• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

One unfinished piece of business was still haunting me. I had conned the DMV into sending me a copy of Eric Heinz’s driver’s license, but I’d used my safety precaution of having the first Kinko’s forward it to a second one—just in case law enforcement had caught on and was staking out the place, waiting for me. Since what I picked up had been faxed twice, the image was so grainy that it hadn’t been much help. I still wanted to get the driver’s license photographs of Wernle, Ways, and Heinz to see if any of them were the same person.

On December 24, Christmas Eve, just before starting to load my things into Gram’s car, I called the DMV posing as Larry Currie, the name of a real investigator with the Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud Unit. Giving that unit’s Requester Code, along with Currie’s PIN, birth date, and driver’s license number, I requested Soundexes on Eric Heinz, Joseph Wernle, and Joseph Ways.

The technician who took my request had been alerted. She notified DMV Senior Special Investigator Ed Loveless, who, according to an official report filed afterward, did a little checking and found that the fax number I’d provided belonged to a Kinko’s in Studio City.

Loveless told the technician to make up a phony Soundex, and she prepared one with a picture of “Annie Driver,” a fictional character the agency used for instructional purposes. Then Loveless contacted an investigator at the DMV office in Van Nuys and asked her to stake out the Kinko’s location to identify and arrest the person who came in to pick up the fax. The investigator recruited some colleagues to accompany her, and the FBI was notified and agreed to send an agent of its own. All of this was going on when the only thing everybody really wanted was to be at home, getting ready for Christmas Eve.

A few hours after calling to request those Soundexes from the DMV, with my things now packed into my grandmother’s car, we ate lunch with Trudy. I said my good-byes and told her how much I had appreciated being able to stay with her. She and I hadn’t been in close contact, so the favor she’d done me seemed all the more special.

As Gram and I set out, I told her I had a small errand to do that would take me only a minute. We headed for Kinko’s.

By now the four DMV inspectors, dressed as usual in their civilian clothes, were getting impatient. They had been waiting for more than two hours already. The FBI agent detailed to join them had shown up, hung around for a while, and then taken off again.

I directed my grandmother to the Kinko’s, in a strip mall at Laurel Canyon and Ventura, in Studio City (so-called because of the nearby Disney, Warner’s, and Universal lots). I pointed out where I wanted her to park, in a handicapped space outside a supermarket, a couple of hundred feet or so from the Kinko’s. She hung her handicapped placard on the rearview mirror as I got out of the car.

You might expect that Kinko’s would be empty on Christmas Eve. Instead it was as full of people as it would’ve been in the middle of a workday. I waited in line at the fax counter for something like twenty minutes, growing increasingly impatient. My poor grandmother was waiting for me, and I wanted nothing more than to pick up the Soundexes and get out of town.

Finally I just walked behind the counter myself, flipped through the envelopes of incoming faxes, and pulled out the one labeled with my alias, “Larry Curry [which the DMV had misspelled—it was actually “Currie”], Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud.” When I pulled the sheets out of the manila envelope, I was pissed off: not what I’d asked for, just a picture of a nondescript lady. What the fuck? I knew DMV employees could be lazy and incompetent, but this took the cake. What idiots! I thought.

I wanted to call the DMV and talk to the stupid technician, but I had left my cell phone in the car. I started pacing back and forth through Kinko’s, trying to decide whether it would be too risky to ask a clerk to use one of the store’s phones, or if I should use the pay phone outside.