So that’s why she keeps it in the kitchen. It felt like home here.
Swallowing his pang of regret, Asprey pulled out the razor blade tucked carefully in his back pocket and stepped up to the painting, running his hands along the outer edge.
Even though he knew the painting was a fake, it seemed wrong to stab the blade into the canvas. The only way he could get it out of there was to shred it in a series of ten one-foot strips. He’d roll each one up as tight as it would go and toss them down the garbage chute on his way out. If all went well, they could get to the garbage dumpsters to collect and hide the evidence before anyone caught on.
Bracing himself for the first rip, Asprey took a deep breath, allowing himself to take in the painting one last time. The colors were typical of Pollock in the forties, bright but also muted, the fractal patterns providing most of the brilliance, the colors secondary to the technique. On a fake like this one, the colors were probably pigments that hadn’t existed prior to 1950, and the layers of carefully controlled paint splatters not quite the mathematical genius that had made Pollock so famous.
It was an incredible forgery, though. Asprey leaned closer, allowing his fingers to graze over the painting, the raised surface of decades-old oil paint grounding him to the spot.
Something isn’t right.
He peered closer. Although he didn’t have any of his equipment on him, there was a telltale crackling to the paint, where time and age had broken down some of the largest raised surfaces. It was possible to fake that, of course, especially with a high-end forgery that applied heat in the right proportion—and even more easily here in the kitchen, where additional moisture would do its damage. But that kind of warping was always too systematic, too controlled, a lot like a Pollock in its own right.
This was natural warping. This was too close to similar paintings he’d examined in the past, always looking for signs of authenticity.
This wasn’t a fake.
Asprey tucked the razor away, surprised to find his hands were shaking. He couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, of course—not without a lab and a thorough examination somewhere with better lighting. But if he was asked to make an initial guess, stick with his gut reaction, he’d say this was the real thing.
Reading people, reading paintings—those were the two things he could do.
Or so he’d always thought.
Asprey reached for his cell phone, unsure who, exactly, he was supposed to call. Cindy? Winston? The college professor who had first introduced him to the postmodern abstracts? For some reason, the voice he most wanted to hear at that moment belonged to Poppy, a woman who knew nothing about art but who could make him feel a thousand times better about his unerring faith in humanity.
“I’m so sorry, Asp.” A familiar voice behind him caused Asprey to whirl, his phone clattering noisily to the ground. “I didn’t think you’d get this far. You’re better at this than I thought.”
The last thing Asprey thought before a heavy cudgel came crashing down on his head was that surprise was an emotion they both shared in that moment. Probably the only one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It’s taking too long.”
Poppy and Tiffany watched the apartment building from the far side of the park, using their ridiculous twin ninja suits to blend into the shrubbery. Heavy rain clouds obscured what was left of the setting sun, replacing the gray sky with an encroaching, inky blue.
At least that’s one benefit to dressing up like kids at Halloween. Unless someone was looking explicitly for them, they were hard to spot.
“Maybe he had a hard time getting into the apartment or something,” Tiffany suggested. She scanned the park, and Poppy could see the other woman’s doubt in the small opening where her eyes peeked through. “We haven’t seen any cops or heard sirens yet, so no one has called the police. That’s a good sign.”
Poppy shook her head and ripped off her mask. It was getting suffocating in there anyway. “Cindy will be home any minute—we can’t risk her walking in on him in the middle of the job. I think I should go in. The doorman knows me. I might at least be able to get up to the floor, find out what’s going on.”
“No way.” Tiffany tore her mask off too, offering Poppy an apologetic smile. “Asprey made me promise that no matter what else happens, you’re not allowed to go inside. I’m supposed to use force to restrain you if I have to.”
Poppy couldn’t help laughing. “What kind of force did he have in mind?”
“He didn’t get that far. But I’m pretty inventive. I think I saw some poison ivy over there.”
“I’ll be good and save you the trouble,” Poppy promised. “I just wish there was some way to know if he was still inside or not. I’d try calling his cell, but for all we know, he left the ringer on. That wouldn’t go over well in a compromising situation.”
“Well…” Tiffany’s face flushed and she wrinkled her nose. “There might be one thing we can do.”
Poppy grabbed Tiffany by the shoulders, stopping just short of shaking her. Maybe she was more wound up than she realized, but she hated being so ineffective. The last time she’d let her partner go in on the job alone, things hadn’t ended well—and Bea was a professional.
“What is it?” Poppy asked, reining herself in.
“You know how you got all mad the other day and said we couldn’t bug you anymore without your permission?”
She didn’t like where this was going. “Ye-es.”
“Well, Asprey might have asked if maybe I’d do it one more time. Just to keep you safe during the heist. You know, in case something happened.”
“Where is it?”
Tiffany pointed at Poppy’s wrist. “He had me sew it into the hem of your ninja suit.”
“Fucking Asprey.” Poppy ripped at her sleeve, not stopping until a tiny round piece of metal not unlike a watch battery fell out. She was about to drop it and crush it under her heel when Tiffany plucked it out of her hand.
“It’s a really nice bug. Please don’t.”
Poppy crossed her arms and did her best to look intimidating. “I can’t believe you let him talk you into that—I thought we were friends. And how is my being bugged going to help us right now?”
Tiffany smiled and inclined her head to the back entrance of the park, where they’d parked Poppy’s car with all their equipment. “I thought it wasn’t very fair, us keeping tabs on just you—especially after you asked us not to. So I planted one on Asprey too. To make it even.”
Poppy could have kissed her. “Are you serious?”
Tiffany sprang to her feet and began climbing out of the bushes. Poppy followed suit, and they both tried to appear normal as an elderly couple took one look at their strange, unmarked clothes and veered the opposite direction.
“It won’t give us all the answers, but at least we’ll know where he is.”
Poppy breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t need all the answers—she’d probably never have those. She just needed to know that Asprey was safe.
Asprey had only had two headaches in his lifetime that competed with the one currently threatening to split his skull in half. The first was the direct result of an overconsumption of alcohol when he was thirteen, before he knew that too much of a good thing was painfully, palpably real. The second occurred in his favorite Balinese prison. It was a good story, and he loved dropping that term around whenever he could, but the truth had been that there was a lot of pain, not a lot of healthy air to breathe and a prison guard with a grudge against rich American tourists.
Still. He’d have taken either of those situations with a glad heart in place of the one currently keeping him bound to Louis. To Louis, of all chairs. His brother should have just dug up their father’s bones and done a voodoo dance through town with them—it would have been less disrespectful to the dead.
“It’s your own fault, you know.” Graff looked up from the opposite side of the room. “If you’d just taken the painting without examining it fi
rst, I would have let you walk out of there.” Asprey was having a hard time getting his line of vision to clear up and stop making multiples of everything, but he would have known this place even if he’d been blindfolded.
Home.
His loft, smelling of leather and the potted rosemary he kept above the sink. Of all the places they could have dragged his limp, lifeless form, they had to choose the one that made his head reel with more than pain.
“I can forgive for you a lot of things, Graff,” he said, managing a small grin. “But letting me butcher a genuine Pollock would have been too much.”
Graff snorted. “How ridiculously noble of you.”
“I wish I could say the same of you.”
Graff was on his feet in seconds, across the room and crouched in front of Asprey so that he had no choice but to focus his gaze on his brother. Brother. That seemed an awfully dirty word these days. “Don’t. You can’t even possibly begin to understand my motivations, so don’t judge me.”
“Where’s Winston?”
“He’s heading here from work—you know, the place that even now doesn’t occur to you? The place the rest of us have spent years of our lives trying to keep afloat while you’ve been off playing airplanes with your friends?”
Asprey winced. He was pretty sure a cut tore apart the better part of his forehead, since that small movement had blood dripping in his line of vision. It hurt, but not nearly as much as the knowledge that he’d been so blind for so long.
“Considering I spent the last six months helping you try and save the company from Winston, doesn’t that seem a little harsh?” Asprey asked, striving to keep his tone light. He wouldn’t let Graff see his pain—either kind. “Talk about judging others.”
Graff laughed and rose to his feet. There was no humor in the sound, no joy in his movements. “Don’t kid yourself. You were helping me save your portion of the profits.”
“Oh yeah? And what were you and Winston doing?”
“Saving your portion of the profits.” Graff checked his watch. “Winston should be here any minute—he’s as much a part of this as we are.”
“Did you give him all of Todd’s money too? Or was that part of some other plan?”
Graff’s eyes softened. “Todd Kennick had it coming—I wasn’t lying when I said he had a string of robberies at his back. He would have only used that money to hurt more people.”
“You’re in a funny position to play jury.”
“I’m doing the best I can, Asp. I don’t like it—any of it. I never have. But put a man between a rock and a hard place and give him a brother like you to look out for, and this is what happens. I had to smash my way out.”
“Don’t pin this on me. I never said this was what I wanted.”
Before Graff could say more, a lock sounded at the front door, and the familiar form of the eldest Charles brother moved smoothly in. “He’s up,” Winston said unnecessarily. He flipped the dead bolts and secured the chain on the door. “That was some kind of stunt you pulled today, Asp. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Your problem is that you’ve always underestimated me,” Asprey returned. Taking a gamble, he added, “Tiffany too. What makes you think she’s not going to the police right now?”
“To say what? That her brother went missing while breaking into an apartment to steal a ten-million-dollar painting?” Winston dropped himself onto Asprey’s favorite recliner. “You can do better than that.”
“So you’re going to keep me here?” He was rapidly losing some of his cool. It felt like Graff had used zip ties to secure his hands behind the chair, and the plastic dug painfully into his wrists. His shoulder too didn’t particularly like the angle it was forced into. “Until…what? Nine o’clock tomorrow morning? Or my untimely death?”
Graff and Winston shared a glance that didn’t add to his comfort. They didn’t know the answer to that question any more than he did.
“You have to understand, Asprey,” Graff said, his voice low. “We didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.” It wasn’t necessarily easy, and right and wrong weren’t always laid out as clear options. But if there was one thing he’d learned from Poppy over the past few weeks, it was that a person could always choose between better and worse. This was worse. “The Pollock was real—I know that now. But the other stuff we took was fake. I saw it with my own two eyes. What gives?”
“Dad didn’t exactly leave us a booming company,” Graff said. Winston tried to shush him, but Graff shook his head. “We have to tell him, Winston. It’s the only way.”
“You were sure he wouldn’t be able to find his way into Cindy VanHuett’s apartment either. Look how that turned out.”
Graff ignored Winston and kept talking. “Dad was all about the people, like you, about discussing painters and donating to the arts community. About making himself look good—which seems fine on the outside, but all that schmoozing hid some really messed up finances. We were facing bankruptcy even before he died.”
So? Asprey wanted to say. Lots of companies had ups and downs—especially around that time. They wouldn’t have been the first business to need a helping hand. But he doubted his opinion was being solicited right then, so he kept his mouth shut.
“It wasn’t our finest hour, but Winston and I knew someone who dealt in forgeries, who might be able to help us out selling some of the higher-end pieces that came through.”
“That part I know already,” Asprey said. “It’s what you told me to get my help with stealing all the forgeries. But if the company is so broke, how can we afford to pay out all the insurance claims?”
“We’re not.” Graff let out a long sigh. “That’s what I told you was going on, but the truth is that we’ve been stealing the forgeries whose claims have expired and not been renewed. We can’t risk the new insurance providers finding out they’re fake. It would only take one or two before all the signs started pointing at us. And it’s not all bad, you have to admit—the owners are still getting their full dollar value for the insurance. Just not from us. We did the best we could, Asp, given the circumstances. You have to believe that.”
“And the Pollock?”
“It was our exit strategy. I’d disappear, you and Tiffany would fail to get in, and Winston would win. The end—until you actually found your way in there.”
Winston sat up. “Tell me, Asprey…was it you who planned that heist or was it Poppy? The three-ring-circus act smacked of your style, but I’m guessing she did quite a bit of the real work. I knew we should have gotten rid of her while we had the chance.”
“It was rather clever of me, wasn’t it?” Asprey said, playing dumb. He didn’t like where this conversation was headed.
“That’s it!” Winston shot to his feet and pointed at him.
“What?” Asprey and Graff asked at the same time. But Asprey was afraid he already knew.
Winston turned to Graff, his brows lifted in excitement. “You said that woman is an ex-con, right? It’s easy. Asprey will keep his mouth shut about this whole thing and maybe even do some recovery work for us in the future.”
“Or else what?” Asprey was inches away from going full-Hulk on his brother and busting out of those zip ties. He just needed about fifty more pounds of green muscle to do it.
“Or else we hand her over to the police with information on the several dozen robberies around town lately. I bet they’d love to pin it all nice and clean on a woman with a chip on her shoulder and a criminal record.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“That might actually work.” Graff turned to face him, leaning in close. “Asprey has a little crush on that woman, don’t you, little brother? What do you say—we’ll keep our mouths shut if you do the same? We can go back to the way things were. You can keep not showing up to work; we can keep paying you for the privilege. Even-steven,” he added, using a favorite term from their boyhood.
It was a tempting offer. Life before all thi
s had been pretty nice, if he did say so himself. Sleeping until he felt like getting up, parties every night of the week, Bali and India and Australia with any woman he chose.
But he didn’t want that anymore. Not at this cost. Not without Poppy.
“Patio door open,” he announced.
“What?” Graff turned. “I’m not opening the door. Come on, Asprey. Please just take this offer. I don’t like this any more than you do, but life means having to make hard choices sometimes. You’ll learn that someday.”
“I think he already has.”
As soon as he heard Poppy’s voice, Asprey snapped his head up so fast it caught Graff’s chin, sending his brother flying backward. The pain reverberated inside his own skull tenfold, but he’d have done it again in an instant. It was that cool.
“How did you get in here?” Winston demanded.
“Voice-activated control panel,” Asprey offered, but his words were lost as Poppy fell into her favorite tuck-and-roll maneuver, moving quickly across the room and behind Winston’s still-bewildered form. And even better—she was in the ninja costume. If he didn’t think his head was going to explode right that moment, he might have tried to take a picture.
Asprey would have been hard-pressed to name half the things she did to Winston over the next twenty seconds, but he did know they involved a kick to the head, a punch to each kidney and some kind of weird Vulcan death grip that had him falling into an inert heap on the hardwood floor.
Graff, watching the exchange warily, equipped himself with a large vase—not Ming but still one of Asprey’s favorites—and prepared to meet Poppy head-on. Since Asprey had always been her target in the past, Graff had no idea what he was up against. It was almost enough to make Asprey smile. Almost.
But then she stopped and studied his brother carefully, her head at a slight tilt. “It was you all along.”
Confidence Tricks Page 28