Fake Alibis

by Frank Sibila

  He tched. “Come on. I’m not even in Vegas yet. What could happen?”

  He was, of course, aware that, even as the words left his mouth, it was one of those karma-defying sentences like, Well, at least it’s not raining.

  He was only recognized by two people in the terminal, a twenty-something male in a backward baseball cap who thought he was the coolest thing ever, and a sixty-something woman who thought he was the worst, illustrating that judgment with a catalogue of her ex-husband’s sins. The man had come in late one night after she’d already fallen asleep, taken cold pizza to bed, fallen asleep without putting away the box, and thus arranged for her to wake up covered with ants. Frank was unclear as to whether this was the final straw that had led to the divorce and, if so, how Fake Alibi could be judged as at all responsible, but then he was used to that sort of thing. Whenever his enterprise got sucked into somebody’s embittered men-are-scum rant, the irrelevant complaints tended to accrue to the relevant ones like lint.

  The flight was only about half boarded. Frank stowed his carry-on and took his window seat right over the wing, traditionally the seat he always received unless he specifically made a fuss about wanting to sit anywhere else. This was usually a vexation to him, as he enjoyed the view during takeoffs and landings. But with his headache raging, he honestly didn’t mind. He preferred to just prop his pillow against the vibrating bulkhead and loosen his teeth with several hours of enforced sleep.

  He therefore missed her approach.

  Frank felt somebody settle into the seat beside him but had no idea who it was, not even when she said, “Excuse me,” and not even when she added, “Frank.”

  Not even when they took off.

  In fact, it wasn’t until an hour later, during drinks service, that something alerted him to the icy blue gaze shooting daggers at him, and he opened his own sleep-drugged eyes to see a face he barely knew looming close enough to dominate his field of vision. It was a definite invasion of his personal space, as close as any woman had ever deliberately lowered her face to his without going the rest of the way and kissing him, except that her look wasn’t passionate or even affectionate so much as academic, like that of a scientist cataloging his parts prior to taking out the scalpel and proceeding with the dissection. Later, he would remember seeing his own face, complete with the startled O-shaped black hole of a mouth, in her pupils.

  It was Monica Custer.

  Keith had been right.

  He was in trouble.

  THREE

  HE REARED BACK. “What the—”

  Monica Custer grinned at him. There was something feline in her smile, and while there were any number of things about her that were both feline and irresistible, it was the feline and predatory aspects that she flashed now with the satisfaction of a house pet who has just left a decapitated mouse on your pillow and expects to be praised for it.

  She had changed clothes sometime between lunch and her inexplicable appearance here. She now wore a black leather jacket over a white knit turtleneck that didn’t break until it hugged her jawline. Her earrings were golden oyster shells, and her black leather handbag, which rested on the tray table beside her drink, matched the color of her jacket perfectly. She looked both elegant and deadly. To Frank hers resembled the look of an icy Russian spy eager to seduce the hero for his atomic secret—the kind of lady who kept a strangle cord in her bra and a spring-loaded switchblade in her high heel. Or maybe he was just projecting.

  She said, “Do you know what they call that?”

  He was still wondering whether to pull the release on the emergency door beside him, since explosive decompression scared him a lot less than being trapped against the bulkhead by this particular cuckolded wife. “C-call what?”

  If she took any satisfaction in his uncharacteristic stutter, she didn’t show it. “What you just did. When you said, ‘What the—’”

  He blinked. “I thought they called it freaking out, lady.”

  “Well,” she said, with a smile and a wink, a combination that, coming from her, implied any number of erotic possibilities while simultaneously promising that he would never get to join in, “that, too. But, seriously. I’m talking about parts of speech. When you say something and deliberately cut yourself off in the middle for rhetorical effect. Like when Moe in the Three Stooges accidentally gets a face full of seltzer and advances on his brother Curly, snarling, ‘Why, you—’”

  “Violence?” he guessed.

  “Or sometimes,” she proceeded, undeterred by his nervousness, possibly even deriving nourishment from it, “sometimes he doesn’t say, ‘Why, you—’ but instead says, ‘Why, I oughta—’ and leaves it at that, trusting in you, the unseen audience, to infer the rest of the unspoken threat, which could be anything from ‘break your neck’ to his common construction, ‘moidalize you.’”

  Frank wasn’t just lost in this conversation. He had stumbled off the path and was lost in the dark, menacing woods around it, unable to find its sense or destination. “I thought women didn’t like the Three Stooges.”

  “We don’t,” Monica said, her red lips curling in a smile so broad it was impossible to determine whether she intended to be vixen or vampire. “It’s genetic. I’ll admit a deep childhood crush on Shemp, but that’s as far as it goes. Please focus on my point, though. It’s a metaphor. I’m using their immortal shtick as an example of the particular rhetorical construct you used when you sensed my presence, opened your eyes in fear and dismay, and said, ‘What the—’”

  Frank blinked again. The reflex seemed to be getting quite a workout today. “All right.”

  She extended her black-gloved hand to the bottle of Evian on her tray table and lifted it her mouth so she could close her lips around the straw and take a single sip. Without being even the slightest bit grotesque about it, she elevated the simple act to an art. Then she placed the bottle back down and continued. “Chances are, Frank, that you don’t even know whether you intended to say, ‘What the hell,’ its more extreme variation, ‘What the fuck,’ or some other more eccentric, personal variation attuned to the situation, like, ‘What the bejeezus am I going to do with this psycho bitch following me to Vegas?’ You always intended to leave it at ‘What the—.’ Do you see what I’m saying, Frank?”

  That did it. It was time to get out of the woods and back on the road to Grandma’s house. “How the hell did you wind up in the seat next to me?”

  She smiled at him again, this time with a true twinkle of her eyes, the look of a woman who takes joy in her life and the splendid humor she shares with the world. Drawing out the syllables and inserting pauses between them for maximum clarity, she said, “Aposiopesis.”

  And there he was. He had thought he’d seen a clearing up ahead, but then the light had shifted and he’d found himself lost in the woods again. “Apo what?”

  “Aposiopesis.”

  His mouth worked. “What is that, a new travel reservation Web site?”

  “Stick with me,” she said. “We’re still talking rhetoric here. You see, whenever you say, ‘What the—’ or, ‘Why, you—’ or, ‘I oughta—’ anything deliberately cut off in the middle of the phrase like that, you’re using aposiopeses. That’s what it’s called. As I said, I’m betting you didn’t even know it had a name.”

  There was nothing he could say to that but, “Well, I’ll be.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s a very good example, Frank.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I had been planning to move on to my next point right about now, but you just gave me good reason to explore aposiopesis just a little bit more. Don’t worry. I’ll make this relevant to our own situation. But the specific question that interests me right this very moment is just what word you think you were leaving out there. Somehow I don’t imagine you as the type to say something like, ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ or, ‘I’ll be hornswoggl
ed.’ Am I correct in that?”

  He laughed out loud. It was a nervous laugh, but a genuine one. Against all odds, he was enjoying this woman. “Yes, you are.”

  “I thought so. There’s nothing about you that says Old West prospector. So am I correct, then, in saying that the idea you just used aposiopesis to conceal was, in fact, the most obvious choice, ‘Well, I’ll be damned’?”

  He thought about that for a moment, found no other possibilities, and nodded. “Yes, that’s it. Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Really?” she said. She dabbed her lips with the napkin her bottle had been resting on, tattooing the paper with a perfect kiss. “This, Frank, brings me at long last to that next point I was talking about, which is that I very much intend to see to it.”

  There’s nothing quite as ominous in this life as being stuck in a long metal tube with somebody who has just announced herself to be your mortal enemy. It was a brand-new experience for Frank, one that silenced him and left him lost in thought as the refreshment service reached their row.

  Monica ordered a scotch and soda. Frank confined himself to a hot coffee. Though he liked it light and sweet, he needed the impact of the caffeine too much to cut it with anything.

  For several seconds the two sat and sipped at their respective fuels, focusing on the drinks in front of them but trusting their peripheral vision to warn them of any sudden movements. The lights on the wing, the only illumination as the plane flew into the night, flashed a constant red strobe through the window, as if warning Frank of imminent danger. He thought of lightning bolts, UFOs firing particle-beam weaponry at the fuselage, gremlins on the wing, and worse things. When somebody six rows ahead of him coughed, he almost mistook the sound for a gunshot.

  Get a grip, he warned himself.

  To which his inner paranoid responded, On what?

  She placed her drink back on her tray table and remarked, “I still haven’t answered your question, you know.”

  Dammit. He’d wanted to say the next thing, whatever it was. He thought on his feet for a living, so it shouldn’t have been outside his skill set. But she’d kept him going for ten minutes with her little vocabulary lesson, and he’d been unable to come up with something equally goofy and intimidating during the intermission. What was wrong with him?

  He said the cleverest thing he could come up with under the circumstances. “What?”

  She batted her eyes at him. “How the hell I managed to divine your travel plans and get the seat next to you on such short notice.”

  He decided honesty to be the best option. “Frankly, Monica, I find that’s no longer my most pressing question.”

  Another sip of her scotch. “Really.”

  “Really,” he confessed. “All things being equal, you strike me as smart enough and driven enough and dangerous enough to find out anything you want.”

  She lifted the cup in a mock toast. “Why, thank you, Mr. Bond.”

  “No,” he said, “my most pressing question is this—”

  And here he hesitated again, formulating his thoughts and giving her the opportunity to bore those deceptively gentle eyes into his.

  She said, “I’m waiting.”

  “I want to know what a woman smart enough and driven enough to pull off a stunt like this, on no notice, is doing married to a yutz like Keith Custer.”

  She feigned shock and reared back, her eyes widening in scandalized affront. “Why, Frank! You should be ashamed of yourself! Bad-mouthing a client like that!”

  He yearned for something alcoholic with which to spike his coffee. “Nice try. But I should be a hundred percent clear about this. This should not be taken as an open admission that your husband’s a client.”

  Monica made a nest from the linked fingers of her hands and rested her chin on it. “Naturally.”

  “Nor should my characterization of him as a yutz be taken as a blanket condemnation of yutzes, as a rule. I like yutzes. I need yutzes. Yutzes who get themselves into trouble, or are afraid of getting into trouble, make up my entire client list.”

  She batted her eyes at him again. “But he’s not a client.”

  “I’m not saying that he is or that he isn’t—”

  “—which is a retreat from lunchtime,” she said, “when you categorically said that he wasn’t. Are you changing your story, Frank?”

  Damn, she was good. Frank forwent his coffee and went straight for her scotch, sipping just enough to get the taste from the first ice cube to touch his lips. He would have taken more but she’d drained the cup, leaving only that ice. It might have been why she made no move to stop him, but rather just waited until he put the drink down and faced her again.

  “Here,” she said, refilling the cup with a miniature airplane bottle from her handbag. “I don’t need anymore. You were about to change your story?”

  There was no way on Earth that taking the drink was a good idea. The way he felt now, he wouldn’t put it past her to have some exotic truth serum just smuggled from the Amazon rainforest inside a shipment of something less exotic and dangerous, like cocaine. Only the deep conviction that this woman would not have needed to resort to tactics so underhanded and blunt allowed him to accept her offer in all good conscience. He drained the scotch in a single gulp, placed it on his tray table, and said, “I wasn’t about to change my story. I was just going to leave my story out of the specific question I’m asking you now. Which happens to be—”

  She tee-hee-ed and placed a calming hand on his wrist. “I can remember. You wanted to know what a woman as smart as myself is doing married to a philandering yutz like Keith.”

  “I didn’t use the word ‘philandering,’” he said, absurdly proud of himself for catching that one, “since I have no way of knowing, but yes. Do you love him?”

  Another woman might have slapped him for such an impertinent question. Monica terrified him with an openly appraising stare of the sort that left him wondering if there was anything between his eyes and the back of his skull that she could not recognize and catalogue with a single glance. One look like that and she probably knew about the time his mother had caught him eating sand when he was three. Then she nodded in approval, lowered her gaze, and said, “Are you at all familiar with the phenomenon of the dedicated wife who believes in ‘for better or worse,’ and sticks with her man no matter how often he wrongs her because of her deep respect for the sanctity of her wedding vows?”

  He felt terrible. “Yes, I—”

  “That’s not me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you familiar with the phenomenon of the instinctive nurturer attracted to damaged men and bad boys because of the conviction that only she can fix them?”

  “I guess that’s not you, either.”

  She laughed out loud. “Frank, my friend, I hate that type.”

  He wasn’t surprised. “Then who—”

  “Nor am I, in case you happen to be wondering, the wronged woman who seeks revenge out of a sense of personal betrayal, or the old battle-axe who runs her marriage like a prison and doles out privileges or punishments depending on how well her personal pet bastard behaves on any given day.”

  “You’ve thought this out,” Frank observed.

  “My husband, your client, has given me a lot of time to think this out.”

  “He’s not a client,” Frank said.

  “Whatever. I think it’s fair to say, Frank, that I hope to hell the earth splits open and swallows me whole before I ever become one of those people. If your hopes of dealing with the threat I represent to you rest on the misconception that I fit any of those stereotypes and can therefore be trusted to do what any of those stereotypes would do, then you would do well to abandon them now. Because that is not who I am.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “I haven’t answered either of your previous questions, which are, first
, what I’m doing with Keith, and second, whether I love him. Here’s the answer. I’m with Keith because for a short period of time a few years ago, he made me love him. I’m with Keith because he made me love him so much that I put a hold on ambitions that meant a lot to me. I’m with Keith because I found out before we even got married that making women love him for a short period of time is to him just a trick he knows how to do, one that happens to be his only trick and that he keeps doing, because if he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t have anything else left. I’m with Keith because he’s like an alligator on a leash who I won’t kill because being an alligator is just his nature, and I can’t release him back into the wild, because now that I’ve been careless enough to feed him, he’s lost his fear of people and has learned to associate them with food. I’m with Keith because I haven’t met the woman he’ll be married to next and therefore don’t have enough against her to do such an inconsiderate thing to her.” She delivered that entire speech without self-pity, without raising her voice or betraying a single iota of anger. It might have been just an amusing anecdote about something cute a friend’s child had said. But now she sighed. “Would you like to know something funny, Frank?”

  He shook his head. But somewhere after the third or fourth shake, it somehow, regrettably, without his conscious consent, became a nod.

  “I’m a real catch,” she said. “Do you believe that? That I’m a real catch? What I’d be like for somebody who deserved me?”

  What was this? “I’m beginning to.”

  “That other one he was with today, Tiffany. I could tell she’s a real catch, too, one in a million. I hated her for being there, but half fell in love with her just sitting across from her. That’s the thing. Keith always catches the good ones. If he had bad taste in women, I wouldn’t mind. I’d leave in a minute and be happy to see him shack up with somebody who deeply deserves him. But instead he goes after ladies who might amount to something. That’s not right. And as long as I’m married to him, I can at least stop that much.” She reclined her chair, laid her head back, and closed her eyes. “Which is why it won’t be my pleasure, but my responsibility, to tear down your alibi business and sow salt on the ground so nothing can ever grow there again.”