Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (29 page)

"Yeah, definitely," she replied.

"I don't want to do that yet though. I want
to talk to u first."

"Why? What do u mean?" she texted back.

"The bank people told me the cops can get
the stores' security tapes and I can identify the thief. So I want
to talk to u first."

"Are u saying I took ur cards?" she
replied.

"I'm just saying I want to talk to u in
person first, because whoever took my cards is going to jail."

That's when she broke down, and admitted
that she stole them. She texted me that she didn't know what had
come over her, and that stealing was totally unlike her. She said
she was taking care of 7 children, and she just didn't know how to
make ends meet, even with the money I had been giving her.

I felt really bad for her, so I didn't press
charges. I forgave her, because I figured, if I was in her shoes,
and I was a single parent taking care of 7 kids, I too may do
things I'm not proud of.

A few days went by, and we made up.
Suddenly, while we were having lunch at Bice, she mentioned that it
was going to be her birthday the next day.

"What? Why didn't you tell me that sooner?
We could have done something nice for your birthday," I said.

"It's ok. My parents are Jehovah's
Witnesses, and growing up, I never had a birthday. So I'm used to
nobody remembering my birthday or celebrating it," she replied.

"Aww, that's so sad," I said. "Well, that's
all the more reason to make this birthday extra special. How about
I take you to Miami Beach tomorrow, and we go to the beach for a
while and then we'll have dinner at a nice restaurant?"

"I would love that! Thank you so much," she
said with a big smile.

A day or two earlier, while we were grocery
shopping for her kids at Walmart on Colonial Boulevard, she had
longingly stared at a laptop and mentioned that she was so broke,
she didn't even have a computer.

So I figured I'd make her birthday extra
special by surprising her with that laptop she liked.

When she came over the next morning, we
drove down Alligator Alley to get to the East Coast. During the car
ride, I handed her the gift-wrapped laptop. She was ecstatic. Once
we got to South Beach, we went swimming and then had dinner at a
fancy restaurant on Ocean Drive. She told me this was the best
birthday of her life. That made me feel really good. At the last
minute, without any advance notice, I pulled off a pretty nice
birthday for her. Later I found out that day wasn't even her
birthday. It was just a scam to get a new laptop.

A few days later, I happened to check my
bank account on the computer. I noticed a few checks I didn't
recognize. Each one was for anywhere around $700 to $900. I clicked
on each one, to see a scanned image of the front of the check. That
wasn't my handwriting. All these checks were fake. Someone had
stolen 8 checks from me, filled them out, and deposited them. Guess
who? Hussy.

She was not exactly a criminal mastermind,
because she didn't even bother to make the checks out to cash. She
actually made them out to herself, and then faked my signature. I
have no idea how she thought she was going to get away with that. I
called her up and screamed at her: "I just saw you stole checks
from me. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?!?"

Hussy started to cry and told me that it had
been a moment of weakness. She said she had stolen the checks on
the same day she had stolen my debit cards, she just didn't cash
them right away. She said her sister Amber's death had made her
crazy with grief. And now that she had to take care of Amber's two
young kids on top of her own 5 children, she had lost it.

At this point I didn't know yet that the
entire story about Amber was completely made up, but I had it with
Hussy anyway. I had forgiven her after she stole my debit cards and
charged $2000 on them. But now she had cashed 8 stolen checks, for
a total of about $7000. This was not just a momentary lapse in
judgment. There was method behind her madness. She cashed the
stolen checks every few days. So she knew she was stealing from me
again and again. There was no way I was going to let her get away
with that. I was gonna put that fucking bitch in jail.

She said she hadn't even spent any of the
money, and that it was all still in her bank account. I told her:
"You better be here tomorrow morning before 10 am and bring me back
all my money, and the laptop, or I'm calling the cops!"

I was going to call the cops either way, but
I wanted to get my money and my laptop back first.

The next morning she brought me the laptop
and handed me $600. I looked at the cash and asked: "What is
that?"

Hussy was so nervous, while I counted the
money, she threw up. Then she said: "That's all that's left. I
don't know what happened to the rest. I thought it was all still in
my account, but when I checked today, it was all gone, except the
$600."

"Get the FUCK outta here!" I said. She
quietly cried, got in her car and left.

As soon as she was gone, I called the Lee
County Sheriff's office. They sent a deputy. I filed a report and
told him what had happened. He asked me to describe Hussy, so I
did. Then he asked me for her date of birth. Since we had just
celebrated her birthday a few days earlier, I knew exactly when her
birthday was.

The deputy said: "I think I know who you're
talking about, but that's not her date of birth."

"Yeah, it is," I replied.

"Come with me, we'll look at my computer,"
the officer said.

On the dashboard laptop in his police
cruiser, the officer pulled up Hussy's mugshot. She had a bunch of
prior charges for writing bad checks. Yupp. That was definitely her
in the mugshot, and her birthday was definitely not last week. And
that's when I realized that we had celebrated a fake birthday just
so that she could con me into buying her a laptop. Motherfucker!
What kind of a sick, twisted psycho does something like that?!

I told the officer that I wanted her to rot
in jail for playing me like that. He said she would, but first I
would have to speak to a detective in the financial crimes unit.
The deputy said he was just here to take the report, but I would
have to wait for a detective to actually work on the case. And that
was going to take at least a week.

"What am I supposed to do until then?" I
asked. "If I don't talk to her anymore, she'll know something is
up, and she'll skip town. Her parents recently moved to Ocala. So
she'll probably hide up there."

"If she tries to run, we'll issue a
warrant," the officer said. "She can't hide forever. We'll catch
her eventually. But for now, just pretend everything is ok, so she
has no reason to run."

So for the next few days, I pretended I had
forgiven her, just like I had done when I found out about her
stealing my debit cards. Hussy came over every day, as usual, and
we had sex as usual, hung out, watched TV, or went to the mall, or
out to eat.

About a week later, a detective called me. I
told him what she had done and that I wanted her to go to jail. He
said he couldn't just go arrest her. He said he would have to call
her into his office and talk to her first.

A few minutes later, Hussy called me,
hysterically crying: "You said you wouldn't call the cops!"

"No, that's what I said when you stole my
debit cards," I replied. "But you stole my checks on top of that.
Of course I'm gonna call the cops. You psycho stole $7000 from
me!"

"If I have to go to jail, I'm going to lose
my kids! DCF is gonna take them away from me! I can't live without
my kids! If you press charges, I'm gonna kill myself!"

"Don't worry," I said. "Just admit
everything. If you cooperate, they'll take it easy on you. You'll
probably just get probation, or you'll have to pay me back or
something. You're not gonna go to jail."

I was just lying to her to get her to
confess everything to the detective. I wanted that bitch to go to
jail so badly! I wasn't just mad about her stealing from me. My
feelings were hurt, because she kept telling me she loved me, and
then she just used me like that. And my pride was hurt, because she
made a fool out of me. Now it was my turn to pay her back. And when
someone fucks me over that bad, I get really vindictive.

Hussy went to the Sheriff station and
admitted everything. She gave a full confession. Then the detective
called me: "Did you tell this girl she's not going to jail if she
admits everything?"

"Well, uhh, yeah. I didn't want her to run
away," I said.

"You can't promise something like that.
Check fraud is a serious crime. Each check she wrote is an
automatic 1 year in jail. She wrote 8 checks, so she's going to
jail for 8 years," the detective explained.

A few minutes later, after Hussy left the
Sheriff station, she called me up, sobbing: "I'm not going to jail!
I'm not losing my babies! I'm gonna kill myself! If you press
charges I'll kill myself! I've tried to kill myself many times, but
this time I'll really do it!" She was crying so hard, it was
difficult to understand her.

I have a soft heart. I guess I'm what they
call a bleeding heart liberal. When someone fucks me over, instead
of feeling bad for myself, I end up feeling bad for them, because I
think about what happened in their lives to make them the way they
are. What got them to this point? If I went through what they went
through, wouldn't I be at the same point now, doing the same
things?

I wanted Hussy to go to jail for a bit.
Maybe 6 months. Maybe even a year. But 8 years? Wow, that was
harsh! Yeah, DCF would definitely take her kids away, and yeah, I
really could see her kill herself over that. I didn't want to live
with that guilt. So I called the detective back and told him to
drop the charges.

Hussy and I didn't talk to each other for a
few days, but she kept calling me over and over, asking me to
forgive her, and that she loved me, and she wanted to make it up to
me. A few days later I caved, and she starting coming over again,
and we had sex two or even three times every day again. At that
point I didn't know yet that she was still with her "ex" Dick, and
that they were living in my duplex together.

Easter was coming up. I took Hussy to
Walmart to pick out some clothes for her kids, and candy. We
planned to spend Easter together. But then, the day before Easter,
she said her parents were coming down from Ocala, and they were
going to bring along some other relatives, and that they were all a
bunch of rednecks who argued at family gatherings, and that I
wouldn't enjoy being around them. So suddenly our plans were
cancelled. I was all alone on Easter.

That really bummed me out. Easter isn't that
big a deal to me. Being alone on Christmas or my birthday would
have been a lot worse. But just the fact that, for the first time
in my life, I was spending a major holiday all alone, really got to
me. Up until now, I had spent every holiday with my parents, or my
ex-wife Donna, or my ex-girlfriend Alice. But now Hussy totally
left me hanging on a big holiday. I was depressed. I felt really
alone.

I spent Easter playing around on Facebook. I
stumbled across Hussy's Facebook page. I didn't even know she had
one. On her page, she was posting in real time about her Easter.
Her family had not come down from Ocala. That was just another one
of her lies. In fact, she posted on her Facebook page how much she
missed her family this holiday. Instead she was spending Easter
with her own little family at home: Dick and the kids. That was the
moment when I found out she had been lying to me for months, about
having left her "ex" and being a single mother. None of it was
true.

I was really upset. I got on a plane and
flew to Europe for a few days. Hussy had been trying to come over
the day after Easter, but I wouldn't answer her calls or texts. She
got scared and asked me why I was ignoring her. I texted her that I
had found out the truth about her and Dick living together in my
house and that I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. We didn't
talk to each other for a few months.

I wanted to get them out of my house. At
first I was going to evict them, but apparently that takes a long
time in Florida. So instead I just sold the duplex, with them in
it, on Ebay. A real estate investor in New York bought it. I told
him that the tenants were nothing but trouble, with criminal
records and a history of domestic violence. He thanked me for the
heads up and evicted them.

"Online dating is just as murky and full of lemons as
finding a used car in the classifieds."

Laurie Perry

Obviously the ad for a mutually beneficial
relationship backfired. So I put a half-assed profile on Plenty Of
Fish, or POF for short. It's a free dating website.

I ended up going out on a date with Maxine.
She was 32, I think, and taller than I was. And she wore high heels
when we met at a little Italian restaurant on Bonita Beach Road.
She towered over me like a giant Amazonian. And she had broad,
manly shoulders. She reminded me of a Football player. She probably
could have given me a piggyback ride around the parking lot.