considered them to be antiquated, obsolete, and so I certainly wasnât in a position to judge whether the form he held out in front of me was standard or not. âThatâs my friend,â he said, and pointed to a line near the top of the form where in faint blue ink someone had written the name âGary Trites.â If he was trying to con me out of four hundred dollars then he was taking a big risk by letting me inspect the money order form. For all he knew, I might be the sort of person that regularly deals with money orders, and so knows what a legitimate form would look like. âThereâs no way heâd try to pass a bogus form off on someone like me,â I thought, and when I thought âsomeone like meâ what I meant was a relatively well-dressed, normal-looking, intelligent-seeming man â my intelligence, I believed, would have been evident to the stranger within seconds of our encounter â but I might as well have thought âsomeone like him,â since I considered him to be well-dressed, good-looking, and obviously intelligent (or intelligent-seeming, at least) even though the desperate and wild eyes that were fixed on me throughout his whole story made me think of the senile patients at a nursing home. He had a nice voice and spoke clearly in full sentences and without the usual pauses, repetitions, and abrupt transitions and loopy syntax that characterize what passes for speech these days. He didnât saturate his story with obscenities or any of the other commonplace verbal tics. And if it werenât for his crazed and hollow stare I wouldnât have doubted that I was speaking with someone in possession of a keen intellect. But the way that he was looking at me as he kept pointing at the name on the form and repeating the blank assertion âThatâs my friendâ, suggested that he wasnât âall thereâ, or that he was a bit âoff.â âEither way,â I thought, âheâd have to be pretty stupid to think that someone like me wouldnât be able to tell the difference between a phony money order and a real one. Why would he risk showing me the money order unless it was the real thing?â I scanned the rest of the form and even though I had never seen one before I decided right away that it was legit. The FedEx logo was featured on the top left and the rest was divided into the boxed grid you would expect from the sort of form designed to record and transfer a sum of money. In addition to this, the form was a colour-coded sequence of three sheets with two carbon inserts, and it seemed altogether unlikely that this guy would have been able to forge this style of document, since the materials arenât available to general consumers and wouldâve had to have been ordered from some sort of specialized merchant who dealt in carbon triplicate forms and that sort of thing. I focussed on the text and was immediately struck by the words âMoney Orderâ on the top of the form. I was so intent on determining the authenticity of the form that it didnât occur to me that he could have stolen it, or that they might be freely available to anyone coming in off the street. âSee,â he said, following my gaze and indicating a line just below the title where $500 had been scrawled in pale blue ink. âItâs like a cheque.â Now that I was convinced that it was legitimate, I began to pay closer attention to what was written in the little boxes, but aside from âGary Tritesâ and â$500â the form was blank except for another name â âLuke MacDonaldâ â and an illegible signature at the bottom. âIs that you?â I asked, pointing at the signature. âYeah,â he said, pulling the form away and putting out his hand for me to shake it. âSorry, didnât I give you my name?â Itâs Luke.â I shook his hand as impersonally as I could manage.
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