21 Tales (6 page)

“I never saw her before,” I told him.

“I would’ve bet otherwise.”

I didn’t bother responding. What would’ve been the point? Somewhat reluctantly, he poured me a fresh martini. I could tell he’d rather have me leave his establishment than sit there at his bar, but hell, it wasn’t my fault that gal threw her drink in my face, and then my own. I just had the bad fortune of looking exactly like Dave Stevens.

If this had been the first time something like that had happened to me it probably would’ve left me stunned, but it wasn’t the first time. Far from it. So I sat glumly drinking my freshly made martini and over the din of voices and ice clinking in glasses and other bar noises I could make out the faint rumbling sound of the universe laughing over the cosmic joke that it had on me.

And it was a good one.

Given how poorly I always did with women, it surprised me how often something like this did happen to me. But this Stevens guy has something I don’t; charisma, extreme confidence, animal magnetism – I don’t know exactly what, but he has no trouble breaking hearts and inspiring violent passion in the girls he dumps. In contrast, the few girlfriends I’ve broken up with over the years couldn’t have cared less.

I finished the martini and asked the bartender for another. As I sat there waiting for it, I thought of Dave Stevens, something I hadn’t done in almost two years. While he might look exactly like me there’s something special about him that women gravitate toward. There’s no denying that. One of these days I’ll meet up with him and see if I can find out what it is. Maybe also knock out a few of his teeth in the process.

My own name is Andy Lenscher. For seven years I sold copier machines in the Mid-Atlantic, and during that time somehow ended up shadowing Stevens. I’d be sitting in a bar in Reston, Virginia or Scranton, Pennsylvania, or wherever, and invariably run into one of Stevens’ pissed-off and furious ex-flings. As best I could figure out, he sold women’s undergarments in the same cities that I sold copiers. I know some of you are probably thinking that this is going to turn out to be one of those split personality stories where in the end I realize I am in fact Dave Stevens. Nope, no such luck. This is just one of those fluky coincidences where the two of us kept traveling in the same cities, and I always had the misfortune of being several months behind him and paying the price for his bad behavior.

During those years I was yelled at, bitten, kicked, spat on, and punched by some very attractive women I’d never seen before. At first I tried to explain myself to these women, but of course it turned out that I also sound exactly like Dave Stevens. I learned the best thing to do was to keep quiet, try my best to protect my vital organs, and hope their rage would blow over quickly. After one of them tried to run me over in a downtown Bethesda crosswalk, I put in a transfer to another sales district. The problem was my company didn’t want to move me – I was too valuable where I was and had too good a rapport with my customers. They dragged their heels and five months later I was shot at outside a motel in Pittsburgh. Whoever it was missed, but that was the final straw. I quit my job and joined up with a competitor who was able to offer me their Midwest district.

That was two years ago. The Midwest was far less lucrative than my old territory and I made about half the money that I used to, but at least I didn’t have Dave Stevens to worry about.

At least until those two drinks were tossed in my face.

With a sick feeling in my gut I realized Stevens must have switched territories also – probably for his own safety. Once again I was shadowing the sonofabitch. And once again the cosmos was having a good long laugh at my expense.

I didn’t sleep much that night. After Wichita, I was going to be driving north to Topeka, then Lawrence and Kansas City, and all I could think of was running into more ex-flings of Stevens’. As it was, I was wide awake at six-thirty when the alarm went off. I showered and dressed quickly, and after checking out of my motel, found a roadside diner where I ordered corned-beef hash and poached eggs. I didn’t have much of an appetite, mostly pushed my food around the plate, but the three cups of coffee helped. The waitress, a motherly type who looked like she could be anywhere from sixty to eighty, gave me a concerned look.

“What’s wrong, Hon?” she asked. “You hardly touched your food. Anything wrong with it?”

“Everything’s fine. I guess I’m just not as hungry as I thought I was.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Hon, you should try to eat. And if you want to tell me what’s troubling you, I’m all ears.”

There was nothing but genuine concern in the smile she gave me. That’s the thing with Midwesterners, most decent Salt o’the Earth types you’ll ever run into. But how in the world could I tell her, or anyone else for that matter, about Dave Stevens?

“Nothing more than I got a long day ahead of me,” I told her. “But I’ll make more of an effort.” I took several bites of the hash while she stood and watched approvingly. The bill for my food came to five dollars and seventy-four cents. When she turned to take another customer’s order, I dropped twenty dollars next to my plate and left the diner.

I had several sales calls to make before leaving Wichita. It was at the first one, The People’s Credit Union of Wichita, that I spotted her. I had an appointment to talk with the operations manager about switching their business to us, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw her. According to the plaque on her desk her name was Lena Hanson and she worked as a loan officer. She was sitting down so I could only see her from the waist up, but that was enough to know she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen or was ever going to see. For a long moment I stood there lost in her golden hair and green eyes and perfect soft lips, watching as she absent-mindedly chewed on the end of a pen.

She sensed that I was staring at her. As her eyes caught mine, at first there was nothing but a slight frown, then I could see the recognition hit her.

Dammit, she knew Dave Stevens. Dammit!

I wanted to bolt, pretend I never saw her, anything as long as I wouldn’t have to stand there and watch her hate me – or at least hate the person she thought I was. But I couldn’t move. It was like my legs had turned into bags of wet sand and I had no strength to move them. So I stood frozen, dreading what was coming, but unable to look away. The hatred never came, though. As the recognition drained away, it was replaced by something more like surprise, maybe even fear. She seemed to freeze up, her color dropping several shades. Then, looking around to see if anyone was watching us, she stood up and came out from behind her desk. As I looked at her I realized she was even more beautiful that I had at first imagined. Her body was damned near perfect. Thin, athletic, but with all the right curves. And those legs, Jesus, I felt my mouth grow dry as I looked at those legs.

Moving cautiously, she walked over to me, stopping about two feet away. “How… what are you doing here?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

There was a faint smell from her, something like magnolia blossoms, at least that’s what I would’ve imagined magnolia blossoms to smell like. I wouldn’t have been able to move away from her if my life depended on it. Not if you’d put a knife to my throat. Over the pounding in my head, I heard myself telling her that I had to see her, that I couldn’t leave things the way we had left them before.

Fear flickered for a moment in those heart-stopping green eyes. “Meet me tonight at Maloney’s. Seven o’clock. We’ll talk then.”

She glanced around to check whether anyone had noticed us, and then walked back to her desk. She seemed like some fragile, beautiful porcelain statue as she sat staring intently at her hands folded in front of her, her face tense, unmoving. I watched her for a long moment and then turned and left the office. I didn’t stop until I got into my car.

I sat there feeling shaky inside. After taking a few deep breaths, I called the manager at the credit union whom I was supposed to meet and told him I had to cancel our appointment. He didn’t much care. There was only a small chance he would’ve switched his business, anyway. After hanging up, I closed my eyes and thought about Lena Hanson.

I had never pretended to be Dave Stevens before. I didn’t intend to with Lena either, but the words just came out of me. Of course I could’ve gone back in there and told her who I really was, but I didn’t. I had to meet with her. I had to somehow have a chance with her. The thought of doing anything else was suffocating. Later I’d figure out a way to set things straight between us, but until that time I would be Dave Stevens. I had no choice.

With the way I was feeling I knew there was no point in going through with any sales calls, so I cancelled the rest of the ones I had that day. I couldn’t keep from thinking about Lena, about the fear I saw in her eyes. I got the sense that she wasn’t so much afraid of Stevens as she was of being seen with him. Then it hit me. It was only a hunch, but in my gut I knew it was more than that.

I drove to the public library. While they only kept a week’s worth of Wichita Tribunes on the shelves, I was able to access all the old copies I needed online. After an hour and a half of searching I found what I was looking for. Five months earlier two hundred thousand dollars was reported missing from the credit union Lena worked at. I found more stories about the missing money over the next few weeks worth of papers, but what it came down to was that they had no leads or suspects.

I sat for a while thinking it over. Then I found a yellow pages, copied down the numbers of the motels in the area, and went back to my car so I could have some privacy. I went through the list of phone numbers, calling each motel and telling the clerk that I was Dave Stevens and thought I might have left my Rolex in my room the last time I was there. The first eight motels had no record of a Stevens ever staying there, the ninth confirmed that I’d been there five months earlier. The desk clerk I spoke with gave me the date Stevens checked out – the day before Lena’s credit union had reported the missing money. He insisted that no Rolex had been left in the room. I told him I’d probably misplaced it somewhere else and thanked him for his time.

So there you had it. Five months ago Stevens had convinced Lena to rob her credit union, and then skipped with the money leaving her high and dry. No wonder she reacted the way she did when I showed up there.

As the magnitude of what I was getting involved in fully hit me, I started to panic. I’d never broken the law in my life – never even come close, and here I was getting in the middle of a two hundred grand robbery. As far as Lena was concerned I was the guy who planned it and I was the guy with the money. I took out my Palm Pilot and brought up my schedule from five months earlier and saw that I had sales calls in Topeka at the time of the robbery. Topeka to Wichita is only a little over two hours. I could easily have traveled back and forth between the two cities. If Lena accused me of being the guy she robbed the credit union with there would be no way of me proving otherwise.

I decided then to leave Wichita. I’d follow through with my sales calls in Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City, and then I’d quit and find a job in another part of the country. Maybe California.

After twenty minutes of driving hard, I was past the city limits and hitting the cornfields. Miles and miles of cornfields – as far as the eye could see. As I drove, though, I couldn’t get rid of the shakiness inside, and I couldn’t keep from thinking of Lena. About thirty miles from Topeka I stopped at a roadside diner, but I just didn’t have much of an appetite and left most of my food untouched. I had a couple of cigarettes and then continued driving. By four, I pulled into a motel off the highway a couple of miles outside of Topeka.

I sat in my car feeling too weak to move, as if all the strength had been bled out of me. I just kept thinking of Lena, of how damn beautiful she was. It was as if her image had been burnt into my brain. I was thirty-two, and so far my life had been nothing but one restless moment after the next. I think that’s why I ended up in sales, so I’d always be on the move, always trying to outrun my restlessness. I know this will sound sappy – after all, I knew almost nothing about Lena and only saw her for at most a minute, but I couldn’t keep from thinking that she was the person I was meant to be with, that somehow she could bring me some peace. And hell, if she could fall for Stevens, then why not me? I thought through a dozen different scenarios where I’d convince her to join me out in California. Nothing quite clicked, but I realized I couldn’t just give up. At five o’clock I was still sitting in my car. I made the only decision I could make, and headed back towards Wichita.

I drove like a madman, my hand aching as I gripped the wheel. As I approached WichitaCounty, I called information and got the address for Maloney’s. A quarter to seven I pulled into its parking lot. From the outside the place looked like a dive. A drab concrete one-story structure with a lone neon sign out front. I waited in the car and watched as Lena pulled in a few minutes before seven. I felt my heart jump as I watched her get out of her car and enter Maloney’s. She had changed her clothes and now wore a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. She was breathtaking in it. I followed her into the place.

Maloney’s was as much of a dive inside as it was out. The smell of stale cigarettes permeated the place and there were just enough overhead florescent lights to keep the room mostly in shadows. About a half dozen guys were sitting at the bar, nobody at any of the tables. Lena jumped a bit when I took hold of her elbow, but she let me lead her to one of the tables in the back where we’d be able to talk without being overheard.

What next?” she asked.

“Let me get us some drinks. What do you want?”

She shrugged. “I guess a beer.”

I went to the bar and got two drafts. When I returned to the table, Lena was watching me intently. Her skin had lost most of its color.

“You were watching me from the parking lot when I pulled in, weren’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I looked away from those mesmerizing green eyes and took a long drink of my beer.