Catch Me If You Can Page 0,45
inside pocket of my jacket. I drove to the nearest bank, walked in jauntily and presented myself at a teller's booth attended by a young woman. "Hi," I said, smiling. "My name is Frank Williams and I'm vacationing here for a few days before reporting to Los Angeles. Would you please cash this check for me? I think I have sufficient identification."
I took the envelope from my inside pocket, extracted the check and laid it on the counter, along with my phony Pan Am ID card and my illicit FAA pilot's license. I purposely dropped the envelope, with its distinctive Pan Am logo and return address, on the counter.
The girl looked at my bogus identification documents and glanced at the check, but she seemed more interested in me. Commercial airline pilots in uniform were obviously a rarity in Eureka. She pushed the check back to me for endorsement, and while she counted out the money she asked chatty questions about my work and the places I'd been, questions I answered in a manner designed to bolster her apparent romantic image of airline pilots.
I was careful to take the envelope with me when I left. I had made certain that she noticed the wrapper, and it had patently enhanced her faith in the check. The transaction also verified a suspicion I had long entertained: it's not how good a check looks but how good the person behind the check looks that influences tellers and cashiers.
I went back to my motel room and labored late into the night concocting several more of the sham checks, all in the amount of $500 or more, and the following day I successfully passed all of them in different downtown or suburban banks. Based on my knowledge of the check-routing procedures used by banks, I calculated I could spend two more days in Eureka making and dropping the bum expense checks and then have three days lead time for travel before the first one was returned as a counterfeit.
But an identity crisis, which I experienced periodically, forced me to revise my timetable.
I never immersed myself so deeply in an assumed identity that I forgot I was really Frank Abagnale, Jr. In fact, in casual encounters with people, where I felt no compulsion to play-act and nothing was to be gained by affecting a guise, I invariably presented myself as Frank Abagnale, a foot-loose fellow from the Bronx.
It was no different in Eureka. Away from my motel, where I was registered as Frank Williams, or the girl, who had succumbed to a man she believed to be a Pan Am pilot, and out of the pilot's garb, I was simply Frank Abagnale, Jr. To a degree, my actual identity became a refuge from the pressures and tensions of posing.
In Eureka I met a fisherman off a fishing boat in a seafood restaurant. He stopped at my table to tell me he had personally caught the very fish I was eating, and then sat down to converse with me. He was a car buff, it developed, and I told him about my old Ford and what I had done to dress up the car. "Hey, that's what I'm trying to fix up now, a 1950 Ford convertible," he said. "You don't have any pictures of your heap, do you?"
I shook my head. "I do, but they're all back in my room at home," I said.
"Gimme your address in New York and I'll send you some pictures of my wheels when I'm finished with it," he said. "Heck, I might even drive to New York and look you up."
It was very unlikely that he'd either write me or come to New York to see me, and just as unlikely that I'd be there to receive either his letter or him, so I searched my pockets for a piece of paper on which to jot down my name and New York address.
I came up with one of the blank counter checks. I borrowed a pencil from a waiter and was writing my name and New York address on the back of the check when the fisherman was called to the telephone, a pay phone on the wall near the door. He talked for a few minutes and then waved at me. "Hey, listen, Frank, I gotta go back to the boat," he shouted. "Come by tomorrow, willya?" He bolted out the door before I could reply. I gave the pencil back to the waiter and asked for my tab. "You