The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [99]
While Wensdae and Senior visited all the next day, Art began a mad dash for supplies. Flush with cash, he rented a truck, then bought a used AB Dick offset from a shop on the Southwest Highway for three thousand dollars. He took it back to the storage space, where he still had his process camera and plate burner. Over the next two days he bought inks, blank plates, and various small items. He crated it all up, took it to a shipper, gave a false name and the address of one of Senior’s friends in Alaska, and slapped down a wad of cash. It was the fastest he’d ever equipped a shop.
With the supplies taken care of, Senior decided that it would be fun for all three of them to hit the road together, so they jumped in the car and headed south. It went without saying that it would be a spending trip, but their first stop wasn’t a mall. It was the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. Only a year and half after his release from the boys’ home, Jason had sold some cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was carrying a 9mm at the time, and the state threw him right back into maximum security, this time for five years. “They only got an hour together, but Jason was excited,” remembers Wensdae. “We let them catch up alone. My dad was shaken up to see him in there. Every one of his kids had problems, but Jason had no real memory of our dad before he left us.”
Seeing their son and brother in prison didn’t deter them from the spree that ensued. The first mall they hit was in Kentucky. Tired from all the gas stations, Art and Senior took a rest, sticking to surveillance while Wensdae hit the stores. Prior to that, Art had given Wensdae a few hundreds to spend, and she had sneaked a few when he wasn’t looking, but this was the first time Art had ever allowed her to accompany him on a full-blown slamming trip. And once he saw her in action, he regretted he hadn’t brought her along earlier. Wensdae turned out to be a spending machine.
“I’m a girl, I love to shop, and I used to be a model,” she says. “And when I say I love to shop you have to understand that there is nothing, nothing in the world I like to do more. I’m a born shopper. Art gave me all kinds of instructions about how to spend, but they just went in one ear and out the other. I know how to spend money. His money was so good that I just treated it like real money, and so did everyone else.” Even on crutches, Wensdae could drop five thousand dollars a day. The crutches helped—no one was inclined to suspect a handicapped woman of handing over a fake hundred-dollar bill. Also, Wendz loved to chat up the cashiers and bond with them. She’d ask the ladies behind the counter if they liked the color of a bra, or which scented soap a man might find most appealing. She had the rare gift of being able to forget that she was committing a crime, at least during the act itself.
Wensdae tore it up through Kentucky, where Art insisted that they drive by Fort Knox and make a symbolic gesture of spending counterfeit as close to the depository as possible. It wasn’t until they swung back up into Indiana that it occurred to Wensdae that her reunion with her father was massively dysfunctional. Fittingly, the revelation came on Father’s Day, when the three of them went out for a celebratory breakfast at a diner in Kokomo. At the table, she handed him a three-dollar card that she’d purchased with a fake hundred-dollar bill. Both she and Art had signed it. After reading it, Senior reached out to give her a hug.
“Don’t touch me,” she suddenly snapped. “You disgust me. This is all wrong.” She began crying.
Senior and Art were taken aback. They asked her what was wrong.
“Here it is, after all these years and we’re out here on the road