Talk Talk (16 page)

She looked harder. Small Sign, very quiet: “No, it is. It is.”

Bridger shook his head emphatically and her eyes went from him to the man in the cap and back again. “Not even close,” he said.

By this point the man had finished with his mail and abruptly pivoted on the ball of one foot to hurry up the aisle toward them, a sheaf of what looked to be bills and a manila envelope clutched to his chest, and she saw how wrong she'd been--even with the sunglasses and the bill of the cap pulled down low, this man was nothing like the one in the photograph. He was older, hair graying at the fringes of the cap, his nose splayed across his face as if it had been molded of clay, lips bunched round a look of eternal harassment. He wasn't the thief. He wasn't Frank Calabrese or whatever his name was. He was nobody. She watched him plunge impatiently through the door and scurry off down the street and still the blood pounded in her veins.

“All right,” Bridger said, swinging her round to face him, “we're going up to the counter now and you're going to be Dana Halter. Okay? You cool with that? Because I tell you, there's no other way.”

She wasn't cool with it. Wasn't down with the program or hip to it or copacetic or even just basically willing, but she let him guide her up to the counter and tried on a smile for the heavyset woman, who gave it right back to her. “Can I help you?” the woman said, and that was easy to read--context, context was all.

“Yes, please,” Dana said, and dropped her eyes a moment while she extracted her driver's license from her purse and laid it on the counter. “I'm Dana Halter?” she said, looking up again. “I just--I don't know, I guess I misplaced my mailbox key...”

The woman was younger than she'd first appeared. She was wearing a pink cable-knit sweater that gave an unfortunate emphasis to her shoulders and upper arms, her skin was pale to the point of anemia and she wore a pair of clunky-looking glasses with clear plastic frames. But her eyes were what mattered, and her eyes were nonjudgmental. She barely glanced at the license and then slid it back across the counter. “No problem,” she said, and her smile brightened, and then she said something else.

“I'm sorry, what?”

Dana saw the woman flick her eyes to Bridger and then Bridger said something.

“She said,” he repeated, speaking slowly so that she could read his lips, “that there is a twenty-five-dollar fee for replacement keys and I said that was okay. Right, honey?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously and holding the woman's eyes, “sure. That's only fair, and I'm sorry--it was my fault, not my fiancé's.” She was elaborating now--lies always required elaboration. “So stupid of me.” She turned to Bridger, playing the airhead, the doll-face, the bimbette. “My bad, honey,” she said. She was beginning to enjoy this, especially the aftershock of the term “fiancé” on Bridger's face. But then the woman said something else and she had to ask “What?” again.

“Number?” the woman was saying. “What number?”

This was what she'd been afraid of--any honest person, any normal person, would have had the number on the tip of her tongue, but Dana didn't have it because she was an imposter--she wasn't Dana Halter at all. Or not this Dana Halter. She felt her lips tighten. For a split second she looked away, averting her eyes like a criminal, a liar, a scam artist, and she struggled to control her voice as she repeated the version of the story she'd rehearsed about this being their second home and how they'd been away and how to her embarrassment--Can you believe it?--she'd forgotten the number. But here was her ID--she thrust the driver's license across the counter again, and dug out her social security card and a major credit card too--and she wondered sweetly if the woman could just look it up in her records?

The smile was gone now and the woman's eyes had lost their sympathy. She didn't look suspicious so much as uneasy--an understanding was awakening inside her and Dana recognized it and for the first time in her life played to it. She stood absolutely still, poised at the counter in the silence that was eternal, and let her eyes do the talking for her. “Yes,” her eyes said, “I'm different,” and it hardly hurt at all to see that this time it was the woman who had to look away.

Aside from the usual glut of flyers and one-time-only offers addressed hopefully to “Occupant,” there appeared to be three or four legitimate pieces of mail in the box. Dana caught the briefest glimpse of a commercial logo on one of the envelopes--was that a bill?--before bundling the whole business up in two trembling hands and willing herself to walk in a measured way to the exit, even turning to look over her shoulder and wave two appreciative fingers at the woman behind the counter. Bridger was waiting for her outside. Together, they crossed the street, careful to look both ways and present an air of calm to anybody who might be watching, and then they were in the car and the mail--Dana Halter's mail--was theirs.

The surprise was Bridger. He was so wound up he actually snatched the bundle out of her hands and began pawing through it, impatiently tossing newsprint flyers and glossy brochures to the floor at his feet. There was an expression of willed triumph on his face, something hard there she'd never recognized before--from the look of him you would have thought he was the one whose identity had been stolen. He came up with the letters--three of them, addressed to the postbox--but it was she who slipped the bill emblazoned with the PG&E logo out of the pile and lifted it exultantly to the light. He might have said “Bingo!” or “Eureka!” but he didn't have to. They both knew what it meant. They had him now. They had their man.

“Open it,” he said.

She could feel the smile aching on her lips. “It's a federal offense.”

“Horseshit,” he said, or something like it. “What about stealing somebody's identity--what kind of offense is that? Open it.” He made a snatch at the envelope then, but she was too quick for him, shifting it to her left hand and secreting it in the space between door and seat cushion. She was afraid suddenly, frightened at the prospect of what was about to be revealed. They were so close. The face of the thief, his mocking eyes, the cocky thrust of his chin, came back to her. So close. Her stomach clenched around nothing, around the remains of the stale croissant and sour coffee they'd got at a gas station hours ago. Bridger said something, terse and urgent--she could feel the force of his expelled breath--but she dropped her eyes and shut him out. He tried to turn her face to him, his fingers at her throat, and she shook him off. Silently, deep in her mind, she counted to ten. Then she tore open the envelope.

The address inside, the service address, stared out from the page, and it gave her a jolt that was almost physical, as if her auditory nerves had been suddenly restored and someone had screamed it in her ear: 109 Shelter Bay Village Mill Valley, CA 94941 Bridger slammed his hand down on the dash and raised his chin to howl in triumph, and then he pumped his fist twice in the air and pulled his lips back to emit what must have been a hiss of jubilation. Context told her what it was: “Yessss!”

The other envelopes revealed little--the first two proved, respectively, to be ads for real estate and equity loans, addressed in a neat computer-generated script meant to mimic human agency and dupe the addressee into opening it. The third one, though, was more interesting. It was addressed to “The Man, Box 2120, Mill Valley, California, ”and inside was a thrice-folded sheet of lined paper torn from a yellow legal pad. A cryptic message was scrawled across it at a forty-five-degree angle in a looping oversized longhand: “Hey, that thing we talked about is on, no problema. See you soon. Ciao, Sandman.”

“'See you soon,'” she read aloud, looking to Bridger.

He had on his wondering look, his features floating across the pale globe of his face like drifting continents. His hair bristled. He ran a hand through it. “Is he going someplace? I mean, Dana, Frank, whatever his name is--is he planning a trip maybe?”

“What's the postmark?”

Bridger turned the letter over. It had been postmarked in Garrison, New York, four days earlier. “Where's Garrison?”

“I think it's near Poughkeepsie,” she said. “Or maybe Peterskill. Maybe that's closer.”

“So what's that--an hour, hour and a half north of the city?”

She shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.”

The sun was on the car and though it was cool enough outside--in the low seventies, she guessed--she began to feel it and turned to crank down the window. When they'd come back to the car, she'd slid into the driver's seat--it was hers, after all, though Bridger had done nearly all the driving to this point--and now she looked out on the quietly bustling street and felt a tickle of emotion in her throat. “What now?” she wondered aloud, and Bridger pulled her to him, awkwardly, across the wheel. They embraced a moment and then he leaned back so she could see his face and the answer there: “We go after him.”

“Us?” Now she went cold, but it was a steadily blowing crystalline kind of cold, and her fear was gone. She made the argument for its own sake. “But what about the police? Shouldn't we just give them the information?”

He gave her a look of disgust. “The police? Right, yeah. And go through the same kind of crap we did back in San Roque? Plus, what if he “is” planning to light out for the”--it took her a minute to catch this--“territories? To”--he finger-spelled it--“Poughkeepsie or wherever? Or what if this isn't even his house?” He didn't blink. Just stared into her eyes, earnest, angry, fired up, all his frustration, his attitude, his “love” come boiling to the surface. But was it love? Or was it just some twitch of the male ego, the need to go mano a mano, the testosterone speaking?

No matter. She wasn't going to think past the moment. She had an address and there was a thief hiding behind it. Even as she twisted the key to turn the engine over and grind the starter--and here Bridger provided the ears for her and the facial expression too--she knew she was going to chase this thing down till there was nowhere left to go.

The fog on the hills had an apocalyptic look, as if it were composed of some fatal gas poised to descend over the trees and rob the breath of every living thing, and yet the sun was still high and vital and the breeze untainted. On another day, in another mood, she might have found the fog a palliative, the cornerstone of the Bay Area's charm, but not today, not now. It was five o'clock. They'd gone to Noah's Bagels for lunch, though she wasn't hungry (or she was, but when the food arrived she found she couldn't eat), and that had given them some time to decompress and think out their next move. Or at least consider it, because they both knew that nothing was going to stop them from driving over to Shelter Bay Village, a mere five minutes away. But then what? Would they confront him? Call 911? Knock him down and bind him up themselves?

What they decided, finally, was to reconnoitre the place (scope it out, as Bridger would say, and she had to assume the phrase derived from “telescope” in some way, but then wouldn't it have been more accurate to say “binoc it out”?), just to see what they could see. Now they were here, in front of a recessed bank of semi-detached redwood condominiums constructed to maximize the views, strolling hand in hand along the gravel path that edged the water in a gently sweeping arc beneath a promenade of palms. And yes, those were binoculars dangling from her neck, and if anyone were to ask, well, she was just another innocuous and slightly dotty birdwatcher, and wasn't that a great blue heron out there? And look at the egrets!

Bridger's eyes were fixed on the deck of the near building, the one they'd identified from the front as #109. Was there movement there? He touched her arm and she lifted the binoculars to her eyes, trying to be discreet. At first she saw nothing, sheets of light glancing off the big flat opaque windows till they went from silver to black, and then she recalibrated and a figure materialized before her, the figure of a woman hovering over a glass-topped table. A young woman. Pretty features, dark hair wound up in a coil at the crown of her head, blue top, black capris. She was wiping down the table, that was it, and now--suddenly, heart pounding, Dana swung the binoculars away and pointed a finger out over the water, as if she'd been tracking the descent of a flock of mergansers--the woman was staring right at her.

Dana felt Bridger's hand go to the binoculars and she let go of them--he was playing the mime too, jerking the instrument back and forth as if following the imaginary birds, but what his lips said was, “Who is that? The wife, you think?”

Still focused on the patch of water that lay just beyond the faded redwood deck of #109, she could only nod. “I guess,” she said. “If this is the right place.”

Bridger's eyes shot to the deck and then went back to the binoculars. “Did you see anyone else? A man? Is “he” there?”

In the end, the tension was too much for her to bear. She gently extracted the binoculars from his grip, let her gaze rove over the surface of the bay a moment, and then swung him round by one arm and led him off in the opposite direction, two bird lovers on the track of something elusive. When they'd gone fifty paces, she leaned into him and they both halted, looking out to the water. “What now?” she asked, and if she could have heard herself--if she were a character in a novel--she might have described her tone as forlorn. Certainly she felt that way. The woman had looked right at her--or had seemed to. There was a face to it now, another face, flesh and blood, dark eyes, dark hair, capris.

Bridger loomed into her field of vision. “I say we ring the doorbell.”

He was right. She knew he was. “Couldn't we just... wait? To see, I mean. If he shows up, gets out of his car--we could see his car and get the license plate...”

“And then what?” His mouth was drawn so thin it was like a paper cut. He was determined, she could see that. A breeze came up then, clean and sweet, and blew the hair across her face so that for a moment she was hidden and what he said next didn't register. But his fingers were there, gently probing, and he brought her back with a sweep of his hand. “Come on,” he urged. “We'll go together. Just ring the bell, that's all. We're visiting. Looking for the Goldsteins. Ask her do you know where the Goldsteins live and just see what happens, see if the son of a bitch is there--maybe he'll answer the door himself, and that's all we need. Just that.”