Here She Lies (17 page)

Twenty minutes later we were out the door and in an-other taxi on our way to Twelfth Night, an Internet cafe on Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue—the third one Bobby had called and the first one that was open all night.

The street outside was so quiet, it was a surprise to find the cafe as full as it was. About twenty men and women sat alone at tables with their laptop screens glowing in the barely lit space. Some typed furiously, others pecked, and a few sat staring at their screens.

Everyone here was alone, busily absorbed in their personal space, surrounded by crushed newspapers, open books and chunky white mugs dripping coffee, tea, cocoa down their sides. Except for the two young men behind the counter—one skinny and spike-haired, the other shaved bald with a massive beard gathered in a frontal ponytail—Bobby and I were the only two people who were in any way together.

Most had brought their own laptops, but there were also five computers bolted down on a shelf against one wall. Three of these were available. We went to the counter to rent one.

“How much time?” Spike-head smiled and all the implied toughness of his hairdo melted away; he was just a kid, probably barely legal. His tight-fitting T-shirt read JOEY where a breast pocket might have been.

Bobby opened his wallet and produced a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m not sure. Can we just pay by the half hour?”

“We don’t do cash after midnight. Credit cards only.” The man-boy pointed to the brick wall behind him, where a handwritten sign repeated his words ver-batim. “We got robbed like three times after midnight this year alone.”

Bobby and I looked at each other. Between us we had no plastic: zero credit cards, zero debit cards, not even a check (though they probably didn’t do checks either, especially from out of state). Then I remembered that I still had Julie’s credit card and driver’s license. I pulled them out of my purse’s interior pocket and handed them over. “Here you go, Joey. And will you put two coffees on that, please?”

“Name’s not Joey.” He looked at me like I was insane to have thought so.

Bobby forced back a smile and I saw us fifteen years later, agreeing with whatever illogic our teenage daughter insisted on. Then I saw other children pop up around us. We
had
to get through this so we could reach that time.

Not-Joey swiped the credit card through the machine and while we waited he compared Julie’s driver’s license photo to my face. When I signed the chit he checked the signatures against each other. Then he handed back the cards along with my receipt.

“Thanks.” I zipped the cards back into my purse.

He checked a notebook, then wrote something on a slip of paper, which he handed to Bobby. “You’re on Number Five. This is your password. The computer will time you, but when you’re done you gotta log out or you’ll keep on paying. I’ve seen it happen.”

“That would be bad,” Bobby politely agreed, sliding me a cynical glance. The kid had no idea.

“You gonna print?”

“Don’t know.”

“Printing costs extra. It’s by the page.” He pointed behind him to another sign reading PRINTING CHARGED

BY THE PAGE. “If you print, we’ll add it on after.”

“Thanks,” Bobby said.

We carried our coffees to the far end of the counter closest to the window overlooking a semidark middle-of-the-night Greenwich Village street. All around us our sleepless noncompanions clicked away and ignored each other. I logged us on and our flat screen sprang to life. Bobby and I were alone in that cafe, in our own little bubble, as we set about searching for answers.

“Here we go,” he whispered.

“I love you, Bobby, for all of this.”

He smiled tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure I’d really said that, then pulled a paperback copy of
Identity
Theft in a New World
out of his jacket pocket and thumbed to a glossary in the back. After a moment of looking he typed the address for Equifax into the browser’s window. The Equifax home page appeared.

One of their products was a “3-in-1” combination of reports from all three of the major credit-rating agencies: Equifax, Trans-Union and Experian.

“That’s what we want.” Bobby clicked on it and a new menu appeared.

He was a little slow navigating the cursor through all the steps, so I took over. We used Julie’s credit card to order a report that promised to show activity on all of Bobby’s and my accounts as recently as yesterday.

In less than a minute our receipt informed us that the report would arrive via e-mail within half an hour.

While we waited I Googled my name to see if any-thing incriminating popped up in relation to my new life as an embezzler. I was listed in only three places: on a federal prison staff directory and on two sites related to photography. Then we Googled Bobby’s name and learned that he was even more nonexistent in cyberspace than I was, appearing only on the staff directory. Lexy’s name brought up nothing (a relief). But Julie—Julie was famous. Her name brought up over ten thousand hits, ranging from her Web site to professional articles to marketing blogs to cyber-dating links.

Seeing the repetition of her name made me sharply miss her and by association Lexy (
always
Lexy) and if it hadn’t been so late I would have tried calling them again. I clicked on a few of Julie’s links, but we were far too anxious about seeing our credit report to really check them out. Every few minutes we maximized my Web-mail page to run e-mail. The usual junk just kept coming in, flying to me like I was a cyber-magnet, everything except the one thing I really wanted.

And then, there it was. Our credit reports came in two separate files: Anais Faith Milliken and Robert Bowie Goodman. We opened mine first.

After my name was my Lexington address (calling our road a lane and with the zip code completely wrong) and my job history (showing me as a therapist, not a
physical
therapist, at the prison and completely omitting my underrealized career as a photographer, which made it look as if I hadn’t been gainfully employed for most of my adulthood, whereas in one way or another I actually had been). Below those blocks of misinformation blared the words FELONY WARRANT.

“Look at the date.” Bobby’s outstretched finger touched the screen.

“That’s last week.”

“
Before
you lost your wallet.” As we paged through the voluminous report it got stranger and stranger. There were Visa and MasterCard accounts with store and company associations I had never heard of, all opened in the recent past. I had never shopped at Neiman Marcus or Harry Winston or bought myself
anything
at Bergdorf Goodman. I had
never
had that kind of money. There were also loans—

loans
I
had never taken. I did
not
own a Jaguar purchased from a dealer in Santa Monica!

The more I read, the more my blood boiled. I started pounding the keyboard so hard as I scrolled through screen after screen of me-getting-ripped-off that a couple of the great American novelists in the cafe turned around to notice me, annoyed. I ignored them. Bobby put his hand on the back of my neck and the warmth of his touch automatically slowed my pulse. I heard his deep, deep sigh. My fingers stopped typing and I turned to him.

“Why haven’t we gotten any of these bills?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been going over our credit reports with a fine-tooth comb, Bobby.
None
of this was there. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Those printouts are two months old.”

“I didn’t realize they’d be wrong so fast.”

“Neither did I.” He shook his head. “If one of us had thought to look this up before you walked out—”

“You were having an affair!” My voice, I realized, sounded hysterical. From the corner of my eye I saw a writer arise and whisper to the bearded man behind the counter. They both glanced our way. I shrugged and pressed an extended finger to my lips in a promise of future quiet.

Bobby leaned in close and whispered as adamantly as a whisper could be: “But I wasn’t!
That
was all part of
this
. Don’t you see it?”

I reared back on my stool. Yes, I saw it. All of a sudden it was very clear: the amorous-looking credit card charges had been signs of betrayal, but not the kind I had assumed. They had been a mere foreshadowing of something far worse. Some thief had not been stealing Bobby—he had been stealing
me
. In secret. He had established credit accounts in our name and made sure the bills never reached us—but why had he put those Lovyluv charges on the cards we regularly used? Had he wanted me to
think
Bobby was having an affair?

But what was his reasoning, knowing we would ultimately learn about the rest?

“What about those e-mails from Lovyluv?” I asked.

“I know I’ve said it a million times, but how did she know so much about you?”

“I don’t know. I’m as baffled by this as you are, Annie. That’s what I’ve been telling you all along.” He was right. The first suspicious charges made more sense than they ever had and the e-mails made as little sense, but somehow they were part of this.

“There are 800 numbers listed with some of the credit cards,” Bobby said. “Let’s start calling them.” He recited a MasterCard customer service number and I dialed. Three a.m. not being peak business hours, there was no wait for the “customer care specialist,” who turned out to be a young Indian man introducing himself as Don. My call had clearly been routed over-seas and normally I might have coaxed him a little, asked him for his real name (Sanjay? Rajeev?) but not now. I told him I had never received a bill for this account and he confirmed that it had been open for nearly two months, generating two monthly bills, both of which had been sent to my home address in Lexington and both of which had been answered with the mini-mum payment.

“But that’s not possible,” I said. “I didn’t make those charges and I didn’t pay those bills.”

“But, ma’am, they have been paid.”

“Can you find out who paid them?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Far off in some other country, his fingers clicked away. “Here it is. You paid them.”

“But it wasn’t me!”

“Do you feel these bills may have been intercepted, ma’am?”

And then I got it. The accounts had been opened in my name, but someone had intercepted the bills before they reached me, which was why we never knew about them.

“I
know
they have been.”

“We can put a fraud alert on your account, if you wish.”

“I wish.”

I listened as he typed some more.

“All right, ma’am. It is done.”

“Thank you. Now can you do something else for me? Can you please read me the bills?” “Every item?”

“Are there
that
many?”

“I will read them.” And he did. And there were.

Dozens and dozens of outrageous charges had been made to this one credit card, things I would never buy in a million years. High-end electronics. Car supplies for the Jaguar. Home furnishings. Expensive hair sa-lons in three different states. Top-of-the-line skin-care products. Men’s clothing. Women’s clothing. When he read off an eight-thousand-dollar charge to a jeweler, I nearly choked.

“Where?”

“Jewelry.com, ma’am. Would you like their 800

number?”

I wrote it down. He read off a few more items, but his voice had become a drone in my buzzing brain.

Eight thousand dollars on jewelry? I had never owned a decent piece of jewelry in my life! I watched Bobby watch me hearing Don list the financial degradation of my (formerly) good name. The concern in my husband’s expression was painful. Bobby Goodman was a practical man; he wouldn’t waste eight thousand dollars on jewelry for me or Lovyluv or anyone else.

When Don got to the end of the list, his voice trailed off as if he were ashamed. I felt it too; there was something almost obscene about such brazen spending.

“Thank you, Don.”

“My pleasure, ma’am. What I mean is—”

“That’s okay. You didn’t buy all that stuff … did you?”

There was silence.

“I’m
kidding
.”

“Oh, I see.” And he forced a laugh. “Ma’am? If I may make a suggestion? You might contact a credit agency and ask them also to post a fraud alert. It doesn’t matter which one, they will share the information.”

“I’ll do it right away.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with today, ma’am?”

Night
, I wanted to cry.
It’s night, not day, and this
isn’t happening to me.

“Thank you, no.”

Bobby went online to find out how to post a fraud alert with Equifax while I dialed the 800 number for Jewelry.com. Being an Internet retailer, it employed a twenty-four-hour customer service center to handle their calls. Again I was routed to India, this time greeted by a young woman whose real name undoubt-edly was not Mary. I asked her to look up the purchase and gave her the date and amount.

“Yes, here it is. Earrings, ma’am. Diamonds. They must be very beautiful. I hope you are enjoying them.”

“I’m
not
enjoying them. I don’t
have
them.”

“Did you purchase the optional insurance?”

“I didn’t purchase anything.” I tried to explain, but she continued to think the earrings themselves had been stolen.

“The credit card may offer insurance, ma’am. You may wish to call the credit card company.”

“I just did.”
Frustration.
But it wasn’t Mary’s fault.

“Just one more question. Do your records show a description of the earrings?”

“White diamonds,” she said. “One carat, round studs in a platinum setting.”

“What address were they delivered to?”

“Let me see.” Fast, clicking fingers thousands of miles away. “It was a UPS store in Lexington, Kentucky, 838 High Street, Ashland Plaza.” I knew the place, I’d passed it, but I’d never gone in.

“Is that the same address as on the credit card?” I asked.

“No, it was not. I am not authorized to release that information. For that, you must call the credit card company.”