“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.”

“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.