The Guise of Another

by Allen Eskens

  “It's nothing more than going to the next step. Why should Tiller have a problem with that?”

  Alexander looked at Max with a sideways glare. “You're kidding, right? If Tiller had his way, I wouldn't be wearing a badge right now. I'd be on leave with the rest of them. I mean one year ago Tiller would have ordered me to go to New York, but now…I'm getting so tired of this shit.”

  “You just have to wait until things blow over.”

  “But I didn't do anything wrong.”

  Max tucked his shoulders up under his ears. Alexander had just opened the door to the conversation Max wanted to have, and now he hesitated before walking through it.

  “What?” Alexander said.

  Max took a sip of beer as he organized his thoughts and then said, “How close were you with Detective Rivas?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I have my reasons. How close were you?”

  “You know we were partners on the Task Force. What about it?”

  “When's the last time you talked to him?”

  Alexander narrowed his eyes and tilted his head like a chess player questioning his opponent's move. “I talked to him the day before they searched our houses. We went home at the end of our shift—as normal as can be—said see you later and went home. The next day, the Feds came busting in with a search warrant and…well you know the rest.”

  “And they searched Rivas's place before they came to your house.”

  “You'll have to ask them. What's with the interrogation?”

  “I just want to clarify something, that's all. Consider this preparation for your grand-jury testimony. So they searched Rivas's place and found a stolen car in his garage—”

  “You mean a forfeited car,” Alexander said.

  “The Feds aren't going to split hairs, Alexander. Rivas took that car off a drug dealer. Had he locked it up in impound and filed the paperwork for a forfeiture, then, yeah, it's not stolen. But if he keeps it, they'll consider that stolen.”

  “That's the point. When they searched Rivas's place, they found a shitload of stuff: TVs, guns, cash. When they searched my house, they found nothing. That's because there wasn't anything stolen at my house.”

  “So you didn't talk to him the day he got raided?”

  “That's what I said.”

  “Were you surprised when the FBI showed up on your doorstep with a search warrant?” The words dropped hard and cold and put a chill between the brothers.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You heard me,” Max said “Were you surprised to see them?”

  “Hell yeah I was. What'd you think?” Alexander squirmed in his seat and paused to take a swig of beer. “I'm minding my own business when all of a sudden all these FBI agents come flying up my driveway. I thought I was under attack.”

  “What about the phone call from Rivas?”

  Alexander looked into Max's eyes as though he were trying to read the fine print. Max stared back with steel in his eyes. “Who told you?” Alexander said.

  “So Rivas did call you.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Rivas called you while they were searching his house. The FBI has his phone records, Alexander. They know that he made that call to you. What did Rivas tell you?”

  Alexander rubbed the lines on his forehead and said, “Rivas just wanted to warn me…so that I could get Desi out of the house. Rivas heard one of them on the radio saying that another team was on their way to my house. He only called me so that I could spare Desi.”

  “But you see what it looks like, don't you? They're going to say you didn't have any property at your house because Rivas tipped you off. Christ, Alexander! You know how this works. You've been trained on these interrogation techniques. They'll lead you through your story then start to disassemble it in reverse. They'll give you bits and pieces and let you tangle yourself up trying to explain. They'll get you to tell a dozen little lies about things that don't seem important, but in the end it'll destroy your credibility. No jury will believe you.”

  “I won't be lying because I didn't do anything wrong. If I'd been stealing stuff like Rivas was, I couldn't have cleaned house in the ten minutes between his call and the feds showing up.”

  “They don't need to get you for stealing. They could be setting you up for perjury. You just told me that you didn't talk to Rivas since the day before he was arrested. That was a lie. If I can trip you up this easily, what do you think a good prosecutor will do to you?”

  Alexander gripped his beer bottle like it was a chicken that needed strangling. His eyes narrowed, staring at the center of the table. Lines creased the frame of his jaw and his forehead. “If all they have against me is a phone call, I should be done with that grand jury by noon.”

  “We don't know if that is all they have. You don't know what—”

  “That's just it Max. I do know. I know that they have nothing on me because I didn't take anything. Every single item I seized in my arrests went to the evidence room and got logged in. I'm not Rivas. I never took forfeited property home. They can pore over my reports until hell freezes over. They're not going to find anything because there's nothing to find. You hear me?”

  “Whoa, Festus. I'm on your side, remember?”

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “Look, I'm going to be straight with you. The folks investigating this thing seem to think that Rivas's phone call to you is important. You tell me it's nothing…then, fine. It's nothing. I bring it up because I'm trying to help you out.”

  “You want to help me out? You can help me get to New York.”

  “So put in for the travel voucher. It's the logical next step in the case.”

  Now it was Alexander's turn to pick at the label on his beer. “I don't think I have the clout to get a travel voucher right now. If I go to Tiller with this Putnam case, he'll pull it and give it to someone else. Maybe he'll say it's a homicide case now and not fraud.”

  “It's not a homicide if you haven't got a body. No one knows if the real Putnam is alive or dead.”

  “Yeah, but he'll say that identity theft is not a big-enough deal to justify a trip to New York. He'll say we should get New York cops to look into it.”

  Max took a drink of his beer and pondered Alexander's argument. He had a point. If this were a murder case, Tiller would send a homicide detective—or have a New York investigator take it up. If this were simply identity theft, why send a fraud investigator all the way to New York, especially one who stood under a cloud of suspicion. “This might turn out to be homicide,” Max said. “But as we sit here, all we have is identity theft. When you think about it, how much priority will New York give an identity-theft case from Minnesota? We approach Tiller with the argument that if you don't go, the case might fall through the cracks.”

  “I know that there's something going on here, Max. If I can get to New York, I'll turn over every rock until I figure out what happened to Putnam.”

  Max nodded his head as the last part of the argument gelled. “I got some clout with Tiller,” Max said. “He owes me a favor or two from the old days—before he got sober. I'll pull some strings and get you to New York.”

  “You get me to New York, and I'll find James Putnam—dead or alive.”

  Night had fallen by the time Alexander walked into his house that evening. Desi was already in bed, propped up with pillows, a laptop on her thighs. Alexander leaned against the doorjamb at the entrance to the spare bedroom. “How was your day?” he asked.

  She looked up from her computer for only a second and said, “Same old, same old.” No flicker of affection, and no hint of a guilty conscience. Alexander felt the air grow thick and cold around him. A knot twisted in the pit of his stomach. He pursed his lips and nodded his head slowly. She had answered the way he expected her to answer—the way she had been answering his entreaties for three months.

  He put his hand into his pocket and twisted the tie clip in his fingers. He started to pull it out, b
ut stopped. He envisioned her coming up with a rift of plausible stories to explain away what he believed. Confronting her now, before he had irrefutable evidence, ran against his training. Springing the snare too early will only scare the prey into hiding. He decided to tack around the subject for now.

  “I might be going to New York,” he said.

  Desi took her eyes off her laptop and looked at him. “You're doing what?”

  “I have a case that needs some follow-up in New York City.”

  “When?” Her question conveyed no discernible interest.

  “If I can swing the approval, probably in the next couple days. I'd love it if you went with me.”

  She looked away, not like a woman contemplating an answer, but like a woman who knew the answer but stumbled on whether or not to say it. “Alexander, I have a million things going on at the office. I can't just up and leave like you. Why didn't you say something about this sooner?”

  “I didn't know about it sooner. It just came up today.”

  There had been a time, and not all that long ago, when she would have pulled him into the bed and screwed his brains out—all the while talking about the crazy time they would have in New York City. That part of their lives had succumbed to a death that Alexander didn't see coming until long after it breathed its final breath.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  Alexander sighed. “I don't know…two, maybe three days. I could postpone it a few days and we could go this weekend.”

  “No. Don't postpone anything on my account. I really can't get away right now.”

  Desi returned to her computer and started clicking at the keyboard. Alexander waited for her to say something, and when she didn't, he started to turn but paused. The image of the stranger with his arm around Desi froze him, and he turned back to her. “Desi, I know these past few months have been hard on us. But that's why we need to go away together.”

  “How will that change anything?” she said. “When we come back you'll still be who you are.”

  Her words cut him deeper than he thought they could. He tried to say something, but nothing came out. His expression must have conveyed the depth of the wound because Desi began to backtrack.

  “I didn't mean it the way it came out. But with the investigation and the articles in the newspapers, and everyone talking…that's not going to change by us going to New York. That'll all still be here, waiting for us when we get back.”

  “We could at least escape it for a couple days.”

  “There's no escape. It's with me every minute of every day. I walk down the street, and I wonder if people are talking about me. I can barely bring myself to walk into the office every day. You have no idea how hard this has been for me.”

  “For you? I'm the one going before the grand jury. How is this suddenly about you?”

  “You know what I mean. I just think a couple days apart might be a good idea.”

  Alexander, again, found himself without words. Had she been thinking about being apart from him before he said anything? How else could she come to that opinion so quickly? He thought back to their wedding day and the way she cried as she said her vows. How had they gotten from there to here?

  “For better or for worse,” Alexander mumbled.

  “That's not what this is about.”

  “Then what's it about?”

  “I've never been in a situation like this before,” she said. “This is all new to me. I need some time to process things. I need time to know what to think.”

  Alexander didn't say anything. He wanted to say that it had been three months. For God's sake, how much time did she need? He wanted to ask her how the man in the nice suit fit into her plan to process things. But he didn't speak his mind. Instead, he simply said, “I understand.”

  Alexander walked out to the kitchen just to get away from her. There, he noticed Desi's purse on a nearby countertop. He stepped over to her purse and peeked inside. Her phone lay on top of a jumble of personal grooming items. He slipped two fingers into the purse and eased the phone out.

  He could hear Desi tapping away on her laptop. He listened carefully for any change in the patter of her typing as he woke up Desi's phone. He accessed her call log and wrote down every phone number that Desi had called or received a call from over the last twenty-four hours. He turned the phone off and put it back in the purse just as he found it.

  Then he opened up his laptop in the living room and logged in to their joint cell-phone account. He pulled up the call information and compared the numbers online to the numbers he had copied from her phone. The first two calls matched, but then he found a number that appeared on the online account that had been deleted from her phone. As he read further, he found the same number deleted three more times. Alexander didn't know the name of the man in the nice suit, but he was willing to bet that he now had the man's phone number. He wrote the number down and closed his computer.

  Alexander Rupert landed at LaGuardia Airport a little before 10 a.m. on a brisk October morning. He had been right about Commander Tiller not wanting to authorize the trip, and Max had been right about his pull with Tiller. The commander had raised every argument that Alexander and Max expected, and they countered each one in turn. In the end, Tiller capitulated. Their conversation took place on Tuesday, and Alexander booked a flight for first thing Wednesday. Tiller made it clear that if Alexander wasn't back in Minnesota by Friday, he would consider that grounds for discipline.

  Alexander took his bag to a hotel in Brooklyn, dumped it on the bed, and tossed a coin into the air—heads, he would go to Red Hook, the neighborhood in Brooklyn where James last lived; tails, he would go to Manhattan and Pace University, where Putman had been a student. The coin landed on heads.

  Alexander took a cab to the address in Red Hook where James Putnam received his letters from William. The cab ride descended from a quaint village, where artists and the upwardly mobile mingled in street-front cafés, to a section of the city full of boarded-up warehouses and weed-covered lots. Despite pockets of sanctuary here and there, it was clear to the casual traveler that the neighborhood had suffered its share of neglect, making it the kind of neighborhood where a struggling college student might be able to afford an apartment.

  The cab stopped at the address, a three-story apartment on a corner lot with brown, painted brick. Alexander paid the cabbie and walked to the entrance, finding a locked door with a corroded panel of security buttons. He ran a finger down the list until he found a name with the word “super” tagged behind it. He pushed the button twice before getting a voice.

  “What?”

  “Um…hello. My name is Alexander Rupert. I'm a police detective, and I would like to ask you a few questions about a former tenant.”

  “You a cop?” The voice, a thick rasp that could have been a man or a woman, crackled through the parched intercom.

  “Yes. This will only take a minute,” Alexander said.

  He heard the person inhale and sigh. “Hang on, I'm coming.” Alexander got out his Minnesota badge—although it had no more power in New York than a kid's plastic sheriff's star—and waited for the super to arrive. After a few seconds, the door creaked open, held by a hefty woman with short, black hair and a yellow sundress that matched her yellow, wool socks. Alexander held out his badge, hoping she wouldn't look at it too closely. She asked, “What can I do for you?”

  He put his badge away. “I'm trying to find someone who used to live here—a guy by the name of James Putnam.”

  “What'd he do?”

  “Can I come in…Miss…?”

  “Call me Shirley.” She backed away from the door, allowing Alexander to step in. “That name doesn't ring any bells. Are you sure you have the right building?”

  Alexander set his briefcase on a radiator and pulled out the file with the letters from William Putnam to James Putnam. He showed her the address. “Apartment 24. This would have been back in 2001.”

  “Apartment twenty-four.” She
raised an eyebrow. “There was something…”

  “You remember him?”

  She passed Alexander a patronizing smile as though he should know better than to ask such a stupid question. “I've only lived here since 2003. This guy you're looking for was long gone before I came here. That unit used to be the only furnished apartment. I remember because the super before me gave me a file that had a letter in it. I think I still have it.”

  She invited Alexander into her apartment, a clean, cool space with simple furniture and a light scent of vanilla. She went to a filing cabinet next to her computer desk, opened a drawer, and thumbed through the files. “Here it is.” She pulled a letter from a thin folder and handed it to Alexander. “My predecessor told me to keep the letter as proof that the tenant gave up the furniture.”

  Alexander read the letter, the same basic message that had been sent to William Putnam, typed on the same paper and signed by the same hand, but with an extra paragraph telling the landlord to keep the deposit and the furniture and all his possessions because he wouldn't be coming back for them.

  “Just up and left,” Alexander said half to himself.

  “That the guy you're looking for?”

  “That's him,” Alexander said.

  “He in trouble?”

  “I am afraid that it might be too late for that. Do you happen to have a copy of his lease?”

  “Not from that long ago. I only held on to the letter because I was worried about him showing up to take back that furniture.”

  “Are there any residents who lived here back then?”

  Shirley thought for a moment. “The only two who've been here longer than me are Mr. Prodrogsta in unit nine and Mrs. Tobias in eleven.”

  “Would it be okay if I go ask them a few questions?”

  “I'm not going to stop you.”

  “Can I keep this letter?”

  “Sure,” she said. “If cops are looking for him, I suspect Mr. Putnam has more to worry about than coming around here to pick up his old furniture.” Alexander thanked Shirley for her help and showed himself out.