Spygirl

by Amy Gray

  With his quiet, no-bullshit intensity, George let me know he was proud by telling me I'd “done good” and “hadn't fucked up.” I felt triumphant.

  He also had an interesting discovery to report. There was nobody, in any of our credit sources, who listed a Garry Wilbur. George told me to go back to my desk and do an extensive database search for the con artist Hector had told me about.

  I plugged in some search terms: “circus” and “police” and “wedding” and “indictment” in various combinations, and, on my fourth or fifth try, I got twelve hits. The first line of the first article I clicked on read:

  January 19, 1997—Dateline: Houston, Texas—Until last week Larry Willburr was living a life of luxury staging an extravagant three-ring circus wedding—literally. Willburr and his bride, Rosemary Burney followed up their lavish wedding, for which they paid the Houston Acrobatic Circus fifty thousand dollars in bad checks, with a two week honeymoon in Texas, also paid for with check kiting and an insurance scam for which Willburr was previously on probation in New York.

  The wedding was held in a tent, where, it was reported, “the bride and groom entered on the backs of Indian elephants decorated like can-can dancers,” and then exchanged their vows before the “swooping backdrop and aerial tricks of three dozen trapeze artists, tumblers, and contortionists.” The picture was gravity-defying. My air passages narrowed, while my internal diagnostic scope of Wilbur's sick mind expanded to cosmic proportions. What was the point of a stolen wedding? The risk-versus-reward-ratio was a gazillion to one.

  The circus wedding, I read, had no master of ceremonies. No one addressed the audience or deciphered the twisted pageantry for anyone present. This spectacle was created for an audience of two. The others present were just seat-fillers, like the time I got to go to the Emmys and had to sit in the empty seats of famous actors while they took a leak. In this case, the role of the bride and groom were played by—themselves. It was a pure display of egotism and opulence, witnessed by no one.

  The article went on to explain that “Mr. Willburr” was a multiple felon with scam-related convictions in two states. It was late in the day, but George had me call Goldie and tell her to put a stop on any checks she'd written on Wilbur's behalf. She mentioned that the money he was wiring had never materialized. George and I made an appointment with Detective Louis DeSanto at the Sixteenth Precinct for the next afternoon at three.

  What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love

  During my first week in the office there was a constant stream of music playing daily from an old dusty Aiwa system in the center of the loft. Then our accountant complained that it sounded unprofessional to have music blaring when she called clients, and it was banned except for off-hours. Apparently, I had started working at the Agency when all our most noteworthy privileges were being rescinded. On this day, though, the clicks and creaks of the office's usual music-free soundtrack were disrupted by Linus, who started singing quietly, “What the world needs now … is love, sweeeet looove!” As he was chanting, he danced over to the tape deck and hit PLAY.

  Evan, Wendy, Otis, and Gus and I were all looking up, spellbound by the simplicity of this sentiment, a radiant contrast to business as usual. Everyone was laughing. I jumped up and sang my way to the back of the room, where Gus and Wendy and Linus now were swaying and belting it out. I saw Sol get up from his desk, and I held my breath, at once transfixed by the incantation and scared that he'd fire our asses on the spot. But he sashayed out the door, shaking his head as if to say, “I can't believe I work with these crazy people.” “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love … no, not just for some, but for everyone …”

  It was stuck in my head for days, as I headed around the city and Brooklyn with love on my mind.

  TEN

  The detective is the one who unlocks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable.

  —PAUL AUSTER, CITY OF GLASS

  The Fake Baby

  Garry Wilbur lived in a world totally disconnected from reality. He had at least seven aliases, fifteen fake Social Security numbers (several of which rightly belonged to other people), dozens of fake addresses, fake businesses, one fake bride and possibly a second, a fake baby (more on that later), a fake book, a fake career, many fake businesses, a fake family (we had checked out that he was not in any way related to the Willkommen family), a fake chin, hairline, cheeks, and lips (he'd had some extensive plastic surgery, as documented in the Arizona Star), and, in a more general sense, a fake life. Figuring out what was real about this guy was the hard part, because almost nothing about him wasn't perverted by his artifice.

  There didn't seem to be anything at the core of Garry Wilbur, and it frightened me. I was alarmed by the fact that I hated his dimwitted Midwestern svelte little bride, who was about to marry a sociopath, even more than I hated him. As a spy, I had hoped to know everything. I wanted to ward off the unexpected with knowledge, and protect myself from surprise with shrewd insights. And who wouldn't rather be the duper than the duped. Except I figured that would make me more identified with this fucked-up crazy maniac than with his poor gullible girlfriend. I tried to imagine what would make someone pursue appearances to the point of total loss of self, where everything about oneself was simply to signify to others. I thought about becoming the red dot in my high school yearbook, about willing things with Elliott to be something they weren't. Could I be … like Garry Wilbur? I was mulling this very scary thought when Cassie called and invited me to Niagara that night. It was only ten fifty-one in the morning. Minimum of seven hours until a bibulous respite. I suggested Plant Bar. She sighed and said, “That place is sooo loud.”

  “Yeah.” Silence. “Well, we can go to Niagara.”

  She brightened, “Okay!”

  When I got off the phone, George motioned me over.

  He was staring at his computer, chewing his cud. He always seemed to be chewing something, but he did it very deliberately and placidly, like a cow.

  “What's up,” I said. He kept chewing.

  Five long seconds later, he looked up. “Yeah, I've got something I need you to do. I talked to Goldie a minute ago and I want you to call her, too, but basically she wants you to follow the girl, Alexis. Today, if you can.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, it's eleven-thirty, just go by the house, it's in Brooklyn, right near you, I think, and I want you to see if she really lives there. Look at the buzzer and talk to the neighbors, see if they know her.”

  “Okay.” I was thrilled. “Who should I say I am?”

  “Just say you're looking for your sister, who's supposed to be staying with her. When you get there, call her number and see if anyone answers. If she's there, don't talk to the neighbors, just see if you can catch her leaving and see where she goes. I'll have you go back next week in the morning and follow her to work.” Supposedly she was working as a part-time music teacher at a fancy Upper East Side conservatory, but Goldie was skeptical and Lou wanted to know if she was at all implicated in the fraud. I called Goldie's office and got a very detailed description of her from them, down to the kind of manicure she had (French-tipped) and what Goldie described as a “ratty, pilly, gross” belted sweater-slash-overcoat she'd worn to both meetings. “A real thrift-store foind,” Goldie added. “Uh-huh,” I said, writing. “Thanks, dawl!” she said, when we got off the phone. I packed up my coat with cigarettes, a flashlight, a small camera, and a tape recorder and made it down to Brooklyn in just twenty minutes, I was so excited.

  I was wearing my trench coat, actually, and black pumps. It was raining, so I stopped by my house and picked up an umbrella.

  The apartment building was near me, but in a completely different neighborhood. New York is like that. You can walk two blocks in any direction and be catapulted into another country, culturally. She lived near the loading docks and w
arehouses of downtown Brooklyn, across the street from a dusty lot with some melted tires and an old moving crane sitting in the middle. The building had a gray metal façade, and on the left it faced onto the waterfront across the street. This was one of the parts of the East River where sailors docked when they were in New York, and twice in the summers they'd swarm the Promenade and Montague Street and Fulton Market in their shocking white outfits and uneasy carriage.

  It wasn't a very nice neighborhood, particularly for a girl slated to move into a ten-million-dollar duplex on Central Park. But stranger things have happened.

  I made a phone call to her apartment on my Nextel. I blocked my phone number first and then dialed. A woman's voice answered. “Yes, is this Acme Advertising?” I tried to sound young and confused. This is what we call a “ruse” at work. It's performing, really.

  “No, I think you have the wrong number—what number did you dial?”

  “Oh, no, I see I did misdial. So sorry.” I hung up. I went into the building's foyer, where the buzzers were, and looked for her name. It was there, in yellowed typed tape: ALEXIS D. WHITCOMB. When I'd spoken to Goldie before I left the office, she told me she'd been contacted by Alex's (this is the name she went by) sister, Marion, who said she was very concerned about Wilbur and that the family was suspicious that something was up. Meanwhile, Goldie had called up Wilbur herself, without consulting George or Lou, and said, “I know you're not who you say you are, so what's the game?” When George heard about this he was furious. “It's all about fucking her, isn't it! Those bitches are all the same!” I wasn't sure who “those bitches” were. “She's got a lot to learn. I'm gonna rip her a new asshole!”

  I shuddered. “Yeah.” I reminded myself to avoid pissing George off.

  I stood in Alex's foyer for two and a half hours. At three I called in to say there had been no movement. I repeated the same into my tape recorder. George told me to stick around for another few hours and see if she left the house. He also said to check if she had a car and get her license plate. Good. An errand to do. I was dying of boredom. It was pouring out. My mascara was dripping down my face. I was turning into an unsavory-looking character.

  I put up my umbrella and went around to the river side of the apartment building, where there was a parking lot with numbered spaces. I saw her car, a tiny two-door Nissan, and said the number into my recorder. I decided to stand outside for a while for a change of scenery. An hour into that, a guy came out of the building and started putting trash bins out on the street. “Hey, sweetie,” he said.

  “Hi.” Could I make myself more conspicuous?

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  “No, I'm meeting my sister. She's, uh, with someone upstairs.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Thanks.” For the next couple of hours the super was skulking around the property, and every so often he'd ask me if I wanted a chair or something. Or if I knew who my sister's friend was so maybe we could buzz him, and I'd decline, and he'd smile and I'd go about my business of counting the tiles on the walls and thinking of good comebacks I should have used with Elliott and twisting my hair. I did get a kick out of knowing how incognito I was. This guy clearly had no clue who I was. At six I was back in the foyer, and I thought my legs were going to crumple. I called George and gave him the license-plate number; he ran it and it came up as hers, with nothing unusual. Her birthday was two days before mine— she was twenty-five. Just then a tall blond figure in a black-belted thigh-length sweater brushed past me down the stairs.

  “Yeah, so I'll see what I can do,” I said, keeping the cadence of what I was saying as natural as possible.

  “Do you see her?” George asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good. Let me know what happens.”

  “Great, okay. Love you too, Mom.” I clicked my phone off and tore out the door. She was walking away from the building with her back to the river. She was probably heading for the subway. I quickened my pace. When I followed her into the subway, I was glad I'd heeded George's advice to stock up on tokens, magazines, and dollar bills. She leaned against a peeling green column in the station, and I breathed in the mist of urine and garbage rising warmly from the tracks.

  Alexis and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

  In New York, the proximity to squalor has been transformed into an aesthetic principle. This has inspired a booming industry in artificial distressing. Rich uptowners pay big money to have the butt cheeks on their jeans worn through, or to have the paint properly cracking off their armoires. They are trying to look like everyone else who has made hipster virtues of necessity.

  On the subway platform, following my first subject into the underbelly of New York, I shivered happily. I have evolved so far in my love of the damaged and dirty that I get a perverse thrill out of being so near bodily emissions and refuse. I'm really doing it, I thought.

  When the train pulled up and she coolly walked on, I sat at the opposite end of the car. I could see her sun-bleached hair, and when the train pulled into the station I followed her ponytail up some stairs, through the turnstiles, up some more stairs, and then onto Lexington Avenue, where she stopped in a deli. She came out, opened a pack of Silk Cut 100s, and lit one, and then continued uptown, where she turned into a storefront at Seventy-second Street. It was a Kate's Paperie. She fingered pretty silvery vellums and creamy hundred-pound envelopes, then headed to the back of the store. I closed in, clutching a lime-yellow stationery set and inkwell to the light, making like I was choosing color combinations. I kept her blond head hemmed in my line of vision by the scallop-edged papers and ink bottles.

  Since I'd gotten into the store, I kept imagining jumping up and outing myself. To the soon to be Alexis Wilbur, I'd say, I'm sorry to tell you your future husband is a con artist, and you've been conned. We know about the penthouse you've never been to, the son he had with a previous girlfriend you've never met. Well, there's no penthouse, there's no child, and there will be no marriage. Your future husband is being arrested at this moment. Don't cry. Things will be much easier this way than if you had never known. At this she would collapse on the floor, crying, and I'd tell the stationer, dryly, It could happen to the best of us. Somehow it just doesn't. I couldn't bury my hostility. How could someone be so dense? The guy was a classic bullshit artist, what George called a “fucking red flag of psychopathology”

  The stationer said something to her, and I heard her say, “Yes, I'm looking for wedding invitations.” My stomach folded over. She smiled and blushed. There was a chair around the corner from the stationer's corner, which I quickly sat in and, whipping out a copy of New York magazine, put my tape recorder between the pages and clicked ON. I pretended to read the Gotham section.

  “So when is the wedding?” The stationer was a thin, manic New Yorker type with a terrible arts-and-crafts style. She wore a quilted patchwork catastrophe of a jacket with glittery rainbow fabrics sewn next to printed text swaths with words like “dream” and “miracle.” The coat combined the worst style of high school art teachers, flea-market patrons, and therapists everywhere. She also seemed to italicize the last word of every sentence.

  The girl, Alexis, had a crumbly, thin-pitched voice, like a girly eleven-year-old smoker.

  “Well, it's soon actually. In May.”

  “So soon.” The stationer thrust out a bell-sleeved arm in excitement. The word “imagine” appeared at the inside of her elbow. “That's terrific. So it will be a rush job, if you choose to go with us. So how did you meet your fiancé ?”

  “Well, at a bar, actually, which is the last place I thought I'd ever meet anybody.” She laughed. Yeah, me too, I thought to myself. “His name is Garry. He's the most generous, romantic, beautiful person I've ever met.”

  “That's great—is it your first?” I imagined the stationer was probably on her second or third marriage, maybe to a part-time junk collector and painter who lived on disability and an army pension, but she
was used to giving lip service to the translucent-skinned, unripe brides. Even the fashion-disaster stationer in her amazing Technicolor dreamcoat seemed to be more in on the joke than this poor girl I was tracking.

  “Yes. It's his first, too.” Guilt overtook me. I was feeling sick. I imagined demon-eyed daredevils in tight black-and-silver latex leotards on bicycles doing figure eights through three flaming rings in my mind. “At first I thought a gorgeous, successful, brilliant thirty-eight-year-old guy like him couldn't even exist.” Thirty-eight? He was fifty-two, according to our research! “Like he couldn't even be real, you know. But he proved to me that he's the real thing.” I was horrified. She seemed so relieved to have found him. How could I blame her? As disturbing as the circus wedding was to me, it didn't compare with the terror it would probably inspire for this poor girl. Like any of us, like me, I thought, she just wanted to be loved.

  From Kate's I followed her to Harry Winston's. At the jewelry store, she asked to see a yellow-diamond-and-platinum tennis bracelet, where each link was a yellow teardrop surrounded by a sunflowerlike crown of small white diamonds. She admired it, but didn't try it on, and then asked to see three engagement rings, each with sleek white-gold bands and between three and four carats of diamonds on them. One had an exquisite jadeite centerstone with two blue diamonds on either side The jeweler told her it matched her eyes. It cost $255,000.

  “When are you getting married?” he asked her. “Well, soon, but I promised my future husband I'd look at rings and then just show him what I wanted.”

  “Well, that's very generous of him. You're lucky. A lot of men want to surprise their brides, and they end up with a quarter-million-dollar ring that the bride can't stand and they have to sell it back and buy another one. I think letting the bride choose is the proper way to do it.”