Faking It Read online

  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,