VII
Hidden at first in the stack of newspapers is a plain white number ten business envelope like the one I received yesterday in the MCI Concord lobby when I was bailed out. This time the name that is typed on its face is different:
CHET SPIRO
CHARLES HOTEL, SUITE 777
It is also thicker than yesterday’s envelope. Instead of five twenty-dollar bills inside, there are fifty fifties. $2500 in cash, a little bit more of a stake than I got yesterday. And credit cards. And a driver’s license with my birth date, the name Chester Turner Spiro, and a photograph that suggests me, but is not exactly me. Amy takes the license from my hand and holds it up to the natural light entering the room from above the Charles River out toward Boston Harbor.
“Close enough for government work, but I think it looks more like John Malkovich.”
“That’s Bruce Gibbs.” It is eerie, because he seems to have groomed himself to look as much like me as possible for this photograph.
Amy lifts the license above her eyes again and gives the picture closer scrutiny. There are three pieces of plastic: an American Express Platinum card in the name of Chet, a Netbank Visa debit card in the name of Chester, and a PayPal MasterCard in the name of C.T. Spiro. There are two other documents, one a passport and the other a handy printout with the user identification and password key information for the financial accounts, a social security number for Chet, and even Google user and email account information for the screen name CTSpiro@gmail.com.
“Jesus, what’s all this?” I ask.
“Looks to me like a free pass,” Amy answers with a combination of wonder and authority.
The suggestion hits home. I leave the cash and credit cards lying on the bed and walk back to the full-length window. It is a window that does not open.
“A free pass. To where?”
“I guess that would depend on you. And on what you find when and if you log on to these accounts.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, where you can run to depends at least in part on how much money you have, doesn’t it?”
“Or where I want to go.”
“Yes. What are you thinking?”
“Well, we’re about five miles from my house. That’s where I have to go.”
“Stanley.”
“Rachel and Sam. They are my life. It doesn’t matter how much money there is. I’m not going to run.”
“Stanley.”
“There’s no such thing as a free pass. I could run half way around the world and every morning I would wake up with a hole in my heart, out of touch with the people I love and knowing I had failed Mary Kate. I would never feel free.”
“What? How would you be failing Mary Kate?”
“Come on, Tuckerman, don’t play dumb with me. You’re the one who called it a sacred trust.”
“Yes, I did, but a lot of water has passed under the bright since last night. Can we take a look at what would happen if you don’t take the free pass?”
“I’m listening.”
“If you make any contact with Diana and the kids other people are going to notice. Do you think this Paula woman wants her fifteen minutes to be over? People get very nosy when somebody’s name gets dragged through the mud, and remember: this whole business of an apparent suicide is only going to increase everyone’s certainty that all their worst suspicions of you are true.”
“Just like OJ’s freeway ride with AC.”
“Bingo. All it would take is for one nosy neighbor to dime you out and the state would be taking a much closer look at those dental records that Bruce Gibbs apparently hacked his way into. You would be right back in the position of having to defend yourself in court, and the weight of everything lined up against you would have increased exponentially. Even if Diana and Rachel did believe you, your legal defense would be a long way from being a slam dunk, precisely because of everything that has happened since you were released on bail. The first thing that would happen to you is that you would be hauled back in front of Judge McArdle for another bail hearing, and she would be pissed. Your chances of getting bail would be zero, between the fact that they would throw a whole set of child sex charges at you and the fact that they would be trying to figure out who the hell got toasted in your car and what you had to do with it. All roads would lead to a murder indictment. They would slap you with it whether or not they actually like you for it, because piling on is what prosecutors do. They can’t help themselves.”
“Murder. You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“What did Bruce Gibbs say? That he was going to help you now?”
“Yeah. Gee, thanks, Bruce.”
“So you end up back in jail with Christopher Reardon and his ilk, and I would be out here rooting around without any money trying to find you a decent attorney. Diana and Rachel might believe you and they might not. For starters, the only evidence you would have pointing to Bruce Gibbs for framing you would be this letter that anybody could have typed. And if they did buy it, that you believed Bruce Gibbs had framed you, it’s just one more nail in your coffin on a possible murder rap. Assuming it was him committing suicide in the car last night.”
“This hasn’t been a very good week.”
“So let’s at least go across the street to Kinko’s so we can see what ol’ Bruce has done to booby trap Chet’s identity for you.”
“Is it open yet?”
“I think it’s always open.”
An hour later we are finished at Kinko’s. I follow Amy’s strong suggestion to stay away from any of my own – Stanley Branford’s – old accounts, despite a compulsive urge to examine the incriminating bones of my old life. I can’t help but entertain the morbid thought that this might be my last chance to inhabit my own skin, but the last thing we want to do right now, Amy persuades me, is to stir up any new movement on, or interest in, that dead old trail.
There are no indications of any further booby trapping. The Chet Spiro Google account is new, but apparently Bruce Gibbs improvised some sort of relay device so that e-mail messages that land in the Chet Spiro mailbox at the Transcript are also turning up here. So I have fan mail, or to be more precise, Chet has fan mail. Some of it expresses disappointment that I apparently missed a week with my column without any warning. I had forgotten all about this responsibility, probably for the first time in my life, even though the column was all written and just waiting for me to click it and send it from home on Friday morning so it could show up in Saturday morning newspapers all over the country. It is on my home computer, which I do not anticipate ever seeing again, since it is now, most likely, somewhere in Daisy Hamill’s office.
I worry that the unposted column is a trail that will lead the authorities back to me if I try to disappear as Chet Spiro, but it is only a vague worry, since the Word file does not include any identifying last names or anything concrete enough to lead them to me unless they were looking for it already, which of course depends on Crocker Talbot and his underlings at the Transcript.
My much greater worry, or angst, is the guilt that is seeping through my brain as the likelihood increases that I am about to seriously consider taking on Chet’s identity completely and in the process, apparently, abandon my family. How can I even contemplate this course of action? I would prefer to simply stonewall the reality dosages that Amy is trying to administer to me. I remember being impressed by a Clint Eastwood line in a movie where he played a thief who was being hunted down by the villainous government after a burglary blew up in his face when he witnessed a murder involving the President of the United States. Actually it was a line spoken to Eastwood’s character rather than by him: “I never thought you would be the type to run,” meaning he was not the type to choose flight when faced with a tight fix. I would have defined myself similarly until now, not that I would ever have expected to be faced with this type of tight fix. So I hate this – it is just one more way in which I feel as if I am encountering the loss of myself as a recognizable human being – but I am having trouble seeing another way.
Chet appears to be in very good shape financially, based on what I find in the online accounts to which Bruce has directed me. The Netbank account is a combined checking and money market savings account with an aggregate balance of more than $3.7 million in it, and all of the money seems to have originated from the sale of securities that were placed in the account in certificate form in Chet’s name, the old-fashioned way, so they do not have other online fingerprints on them. Everything else about Chet’s account appears to be impeccably legitimate, with Chet’s social security number as the registration and no apparent ties to any other accounts held by me, Bruce Gibbs, or any other person living or dead.
“It looks like Chet Spiro is as pure as the driven snow,” says Amy.
“Yes, I should be thrilled, right?”
“Well, lots of people would kill to have what you’ve got here. Three million bucks, not ties or obligations to anybody, a brand new identity. It’s like the false ending of every John Grisham plot.”
“They can have it. I just want my old life back.”
“No can do, Chet,” says Amy.
Amy calls Wick from the hotel suite at 8:30 to cancel their breakfast appointment. Her call wakes him, so he has yet to see the paper.
“I’m sorry, Wick. Rain check,” she says. “You’ll understand when you see the papers.”
After a pause she has to explain that a “rain check” means that they can have breakfast some other time, but not today. “Trust me, you will understand. Just look at the paper. Bye, bye, now, sugar.” She hangs up. Actually I do not see Wick ever having breakfast with Amy.
“Okay,” I say when she is off the phone. “I am beginning to get this. I have to rent a car and drive somewhere.”
“You don’t want to stick around here so you can witness your own funeral?”
“I have a feeling it would be pretty damned depressing. Nobody would know what to say, not that anybody would show up. Not to mention it might not be the safest place for me to hang out.”
“No doubt. Any idea where you might drive?”
“I’m kind of thinking Canada.”
“Big place. Lots of moose.”
“Quebec City. The Chateau Frontenac.”
“Oh?”
“It’s where Mary Kate and I went for our honeymoon. It just kind of feels like the right place for me to be right now.”
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