The Anonymous Man Read online

  “So,” he asked, his face aglow from the heat emitting from the fire, “what do you think?”

  Jerry frowned for a time, took a sip of wine. His first inclination was to laugh, but he soon realized that Jeff was serious. Holly just sat there next to Jerry on the couch, her legs under her slender frame, poker-faced, seeming to be sizing things up.

  “How could we make it look like an accident?” Jerry asked. “What would happen to me to make it look like an accident?” He felt the wine course through him. “And then, what about my body?”

  “We’d set it up so you burn,” Jeff said. “You know, in some kind of accidental fire. A garage fire or something. Burned beyond all recognition. No DNA left.”

  “But, whose body would it be?” Jerry asked.

  “One of those bodies from the medical school,” Jeff said, indicating that he had thought through certain messy details, and even done some research. “You know, one of those cadavers donated by someone for use in anatomy class for dissection by medical students. They have dozens of them at the university medical school, right here in town. We could get one of them, bribe a worker who takes care of them or something. As far as the autopsy, the medical examiner would have no cause to doubt that burning or smoke inhalation was the cause of death.”

  There it was, the seed of a seemingly crazy, if not entirely stupid, criminal conspiracy. Insurance fraud of the highest order. And the million-dollar policy subsequently became two, purportedly by Holly’s selfish scheming, meaning a take of four million dollars because of the double indemnity rider. Meaning, of course, that the three of them could and would be set for life if they did the improbable and actually went through with it. And even more improbably, pulled it off.

  “It’s called pseudocide,” Jeff said. “It’s been done before. Lots of times. There’s even a TV series on it, I think. Most people do it without a lot of planning. We have to be careful, we have to be good. We have to be patient. Go slow. Real slow. Wait a year or more to pull it off.” Jeff laughed. “You know, someone even wrote a book on it. But don’t worry, I didn’t buy a copy. That would leave a trail. You have to be careful about those things these days.”

  The fireplace had long grown cold, reduced from a once crackling blaze to a few hunks of black dying embers. Outside, it had stopped snowing and a cold full moon produced a stark blue glaze along the blanket of white covering the front lawn of Jerry and Holly’s modest, split-level Colonial as if were made-to-order to give atmosphere to Jeff’s bizarre proposal.

  With Jeff apparently finished, Jerry looked over at Holly. Her legs were still pulled tightly under herself, and her eyes glazed over as she stared forward with a simple, fathomless Giaconda smile. It was at that moment when Jerry first suspected that Holly had already known about the plot. That Jeff had already secretly discussed it with her at some point previous to this, and that this meeting had been not been spur-of-the-moment but a set-up to convince him to do it.

  They continued discussing what was then only the fantasy of a criminal plot, massaging it, adding and subtracting details. At around midnight Jeff proclaimed with bold conviction that this was something that they could and would actually do.

  “You will need a front, of course,” Jeff had stated somewhere along the way. “Like in your comic book. To be your interface with the world so that you can survive. Someone to secure your shelter and your food, the basic necessities. Just like your Anonymous Man.”

  Jerry mulled that over for a time. “Why not just get me a new identity? There are ways of doing that, right?”

  “Too fucking risky,” Jeff slurred, by then having consumed six or seven glasses of red wine. “Too much paper.”

  Jerry nodded. Yes, as Jeff stated, the perfect way to commit the crime, and to avoid risking detection in the future, was for him to become his comic book hero.

  Jerry looked over at Holly. She was still playing dumb.

  “So,” Jerry said, still looking at her, now himself slurring his words, “I presume you will be my front?”

  Holly turned to him. “Of course. Who else would do it? Not the girl from your comic book drawings. What was her name?”

  “Karen,” Jerry said. “Her name is Karen Smith.”

  He held up his wine glass and toasted the plan as eagerly and enthusiastically as Jeff and Holly did. Following the toast, he joined in the embrace in a symbolic ménage a trios consummating the conspiracy, proclaiming that it was real, that they were going to do what needed to be done to fake his death and fraudulently collect the two million dollars.

  Part two of the plan concerned Jerry’s exile to Binghamton, New York, three hours away, until the claim on the insurance policy was filed and paid. Then Holly could join him to become what Jeff had called his “front.”

  Jeff had sensed Jerry’s unease with this part of the plan. For the first few weeks, certainly no longer than two or three months, Jerry would have to go it alone in Binghamton. He certainly could never return to Buffalo. Once they had the money, they could go wherever they pleased, provided he remained anonymous.

  “Just take my advice,” Jeff continued. “Lose some weight. Get a different haircut. Grow a beard. Become a new man, totally different, in looks anyway. And it couldn’t really hurt, could it, for you to lose a few pounds?”

  Jeff smiled, and there it was for the first time, Jeff’s first cruel reference to Jerry’s abundant waistline.

  “Then,” he went on, “once Holly joins you, you can both start a new life with money in your pocket this time around.”

  Start a new life. Yeah, that’s what Jerry and Holly needed, big time. Maybe Holly would even get pregnant, and all the dreams they used to talk about in those wonderful first couple of years of their marriage might actually come true. Back when Holly still thought she would become an actress, and had studied scripts late into the night.

  For his part, Jeff had talked about moving out west, buying a ranch, settling down. Hunting, fishing, golfing, relaxing 24/7.

  “Fuck the world,” he said. His idea of romance, of finding the woman of his dreams, he added with a wink toward both Jerry and Holly, was to “pork” half-way decent looking escorts three or four times a month, a different one each time. Or finding a country girl, some rugged Sarah Palin type who believed in the right to bear arms. Not like the women in these parts, intellectual bitches who became lawyers and had daddy issues.

  “All you have to do is keep a low profile, my friend,” Jeff said and patted Jerry on the shoulder. “Then we’ll be millionaires. Set for life.”

  “No problem,” Jerry said. “What other choice will I have?”

  They gave themselves two years to pull it off. Two long years, a timetable Jeff insisted upon and Holly debated. Jeff needed time to find the right medical school employee to bribe for a body. And all the other details needed to be hashed out before they even remotely tried to pull it off.

  Almost a year to the day when it was first proposed, just a week or two before Christmas, Jeff came beaming over to their house and exclaimed that he had found “the body guy.” That was when they finally picked a relatively certain date for Jerry to become the Anonymous Man.

  Chapter Five

  “Look,” Jeff said, “no more time to chit-chat. I have to get to your funeral brunch and you have to get your fat ass moving before something bad really does happen.”

  As he opened the passenger side door, Jeff reached back and patted Jerry on the shoulder.

  “Everything’s going to work out just fine, Jerry boy,” he said, smiling. “We pulled it off, man. They really think you’re dead. Once Holly gets the money, she’ll come down to Binghamton and you guys will live happily ever after while I slink off alone to Wyoming or Montana or wherever-the-fuck I find that ranch I’ve been blabbering about.”

  He patted Jerry one last time.

  “You have become your creation, pal,” Jeff said as he left the car. “The Anonymous Man.”

  Jerry nodded, suddenly unsure of anything r
ight now. He started the car and drove away.

  He should have gone directly to the Thruway entrance ramp for the two-and-a-half-hour trip east to Syracuse, then another hour south on I-81 to Binghamton. Instead, Jerry took the route for one last look at 320 Northview Lane, the first and only house he and Holly had ever owned.

  The modest three-bedroom split-level Colonial was in a relatively new subdivision representing the kind of lifestyle pursued so thoughtlessly by young, aspiring middle class, credit-card-crazy-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses couples. They had bought the house six years ago. Jerry had just been hired by Micro-Connections, then an upstart company with few assets but fueled by the dreams of its two owners. Kent Grant, one of the sharp, fast-talking gurus who had started the company, had employed Jerry fresh out of the State University of New York at Binghamton, or SUNY Binghamton. Jerry had been awarded a degree in business, with a relatively impressive GPA. At the time he was sufficiently motivated to convince Grant, himself a SUNY alum, that he could not only adequately serve the existing customer base, fledgling as it was at the time, but also, and better yet, substantially increase it. For that, Grant had agreed to pay Jerry what seemed a generous $50k a year to start, with the promise of making a lot more in salary and bonuses with the increasing client base.

  But after six years, Jerry had settled into to a kind of melancholy competence, a comfortable numbness, and general obscurity in the company chain-of-command, satisfying existing customers and developing just enough new ones to keep his managers unaware of his lackluster and uninspired performance. He got lost in the mix as the company burgeoned and Kent Grant and Arthur Bay, the other owner, another Binghamton grad, became too far removed from the day-to-day trenches to notice what guys like Jerry were doing. Jerry had settled somewhere between the cracks, so as the company increased in size and profits, Jerry became professionally anonymous. And at times, true to form, he found himself wasting an hour or two during the drudgery of the nine to five drafting storyboards on his computer screen concerning the latest exploits of the Anonymous Man.

  Holly was working part-time as a retail clerk in a jewelry store at a nearby mall back then. She was also getting some shoots for clothing catalogs arranged by a somewhat suspect modeling and talent agency that had sucked a bushel of money out of them with the promise of serious TV commercials or stage roles that never seemed to materialize. There was a side offer to do a soft porn series which Holly had flatly rejected. It once led to a really big argument between Jerry and Holly when, during one of their rare love-making sessions late one night, Jerry was stupid enough to admit that the thought of her making soft lesbian porn genuinely excited him.

  Only a year or so after that, having completely settled into the house on Northview Lane, and, having still not yet gotten pregnant, Holly took a full-time job as a secretary in a medium sized law firm, Carlton and Rowe, that specialized in handling personal injury cases for accident victims. It was at this point that Holly truly and sadly seemed to give up on her modeling and acting career. She had stopped talking about it with Jerry and stopped seeking auditions or reading lines from some script late into the night. It was as if someone had operated on her brain one night and excised all interest in the thespian art.

  On the day of his funeral, Jerry turned onto Northview Lane just before noon and slowed as he approached number 320. The street was deserted, with everyone in the neighborhood working and their kids at school or in daycare, so Jerry did not believe there was much risk of being spotted. He pulled the car to the curb almost directly in front of the house. The attached garage up a short driveway was a burned out shell. What used to be the garage door had already been boarded up with several sheets of plywood and there was a bright red sign on it from the salvage company, Brewer & Sons, Inc.

  To the disappointment and chagrin of Jerry, Holly, and Jeff, the firewall between the garage and the house had worked gloriously to specifications and saved the house from complete destruction. So far, this had been the only glitch in their scheme, which had included not only faking Jerry’s death, but destroying the house as well. The fire had been called in to 911 by the cell phone of Dan Kleingensmith, a neighbor from down the other end of Northview who had been out walking his ornery fox terrier and observed smoke billowing out from under the garage door and flames shooting out of a side window. Kleingensmith was the same neighbor who after making the call burst into the house and, after hearing someone taking a shower in the upstairs bathroom would forever believe that he had rescued Holly from the blaze.

  Their failure to burn down the house had caused a momentary panic among the three of them, a lack of confidence that their perfectly planned and executed crime had not been so perfectly executed after all. The thought finally occurred to each of them at that moment that there were a million things that could and would go wrong. It had been their intention all along not only to collect on Jerry’s life insurance policy, but also on the homeowners’ casualty policy as well. Holly said the house was insured for twice its value. Together with their personal belongings, the homeowners’ claim would put another four hundred fifty grand or so in their pockets. But with the house proper withstanding the blaze, the destruction of the garage and some smoke and water damage would merit only fifty or so.

  Not to mention that confining the damage to the garage might make it easier for the arson investigators to pin down the cause of the blaze as intentional rather than accidental. Jeff had read that the more damage inflicted on a structure during the course of a fire, the less likely the arson guys would be able to prove arson.

  Jerry stayed parked along the street not far down from 320 Northview for at time with the car idling, remembering all that and other things while staring at the house he had lived in every single day for the last six years. Finally, he surprised himself by choking up. The sight of the house and its burnt-out garage confirmed once and for all that he was never going to live there again, that his former life was over. That indeed his life as Jerry Shaw was over. Or, if he ever lived as Jerry Shaw again, he would do so in jail.

  Glancing up into the rear-view mirror, Jerry saw a car cruising toward him from the far other end of the street. He put the Malibu in drive, and slowly pulled off from the curb. After passing six or seven houses in the subdivision, he pulled back to the curb and let the car pass. He took one last look over his shoulder. What had used to be his house looked empty and quite alone right then, forlorn and forgotten, an innocent victim of their crime.

  That was when Jerry really started crying.

  Chapter Six

  As Jerry merged onto the New York State Thruway for the three and a half hour ride to Binghamton, he thought back to how he and Holly had met. It had been the first weekend of his junior year at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He had gone with his two housemates, his best friend, Dan Cormack, and Steve Fisher, to Bo Jangles, a newly opened singles’ bar in Johnson City, a poor, working class town squeezed between its equally poor, working class neighbors, Binghamton and Endicott, hugging the meandering Susquehanna River, together making up the so-called Tri-Cities.

  Having lost his buddies among the wall of bodies in the crowded bar after visiting the cramped men’s room, Jerry situated himself into a dark corner. Bo Jangles thumped and roared with inaudible music and conversation. To be heard by the person next to you, you had to shout.

  Jerry observed the crowd of people around him with disinterest. He wanted to find Dan and Steve if for no other reason than to tell them he was leaving, going home to watch Saturday Night Live or some old, silly Japanese spy movie on TV when really he would probably end up jerking off to porn on the Internet.

  Jerry’s decision to abandon the bar was related, of course, to his complete lack of confidence or hope that he’d find a girl to make it with that night. He was self-conscious of his bulging stomach, his lack of even a hint of pectorals, and the assurance that, because of these attributes, no respectable girl between eighteen and twenty-one could find him even
the slightest bit attractive.

  “I wouldn’t fuck me if I was a girl,” he had recently told Dan.

  But as he stretched up on his toes to try and glimpse the whereabouts of Dan and Steve, Holly happened by, nudged him accidentally. In the process of saving himself from falling sideways into the bar, he corrected in the other direction and fell flatly into her.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said as he nearly smothered his face in her neck and bosom.

  She laughed. “Did you just give me a hickey?” she asked.

  While he backed off and straightened himself, apologizing profusely at what an awful klutz he was, she smiled and said that he had “great blue eyes.”

  “I love eyes,” she said. “Especially blue eyes.” Then, she added the clichéd, “Did you know, the eyes are the windows into the soul?”

  It was the first time Jerry had ever heard such a thing. In fact, he thought it was clever and nice and could think of nothing to say or do so he simply shrugged and said, “I guess.”

  “No, really,” she insisted, thinking perhaps the shrug and his comment was an indication that he doubted her sincerity. “You have really nice eyes.”

  “Really?” He thought a moment, then added, “What, you mean, like a teddy bear or puppy dog?”

  “Yep, that’s exactly what you remind me of,” she said, and smiled, “a big, sweet, huggable puppy dog.”

  Jerry smiled too, and they somehow transformed that lame initial discourse, which Jerry would never forget, into an engaging and ultimately sweetly intimate conversation that somehow, over the roar of Bo Jangles, lasted almost an hour. Finally, with his voice growing raw, Jerry felt entirely secure in suggesting that they take a walk outside. That walk led to a stop at Jerry’s car, fifteen minutes of necking and panting and massaging, and, finally, to Jerry’s utter astonishment, a trip to the bedroom of the apartment she shared with three other classmates for sex.