Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) Read Free Page A

recognizing danger when walking into it. Before my time in Dallas was over, a mafia henchman was going to hold a gun to my head, and that did not so much frighten as annoy me. So, even though I had no plan, I was not alarmed or concerned. Even though this was going to be the biggest act I had ever put on, I intended to play it as I always had—pure improvisation, all on impulse, with little more known than I would be playing the part of a countess.
    In the late afternoon, I had a taxi drop me at an address just outside of Dallas, and then when he was gone, I started walking along the highway. “I’ll be lost,” I started concocting the first act in my performance.  “I’ll be the lost countess.” It sounded quite mysterious.
    When a man stopped to ask if I needed help, I graciously accepted and got into his car. “I’m afraid I am a bit turned around.”
    “Where were you trying to go?”
    “Well,” I looked over the green lawns passing outside the windows, “I was supposed to be in Egypt.”
    The conversation wasn’t going to make any more sense as we moved further along either. He took me home and called his church. “She thinks if she gets to Egypt, whoever is looking for her will find her.” After a bit of silence on his end, he agreed with the preacher, “No, we can’t have that. I’ll bring her right over.”
    It was Wednesday night and the Baptist church in Plano was packed with hundreds of congregants. I was in the preacher’s large office but he couldn’t make any more sense of me than the motorist had, so they went out and got Mike, a retired FBI agent.
    As Mike and the preacher entered the office, I was explaining to a deacon, “I just need to get to Egypt, then I’m sure they will find me.”
    Mike took a chair opposite me and wanted to know, “How are they going to find you?”
    “Well,” I stopped to consider it, “I don’t know. They were expecting me, so surely they will look.”
    Mike settled into a thinking stare, taking in the fur coat draped over the arm of the couch, the black cocktail dress, the high heels, and the accent. I couldn’t tell his age but I thought he was in his forties. What I did recognize was he was serious, and his eyes were critical, not at all like the preacher who worried about my soul rather than the facts. Mike said, “Let’s start again. What is your name?”
    “Constance.”
    “Your full name.”
    I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I paused for the briefest moment to think. I was thinking about my father. His first marriage had been to a Bolivian, and when he gave her full name, it seemed to run on forever. It was gloriously foreign and exotic. As Mike waited to hear my name, I was trying to remember how my father had accounted for them all. Some of her names had come from maternal and paternal grandparents, and then something was from her mother, and maybe more from her father, and lastly she’d taken the surname of my father. If I hoped to pass as foreign, I thought I would need at least four names to be taken seriously.
    I started stringing them together, “Countess Constance Anna Marie Tanya Mitchell.”
    I dropped countess on them like it were nothing, added my own name because I liked it, and then practically undid myself by choosing the last name of the family dog. The dog was Martha Mitchell, named after the wife of John Mitchell, President Nixon's Attorney General. The dog had come into our family a year old and already named, and I still have no idea what I was thinking when I borrowed her surname, but when you’re making things up as you go along, these things tend to happen.
    Mike asked me to say my name again and I nearly laughed. I hoped I remembered the order. “Countess Constance Anna Marie Tanya Mitchell.”
    “You’re a countess?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “I just came from Kenya.”
    “So, you’re Kenyan?” the preacher asked. To Mike he said, “She does sound South African.”
    “I have been there,