Lilith: a novel (11 page)

Now unemployed, Jessica used her time to launder the cache of riches that was hidden in her kitchen pantry.

The money in the cash bundles consisted of hundred dollar bills. During the three years she had worked at the bank, Jessica had handled similar bundles many times; she was not entirely surprised at how much money was there.

She opened two separate savings accounts at two banks. Neither bank, of course, was the bank she had worked at. As an additional element of subterfuge, she chose branch offices that were on opposite sides of Cincinnati.

Converting the gold bars to cash was a bit more problematic. Each of the gold bars she had taken was stamped with a unique serial number. A bit of online research told her that these serial numbers could be used to track down the owner of record—whose surname would almost certainly be Crabtree.

It took her awhile, going from gold buyer to gold buyer, to find an underground dealer who was willing to buy the bars, no questions asked. He was a Russian man in his early forties, whom Jessica suspected of being a member of the Russian mafia. The underground gold buyer charged a commission of twenty percent. But the envelope that she carried out of that meeting nevertheless contained enough cash for her to live frugally on for several years.

As she had suspected, the coins comprised the least lucrative portion of her nest egg. She took them to several different coin shops around the city, so that she wouldn't arouse the suspicions of any particular one of them. Before negotiating each transaction, she did some perfunctory Internet research so she would know the ballpark range for each coin. She found, however, that there was a lot of latitude in the amounts that coin dealerships actually paid for rare and historic coins. By the time she disposed of them all, the coins netted her a little more than six thousand dollars.

When all of the money was totaled up, there wasn't nearly enough for her to retire on—as in never working or earning another hour’s wages again. There was, however, more than enough for her to take it easy—to live without significant financial anxiety or struggle.

She could not use her work at the bank as a reference, so her brief and tentative entry into the professional workplace now appeared to be permanently stymied. She worked a series of low-paying jobs, always refusing overtime, and endeavoring, when possible, to hold her weekly hours to thirty or thirty-five hours per week. She did not make much money this way, but the spending money enabled her to avoid tapping too deeply into the principal of her “nest egg”.

When a job became too boring or a boss too demanding, she simply resigned—or occasionally stopped reporting to work without further notice. It was no problem to go a few weeks or a few months without work—she had plenty in the bank. Jessica was in one such period of casual unemployment when she met Travis Hall.

Jessica didn't go to bars that often. She had no trouble meeting men, and during the post-bank years she went through a handful of professional office types, another construction worker like Bryan, and even one cop. A few of them tried to get too close to her, and this became the point where she inevitably pushed them away. She still recalled her mother’s sad experiences with her father, and then Floyd. A life of dependency on a man was no sort of a life plan.

So the night she met Travis Hall, she had gone to the bar for amusement more than anything. It was a Friday, and she could not bear the thought of an evening alone in her apartment with cable TV.

Travis was, she thought immediately, the most beautiful man she had ever seen. The first time she saw him, he was leaning against the wall in a far corner of the bar. He was sipping beer from a brown longneck bottle and watching the dance floor. He was clad in blue jeans and a blue oxford work shirt.

Not much was required for them to come together. He might have been the most attractive man in the bar, but Jessica knew that she was at or near the top of the hierarchy of the ladies. She made eye contact with him a few times, and he eventually sauntered over to her side of the bar and struck up a conversation with her. She went to bed with him that same night. It was one of those things.

The problems began shortly thereafter. Travis turned out to be not simply a one-night stand, but a virtual addiction for her. Unfortunately, Travis also turned out to be an expensive habit.

Jessica realized that she was “lazy”—at least according to the standards by which the fast-trackers evaluated things. But this laziness was offset by a fundamental frugality.

Sometimes people who grow up with nothing are infused with an insatiable ambition. Jessica, on the other hand, saw her minimum-wage existence as an improvement from what her mother had known. And most importantly, there was the nest egg.

It was enough to know that the nest egg was safely in the bank, that it was her protection from excessive reliance on others, or slavery to hard-driving, tyrannical bosses. Although she worked, she did so on her own terms, and at her own pace.

Travis, on the other hand, had a taste for the good life. When he saw something that struck his fancy, he purchased it on impulse. This wouldn't have been a huge problem—if he’d had any money.  But once they moved in together, it was almost inevitable that Jessica’s money became Travis’s money.

He did not come from a privileged background; his roots were as blue-collar as hers were. Travis was what Jessica’s mother always liked to describe as someone with “champagne tastes and a beer budget.” 

“Jeez, Jessica? Generic canned goods?” Travis decried one day, early in their relationship, as he was perusing the contents of her pantry. “Who the heck buys generic canned vegetables?”

My mother always did
, she had wanted to say, but held her tongue.

For all his presence and physical beauty, a tendency toward being a spendthrift wasn't Travis’s only drawback. The night they’d met, Travis had avoided any discussion about himself. Jessica knew this to be a sign of trouble. Men—especially the more egotistical ones—always liked to talk about themselves.

That first night, she accepted his evasions about his past, knowing that he was lying and prevaricating, but not really caring. By the end of his first week in her apartment, she pressed him to come clean.

“Let’s just say I’ve recently spent some time in an ‘institutional setting’,” he said.

“You mean prison.”

“Yes, I mean prison.”

Travis wasn't a violent criminal—he wasn't a rapist or a murderer. He would later tell her that before going to prison, he had fired a gun on only one or two occasions. (That would change, of course, after the two of them invented Lilith.)

Travis was sentenced to two years in Ohio’s Lebanon Correctional Institution after a bungled burglary and theft. He shimmied open the side door of a neighbor’s garage and removed two thousand dollars worth of power tools.

Not that Travis had any ambitions toward carpentry. He tried to sell the power tools in order to fund another of his expensive habits: gourmet marijuana. But he hadn’t even bothered to sand off the serial numbers on the tools. Travis might as well have saved everyone a lot of trouble, and simply presented himself to the state for incarceration in the first place.

During his two years in stir, Travis spent time with some far more competent thieves. These were men who had heisted tens of thousands at a time—or so they had claimed.

“I listened while I was in Lebanon,” Travis told her once, tapping his earlobe symbolically with an index finger. “I learned how to score some easy money. And I’m not talking about the peanuts that I was planning to score from those tools, either. Jeez, what a simple one I was.” He smiled, as if recalling some foolish, but fundamentally wholesome mistake from his childhood. “Now I know better.”

But what Travis mostly demonstrated was a capacity to spend Jessica’s money. After much browbeating, cajoling, and threats to move out, Jessica had reluctantly agreed to give him two bankcards, so that he could withdraw money from her accounts at will.

One day he confronted her with a receipt for his most recent withdraw of one thousand dollars. Whereas Jessica had customarily withdrawn money in increments of one or two hundred dollars, Travis seemed to consider $1,000 the minimum amount. That was also the maximum amount that either of her banks permitted to be withdrawn in a single day, without corroborating signatures and other formalities.

“Have you been keeping an eye on the balances in our accounts?” he asked. His use of the first-person possessive hadn’t gone unnoticed by her. But his presumptuousness was overshadowed by the frighteningly low balance shown on the receipt.

“Is the account in the other bank this bad?” she asked, genuinely alarmed.

“The account in the other bank is even worse,” he said.

“No wonder,” she shot back. “You spend money like it grows on trees.” She realized now that this was something her mother would say, but she didn't care.

“I only use the money for basic necessities,” he said smugly, as if she were the offending party.

“Oh, yeah: Like weed, and designer clothes, and cocktails in the middle of the afternoon, at ten and twelve dollars a pop.”

She was so angry in that moment that she did something she had never done: She struck Travis. She didn't strike him hard; she only smacked her open palm up against his chest. Nevertheless, this act of defiance humiliated him. He pushed her back across the room, and they had a screaming fit that ended with Travis storming out of the apartment, vowing never to return.

Only a few hours passed before Jessica found herself crying. Although the loss of the money was devastating, the loss of Travis seemed the greater tragedy. No man had ever made her feel like Travis made her feel.

Moreover, Travis was dependent on her. Her father had obviously never needed her. Floyd had desired her in a way that was unhealthy, given the nature of their relationship; but her mother’s boyfriend had not hesitated to cut the cord between them. She had been the dependent party in her relationships with Mr. Frogge and Tony McClure. Even Seth had turned his back on her when push came to shove. Seth had a good job with the bank, and there would be other vulnerable young female subordinates whom he could sleep with.

But Travis: Travis was like a child who was fundamentally incapable of functioning in this world. During their time together, he had been wholly dependent on her—on the money that she had secured with her own wits, before the two of them had ever met.

And now Travis was gone—probably forever.

She spent that night huddled on the couch before the blank television set. The parallels to her final afternoon with Floyd were not lost on her.

But Travis, unlike Floyd, came back. At about ten o’clock the next morning, Jessica was awakened by the sound of Travis’s key turning in the lock. Then she recalled Floyd placing his key on her mother’s kitchen table. Travis had walked out, but he had not relinquished his key.

He didn't apologize. But he did walk over to her, kiss her still sleep-soured mouth, and the two of them made love, hard and long. After that, no explicit words of reconciliation were needed. Travis was back. They were together again.

There remained, however, one overwhelming problem:

“Baby, we need money,” Travis said.

They spent the rest of the afternoon lying unclothed on the couch, her leaning back in his arms, talking. Over the course of that afternoon, they gradually arrived at the idea that they would refine, over the next few weeks, as Lilith.

It was practically a foregone conclusion that they would embark on some sort of criminal activity. They were, after all, both criminals. (The only difference being that Jessica had been savvy enough to avoid capture.)

This commonality between them was never explicitly acknowledged. Nevertheless, all of their ideas for making money naturally tended in the direction of something illegal. Neither one of them had a burning desire to start a maid service or a corner restaurant. They would have had no capital for such ventures, anyway. Neither of them had much in the way of marketable skills. Both of them, moreover, had tried life on a payroll (Travis had been employed in a factory at the time of his arrest for theft and burglary) and both had found themselves allergic to it.

Since Travis was such an aficionado of marijuana, his first ideas all focused on drug dealing. Jessica gently steered him away from these ideas. She knew that Travis would end up consuming most of their inventory.

Travis also suggested armed robbery and burglary. The first of these ideas struck Jessica as outright suicidal. The second one she rejected as having a poor risk-to-reward ratio. How much money could really be made by stealing the contents of people’s houses and reselling them? Certainly not enough to offset the perils of watchdogs, security alarms, and gun-toting homeowners.

“What about cybercrime?” Travis said. “I bunked with this guy in prison for a while. He showed me some stuff.”

“You’re a hacker?” Jessica asked, honestly surprised. “You can use a computer to tap into a bank? To transfer money from one account to another?”

“I didn't say I was a hacker, baby. I said there was a guy in the joint who ‘showed me some stuff’.”

In this iterative fashion, Travis’s osmotically acquired computer skills were defined. It was determined that Travis didn't know enough to steal anything using a computer alone. He did, however, know how to conceal online activity, so that no one—with the possible exception of the very highest levels of government—could ever trace that activity.

“I know my computer stuff,” Travis said. “That’s what I bring to the party. And what about you?” 

Without too much hesitation, Jessica said, “I’m good with men.”

“Wait a minute, baby: If you’re talking about some kind of escorting or something, that isn’t going to fly. I’m not pimping you out to other men.”

“Of course not,” Jessica said, the very idea repugnant to her as well. Although she had slept with Mr. Frogge and Seth, the idea of doing that indiscriminately, as a form of commerce, was out of the question. Besides, she knew that Travis would never go for that.

Nevertheless, the fact remained that she was good at manipulating men. So how to combine that with what Travis ‘brought to the party’—as he put it?

Over the years, she had noticed a particular variety of man that she seldom interacted with. She seldom gave these men a second thought, in fact, though these men invariably noticed her.

These men were a breed apart from the Tony McClures or the Mr. Frogges. They were even distinct from the physically unimpressive, but sly and manipulative types like Seth Greenwald.

These were the sort of men who put women like Jessica up on a pedestal, without even talking to her or knowing anything about her. Several times a week, she caught one of these types eying her hopefully, desperately yearning for a little bit of attention.

What if she gave them a little bit of attention (though not
too
much)? What could she get from them in return?

It took her a while to explain the grand concept to Travis—partly because it was still an inchoate idea in her own mind. (Travis, of course, was the polar opposite of the men who would be her targets.)

But how to identify such targets? How to make contact with them, and how to build a scam that would reel them in and impel them to hand over money?

“I know,” Travis blurted out. “Online dating. That would be perfect for us. Your skills would line up perfectly with mine.”

Travis told her how he would use pilfered images, black market devices, and public WiFi networks to make the online portion of their plan untraceable. “If you use your own computer for something illegal, the cops can find you,” Travis said. “That guy in prison told me that.”

After a bit more discussion, they arrived at the final idea, more or less: Jessica would meet the men online, she would go on a few dates with them and get them “hooked”. It was understood that she would not sleep with them.

“Absolutely not, baby. No exceptions,” Travis said. “You have to promise me.”

Jessica promised—though they both allowed that she might have to engage in some handholding and light petting.

“Okay,” Travis acquiesced. “But not too much.”

“Think of me as one of those female spies,” Jessica said. “That is kind of what this will be like.”

Then, Jessica would plead a hard luck case to each of the men: She would claim that she needed to pay off a loan to an abusive boyfriend. The manufactured scenario behind this ruse would be just short of criminal, so the men would be easily convinced not to call the police.
But I owe him the money
, she would claim.

The amount would be in the low five-figure range: somewhere around ten or twenty thousand dollars. A few thousand dollars wouldn't be worth bothering with. A high five-figure amount might cause some of the targets to balk—their attraction to Jessica notwithstanding.

“Then I’ll show up and collect the money,” Travis said. “And then you’ll never see any of those guys again.”

Jessica had not bothered to clarify the exact details of Travis’s involvement at the final step. To her, Travis’s presence seemed an unnecessary complication.

“Why shouldn't I just take the money?” Jessica objected. “That would be a lot simpler. Why do you have to be there at all?”

“Authenticity,” Travis said. He tapped one of his temples, as if to draw attention to his power of insight. “If they see me, then they won’t think that you’re just a pretty girl tellin’ tales.”

Jessica found Travis’s logic dubious. She didn't believe that such “authenticity” was necessary. A far more likely explanation was male ego: Travis wanted to be the one who actually took the money in hand, to play the role of provider. No doubt he also wanted to intimidate the men who had spent time with his girlfriend—even if they were to pay ten or twenty thousand dollars for the privilege of taking her on a few platonic dates.

Why not indulge him?
she thought.
What harm could come of it?

The first target they snagged was Harold Markey. While priming Markey for the scam, Jessica and Travis relocated to Columbus. There was no reason not to relocate—at least temporarily: Jessica had been more or less evicted from her Cincinnati apartment a few weeks earlier, after her rent check had bounced twice. Her nest egg had now been reduced to a few thousand dollars in one account. The account that she usually used to write checks and pay the rent was empty.

They were now in a Columbus efficiency apartment—a cheap place that would let them rent by the week on a cash basis.

Nevertheless, Travis liked Columbus. He had begun working out at a local gym, and he somehow managed—in the short time they were there—to tap into the local marijuana market as well.

“Don’t spend all of our money on weed,” Jessica cautioned him. She had just returned from an evening out with Markey. “We don’t have much money left, you know.”

“Don’t you worry, baby,” Travis replied. “I’m just bidin’ my time, waiting to make the big collection. Is ‘Harold’ ready to hand it over?”

“Yes,” Jessica said. She was frankly surprised at how eager Harold Markey had been to play the knight in shining armor, once she had spun out her tale of woe. “I’m supposed to pick up the money tomorrow night. I told him that my ‘boyfriend’ is putting the pressure on me. But there’s also the fact that we’re spending money we don’t have. We’re almost out.”

“And we’ll take care of that tomorrow. Or
I
will. I’ll get that money from him.”

With considerable effort, Jessica bit back an angry, sarcastic reply that would have quickly escalated into a screaming match. They were nearing crunch time on the Harold Markey project, and another big fight would derail everything.

Nevertheless, Travis’s transparent, self-serving tendency to shirk and freeload was galling. He would claim the lion’s share of the credit for the money that Harold Markey would provide them. After she had done all of the difficult, subtle work, Travis would swoop in at the last moment for the handover. He would thereby convince himself that Jessica had been but a minor accessory in the whole affair.

Whatever. As long as they got the money.

The next night, at the hour of the “handover”, Travis did not ring Harold Markey’s doorbell or knock. He snuck in the front door of Harold Markey’s apartment while Markey was in his living room with Jessica.

They had preplanned this much: Jessica had made sure that the door remained unlocked. This wasn't difficult to do: Harold Markey was easily distracted.

But she was uncertain about the wisdom of doing this. They had debated the issue only hours before her final meeting with Markey.

“Is it really necessary for you to break into the guy’s apartment?” she had challenged.

“I ain’t going to be breakin’ in,” Travis had replied. “I’m going to be walking through an open door. Because you’re going to make sure that your fella leaves the door unlocked.”

“He’s not my ‘fella’,” Jessica reminded him. “You’re my fella. That’s why we’re doing this together.”

These words had been intended to soothe Travis, but they seemed to have the opposite effect.

“He sure ain’t going to be when I get done with him.”

Travis punctuated this statement with a smile that chilled her. She almost questioned him further: What exactly did he mean by that? They had already agreed that Travis wasn't going to threaten the other man, or rough him up in any way. His presence would be for the sake of “authenticity”—and nothing more. Right?

Well, Travis had never been violent. He had gone to jail for a pathetic burglary offense. He wouldn't seriously hurt someone.

There was no point in covering the same ground with him now. There was no time for further discussion. Travis had given himself the central role in the handover, and he wasn't about to remove himself now. She would have to hope for the best.

Along that same line—the line of hoping for the best—Jessica hadn’t really expected that Travis was going to shoot Harold Markey in the back of the head with a silencer-tipped pistol. At least, she had not
completely
expected it.

This possibility had, perhaps, loomed in the back of her mind. And that possibility involved more than Travis’s volatility. The killing of Harold Markey—and the subsequent two men—did follow a certain logic.

The plan was for her to do a disappearing act once each man handed over the money for the fictitious “loan repayment”. She knew that all but the most gullible of men would immediately know that they had been scammed.

A man who had been scammed out of a few hundred or even a thousand dollars might write off the loss. A man who had been scammed out of ten or twenty thousand dollars would not readily let the matter go.

Some of these men might attempt to find her. This would place her in constant danger of physical retribution. Others would report her to the police.

She did not know if a whopper of a lie, and the acceptance of money given under false pretenses constituted a crime. Maybe and maybe not. It might fall into one of those “legal gray areas”.

But multiple swindles of such magnitude would not simply be tolerated. She could foresee a cascading series of problems that would result from the activities of even one dedicated whistle-blower: If she were publicly identified, the authorities might peruse her bank records. That would reveal the (now vanished) wealth that she could not explain—wealth that she had never earned, and certainly never paid taxes on.

At the very least, the dating sites would be on the lookout for suspicious-looking profiles. They wouldn't permit their male members to be scammed. It would be bad for business. Even if the law didn't pursue them (and she believed that eventually the law
would
) the dating sites would expend considerable effort to expose them.

This might mean that the first successful scam would be the last one. All their planning and hard work would be for naught.

They would be back to square one. Back to an empty bank account.

It was entirely possible that Travis—simple-minded though he was—had the right idea, after all.

“Everybody’s gotta die sometime, baby,” Travis told her on the night of the first murder. The image of Harold Markey’s ruined head was still fresh in her memory.

Everybody’s got to die sometime
, Travis had said. Despite the crassness of his observation, Travis was absolutely right, wasn't he?

And Harold Markey had led a truly pitiable life—alone, without any companionship that Jessica had been able to discern.