The Anonymous Man Read online

  Bingo! thought Fox. But bingo for what prize? He wasn’t quite sure.

  He called Chief Reynolds’ cell phone right away. It was ten forty-two. The Chief would likely be up watching some old, schlock detective movie starring Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.

  “Yeah?” the Chief answered.

  “Chief?”

  “Yeah. Fox?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “The grieving widow has a boyfriend,” he said.

  They both knew what that meant—now, at least, there was a possible motive.

  The Chief was munching on potato chips as he listened to Fox tell him what he had seen. Jeff Flaherty visiting the grieving widow.

  “Got that all the first night?” Reynolds said. “You sure are one slick operator, Jack.”

  “You want me to stay up here, Chief?” Fox asked. “Watch her another night?”

  “Yeah, sure,” the Chief said. “It’ll be like a vacation, up there in beautiful Buffalo. Is it snowing yet?”

  Fox laughed. “Hey, Chief, what you watching tonight?”

  “Watching?”

  “Yeah. What old movie?”

  The Chief kept quiet a moment, knowing that his staff of four investigators secretly laughed about his interest in old detective movies.

  “Double Indemnity,” he said. “You know, the one with Barbara Stanwyck at her foxy and sultry best, and Ed McMurray before My Three Sons ruined a decent acting career. And best of all, Edward G. Robinson as the insurance investigator. Ever see that one, Jack?”

  “Sure have, Chief. Sure have.”

  Chapter Ten

  In early May, five months before they faked his death, Jerry drove down to Binghamton to buy a house in one of the nondescript, old residential neighborhoods in the town of Endicott just west of it. With a population now dwindled to around thirty thousand, Endicott constituted one part of the so-called Tri-Cities—Endicott, Johnson City, and Binghamton. More importantly, as far as Jerry, Holly, and Jeff were concerned, it was only a three and half hour ride down from Buffalo.

  At one time, the Tri-Cities had been an economic hub, a vibrant metropolis with industries like Endicott Shoes and IBM, among others, providing decent wages to mostly lower middle and working class stiffs to spend in supermarkets and department stores and on mortgages for now outdated, oversized clapboard houses. But like so many other northeastern rust belt towns in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Tri-Cities had lost its manufacturing base and fell into a long, numbing, slumbering decline. The sons and daughters of its once proud and prosperous citizenry, themselves sons and daughters of proud eastern and southern European parents and grandparents, had abandoned family and friends to join the grand exodus of the U.S. masses to the more promising environs in the sun belt or out west, to boom towns like Charlotte, Orlando, Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, or Las Vegas.

  In the last decade or so, Endicott’s most famous and largest employer, the iconic IBM, had sold off its manufacturing plant to Endicott Technologies resulting in yet another round of devastating layoffs. A few years before that, the longstanding Endicott-Johnson Shoes, which had employed thousands for nearly seventy years, had gone under. On and on it went, bad economic news followed by more bad economic news, as the old companies went bankrupt, closed down and boarded up or left town for better tax breaks and cheaper labor until there didn’t appear to be a reason for the existence of the Tri-Cities anymore except to house the stragglers who didn’t have the wherewithal or gumption to pack up and leave town.

  The conspirators had selected Endicott as Jerry’s initial hiding place because, first of all, it was far enough away from Buffalo to avoid the likelihood that anyone presently living there would know Jerry or Holly, yet close enough so it wasn’t a hassle to make a morning or afternoon drive. Second, Jerry and Holly knew the area from their college days. They also knew that it was a quiet, nondescript community in which Jerry and later Holly could blend into until they made their ultimate move to a warmer and happier clime—say, Charlotte, Orlando, Atlanta, Phoenix or Las Vegas.

  Once safely ensconced in Endicott, they would begin their new lives in earnest, with all the money they would ever need, and, according to their plan, live happily ever after. By then, Jeff would have gone his own way, out of their lives forever as strangely and expectantly as he had entered it. He would have bought that ranch in Montana or wherever he really intended to go and be living happily ever after himself in his own distinctive, filthy rich way. On occasion, they discussed missing each other once Jerry’s death was faked and the insurance money paid, but mostly they avoided the topic.

  Once Jerry had found a house that seemed right for them, he was to confer with Jeff. If they agreed that the place was a good fit, all he had to do was call the realtor and make an acceptable bid on behalf of a limited liability company, or “LLC,” they had formed under the laws of New Mexico. Establishing the New Mexico LLC had been Jeff’s idea. He had read about it after doing some research on his home computer on becoming anonymous, or invisible. He even found a website written by some former CIA agent explaining how one could fairly easily do so, becoming hidden from even the most determined law enforcement authorities.

  Actually, it was quite simple. New Mexico offered the legal means of incorporating an LLC without identifying its members or requiring annual reports. All one needed to do was designate the name for the LLC, an address, its duration (December 31, 2099, was acceptable) and, a resident agent, —that is, an individual who resided at a real street address in New Mexico who was then authorized to receive communication and accept service of legal process. Sharp New Mexicans offered their services as resident agents for a reasonable fee, then filed the incorporation papers which, importantly, under New Mexico law, did not require the actual members, or owners, to be identified. Ever. For an additional fee, the New Mexican resident agent service offered to obtain a “ghost” address someplace for the owners of the LLC, usually in the Canary Islands.

  According to Jeff, ownership of such an LLC was completely untraceable. They could use it to purchase cars, real estate, and importantly, they could open an account in the name of the LLC in an obscure local bank or credit union outside New York, where they could stash their respective shares of the life insurance money. The paper trail would lead, eventually, to an LLC that had no identifiable members. Thus, it was the rare paper trail that led nowhere and to no one, making it impossible, should they be inclined to try, for the fraud investigators to trace where the life insurance money had gone. Once it was paid, the insurance money itself would become invisible. At least, that was how Jeff explained it.

  Jerry could still remember that Tuesday-with-Jeff-dinner-night in January just after the Christmas Holidays, a few weeks after they had first concocted what had seemed a cockamamie conspiracy to fake Jerry’s death, when Jeff told them about the New Mexican LLC deal. He had burst into the house out of breath, laughing, proclaiming that he had found a perfect way for Jerry to become anonymous.

  With his wide, handsome grin, he told them, “This is better, much better, and safer and easier, than establishing a new identity for Jerry or setting up an offshore bank account where we could stash the insurance money.” Then he had let out a whoop and danced around the kitchen with Holly in his arms.

  The name selected for the LLC, at Jerry’s suggestion and insistence, was “Anonymous Incorporated, LLC.”

  Mostly college kids attending the University of Binghamton rented in the Endicott neighborhood where Jerry had found a house that he considered acceptable for purchase by Anonymous Incorporated. In fact, Jerry and his two closest buddies from his college years had rented a flat in one of these monstrous doubles just a few blocks away. Not much had changed about the neighborhood in the ten years or so since Jerry had lived there. Or in the fifty years before that.

  “The place is perfect,” Jerry had told Jeff.

  As instructed, Jerry was calling Jeff’s cell phone from a pay
phone, perhaps one of the last in existence, near the entrance of the convenience store of some self-serve gas station.

  “An upper and lower flat, right now occupied by college kids who’ll vacate by the end of the semester. I can move into the lower flat and keep the upstairs empty. The rest of the houses in the neighborhood are doubles, renting to college kids. I won’t hardly be noticed. ”

  “Sounds good,” Jeff said. He sighed, annoyed, as he was a lot these final weeks as they prepared to actually pull off the fraud.

  “So, okay,” he said after a moment, “make a bid. Lowball, but not too low. I’ll handle the closing. It’s a cash deal—my cash, so it should close quickly. Shouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Looks like Anonymous Incorporated is about to own a house.”

  The bid was accepted for only two thousand dollars more than Jerry’s initial offer. Less than a month after the bid had been accepted, the house was deeded to Anonymous Incorporated, LLC. It would remain empty the rest of that summer and into the fall until Jerry needed it in late October, when they planned to implement the conspiracy.

  Now that they had a safe house for Jerry to spend his first anonymous days, they could move on to phase two of their plan: faking his death.

  Chapter Eleven

  It had been decided that Jeff would sleep over the night before they faked Jerry’s death. Before going to bed, Jeff and Jerry had gone downstairs and pulled the cadaver out of the freezer so that it would be defrosted by morning. It had been stuffed into a dark blue body bag with a zipper along the side. As they lifted the body from the freezer that night, it struck Jerry funny that they were defrosting the body of a dead human being so that they could, in effect, cook it in the morning and he let out a laugh.

  “What’s so funny, Jer?” Jeff had asked as they lowered the body bag onto the basement floor.

  “This,” Jerry had said and pointed at his feet. Then, he shrugged, not seeing the humor in it anymore. “Nothing.”

  The alarm went off way too early the next morning, a Saturday. The plan called for them to start the fire a few minutes before eight, even as early as seven thirty. This, they believed, would ensure that most of Jerry and Holly’s neighbors would still be fast asleep.

  Each of them was a little hung over that morning, and Jeff was especially ornery. He insulted Jerry every now and then, barking at him to hurry it up and that he better get his “fat ass” in gear. Jeff got especially abusive as he and Jerry lifted the still quite cold and stiff cadaver off the basement floor and carried it upstairs through the kitchen and out into the attached garage.

  Jerry recalled that Holly had been pretty much useless that morning, seeming more hung over and out of it than either him or Jeff. She slunk around the kitchen table with her robe half open, a coffee cup dangling in her hand, advising them to take it slow, that haste makes waste. Just take your time and do it right, she kept saying.

  Jeff was first to unzip the body bag. He immediately backed away from it, gagging.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, wobbling, making a “gack” sound, seeming about to retch.

  Jerry stepped forward and looked down at the cadaver and did likewise. The corpse was markedly decomposed, and, despite the refrigeration and still half-frozen state, it reeked. The face, what little Jerry could make of it, was badly mangled, hardly recognizable as human. Still, it was a human cadaver, formerly a man, approximately Jerry’s height, if not weight.

  Holly entered the garage from the kitchen carrying a supermarket paper bag containing old sweatpants that Jerry had worn out, together with a pair of his old boxers, used tee-shirt, socks, and sneakers. As she handed the bag to Jerry, she looked down at the naked cadaver.

  “Ew!” she said and stepped back into the kitchen. Jerry and Jeff looked at each other a long moment.

  “Now we got to somehow dress this motherfucker,” Jeff said. Jerry sighed. “Dress it? It’s still stiff as a board.”

  So that was their first blunder and it almost soured them to the whole scam. They had totally underestimated how long it would take for the cadaver to defrost sufficiently during the night so it could be dressed with Jerry’s old clothes before it was deposited under the car. Because of that, they had to wait forty-five minutes in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the morning paper for the body to thaw to enable them to pull Jerry’s boxer shorts and sweatpants up its legs, slip an old one of his tee shirts over its head, and then shove onto its feet a pair of Jerry’s old sneakers. Jeff wondered how they could have overlooked that important detail and fretted about what else had been overlooked. He must have said, “Goddamn it,” and “stupid fucking idiots,” a hundred times.

  This waiting made them commence the scam almost an hour after they had planned. Even though it was almost nine by the time they started dressing the cadaver, they decided it was still early enough to do the job. And anyway, there was no way Holly and Jerry were going to tolerate that cadaver in the house another night.

  When Jerry took the initiative and tried to slip the boxer shorts up the cadaver’s gummy legs. He started to retch, then he actually bent over and dry-heaved, “Jesus, Jer,” Jeff said, laughing. “Get a grip.”

  Jerry backed off to stop from throwing up outright and with a frown, Jeff took over the job. And despite swearing the whole time, and stopping to dry-heave himself several times along the way, Jeff got it done in about ten minutes. The cadaver, laying there now on the cold cement floor of the garage fully clothed, looking somewhat like a sleeping zombie, was ready to be shoved under the car. Jerry came over and helped Jeff push the body to a spot almost directly under the old clunker’s ten-gallon gas tank which Jerry had filled last night at the Noco station around the corner. Both Jerry and Jeff retched again at some point in the process and had to stop a few moments. After a breath, they got back to it. With the body in place, Jeff used an oil can to squirt a sizeable enough puddle of gasoline next to the cadaver. All they had to do now was light it.

  “Ready?” Jeff turned and asked Jerry. “Guess we’re at the point of no return, huh, Jer?”

  Jerry shrugged.

  “I wonder what the guy’s name was?” Jerry asked as he and Jeff stared down at the sneakered feet of the dead body sticking out from underneath the Sunfire. The cadaver had settled in a most unnatural position, with its legs twisted around the wrong way and its sneakered feet pointing in opposite directions. But that didn’t matter. In a few minutes, the thing would be a lump of ash, even more unidentifiable as a human being.

  “Dumb shit,” Jeff said, “like you.”

  “Fuck off,” Jerry said and thought a moment of slugging Jeff.

  Holly had entered the garage and focused her gaze on what they were looking at.

  “Are we a go?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Jeff said. “We are a go. T-minus one minute and counting.”

  Three days later, at just after five on the afternoon of his fake funeral, Jerry arrived at the house in Endicott. He opened the front door and stepped into a musty, stale smell, half-expecting a couple of sharp-edged detectives from the Endicott Police Department or mirthless Special Agents from the FBI to be waiting for him with an arrest warrant and Miranda rights. But the kitchen was empty, and the place was silent.

  During his ride down from Buffalo, Jerry had been consumed by the thrill of escape. They had pulled it off, a major crime. The only thing that worried Jerry during the ride down to Binghamton was doing something stupid, like speeding or getting into an accident, that would draw the attention of a state trooper or county sheriff’s deputy to himself. But nothing had happened, and here he was.

  Jerry had questioned Jeff about his ability to drive once he was deemed a dead man. Jeff had assured him, and Holly as well, that he didn’t have to worry.

  “The DMV won’t know you’re dead until someone tells them you’re dead,” he said. “There’s no death certificate database that refers that kind of information to the Department of Motor Vehicles, resulting in your license being cancel
ed. Nobody ever thought that something like that would be necessary. They didn’t imagine this situation. So, rest assured, my little chubby buddy, even after you die, you’ll be able to drive. And your license doesn’t expire, what did you tell me, for six years?” Then, he added with that silly grin that made him go instantaneously from serious to silly, “You’ll be is a ghost driver.”

  Jeff summed it up by assuring Jerry that if a state trooper, or any cop for that matter, stopped him, Jerry could flash his license and they’d accept it without ever realizing that the driver they had stopped, Jerry Shaw, was listed as deceased by the records of the County of Erie.

  The lower flat was partially furnished with an old living room set including banged up end tables and a crooked wooden coffee table. It also included a gas stove and refrigerator. During a subsequent trip down to Binghamton only three weeks before his death, Jerry used cash to buy a plain bedroom set from an anonymous thrift store, together with a love seat and assorted bric-a-brac to complete the living room and satisfy his need for some semblance of comfort and homeyness during the period when he would be exiled down there alone, waiting for the proverbial dust to settle so that Holly could join him. Then she would start filling her role as the front for his anonymity. She would be just like Albert, Batman’s front, or Beavis, the front Jerry had invented for his comic book hero, the Anonymous Man, after his first front, Karen, left him in Issue #2.

  Jerry stood at the wide archway leading into the living room for a moment and took a deep breath. To the world, he was dead. He no longer existed. He was completely and utterly free.