Eunice was fifty-five years old, a coppery blonde with gray roots that she seldom bothered dyeing anymore until there was at least an inch showing. She was fifteen pounds heavier than when they’d married nine years earlier, and her tits and ass were starting to nose-dive, but when she fixed herself up, she could be passably attractive. The four packs a day she smoked sent her to a spa for regular Botox injections to smooth out the lines and wrinkles, but there was no reasoning with a nicotine addict, especially a hardhead like Eunice, so he’d given up long ago. Anyway, he figured that the world’s best plastic surgeon could never erase her natural scowl lines.
Their “workroom” was what for most people would have been the living room. There was a long table with three computers and mail trays taking up every inch of the tabletop. On the other side of the room was a cheap metal desk with another computer as well as a stack of mail trays, all of them full of neatly catalogued envelopes with current work inside them. Eunice had reserved the table nearest to the window for the machine that she bought online to reencode information on magnetic strips.
She had a genius for recovering information from online public information sources. By no means did runners stealing mail or credit cards accomplish most of her information collecting. And Eunice had acting talent when it came to telephonically posing as a store employee where a purchase had been made, or as a bank employee requiring account information from a gullible bank customer.
He’d watch her with admiration when she’d do her “social engineering” calls, such as phoning the gas company in order to pay “her husband’s” gas bill. She’d ask which credit card he used last time, and the gas company employee would almost always tell her the last four digits on the card. It was childishly simple for her to obtain needed data.
She’d frequently go on MySpace, where she could often learn a woman’s full name along with her year and place of birth. Then she’d contact that city, claim to have lost her birth certificate, and obtain a new one. She’d go to the DMV with the birth certificate and get a driver’s license. After that, she’d claim to have lost her Social Security card, and with all of the identity documents she’d already gotten, a new one would be issued. She could start all of this by just going to websites, doing nothing more than that.
The information that legal entities such as convention centers or cruise lines acquired from customers for access cards that their machines could read often ended up in the hands of Eunice Gleason and others like her. There was much valuable information to be gained from these and countless sources, and yet she was relentless in still requiring old-fashioned hands-on collecting from skimmers that she’d bought and provided. If her husband wasn’t of use to her in this collecting phase of their enterprise, he wondered if he’d still be her husband.
He walked into the second bedroom, where he slept alone, loosened his tie, and entered the bathroom. After urinating, he washed his hands and face and, carefully pulling away the tape holding it in place, removed the silvery wig. Then he opened the medicine cabinet, found the contact lens case, and groaned with relief when he got the pale lenses out of his eyes. He looked at his normal light brown eyes for signs of irritation and squeezed some lubricating drops into both eyes. He took the jowl-enhancing gauze pads out of his mouth and, after brushing back his own gray-brown hair, examined himself. Without the dark shadows and tiny lines he’d drawn so carefully around his eyes, and after losing the wig, he figured he looked thirty-nine years old, although he was actually forty-eight.
When he reentered the workroom, he went straight to a window and opened it to let out some of the smoke that the electronic smoke eater hadn’t removed. Eunice was too paranoid to ever let the shades be raised.
“Hey, don’t let in the hot air,” Eunice said. “The electric bill’s killing us as it is, with all these computers going.”
“I can’t breathe in here,” he said. “Edward R. Murrow didn’t smoke this much. Nor did the Malibu Canyon fires, for that matter.”
“Instead of standing here whining about it, just go in your bedroom and start phoning the college kids. And you got some shoppers to work before you go to bed tonight, so you better get into costume ASAP.” Then she said, “By the way, did you buy another couple of prepaid cells?”
“Yes, I bought more GoPhones,” he said with disgust. “I don’t have dementia yet.”
“How many kids you got for tonight?”
“Two. They both park cars at restaurants and love to act. They’re perfect.”
“Do they look like the faces on the driver’s licenses?”
“Of course they do! You made the damn IDs, didn’t you? Gimme a little credit.”
“Yeah, I made them, but the last time you gave me photos to work with, the little bastard was five years younger in the pictures. Remember?”
“Okay, I shoulda paid attention to the photos he gave me. Gimme a break, Eunice!”
“That kid got busted behind it, Dewey,” she said. “He went to jail.”
“It didn’t come back on us, did it?”
“It’s stupid to get your people arrested,” she said. “It’s bad business and it’s risky, Hugo always said.”
“Hugo!” Dewey Gleason said. “I’m a writer and an actor, not a lifelong grifter like Hugo. And look how that big-shot ex of yours ended up. In San Quentin and nearly dead from emphysema, with a criminal record from here to Baltimore. Anyway, that kid didn’t know who I am or where I live, nothing. So stop worrying.”
“So who were you on that one, Jakob Kessler?”
“No, I think I was the Jew, Felix Cohen, then. I hadn’t created Jakob Kessler yet.”
“You should uncreate him,” she said. “That German accent sounds phony.”
“It sounds just like Arnold!” Dewey said. “It’s an Austrian’s German accent.”
“It sounds phony on Arnold too,” she said. “And that cotton you stuff in your cheeks doesn’t make you look like the Godfather. It makes you look like a man with a mouthful of disgusting food he can’t swallow. Kill the Kraut like you killed the Hebe. Stick with American characters. You’re not actor enough to pull off the accents.”
His jaws clenched and he said, “I can’t do it till I use up the new guys, Creole and Jerzy. They only know me as Kessler.”
“By the way, what happened to the old Polish guy that got pinched in Santa Monica?”
“That’s Old Jerzy,” Dewey said. “He was a parolee. Probably sent back to Pelican Bay or wherever. I use his memory to keep the new team in line.” With a bit of pride in his voice, he said, “They think scary Jakob Kessler had Old Jerzy eliminated because he got greedy. I used some imagination on that one.”
With her iguana smile: “Imagination? That’s so goddamn lame, Dewey. It’s the reason you failed as a screenwriter and as an actor. Kessler’s a walking cliché. Why don’t you face your limitations and concentrate on something you can do?”
Eyes moistening, Dewey said, “You can pull the guts right out of a man sometimes! I put in a ten-hour day already!”
“I put in twelve hours already,” she said. “And you got problems with relationships, take it up with Dear Abby.”
Malcolm Rojas wondered why he’d told young Naomi Teller that his name was Clark. He didn’t have a conscious reason to lie to her, and yet he had. Something deep inside him made him do that, and he didn’t quite understand it. There were lots of things about himself that he did not understand lately, lots of things that he had to do and did not know why. For instance, he did not consciously understand why he’d taken the box cutter home today from his job opening cardboard boxes at the massive home improvement center on Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t for protection. Since he and his mother had moved to the apartment building a few blocks west of Highland Avenue, he’d felt very safe. He’d never felt safe when they lived in Boyle Heights, not in the middle of Latino gang turf, where he’d been raised until a year earlier, when he’d finished high school and got the job at the shopping center, far from Boyle Heights.