Practice to Deceive

by David Housewright

  Next to it is another photograph in which I look even more ridiculous. It was taken for the Minneapolis newspaper and shows me dressed in a trench coat and fedora and leaning on my personal computer. HAVE PC—WILL TRAVEL, reads the headline of the accompanying article. The story was all about how detectives find missing witnesses, untangle insurance frauds, search for hidden assets, screen potential employees, and investigate business rivals by scouring computerized databases—and how I used my PC to discover damaging information about the key officers of a Chicago-based high-tech firm attempting a hostile takeover of August-Crane, a much revered local firm.

  It had been simple enough. I merely followed the social security numbers of Datatron’s CEO, CFO, and president until I uncovered several hidden bank accounts in Nevada and Nassau where the three men had quite illegally squirreled away nearly fifty million bucks. I turned the information over to August-Crane, which in turn gave it to the FBI, SEC and IRS, who fell on Datatron like the wrath of God. The takeover was aborted, the officers were indicted, Datatron was forced into Chapter Seven, and John Crane personally handed me a bonus check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Even Steve VanderTop had been impressed.

  Yeah, Steve. I paused in front of the photograph. If I’m going after Levering Field, I’ll need his help, I told myself.

  THE MAIL ARRIVED while I was cleaning. I sorted the batch: bill, junk, bill, junk, bill, junk, junk, junk, junk—hey, a check. It was from Sullivan, Shea, Rock, and Engler. Forty-eight hundred bucks and a note from David Shea: “Without the eleventh-hour information you uncovered, the plaintiff would have ripped off our client for half a million. Thanks for saving our ass. If you ever need a reference, I’m the guy to call. Thanks again.”

  That was nice of him, I told myself as I did the paperwork, recording the check in my ledger, then folding it and stuffing it in my wallet. Of course ten percent of the five hundred thousand would have been nicer. Or five percent. Or even two and a half. Still, when I left my office, I wasn’t angry anymore. Money will do that. Something else. You have a pocketful of money, you start thinking about getting more.

  FOUR

  STEVE VANDERTOP HAD lived much of his third decade in poverty. And it had made him happy to do so.

  Five dollars for food for a week, nights spent sleeping in his car because he didn’t have an apartment, clothes from the Salvation Army: these indignities hadn’t bothered him a bit. He’d embraced them. Unlike the rest of us who live two paychecks away from homelessness, Steve had enjoyed the precariousness of his lifestyle. It hadn’t been poverty to him, it was “the simple life.” He’d had his friends, an extended social circle that included nearly anyone except those who have actually known real poverty. He’d had his freedom. And he’d had his philosophy, which, loosely translated, proclaimed: I’m going to live my life now!

  Of course, it had helped that he was a VanderTop—one of the VanderTops of North Oaks. When times became really tough, his family could always be counted on to provide a square meal, a change of clothes, a Jeep, a membership in a health club.… Steve’s nourishment for the day might have consisted of a half loaf of French bread off the day-old shelf, but thanks to Mom and Dad, in the evening he’d be going to see the San Francisco Ballet at Northrop Auditorium and then catch “the artist formerly known as Prince” at Glam Slam. The way Steve saw it, he had done his family a favor by mooching off of them.

  “It made my parents feel better to give me things,” he once told me. “They hated to think their son was living like a dog. Besides, they never really expected me to pay my own way.”

  However, two separate events during his twenty-fifth year dramatically altered Steve’s plan to live blissfully and irresponsibly among the privileged poor—at least until he received his inheritance. His parents gave him a personal computer for his birthday. And he discovered Sara.

  STEVE—AND SARA—lived in a warehouse across the tracks from downtown Minneapolis, about twenty minutes walking time from my office. A sign above the front door announced that twenty-seven thousand square feet were available to lease on the first floor. To gain entry, I had to identify myself through an intercom.

  “Hey, Taylor, come on up,” Steve said happily, buzzing me in.

  The elevator was little more than a large metal box with thick pads covering the walls—the kind of quilted blankets movers use to keep furniture from banging the side of their trucks. It shuddered and shook, and when the doors finally opened on the third floor, I literally jumped out, half expecting the box to fall, surprised when it did not.

  Steve’s place was behind a large steel door that slid sideways on a metal track when you released a spring. It did not have a lock. I pounded on the door, and he yelled, “C’mon in!” The door squealed painfully when it opened.

  Steve’s loft was decorated in early industrial: Metal beams supported steel girders overhead, huge factory windows made up an entire wall, the wood floor was stained and warped. It was about the size of a junior high school gymnasium; if it wasn’t for the beams, there would have been more than enough room for a full-court basketball game.

  The only area enclosed behind walls was the bathroom. Steve’s kitchen, bedroom, guest bedroom, library, and living room were arranged like galleries in a furniture store, with only empty space separating them. His possessions now included computers, stereo system, big screen TV, aquarium, pool table, golf clubs, and a ten speed. Also in plain sight were their clothes, which hung on racks bought at a department store’s going-out-of-business sale. A red silk dress cut down to there hung on the end of one rack. Sara’s, I presumed.

  Steve was sitting in front of a computer screen, his back to me, long delicate fingers flying over a keyboard. Actually there was a bank of four screens, but only one was on. There was a lot of other equipment, too: hard disk drives, printers, modems, and systems I was not literate enough to identify.

  “How the hell are ya, Taylor?” he said, turning his head slightly—one eye on me, one on the screen. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Where you been keeping yourself?”

  “Here and there,” I said.

  Steve gave the computer screen his full attention again. He was wearing a University of Minnesota sweatshirt and jeans torn at the knees, no socks or shoes. Thick, silken hair fell in a golden sheet over his shoulders—he usually wore his hair in a ponytail to keep it out of his eyes as he bent to the keyboard, but today he kept brushing it back with his hand. I knew women who would kill to have his hair, as well as his eyebrows and lashes.

  “Give me a minute, I’m almost done with this,” he said. “Why don’t you put on some tunes?”

  I took his advice and wandered to his CD/stereo system. He had a huge selection of jazz recordings, half on CDs, half on vinyl. “Nice,” I said soft and low, picking up an ancient record.

  “What?” he called from across the room.

  “Coleman Hawkins with the Mound City Blue Blowers, nineteen twenty-nine,” I called back. “Hawkins on tenor sax, Glenn Miller on trombone, Gene Krupa on drums, Pops Foster on bass—oh, man, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet …”

  “Put it on,” Steve urged. I did, as carefully as I could, what with the way my hands trembled with anticipation. I set the needle ever so gently on the rim of the record and was immediately surrounded by sound coming from a dozen speakers. It was an original recording with all the pops, clicks, rumbles, and surface noise you’d expect, but none of it could detract from the pure power and soulful majesty of Hawkins’s sax or Russell’s clarinet. You just don’t get that kind of beauty with fully equalized, digitally mastered CDs, I don’t care what the tech heads say.

  I continued to search Steve’s collection as I listened. Jack Teagarden, Red Nichols, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke: all original recordings. I stepped back. The things money could buy.…

  “Where did you get these?” I called to Steve across the room.

  “What? Oh, the Victors. Old guy in New York had a huge collection; some Verve, some Blue Not
e. He died, left his collection to his son. Son moved to Duluth. Then he died, and his wife sold the records at a garage sale.”

  I was appalled at the idea and looked it.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” Steve said, recognizing my expression. “Anyway, a woman from Stillwater bought the collection. She was impressed by the dates, not the names—thought they were antiques. She sold them on consignment at an antique mall on Lake Street. A buddy of mine who knew I liked jazz told me about it. I hustled down and bought up all the old Victors from before 1930, before the label merged with RCA. I was just in time, too. While I was writing the check, another guy came in and bought everything that was left.”

  “Can I ask how much you paid?”

  Steve grinned. “A lot less than if the woman had known what she was selling. Hey, if you like that, I have Jazz at the Philharmonic from 1946; Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Willee Smith.…”

  “Isn’t that the first Verve release?”

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “What became the Verve label, anyway. Back then it was called Clef.”

  I found it and put it on, listening to “Oh, Lady be Good” by the Gershwins. That’s how Steve and I met, listening to jazz. We had seats side by side at a Sonny Rollins concert. The next day we bumped into each other at the Electric Fetus, a record store in Minneapolis.

  By then Steve had become thoroughly infatuated with the Orwellian world of computers, by the notion that the most intimate information about any individual or company could be revealed to him with the stroke of a key. Phone records, utility records, credit card charges, arrest records, IRS returns, medical records: He delighted in obtaining all this data and more. He learned to intercept electronic mail, invade voice mail and smoke a PC in minutes—computers yielded their secrets to him like spinsters confessing to a priest. He began to think of himself as the Garry Kasparov of computer wizards, for a time even using the chess master’s name as a handle. When he was on his game, no program could beat him.

  Steve slowly abandoned his bohemian ways—not as a repudiation of his privileged poor philosophy and certainly not because of any newfound maturity. As he had often told me, “I can’t do nine to five, man. No way.” He simply discovered that using his computer skills to collect isolated bits of information gave him more pleasure than just about anything else. And the primary employers of such skills—especially on a freelance basis—were big businesses. Big businesses did not hire flakes.

  Besides, he liked the money; Sara had expensive tastes. So he started his own business. VanderTop Intelligence, Inc. “The timely collection, analysis, and dissemination of data for a company about its competitors” was the service he sold—at least over the counter.

  He finished his program and came to where I was standing by his music collection, putting a Chet Baker reissue on the CD player. He sat on the floor and asked to what he owed the pleasure of my company.

  “I need a hacker,” I told him.

  “I am not a hacker,” he replied. “I am an intelligence research professional.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “About a hundred and fifty bucks an hour.”

  “Does that include industrial espionage?”

  “No, that’s extra.”

  “How much extra?”

  “What have you got in mind, Taylor?” he asked.

  “There’s this guy named Levering Field—”

  “What kind of name is that?” Steve wanted to know.

  I didn’t answer. Instead I told him about Mrs. Gustafson and what Field had done to her, I told him about my meeting with Field that morning, and I told him what I wanted done.

  “I want his electricity turned off. I want him to get calls from his mortgage company asking what happened to his last three house payments. I want stores to confiscate his credit cards and cut them in half. I want his checking account to be suddenly overdrawn. I want to take this guy apart piece by piece until he cries uncle.”

  Steve was lying on the floor now, his legs crossed at the ankles, his hands supporting his head, golden hair fanned about him—he looked like a saint in one of those early Christian paintings, a nimbus around his head.

  “What you’re suggesting is illegal to the max,” he told me. He was staring at the steel girders that held up his ceiling.

  “I know.”

  “Why come to me? Why not do it yourself?”

  “I’m not good enough,” I answered. “We didn’t cover these things when I was your pupil.”

  I was just starting my PI firm when Steve and I had met in the record store. After exchanging occupations, I told him I needed to learn how to use a computer, needed to learn how to compile dossiers for clients by dragging databases for information. Steve had been happy to instruct me. He’d done his job well. But not that well.

  “Do you realize what you’re asking, Taylor?”

  “I do.”

  “This isn’t waste retrieval, you know; sortin’ through some guys trash. Illegal use of a telephone access device, computer fraud. We’re talkin’ serious time, man. Federal time.”

  “I know.”

  “Gig like this, can’t leave no fingerprints. Gotta go in like the CIA.”

  “Those amateurs?”

  “And credit card companies, banks? Shit, man, they’ve got firewalls you can’t knock down with sledgehammers; strong passwords, cryptographic programs—some of them employ a posse, computer security experts whose only job is to track down anyone who even attempts a break-in.…” Steve smiled. “Sounds like fun. Count me in.”

  “No, no, no,” I told him. “Think about it first.”

  “Nothing to think about,” he said, rising off the floor. “I appreciate the challenge. Besides, the motive is pure.”

  What was I going to do, argue with him?

  “One rule,” I said. “No permanent damage. I don’t want to do anything to Field that we can’t undo after he pays off.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “Gratis, man. No charge.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Hey, I’m serious.”

  “You’re going to risk going to federal prison for nothing?”

  “It’s not the money, Taylor,” Steve said. “It’s the game, man. To pull this off is gonna take some killer apps. I can’t wait. When do we start?”

  “Need anything besides the man’s name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then we can start now.”

  “Cool,” he said, looking at his watch. Then he wandered over to the clothes rack, removed the red dress, held it in front of him by the hanger. “What do you think?”

  “Little flashy for my taste,” I told him.

  Steve returned the dress and started searching the rack. “We’ll start after lunch,” he said without looking at me. “You can buy.”

  “Is Sara going?”

  Steve took a woman’s suit from the rack and examined it. “You have a problem with that?”

  “I was just wondering if I should take out a loan.”

  Steve grinned, laying the suit across his bed. “She is a pricey vixen,” he said.

  STEVE WAS TESTING me. I had always known he was a cross-dresser. I figured it out the day he showed up at my office wearing a sweater and skirt. But this was the first time he dressed in front of me, showed me the process. I figured he wanted to know if I was willing to risk embarrassment for him if he was willing to risk federal prison for me.

  He shaved twice, first with an electric razor and then with a straight edge. Then he put on a seven-hundred-dollar pair of breast prostheses from Denmark, attaching them to his chest with Velcro and adhesive anchors. After that he slipped on a white lace bra, pantyhose, and a white lace half slip. Not once did Steve look at me, not once did I look away—although I admit I wanted to. I had enjoyed watching Laura get dressed, especially when she was going all out for a night on the town. The same with Cynthia. It gave me a pleasure I felt deep in my lower extremitie
s. But watching Steve become Sara made me feel creepy.

  Sara began to emerge almost immediately. The way Steve carried himself, tilted his head, relaxed his posture, used his hands, became, well, feminine. His voice changed, too. It did not become higher, as you might expect, but deeper, throatier, and softer. I swear to God he sounded just like Lauren Bacall.

  “There is a reason why I enjoy your company, Taylor,” Sara said as she smoothed into her skin a healthy dab of Nye Coverette foundation, the same foundation used by actors, concealing the red blotches from shaving and Steve’s inevitable stubble. “In the four, five years we’ve known each other, you never once asked, ‘What went wrong?’”

  “Did something go wrong?”

  Sara smiled. “There are those who think so.”

  “Mom and Dad?”

  “Mom and Dad and the rest of the VanderTop clan do not know about me,” Sara confessed. “Every time I see my father, he asks when I’m going to get a haircut. Can you imagine what he would say if I showed up wearing a Donna Karan original?”

  Sara applied a Q-tip’s worth of Nye Coverette stage cream to each side of her nose, and magically it was narrower.

  “Very few people know about me,” Sara continued. “It’s not because I feel ashamed or humiliated. It’s because I don’t want to deal with their shame and humiliation. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual lists transvestitism as a paraphilia or fetish. It claims people like myself derive abhorrent sexual excitement from cross-dressing. That is not true. I simply like to dress like a woman. Is that wrong?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” I answered.

  Sara turned and looked at me for the first time. “Yes, it is for you to say.”

  I gave it a beat, then answered, “No, it is not wrong.” It wasn’t hard to do. I had expected the question and planned my answer the moment Steve started performing for me, doing a striptease in reverse. If Sara had caught me by surprise, I might have answered differently. Or maybe not. Truth is, except for an uneasiness I felt in Sara’s presence, I didn’t much give a damn. I try not to pass judgment on other people’s lives unless I’m paid for it.