“Don’t be alarmed, dear, when you see a credit card charge from Chardonnay at Sunset,” announced Barb Silver to her husband and business partner, Bernie.
“’Horrified’ would be more like it, Barb,” he responded. “A senior dating service? Was it something I said?”
“Nothing quite that interesting,” she chuckled. “In fact, even the Chardonnay will be a tax deductible business expense for Silver Investigations,” the private investigation firm they’d established after resigning from their long-time jobs as investigators at the Alpha Insurance Company.
“I know the IRS has gotten more permissive lately, but isn’t this pushing it a little?”
“Not at all,” she answered. “Al Jordan,” their former supervisor at Alpha,”called yesterday and asked if we’d be interested in investigating some frauds on women of a certain age who use this dating service, which is insured by Alpha.”
“I know you’re dedicated to your work,” he said, “but dating senior frauds might be a bridge too far.”
“Not if they end up having to pay a toll for their sins…”
“Ah, yes,” he rejoined, “sort of like ‘the wages of sin is death’?”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
***
“Thanks a bunch, Al, for getting my wife to sign up for Chardonnay at Sunset,” groaned Bernie. “What am I supposed to do during this investigation—sit at home on Saturday night and wait for the phone to ring?”
“Don’t worry, Bernie,” replied Al Jordan, “Alpha insures a number of these senior dating services, men are defrauded even more often than women, and I think I’ve found the perfect dating service for you to check out.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s called ‘The 70-Year Itch.’”
“You know I’m not 70, Al.”
“True, but some of these female frauds might like a younger man.”
“I thought Chardonnay at Sunset sounded corny,” said Barb, “but The 70-Year Itch sounds even worse. Are there really enough seniors who want to horse around out there?”
“Many more than you would think,” replied Al. “In a way, I’m in trouble for this because it was my bright idea to offer general liability insurance to these senior dating services. I figured that there would be a lot of tea and sympathy, but not much more—and therefore no insurable events. Boy, was I wrong! Have you ever heard of a retirement facility in Florida called The Villages?”
“We’re quite happy in California in our own home,” answered Barb, “so no. Should we have?”
“It’s the largest such community in the world, not far from Orlando, with over 100,000 residents,” replied Al, handing over a newspaper clipping. “This article will tell you all you need to know—arrests for drunk driving golf carts, a black market in Viagra, and a re-run of the ‘60’s sexual revolution. Baby Boomer residents of retirement homes are much healthier than in the past. Put that together with no fear of pregnancy, and ‘bingo!’, or, rather, lack of interest in Bingo.”
“What about sexually transmitted diseases?” asked Barb.
“At places like The Villages, they’re sort of like the common cold.”
“Great,” sighed Bernie. “I think we’ll be crossing The Villages off of our next Florida itinerary.”
“No problem,” said Al. “All of this sexual energy is not limited to Florida, which brings us back to Chardonnay at Sunset and The 70-Year Itch.”
“With all due respect,” said Barb, “we don’t really care what energetic seniors do in their private lives.”
“Agreed,” said Al, “but Alpha gets very interested when fraud enters into the picture, our insured senior dating services get sued by the victims, and we have to defend those lawsuits and potentially cover the losses.”
“So, you want us to follow the sex so that you can follow the money?” Bernie laughed.
“Precisely–the root of all evil! Take a look at these files and let me know if you’re interested. As you’ll see, we’re not even sure at this point whether we’re dealing with one perpetrator or more. You’ll get combat pay for this one—double your usual outrageous rates.”
***
“Assignments like these are not why I got a good education and worked hard all my life,” said Barb to Bernie later over dinner at a local bistro.
“True,” he replied, “but the files Al gave us describe some pretty bad actors taking advantage of vulnerable men and women. Did you read the one about the so-called Forever Living Assistance?”
“No, I got bogged down on the Jamaican Lottery scam.”
“Well, this one’s pretty clever. The bait is payment of your living expenses for life in exchange for an up-front fee of $5000. But, before you have to pay the fee, the fraud offers to pay some of your living expenses to show they’re authentic. So, they get information from you about your accounts for a few monthly bills you receive, pay them with a credit card, get your $5000, and cancel the credit card. Now the fraud has your $5000, plus information about your accounts that have allegedly been paid. Adding insult to injury, when your “helper” stops paying, you get charged by your creditor for a late fee and your credit record takes a hit.”
“Fiendishly clever,” Barb admitted, “but I’m not about to sacrifice my body for the cause.”
“Of course not,” chuckled Bernie. “You just have to be your usual charming and attractive self, up to a point.”
***
Dorothy Lockyer, the webmaster of The 70-Year Itch, sized Bernie up as he sat down in her office after they had introduced themselves. “Great!” she exclaimed. “We will not have to photoshop your picture.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he responded. “But I assume that everything else on my profile will be fake.”
“’Fake’ is not a word we use much here,” she said. “But, having seen thousands of profiles, I can assure you that yours will be perfect for this purpose.”
“Just so I’m clear,” he queried, “how do you understand that purpose?”
“Well, we have the worst problem a dating service can have: a criminal or criminals defrauding our customers. They are very sophisticated, and the best way to catch them is with the bait they’re looking for: wealthy, vulnerable people looking for love in what we want to be all the right places.”
“So, I take it I won’t be Bernie Silver on your website?”
“Of course not. Then you could be googled 17 ways to Sunday, and they would find out, among other things, that you’re happily married.”
“So, how do you provide me with a new identity?”
“That’s our trade secret, Mr. Silver. You will have not only a new identity but also the email address, Facebook account, and Twitter handle to go with it. I can guarantee you that you will be irresistible to female frauds. Let’s start with the five things a woman in her seventies is looking for in a partner: kindness, honesty, attentiveness, manly conduct and good hygiene.”
“Well,” he responded, four out of five will have to do.”
***
At the same time Bernie was meeting with Dorothy Lockyer, Barb was having an almost identical conference with Don Bertrand of Chardonnay at Sunset. He had gotten to the point of taking her profile picture.
“Smile, Mrs. Silver, and please look down and lean forward a bit more.”
“Look down?”
“I hope I’m not being disrespectful if I say that chins are often not the strong point of our clients. Although yours is quite lovely,” he quickly added.
“Hmm. Any other suggestions?”
“No, you have the perfect profile, which is not too perfect, because that would be intimidating. Frauds like to be better looking than their prey, because that weakens the prey’s defenses.”
She grimaced: “So happy I can accommodate you.”
***
“I’ll show you my profile if you show me yours,” offered Bernie to Barb when they met for lunch after their respective meetings.
“Go for it,” she responded, while sipping the onion soup.
“Widower after 40 years of marriage looking for a serious someone with whom to share my Palo Alto and Napa homes. Retired CPA. Not religious but spiritual. Loves pets and long walks. Someone with grandkids and pets would be ideal.”
Barb’s reaction was “Perfect. It just cries out ‘rob me.’ The amazing thing is that mine is almost identical.”
“Not really surprising,” he said, “because we’re dealing with the same type of professional profilers who know the types that get defrauded. Widows and widowers are vulnerable, retired professionals who own a second home are affluent, and people who love kids and pets are likely to be suckers for others who claim to have the same feelings.”
“So, what should we be looking for on the other side?” she asked.
“Our dating sites have given us total access to what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, their inventory. Why don’t we start by looking for some candidates who, online research reveals, have a little shadiness in their backgrounds? Things like messy divorces or bad credit records or drunk driving convictions.”
***
Bill Warner had had two messy divorces, but he didn’t mention them to Barb, aka Marjorie Lackland, who was sitting across from him at a café for a get-acquainted lunch. They had exchanged several friendly communications on the messengering function of Chardonnay at Sunset. Barb was interested in how his reality would compare with his picture. She was impressed with his fitness for what she estimated was an 80-year-old, but disappointed that his online profile had said he was 70. His smooth-featured, almost beardless face barely let him get away with the age fudge, but there was no way his five-foot-six-inch frame came close to the five-feet-nine inches listed on his profile. “Must’ve forgotten his elevator shoes,” she thought.
Fitness was obviously very important to him. “I had my personal best in a half-marathon last Sunday,” he boasted, and then went on to recount the details of the five half-marathons preceding that one, the 10k races preceding the half-marathons and the 5k’s preceding those.
Barb feigned interest and tried to direct the conversation to financial matters to see if Bill would take the bait. When he didn’t, she hastened the end of the lunch and said that she had to catch her commuter train back home. Bill insisted on driving her to the station. They walked out to the front of the café, where he said he’d be right back, calling over his shoulder to Barb as he broke into a trot in order to show off his running form.
***
“And then he tripped,” Barb related to Bernie when she got back home early that evening. “Plus, his phone broke in the fall, and I had to use mine—or, rather, Marjorie’s–to call 911. I knew senior dating was risky, but I didn’t think I’d end up accompanying my elder companion to the emergency room and handling all the details while his ankle sprain was attended to. Changing the subject, how did the initial meeting between Marilyn Cook and what’s-his-name go?”
“Barry Keller, if you please,” said Bernie, warming up to his alias. Marilyn was a very nice lady,” said Bernie, “and, forgive me for saying so, quite curvy. She quickly led me to the darkest part of the coffee house where we met, which was a little suspicious, but she had nice make-up and attractive grey hair, with perhaps a little too much blue in it. She was wearing a nice dress made of a lightweight stretchy material, with long frilly sleeves. Given her previous problems with credit card debt, I tried to steer the conversation to greedy credit card companies, but she was supremely uninterested in that subject. In fact, all she wanted to discuss was her late husband. I got all the details of what she thought was his extraordinary life from the time they met 40 years ago to his extremely well-attended funeral.”
“What did he do?” asked Barb.
“He was a patent examiner,” responded Bernie, “and I don’t doubt that he was a good one. But talking incessantly about your late spouse is not what The 70-Year Itch is about. Her only attempt at reciprocal conversation was, not surprisingly, her morbid and intense interest in my fictional late wife, Edith, for whom, I am impressed to say, The 70-Year Itch did an excellent job of creating an online identity, including an obituary. I’m not sure I can top your emergency room story, but, when she pulled out her extra-large purse to pay her share of the bill, I did spot what looked like a cremation urn in there.”
“I guess she just wanted him to meet and approve of you,” she cracked.
“Maybe so, but we’re getting nowhere on our investigation,” he sighed. “I’ve faced some tough investigative obstacles before, but fake senior dating might be the toughest. Dating was never much fun for me, but, when it’s fake, you’re literally all dressed up with no place to go.”
“We need to shift gears,” Barb said. “We’ve been looking for people who might need money because of divorce or credit problems that online searches could easily turn up. But frauds would want to seem perfect, and they would make sure that nothing online would trip them up. They might even steal the identities of real, respectable people. Let’s look for some profiles that look too good to be true.
***
Ward Laidlaw III’s Chardonnay at Sunset profile was better than too good to be true. A Harvard grad, class of ’72; a retired investment banker; on the boards of a major hospital and other charitable organizations; and he looked like the late movie star, Paul Newman.
“I’m jealous before you’ve even met the guy,” sighed Bernie. “My only comfort is that he is so perfect that he has to be a fraud.”
“Have you found your perfect match yet, Bernie?”
“Not quite as good as yours, but I think so. Madeleine Kotsakis is the widow of a shipping magnate, mother of four, grandmother of six, and she looks like Cher.”
“What do you think she’ll see in Barry Keller?”
“An easy mark, I hope.”
***
Barb aka Marjorie could not believe her eyes: Ward Laidlaw III looked better than his profile picture on Chardonnay at Sunset. His profile picture was a stuffy portrait; it did not capture his dynamism, which enhanced his movie-star good looks.
“How long have you been on dating sites?” she inquired. “Not very,” he responded. “Quite frankly, I’m just about to give up.” He took a sip of the coffee that they had just ordered at a nice bakery in San Francisco.
“Why is that?”
“The usual triumph of hope over experience makes it hard to get excited about trying again and again. Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course,” she said. “I feel the same way, but, at our age, it’s hard to meet people in the normal course of life.”
“That’s not my problem,” he responded. “I get far too many opportunities from people who know me and, therefore, know that I’m not a poor man. Although I can’t hide who I really am, I really need the randomness of online dating to find someone who might actually like me for myself. What I’d really like is to find someone who is interested in joining me in my philanthropic activities.”
Barb’s ears pricked up at this possible ploy to get money out of her. “I noticed,” she said, “that you’re on the board of University General Hospital. What sort of projects did you have in mind?”
“Interesting that you mentioned that,” he said, “because, as part of its teaching mission, University General is starting a project in Nigeria. You would not believe what people have to go through to get medical care there and the low quality of care if they manage to get it.”
Barb jumped on this: “I’m lucky to have some financial security too, so, regardless of whether anything works out between us socially, I might be interested in making a contribution. How much are you looking for?”
“You wouldn’t believe how cheap things are there,” he responded. “If we each gave $5000, we could endow an operating room.”
“Let me give that some thought,” she said.
***
Later that evening, Bernie reacted to Barb’s intriguing news: “So will I hear next that you’re dating a Nigerian prince? Coincidentally, I get emails from Nigerian royalty all the time, so I’m not impressed.”
“That’s exactly the point, Bernie. I think the perfect profile has lured us to the fraud.”
“So now what?” he asked. “We’re like the dog chasing a car, who doesn’t know what to do when he catches up with it.”
“Let’s ask Al Jordan for the $5000 donation as an expense. Breaking this fraud ring is worth much more to him than that.”
***
“You want me to donate $5000 to endow an operating room in Nigeria?” exclaimed Al when Barb and Bernie met with him the next day. “What’s next? 1000 tickets to the Jamaican lottery?”
“Calm down, Al,” responded Barb. “This is exactly the kind of scam that we’ve been hoping for. And this guy, Mr. Laidlaw the third, is not even trying very hard to cover his tracks. Here is the information he gave me for the bank transfer. Once he starts that process, we’ll have good clues to track him to his fiefdom of fraud.”
$5000 is the limit of my signature authority,” said Al, “so fortunately I don’t have to run this by anyone else or they would laugh me out of the room. You can have the money, but you better make sure you get defrauded.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Barb.
***
Barry aka Bernie met his perfect date at a restaurant bar in Woodside, and he was shocked: Madeleine Kotsakis did look like Cher. When he mentioned that to her—“I’m sure I’m not the first to say this but”– she took it in her stride: “It was important to my late husband, Andreas, that I look good, so he provided me with the time and the money to do that.”
“Then why on earth are you on The 70-Year Itch?” he queried.
“Having a shipping magnate hubby is not as enviable as it might appear, Barry.”
“Not a continuous boatload of fun,” he commented, regretting it immediately.
She grimaced, but agreed. “Not everyone would put it so directly, but, in the right circumstances, I appreciate candor in a man.”
Pressing, he noted that her online profile said that she was open to short-term relationships. “Why is that?” he asked.
“Same reason, really. I was married to a difficult man for 35 years, and I need to see what else is out there.”
“How short is short-term?” he followed up.
“A night is too short and a year is too long,” she murmured.
“Very interesting proposition,” responded Bernie/Barry, trying not to seem too encouraging.
“But,” she said, “there would have to be one condition.”
“Oh,” he said, remaining noncommital.
She continued, “I cannot trust someone who I can communicate with only through The 70-Year Itch messengering system. I would need to have your actual cell phone number, address and email.”
“I see your point,” he said. “Let me think on it. It’s been nice to meet you.”
***
Later that day Bernie recounted to Barb his rendezvous with Madeleine: “I think we have a live one. She wants me to break rule number one of online dating, ‘Stay on the platform; don’t reveal your personal information.’”
“That does seem fishy,” Barb agreed. Are you going to give her the information?”
“Why wouldn’t I be happy to give her Barry Keller’s information, with the devout hope that she tries to defraud him?”
“Ok,” she responded, “then what?”
“Then we engage in the most important skill of detective work: waiting”
***
They didn’t have to wait long. The next day, Barb got a call from the public relations department of University General Hospital.
“Let me guess,” said Bernie. “They want to give you an all-expenses-paid trip to Nigeria for the grand opening of the new operating room.”
“Not quite,” she responded, “but you’re closer than you might think. They want me to come to the hospital to pose with Ward for pictures publicizing the gifts for the new Nigerian operating room.”
Bernie registered shock: “I have never been so disappointed to hear that someone is not a fraud. Our theory of looking for the perfect profile might need some fine-tuning. Ward actually might be perfect.”
“I have to say that I never thought Ward was a fraud,” she responded, “but I suppose you could say that about most successful frauds.”
“Correct,” he exclaimed. “If they appeared to be frauds, it would be much harder for them to defraud people. People with squinty eyes, upper lip sweat and facial tics are just not that persuasive.”
“What are we going to tell Al,” Barb said plaintively. “He’s not going to be happy about making this charitable contribution without me getting defrauded.”
“It’s a good cause,” said Bernie. “and they make plenty of money at Alpha Insurance, so they can spare some for this operating room. Plus, we still have the possibility of being defrauded, just not by upstanding citizen Ward Laidlaw III. And, if I know Al Jordan, he’ll find a way to get a tax credit from the Nigerian authorities.”
***
Barb and Bernie’s fraud watch continued. The next day, something much more ominous than Nigerian operating rooms came in.
Barb got an email on the account of her alias, Marjorie Lackland. The subject line contained just one word: “snowball.”
“What’s the significance of that?” asked Bernie, “aside from the fact that it’s the name of your beloved pooch?”
“More seriously,” responded Barb, “it’s also the password for Marjorie’s email account. The person who sent this wanted to show Marjorie that he had access to her email, and naming the password accomplished that in spades.”
“Hmm,” mused Bernie. “Do I smell some blackmail comin’ ‘round the bend?”
“Exactly,” said Barb. “When Chardonnay at Sunset created Marjorie’s account, they put some racy emails—including suggestive photos–in there in case the scammer was using a fairly well known blackmail scheme: threatening to publicize embarrassing information to everyone—from her grandchildren to her minister–on Marjorie’s contact list.”
“But you didn’t give Marjorie’s personal contact information to anyone,” protested Bernie. “Or did you?”
“Well,” she answered, “Ward Laidlaw is out of the picture, so that just leaves my careless runner date, Bill Warner, and he was so busy recounting his running exploits, I didn’t give him any such information.”
“Didn’t you accompany him to the emergency room?”
Barb looked stricken. “That little weasel faked his injury, knew that I would accompany him to the emergency room, and overheard me giving my, or rather Marjorie’s, contact information to the admitting nurse. Then he hacked the account for the password.”
“Pretty damn clever,” said Bernie, admiringly.
“Well, we’ll see how clever he is now,” she gloated, picking up the phone to call their contact at the SFPD, Joe Kelly.
***
As she was doing that, Bernie went to check the emails on the account of his alias, Barry Keller. He was surprised when he opened the first email, which had as its subject line “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
The body of the email stated that the computer of Barry Keller’s widow, Edith, had been hacked and that, if Barry Keller didn’t immediately make a $10,000 payment in bitcoin, his late wife’s memory would be “covered in shame.”
***
“That email was so threatening,” Bernie confided to Al Jordan when they were doing their usual case post-mortem in his office at Alpha a few days later, “that I was actually quite worried for a moment until I realized that Edith didn’t exist. In fact, the only person in the world who thought Edith existed was my date who couldn’t handle her credit cards, Marilyn Cook. I presume she is in the clink by now, Al, right?”
“Well, yes and no,” Al responded.
“How’s that?” asked Bernie.
By way of an answer, Al handed him a picture of a bedroom. Strewn around it were a blue-grey wig, foam padding in various shapes, bottles of make-up and items of female clothing.
Bernie looked at Al quizzically.
“Guess whose apartment this is,” Al challenged.
Bernie looked puzzled, but Barb immediately exclaimed “My runner date, Bill Warner!”
“Indeed,” said Al. “Bill Warner was an equal-opportunity fraud. To make sure he could chisel men as well as women, his alter ego was Marilyn Cook.”
“I mean,” Bernie stammered,” she was so curvy that it never occurred to me that she wasn’t female. I’ll have to look into buying stock in the company that makes that foam rubber she—he—uses. Very authentic. I now realize why her frilly sleeves covered much of her hands. 70-year old male hands would have been a dead giveaway despite her curves.”
“Remind me to hire someone next time who knows the meaning of vive la difference,” responded Al. “But I have to give both of you credit. Two out of the four profiles you chose were problematic, and that led to the solution of the case. And, perhaps we’ll still see some criminal activity from the fourth, Madeleine Kotsakis.”
“I doubt that,” said Bernie. “I—Bernie Silver, not Barry Keller—got an email from her this morning. Let me read it:
Dear Bernie/Barry,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your real
first name. As I mentioned to you, being married to a
shipping magnate was not all peaches and cream, but
one of the current advantages is that I have access
to first-class computer experts. Indeed, I would have to say that they are superior to the computer experts
at The 70-Year Itch, because it did not take my
experts long to discover your true identity. So, I’m
afraid neither a short-term nor a long-term
relationship would work out for us. Please give my
best regards to your lovely wife, Barb.
Itchily yours,
Madeleine
BIO
Ron Katz is a trial lawyer who has published non-fiction extensively. The Sleuthing Silvers series is his first foray into fiction. In 2016, he was a Fellow in Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute.
Read all 5 short stories. Your wit shined through your characters – well done. They were short, funny, and kept my attention. Good luck in your new venture!