Confidence Tricks (38 page)

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 first, 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 this 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.”

It was an odd time to start a conversation, but when Asprey felt a tug on his arms, he realized Poppy hadn’t come alone. Tiffany used a knife she must have grabbed from the kitchen to free his bound wrists before moving on to his feet. The return of blood to his limbs hurt even more than his head, pins and needles stabbing the surface of his skin. He shook loose the worst of it, determined to come to Poppy’s aid, but Tiffany placed a finger to her lips in a gesture of silence as she jerked her head toward the door.

They were here to rescue him.

It was both the most touching and the most emasculating gesture anyone had ever made on his behalf. Which was why he planned on ignoring it.

“This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Poppy,” Graff said carefully, not moving. “I’ll give you all of Todd’s money back, I swear. You can go your way and we can go ours—there’s no reason for our paths to ever cross again.”

Tiffany gestured again, but Asprey shook his head firmly, even though each movement hit him as a wave of nausea. Moving as stealthily as he could, he crept up behind Graff. He could have tried another one of those cool leg sweeps, or even kicked the vase out of his brother’s hand…but he didn’t. He was tired of fighting.

With a heavy sigh, he dropped his hand to his brother’s shoulder. Graff whirled, the vase poised over Asprey’s head. But he caught sight of Tiffany standing near the door and lowered his arms. At least all that stuff about protecting their sister hadn’t been a lie.

“You know Poppy can take you out in five seconds flat. You’re outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Why don’t we skip this part for once?”

“So what?” Graff said, a sneer twisting his lips. “It’s
your
turn to lead
me
to an untimely death? Is that what you’re saying?”

Asprey didn’t lift his hand. “No. I’m saying maybe it’s time we all sit down and have a nice, long talk about the family legacy.”

Graff snorted. “What family legacy?”

This time, Asprey did give his brother a little shove. Directing him toward the couch—that long, L-shaped, rich leather seat he’d been dreaming of for months—he and Graff moved as one.

It was probably the first time that had happened in a long time. And, based on the aching hole in his chest, right where his favorite brother had once held a crowning seat, Asprey realized it was also probably going to be the last.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Poppy took a long pull from a fifth of Jack Daniels before wiping her mouth on her sleeve and handing the bottle off to Bea. If either of them thought it was an odd sendoff, guzzling whiskey and scattering Poppy’s grandmother on the front lawn of the Aberdeen Bingo Hall, they didn’t mention it.