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

by Tanya Thompson

  It hadn’t been intended, but I ended up with nearly twenty original or certified birth certificates. It was 1986 and identity fraud was not yet a publicized issue, and, as I discovered, models were absolutely desperate to please. It made them terribly easy to manipulate, a trait that simultaneously pleased and distressed me. They needed to be protected from the likes of me, but I knew there were people with intentions far worse than mine that would cause them no end of unhappiness.

  By the end of our chatty conversations, I knew their mother’s maiden name, what their father did for a living, and where everyone in their family was born. I’d put the phone down knowing every distinct detail of their identity so that I didn’t really need a copy of anything, but I still asked for them to send it.

  Almost always I walked away disturbed by the hope and expectation I was going to shatter. My greatest concern was the weeks of anxiety I would cause when they didn’t get the promised contract. I could imagine it, and I couldn’t stomach it. I sent them all apology letters explaining the show had been canceled but I would keep their details for the spring event.

  Conscience appeased, I organized the treasure into a file. Some names were only copies of the driver’s license, most came with Social Security numbers, and almost twenty had genuine birth certificates.

  I started going to the Driver’s Licensing Service Centers and saying, “Hi, I’m Ms. Model and I lost my license. That’s me alright: aged twenty, five-foot-eight with brown hair and eyes.”

  ~~~~~~

  Every week I added another Tennessee issued driver’s license to my collection. The names and addresses were unfamiliar but the picture in the corner was clearly me. In some my hair was flaming red, and in others I was Goth, but the high cheek bones and strong lines of my face remained the same. I was never going to be a spy that could don a disguise and meld into any person. But as Tennessee didn’t keep a copy of the pictures on file, the risks associated with my crime were so low as to be nonexistent.

  There was nothing to slow me down, and I wasn’t going to stop until I had at least a dozen IDs, and a few more from Georgia, but I had very little idea of what I wanted to do with them.

  For inspiration, I went to the library to look up con artists and fraud. The books repeatedly referenced check kiting. If it hadn’t had such an appealing name, I might have overlooked it, but I just loved saying the words: check kiting.

  It sounded breezy, but essentially it was nothing more than writing one bad check to cover another. It’s illegal the very moment you don’t have the funds to cover either check, but it becomes particularly criminal when you withdraw the erroneous balance that’s been created.

  History’s most outrageous kiters had brought several major banks to their knees, and because of it, the banks were on the lookout for similar activity. But as the library books explained, it was more difficult to spot by using multiple accounts with different names. The more accounts, the longer you could float the checks.

  There was no risk I would bankrupt a bank when all I needed was five thousand dollars. The goal was a laser printer and a computer so I could continue my experiments in creating legal identification.

  I opened four checking accounts in four unique names at four separate banks in four adjoining states, and then I started writing checks from one account to the other, keeping them all up in the air, in transit, increasing the value of deposits until I had withdrawn nearly eight thousand dollars. Then I let the checks fall where they may, and whose ever name was on the license got to explain they hadn’t been involved.

  When I had opened the accounts, each bank had taken photocopies of the driver’s license with my image in the corner, and while the pictures were black blobs of grainy ink, barely recognizable as female, I assumed it was enough to clear the models of wrong doing. The fear that I would mess up anyone’s life didn’t prevent me from doing it, but it did keep me from continuing the practice.

  Not wanting to explain to my parents how I came to be in possession of the computer and printing equipment, I kept it at a friend’s house. John Mittwede and I had classes together three times a week. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we’d leave campus to race each other through the curvy back roads to his house. I had a six-cylinder Mustang and no fear of passing on the curves, so it was a race he never won. Early on he declared me crazy and himself foolish for playing games with a lunatic.

  When he met my grandmother, he thought she was prophetic because she could never get his name right, always calling him Nitwitty.

  “And I am a nitwit for letting you do this here.” From the very start, he protested, but he was also an artist, and he found immense joy in the new technology of laser printing. He wanted to see what the printer could do, but not in the same way I did.

  “There are better things to use this for than birth certificates,” but then he’d grimace and criticize that I was doing it wrong, without style and with no regard for perfection.

  I’d say, “They won’t notice,” and wave it away, but he couldn’t bear to see it.

  He’d smoke a joint, eat some pills, and then shoo me away from the computer to do it himself. When I pulled the documents from the printer to finish them, I was reminded he didn’t like my handwriting either. I could forge a signature better than he, but as long as we were making everybody up out of air and imagination, he thought the mother’s and father’s signatures should complement the doctor’s. The husband’s should be dark and bold, the wife’s should scroll fancifully across the paper, and the doctor had to dominate them both with decisive authority, then everybody had to have the proper amount of loops both above and below the line.

  I would laugh at his obsession, but his need for visual harmony meant he made all of the birth certificates I used, and he made them very pretty. The agents at the Driver’s License Service Centers never remarked on this however. They just took the document for how it appeared and started me with the written exam. This I never failed, but I’d still roll through the stop signs, pass in the intersections, or think the agent would just love to read the book on the backseat and reach around to get it, then I’d have to return to take the road test again.

  ~~~~~~

  Check kiting was more amusing to say than do, but it gave me a taste for banks. I liked the feel of banks. I liked the ones with marble floors and chandeliers as much as the ones with corporate carpet and stained paneling. I was comfortable in the hushed atmosphere that was so similar to a library. I not only liked the little slips of paper you had to fill out to deposit or withdraw, but also the black pens on ball chains that would loop so nicely into a circle. I adored the antique vaults and was mesmerized by the rows of safety deposit boxes. I imagined they held fabulous secrets. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits, and everything was so very tidy. Banks were marvelous.

  And I could be twenty-three again. It was a good age to acquire a loan. I asked for five-thousand dollars, and all the loan officers wanted in return was a copy of a 1040 tax return and proof of employment. It didn’t seem right that it should be so easy.

  I expected to be caught by some unexpected security feature. I thought I was wasting money renting a house, setting up a phone, and then waiting for the bank to call so I could confirm I worked at whatever imaginary business I had named on the form.

  I wondered if I really could just get away with filling out a 1040EZ and then photocopying it, as though this alone were evidence of filing with the IRS, but it never failed to appease.

  It was harder to get a Social Security number than five thousand dollars.

  But not much harder.

  I entered the banks looking civil, but I would go into Social Security like a backwoods holy-roller. With my hair brushed straight and rolled into a bun, I finished the look of a Pentecostal by scrubbing my face clean of makeup and wearing socks in sandals under a long floral skirt. The clothes I wore had been homemade and were well-used by the time I bought them at the Salvation Army, so no one doubted that if it were Sun
day, I’d be speaking in tongues or proselytizing with snakes; but as it was midweek, I was staring at the floor, acting shy and backwards, making everyone uncomfortable that I had come down off the mountain.

  I also knew how to speak wood-hick: “I got me a job at the Piggly Wiggly but my mamma didn’t never get me one of those Social Security numbers, and they say I needs one to work.”

  And then there was the phrase that always put an end to every agent’s curiosity about why I didn’t already have one: “I’s homeschooled … by my daddy.” Nobody was crossing into that shit.

  TCBY

  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 r
ent.”

  Passport Services

  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.