopted kids wish they were adopted. That there’s these nicer, real parents waiting for them someplace. The same friend used to say she was raised by nuns in a French orphanage. Instead, she was from Milton, Ohio. I remember her father collected hubcaps.”

  “Look, stop changing the subject. Do you know the man you saw at the bank robbery or not?”

  She made a point of staring at me dead-on. There was not even the slightest flicker in her eyes. “No. I never saw him again.”

  “You’re acting like you have something to hide.”

  “So are you, Dad. Why do you care about this guy? You even asked me about him when I came to visit that time.” She leaned toward me. “Don’t worry, I know I’m covered in paint. I won’t touch you. But really, Dad. Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

  I thought for a moment, took a deep breath, and told Sabrina about the identity thief. At one point I got carried away and touched her shoulders, getting some paint on my hands. “Promise me,” I concluded, “that you won’t tell anyone I was here.” I washed my hands in her industrial sink.