Faking It

by Jennifer Crusie

  Tilda shrugged. “Mason Phipps, I guess.”

  “So we take that one back.” He watched her stiffen. “Betty, you’re keeping things that don’t belong to you,” he said sternly. “That’s bad.”

  Tilda stared back at him, unblinking, as Gwen came in radiating tension and said, “It’s set. They’ll be here at eight. Mason is thrilled?” She sounded not thrilled. “Did you get the files?”

  “Going down after them now,” Tilda said, equally tense. They both looked miserable.

  “Not used to crime, huh, girls?” Davy said.

  “Good heavens, no,” Gwen said and went back out into the gallery.

  “You may go now,” Tilda said to him, and he thought, I could be chasing divorced Eve right now. Then the light caught Tilda’s crazy blue eyes again, and she looked stubborn and difficult and exasperating and infinitely more interesting than Eve, if he could keep her from maiming him. And he already knew she could kiss.

  “So,” he said, sliding down the door to sit on the floor. “Talk to me, Matilda Veronica. Tell me all about it.”

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  ACROSS TOWN, Clea sat at her bedroom vanity and fumed, mostly so she wouldn’t panic. Mason was besotted with that horrendous Goodnight woman.

  If Gwen had been twenty, it would have made sense.

  Clea looked in the vanity mirror. Forty-five years of taking exquisite care of herself couldn’t make her twenty. The way she’d squandered her youth appalled her. Rich men had wanted her, but she’d wanted to be an actress. She’d wanted to show everybody she was somebody.

  The problem was, you needed money to be somebody.

  You don’t have much time, she told her reflection savagely. You made stupid choices and now the clock is ticking. This one has to be the one. Do something, you dumb bitch.

  The contempt she felt for herself was making her frown. That added a good ten years right there. She smoothed out her forehead, shoving away her anger, and with the anger gone, all that was left was panic.

  No. Clea straightened on the vanity bench and smiled at herself. Her competition was not a twenty-year-old, it was Gwen. Gwen was old. So maybe it wasn’t the woman, maybe it was the gallery. In which case, why didn’t he buy a damn art gallery? Honestly, men.

  The phone rang and she picked it up, ready to mutilate whoever it was on general principles.

  “Clea!” Ronald said. “Darling!”

  Darling, my ass. “Tell me Davy Dempsey is on his way to Tibet,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Why would he go to Tibet?” Ronald said.

  “You were supposed to get rid of him, Ronald,” Clea said. “You’re failing me, Ronald.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Ronald said, panic making his voice rise. “But it’s okay. I talked to somebody—”

  “I don’t want you to talk to somebody, I want you to get rid of him,” Clea said. “Do not call me again until he is out of the way.”

  “But I did—”

  Clea hung up on him, taking savage satisfaction in smacking the receiver down hard. Those phones where you pushed the button to hang up were never going to last. People needed cradles to smash receivers into to let fools know they were pushing their luck. Fools like Ronald. Her eyes narrowed. And Gwen Goodnight.

  She needed a contingency plan. She tapped her foot for a moment and then picked up the phone and hit star 69. “Ronald?” she said a moment later, her voice much softer. “I’m sorry. I’m just so worried about Davy.” On the other end of the phone, Ronald made soothing noises. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Clea thought. “There is one way you could help. You know so many things, so many people. Could you be my darling and find out everything you can about Gwen Goodnight and the Goodnight Gallery? Especially Gwen Goodnight.” Ronald babbled all over himself. “You could? Oh, thank you, darling. I’ll be thinking about you.”

  She hung up and thought, He’ll get something. That was one good thing about Ronald. He was efficient. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Frown lines again. She looked forty. Her face blanked out in panic —she was not aging, not yet, she didn’t have any money, she wasn’t going to be alone and poor— and then she took a deep breath and looked again, smiling.

  An angel smiled back from the mirror.

  “Don’t do that again,” Clea said to the mirror, and went to her closet to find something to wear that would make Mason forget all about galleries and Gwen Goodnight.

  TILDA FROWNED AT DAVY, sitting calmly against the door to her escape, looking pretty damn good for a stalker-thief. “I don’t want to talk to you. Move.”

  Davy smiled up at her. “So tell me, Matilda, was Dad slightly crooked?”

  “Hey!” Tilda straightened, flustered with what she hoped looked like indignation. “Listen, you, my father had an impeccable reputation, my whole family does, for generations. We’re Goodnights.”

  “Good for you.” For the first time, Davy looked a little taken aback. Steve walked over and sniffed him, and Davy scooped him into his lap and held him there like a shield.

  “He used to warn people about some of the paintings,” Tilda said, on a roll. “He’d tell them to wait, to get more documentation—” She broke off as Davy perked up.

  “Documentation. That’s how he knew if a painting was real?”

  “He traced its provenance,” Tilda said, her voice full of forged virtue. “He found out where it originated, who sold it first, got letters from people who had owned it. He—”

  “He was trusting a lot of people, then,” Davy said, patting Steve. “All he’d need is one crook in the bunch and only the artist would know for sure.”

  Tilda snorted. “You can’t even trust the artist. They used to take paintings to Picasso for verification, and if he’d painted them and he didn’t like them, he’d deny them. But if somebody else had painted them and he liked them—”

  “He’d claim them,” Davy said. “That makes sense.”

  “Only if you’re dishonest,” Tilda said virtuously.

  “But there are other ways of telling? Science? Chemical analysis?”

  “For some things,” Tilda said, growing more cautious. “Good forgers scrape down old canvases and grind and mix their own paints. You can still get them on trace elements, so if people take their time and get the results back before they buy, they can walk away. But if they’ve already bought it, even if the evidence comes back—”

  “They don’t want to hear it,” Davy said.

  “Right.” Tilda frowned at him. “You know about this?”

  “People don’t like to be made fools of,” Davy said.

  “So they’d rather keep believing the con than go after the guy who swindled them.”

  Tilda shrugged. “I can’t feel sorry for them. If they really fell in love with the painting, what difference does it make if it’s real or a fake or a forgery? And if they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t have bought it.”

  “So they deserve to be swindled,” Davy said. “I’ve heard this before.”

  “No.” Tilda jerked her head up. “Nobody deserves to be swindled.”

  “You said a fake or a forgery,” Davy said. “I thought they were the same thing.”

  Tilda looked at him, trying to think how she could get rid of him. “A forgery is corrupt from the beginning,” she told him. “A fake is something that began honest and then somebody corrupted it to make it look like something else. And now, I really have to go.”

  “You know a lot about this.” Davy’s smile was open and honest. Clearly a forgery.

  “Family business. Nobody knows how the crooks work better than the legit people in the same business. Look, I have work to do.”

  “So what’s the best art con?” Davy said, keeping his seat against the door. “What’s the surefire fake?”

  Tilda frowned at him. “You planning on going into art fraud?”

  “The fake that can’t be caught,” Davy said. “Tell me and I’ll let you out.”

  “It’s not a fake,
” Tilda said. “It’s a forgery. A contemporary forgery.” When Davy shook his head, she added, “A forgery painted at the same time the real painter was painting.”

  “What if you didn’t have an ancestor who forged and left you his work? What’s the next best thing?”

  Tilda sighed. “There was one guy, Brigido Lara. He forged an entire civilization.”

  Davy grinned. “My kind of guy.”

  “Yes,” Tilda said. “He was exactly like you. He had no morals and no fear.”

  “What’d he do?”

  Tilda hesitated, and he folded his arms.

  She sighed again, trying to shame him into letting her go. “Okay, when pre-Columbian pottery got hot in the eighties, he made beautiful ceramics and then spread the word that they were from a newly discovered tribe, and he was the greatest living expert.”

  “I’m impressed,” Davy said. “How’d they ever catch him?”

  “They didn’t,” Tilda said. “He finally came clean.”

  “And even then, a lot of people didn’t believe him,” Davy said.

  “It was really beautiful pottery,” Tilda said. “Lara became an expert on pre-Columbian fakes, if you can believe it. The old ‘set a thief to catch a thief bit.”

  “Hard to believe,” Davy said, not meeting her eyes.

  “My dad had a Lara piece for a while until somebody talked him into selling it.”

  “But he told them it was a forgery,” Davy said.

  “Of course,” Tilda said, tensing again.

  “So, Matilda,” Davy said, watching her closely. “Are we stealing back a fake or a forgery?” Tilda froze, and Davy shook his head. “Look, babe, it has to be one or the other. There’s no other reason for you to be so desperate to get it back.”

  “The Scarlets are real,” Tilda said. “What are you stealing?”

  “We’re not talking about me,” Davy said.

  “We are now,” Tilda said. “Unless you’d like to agree that neither one of us really needs to know what the other one is up to.”

  “Maybe we’ll talk later.” He leaned forward to get up as Steve scrambled out of his lap to follow Tilda.

  “Maybe we won’t,” Tilda said. “For us there is no later. You’re out of here once we get back. Have a nice time in Australia.”

  Then she opened the door, hitting him in the back with no guilt whatsoever.

  DAVY WATCHED Tilda unlock the basement door, Steve on her heels, and then pull it shut behind them, neatly cutting him off from following her. A locked basement. Clearly the Goodnights had secrets. He tried to think if there was any way that could help him and decided that whatever was down there was Tilda’s problem, not his, and that was the way it should stay. A better plan was to go eat. The way his luck was going he’d be in jail by midnight, so he might as well take advantage of German Village’s good restaurants.

  At seven-thirty, he went back to the apartment, keeping the door ajar so he could hear Tilda when she came to get him. He turned on his cell phone and called Simon again, but there was still no answer, so Davy left a message that he needed fifteen hundred dollars FedExed to Gwen, sparing a moment to wonder where Simon was. Somewhere brunette, undoubtedly. Then since it was Friday, he dutifully punched in his sister’s number, and his niece answered on the second ring. “Hey, Dill, it’s me,” Davy said.

  “Excellent,” Dillie said. “I need some advice from a guy.”

  “Right,” Davy said. “I reserve the right to bail from this conversation at any time.”

  “Don’t be wimpy,” Dillie said. “Jamie Barclay quit the softball team. She says boys don’t like girls who compete with them. Mom says that’s garbage. But she would say that. I mean, you know Mom. But Jamie’s mom says it’s true. And she’s been married to a lot of guys. So I need to know. Is it true? And don’t give me any of that after-school-special stuff.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Davy said, following with some difficulty. “Some guys don’t. That’s not the point. You like softball, right?”

  “Yes,” Dillie said. “But—”

  “Well, what kind of loser guy would make you give up something you liked so he could feel better?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dillie said. “That sounds good, but—”

  “Got your eye on a seventh-grader, too?”

  “No,” Dillie said. “He’s in my grade. His name’s Jordan.”

  “And he doesn’t want you to play?”

  “I didn’t ask. He doesn’t know I like him. He doesn’t know I exist.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it.” Davy thought for a moment. “I think you have to look at the big picture here, Dill. This guy, whoever he is, is a practice swing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn’t mean it isn’t real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, but basically, we’re talking a practice swing in the big game of love.”

  Dillie groaned.

  “So he’s temporary. But softball is permanent. You can play softball forever if you want to. Softball is not a practice swing. The things you love are never practice swings.”

  “Okay, yeah, that’s good,” Dillie said, sounding overly patient, “but I like Jordan. You know?”

  “Right.” Davy looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I’m going to explain something to you, so listen carefully. And don’t ever tell your mom I told you. Or God knows, your dad. They’d never let me near you again.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said. “Cool.”

  “You can get anything you want from people if you approach them the right way. But you have to think it through and watch the other person very carefully. You have to think more about the other person than you think about yourself. You have to know the other person.”

  “Is this some kind of Golden Rule thing?” Dillie asked, her voice skeptical.

  “No,” Davy said. “Not even close. This is the basic, uh, sales pitch that every Dempsey knows in kindergarten. Five steps. Memorize them. Don’t write them down, memorize them.”

  “Okay,” Dill said. “Shoot.”

  “One, make the mark smile. In your case, Jordan is your mark.”

  “Got it. Make him smile. How?”

  “Smile at him. People usually smile back. And once they smile, they relax.”

  “Okay. One. Smile.”

  “Two, get him to say yes. To anything. Ask him if he watches the WWF or if he has a game after school. Anything, but get him to say it.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said. “But I don’t get—”

  “If you can get somebody to say yes to something, he’s likely to keep on saying it. You’re setting up a pattern so that he associates talking with you with saying yes. Then, three, make him feel superior to you. It increases his confidence and he’ll get careless.”

  “So I do what?”

  “Ask him a question he can answer. He’ll feel smarter than you.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said. “That’s sort of girly, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Davy said. “This is not a girls-are-dumb, boys-are-smart thing. This is lulling him into a false sense of security. This is you running a... sales pitch on the poor schmuck. Which is really unfair because you’re holding all the cards because you’re the girl, but you’re also a Dempsey, so it’s his tough luck.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said. “One, smile, two, yes, three, superior.”

  “Now he’s feeling pretty good around you,” Davy said. “So you want to reinforce that. So on four, you give him something. Like a compliment. Or half of the candy bar from your lunch. Something that makes him think he’s the one who’s ahead in the conversation.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said, sounding confused.

  “Then you move in for the kill,” Davy said. “On five, ask for what you want but do it so that he thinks you’re doing him a favor by taking it.”

  “I want to know if he likes me.”

  “Translate that into something concrete. Do you wan
t him to take you to the movies? Walk you home? Give you his ball cap? What?”

  “I want him to like me,” Dillie said.

  “He probably does, you’re a likable kid. That’s too fuzzy a goal. Figure out specifically what you want. And in the meantime, practice it on people until it works. Just not on any people named Dempsey.”

  “Jamie Barclay,” Dillie said.

  “Good,” Davy said. “But don’t ever push it. If it’s not working, drop it and find another way in on another day. And do not tell Jamie Barclay. This is for Dempseys only.”

  “Right,” Dillie said. “I love you, Davy.”

  “I love you, too, Dill,” Davy said. “If the practice swing turns out to be a loser, I’ll come beat him up for you. Now let me talk to your mom.”

  “She’s not here,” Dillie said. “She’s at a meeting.”

  “Okay, tell her I said hi. Tell her I’m all right and I’ll call next week.”

  “She’ll be mad she wasn’t here,” Dillie said. “You better give me your number. And not your cell phone. You always turn it off and that makes her mad. What’s the number where you’re staying?”

  “I don’t think so,” Davy said, imagining Sophie talking to Tilda. “Tell her I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  Dillie was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “Yeah, that’ll get me off the hook. I can see Mom saying, ‘No problem, I’ll just trust him because he’s never bed to me.’”

  Davy grinned into the phone. “Very funny. Tell her I’ll be down to visit soon.”

  “You’re coming to visit?”

  “Yep,” Davy said.

  “Good,” Dillie said. “Then you can teach me more of this neat stuff. I never learn stuff like this in school.”

  “I can well believe it.”

  “It’s too bad I can’t tell anybody, but I won’t because I know you’re right. You’re always right.”

  Davy looked at the phone and laughed.

  “What?” Dillie said innocently.

  “I told you, never push it,” Davy said. “But that wasn’t bad. You hit four before I caught on.”

  “It was easy,” Dillie said smugly. “I almost had your phone number.”

  “Not even close, Dill. It’s not horseshoes. If you don’t get all five, you get nothing. You pushed it too hard and you didn’t think about your mark. I’m always right? Come on.”