Jennifer Crusie - Faking It

“Mason’s not that old. He’s in his fifties.”

“The one I saw her kill was in his forties. I gather Cyril was her latest victim?”

“She did not kill her husband,” Ronald said. “Cyril was eighty-nine. He died of natural causes. And she didn’t make porn. She made art films. And she loves m-”

“ Coming Clean ,” Davy said. “Set in a car wash. She’s billed as Candy Suds, but it’s Clea. Don’t believe me, go rent it yourself.”

“I don’t-”

“But first you’re going to help me get my money back.”

Ronald drew himself up again. “I most certainly am not.”

Davy looked at him with pity. “Rabbit, you can stop bluffing. I have you. If I tell the Feds what you’ve done, you’re back on the inside. I understand why you fell for Clea, I wasted two years on her myself, but you have to pick yourself up now. I’m going to get my money back, and you’re either going to help me or you’re going to go away for a very long time. Is she really worth that to you? Considering she hasn’t called you since she got the money?”

Ronald sat motionless for the entire speech and for a few moments after, and Davy watched his face, knowing wheels were turning behind that blank facade. Then Ronald spoke.

“Coming Clean?”

Davy nodded.

“You and she…”

Davy nodded.

“You think she and Mason…”

Davy nodded.

“I don’t know how to get the money back,” Ronald said.

“I do,” Davy said. “Tell me about Clea and art.”

Ronald began to talk about Mason Phipps and his collection of folk paintings; how Clea had followed Mason to begin her own collection and was staying with him now; how she had promised to call, would call, as soon as she had a chance.

“She’s very busy with the collection,” Ronald said. “It’s taking a lot of her time because Mason has to teach her so much.”

How you ever made a living from crime being this gullible is beyond me , Davy thought, but he knew that wasn’t fair. Clea was the kind of woman who flattened a man’s thought processes. God knew, she’d ironed his out a time or two.

Ronald went on about Clea the Art Collector, and Davy sat back and began to calculate. All he needed to do was con her address and account number out of Ronald, get her laptop, go into her hard drive, find her password-knowing Clea, she used the same password for everything-and transfer the money. It wasn’t a con but it was semi-risky, and it appealed to him a lot more than it should have. He was not looking forward to breaking the law. He was straight now. He’d matured. Crime no longer excited him.

“What?” Ronald said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re breathing heavy.”

“Asthma,” Davy lied. “Give me her address and her account numbers.”

Ronald furrowed his brow. “I don’t think that would be ethical.”

“Rabbit,” Davy said, putting steel in his voice. “You have no ethics. That’s how you got into this mess. Give me the damn numbers.”

Ronald hesitated and then took a pen and notebook from his inside jacket pocket, flipped to a page, and began to copy numbers down.

“Thank you, Rabbit,” Davy said, taking the page Ronald tore from the notebook. He stood up and added, “Don’t leave town. Don’t steal anything else. And do not, for any reason, call Clea.”

“I’ll do anything I damn well please,” Ronald said.

“No,” Davy said. “You will not.”

Ronald met his eyes and then looked away.

“There you go.” Davy patted him on the shoulder. “Stay away from Clea, and you’ll be fine. Nothing but good times ahead.”

“At least admit you stole her money, you crook,” Ronald said.

“Of course I did,” Davy said, and went off to rob the most beautiful woman he’d ever slept with. Again.

BREAKING INTO Mason Phipps’s house had been a bad idea, but Tilda hadn’t been able to think of a better one. Now, creeping through Mason’s halls in the dark of night, she was reconsidering. She really wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. She was a retired art forger, not a thief. Plus, the place was deserted except for a caterer in the kitchen and Gwennie’s Dinner Party from Hell in the dining room, and it was spooking her out. “Drama Queen,” her dad would have said, but she had reason to be spooked. She’d searched an empty billiard room, an empty library, and an empty conservatory, and now she stood in the barren hall, thinking, I’m knocking over a Clue game. Miss Scarlet in the hall with an inhaler . Those were the days, the Golden Age, when men were men and women didn’t have to do their own second-story work. What she needed was one of those old-fashioned guys who rescued women and stole things for them.

Oh, pull yourself together , she told herself. She crept upstairs and opened the doors to one empty room after another until she found a bedroom full of silky things tossed everywhere, perfume scenting the air, the kind of room that fit the kind of woman that Tilda would never be. For one thing, she’d never have enough money.

Something glowed on a desk. Tilda squinted at it through her glasses and realized it was the edge of a laptop computer. Clea Lewis had closed her laptop without shutting it down. Careless , Tilda thought, looking around at everything the woman had and didn’t take care of. Really, she didn’t deserve to own a Scarlet.

Downstairs, a phone rang, and Tilda picked up speed, making a circuit of the room in the dim streetlight that filtered through the curtains, checking behind furniture and under the bed, feeling her way when the shadows were too deep to see. The Scarlet wasn’t that small, she thought as she turned to the quartet of paneled closet doors along one wall. Where the hell had Clea stashed it?

She opened the first two doors and shoved the clothes apart to search the back of the closet.

A man stood there.

Tilda turned to run, and he slapped his hand over her mouth from behind and yanked her against him. She kicked back and connected with his shin, and he swore and lost his balance and dragged her to the carpet as he fell.

He weighed a ton.

“Okay,” he said calmly in her ear, while she struggled under him, trying to pry his hand from her mouth before her lungs collapsed. “Let’s not panic.”

I can’t breathe , Tilda thought and sucked in air through her nose, inhaling a lot of dusty carpet.

“Because I’m really not this kind of guy,” he went on. “There’s no criminal intent here. Well, not against you.”

He had a grip like a vise. Her lungs seized up as his hand pressed against her mouth, her muscles clenched, the world got darker, and the familiar panic overwhelmed her.

“I just need to be sure you’re not going to scream,” he said, but she was going to suffocate, she’d always known she would someday, her treacherous lungs betraying her like everything else in the Goodnight heritage, but not like this, not in the middle of breaking the law while being mugged by some deadweight lowlife, so as her lungs turned to stone and his voice faded away, she did the only thing she could think of.

She bit him.

D OWNSTAIRS, GWEN SMILEDover the last of dinner at sweet, chubby Mason Phipps, trying to keep her thoughts on the landscape that Mason was showing her and not on her youngest daughter, roaming somewhere in the house looking for evidence of her misspent youth.

“What do you think?” Mason said, and Gwen yanked her attention back to him. “It’s a Corot.” He stroked the top of the frame with one finger. “Tony wasn’t sure, but I said, ‘No, that’s a Corot.’ And when I had the canvas tested, I was right. It’s a Corot.”