People don t usually rap on my car window at red lights, so I was a little startled when, on my way to work a few months ago, I turned to find a man peering in at me and mouthing what seemed to be an urgent message. “My car got towed,” he said once I’d rolled down the window. “Can you help me?” The light was changing and the man was reasonably well-dressed so I told him to get in. It’ didn’t take long to discover that he was hoping to borrow money.
We drove on and my new friend explained his recent travails, but I wasn’t really listening. My thoughts had turned back four years, to the last time a ” stranded motorist” hit me up for a short-term loan. My editor and I had pulled into a service station in a seedy part of northeast Washington, D.C., for a fill-up. As I walked back to the car after paying for the gas, a man in his 30s in a ratty-looking parka sidled up to me. “Can I talk to you for a second?” he asked. It turned out his car, a rusting heap parked across the street, had just blown a distributor valve. Or a Johnson ring. Or a fribulator gasket. Or some other vaguely esoteric but absolutely vital piece of engine equipment. A replacement would be cheap and easy to get, but unfortunately — and this was the worst part, he said — he had left all his credit cards at home that day. All he needed was $ 7 to get his car going again, and could I lend it to him? He’d mail me a check as soon as he got back to his house. He promised.
I stepped back to take a look at the man. He looked dirty and shaky and short of teeth. And he talked too fast, managing to come off as demented and sly at t he same time. I should have walked away then. His story didn’t make sense. No c ivilized nation would have issued this guy a driver’s license, much less let hi m drive. But I didn’t walk awa y. Instead, I forked over the money, along with my address, written on the back of a parking stub. I wanted to believe I had found Washington’s one honest beggar.
Think you’ll ever see your seven dollars again?” my editor asked when I got back into the car. He spoke with a mixture of pity and fascination, in the tone one reserves for the truly stupid. “No question,” I said. “I’m sure he’s good for it.”
To nobody’s surprise, he wasn’t.
The con artist at the gas station and the fellow I had just picked up seemed to have little in common. For one thing, this guy didn’t look like a drug addict. More telling, he appeared to have a legitimate job. His name, he said, was Derek Richardson, and he worked as a teacher at the “Foreign Service School in Bonn, Germany.” He had been in Washington on vacation for less than 24 hours when his car, which contained his wallet and passport, had been carted away by over-zealous parking police. “I should have known it would happen,” he said. “I went to school here. At Georgetown.”
Pretty convincing stuff. So I lent him $ 48 to get his car out of hock. ” Please send back the money,” I said before dropping him off near the DMV. ” You’ll wreck my faith in this kind of thing if you don’t.” He looked surprised I’d even question him. “No doubt, man. And I really appreciate it.”
Needless to say, that was the last Iheard from Derek Richardson. After a few weeks of waiting for the check, I decided to track him down. I called the State Department personnel office, scanned the federal employees’ directory, harassed the lady at the registrar’s office at Georgetown. Not a trace of Derek Richardson. Finally, I called the American embassy in Bonn. The woman I spoke to seemed confused, both by the name Derek Richardson and by the institution he had claimed to work for. “The Foreign Service School?” she asked, the familiar pity creeping into her voice. “There’s no such thing.”
Normally I would have given up, but by this point I was determined to catch up with Derek Richardson. So I ran his name through Nexis, in the hope he might have cheated somebody else in a newsworthy way. He hadn’t, but his name certainly had been a lot of places. Derek Richardson, it turned out, was a fireman in Louisville, an astrophysicist in Toronto, an employee of a dog-food company in London, a high-school debate champion in Atlanta, the chairman of the National Farmers’ Union in England, and a referee in the NBA. Several years ago, he was a murder victim in New Orleans.
Derek Richardson seemed to be everywhere. Except where he really was, cadging money from dummies like me at red lights. That was the one identity he didn’t seem to have. I guess they never do.
TUCKER CARLSON
