Crowne of Lies

by Reiss, CD

  “So late?”

  Websites with flames, guys in hoods, green letters on black backgrounds came up and disappeared.

  “Rehearsals. The spring production’s Cats. She’s Grizelda. Been hearing Memories for weeks already.” He paused to scroll. “You coming?”

  “Of course. Get me a ticket.”

  “Boom.” Amilcar held out his hand at another website I couldn’t make heads or tails of. “God bless the dark web.”

  “Does he have it?”

  “In his fucking couch cushions, lady.”

  I clapped once. “Awesome.”

  “You’re not marrying him or anything are you?”

  Amilcar’s instincts were finely tuned. I should have known he’d get it on the first guess.

  “Who knows what the future holds?”

  He shook his head, part impressed part dissatisfied. “So you’re dating.”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “But it’s a short story too, so I wanted to make sure he has what he says he has. Not that it matters. I just… well, why I wanted to know about the money is the long story part. And I can’t tell you, so don’t ask. You just have to trust me.”

  “Trust but verify. Your judgment sucks. I want to meet him.”

  “If we get married, you will.”

  “Before that. I want to give him a look over. Sniff his ass out. Make sure he’s not some kinda rapist, or like, I don’t know. Whatever.”

  “Okay. You give me your first impression. I’d like that.”

  “Hope it’s worth it,” Amilcar said. “Whatever it is you need stupid money for.”

  I threw my arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek, but I didn’t tell him I was selling my hand in marriage for stupid money.

  4

  LOGAN

  “I think we should win,” Byron said. “That’s what I think.”

  The conference room we’d occupied for the past four hours still smelled of dinner, and the halls outside it were quiet. The head of supply and the VP of operations were catching my brother up on shit he would have known if he’d been around.

  “There’s no point to winning the contract if we overpay for it,” I said.

  “We can make money back,” Byron said as if there was nothing more obvious. “Losing damages our reputation. Forever. You want to risk that for a few pennies on the dollar?”

  This fucking guy. He couldn’t read an EPS report or between the lines of an MD&A, but here he was tossing numbers around as if he were on a Mardi Gras float.

  My phone rang. Mandy.

  “I think we should pick this up in the morning,” I said, standing.

  The operations VP closed his folder.

  I slid into the hall, whispering, “Well?”

  “You owe me,” Mandy said.

  “She in?”

  “Open to the idea. It’s going to cost you.”

  “How much?” I closed the door to my office.

  “A strategic buyout of her father’s company.”

  “I need you to be more specific. This WalMart or the corner store?”

  “If I tell you who she is, you’re on for a meeting. Okay?”

  The interior walls of my office were glass, and I watched Byron walk down the hall with the VP, talking like a man making a point. Probably selling him on spending a few more pennies on the dollar.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “The company is Basile Papillion.”

  “Ella,” I said without hesitation.

  “I knew you’d remember. See? It was meant to be.”

  * * *

  Ella Papillion.

  What did I remember?

  Cute. Very cute, actually. Smart. Dead mother. The age difference was a joke now, but at the time, she’d seemed too young to touch.

  I remembered her alongside Millie, my senior year girlfriend and director of the school theater production. Her costumer had been a sophomore, still been young enough to be called a prodigy, pins in her mouth, hunched over a sewing machine or sketching so quickly my girlfriend hardly had to finish a sentence.

  Cooper Santon was supposed to be investigating the rest, but I couldn’t wait. I had Mandy arrange a meeting for the next evening. Ella insisted on her place. I was already halfway across Beverly before Cooper called. I pulled over to take it.

  “You have five minutes,” I said when I picked up.

  “You didn’t give me a lot of time.”

  “Fast, cheap, and good, Coop. You get two out of three in life and I didn’t bother with cheap. So tell me what I paid for.”

  “Okay. Ella Papillion. She still works at her father’s company. Lives on—”

  “Highland Ave. I know.”

  “It’s not zoned for a residential lease.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “There aren’t any liens against her.” He rattled off the relevant facts. “No drug arrests. No mental health issues I can see. And—you said this was important, so I made sure before I called—the internet’s clean. No bad publicity with her name on it.”

  “No drug arrests.”

  “Right.”

  “The specificity is weighing on me, Coop.”

  “That’s what you asked about. Specifically.”

  “Has she broken any laws that matter?”

  “She was into graffiti as a kid. Got picked up for vandalism and trespass in 2007. Pled and took the fine. Then again in 2008. Community service picking up garbage on the side of the 101.”

  That was after I knew her. She’d left Wildwood School a few months before I graduated, leaving Millie without spring production costumes. Must have had a few downhill years after her father got remarried.

  All of that was a long time ago. I had a few hours to decide if I could live with it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you have an opinion? A gut reaction?”

  “Depends what you want with her. Would I date her? Yeah.”

  “Would you marry her?”

  “If I loved her. Wouldn’t give her my bank account numbers right off.”

  “Thanks, Coop.”

  We hung up and I pulled back onto Beverly with a few minutes to ask myself how desperate I really was. How important was getting married? How much time did I have before Byron wedged himself in so deep I couldn’t get rid of him? Every day for six months, he’d gotten more comfortable. He kept his woman happy, played around on the floor with his son, and ran a multinational business with me. Every day, he proved he could handle Crowne and a personal life without breaking a sweat, and every day I wasn’t married, I proved I couldn’t.

  My father held the keys. He was in charge of succession and wanted a Crowne to run the business. It had always been Byron, until his first fiancée committed suicide and he left to flip real estate. Then my father turned to me, and I jumped in with an exhilaration I’d never felt before, working at his side for six years until he decided I wasn’t happy enough.

  Byron was winning. He thought everything was about winning, but it wasn’t. It was about getting in the ring and staying on your feet for every round. Beaten bloody, aching from the battle, ears ringing so loudly you could barely hear the last bell—that was the point.

  Born two and a half years apart, we’d spent one season in the same Little League division, but on different teams. He hated baseball, and I figured he stayed in another year just to play against me. He pitched. I hit. And when our teams met in the playoffs, the fucker beaned me cold. Swore he didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe he hadn’t. But I’d be damned if I was going to let a pinch runner take that base. Damned if I wasn’t going to steal a second and drag my ass up to the plate in the next inning.

  I was a hitter. I knew where to put the ball. And when he sent an off-speed pitch I saw coming a mile away, I sent it right to his fat fucking head. He dodged but couldn’t catch it, and I got to second.

  It was the last time he let a m
an on base, but I stole third and made it home on a sac fly. It was the last run we needed to win, so fuck him. When we got home, he apologized and I slept like a concussed baby for fourteen hours.

  For him, anything less than total domination was a loss.

  I was more surgical. I wanted what I wanted. He could have the rest.

  And I wanted Crowne. I didn’t want to lie to get it, but I had to, and I had to lie now or let Byron take everything.

  The address on Highland was in a semi-industrial zone on a block of converted warehouses built when the neighborhood was one big storage unit for Hollywood studios. Most had been turned into restaurants and furniture stores. Ella Papillion’s sat between two galleries and had a billboard on the roof. The barred steel door and small window in front had been integrated into a graffiti-style mural that said BREAK SHIT.

  Not a great sign.

  My family would have to be convinced I’d marry into a message like that.

  I turned around the corner and found the back alley. Two cars were parked behind her building. An El Camino that had been dark blue when it came off the factory floor, but was now a cool gray, and a new black Toyota Camry.

  I pulled my BMW into the last available space and got out, then went up the concrete steps to the metal door, which was ajar. I pushed it open. “Hello?”

  The space stretched to the front of the building. Clean white wall on one side. Fucking mess of small, stacked canvases on the other, along with shelves of paint, brushes, a slop sink, a drafting table, and a mismatched couch and chairs that looked as if they’d been dragged in from the street.

  The white wall had a single, seven-foot-high, five-foot-wide blank canvas on it. The fluorescent light made it seem to glow.

  A door in the back of the white side opened, and Ella stepped through. “Hey, Logan.”

  Not the same girl. First off, she was pierced. Nose. Ears all the way around. Her wavy black hair was pinned to the top of her head, and her eyes seemed to be a paler brown. Almost amber. The freckles I remembered from high school had paled, making her seem sexy instead of young. She wore a black choker and a sleeveless Star Wars T-shirt that hugged her curves. The ripped jeans sitting low on her waist were painted, patched with contrasting thread, and wide on the bottom in a way that was out of style, but somehow right with the red cowboy boots.

  “Ella,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “You too.”

  She was looking at me the same way I looked at her. Taking stock of my face, my suit, with her thumbs hooked in her belt loops, ringed fingers tapping her hips.

  Bit of a challenge, this one. Maybe I’d make a deal with her. Maybe I wouldn’t. But no matter what my decision was, I wanted her to agree to the proposal. I wanted her to want it as desperately as I needed it.

  I said, “You look good.”

  “Let’s not start with bullshit, okay?”

  Before I could answer, a man came from the same door. Six-three. Built. Dressed for business and looking right through me.

  “Logan Crowne,” Ella said. “This is my friend, Amilcar Wilton.”

  We shook hands and I wondered if the El Camino was his. That would be a kind of relief.

  “Good to meet you,” he said.

  “Same.”

  He turned to Ella and nodded. “I’m out.”

  “Yeah?” she answered as if he’d said more than two innocuous words.

  “Yeah.” He kissed her cheek, and though she and I hadn’t agreed to a damn thing, my blood ran a little hotter and my hands tightened into fists as if she was already mine.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “See you,” Amilcar said to me as he passed.

  Behind me, the door closed and we were alone.

  “Cool place,” I said.

  “Thanks. You want to sit?”

  “Before I get comfortable, Mandy said you were single. That meant unattached. Completely unattached.”

  Outside, a car started in the back alley. It wasn’t the rumble of an El Camino, but the whirr of a new Camry.

  “You mean Amilcar?” she said, eyebrows raised. “No, no. He’s a friend. A good friend, but you know… just a friend.”

  “Ah. Right. Just checking.”

  “Full disclosure. I wanted him here to meet you. He’s a first impressionist. It’s like a gift. One look and he knows.”

  Every person who knew about what I was trying to arrange was a potential leak, and if my family found out, I could kiss Crowne goodbye. I didn’t know this Amilcar person well enough to trust him.

  “You told him?” I asked.

  “I said you and I are dating, if that’s okay.”

  “And he gets an impression of everyone you date?”

  “I wanted to make sure you’re not just trying to get laid.”

  “I don’t need to go to this much trouble to get laid.”

  “Or maybe you’re a serial killer.”

  “I didn’t kill Millie. We just broke up.”

  She laughed.

  “Sit.” She indicated a worn couch and two chairs around a chest that served as a coffee table. “I’ve got a pot of water boiling. Or soda. I have Sprite. But…” She looked me up and down again, and I squinted at her as if that would help me discern what she was seeing. “I can get you a glass of milk if you want that.”

  Milk?

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  I’d be fucked before I let her get milk out of the fridge just for me, because even though it didn’t matter what she thought of me as a man, I cared.

  5

  ELLA

  Leaving Logan in the working side of the space, I crossed to my makeshift kitchen.

  Yeah, a guy like that didn’t have to work to get laid at all.

  The Logan Crowne in my memory was straight-arrow, straight-A, just the cool side of math nerd, and way too handsome to be shunned by the rich beauties who could have anyone they wanted. I’d heard them talk as if I wasn’t right there, on my knees, fixing the hems on their costumes. They said Millie must be putting out. They said he’d dump her soon.

  But he didn’t, and though I’d blushed whenever he was near me, I couldn’t help but root for them to make it as a couple.

  The Logan Crowne standing in my studio wasn’t that boy anymore. He was a full-on man. Old-school, Carey Grant gorgeous. Women probably took their clothes off as soon as he walked into a room.

  Not that it was supposed to matter.

  “I hear Millie’s the theater director at the Ahmanson,” I called out.

  “She goes by Millicent now.”

  “Why did you guys break up?”

  “She was a little too ambitious for me.” Before I could ask him what the fuck he was talking about, he changed the subject. “What are you doing with the big one?”

  Trying to catch a glimpse of him through the doorway, I leaned back as I turned off the hot plate under the saucepot of boiling water. He was pointing at the Big Blank.

  “Not sure,” I said. “It’s bigger than I usually do, so I haven’t decided what’s important enough.”

  “Did you do the one out front?” He leaned in the doorway. “Break shit?”

  I saw the living space the way a stranger did. Mismatched canvases covered the walls. Beat-up concrete floor. Shit kitchen. The bed visible on the other side of the half-wall. He was looking right at it with those damn eyes.

  “That was a bunch of us,” I said. “The stuff on my own is tiny.”

  He looked back at me, and I zipped my hoodie, as if that would keep him from thinking I’d take my clothes off just because we were in proximity to a bed. Which—I admit—was a temptation. It had been a while since I’d been around a man I wanted to take my clothes off for.

  “So all this…” He waved his hands at the art on the walls. “Some’s pretty big. It’s not all yours?”

  He was looking right at Kira’s painting, of course. A woman sat with her robe open as wide as her bare legs, straigh
t blond hair covering her face as she looked down at the nude woman on her hands and knees, eating her pussy.

  Great.

  “Friends, mostly. We trade, or buy if we can.”

  He was still looking at it and it was making my neck break out in prickly heat. Did he think I’d bought it? Because I fucking had.

  “There’s an iPod on the table by the red chair. Pick something, would you?”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Break the tension around here.”

  I laughed nervously, grateful he’d acknowledged what we were both feeling.

  He unbuttoned his jacket and sat in the shitty chair Nerfy had given me when he moved. I always hoped for free furniture for the studio, because it could get paint on it, but seeing him there, I wished I had something nicer for him to sit on.

  “You left Wildwood.” He scrolled through my music, making himself heard from the other side of the wall without raising his voice. “No one knew why. It was the biggest mystery of the year.”

  “Was it?” I called out, because whatever power his voice had wasn’t one I shared.

  “Solve it for me.”

  “I smashed my stepmother’s car window with a pattern weight.”

  “Why?”

  “Sugar?” I called.

  “In what?”

  Of course. He’d asked for whatever I was having, but I never told him what that was. Terrible hostess. He probably needed a wife who was better at this.

  “Mint tea.”

  “Yes, then.”

  “Full disclosure.” I put the leaves into the white porcelain teapot. “It’s wild mint that grows behind the building. Could be toxic, but it hasn’t killed me yet.”

  “It’s fine.” He turned his attention back to the music.

  As I poured hot water into the pot, I peeked to the other side again. How much did my iPod reveal about me? He seemed fascinated.

  He looked up at me with his thumb on the glass. “The window. What did she do?”

  “She convinced my father I shouldn’t work at Papillion until I got my grades up.” I poured hot water over the leaves. “That company was my life. It was my mother’s life, and that bitch wanted to cut me off from it.”