Fake Alibis

by Frank Sibila

  His throat had gone dry. He cleared it with a cough and managed, “Well, ummm … good luck with that.”

  “Luck is for rabbits,” she yawned. “I’m going to nap now. Be a dear and wake me up when we’re about to land.”

  Frank actually let her sleep through the landing several hours later, but that didn’t do any good. She was between him and the aisle, and the only way to escape without her noticing would have been to levitate. Her success at intimidating him could be best measured by the long heartbeats he spent wondering whether there was a way to manage it—if there could possibly be a graceful and dignified way to either leap over her or scramble over the seat in front of him.

  Instead, one kind curtain drawn over that dilemma later, he found her strolling beside him in the airport, trailing her rollaway like a dog on a leash as she happily chatted away about all of her other vacations to Vegas. She rambled on about the Cirque du Soleil shows she had enjoyed, about the inside straight she had successfully pulled, about the lions at the MGM, and about dangling a thousand feet over the street in the teeter-totter on the roof of the Stratosphere. She was gay, ebullient, even delightful, though her conversation was one-sided and the subject matter veered from “Oh I love this city; I’m going to have such a great time” all the way down to “I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds; prepare to be annihilated.” Halfway through the terminal, he excused himself and ducked into the men’s room, musing even as he did that it was a rare woman capable of making two separate men try this same dodge in the same day. If nothing else, acquaintance with Monica Custer accomplished wonders for male regularity. Frank didn’t even have to fake it, as Keith had, though he did deliberately spend more time in there than he needed to in the vain hope that she would give up and toodle off out of impatience. But it was all for naught. When he emerged, she was there waiting for him, all concern and empathy, wanting to know if he was all right.

  The taxi provided more difficulties when she tried to get into the first available car with him. “We’re not sharing,” he told her.

  She emitted an airy laugh. “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’ll be silly if I want to,” he said. “We’re not sharing.”

  A pout for the benefit of the long line of onlookers. “But I want to check into the hotel. I’m horny.”

  The cabdriver, who had gotten out to help them with their luggage, was a fireplug of a man with semicircular shoulders and jowls that folded accordion-style as his head spun around to watch the argument ricochet between participants. “Mister, if you don’t want them with you in Vegas, you’re supposed to leave them at home.”

  Frank threw up his arms and addressed the multitudes, who were beginning to boo him. “I don’t even know this woman!”

  She drew close and clutched his lapels, speaking her next line with her lips a few centimeters from his nose. “That’s not what you said last night … stud.”

  Oh boy. Aware by this point that pushing her away might get him lynched even in this town, he exercised a little deft man-fu and evaded her embrace completely, darting into her blind spot and remaining behind her even as she pivoted on her heels, looking for him. “I don’t know this woman!” he cried. “I don’t want this woman! I need to escape this woman!”

  “But, Frank, I love you….”

  Frank fled around the rear of the cab, keeping the vehicle between them. “You’re not getting into my cab and that’s final!”

  The next cabbie in line, a gaunt young white man with shoulder-length scarlet dreadlocks, approached her and said, “Use my cab, ma’am. We’ll follow him. We won’t let him lose you.”

  “That’s so kind of you,” she said, turning one last time to address the scowling crowd. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into him today. All I did was tell him he’s going to be a daddy….”

  That did it. The crowd’s hatred for Frank was now virulent and absolute. Someone among them threw a Coke can, and not an empty one. It missed Frank’s head and punctured when it hit the pavement, a needle-thin stream of escaping soda forcing the can into such a furious spin that it was if the carbonated beverage despised him as much as the people at the curb did.

  He ducked into the back of the cab, pushing his overnight bag before him, half expecting the entire playlet to turn into one of those dire third-world situations in which the ambassador’s limousine is rocked back and forth by rioting locals.

  The fireplug of a cabbie shrugged, said something indistinct that raised an enthusiastic cheer from the onlookers, and squeezed behind the wheel, taking more time than strictly necessary to get comfortable against the beaded abacus of a backrest. It all turned out to be a delaying action, though, because the first thing he did when he was finished was turn around and confide, “Y’ask me, you’re making a big mistake. You ain’t gonna find a more devoted, more beautiful woman than that, even in this town.”

  “Probably not,” Frank said. “But there’s an extra twenty in it if you lose her.”

  The fireplug looked genuinely displeased by this, but he shrugged again and addressed the wheel, pulling the cab into traffic. Behind them, Monica’s cab quickly followed, trailed by the cheers of the onlookers urging her on to victory.

  They hadn’t even left airport property before they were both stopped at a red light. Frank knew without looking that Monica’s cab was directly behind his, that the angry eyes of her dreadlocked cabbie were burning holes into the back of his head, and that she was in the backseat waiting for Frank to turn around so she could grin adorably and wave. The main reason Frank knew all this without looking is because he did not dare to look to confirm it. Determined as he was to avoid being rattled by her, he nevertheless got the impression that making eye contact at this juncture would turn him into a pillar of salt.

  Frank’s cabbie said, “You got a destination in mind, or is this all about the journey?”

  Frank thought about it and realized he had a problem, one that hadn’t occurred to him, as he’d somehow never had to shake a tail until now. Fly into most major airports anywhere in the world, and you have a bit of a drive before you get downtown; there’s room for maneuvering, if that’s what you need to do. But the Vegas airport is right there at the end of the strip, a perfect convenience for visitors who would rather not sit sweating in traffic before rushing into their casino of choice to start losing little Bobby’s college fund. What’s worse, the specific casino Frank needed to go to, the Excalibur, was one of the very closest. Frank could have traveled the distance on foot had he wanted. His cab couldn’t escape Monica’s without a catapult.

  But there was no reason he had to get there right away.

  He picked a local destination at random. “Hoover Dam.”

  The cabbie all but whirled. “You can’t jump, mister! You got everything to live for!”

  FOUR

  SEVERAL HOURS OF FRANTIC RUNNING around Vegas later.

  The Excalibur squats at the extreme end of the Vegas Strip, surrounded by nicer casinos, more expensive casinos, and casinos whose upstairs hallways don’t make your nose itch. Walk down the street, and you have the cool elegance of the Wynn and the Bellagio. The MGM and the Wynn and the theme-park places like New York–New York and the Parisian are all within easy traveling distance. These are all nice places, all comfortable places, all places designed to render you, the visitor, complicit as you loot your bank account and turn savings that once amounted to a respectable number of zeros to as few as one of them.

  The Excalibur, if ever in their class, is not anymore. Built to resemble a medieval castle, glowing bright and magical in the middle of a sea of neon, it now retains all of the other attributes of such ancient structures, including must. A casual walk through the playing floor exposes the budget traveler to carpet that has not only absorbed every ambient odor but also become a key element of them. The atmosphere may be antique, but that’s just another way of saying that the air feels
old. Wherever you look, there are places where the fantasy has failed, where the wallpaper has peeled, if not in actuality, then at least in conception.

  Walking down the fifth-floor hallway after hours of hitting half a dozen casinos in what had eventually turned out to be a successful quest to leave Monica behind, Frank could only wince at the feel of his shoes thudding on carpet that felt like it had known too much cigarette smoke and too few shampoo treatments and think that this was the place George Yorick had chosen for the single wildest spree of his entire adult life.

  Alas, poor Yorick.

  Frank had been looking forward to an opportunity to amuse himself with that joke and was now happy that he’d gotten it out of the way so he wouldn’t have to do it again.

  Frank had never met Yorick before. The client intake had taken place over the phone after an Internet connection precipitated by Yorick’s coworker—gee, there was that name again—Keith Custer. Those five minutes of conversation had been enough to establish Yorick as the kind of guy so dedicated to always coloring inside the lines that, even if handed a blank sheet of paper to color on, he would have first sought somebody else to draw lines on it for him. Under the circumstances, his little “business trip” to Vegas, which Frank understood to be the first and probably last fling of his married life, probably hadn’t required an alibi at all. Given his personality, any woman married to Yorick for any length of time at all would have trusted him to the extent that he could have come out and told her that he’d taken a vacant room inside a brothel where he had $2,000 worth of house credit and not given her one moment of worry that any part of him would ever twitch a millimeter with temptation, whether deliberate or autonomous.

  No, as far as Frank was concerned, the alibi had only been in place as a license for Yorick to relax a little during a spree that Frank had been ninety percent certain would amount to nothing more than the man sitting in his hotel room, the sex listings open beside him on the bed, his hand reaching for the phone every thirty seconds or so but pulling back as if repelled by tremendous radiant heat. Frank looked at the alibi as a medical expense of sorts, there to prevent Yorick from keeling over from massive myocardial infarction. He hadn’t expected Yorick to hook up with anybody, though now that he had, the result seemed to have been not one millimeter more fortunate than expected.

  His impression of Yorick was not improved by his first sight of him at the threshold to his hotel room. The last thing Frank had done before leaving his office was call the Excalibur and pay its rack rate to get Yorick back into the room, where he was instructed to get some sleep and stay out of trouble. Yorick, bless him, came to the door in a white T-shirt and oversized blue boxers, wearing the pale, exhausted look of a man who had spent the last ten hours being pursued by ninja. He was the foreground figure in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with less self-confidence. The only light in the room behind him came from the TV set, playing something with a laugh track. The ambience was blue and flickering.

  Frank said, “Mr. Yorick?”

  Yorick said, “You’re not here to arrest me again, are you? I’m not that guy.”

  No, Frank thought, you’re sure not. “I’m Frank from Fake Alibi.”

  “Frank.” Yorick blinked. Then, with feeling, “Frank!” The moment came perilously close to a hug. “Frank! My God! Frank! Whoa! Frank! I can’t believe you made it, Frank!”

  “I made it,” Frank said.

  Yorick clapped him on the shoulders. “I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!”

  After the night he’d just endured, Frank was in no mood for this. “Mr. Yorick, you can either accept the evidence of your senses, or you can assume this a remarkable full-immersion hallucination brought on by the great time you’ve had so far. May I please come in?”

  At that precise moment, a young Japanese woman wearing a beret, a belly shirt, and tiger-striped Danskin leggings just large enough to avoid being as tight as her tattoos, strolled by, noting Yorick’s presence and his relative state of undress without thinking much of either. Yorick watched her pass and seemed to realize that he was in no sartorial state to be standing around looking forlorn in dingy hallways not his own. “Oh, sure,” he said, stepping aside and actually having the nerve to add, “Mi casa es su casa.”

  Frank rolled his eyes and followed him in, identifying the show on TV as Two and a Half Men. A fine choice of programming for those trapped in Vegas and forced to watch sitcoms after midnight. “Have you had any more trouble since we last spoke?”

  “Nope. Haven’t even been out to eat.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  Yorick spread empty hands. “Not since dinnertime yesterday.”

  “Why not?”

  “No money.”

  Frank winced. “You could have ordered room service or gone downstairs and charged something to the room.”

  Yorick said, “You told me to stay.”

  “This isn’t the Federal Witness Protection Program. I would have understood if you left to get something to eat.”

  “I didn’t know I was allowed,” Yorick said.

  “Coloring inside the lines again, eh?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Frank had a momentary image of George Yorick left standing in a strip mall parking space, equidistant from the painted white lines on the pavement, told that they constituted a maze and abandoned to starve because his skills at problem solving were not equal to finding his way out the one open side. There’s an old joke about a fellow so literal-minded that he uses the entire bottle of shampoo by following the directions, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” He had one up on Yorick, so hapless that he’d keep going to the store and buying new bottles so he could continue the process indefinitely. “It’s all right,” Frank said, in a spasm of pity not unlike what he would have felt for a wounded puppy. “We’ll go downstairs and get you something to tide you over while we’re figuring this out. This hooker who stole your money—where did you find her?”

  Yorick started pulling on his pants. “She wasn’t a hooker.”

  “You found her on the street, didn’t you?”

  “No. We had dinner in a very nice restaurant, hit it off, and decided to come back here.”

  “Who approached who?”

  “I called her and made a date.”

  “So she’s an escort.”

  “No,” Yorick insisted. “She’s a blind date.”

  “A blind date you order like a pizza and then pay for is an escort.”

  “I know that,” Yorick said indignantly. “This was a blind date.”

  “How did you hook up, then? Personal ad?”

  “No. We were set up by a mutual friend.”

  Frank said, “Who?” But the answer came to him so quickly he provided it at the same time Yorick did. “Keith Custer.”

  “That’s right.”

  Rubbing his forehead, wondering why he hadn’t just listened to his mother and become a dentist, Frank said, “So let me see if I can figure out the rest. He gave you her cell phone number, told you she was a good sport who’d take you to the moon and back in exchange for an edible dinner and drinks afterward. He said the two of you would really hit it off, no strings attached, because Lord alone knows you’re the kind of guy a woman like that gets hot for. He told you it was a sure thing, talked it up until you were half crazy, and put you on a flight to Vegas eager for a weekend out you never would have considered in your life were it not for your best buddy whispering the temptation into your ear. Is that about the size of it, Mr. Yorick?”

  Yorick had finished donning his pants and was now studying his reflection to make sure every hair was properly stuck to his scalp. “It wasn’t like that. He said she was very sweet. And she was, until we got back here and she slipped me the Mickey.”

  “The Mickey, Mr. Yorick?”

  “Isn’t that what it’s called
?”

  Now that Yorick had retrieved his pants, the room’s desk chair was free for use. Or should have been. In fact, it was already occupied. Frank was a little surprised to discover that this was because he was sitting in it himself. “May I ask you another question, Mr. Yorick?”

  “Sure. But stop calling me Mr. Yorick. I’m George.”

  “Thank you, George. Is your wife good-looking?”

  Yorick blinked several times in rapid succession before opening his wallet and handing over a small photograph of a redhead with a dazzling smile, freckled cheeks, and eyes as green as emeralds. She had one of those faces you couldn’t help but fall in love with, at least a little. And the kind of body that Keith Custer would go nuts for.

  Frank took the photo, looked at it, nodded, and handed it back without comment or even any notable change of facial expression.

  He thought, I’m going to kill him.

  Destinii never slept.

  Look, seriously, you’re going to have to accept some things in life even if you don’t want to, and one of them is that if you know somebody with some silly ass name like Destinii, then you’re not going to avoid sentences that sound like the titles of paperback thrillers or mid-sixties rock albums.

  Frank had long since grown accustomed to the sound of his own voice speaking sentences not intended as portentous that nevertheless emerged as pronouncements from God, like “Destinii’s working overtime today,” or, “Destinii’s on the job,” or Frank’s all-time favorite so far, spoken by Max one fine morning when Destinii was being especially cryptic, “I know Destinii’s talking to me, but I don’t know what she’s saying.” You honestly can’t be the friend or coworker of somebody named Destinii without having those kinds of things pop up in conversation. Honestly. Try it sometime.