Talk Talk (7 page)

Bridger's hands were traumatized. He had to fingerspell most of it--“victimless” took him forever--but Dana picked right up on it. “Victimless?” she said. “What about me? My job? My students? What about the four hundred and eighty-seven dollars--who's going to pay that?”

Who indeed?

The explanation was circuitous, dodging away from the issue and coming back to it again, and it took a while to unfold. First of all, Dana was a victim, of course she was, but she had to understand just how much violent crime there was in the state of California--in the country as a whole--and how limited law enforcement resources were. There were rapists out there, murderers, serial killers. Sadists. Child molesters. But this in no way diminished what had happened to her and there was a growing awareness of the problem (the counselor--what was her name?--dispensed clichés like confections, like tea, because they were soothing) and there were a number of steps Dana could take to restore her good name and maybe even bring the criminal to justice. At this point, the woman drew a pad and pencil from the top drawer of her desk. “Now,” she said, “do you have any idea who this man is or how he might have got hold of your base identifiers?”

Dana hesitated a moment till Bridger had laboriously spelled out “base identifiers,” a term neither of them had previously come across. “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “I've never seen him before.”

“Have you lost your purse or had it stolen anytime in the past few months?”

She read this on the woman's lips and shook her head again.

“What about your mailbox--is it secure? Locked, I mean?”

It was, yes. The mailboxes at her apartment complex were located in a special alcove, and everybody had a key to his or her own box.

“What about at work? Do you receive mail at the”--here the woman brought the glasses back into play and glanced down a moment at the sheet before her--“the San Roque School for the Deaf?”

Dana did. And no, the mailboxes there were in the main office and anyone could have access to them. But Dana hadn't missed anything--her pay stubs were there every two weeks on schedule and there had been no interruption of her mail at home, or not that she knew of, anyway.

The woman looked to Bridger a moment. He'd been so rigidly focused on what she'd been saying and the effort to communicate it to Dana that he'd forgotten where he was. Now he saw that it was getting late, past six anyway, the venetian blinds pregnant with color, thin fingers of sunlight marking the wall like the vestiges of a thief. He thought of Radko. He thought of Drex III. He'd have to go back after dinner, he was thinking, and that thought--of dinner--made his stomach churn in an anticipatory way. When was the last time he'd eaten?

“You see, the reason I ask,” the woman went on, holding Bridger's eyes a moment before shifting back to Dana, just to be sure he was with them so that none of this--her spiel, her words, her professional empathy--would be wasted, “is because the vast majority of identity fraud cases come from a lost or stolen wallet or misappropriated mail. In fact, one of the thieves' favorite modus operandi is to get your name and address--out of the phone book, off your business card--and put in a change of address request with the post office. Then they get your mail sent to a drop box in Mailboxes R Us or some such, and there's all your financial information, credit card bills, bank statements, paychecks and what have you.”

She paused to see what effect she was having. The fingers of light crept higher up the wall. On her face was a look of transport or maybe of triumph--she knew the ropes and she was in no danger and never would be. “Then all they have to do is make up a driver's license in your name, order new checks, replacement Visa cards, and voilà--you're out an average of something like five thousand dollars nationwide.”

Bridger was thinking about his own mailbox, just a slot with his apartment number under it, and how many times had the cretins at the U.S. Postal Service stuffed it with his neighbors' mail by mistake? Or what about the time he wound up with half a dozen mutual fund statements addressed to a woman on the other side of town who had only a street address--196 Berton instead of 196 Manzanita--and a zip code in common with him? What if he'd been a crook? What then?

Dana broke into his reverie. She was getting impatient. She wanted action. That was Dana: cut to the chase, no time to spare. “Yeah,” she said, her voice even hollower and more startling than usual, “but what do I do now, that's what we want to know.”

The woman looked flustered a moment--this was a departure from the orthodoxy, from the ritual that soothed and absolved--but she recovered herself. “Well, you'll want to file a police report right away and you'll need to include that in any correspondence with creditors, and the credit reporting agencies should be notified if there are any irregularities. Your credit reports. You should order copies and check them over carefully--your Visa and MasterCard and what-have-you as well. But we'll get to all that. What I want you to know, what I want to tell you, is how these things happen--so you'll be prepared next time around.” The look of rapture again. She arched her back and gazed into Dana's eyes. “An ounce of prevention, right?”

She held them there for half an hour more, and by the end of it Bridger began to wonder exactly what she was trying to convey. Or even how she felt about it. Her eyes seemed to flare and she became increasingly animated as she trotted out one horror story after another: the woman who had her rental application swiped from the desk in her landlord's office and wound up with some thirty thousand dollars in charges for elaborate meals and services in a hotel in a city she'd never been to, as well as the lease on a new Cadillac, the purchase price and registry of two standard poodles and $4,500 for liposuction; the twelve-year-old whose mother's boyfriend assumed his identity till the kid turned sixteen and was arrested when he applied for a driver's license for crimes the boyfriend had committed; the retiree whose mail mysteriously stopped coming and who eventually discovered that thieves had not only filed a change of address but requested his credit reports from the three credit reporting agencies so that they could drain his retirement account, cash his social security checks and even appropriate the 200,000 frequent flier miles he'd accumulated. And it got worse: deprived of income, the old man in question--a disabled Korean War veteran--wound up being evicted from his apartment for non-payment of rent and was reduced to living on the street and foraging from Dumpsters.

“That's terrible,” Bridger said, just to say something. Dana sat rigid beside him.

“Tip of the iceberg,” the counselor sang out. “And in your case, honey”--turning to Dana--“it's even worse, or potentially worse, because this isn't simple ID theft, where a drug user or ex-con tries to make a quick score and move on, but what we call identity takeover.”

“I don't understand,” Dana said, her face lit from beneath as the sun crept up the wall behind her. “Something's over, you're saying?” She turned to Bridger and he was trying to help as best he could when the woman simply scrawled the term on her pad and slid it across the desk.

“Identity takeover,” she repeated. “It's when somebody becomes a second you--lives as you, under your name, for months, sometimes years. And if they live quietly and don't get in trouble with the law, they might never be detected--”

“Now “I” don't understand,” Bridger heard himself saying. “Why would anyone want to do that--assume somebody's identity--if it wasn't for some credit card scam or something? I mean, what's the point?”

The woman shrugged. Looked down at the telephone on her desk as if she expected it somehow to provide the answer. She began boxing the photocopies between her hands in a brisk valedictory way, then looked up. Her eyes were gray and clear and lit with a strange excitement and they went from Bridger's face to Dana's and settled there. “Think about it,” she said in a soft voice. “You're broke, uneducated, you owe child support payments, you've got a criminal record and your credit report stinks--maybe you've defaulted on a loan or gone bankrupt or driven your business into the ground. You find somebody solid--somebody like you, Dana--with good credit references, higher education, no criminal record of any kind at all. You said you had a Ph. D., right?”

Dana looked to Bridger for a translation and he did the best he could: “She says you have a Ph. D., right?”

“From Gallaudet,” Dana said after a moment, her voice echoing tonelessly off the walls. She sat up, squared her shoulders. For the first time all afternoon the hint of a smile settled on her lips--she was proud of what she'd accomplished, proud of the recognition it gave her in a world full of slackers and underachievers, and she saw it as a springboard to more, much more. Her ambition was to move up to a four-year college, and not a deaf college like Gallaudet, but a hearing college where she could teach the contemporary American novel and poetry and maybe even creative writing to hearing students. “In English/ American studies. I did my thesis on Poe and won the Morris Lassiter Award for Scholarship two years ago, the year before I came here to teach at San Roque.” Her voice ruptured--she was tired, he could see that--and she chopped and elided the syllables. “It is un-der consideration at a ve-ry pres-ti-gious univ-ersity press my the-sis dir-ec-tor gave me an introduction to--to which, I mean--but I don't really feel comfortable mentioning the name until things are finalized. It wouldn't be right somehow...”

“Yes,” the woman was saying, and she wasn't really listening, just trying to make a point. She had one of the photocopies in her hand, the one that showed the imposter, the smug thief with his shoplifter's eyes, in sharpest detail. “You see”--she tapped a glittering red fingernail on the stretched skin of the page--“this is Dr. Dana Halter. And you can bet he didn't have to write any thesis to get his degree.”

Though he knew he should get back to Digital Dynasty, let himself in quietly and see to The Kade's unfinished business, he couldn't let Dana suffer all this alone. The news had been exclusively bad--No, the counselor had informed them, the city was not liable for the towing and impound fees and the police were within their rights for having arrested her because her base identifiers were the same as the thief's and they could try a lawsuit but it was just about as unlikely to fly as the San Roque phone book on her desk, though they “might” try small claims court for the towing and impound costs, but of course that would depend on the whim of the judge--and he wanted to be with her, even if it was only to order out pizza and sit in front of the TV while she put her head down and plunged through her student papers. Which was just what happened. They drove separately to her place and while he went out for the pizza (extra large, half garlic and chicken, half veggie) and two dinner salads with Italian dressing, she threw down her briefcase and got to work.

It was just after eight when the phone rang--or flashed, actually. He'd been sipping Chianti and watching a re-run of “Alien,” a movie he must have seen at least twenty times (Dana loved the tag line for the trailer: “In space no one can hear you scream),” trying not to feel too guilty about work. His feet were propped up on the coffee table, the fifth slice of pizza had plugged the hole in him, and he was enjoying the fact that he could crank the sound as loud as he liked without having to worry about distracting her. Every once in a while, as the creature retreated in a tail-whipping blur or mugged to the thunder of the score preparatory to ending the existence of one clueless crewmember or another, he would glance up at Dana. She was sitting across the room at her desk, the buttery glow of the lamp catching and releasing her face as she hovered close with her red pencil and then leaned back again, order restored and everything finally at peace--but for the creature, which was doing its thing now with the saliva machine and the multi-hinged jaws. Yes, and then the phone began to flash.

Dana glanced up. “Would you get that?”

He lifted his knitted ankles off the coffee table without shifting his gaze from the screen--they were going to commercial, a direct cut from the drooling teeth to a baby's naked bottom sans irony or even the faintest glimmer of network awareness--stood and crossed the room to the phone. Like most of the deaf, Dana had a TTY, an assistive listening device that was compatible with her cell and allowed her to send and receive both text and audio messages. He depressed the on button and the light stopped flashing, but instead of a text message, a high querulous whine of a voice came stabbing through the speakers: “Dana Halter? This is John J. J. Simmonds, accounts payable, down here at T-M? I'm calling about your delinquent account--”

““Who”?” Bridger said.

“Because if you're having financial difficulties, I'm sure we can work out some sort of payment schedule, but you have to understand that payment in full must be made each month under the terms of the agreement you signed--”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bridger said. “Hold on now--what account?” He glanced up at Dana; she was frowning over one of her papers, the red pencil poised at her lips.

“Don't give me that crap--”

“I'm not--I mean, we, I mean she--”

“--because deadbeats are one thing we just do not tolerate and I'm sure you can appreciate that.”

“I can, yes, but--”

“Good, now we're getting someplace. ” The voice came right back at him, hard-charging, impenetrable. “Let me give you the straight facts: we're going to need a certified cashier's check in the amount of eight hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents overnighted to our offices by closing time at five p. m. Pacific Coast Time or we “will” discontinue service and we “will” take legal action, and this is no idle threat, believe me.”

Bridger could feel the irritation rising in him. “Hold on just one second, will you? What account are we talking about here--can you please just tell me that, “please?””

“T-M Cellular.”

“But she doesn't--we don't even use T-M. Both our phones are with Cingular.”

“Don't give me that crap. I've got the past-due deadbeat bills right here in front of me. You understand what I'm saying? Eight hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents. FedEx. Five p. m. tomorrow. This is no game, let me assure you of that.”