The Big Con

by Adam Walker Phillips

  Despite Rebecca’s assertion that she and Julie never delved much into each other’s past, she made an exception on this because it might have been the only path that would lead us to her wife. There were gaps in the narrative Badger provided about the young woman from Vero Beach, Florida, who had become a librarian in Sierra Madre and then an executive coach and consultant guru living in a glass palace in Palos Verdes. Viewing her life as a résumé, those were not very credible transitions between roles. The narrative wasn’t “tracking,” as recruiters liked to say, and begged further exploration. The bag full of hundred-dollar bills printed before 1985 helped me prioritize at which point in time to start.

  As I drove north into the canyons, I watched the rain clouds hung up in the mountains ahead of us and wondered if the long climb into Sierra Madre would put us square in their midst. My windshield was peppered with a slight drizzle, not enough to warrant the wipers but enough to make it difficult to see too far ahead. Driveways along the left side of the street were buttressed with pale sandbags two or three rows high. Mini-sandbars left by last night’s run-off added further protection, or perhaps served as perfect ramps to breach the fortifications during the next deluge.

  We headed west at the downtown intersection and found the Sierra Madre Library after a few long blocks. It was a low structure of reddish brick and pitched roofs that read proudly from the 1950 civic-building handbook.

  “Can you see Julie as a librarian?” I asked as we made our way inside.

  “To be honest, I’ve never seen her read a book,” she replied.

  “No one reads anymore.”

  I braced for the pungent smell of ten-day-old body odor and stale urine and instead was greeted with an inviting, almost homey scent. My only interaction with libraries these days was when I used the one in downtown LA as a shortcut on my way to a favorite lunch spot on Flower Street. The Central Library hadn’t yet officially been declared a new chapter of Midnight Mission, but its denizens treated it as one, particularly during the rainy season.

  Another surprise but a less welcome one was the age of the women behind the desk. I had hoped for elderly spinsters but instead saw several young women who obviously hadn’t been here when Julie manned the card catalogue. After a quick discussion with the woman at the front desk, we were guided to a back room where the town’s volunteer archivist donated precious hours to sit and do nothing at the library when she could be doing the very same thing at home.

  “The bathroom is back by the entrance,” she said, mistakenly thinking that whoever came upon this room would do so only by accident. I had to explain that we weren’t lost patrons but that we were actually interested in learning more about some of the town’s residents. “You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Born and raised in Sierra Madre, my great—”

  “Julie St. Jean,” I jumped in before she ran through her entire ancestry.

  The old woman studied me.

  “You’re the man who found the body,” she stated.

  “Yes, how do you know that?”

  “Oh,” she said, a blush rising on her cheeks, “I heard there was a commotion up that way and thought I’d drop in and see what the to-do was about.”

  I secretly added Town Busybody to her growing list of qualifications. This was a good development because these sorts of people know everything in a small town, particularly the shadowy parts of people’s lives.

  “The police say they don’t have any credible leads,” she said in a way that begged for me to confirm or deny that statement. I let it hang there unanswered. “Are you family?” the old woman finally asked.

  “Yes,” I jumped in before Rebecca could reply. It felt like a feeler question and I wanted to see where it would lead.

  “Surprised to hear that. Miss St. Jean never had any close family…understandably,” she added, with a curious look in Rebecca’s direction. “Listen,” she began, in a manner that signaled something juicy, “we’re a small town with small-town values but we don’t judge. She was a gentle soul, kept to herself, quiet as a church mouse. She could have been more open about it but that wasn’t Julie.”

  None of it sounded remotely like the Julie I knew, the woman most comfortable with a spotlight permanently affixed on her.

  There was something peculiar about the way the archivist described Julie. She used that persistently positive tone reserved for retirement parties and eulogies and someone who, when trying to sum up a career or life, can muster only a white-washed meandering devoid of anything remotely unique. My suspicion was confirmed with her next question.

  “When did she pass?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked. Unless she trolled the newspapers for local crime logs, there was no way for her to have heard of the supposed suicide.

  “Isn’t that why you’re here? To claim her money?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rebecca shooting me a look.

  “What money?” I asked unconvincingly.

  “What money,” she admonished. “Like I told you, we don’t judge around here.” It certainly felt like she was doing just that. “The Social Security can’t be much,” she mused, “but that house is certainly worth a pretty penny. And you want to know if anyone else might have a claim on it.”

  “And if that was the case?” I asked.

  The old woman leaned in.

  “If I were you, I’d be concerned about that ‘roommate’ of hers. Who knows with those crackpots up in Sacramento, giving away the state as they are to the illegals. Look at what they’ve done to the sanctity of marriage. Who knows who gets what with the laws now.”

  We had a growing sense that the Julie and Lois affair was much more than a recent thing, perhaps even predating the long-term one Julie had with Rebecca. The specter of a double life followed us out of the library and along the silent drive over to the coffee shop, where we hoped to find more answers.

  “You just getting out now?” The old man smirked as he poured me a cup of coffee. Rebecca waved him off as she sat down at the counter.

  “Just a little misunderstanding,” I explained. “You know, you didn’t have to call the cops,” I told him when he finished pouring.

  “I’ll decide what I can and can’t do,” he responded. “But in this case, I never called them.”

  One detail that supported his assertion—something that had been gnawing at me since I spent the afternoon at the police station—was the speed in which the police had arrived on the scene. Rebecca and I were at the house for at most three minutes, and yet they were there en masse right after I entered the lower level. I sympathized with the plight of a small-town cop with nothing to do but that was a surprising response time, particularly when you consider the circuitous route it took to get up to the house itself. This all led me to believe that someone tipped them off long before our arrival. The officers were waiting there the entire time.

  The coffee shop was quiet this late in the afternoon. A few patrons nursed mugs of black coffee and stared out the windows. It was colder than during our last visit and the rain was really picking up. The old man caught Rebecca glancing at the woodstove and quietly came out from behind the counter to add another log.

  “How’s the neighborhood dealing with the murder?” I asked.

  “That’s a dumb question.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He was right, but I still had to defend it to save face.

  “I figure you don’t get much of that kind of action up this way.”

  He humored me with a long, silent stare.

  “What can I get you?”

  “We’re looking for a little more information on Julie St. Jean’s roommate,” I told him.

  “Can’t help you there.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I know of her. She isn’t a regular.”

  “What do you think of her?” I probed.

  “I just told you I barely know her.”

  “Have you seen her around
lately?”

  “I quit the neighborhood watch group years ago. What’s with all the questions?” he asked with one of his own.

  “Julie St. Jean’s wanted for questioning in her murder.”

  The flip responses ceased. He looked at me, glanced in Rebecca’s direction, then settled back on me.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Julie.”

  “Long time.”

  “Long can mean a lot of different things.”

  “Decades,” he amended. “Ever since she moved to Florida.”

  Julie’s rendezvous with Lois at the home up the street were frequent enough that someone must have run into her over all these years. The old man had to have seen her or at a minimum heard about it from the gossipmongers within this tight-knit community. Either way, he wasn’t being truthful.

  “You mentioned Florida,” I said. “You said something similar when we were first here.”

  “Did I?” he deflected.

  “The helpful woman at the library said the same thing.”

  “Well then, now you know it’s a fact,” he said dismissively.

  “Julie never moved to Florida. She never left Los Angeles. She may have moved out of the house up the road some time back but she hasn’t actually stayed away. She’s been using it for…other purposes.”

  The old man wanted to interject, most likely with another dismissive comment, but I wouldn’t let him. The look on his face foreshadowed two possibilities—finally bending or getting so annoyed he would kick us out. I continued to push.

  “I think you knew all this already but for some reason you don’t want to acknowledge it. Everyone and their sister knows what’s going on up the road but it’s some big mystery to you. And you can smile and throw out every flippant response in the book but just be clear that every time you do, you’re only convincing me that you know more about Julie than anyone in this town.”

  The few patrons in the room stopped their conversations and, with ears bent toward the counter, waited for the old man’s response.

  “Why can’t you just leave that poor woman alone?”

  “I’m her wife,” Rebecca stated.

  I watched him take a deep breath, like someone about to agree to something they don’t want to do. The old man didn’t like the cut of my jib but he clearly had some concern for Rebecca.

  “I don’t know much,” he said softly. Although he addressed me, it was clear he was talking to Rebecca.

  “Were you close?” she asked.

  “Julie was one of our regulars,” he started. “Never a counter patron, though. Nope, never the counter. It was too far away from the stove.”

  “She always complains about being cold,” said Rebecca.

  “That sounds right,” the old man recalled. “Probably the real reason she moved back to Florida.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” Rebecca asked gently. “Don’t feel you have to hold back because of me. I’m fully aware of everything that’s going on.”

  “How long have you been married, hon?” he asked.

  “Officially, seven years. Together for three times that.”

  “I always liked Julie,” he stated. Unlike the pleasantries we’d heard from the archivist, the old man’s words felt genuine. “But I’m being truthful when I say I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “With all due respect,” I cut in, “she’s been at the house up the road pretty regularly for many years. You have to know what’s been going on.”

  “Don’t lecture me, son. I know what’s going on up the road.”

  “You know about what the house is used for?”

  “Everyone does.”

  Rebecca and I shared a look.

  “Then how can you say you haven’t seen Julie in decades?”

  “Because she hasn’t been here,” he answered. “Can’t you get that through your thick skull?”

  The old man was past the point of losing his patience and was fast approaching the point of shutting down entirely. Rebecca sensed it, too.

  “I believe you,” she said. “But please, just humor me.” She then used her phone to pull up a picture of herself and Julie standing before an ocean vista. “The woman on the left.”

  The man leaned back to get a better look at the photo.

  “That’s not Julie,” the man said.

  “Who is it?”

  “That’s her old roommate.”

  DRY ERASE

  When did Julie leave for Florida?” asked Badger.

  “Summer of 1986,” I recalled, and simultaneously wrote the date and event down on the whiteboard in my office.

  “That’s right around the time Fitch’s sister disappeared.”

  I wrote that down, too, but in a different color.

  I captured everything we had discovered on the board to create one big timeline stretching from today all the way back to the early 1980s. I drew solid lines between connected events and dotted lines where I had a hunch there was a connection but couldn’t confirm it. I’d always felt as though a thread tied these random periods together but only now that I could visually represent them on the board did they take on meaning.

  Badger didn’t share my enthusiasm.

  “Why do you keep writing down everything I say?” he asked innocently.

  I was momentarily flummoxed. Whiteboarding was the darling of the corporate world and the truest signal to everyone watching that there was some serious strategizing going on. While the guy in front of the old-fashioned flip chart was a mere “note taker,” the one in front of a whiteboard was an “ideator.” I’d mastered whiteboarding sessions years ago, much to the benefit of my career advancement, and in all that time no one had ever questioned such a proven approach before.

  “I’m trying to visualize a complex scenario by putting words to paper,” I explained, even though there was no paper involved. And for a guy who never used paper, this was clearly a foreign concept to Badger. “Breaking it up into snackable bites allows us to overcome the enemy of all strategic problem-solving—inertia. As we’ve done here, capturing the seemingly random events from the past paints a clearer picture from which we can deliver viable solution sets.”

  Badger nodded.

  “What are you going to do with it when you’re done?”

  “It’s the process that has value, not the output.”

  “So you won’t actually do anything with this?”

  “I mean, I might take a photo of it with my phone.”

  He nodded again.

  “And do what with it?”

  “Just to have in case we need to reference it…or something.”

  As he was about to ask his next undermining question, I quickly grabbed the eraser and wiped the board clean.

  “Let’s get back on track,” I huffed, and sat down at my desk. “So where were we?”

  We returned to the topic that had everyone’s head spinning—that the Julie St. Jean we all knew was actually Maggie Fitch from Arizona. I had assumed that all of the “roommate” talk in Sierra Madre referred to the affair between Julie and Lois. But it now looked like it was in regard to an entirely different affair, one that transpired some thirty years earlier.

  Badger riffed on how it might have played out.

  “Say Maggie jumps bail,” he started. “First thing, she needs to get out of town fast. I could see picking Los Angeles. Her brother was out here by then and she probably ran to family.”

  According to the old man at the coffee shop, Maggie began renting a room at Julie’s house in Sierra Madre shortly after her arrest in Phoenix. Maybe it started as a business relationship but it apparently turned into something more. The town gossip at the library said as much.

  “Within a few years, Julie has quit her long-term job at the library and up and moves everything across the country,” I added to his narrative.

  “She doesn’t take everything,” Badger corrected. “The house was never sold.
”

  The old man at the coffee shop made this point. Maggie continued to live at the house for some period. This raised a few eyebrows over coffee in the shop but nothing more than that. Julie had always been a private woman and neighbors felt it better to leave well enough alone. After a few months Maggie moved out and apparently took Julie’s identity with her. This explained the age discrepancy on “Julie’s” original W-9.

  I sat back and smiled. The fact that the ageless guru wasn’t so youthful made me feel better about my own losing battle with time. I also admittedly enjoyed knowing that the sage of the corporate world was actually a former drug addict who had sold her body for the next score. But what really warmed my heart was thinking about how Pat Faber had made critical life decisions based on this woman’s advice. I temporarily basked in a pool of Schadenfreude, but then I remembered watching Rebecca as she processed the same information the night before.

  We had driven home in silence from the coffee shop in a rain so heavy it felt like we hydroplaned all the way back to Eagle Rock. I built a fire and warmed some soup, the only thing Rebecca could still stomach anymore. She was wasting away in front of me; the already rail-thin woman somehow had gotten thinner over the last week. The untouched bowl sat in her lap as she stared silently into the fire. After what seemed like twenty minutes, she finally whispered:

  “She’s the same person.”

  “You think Julie and Maggie are one and the same,” I said.

  “So do you,” Rebecca replied, “and that’s not what I meant.” The two who had never delved into each other’s past now had to come to some sort of reconciliation with it. Rebecca’s was one of reluctant acceptance. This new information about Julie’s real identity didn’t change the person she was in love with. After a moment’s reflection, she added, “She’s the same person to me.”

  Badger continued to build the narrative.

  “Maggie reinvents herself in Los Angeles. She needs a new identity, a new everything.”

  “So she takes on Julie’s identity and starts fresh in the leadership coaching business.”

  “Let’s hope that’s all she took,” Badger shot back.

  He verbalized the unstated fear behind all of the arched eyebrows, the whispers in the coffee shop, the back-of-the-library conversations—that the real Julie never made that trip to Florida after all.