Fake Alibis

by Frank Sibila

  “This is Vanessa,” Monica said. “I’m with Frank.”

  “Tell me you’ve got your problems straightened out,” Felicia moaned. “They’re all talking about a pilgrimage to the world’s biggest aluminum foil ball, and I’m not sure that my heart’s capable of dealing with all the excitement.”

  “No worries. We’re set. Except that you have to head back to Vegas, arrive two days from now, and rendezvous with us at a location we will provide to you sometime tomorrow. Everything will be settled then. Everything.”

  “Thank God,” Felicia said fervently.

  “And one last thing. This is a deal-breaker, girlfriend. Whatever happens from now on, don’t have sex with George. Cocktease him as much as you want—indeed, feel free to work him up into the finest lather you possibly can—but don’t actually seal the deal. Is that clear?”

  Felicia was doubtful. “That’s pretty much where things have been heading, but … are you sure? His head will explode.”

  “That,” Monica said, grinning at Frank, “is straight from the big man himself. All will be explained. In the meantime, have a nice drive.” She hung up the phone. “A little favor to Yorick’s wife.”

  “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it,” Frank said. He surprised her then by taking her right hand, lifting it to his lips, and bestowing a sweet, gallant kiss. “Two days from now. Ballroom to be announced. Get formal dress. I’ll call you.” And then he disappeared down the same concourse that had delivered him, his gait not just jaunty, but downright celebratory—the walk of a man who not only knew where he was headed, but trusted in a large crowd to head there with him.

  Monica had rarely seen an exit so perfect. Zorro couldn’t have done it better.

  Several minutes later, when her cell phone lit up again, its message window displaying the caller ID KEITH, she actually spent a heartbeat wondering, Keith who?

  TWELVE

  IF YOU’RE ONE OF THE THIRTEEN HUNDRED members of the International Cat Bed Designer’s Association based out of Minneapolis, the number one event in your professional calendar has always been the organization’s annual convention, which is called that even though it’s not held every year, but rather every other year, on the grounds that the convention’s never been all that great. Imagine a full day-long symposium on the benefits of fleece and you pretty much get the idea.

  This year the so-called annual convention, held at the you-guessed-it Excalibur in Las Vegas, began with the usual opening speech by a Dr. Engelbert Smalls, beloved in the organization for his innovation of sewing ticking clocks into the lining of kitten beds, a process based on the truism that kittens just love sleeping near ticking clocks, as it keeps them from getting too lonely in the middle of the night. It ended with Dr. Smalls’ exhortation to Enjoy Vegas and his announcement that an unknown benefactor and cat fancier had just invited the entire membership of his convention to a catered reception with an open bar, free entertainment, and a five-thousand-dollar door prize. He did not mention that Frank Sibila had slipped him an honorarium for mentioning it.

  Stewing in first class on his way to what he hoped would be the ultimate confrontation with his total bitch of a wife, Keith Custer could think of nothing about how incredibly, unbearably, awfully, unprecedentedly unfair this all was.

  He took a sip of the latest of a series of scotches and analyzed the whole thing, so he could explain it to Monica and get through to her. He was sure that if he could line up all the facts and present them in a rational and reasonable manner, she would finally understand what he was all about.

  The thing was, this was the thing, you see. The thing. The thing, you know, was that he wasn’t one of these other pathetic schmoes you see running around, the ones who spend their entire lives being locked inside a box and thanking their keepers for an occasional spoonful of oatmeal fed through the slot. (Metaphorically, of course.) He was a free being, an adventurer, a guy who was, like, well, this was the thing, so busily living life that he wasn’t just seizing it with both hands but also using a funnel to store big gobs of it away in his pockets. (Metaphorically, you see.) He wasn’t, like, weighed down with rules, like all of those other schmucks, the ones who got their johnsons locked up in little steel cages and were so happy for the opportunity to romp in the exercise yard once a while that they never noticed the chain-link fence and the guards in the watchtowers sweeping Block A with searchlights. (Well, maybe that was too much of a metaphor.) The way he saw it, the way he saw it, you see, the way he saw it, the important thing to remember, was that he wasn’t like one of those other woozers. He was too big to be contained. He was, like, a man’s man. And he kind of understood why this placed him in conflict with Monica, because his overpowering sexual energy sent out a signal, of sorts, one that frightened her so much that she felt the instinctive, unthinking—and all those other womanly adverbs—urge to control that which she would never be able to reduce to her own level.

  Keith was not too drunk to understand that there were a few problems with this theory, among them the fact that his formidable wife scared the living snot out of him and the awareness that if he ever really tried to explain these self-evident truths to her in those terms he would probably end the conversation flat on his back with a blood geyser for a nose.

  But the point was a good one. This being the point, you see. A man has needs, dammit. A man has needs.

  “Excuse me?” This from the woman across the aisle, in first class: a tall, statuesque redhead wearing a big floppy hat and wrap-around sunglasses so voluminous that only her button nose and purple lips emerged as evidence to what she looked like.

  He gave her an uncertain bleary gaze over the rim of his plastic cup. “What?”

  “You’ve been speaking out loud,” she said, using a flip of her hand to establish the hostile glares on the faces of their fellow first-class passengers. They were all displaying Keith the affection they would have shown an ambulatory tumor that had just gnawed its way out of a more respectable passenger’s chest. “You said, A man has needs.”

  At this point, Keith had a choice between denial, contrition, humiliation, and arrogance. At a different point of his life he might have chosen any of the first three; he was sufficiently irritated by thoughts of this state Monica had driven him to, to plunge head-first into obnoxiousness. “Got a problem with that, lady? It’s true.”

  The passengers around Keith gasped in unison, like courtroom spectators after the judge has leaped up to confess to the crime.

  The tip of an eyebrow peeked over the woman’s heat-shield sunglasses. “I’ve finished my book.”

  “What?”

  “Marley and Me. All about the worst-behaved dog in the world. It was funny and heartwarming and filled with human feeling, but I read the first two-thirds in the terminal while waiting for the flight, and now it’s over. Now I have nothing else to read, and I’m bored. Exceptionally bored. Not bored enough to talk to myself, but bored.”

  Keith blinked. “I’m sorry.”

  “I hate planes,” she said. “I can feel the engines vibrate right through my seat.”

  More blinks. “That’s a problem.”

  The woman with the two hubcap-sized sunglass lenses pursed her lips, as if in deep consideration of the exchange rates between New Zealand and Burkina Faso. Then she took a sip of her own drink, which Keith hadn’t noticed, and slipped out of her seat, with a feline grace that permitted the operation to take place without disturbance of the tray-table. (Keith would have sworn that impossible.) She moved like a coiled spring, and she headed toward the back of the plane, avoiding the perfectly good pair of bathrooms just a couple of rows ahead of her in favor of the distant promise of relief some thirty rows back. About the time she passed the wings, Keith imagined he heard the engines skip one rotation out of sheer awe.

  You see, Keith told himself with infinite sadness, this is the thing. This is what he had to make Monica unders
tand. He had gotten where he was today, by seizing his opportunities. Not for him to add those words Richard Nixon had once claimed to have been just outside the quotation marks of a morally questionable suggestion he’d made on tape: “… but it would be wrong.” To hell with that. Fidelity? For a man like him, a man who kept being handed opportunity, on silver plates with the whatchamacallit, you know that silver dome the room service waiters whip off and say “walla” with, that, my friends, oh yes, that, would be wrong.

  Keith Custer swept his gaze over his fellow first-class passengers. They all glared at him, even the baby, who drooled, and seemed to resent him as much as everybody else. But, you see, here’s the thing. He didn’t care. He saluted them smartly, stood, adjusted his belt, and loped toward the rear of the plane.

  One of the ladies said, “Isn’t somebody going to do something?”

  “Wait your turn,” Keith Custer hiccupped.

  The red convertible driven by Felicia Starlight and bearing a supremely frustrated George Yorick pulled into the Bellagio at mid-afternoon, Felicia looking profoundly frizzy and Yorick looking exactly like a guy whose erotic getaway had turned into an exercise in taking thousand-dollar call girls on pointless road trips into the desert and back. He was grinning, but that may have been the effect of wind shear on his cheeks. Her expression was significantly more complicated, but suggested murder.

  “Well,” Yorick merely babbled. “That was enjoyable. We ought to do it again sometime.”

  Felicia’s head swiveled on her perfect neck, positioning her eyes for a look of such focused laser-like irritation that a more intelligent man would have felt his own boiling brain matter bubbling down the back of his neck.

  Yorick was only smart enough to sense that he might have offended her in some way. “Ummuna,” he suggested. And then, “Hey, I enjoyed myself. Really. You’re a nice person.”

  Felicia Starlight was not the stereotypical hooker with the heart of gold. She put all her money into the commodities exchange and liked to say that she owned more ham than the rest of the world combined, Israel excluded. Under non-professional circumstances, the description of herself as a nice person would have driven her to convulsive hilarity. She was not a “nice” person. It’s more accurate to say that, after dealing with George Yorick for several days, and accumulating an entire band of merry idiots along the way, she was a saint. Her smile was not complicated. Think the shark in Jaws. “Thank you.”

  “Can I have my check back?”

  She was still holding the check the Excalibur had written Yorick for winning the jackpot. “No point in it, honey. You still don’t have any ID. You couldn’t cash it anywhere if you tried. I’m gonna need to hold on to it until the Boss says it’s okay.”

  “When is he gonna say it’s okay?”

  “When I ask him if it’s okay.”

  “So,” Yorick said, with unassailable logic, “if all you gotta do to get his okay is ask him if it’s okay, then the okay is inherent in the question and should not be subject to you asking, so we could just take the permission as implied. Besides, it’s my check.”

  “George.”

  “What?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get out of the car.”

  “Okay.”

  He got out, and as she sped away spent several additional seconds blinking in the bright Vegas sunlight before shrugging and going back inside to gamble away the rest of his cash.

  You wouldn’t believe us if we reported the crazy siren wails that announced his precise position in the slots casino within twenty minutes of him sitting down, so we draw a curtain over the proceedings before explicating that tantric moment. We note only that there is a certain karmic benevolence that watches over a certain species of fool, that it is as beyond rational explanation as the tendency among smart women like Monica to marry men like Keith. It happens. It just does. The Twilight Zone is not involved.

  Felicia rubbed her forehead as she entered her condo, which was Tchotchke Central, specializing in cats. Cats, cats, everywhere, of every variety but the meowing: ceramic, crystal, pewter, water-color, oil, animation-cel, stuffed, and in one case freeze-dried; they peered at her from a thousand separate locations, their slitted eyes suggesting either adorability or thorough creepiness, depending on the saturation point of the observer. This was a personal quirk worth remarking upon because, while she adored having several dozen of their graven images in sight, no matter what that line of sight might be, she absolutely loathed the animal. Hated it. Would have drop-kicked any meowing furball any asshole chose to leave within her personal space, unless it was laminated.

  The only trouble this cognitive dissonance caused her, in life, was the occasional nightmares caused whenever tricks of the light caused phantom movement.

  As in Ohmigodohmigodohmygod that one’s moving aieeeeeee—oh, never mind, that’s just a shadow cast by a truck that went by outside with its brights on.

  Returning from her pointless Moebius Loop of a journey into the desert with Yorick and Urich and company, Felicia was sufficiently shell-shocked to impart sinister, knowing intent to each and every one of her immobile faux-felines, more so when she checked her answering machine and found a perturbed message from her agency, which had checked with the famous Frank from New Jersey and found that he hadn’t been to town in weeks, let alone sent any of their girls on any secret missions. Not particularly surprised, she collapsed upon the couch with an impact worthy of a plunge off a balcony, and returned the call.

  “Sophisticated Promotions. Shaquita speaking.”

  “Hey, Shay. It’s me.”

  “Felicia? Where the fuck you been?”

  Felicia rubbed her forehead. “You know that Johnny Cash song, ‘I Been Everywhere’?”

  “Johnny Who?”

  “Cash.”

  “He someone new?”

  Felicia kicked off a clog, too hard. It arced across the room and collided with a porcelain Siamese, shattering it. “Never mind. Listen, I’ve been on a mission, of sorts. Still am, ’til I straighten out some shit. Won’t be available for calls ’til I take care of same.”

  Shaquita sounded dubious. She always sounded dubious, but sounded a little more dubious. “The other day you said you were working for Frank.”

  “I was. Frank from New York Frank.”

  “Don’t you mean Frank from New Jersey Frank?”

  “No, I’ve never met Frank from New Jersey Frank. This is Frank from New York Frank.”

  “There are two?”

  “It’s been causing some confusion.”

  “Does Frank from New Jersey Frank know about Frank from New York Frank?”

  “Frank Sibila,” Felicia said. “The answer’s no. Hence the shit I have to straighten out.”

  “You lead an interesting life, girl.”

  “Goodbye, Shay.”

  “That’s all I get after all this? Goodbye?”

  “For now.”

  “Jesus, Girl.”

  “Shay—”

  “Okay.”

  “All right. Bye.”

  Felicia hung up the phone and kicked off her other clog, which described an arc just as violent as the first but miraculously passed between representations of yawning cats and struck the wall without damaging any.

  She slipped off her clothes and went to the bathroom, which was another gallery of simulated felines, complete with an assemblage of cat-shaped soaps: sleeping cats, head-tilting cats, kneading cats, curled-hoping-for-a-belly-rub cats, arched-spine cats, all scented and all strictly-don’t-touch, with the exception of the one calico with semi-liquefied head that had been reduced to that condition by an in-call client incapable of following directions to leave the decorative soaps alone and use the liquid in the clearly visible pump bottle (Jesus). (T
hat silly son of a bitch had spent the last five minutes of his one-and-only visit screaming that he hadn’t meant nothing by it, as he ran around the sofa dodging heavy objects tossed by Felicia, who deeply resented the murder of one of her babies.) Leaving the temporary cell she’d been provided by “Veronica” by the side of the tub, lest it ring and either fix everything or complicate her life further, she set the water to a temp at that delicate border between luxurious and scalding, poured in some bubbles, and slipped into the massaging soup.

  Time passed, as it has a habit of doing.

  The phone rang. She yawned, reached out with one belathered arm, and plucked the cell phone off the toilet seat where she’d left it. “Hello.”

  “I’m downstairs.”

  “You alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m in the tub. Look, I’ve never met you before and don’t know what kind of man you are. But I don’t want to get dressed. Can I trust you to not want any sex?”

  A bemused pause. “Would you actually take my word for it?”

  “Normally, no. But right now I’ve reached my saturation point, and I’m going to trust my instincts. Besides, I’ve told my agency I’m expecting you. Can I trust you to not want any sex?”

  The bemused pause became a bemused chuckle. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come back later?”

  “Look, I know you want to get this crap out of my life as much as I do, so just answer the goddamn question. Can I trust you to not want any sex?”

  After a moment, her caller said, “Want? Always. Expect? No. Demand and get pissy if I don’t get? Absolutely not.”