Faking It d-2

by Jennifer Crusie

  “It wasn’t your money. You stole it.” Ronald looked around, apprehensive. “Where’s Simon? Is he here?”

  “Simon is in Miami. I will be beating you up on my own. And you know it was my money, you saw me make it playing the same stocks you did-”

  “The million you started with wasn’t yours,” Ronald said, and Davy grew still, struck by the three-year-old memory of a beautiful, enraged blonde.

  “Clea.” Davy shook his head. “Did you have a good time, Rabbit?”

  “See, you don’t even deny it.” Ronald was virtuous in his indignation. “You stole that poor woman’s inheritance from her father-”

  Davy sighed and reached for the salt. If Rabbit had embezzled in the heat of Clea, it was going to be difficult to cool him down again. “That woman is not poor, she’s greedy. She inherited a chunk of change from her first husband and the last I heard she’d married some rich old guy in the Bahamas.”

  “You stole her money,” Ronald said, sticking to the high ground. “She’s innocent.”

  Davy pulled Ronald’s plate over to his side of the booth and reached for the ketchup. “Rabbit, I know she’s a great lay, but not even you could believe that.”

  Ronald drew himself up. “You’re talking about the woman I love.”

  “Clea is not the kind of woman you love,” Davy said grimly. “She’s the kind of woman you think you love, but then it turns out you were just renting her until somebody else came along with an option to buy.” He dumped ketchup on Ronald’s remaining fries.

  “I believe in her,” Ronald said.

  “You also believed the tech ride was going to last forever,” Davy said. “Like my daddy always says, if it seems too good to be true-”

  “We’re not talking about money,” Rabbit said. “She loves me.”

  “If you’re talking about Clea, you’re talking about money. It’s all she cares about.”

  “She cares about her art,” Ronald said.

  “Her art? That’s what she calls one cult movie and two porn flicks? Art?”

  “No,” Ronald said, looking confused. “Her art. That’s how I met her, at her family’s art museum when I was helping value her late husband’s collection.”

  “Late husband?” Davy laughed. “Imagine my surprise. Rabbit, her family doesn’t have an art museum, and she turned to you when she found out you had access to my accounts. What’d the last guy die of?” He held up a fry. “No, wait, let me guess. Heart attack.”

  “It was very sudden,” Ronald said.

  “Yeah, it always is with Clea’s husbands,” Davy said. “Word of advice: don’t marry her. She looks really good in black.”

  Ronald stuck out what little chin he had. “She said you’d speak badly of her. She said you’d threatened her, and that you’d spread lies about her past. You lie for a living, Davy, why should I believe-”

  Davy shook his head. “I don’t have to lie on this one. The truth is grim enough. Look, if you want to commit suicide, dying in Clea’s bed is as good a way to go as any, but first I need my money back. I don’t like being poor. It limits my scope.”

  “I don’t have it,” Ronald said, looking affronted. “I returned it to its rightful owner.”

  Davy sat back and looked at him with pity laced with exasperation. “You already gave it to her. So when was the last time you saw her?”

  Ronald flushed. “Four days ago. She’s very busy.”

  “You gave her the money as soon as you got it, and then she got busy.”

  “No,” Ronald said. “She’s collecting, too. It’s part of our plan, to build a collection-”

  “Clea’s collecting art?”

  “See,” Ronald said smugly. “I knew you didn’t understand her.”

  “There’s not enough fast money in art.” Davy frowned as he pushed away Ronald’s empty plate and picked up Ronald’s coffee cup. “Plus it’s a bigger gamble than tech stocks. Art is not a good way to make money unless you’re a dealer without morals, which entails working.” The coffee was lukewarm and did not go well with the fries. Rabbit had no taste.

  “It’s not about the money,” Ronald was saying. “She fell in love with folk paintings.”

  “Clea doesn’t fall in love,” Davy said. “Clea follows money. Somewhere in this there is a guy with money. And a bad heart. How’s your heart, Rabbit? You in good health?”

  “Excellent,” Ronald said acidly.

  “Another reason for her to dump you,” Davy said. “You lost your fortune in the tech slump and you’re not going to be easy to kill. So who’s the guy she’s spending time with? The guy with a lot of money, a weak heart, and a big art collection?”

  Ronald sat very still.

  “You know,” Davy said. “I’d feel sorry for you if you hadn’t ripped me off for three million. Who is it?”

  “Mason Phipps,” Ronald said. “He was Cyril’s financial manager. Clea saw his folk art at a party at his house in Miami.”

  “And shortly after that she saw the rest of him.” Davy sat back in the booth, his low opinion of humanity in general, and Clea in particular, once again confirmed. “What a gal. She’s learning about art so she can dazzle him into marriage and an early grave.”

  “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.”r />
  “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.

  Chapter 2

  D OWNSTAIRS, GWEN SMILED over 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.”

  It’s a Goodnight, Gwen thought, but she said, “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Those were the good old days, collecting with Tony,” Mason said, and Gwen thought, Tony sure thought so. She listened with one ear while Mason waxed on and on about the old days. This dinner was lasting for months. She could have done an entire Double-Crostic by now. A hard one.

  “I prefer folk art,” the blonde at the other end of the table said, and Gwen turned to look at Clea Lewis, lovely as a spring morning, if spring had been around for forty-odd years but had taken really, really good care of itself.

  “Folk art,” Gwen said politely. “How interesting.”

  “Yes, I’m still collecting it,” Mason said. “But it’s not the same without Tony. He really had the life, buying art, running the gallery, hosting all those openings.” The envy in Mason’s voice was palpable, and Gwen thought, Yeah, Tony had a good time.

  “And living with you and the girls, of course,” Mason added, smiling at her. “Little Eve and Matilda. How are they?”

  Eve’s been divorced since her husband came out of the closet, and Tilda’s given up forgery for burglary. “Fine,” Gwen said.

  “You were always the best part of his life, Gwennie,” Mason said. “You don’t mind if I call you Gwennie, do you? It’s what Tony always called you. It’s the way I always think of you.”

  “Of course not,” Gwen said, thinking, Yes, I mind, and a fat lot of good it does me.

  “Mason and I first met at a museum opening,” Clea said, looking beautifully reminiscent, all dreamy blue eyes and creamy soft skin and silky blonde hair. Gwen thought about throwing a plate at her. “My late husband’s grandmother founded the Hortensia Gardner Lewis Museum,” Clea went on. “It was Cyril’s passion.” She smiled at Mason. “I find passionate men irresistible.”

  “Cyril was a good man,” Mason said. “We were more than business associates, we were great friends. I helped him the way Tony helped me.”

  Oh, God, I hope not. Gwen picked up her glass of wine. “The Lewis Museum?” She tried to remember if Tony had ever sold them anything. Private museums could be so gullible.

  “It’s a small museum,” Mason said, adding, “Of course it got larger when I gave it my Homer Hodge collection.”

  Gwen choked on her wine.

  “And now I’ve come home to finish the last of my new collection with a southern Ohio painter, Homer’s daughter, Scarlet,” he said while Gwen tried to turn the choke into a cough. “Do you remember Scarlet Hodge?”

  “Uh,” Gwen said, and hit the wine again.

  “According to a newspaper interview Tony did back in eighty-seven, she only did six paintings.” Mason leaned closer to Gwen. “In fact, as I remember, Tony had exclusive rights to her work.”

  “Are we having dessert?” Gwen said. “I love dessert.”

  “You eat dessert?” Clea said, clearly appalled, and Gwen turned to her gratefully.

  “Every chance I get,” she said. “If possible, I eat it twice.”

  “Good for you,” Mason said. “I was hoping to come by and look at your records. I’d like to con
tact the others who bought Scarlets.”

  “The records are confidential,” Gwen said. “Couldn’t possibly. Unprofessional. So, dessert?”

  Clea had been tapping on her water glass, evidently trying to summon the caterer who showed up now, looking like Bertie Wooster in his white jacket and slicked-back dark hair.

  “Dessert, Thomas,” Clea said.

  Thomas exchanged a look with Gwen, not the first of the evening.

  “Confidential, of course,” Mason was saying. “But perhaps you could contact them for me. Let them know someone is interested in buying. For a commission.”

  “Really, Mason,” Clea said. “The woman came for dinner, not to be harassed.”

  Mason looked across the table, his face suddenly hard, and Clea shut up. “But what would really help,” he went on, turning back to Gwen, “would be to meet Scarlet. I’d like to do an article on her, nothing professional, of course.” He laughed self-deprecatingly, and Gwen thought, Article? Oh, no. “Do you know where she is?” Mason asked.

  Upstairs burgling your mistress. “I think she’s dead,” Gwen said.

  “But she was so young,” Mason protested. “In her teens. How did she die?”

  Gwen thought about Tilda, throwing the last canvas at Tony and walking out the door seventeen years before. “She was murdered. By an insensitive son of a bitch.” She smiled cheerfully at Mason. “And I have no idea what happened after that.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Mason said, leaning forward.

  “Not if you’re Homer or Scarlet,” Gwen said, as Thomas brought in the cheesecake. “Then it just stinks. Oh, good, chocolate. My favorite.”

  Beside her, Clea contained her scorn, and Gwen cut into her dessert and prayed that she’d heard the last of Homer and Scarlet Hodge.

  “So when can I come by the gallery and talk more with you about Scarlet?” Mason said.

  “Excellent cheesecake,” Gwen said, and kept eating.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  DAVY HAD been braced for Clea, so he was pleasantly surprised when he fell on somebody soft and padded. Definitely not Clea, he thought as he pinned her to the carpet in the darkness and tried to reason with her, one adult to another. It was a fine manly show of control for the ten seconds before she bit him. Then he jerked his hand away, swallowed his scream, and resisted the urge to deck her. A fistfight was not in his best interest at the moment, especially with somebody who fought dirty.