The Guise of Another

by Allen Eskens

“Yeah, the guy in the Porsche in the oncoming lane, the guy who was minding his own business, not doing a damned thing wrong.”

  “Highway Patrol handled the accident,” Alexander said. “They would've done the reconstruction. Not us.”

  “I'm not looking for accident reconstruction. I have all that.” Dogget tapped his finger on a file lying on the table in front of him, a file he'd brought to the interview.

  “Then what are you looking for?” Alexander said. He made no attempt to hide his growing impatience. “This is the Fraud Unit. We don't handle accidents or deaths.”

  “I'm getting there. When I got the lead on this case, I had my investigator try to scrounge up a relative—someone I could send a letter to.”

  “A relative?”

  “It's a wrongful-death action. The heirs of the dead get to sue the people who caused the death.”

  “So you stalk the relative of the guy in the Porsche, hoping to take a cut of what his heirs should get for his death.”

  “Hey, I provide a valuable service,” Dogget said, pointing his finger at Alexander. It was all Alexander could do not to reach out and break the finger in half. It would have been so quick, so easy. “I go after the deep pocket once the insurance company offers up their meager policy limits.”

  “So did you find a relative?”

  “Sort of.” Dogget shrugged.

  “‘Sort of’?”

  “The guy in the Porsche lived with a woman named Ianna Markova. I sent a letter to her that same day. I normally wait and make sure that the significant other is a wife because a girlfriend does me no good. The heir has to be a blood relative or a wife. Girlfriends are shit out of luck.”

  “Sucks to be her,” Alexander said.

  “Don't it, though.” Alexander's sarcasm floated right past Dogget. “So this Ianna Markova calls me up. Wants to come in and see me. I clear my calendar to get her in. You know, get ’em while they're hot. And boy was she hot. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, blond hair, knockers…” Dogget gave a sideways glance up to the camera in the corner of the ceiling, cleared his throat, and continued in a manner more professional than before. “So she's all bereaved, and I'm taking my time with her. Then I ask her if she and James were married.”

  “James?”

  “The guy in the Porsche. His name was James Erkel Putnam. She had just come from making the funeral arrangements. She tells me that she and Putnam never tied the knot. I almost started crying myself. So I ask her if there were any brothers or sisters or parents. I tell her that we need the names of all of his living relatives. At first she says that James doesn't have a living relative.”

  “So no lawsuit? You must've been heartbroken.”

  “I don't give up that easy. I've never met a man with no blood relatives. You shake a family tree hard enough, someone always falls out. So I laid it on the line. I told her that without a blood relative, there's no lawsuit. No money.”

  “Why would she care? The girlfriend gets nothing, remember?”

  Dogget gave a sly grin, like a man about to share a dirty joke. “I kind of told her that she still gets part of the settlement. I said that once we had the blood relative, she can stake a claim against the jewelry mogul.”

  “So you lied to a woman who just lost her boyfriend.” Alexander leaned into the table and aimed his stare at Dogget. “Is that the crime you came here to report?”

  “You're funny, Detective.” Dogget tapped his knuckles against his chest as if trying to pass a burp. “I come in here to do the right thing, and you bust my chops.”

  “You understand this is the Fraud Unit, don't you? Lying to Ms. Markova is the first thing I've heard so far that sounds like a fraud.”

  “I'm getting there,” Dogget said.

  Alexander could see tiny beads of sweat starting to form on Dogget's temple, and he took some pleasure in it.

  “So, the next day, she came back with a box of documents: birth certificate, Social Security card, and some letters.”

  “Letters?”

  “Yeah, letters that James received years ago from a brother in prison in New York. I had my investigator check into it and, sure enough, Putnam has this older brother doing a stint in the Clinton Correctional Facility for a drug conviction—what they called a class A-1 felony.”

  “So why'd she tell you that James had no relatives?”

  “She said that she found the stuff in a hidden box full of James's personal things. She said she wanted to respect his privacy. My thought is that she just didn't want to share with the brother in prison. But who knows?”

  “What's the brother's name?”

  “William Bartók Putnam. We followed up on the information, compared the birth certificates with city records. Putnam's parents are dead, died in a car crash back in ’98, and the older brother's legit.”

  “So you have your heir. You can rape the jewelry king to your heart's content.”

  “You would think so, but not so fast with the happy ending.” Dogget folded his fingers together in order to give his words some dramatic weight. “I sent William Bartók Putnam a contract to sign, allowing me to file a lawsuit on his behalf. I also sent him a copy of the obituary of his brother. A week later, I get the whole mess back with a simple note that read: ‘That is not my brother. That is not James Erkel Putnam.’”

  After Dogget left, Alexander opened an investigation into the identity theft of a man named James Erkel Putnam. First, he put a call into the Highway Patrol and requested a copy of the accident file. The trooper he spoke with offered to drive a hard copy of the file over, an offer Alexander gladly accepted. By midmorning, Alexander had both the accident file and Dogget's file on his desk. He ran the dead man's driver's license to get a photo. The man claiming to be Putnam looked to be in his midthirties, with handsome features and a smiling face that held a hint of gloating around the eyes.

  He put the photo down and pulled the accident-reconstruction report from the file. Both of the cars were equipped with sensors that captured their speed, direction of travel, and reaction time between braking, impact, and airbag deployment. The accident report read like a technical manual—numbers and calculations and formulae, but it gave no depth, no sense of the living, breathing human being who lost his life. To learn more about the man, Alexander looked to the narrative reports of the officers on the scene.

  Officers Kevin Tiegs and Sandra Percell had arrived within a minute of one another. Tiegs went immediately to the Lexus, where he found a man and a woman, both in their midthirties, both in the area of the driver's seat. The man faced forward as if he were driving the car, and the woman sat partially on the man's lap, with her upper torso slumped across the console. The man had his pants and underwear pulled down around his thighs, and the woman wore a red dress that had been pulled up around her hips. The man was conscious, mumbling gibberish. The woman was unconscious.

  Officer Sandra Percell's report dealt with the man in the Porsche, whom she later identified by driver's license as James Erkel Putnam, born February 22, 1980. The impact of the crash pushed the engine of the Porsche through the firewall and into his lap. The column for the steering wheel had entered his chest just below the clavicle, disconnecting his right shoulder from its socket. A smear of the man's blood and hair coated the shattered windshield, which had folded into his head. Even with those massive injuries, the man in the Porsche floated in and out of consciousness.

  Percell determined that extraction of the man would be impossible without the Jaws of Life, and even then, she didn't see how he could survive his injuries. She wrote in her report that she believed that he was about to die, but she followed her training and tipped his head back, far enough to keep his airway open.

  In a gurgling whisper, the man asked Percell if he was going to die. Percell didn't answer but continued to give what aid she could. The man struggled to speak, but his words sank into a bog of incoherency as he fought to stay alive. She wrote down what words she could make out. Amidst the garble o
f phrases, Percell wrote that Putnam whispered “find it…before…they…find her.” He said those words shortly before his body went into shock. Within a matter of minutes, the man fell into unconsciousness and died.

  Alexander let the man's final words churn in his head for a moment and wondered whether they were the labored last message of a man who knew that he was dying, or the confused ramblings of a man with a massive head injury. He put the thought aside and moved on, returning to the Department of Public Safety database. He found that Putnam applied for a Minnesota driver's license in November 2001, when he was twenty-one years old. Alexander could find no record of James Erkel Putnam holding a driver's license in Minnesota or any other state before that date. The picture on that first license as well as the most recent DL photo matched the photos from the crash scene and the morgue. Putnam had no traffic violations, and a search of state and federal databases showed no criminal charges or convictions.

  Then he ran the name of the brother, William Bartók Putnam, and came up with a hit on NCIC for a felony controlled-substance conviction in New York. He wrote the information down on a piece of paper, along with the contact information for William Putnam's current residence—the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York.

  He typed the name James Erkel Putnam into Google and came up with a handful of hits referencing the imposter and his quiet life in Minnesota, but he also found a single hit that predated November 2001, an old MySpace page. The photo of the man on the MySpace page did not match the Minnesota driver's license photo for Putnam. While they had some similar features, there could be no question that they weren't the same person.

  Alexander leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his sandy-blond hair, locking his fingers behind his head. He stared at the imposter's DL photo and whispered to the man in the picture, “Who are you…and what did you do to the real James Putnam?”

  Alexander scanned down the comments section of the MySpace page and noticed that the last comment was an entry by Putnam himself dated August 30, 2001, three months before the new James Erkel Putnam sprang from the dust in Minnesota. The comment merely read: “Life can be so utterly strange…more to come.” But there wasn't more to come—not on that web page or any other.

  Alexander did a quick search through obituary records from New York City and held on as the trickle of deaths turned into a torrent on September 11th of that year. He could feel his palms grow warm on the keyboard as he checked and cross-checked every database he could find, certain he would find his man on one of them. But he found no James Putnam on any list, either official or unofficial. No James Putnam had been declared dead or missing in the weeks before or the weeks after the fall of the towers. Dead end.

  At 11 a.m., Alexander made a call to the prison in Dannemora, New York, speaking first to a caseworker, and then, after an eternity on hold—while they brought William to the caseworker's office—to the convict William Putnam.

  “William, my name is Detective Alexander Rupert of the Minneapolis Police Department. I'm calling about some confusion we're having over the death of a man named James Erkel Putnam. First, let me just ask, do you have a brother by that name?”

  “I do—or I did. That guy in the obituary—that's not my brother. What happened to my brother?”

  “That's what we're trying to figure out. Maybe it's just an odd coincidence. Two guys named James Putnam.”

  “How many James Putnams will have a middle name like Erkel?” William asked. “Our mother was Hungarian and a musician and gave us the middle names of a couple of Hungarian composers. Mine is Bartók, after Béla Bartók. James was named after Ferenc Erkel.”

  “When's the last time you saw your brother?”

  “The day I got busted. He never came to visit—my choice. I didn't want him seeing me like this, so I told him not to visit me.”

  Alexander told William to have his caseworker pull up James Putnam's MySpace page on her office computer. When the page popped onto the screen, William said, “That's James. That's my brother. You see? That's not the guy that died in Minnesota.”

  “I've been told that he wrote to you.”

  “He used to—about once a month. Then…”

  “Then what?”

  “I got this letter saying he was leaving the city. He said that the terrorist attack was too much for him and he was going to find someplace safer to call home. He said he was starting over and didn't want anything more to do with me.”

  “Did it seem odd to you that he would react that way…not want to have anything more to do with you? Want to leave the city?”

  “Yeah, it seemed odd. He was a senior in college, or going to be. He worked hard to get that far. It didn't make sense that he would leave that behind. And yeah, it was hard to swallow that he didn't want to have contact with me.”

  “What is the date of that last letter?”

  “October 12th, 2001.” William answered without hesitation, like a man who'd memorized every word of his brother's last letter.

  “You haven't heard from him since then?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and Alexander suspected that a troubling thought was beginning to nudge at William. “Not a word. Nothing since I got that good-bye letter.”

  “Can you fax me a copy of all of his letters?”

  “Detective, who was that guy in the obituary?”

  Alexander paused, not sure if he should answer the question. But William had the right to know at least that much. “That man appears to have been living under your brother's name. He's been James Erkel Putnam since November 2001.”

  “How can that happen? How can two men be…?” William's voice trailed off, and Alexander could almost hear the wheels turn as William found his way to the conspicuous conclusion. When he spoke again, William's voice barely made it through the phone line. “Detective Rupert, is my brother dead?”

  Alexander thought he knew the answer to that question, but he lied to William and said, “I don't know.”

  Max Rupert squinted to see the thin fishing line as he tied it to the steel leader attached to his Dardevle lure. He blinked the strain out of his eyes and then saw his brother, Alexander, at the front of the boat, tying off a crankbait lure.

  “You using crankbait?” Max said, already knowing the answer.

  “I'm planning on eating fish tonight,” Alexander said.

  “We're back-trolling,” Max looked at the calm lake. “Clear day, no clouds, no chop on the water—you're never going to get deep enough to catch a walleye today.” Max cast his line out about twenty feet and popped their fifty-horse motor into reverse.

  “That's the difference between you and me, Maximilian, I'll settle for a northern, but I'm setting my sights on a walleye.”

  Max smiled at his brother's jab—using the name Maximilian. Max never felt at home with his birth name. He always dreaded that first day of class every year when his teacher would roll-call his given name, Maximilian Rupert. The way he saw it, the name Maximilian belonged to someone with shoes much nicer than he would ever wear.

  Alexander, on the other hand, seemed to wear his name like Joseph wore his coat of many colors. Writing Alexander's name on his birth certificate was one of the last things their mother did before slipping into unconsciousness. She died that day from an internal hemorrhage. But to Max a name like Alexander demanded a nickname. So when Max was twelve and Alexander ten, Max took to calling his brother Festus, a name he'd found watching reruns of Gunsmoke.

  “Festus,” Max said with a grin. “You can set your sights on a grizzly, but if you're shooting bird shot, you're going home empty-handed.”

  In the early years, the name Festus found its way into every fight the two boys had, either as a source of the scuffle or as a parting taunt. But as they got older, something changed between them, and the name became a secret door that connected the older brother to his tagalong sibling. Max called his brother Festus the day he caught Alexander shoplifting a Playboy, and t
he time that Alexander puked up his first attempt at drinking whiskey. Now that they were older, Max only called his brother Festus when it was just the two of them getting together for a beer.

  “Cigar?” Max said.

  “Is it one of those nasty-ass, gas-station rags?”

  “Nothing but.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Trade you for a beer,” Max said, reaching into a foil pouch and digging out a couple of cigars that looked like cedar twigs. They opened their beers, lit their cigars, and puffed out tiny clouds of white smoke, tinted blue by the lake and the October sky.

  Their boat chugged slowly across Torch Lake—a lake they shared with no other people. A lumberjacking ancestor of theirs built the cabin on Torch Lake back when that part of Minnesota was still called the Wisconsin Territory. In 1902, Minnesota assumed the land around the lake for a forest reserve, putting a moratorium on any further development. The Ruperts were granted the right to keep their cabin, provided they pay a small stipend to lease the land it stood on.

  Max sat in the stern of the small boat, his left hand on the tiller, his right hand jigging his fishing line. Alexander sat forward, his back to Max, his feet propped up on the bow, his rod resting across his thighs. They sat a mere ten feet apart, but that space between them sagged with the weight of three months of silence, three months of avoiding any mention of the Task Force, the grand jury, or Alexander's fall from grace. Their recent conversations skipped like stones across the surface of their lives, never finding depth, never touching the trouble that had been visited upon Alexander. And that's why Max suggested the weekend at the lake.

  Alexander's shoulders flattened as he relaxed into his seat, blowing smoke rings into the light breeze. It gave Max second thoughts about starting the conversation, but there'd be no better time.

  “I heard they served you with a subpoena,” Max said.

  Alexander stiffened as the apparent chill of those words settled on the back of his neck. “Good news travels fast,” he said, his fingers picking at the cork handle of his fishing rod.