by Frank Sibila
“Oh,” he said one peck later as he took a seat, “you know how it is. This city. We should all get up forty minutes earlier if we want to get anywhere on time.”
“Or make our appointments forty minutes later,” Tiffany suggested.
“That,” he said, “would make us all ninety minutes late, wouldn’t it?—Where’s the man himself? Don’t tell me he’s having one of those intestinal crises of his!”
“I’m afraid so.” She lowered her eyes demurely. With the lids at half-mast, the eclipsed brightness behind them suggested all sorts of delightful possibilities, explaining in an instant why a fellow like Keith would make a fool of himself—well, more than a fool of himself—out of desire for her. And that look seemed to be directed at him now; whatever happened now, Frank laid ten-to-one odds that his hapless client had already lost his chance. “The poor thing. He really should see a doctor and get himself looked at.”
Across the dining room, the door to the men’s room opened, and Keith Custer, big and broad-chested and grinning as if he’d applied superglue to his gums to get the impression to stick, emerged, fighting a limp that Frank attributed to numbness after fifteen minutes perched on a toilet seat like a buzzard waiting for some dying prospector to crawl by. Keith did not sport the shiny forehead Frank had feared, but instead a dry one, and he did not have the special look of a man who had perspired quite a lot in the recent past. His wave, when he spotted Frank, was as theatrical as that of any politician saying good-bye from the doorway of a departing helicopter. “Hey, buddy!”
Frank hated being called buddy, but he could live with it for the sake of the job. He stood and shook Keith’s hand. “Hey, pal! What took you so long?”
“Oh,” Tiffany said, “you know. This city.”
“We should all get up forty minutes earlier,” Frank amplified.
They were all chuckling over that like buddies and pals when the fourth chair at the table became occupied by 120 pounds of pure scowl. Monica had not stormed across the room, because she was in too much control of herself to storm, but she had moved from her table to theirs without making a sound. Her approach had been so smooth it may have been a specialized form of social Ninjutsu for wives bent on public confrontation, so perfect that all three people at the table, though they’d expected her, gave a little jump as she fixed her gaze on Frank and said, “I know who you are.”
Keith had reached the limits of his capacity to keep up the act. “M-monica!”
But Frank was just getting started. “Monica?” He glanced at Keith. “You’re Monica?”
Keith managed an entirely unpersuasive “Honey, what are you doing here?”
“What I’m doing here,” Monica said, her voice sweet but her tone dripping venom, “is not being fooled. I recognize this man. He runs that fake alibi service. You hired him to cover up your little rendezvous with Pippi Longstocking here, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Keith provided a clever “Ha buh dumma huh.”
But it was Frank who managed to look truly mortified. He had, in the course of training for his unusual profession, worked out the knack of blanching without showing genuine horror, a talent that would serve many professional actors well and which, on a couple of earlier occasions, he had needed to fake by jabbing himself in the thigh with a fork. He said, “Oh, God. Is that what you think? Oh, God.” He shook his head in true misery. “This is why I can’t go out with friends anymore. Ever since Oprah everybody thinks I’m always playing an angle.”
Showing true talent for the work, and probably enjoying herself more than she would have had the day ended with her bedding Keith, Tiffany gave his wrist a couple of protective pats. “That’s all right, Frankie. We know better.”
Monica’s gaze darted from one suffering face to another, turning uncertain when Keith’s showed a level of embarrassment entirely too polluted by hope. She announced, “You don’t for even one second expect me to swallow this crap.”
“There’s nothing to swallow,” Keith insisted.
Tiffany covered her grin behind fanned fingers. “Not anymore.”
Frank elaborated in a hurry, demanding Monica’s attention before she could see that the other woman was losing it. “He’s not my client, Mrs. Custer. I’m his. I’m doing so well lately that I’m about to open up a chain of new offices in retail spaces.”
Though unable to hide his substantial surprise at this, Keith still recovered quickly. “Didn’t I tell you about this, honey? If the financing comes through, people will be able to arrange fake alibis in mall outlets all over the country.”
Tiffany was turning various colors not often found on the palate of possible human complexions. “Yes, we want prime positions near the food courts.”
Monica radiated chill in her direction. “And you are—”
Tiffany cut her off despite sudden difficulty speaking. “We plan to give out grand opening coupons.”
Monica started over. “You are—”
“At Orange Julius,” Tiffany concluded, erupting in a fit of suspicious coughing that ended with her forcing out a strangled apology as she fled for the restroom.
Monica’s head swiveled toward Frank. “And she is?”
“Oh, Tiff?” Frank said. “The poor thing has food allergies. Absolutely tragic. One of the most charming ladies I’ve ever met, but she swells up like a balloon if you get her anywhere near peanuts. She’s probably just taking a whiff of her inhaler now.”
“Nice try,” Monica said, somehow managing a hiss in a phrase without any sibilants. “What is she doing here?”
“Working for me. She’s a graphic designer on the team that maintains my Web site, and one of the partners in my new venture. I asked her to meet your husband here when I found out I was going to be late. Told them to order up some champagne, on me. We have cause to celebrate.” At that point he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a clean white business envelope, already marked with the words “Contract for Keith” in thin black marker. Keith’s double take upon seeing that envelope was no less theatrical than his wife’s, but she didn’t get to see his expression, as she remained focused on those words even as Frank opened the flap and removed three sheets of paper, dense with legalese and parties-of-the-aforementioned parts. It was boilerplate, of course, fresh from his car fax with Keith’s name, the nature of the services rendered, and the price all inserted at Fake Alibi’s home office and zapped to Frank while he was still speeding to the site where Keith was still hiding out in the toilet. He held it in his hand long enough for Monica’s eagle eyes to zero in on her husband’s name and then passed it over to Keith, who snatched it with the eagerness of a starving dog grabbing at the week’s first Liv-A Snap. “And there you go, my good man.”
Keith’s famous smile now shone its light upon the world atop a neck corded with lines of tension. “Oh? Ah, yes. You understand I, um, do need to show this to my people….”
Monica’s stare, still fixed on the spot where the envelope had been, now turned toward her husband, who had already made the envelope disappear into his own jacket. “You’ve never had any people.”
“For this deal,” Keith said, “I have people. Come on, honey, as long as you’re here, don’t you want to order something?”
Monica turned from Keith to Frank to Keith and then back to Frank again.
Across the room, the door to the lady’s room opened and a frightened matron scurried out, peering back over her shoulder as gales of laughter, clearly identifiable as Tiffany’s, followed her into the restaurant proper.
Monica’s stare settled on Frank, who returned it with a neutral smile, but who, for the first time in his professional life as a purveyor of excuses and alibis, felt something formidable testing the strength of his personal armor. It was like that moment in Forbidden Planet when Leslie Nielsen and Walter Pidgeon barricade themselves behind an armored door that is deformed with fist-sh
aped bulges as the unimaginable monster from the id hammers at it, struggling to get in and eat them.
He expected her to start yelling.
Instead she sat up, flashed a grin utterly disarming in its sweetness and utterly terrifying in its undeterred confidence, dabbed the corners of her lips with the tip of a cloth napkin, and told Frank, “I’m impressed. You’re very good.”
“Thank you,” said Frank.
She turned to her husband. “I’m sorry for doubting you, dear. Will you be home at the usual time?”
“Of course,” said Keith.
She nodded at both men. “Gentlemen.” Then she replaced the napkin on the table, rose, and turned her back on them, leaving the dining room without so much as another word, her high heels stabbing at the parquet like daggers.
Frank watched her departure with distinct unease, half expecting her to whirl around and shout out something to the order of “You may have won this day, Richelieu, but our swords will cross again!” But that didn’t happen. Once she was gone, she was gone. The background sounds that normally filled the dining room seemed to resume only now, as if they’d cut out in her presence and just found enough courage to return.
Another old lady fled the restroom followed by more howls of laughter from Tiffany.
Frank told Keith, “That was easy.”
Keith, who knew Monica better, told Frank, “You’re in trouble.”
TWO
IN TRUTH, it was only in his worst nightmares that Frank envisioned a franchise future for Fake Alibi. Can you imagine that? Not just mall outlets but drive-throughs, complete with customers thick enough to pull up to the window with their spouses sitting right there next to them and demand to be covered for that unpleasant scene last Friday evening when Poo-Poo came home early and found Snookiwoogums on the couch doing the nasty with that unpleasant person from payroll. He imagined teens applying to the corporate office for summer jobs and using their valuable experience on their college applications, taking special pride in the day their mothers came in to obtain the company’s services and they were so professional about the whole thing that they didn’t get on her case for running around on Dad.
The very idea was enough to make Frank’s duodenum clench.
The truth was that Fake Alibi was, despite its several hundred employees, by requirement a guerrilla enterprise, operating out of an unmarked office on the second floor of a not-very-exclusive office complex that also played home to a dentist in his seventies, a firm that distributed crepe makers advertised on late-night television, and a fellow who, though he didn’t seem to do much of anything, didn’t seem pleased by all the mail he got and could often be heard shouting at it after a hefty delivery. Frank’s company was not listed on the building directory as Fake Alibi, but as the much more anonymous Syllabus Enterprises, Ltd., a name that meant nada and was inspired by a dull neighbor girl from Frank’s childhood who had never been able to figure out the precise order of the consonants in his last name. (Between the ages of eight and nine he’d deliberately mispronounced her last name, Smith, as Thism in retaliation, but that had never come to anything.)
Further discouraging drop-in business, the front door was perpetually marked with a sign assuring clients that the office was closed and expected to remain closed except for operating hours so brief by design that attempts to show up and engage the business in person would require a degree of pinpoint timing on the level of skeet-shooting off the deck of an ocean liner.
Inside, the place was furnished in the style of Baroque Temporary, with long folding tables bearing an Internet server, laptops, a laser printer, a phone system with four remotes, and blank receipt forms for fictional hotels in faraway places. Shelving purchased from a box store completed the ensemble, holding stacks of additional bogus documents and phone directories of places nobody would ever visit by accident, which provided excellent research material for those cases when, for instance, Philanderer X needed to prove he couldn’t have been in that Chicago hotel room with four hookers and a donkey, because he was really having a slice of pizza in Truth Or Consequences. A bulletin board tacked to the wall bore Polaroids of a number of smiling faces: temps hired from acting workshops who were never trusted to bear the weight of any given bullshit story but could always be counted upon to play supporting roles whenever one required corroboration by random nearby background people.
At the moment Frank walked in that afternoon, Destinii and Max were the only two full-time employees in residence. Max was in the back, thumbing through a stack of magazines that included Wizard and National Review. Destinii, whose last name was mostly consonants and who therefore avoided using it whenever possible, was a petite thing who, around the office at least, wore oversized white T-shirts and pants so baggy on her that the visual effect was that of a twelve-year-old girl who had just rolled out of bed following a slumber party and thrown on just anything before shuffling downstairs to raid the fridge for a slice of cold pizza. Her spiky blue hair and her two sleeve-length tattoos, one a photo-realistic reproduction of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the other Picasso’s Guernica, suggested, without quite proving, an inner life somewhat more interesting. As usual, she didn’t sit, but rather perched, legs tucked away beneath her, too involved with the conversation she was having on headphones to give Frank as much as a wave. Right now her voice didn’t sound a day under sixty-five. “Oi, yes. Oi remember ’im. ’Ere for two nights, ’e was. Worked all the toime, the poor thing, except when he had to complyne about a bat in his room…. Yes, a bat…. We never found the bloody thing, but we ended up movin’ the bloke just to keep ’im happy. Anythin’ to keep the customer happy, roight, mum? Roight….” She double-clicked a button that added the tinkling sound of the little bells that rustic establishments hang over their front doors to signal that a new customer has entered. “Crimeny, look at the styte of this one. Can oi ’elp you with anything else, dear? All roight, toodle-oo!”
She clicked off, then pulled off her headphones and glared at Max, who didn’t look up from his Wizard magazine feature article on the repercussions of the latest fistfight between Iron Man and the Hulk.
“I said I was sorry,” Max said.
The heavyset Max had eyebrows like umlauts over eyes so pale they required that extra emphasis, a hairline that was theoretical at best, a cranberry complexion, and a jawline much improved by a neatly trained black beard. For clothing he favored two out of the three elements of a basic three-piece charcoal gray suit, keeping the pants and vest but usually eschewing the jacket, which had a stain resistant to all modern cleaning technologies.
Frank said, “What happened?”
Now speaking in her natural voice, a smoky half-whisper with just enough gravel to suggest frequent exposure to double-malt scotch, Destinii jerked a thumb at her studiously uninvolved coworker. “Marvel Zombie over there handled the Aiken case. Remember that one?”
Frank remembered a twitchy little guy whose firm provided hydraulic fluid for prosthetic limbs. “Yes.”
“Fanboy was supposed to provide documents proving that our man Cecil spent two days in England at something called the Tea and Pudding Bed and Breakfast in Derbyshire. On his first try, he printed out a receipt for only one day. Rather than throw it out, he printed out an entirely different receipt for the second day … and used a different room number. The missus, who knows her old man a little too well, looked over the papers and detected the fine aroma of rodent.” She grimaced as she unplugged her headgear from the cellular phone, one of several anonymous sets the firm paid for and kept registered to convenient area codes, foreign and domestic. “Only problem is the lady’s so charmed by me she wants to pressure Cecil to take her on vacation there for their second honeymoon in a couple of months. You think you can find a way to bill her pig of a husband for the construction and staffing of a colorful inn by that name somewhere in the British boonies?”
“No
t necessary,” Frank said. “You already provided the back door by being all charming and colorful. Max? Start putting together a fake news item about the tragedy of a charming bed and breakfast forced to shut down because of guest rooms infested by bats. Make it sound like a fresh biblical plague or something. If it comes up, I think we can fix it so Cecil’s wife won’t want to vacation there.”
“Why not?” Max asked, still without putting down his magazine. “From what I hear, she’d be right at home in that environment.”
“Max….”
“All right, all right.” Max slapped down the magazine and rolled his chair to one of the desktops.
Destinii bared claws at his back like a Siamese cat confronted with its first full-sized iguana.
Frank showed colossal patience for the close to fifteen seconds it took her to get the raking and disemboweling moves out of her system, not returning to business until after she turned around and batted her eyes at him in a fair parody of affronted innocence. “Any messages?”
Destinii emitted an “Ah, yes” and propelled her chair to a While You Were Out pad by one of the older laptops. Tearing the first note off the pile, she announced, “One from a Tiffany Watson who says she got your phone number from Keith Custer and wants to know if she can send you her résumé. She says today’s lunch was the most fun she’s ever had in her life. Something you want to tell me, boss?”
“Not much,” Frank said. “She’s bright as hell and a quick thinker, but breaks into giggles under pressure. I don’t know. We might be able to use her for something. Tell her to send her résumé, and we’ll keep her in mind. Anything else?”
“The senator called. He’s planning a little trouble with one of his assistants and hopes we can come up with some political reason for a fact-finding mission to someplace with palm trees and room service. I told him to pay his last four bills and we’d think about it.”