If you want to get a fake I.D., it’s easy, especially if it won’t have to hold up for years. Visit the hall of records, check on someone who died a long time ago, someone who was born about the same time you were. Check the birth records, get a copy of the birth certificate. If they ask, tell them you lost the original. If you really want to be safe, make sure that the person was born or died in a different county or state. But it’s not crucial — no jurisdiction compares birth and death records. Take the birth certificate to your local motor-vehicle office, and you can walk out with a driver’s license; most states don’t even insist on the birth certificate.
To get a passport, you now have the two necessary documents. A private mailbox gets you an address; no one is going to check. For the bank accounts, Boynton just had to give phony social security and federal employer I.D. numbers he made up. By the time they got around to checking, filing tax information and such, he would be long gone.
In fact, it isn’t even illegal to set up another identity as long as there is no intent to defraud or commit an illegal act. Pay your taxes and stay out of trouble and no one really cares.
There didn’t seem to be much we could do about finding Boynton. He hadn’t left a trail and it was virtually certain he had left the country, at least long enough to empty the Swiss bank account. It would take the resources of the FBI and the State Department to track him down.
Charlie Schwartz rolled into the office late Tuesday, smiling from ear to ear. He had a lead. F. Terrance had a girlfriend. Charlie had spent his time talking to the neighbors in Boynton’s condo.
As Charlie told it. “I was getting pretty discouraged. I had talked to seventeen of Boynton’s neighbors. Most hadn’t even known him, a few knew him by sight, two had talked to him occasionally. Our Mr. Boynton kept to himself, didn’t socialize with his neighbors, and didn’t attend the owners’ meetings.
“Then I knocked on Samuel Dobbins’s door. Even he really didn’t know Boynton, other than to say hello. But he remembered Boynton’s girlfriend. And he remembered her only by a fluke. She was a good-looking girl, late twenties, blond, but what he really remembered was her car.”
Charlie paced up and down the office, gesturing with his hands, bubbling on. “She drove a red Triumph TR-6 and the reason Dobbins remembers her is because she parked in his spot — they all have assigned parking spaces — and he had to get her to move it a few times. But the best part, the really great part, is that he remembers the license number. It’s one of those personalized lobbies: FUNGIRL.”
A check with the DMV in Sacramento the next day gave us an address in the Valley. Charlie and I headed over the 405 freeway. The address was near the Van Nuys Airport in a large apartment complex — one for swinging singles, or so they advertised.
Kristi Mayhew didn’t live there anymore. She had moved out at the end of September. No forwarding address. Maybe she was moving in with her boyfriend. Maybe they were leaving town. Kristi had been happy. We got all this from the manager. We told him we were insurance investigators, that the girl had been a witness to an accident, and the lawyers needed her for a deposition. He gave us the address of her former employer, a beauty salon on Ventura Boulevard in Encino.
I left Charlie to pound on the neighbors’ doors and headed for Ten Snips — Salon for Beautiful Women. The manager wasn’t helpful.
“Well now, darling! She left weeks ago! And she was my best stylist! It was such a bitch replacing her!”
I didn’t like the guy. The gold chains and rings were bad enough, but the two-tone yellow-and-black hair left me cold. He did say that Kristi’s best friend, Paula, worked at the salon, but she was off today.
I went back for Charlie. He hadn’t had much better luck. Only one person had any answers. The guy next door to Kristi said she was talking about leaving the country, for someplace sunny and warm — exotic and out of the way. That left out Siberia and Antarctica, but the world is still a large place and a lot of it’s sunny and warm. Exotic and out of the way wasn’t going to help much either.
I didn’t think we would have much luck taking Paula White on straight if her boss was any indication of the state of the world at Ten Snips. The next morning I called in Susan Emerson, one of our operatives. Susan was forty, passed for thirty, blonde, petite, and dressed smartly. I told her she needed her hair done.
Paula couldn’t book Susan for an appointment until Friday afternoon. I worked on another case. Peterson Trucking was losing appliances off their loading dock. They were in Riverside, and it was late Friday before I got back. Susan had left a message: “Have a good lead, will follow up Saturday, report in Monday.”
I was getting the anxious itchy feeling. I wanted to press ahead, but you can’t rush these things. I phoned Robin instead. We went to Solvang, a Dutch-style village north of Santa Barbara. The weekend was uneventful and filled with too much good food, clean air, and beautiful scenery.
Susan was waiting for me Monday in my office.
“Paula White is your basic scatterbrained, twenty-five-year-old teenybopper, if there is such a thing. But she’s a pretty good hairdresser. I worked her around to Kristi Mayhew. I told her what a good job Kristi had done on me before, was sorry to hear she had left, and did she know where she had gone.”
Charlie wandered in and Susan continued, “Paula said Kristi went off with her boyfriend. She mentioned Boynton’s name, that he had retired and had some money. They were going to travel out of the country for a while. She said Kristi was really excited. She had mentioned some secret she couldn’t talk about.”
Susan asked if she knew where they were going to start the “grand tour.” Paula said that Boynton had gone ahead, and Kristi would meet him someplace. Kristi had brought in a lot of travel brochures one day, mostly about the Caribbean.
“I said that must have been exciting, that my husband and I were thinking about a Caribbean cruise. Did Kristi go to a travel agent? Paula said yes and she happened to remember the name because they were stamped on some of the brochures, a place called Travel for Pleasure in Sherman Oaks.”
On Saturday Susan went to Travel for Pleasure to see about Caribbean tours. She told the man that her hairdresser, Kristi Mayhew, had used the agency and raved about how helpful they had been. Did he remember Kristi? She described her. The man said yes, but the name didn’t ring a bell. By the time Susan was through with Henry Smith, travel agent, she had a good idea where Boynton or, at any rate, where Kristi had gone.
“She used the name Kristi Callander. I said that must be her married name now. She booked flights from here to Houston and then to Georgetown, Cayman Islands. Smith said that she talked about living in the Caribbean and took folders on all the different islands, places to see.”
Boynton had made a mistake, he should have bought Kristi’s tickets himself. We now had a sunny, warm, exotic, and out-of-the-way place to go look for F. Terrance Boynton. It was time to see our client, Daniel Naughton.
Instead of downtown, Naughton wanted to meet for breakfast. There’s a good buffet style restaurant on Ocean Boulevard facing the Pacific with a great view of the Santa Monica Pier and the bay. It was nice enough to eat outside on the terrace.
I brought Naughton up to date on the investigation, “It’s likely that Boynton and the girl are in the Cayman Islands, or were not too long ago. Art Torres knows someone at the State Department; he’s checking to see if the girl used the Callander name for a passport. Either way I think I should go down there and look around. The islands are small and there are fewer than twenty thousand people. But we’re starting to talk serious expenses. How far do you want to go on this?”
“I’ve been thinking about this the last week, McDermott. I checked with the district attorney. He doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to prosecute, even if Boynton has the money.”