The Other Mr. Bax by Rodney Jones Page A

raised letters, held down a stack of papers on the desktop. Waterman dropped into a swivel chair behind the desk, pulled open a drawer, lifted out a file and laid it open over a heavily-doodled desk pad. A variety of ID cards were clipped individually to the lined forms in the folder.
    “Can I get you a coffee?”
    “Yes, thank you.”
    “You take anything in it?”
    “Cream, please.”
    He pushed himself up out of his chair and left the room.
    A dozen or more framed photos and signed certificates adorned the wall behind the desk. Joyce leaned forward, trying to make out the person shaking the sergeant’s hand in one of the photos—no idea—then glanced down at the open folder on the desktop; a laminated blue and white card was paper-clipped to a scribbled-in form. She turned the form around to read it.
    “Erie County Library…” She jumped at the sound of Waterman’s voice coming from behind her. He set a white polystyrene cup before her. “It’s really not good for anything other than borrowing books,” he said. “Not legal ID, you know.” He picked up the sheet the library card was clipped to, removed the card, and handed it to Joyce. “Does that look like his signature?”
    She nodded.
    “Your husband’s?”
    She looked up at him, annoyed by the deliberate redundancy of the question, and again nodded.
    “One of two credit cards…” He stepped around to the other side of the desk, picked up the next sheet, removed the card, and handed it to Joyce. “Same signature. The card’s number’s not valid though. No matching account. Never was. So, what could he have used it for?” He shrugged. “Turn it over. Look at the backside.”
    She flipped the card over.
    “Looks like it’s been swiped a thousand times, doesn’t it?” He smiled. “I can’t help but admire your husband’s respect for detail.”
    The card, she noted, was not from a bank she was familiar with.
    “This one caught my interest. The state recently redesigned our licenses, to make them more difficult to forge. This though…” He slid another laminated card toward Joyce. “Some DMV employee had to have printed it up and then deleted the record. Bad employee.” He shook his head. “I fail to see the point in carrying around an invalid driver’s license with your real name and birthdate printed on it.”
    Joyce examined the photo on the license—a bored looking Roland. “You said last night that he isn’t in trouble. This stuff isn’t illegal?”
    “You’ve never seen these before?”
    “ Is it legal?”
    “Possessing fake ID is not a crime. Freedom of speech. Using fake ID to commit fraud, on the other hand, is a felony. Thing I don’t understand is why a person would go to such an elaborate degree of trouble and expense unless they were planning to profit from it.”
    “That’s not Roland. I mean, he isn’t—”
    “The other night, you said your husband was with you in Phoenix. You seemed convinced our guy here wasn’t your man. You first noticed him missing at around”—Waterman flipped through the pages of a note pad—“sometime before five PM.” His eyes locked onto Joyce’s. “Now you’re telling me this is him?” He patted the forms on his desktop.
    Joyce glared at Waterman, irritated by his pointed innuendoes and by her own gullibility—walking into what now felt like a trap. “You’re wanting me to repeat what I told you on the phone? Fishing for inconsistencies? I don’t have the answers you’re looking for. I can’t tell you why he had all this phony crap on him; it doesn’t make sense to me either. But I’m absolutely sure he wasn’t intending to commit fraud. Nor am I.”
    “Mrs. Bax, I’ll be frank with you. This doesn’t look like fraud to me. Not in the typical sense, anyway. The first thing anyone would do is change their name. But what was he doing with all this? A man from Arizona, a wallet full of New York ID? It doesn’t make sense that he’d spend the effort and money