Larceny

By

Kate Davison

Larceny swam in her veins like an epidemic searching for a host. It bred in her bone marrow, pulsing out in her white blood cells, infecting her organs to the point of decay.

Molly peered through the bars of her jail cell with weasel-like eyes, waiting for the next opportunity to come along, but unwilling to sacrifice even an ounce of effort to obtain her desires through honest means. Even in the close confines of the county lock-up, she was considered a pariah.

The late winter sun filtered through the frosted windows set high in the walls, away from the cells and temptation of escape. Somewhere down the hall, in the squad room, a television played continuing coverage of the Challenger disaster. Molly was perhaps the only person in the state of Florida that didn’t care one way or the other what happened at the Cape. How did it affect her? It wasn’t like NASA was going to ever offer her a job, besides, she couldn’t think of anything more depressing than having to work for a living.

A guard stood down the corridor from Molly’s cell, her back turned to the prisoners as she talked to a man in a suit. They moved off down the hall until Molly could no longer see them. In a few moments a guard would come and escort her to the little locked room where she would be interviewed by the court appointed attorney. Already the wheels of corruption spun in her mind, pulling the threads together to fabricate a tale of how she had come to possess the old man’s credit cards.

She had been through this before - interrogation, booking, and court process. All she had to do was to make her story sound convincing, as if she were the victim here, and the judge would show leniency. They would never find her old record. That had been buried along with her past, and besides she hadn’t been prosecuted under the same name.

Molly looked around the cell. Most county lock-ups were basically the same, tired gray walls and stainless steel benches. The room smelled suspiciously of Lysol, instead of burnt coffee, day old cigarettes, and stale urine as they did in the old days.

The first time she had been arrested was in her sophomore year of high school. Her parents were gone for the afternoon so she decided to invite her friends over instead of going to school. They shared a few confiscated drinks from the liquor cabinet and a nickel bag until old lady Beatty from across the street heard the loud music and called the cops, who dragged all the kids into the station, delivered a lecture on truancy and the dangers of drugs, and then called parents.

Molly had not made out quite as well. A prior run-in with the same cops for shoplifting a few weeks earlier had earned her the distinction of being the only one in her circle of friends to get booked that day. The attention she received for her infamous booking made her a heroine among her friends. By morning, the story had spread through the school like mono. Finally, she wasn’t unimportant, or invisible. People knew her, and knew her name -when it was still safe to use her real name.

“All right, Ms. Rothschild, quit your daydreaming and step lively. You have a visitor.” Officer Howell jangled the key in the lock then swung the heavy door open under the loud protests of abused hinges.

Howell’s perfume swam in a cloud around them. It was a sweet clawing scent that denoted its origins of a bargain bin at the local Eckerd Drugs. Molly tried not to breathe in the offensive stink of mediocrity, worried that it would invade her lungs and become a permanent part of her. It reminded her too much of her own lower middle class origins.

Officer Howell cuffed Molly’s wrists behind her back escorted her down the hall to the interview room where the attorney waited. This too was a familiar ritual for her.

The walk took them past several empty cells and a desk with another guard sitting there reading a manual of some sort. He looked up and sneered as Molly was escorted down the hall. His large bulbous nose protruded from his face like a scarlet letter, announcing to the world his love affair with the bottle. He had no room to look so condescendingly at Molly. She raised a professionally waxed brow at him, and made sure he knew her displeasure.

When they reached the interview room, Howell opened the door, ushered Molly inside, removed the cuffs then locked her in with the court appointed attorney.

Molly gave him a five second assessment. Unmarried. Retail suit. Overworked. Frustrated. With that information she would know how to play him to her advantage.

She first learned how to play public defenders after her first adult arrest for a pyramid scam gone wrong. The poor man had taken one look at her feigned confusion and earnest admission of not knowing the scam was illegal and he became putty in her hand.

He stood up and offered his hand. “Ms. Rothschild, I’m Stanley Potter.”

She held out her hand in a limp, lady-like handshake. “Mr. Pott-ah.”

Molly watched his gaze shift from her face to her hands as she rubbed her left hand over the right wrist. Affecting a soft genteel southern accent, she said. “I think those dreadful handcuffs must have been a little tight.”

The accent had the desired effect on him, and he gave a concerned frown. “Have the police been mistreating you?”

She gave a little shrug of her shoulder. “Not truly, considerin’ the circumstances. But I don’t feel they believe this is all a misunderstandin’.”

Mr. Potter pulled a chair out for Molly as she gave him a gracious smile and a nod of thanks.

The table could only be considered one in an academic sense. It had a worn Formica top and rickety metal legs that listed to one side. Someone had placed a folded paper napkin under the short leg to give some semblance of uniformity, but time had rendered the napkin, much like the table, virtually useless.

Mr. Potter took the seat across from her and took up a fresh yellow legal pad. The pen he held poised to take down the details of her story appeared as inelegant as his suit.

“Why do you feel they don’t believe you?”

“If they believed me they would have taken the credit card from me and given it back to Mr. Sorenson instead of arresting me.” Molly held her hands in her lap, and sat straight in the chair, her ankles crossed to project an air of grace and sophistication - two traits she had to work very hard to incorporate into her repertoire.

Mr. Potter shook his head as if to clear it. “Perhaps we should start from the beginning. What is your full name?”

“Margaret Madison Rothschild. My friends call me Maddie.”

He looked up from the paper and smiled out of the corner of his mouth at her. Molly was pleased he understood the implied consent to call her Maddie as well. She found it was always best when dealing with men to let them be as intimate and friendly as possible. It was easier to manipulate them that way.

“Your address?”

“Did the police not provide this information to you?”

“Yes, but I like to be thorough.”

Molly gave him a dazzling smile with orthodontia-perfected teeth, courtesy of a Mrs. Monica Llewellyn from Winter Haven. “I’m glad to hear it.”

His glance lingered on her smile then moved back up to her eyes. Mr. Potter narrowed his slightly then looked back down at his legal pad.

“Address?” He prompted again.

“Technically, I’m between them at the moment. I had just left Jacksonville on route to Biloxi to start a new job, when I found Mr. Sorenson’s credit card at a rest area. Poor dear must have left it there.”

“Do you have any friends or family that can vouch for your story?”

Molly sat back in a shocked silence. Her mind worked overtime. Never, in her experience, had a court appointed attorney asked her if she could corroborate her own story. They were supposed to defend you whether you were guilty or not. What ever happened to the right to a fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, and all that other Constitutional crap public schools rammed down the throats of children?

“I’m alone.”

He looked up sharply. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Her first instinct was to begin to flay him with her sharp tongue, but by a will born of many desperate hours she forced herself to lower her head in sorrow. “Yes, well it hasn’t been easy for me.”

Molly rubbed the indentions on her fingers where the large diamond rings used to sit. The police had taken all her valuables when they booked her, now she felt naked and vulnerable without the expropriated jewels on her hands. She had, after all, stolen them fair and square from that widow she worked for in Atlanta.

Molly turned her attention from her bare hands to study the mirror on the wall behind Mr. Potter. The glass had a smoky hue, like a doorway to another world. She shook her head. Couldn’t the taxpayers of Grover’s Lake afford a more convincing two-way mirror for the Sheriff’s department? Though the quality of the mirror was poor, it still afforded enough of a reflection to show Molly a woman she wasn’t entirely pleased with at the moment.

Dark circles made hollows under her eyes and emphasized the smeared mascara that claimed to be smudge-proof but had not lived up to its promise. Molly didn’t like the way it made her smallish eyes appear more beady. After she got out of here, her next scam would at least provide her with the means to have eye work done. She knew of a plastic surgeon in Birmingham who did wonders for a man she once knew that needed extensive alterations made to a rather recognizable face. The best thing about the plastic master was he took payments under the table and asked no questions. For now, she made a swipe at the smudges and smoothed her hair back.

“How long have you been alone?”

Mr. Potter’s voice startled Molly. She had been so involved in her own daydream.

The lie she had told so many times it eased between her lips as naturally as breath. “My father killed my mother when I was twelve, then committed suicide. I was shuffled between family members who didn’t want me, or had too many children of their own to reach out to a traumatized adolescent.”

Truthfully, her parents lived in a mobile home park in Clearwater, where they regularly attended discount buffet dinners and played bingo every Wednesday at the local Baptist church. They were silver-haired retirees who lived on social security checks and the benefits from a pension plan. They weren’t bad people, just small-minded. Molly had often wondered how she had ever been born to them and their complacent happiness in middle class suburbia. Once she had even forged a death certificate to cash in on her parents’ life insurance policies - that alone had made it necessary to change her name.

Mr. Potter’s silence at her revelation unnerved her. Perhaps she had played this one wrong. Most attorneys locked their jaws around the story like a hungry snake on a mouse, swallowing it whole until only the tail protruded waiting to be sucked in by a forked-tongue. It appeared time to reassess the situation; however, she’d let him make the next move.

The silence stretched between them, a third party in the room insinuating its presence in the conversation and making it uncomfortable. Molly dared not look at Mr. Potte,r afraid he would see her flagging confidence beneath the surface of her eyes. She ran a hand over her once tight chignon, internally cursing the fact the police had not given her time to cosmetically prepare before meeting her attorney. Appearance meant everything, and if she presented the look of a desperate woman she would be treated as such. She could not afford that. There was no way in hell Molly would go back to prison.

Mr. Potter cleared his throat. “Your birthday, please.”

“June the eleventh, nineteen sixty-three.”

“So, you’re twenty-three.” He looked up again at her, this time his eyes lingered longer on her face before his hand began to scribble something on the legal pad.

“For a few more months anyways.”

“Place of birth?”

“Indianapolis.”

“Now, tell me everything you can remember about your stop at the rest area, and how you came to have Mr. Sorenson’s credit card.”

“I stopped at the rest area on route 10 outside of Lake City. I was on my way to use the facilities when I noticed a credit card on the floor under a bank of candy machines. I picked it up and put it in the outside pocket of my purse, with the intention of mailing it back to the bank.” Molly stopped here, her hands stalling mid-air. “The rest area doesn’t have attendants at it. It’s basically just restrooms and free brochures, candy machines and a small picnic area.”

“And?”

“By the time I got to the beach here, I had forgotten all about it.”

Mr. Potter nodded, but said nothing else. He reached into the inside pocket of his cheap suit and slid a picture across the table to her. “Do you recognize this woman?”

Molly felt the blood drain from her face and tried hard not to let the shaking in her hands show as she looked at the picture. It had been taken about three years before. Her hair was blonde then, a deep tan made her look healthy and rich. Her clothes were impeccably tailored by a small exclusive boutique in Palm Beach. She stood between a man and a woman in their mid to late fifties. The Sorensons. “Where did you get this?”

“From Mr. Sorenson.”

She gave a nervous laugh. “Where did he get it?”

“Come now, Ms. Rothschild, you know you’ve been discovered, so just come clean.”

Molly snapped, pulling away from the table and standing up. “You are a sorry excuse for an attorney, Mr. Potter?” Her accent disintegrated with the story.

Mr. Potter gave a dark, chilling smile. “Who said I was an attorney? I’m with the F.B.I.”