Identity Thief (18 page)

“I don’t have to tell you. You gave up all visitation rights.”

“Isn’t there anybody in the world who wants my love?”

It occurred to me she may have taken an anti-depressant, but if so, it zonked her out more than anything else.

“Cut the crap, Betsy. Look, we need to get going. I’ll go get Scotty and you can say good-bye.”

I stood by the car, maybe twenty feet away, as Scotty gave his mother a hug. She did not hug him back but made a cruel face. “My son. What a joke. He hates me. He hates his own mother.”

Scotty started crying. As I approached them, I heard him say, “Mom, please speak to me. Is it because of Biff? Did you find out? I’m sorry, but I had to do it.”

Betsy’s nastiness turned to a lewd grin. “Biff? What about Biff?”

“Scotty had an argument with Biff. It was nothing. But he thinks that’s why Biff ran away.” I glared at Scotty and grabbed his hand to lead him back to the car.

Betsy stood up. “Oh my God. You know what happened to Biff, don’t you?”

“According to you, you killed him yourself.”

“I had no choice. I mean, I had to say that I did. I couldn’t let you win. But you really know about him, don’t you? Is he alive? Is he dead? Did you—?”

Scotty broke free of my hand and gave her a shove. He was only a small boy, but Betsy was pretty unsteady on her feet. Losing her balance, she hit her head against the porch support beam and fell down, unconscious.

“Is Mom dead?” Scotty asked, considerably more concerned than when he’d asked the same thing about Biff.

“No. Don’t worry. Go back to the car.” He scurried back to Mom and Sequoia with his little-boy high energy.

After a moment, Betsy came to and sat up on the porch step, rubbing her head. “That’s it. I’m calling the cops.”

“And telling them
what
?”

“I’ll think of something. Maybe Dr. Jesse Falcon, for starters.”

I stood over her, trembling with rage. “I swear, Betsy, I should’ve killed you. That last night together, with my hands around your neck, I should’ve kept going and going until all that ugliness inside you was gone. Your precious Biff molested our son. Did you know that? Your one great true love liked to diddle with little boys.”

“No, it was nothing.” She started to cry a little.

I could feel myself turn pale. “What do you mean, nothing?”

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.

W
E 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.”