Like to Die

by David Housewright

  The rational part of Christine’s mind told her to quit, told her that a lot of people had student loans and got by just fine. It told her to concentrate on her daytime job, make more of an effort, work herself up into a management position. But the dark side that she had tapped into when she returned to Sheridan Road after Averill’s death wouldn’t allow it. It was as if she were trying to punish herself. How else could she explain why she had subjected herself to a second date with Grollman, one that had left her both physically bruised and emotionally shaken? It might have been role-playing for him, yet it was real enough to Christine.

  That’s when Carson Brazill approached her.

  He was older than Christine by about fifteen years, which made him young compared to the men she had been seeing. Plus, he had an easy charm; there was nothing desperate about him, which was something else that was new to her. He asked if she had ever considered a life of luxury and deceit. It was an old Rodney Dangerfield line, something from one of his movies, and there was a time when it would have made her laugh. Only now she didn’t think it was particularly funny and told him so. Brazill said that was the response he was looking for. He said he knew about her relationship with Averill Naylor and with the other men she met on Sheridan Road; he said he knew everything about her, which Christine discovered weeks later to be untrue. He didn’t know her real name, for example. Christine asked him what he wanted. He said he needed a partner. Five hundred dollars an hour, she said. Not that kind of partner, he said. What, then?

  “Lenny Grollman—we’re going to fuck him up.”

  Christine liked that idea very much and asked him what he had in mind. Brazill told her she merely had to endure one more rendezvous with Grollman, only this time there would be audio, there would be video. Blackmail, she guessed. In a manner of speaking, he said. What was in it for her? Ten thousand dollars. Again her rational mind tried to warn her, telling Christine that ignoring whatever else she had been doing up till then, this was a real crime; she would be a real criminal. Looking back later, she was shocked by how quickly she said, “Okay.”

  The last time Christine saw Grollman in person was when he was leaving a hotel room with a tourist’s view of Grant Park. He was upset that Christine wouldn’t stop weeping after he took her and said he didn’t think this relationship would work out; she didn’t have the proper attitude. She would, however, see Grollman’s photograph in the newspapers and his image on TV in the coming weeks as an alleged sex scandal forced him from his position on the Cook County Board of Commissioners—Christine hadn’t even known he was a commissioner. The sex scandal was “alleged” because it was something that anonymous sources whispered to the media; no details and no names were reported except for the name of the hotel on Michigan Avenue where Grollman’s assignations were supposed to have occurred. Certainly Grollman didn’t explain his abrupt resignation except to say that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

  A short time later, the Board of Commissioners approved a real estate development along the North Shore by a head count of nine to eight. Grollman’s replacement had cast the deciding vote. On a previous ballot, Grollman had voted against the development.

  Shortly after that, Brazill approached Christine again, this time with a small bag filled with the promised $10,000 in cash and a job offer.

  * * *

  “Have you ever heard of Murder Incorporated, McKenzie?” Erin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know that it was an enforcement arm for organized crime in the thirties and forties. How it worked—if a boss needed someone killed in, say, St. Louis, he would contact the Commission in New York. If the Commission approved, Murder Incorporated would be given the contract. It would send a hit team to St. Louis to execute the contract while making sure that there was little or no collateral damage to both civilians and the local police. The killers were paid a regular salary as well as an average fee of $1,000 to $5,000 per killing. Their families also received monetary benefits. If the killers were caught, the mob would hire the best lawyers for their defense. Murder Incorporated killed a couple of thousand people before it was finally exposed.

  “I learned during my meeting with Carson that he was a dues-paying member of the Outfit and that the Outfit had been so delighted with how well he had handled the Grollman situation that they agreed to let Carson assemble and manage Blackmail Incorporated—that’s what I called it. I don’t think it had a real name. Instead of killing their opponents, the Outfit tasked the group with finding nonlethal methods to compromise them—to get them to see things their way, if you know what I mean. Either that or frame them for some misdeed or another that would render them powerless to oppose the Outfit’s plans, whatever they might be. Carson wanted me to join his team. At the time, I was also so pleased with what had happened to Grollman that I said yes.”

  * * *

  Christine was surprised at how much fun it was, especially in the beginning. Typically the marks they targeted were smart—politicians, prosecutors, police officers, businessmen and women, journalists, even clergymen. Many of them also had people around who were looking out for their interests. That meant, for the most part, they were not susceptible to something simple like the badger game; they were not going to allow themselves to be lured into a motel-room tryst and then extorted. Only the long con would do, and that required preparation and research—something that Christine had always excelled at, one of the reasons she had become an economist. Blackmail Incorporated would scrutinize their targets with great intensity to learn their weaknesses, and then she and Brazill would create a character to exploit them that Christine would invariably play.

  * * *

  “I doubt Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett ever prepared for a role as meticulously as I did,” Erin said.

  * * *

  Each role Christine performed was different because each mark was different. Yet they were all based on real people. If the character needed to be well versed in anthropology to appeal to the mark, Blackmail Incorporated would scour the alumni records of various colleges and universities until they found a woman with a degree in anthropology who fit Christine’s general age and appearance, and Christine would then claim that identity for her own. If a mark or one of his people checked with the school, the school would say yes, of course, Ms. So-and-So graduated on a certain date with a bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in such-and-such. More often than not, that was as far as the background searches would go, the marks deciding if one thing was true, then all of Christine’s story must be true. If they did look further, at her job or family history, for example, Blackmail Incorporated would have salted the internet with enough social media evidence to cover that as well.

  For the duration of the con, Christine would become a different person—a New England Brahmin, Southern Belle, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, California Golden Girl, soft or hard, flirtatious or shy, pious maiden or promiscuous minx. It distracted her from what she had become so drearily, a woman without illusions.

  * * *

  “Should I tell you the secret, McKenzie?” Erin asked. “The secret is that you never, ever approach the mark. You make the mark approach you. You make it seem as if it’s all his or her idea. That’s how I justified myself. If the marks had kept their distance, if they had just said no, nothing bad would have happened to them. I told myself they had brought the misery on themselves—like I had.”

  “You said you hit rock bottom.”

  “I didn’t have an epiphany, if that’s what you mean. There wasn’t a specific moment when I saw myself for what I was and vowed to change my life. It was more like a general ache, a kind of throbbing pain that filled all of my days when I wasn’t working, when I wasn’t pretending to be someone else. I kept replaying the scene where Averill’s granddaughter thanked me for bringing happiness into his life. I hadn’t brought a moment of joy to anyone else since, not even to myself, and it was eating me alive. McKenzie, I lived in the gutter for so long …

>   “Finally, one morning, I got into my car, my rental car—we were working a mark in Raleigh, North Carolina, of all places. I got into the car and drove away. I didn’t tell anyone; I left no notes. Carson must have thought the mark had made me and took steps to protect himself. That gave me some extra time. I knew Carson would come after me when he discovered the truth.”

  “He said you have something that belongs to him.”

  “I’m sure he sees it that way, but the thing is—we were skimming, McKenzie. The Outfit would ask us to compromise a mark in order to convince him to appoint a certain person to a certain commission or support a specific candidate for sheriff or drop charges against one of its people or, I don’t know, plant a story in the Chicago Sun-Times; something like that. But we also took money. The Outfit didn’t know about that, though, the money. We had kept it all to ourselves. When I left, I took half of the cash we had collected, $680,000 and change. If I had known Carson was going to be such a prick about it, I would have taken it all.”

  I pulled the cell phone and battery from my pocket and gave them to Erin.

  “Put that back together,” I said.

  “McKenzie…”

  “You can make sure the GPS is turned off, but I need the phone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can never remember anyone’s number, that’s why.”

  Erin did what I asked. I took the phone, unlocked it with my thumb, and scrolled to my phone contact information. I tapped the icon for her business because Nina often leaves her cell in her bag when she was working. A woman’s voice said, “Rickie’s, how may I help you?” I recognized the voice.

  “Jenness,” I said, “this is McKenzie. Let me speak to the boss.”

  Half a minute later, Nina said, “Are you all right? I’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone keeps sending me to voice mail.”

  “I’m fine. Why have you been trying to reach me?”

  “You have that sound in your voice.”

  “What sound?”

  “That serious sound you get when you think I might be in trouble.”

  “Why were you trying to reach me?” I repeated.

  “You told me this morning that you were being followed, remember? Well, there’s a man sitting at the bar nursing a Heineken. All he’s been doing for the past thirty minutes is watching the door—and me.”

  “Describe him.”

  She did. It was the wool coat that clinched it.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. Don’t go near him, and don’t leave the club.”

  “Are you coming over?”

  “No. I’m too far away and heading in the opposite direction. I’ll send somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll know him when you see him.”

  “McKenzie, should I be afraid?”

  “No. The man in the wool coat is there to frighten me.”

  After saying good-bye, I ended the call and used my thumb to find another contact on my phone list. I tapped his icon. He answered after two rings.

  “McKenzie, what?” Herzog said.

  “Nina’s at Rickie’s. So is Levi Chandler.”

  “’Kay.”

  “Herzy?” I said.

  He was already gone. I returned the cell to Erin, who promptly took the battery out.

  “We could go back,” she said.

  “We will go back, just not right now.”

  “If they’re threatening Nina—I don’t want anyone hurt because of me.”

  My inner voice knew the truth. If it comes down to a choice between Nina and Erin, that’s a trade we’ll make in a heartbeat. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

  “Finish your story,” I said aloud.

  * * *

  Christine went on the run. It wasn’t a particularly difficult thing to do if you knew how. After all, there’s a reason why the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list hardly ever changes.

  Christine knew you never tried to fake your own death. They had a name for that—pseudocide—and it brought out cops and volunteers and dogs and news crews and helicopters and questions about your remains. Faking sent up emergency flares.

  She knew that you never tried to create a false identity, either. It might work for the short term, the length of a long con, for example. Yet it would never fool the cops, FBI, or customs agents. And if you shelled out the bucks for a black-market special complete with Social Security number, you might find yourself buying someone else’s bad debts and arrest record. Not to mention that the black-marketer probably sold the same ID to a dozen other people as well.

  Instead, Christine knew that to disappear successfully, you needed to diminish the shadow you cast. You kept your identity, but you hid your location. You melted into the crowd—no sports leagues, no social clubs or networks, no Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, nothing that said, “Look at me.” You never snuck home to try to reclaim some of what you left behind. You never Googled yourself to learn what people were saying about you. You never visited the sites where information about missing persons was stored, because cops and skip tracers could be waiting to capture your IP address and trace your location …

  * * *

  “Oops,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s how Brazill must have found me. I looked up Christine Olson on the missing persons page of the Illinois State Police website.”

  “I asked you not to research me, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you did it anyway. You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “Now I feel bad.”

  “I hope you do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Damn, McKenzie…”

  “The pics that were posted on the website—they weren’t of you.”

  “Carson must have provided them. He doesn’t want anyone to find me but him.”

  * * *

  Christine had a plan. It involved leaving bread crumbs for Brazill to follow. She would make a phone call from Nashville, six months later send an email from Oklahoma City, and six months after that accidentally bump into a member of the Outfit she knew in Dallas. Slowly, meticulously, she led Brazill across the country. Finally she made it known that Christine Olson was working in a restaurant in Sierra Vista, New Mexico.

  * * *

  “Best salsa I ever had,” Erin said. “The owners of the restaurant made it themselves. I stole the recipe.”

  “Of course you did,” I said.

  * * *

  By the time Brazill and his people arrived in Sierra Vista, however—poof—Chrstine had disappeared, leaving evidence that she had managed to cross the border into Mexico. That’s where the trail went cold until some self-important kibitzer decided to play detective.

  * * *

  “I said I was sorry. Besides, if you hadn’t used the name when you went to visit John Ripley from Central Valley International, I wouldn’t have even thought of Googling Christine Olson.”

  “Nonetheless…”

  * * *

  Erin Peterson moved to Minnesota because the Outfit had no presence there; it was highly unlikely that she would ever encounter someone who knew her from her previous life. It was difficult at first because she had lived so long under the name Christine Olson that sometimes she didn’t respond to her own.

  * * *

  “Erin Peterson is your real name?” I said.

  “Yes. I was born and raised in Naperville, Illinois. You can look it up. I was able to use my own birth certificate, my own Social Security number, and my own passport again. But just to be sure I was safe, I adopted the identity of a woman who majored in horticulture at the University of Wisconsin. She left after her junior year, so I had to as well.”

  “She went back and finished her degree.”

  “Good for her. But you see why I manipulated the facts the way I did. I had to salt my personal story with enough information that if anyone had checked, they would think I was her. It’s also the reason
I invented Salsa Girl. This way the real Erin Peterson could hide in plain sight.”

  * * *

  So far, so good. Except it would be difficult for Erin Peterson who had a degree in economics from Northwestern to get a job while pretending to be Erin Peterson who had an incomplete degree in horticulture from Wisconsin. Fortunately, Erin Peterson had a plan fueled by her ability to create fact from fiction, a recipe for the best salsa she had ever eaten, and well over half a million dollars in cash.

  Using the skills she had mastered as Christine Olson, she made herself familiar at the clubs and social meccas where Minnesota’s elite gathered. Eventually she identified the perfect mark—Randy Bignell-Sax. He thought he was smart but wasn’t, thought he was irresistible to women, which was also untrue, and was needy because his family had turned off the money tap.

  * * *

  “I lucked out with him,” Erin said. “At least I thought I did. Randy was a ditz, but he had an important name, one that nobody would question. He was also easy to manipulate. I pretended to give him the money that he pretended to loan me, and I used it to create the first production plant that made my salsa. I put his name on the building so his parents would be proud. When my salsa started selling, I pretended to pay off the loan. In exchange for his assistance, I gave Randy ten percent of the net profits. That guaranteed he would keep my secret; the man needed the money. Plus there was the fear of being arrested for aiding and abetting money laundering and tax evasion. The fact that he was able to help me gain access to Minnesota Foods was a bonus.”