Fake Alibis

by Frank Sibila

  She was riding the elevator to Yorick’s floor within twenty minutes of Frank’s departure from same, and she was knocking on the door with a special sense of purpose not quite twenty minutes after Yorick had called for an escort and specified only that she be blonde, beautiful, and bitchy.

  The word “knockers” does have a possible sexual connotation, but “knocking,” the verb, is usually considered value-neutral. Male or female, there are only a certain number of ways to rap a door with your knuckles. The sound is always pretty much the same, and the only suggestion possible is pretty much provided by context. If you’re a wanted man, the sound becomes the threatening long arm of the authorities. If you’re a hungry person expecting a Chinese food delivery, the sound becomes lo mein with chicken. And if, like George Yorick, you’re expecting an exotic queen of sensual delight to arrive and take you to Heaven and back, you, for lack of a better phrase, pop to attention, ready for everything that knock promises, even if you know that there will certainly have to be some back-and-forth negotiation.

  He had already changed to the casino’s white terry cloth bathrobe, which he thought made him look suave, and poured himself a brandy, which he thought made him look even suaver. (In truth, there’s a rule that applies without exception that dorks posing with brandy snifters just come off as looking like bigger dorks.) Now he ran a hand over his wisp of failing hair and glided to the door, a substantially tented terry cloth figurehead preceding him.

  When he saw what waited on his doorstep, a blonde vision in leather with legs like sculpted pylons and eyes like twin lasers, regarding him with a moral authority even greater than he had ever dared to dream, he hommina-hommina-hommina-ed.

  “George Yorick?”

  “Omma. Gah.”

  The blonde didn’t smile. She looked at him like a bug she found wanting. “You’ve been a naughty boy. We’re going to have to talk about that.”

  His gulp could have been audible from space. “Come in.”

  She raised an eyebrow but said nothing as she sidled past him and regarded the suite, with its sunken love nest of squared sofas and panoramic view of a skyline defined by flashing lights. “Quite the room, George. You’ve done very well for yourself, this trip.”

  He could only shrug in desperate self-deprecation. “Comped. What do I call you?”

  “You don’t need to know my name, George. I’m not here to make friends.”

  He gulped at his cognac, missing his lips entirely and christening his chest instead. “It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this. It feels … different. Would you like something to drink?”

  “I’ll have a glass of water,” she said. “This is very serious business, and I want to keep my wits about me.”

  By the time Yorick made it to the bar, his hands were trembling. He spilled the ice on the floor and managed to get only a little of the water into the glass. When he emerged from the bar, still attempting suavity, his ankles crossed, and he came within one twitch of propelling himself headlong into the opposite wall. Even so, he had to adjust his bathrobe and the underwear beneath it to avoid giving himself a blood clot as he duck-walked to Monica’s side, handed her the glass, and then hastily sat down opposite her, waiting for direction.

  She sipped, leaving a perfect lipstick print on the rim, before placing the glass on the coaster before her. “You’re taking this very calmly, George. That’s good. It’ll make coming to an arrangement that much easier. You do know, of course, that I could make things very rough on you, if I wanted.”

  He closed his eyes halfway and licked perspiration off a sweaty upper lip. “I suppose I asked for that.”

  “I’m glad you can admit that much. That’s a good thing. It shows you can admit when you’ve made a mistake and gotten yourself in over your head. And that maybe we can be friends, after we’ve talked about what’s happening here. I’d so much prefer that to … more unpleasant consequences.” She stirred the glass with a sculpted fingernail, which she then sucked dry with her lips. “I think you know what those would be, don’t you, George?”

  His mouth was hanging wide open. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “You’ve said that already. But you’re here, aren’t you? You’re away from your wife, aren’t you? You’re getting into trouble, aren’t you?

  If you weren’t here to do something you shouldn’t be doing … then what were you thinking?”

  This was, by Yorick’s lights, by far the most brazen come-on he had ever experienced. He closed his mouth, swallowed again, blinked, stammered without making a noise, and tried to get down to business. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  She stared at him. “Is that what you think this is about? You think I want money?”

  He was suddenly uncertain. “Don’t you?”

  “That never entered into it. You don’t have to be afraid of that. I’m no gold digger. If I’m here, it’s because I take this entire situation very personally, and if I want you to come clean, it’s because I think it’s not too late for you.”

  A sudden wave of heat, starting from the groin and rising through his body in waves, made Yorick’s neck and face turn scarlet. He was suddenly certain that he knew what was happening here.

  This wasn’t the call girl he had ordered. This was something more.

  This was one of those glamorous, incandescent, world-trotting women you only see in James Bond movies. The ones who see the hero winning at a game of chance and immediately show up at his threshold offering themselves to him. They do this, he knew, because they can sense the forces of fate and destiny, if those aren’t the same thing, swirling around a winner in eddies of karma and stuff like that. And because they know that the men blessed by such good fortune are always, without exception, good in the sack. His sudden increase in blood pressure, upon the realization that he’d just entered the elite of personal attractiveness, was so immediate that if he’d had a hole in the top of his head, he would have spewed steam and whistled like a teapot. He grinned goofily and almost sang, “Well, my magnificent little vixen, where do you want to start?”

  The beautiful blonde started. “What did you just call me?”

  “I called you my—”

  The door to the suite opened. A much-exhausted Frank entered, facing the floor and thus not at any position to make eye contact with the blonde, who immediately scooted back against the sofa cushions as if preparing for flight. He murmured, “Sorry, George, forgot my cell phone. I’ll—” and then looked up, his eyes working for all of ten seconds before they narrowed in full understanding.

  Yorick hastened to tell the blonde, “I’m not gay! This is just a friend of mine!”

  Frank’s eyes flickered in his direction, then back toward the blonde. “Hello, Monica. This isn’t your room.”

  “I’m sorry, Frank. Just a misunderstanding, I promise.” She got up and allowed those magnificent and oh-God-please-don’t-leave-the-room-now-that-we’re-in-love legs to carry her out the door Frank held open for her. Just before she left, she turned and blew a kiss at Yorick, who would have testified in open court that he physically felt it strike home.

  As the door clicked, Frank rubbed his forehead. “Why did you let her in?”

  Yorick’s face grew hot. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Frank had the look of a man lost in a cacophony of twenty possible responses. “Probably.”

  “Then why did you make her leave? Especially if you already know each other.”

  Again, Frank seemed to reject nineteen of the first twenty responses that came to mind. “Please. You need to be careful. You’ve already been set up once, and we especially don’t want it happening again with that casino check burning a hole in your pocket. Will you just listen to me and behave yourself until we get you covered? At least for tonight?”

  Yorick was still a little irritated about the transcendent beauty Frank
had just permitted to stroll out the door, and so he answered with the pout of a preschooler told he couldn’t have any cake. “All right.”

  “Fine.” Frank was suddenly all business again. “It’s going to be all right. I haven’t had a chance to tell you this yet, with all the craziness about your jackpot, but I’ve called in a little extra help on this one, a local recommended by my personnel girl at the agency. With luck, she’ll be taking over your case while I fly back to New York to clear things on your wife’s end. Since you don’t have any ID right now, I think getting you a flight is out of the question. The best solution, if this local is up for it, will be for her to rent a car and drive you home while my people and I work out some way to cover your long absence. In the meantime, I want you to get some sleep, and meet me—let’s say, 10 a.m.—at that breakfast buffet place. Is that okay?”

  “Fine,” said Yorick, his lower lip still protruding.

  “Good night, then,” said Frank. He didn’t add, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” because that ship had already sailed. But he did leave.

  For Yorick, left alone, it was the biggest buzzkill he’d experienced yet. He felt like the guy who always got the free ticket whenever he played a scratch-off lottery, and then nothing else. Like the last kid ever picked for a team. The one who always got the rock when the other kids got candy. It was the second time in the last two days that he’d come within groping distance of nirvana and had it yanked from his grasp before his fingers could close. It felt like the lights of Vegas, visible from the panoramic window of his suite, had all joined together as if in one colossal neon display blinking the word LOSER in perpetuity.

  But then there was yet another knock at the door.

  There’s a certain behavior familiar to dog owners, when they call a pet who knows he’s been bad. They say, “Come here!” The dog has no reason to come, because he knows he’s going to be punished when he does. But obedience is hardwired into his tiny canine brain, and so the words “come here,” repeated with sufficient authority, force obedience as an unwilling, autonomic response. “Come here!” and the clearly reluctant dog comes, because his legs are forcing him to.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Answering it was, by now, the last thing Yorick wanted, because he could not imagine it being anybody but Frank, here to provide a postscript that would no doubt begin with, “And another thing.” But his legs forced him to.

  He opened the door.

  And what greeted him there was a cute little thing with feathered blonde hair, a black leather skirt just barely long enough to qualify as legal, wide-mesh fishnet stockings, a leather jacket that reached only as far as her third rib, a white silk blouse, the most adorable little button nose, and eyes like the sky in the morning. She was at least four inches shorter than he, but she still faced him with such absolute authority that the prospect of closing the door on her, as Frank would want, was absolutely unthinkable.

  Still, he lived in fear of inviting her in only to have whatever started then interrupted by yet another visit from Frank, so he hesitated.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Felicia. Are you George?”

  Oh. That explained it. No doubt she was the local Frank had mentioned.

  Referring to one thing, Yorick asked, “Did the agency send you?”

  Referring to another, Felicia said, “Yes.”

  “Omma. Gah,” said Yorick.

  She strutted in, took off her jacket, and said, “Quite the room, George. It looks like you’ve done very well for yourself, this trip.”

  Yorick felt a wave of déjà vu. “I hit the jackpot.”

  “Mmmm. You certainly have.”

  He offered to make her a drink. She said that was a wonderful idea but asked if she could make it herself. While she was mixing herself something, and his mind was circling around itself hoping this wasn’t some astounding, alternate-world version of Groundhog Day where the world reset every time it looked like the beautiful woman was getting down to business, she said, “I’ve got to tell you, George. This was a last-minute call for me, and I didn’t get many details. I’m up for almost anything, but nobody said what you needed me for.”

  Yorick said, “I need you to rent a car and drive me to New York.”

  She stopped mixing her drink. “You mean New York–New York, the casino? That’s just across the street.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean New York, New York, the city. Tomorrow.”

  “That’ll take days.”

  “That’s all right,” Yorick said. “I’m paying for it.”

  “Why don’t you drive yourself?”

  Wow, Frank hadn’t told her anything. “I lost my license.”

  “You’re serious. You want to hire me to drive you to New York.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Well, it’s a bit of a situation.”

  Felicia resumed mixing her drink, but with significantly more wariness. “You realize what you’re agreeing to pay for. Not just expenses, like gas, food, and overnight stays wherever we have to stop along the way, not to mention my flight back. I also make, like,” she hesitated before coming up with the figure, “an average of $4,000 a night. You’re willing to match that, the whole trip? In advance?”

  “I have the money,” Yorick assured her. “You can check it out yourself. I won the $5 million jackpot just a couple of hours ago. Took about a hundred thou in cash.”

  “And this is the first thing you’re spending your new wealth on?”

  He shrugged. “The room was comped.”

  Felicia looked a little unsteady on her feet. She swallowed her drink in one gulp, coughed, and put the glass back in the sink. When she spoke again, her voice had gone hoarse. “I’d have to make a couple of phone calls to clear my schedule and make sure the agency can cover me, but sure. Why not? Let’s have a road trip. It’ll be fun.”

  He grinned, feeling goofy. “I must say, the idea of being chauffeured that far by a beautiful woman really turns me on.”

  Felicia coughed. “Honestly, dear. I already got that.”

  SIX

  FRANK’S NIGHT, already well into extra innings, went into additional overtime even as he reached the elevator bank on Yorick’s floor. He pressed the down button not once, but four times, rat-tat-tat-tat, betraying the common misconception of the aggravated person who has fooled himself into believing vehemence can make the car come faster. He also immediately felt the frisson of self-disgust that so commonly afflicts those who treat elevator buttons in this uncalled-for fashion and stepped back, as if in denial that he would ever think of doing anything like that.

  His evening was not improved when a familiar voice said, “Having a bad night, Frank?”

  Oh, God.

  If there was one element of hotel design that Frank had never understood, it was the insistence among certain establishments to decorate the elevator bank of every floor like a talk show set, complete with easy chairs separated by coffee tables. The first time he’d seen this arrangement a few years earlier, he’d wondered if anybody ever really devoted a nice leisurely sit-down to staring at elevator doors. Since then, the practice had become de rigueur of every establishment above a certain Zagat rating. He had always thought if people staying on this floor want to sit down, why don’t they go to their rooms? If they want to hang out in public, why don’t they go down to the lobby? Are they so determined to observe the comings and goings of their fellow travelers that they’re willing to sit and stare at elevator doors, perhaps the least entertaining objects this side of the common loading dock?

  It had, honestly, always baffled him.

  Now he understood. Those chairs were there solely for the comfort and convenience of people stalking other people. As such, they made perfect sense.

  He didn’t turn around. “Monica. What a surprise. Are you planning
on staying there all night?”

  “No,” she said. “Were you planning on inviting me to your room?”

  The elevator light dinged, going up, and the doors opened, revealing a cute little thing with feathered blonde hair, a black leather skirt just barely long enough to qualify as legal, wide-mesh fishnet stockings, a leather jacket that reached only as far as her third rib, a white silk blouse, the most adorable little button nose, and eyes like the sky in the morning. She twinkled her eyes at Frank and proceeded down the hall. He thought nothing of it and let the doors close. It wasn’t going his way.

  He said, “The guy doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Which guy are you talking about? My husband? Is that the sound of you admitting that he’s a client?”

  Against his will, feeling like Lot’s wife must have felt even as she turned to face the miracle that would forever turn her into salt, he faced her. She was sitting in the oversized easy chair, her legs crossed, the one on top bobbing gently. Her eyes were wide, her smile almost sympathetic enough to qualify as concerned.

  “No,” he said. “Yorick.”

  “Ahhhh. You’re very protective of your clients, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not saying he’s a client,” Frank said.

  “And yet you fly all the way to Vegas just to fix his mess. What a fine friend you are.”

  “I’m not saying he isn’t a client, either.”