The Crimes of Jordan Wise by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

the letter Richard James Laidlaw and gave the mail drop's address as my own. The vital stats office had no reason to cross-check the name against their death records and no legal reason at that time to turn down the request. I wasn't the first to use this method of obtaining a birth certificate in order to establish a false identity, of course. I got the idea from reading about a similar case in Detroit that had come to light the year before. The method was used often enough, in fact, for the regulations and requirements covering the issuance of copies of birth certificates to be eventually changed in most if not all states.
     
    Step five: I bought a secondhand IBM typewriter, the kind that had a ball element and came with extra elements in different type faces. At night in my apartment, I manufactured half a dozen detailed invoices, one for each of the dummy companies, keying each to specific job sites that Amthor was currently operating in various parts of northern and central California and that were guaranteed by size to last more than a year. In two cases there was a distance of several hundred miles between the job sites and the bogus company addresses, but this was not unusual. Amthor hired its subcontractors on a bid basis and its suppliers on a price-break basis, and the costs of relocating workmen and equipment and of long-haul shipping were always factored in.
     
    I kept the total amounts of these first six invoices relatively small; the highest was a little more than $9,000, from Darwin Electric. They were as much a test run as an opening gambit, to satisfy myself that the forgeries were good enough to pass through the comptroller's office without question. Not that I had any doubt of it. In the past I had rubber-stamped invoices in the high five figures, and the comptroller's office had paid them without question.
     
    Step six: At the office I established new accounts in the names of the six dummy companies, then okayed the invoices and sent them along one or two at a time in the daily batches. In each case I noted that the company had requested payment by direct deposit.
     
    A week went by without incident. No one in the comptroller's office asked to see me about any of the new accounts. The invoices were absorbed into the system as easily as any of the legitimate ones.
     
    Notifications of deposit began to arrive from the banks until I had all six. I didn't withdraw any of the money. And wouldn't until much later in the game. I had enough cash in my personal savings account to take care of expenses such as the Portland trip.
     
    Step seven: I created a second set of invoices along the lines of the first set, with larger total amounts—upwards of $10,000 on both the Darwin Electric account and the West Valley Construction account. After two weeks I sent a couple of the invoices through for payment, since it wasn't uncommon for some of the high-overhead independent contractors to bill on a twice-monthly basis; the other phony invoices went in on the monthly schedule. From then on, I increased the sums of some invoices incrementally, while decreasing others so as not to raise any red flags.
     
    Three weeks after I sent the letter to the Multnomah County courthouse, I received the copy of the birth certificate. In a sense that would have horrified Annalise's religious aunt and sister, Richard James Laidlaw—like Jordan Wise—had been reborn.
     
    Step eight: I took another day's sick leave and drove to Sacramento, where I applied for a Social Security card at the local office in the name of Richard James Laidlaw, using the birth certificate as proof of identity. If I'd been asked why a thirty-four-year-old man was applying for his first card, I had a story ready: I had inherited a large sum of money and now that it was almost depleted, I was forced to go job hunting. But the lie wasn't necessary. The bored clerk looked at the application just long enough to make sure I had filled it in properly.
     
    After