Red Glove (27 page)

I drop Sam off at his place around eleven and crash for a few hours at the garbage house. I wake up when the cordless phone rings next to my head. I’d forgotten that I brought it into the room days ago. It’s tangled in the sheets.

“Yeah?” I grunt.

“May I speak with Cassel Sharpe?” my mother asks in her chirpiest voice.

“Mom, it’s me.”

“Oh, sweetheart, your voice sounded so funny.” She seems happier than I’ve heard her in a long time. I shove myself into a sitting position.

“I was sleeping. Is everything okay?” My automatic fear is that she’s in trouble. That the Feds have gotten tired of waiting and have picked her up. “Where are you?”

“Everything’s perfect. I missed you, baby.” She laughs. “I’ve just been swept up in so many new things. I met so many nice people.”

“Oh.” I cradle the phone against my shoulder. I should probably feel bad that I suspected her of murder. Instead I feel guilty for not feeling guilty. “Have you seen Barron recently?” I ask. I hope not. I hope she has no idea he’s blackmailing me.

I hear the familiar hiss of a cigarette being lit. She inhales. “Not in a week or two. He said he had a big job coming up. But I want to talk about you. Come see me and meet the governor. There’s a brunch on Sunday that I think you’d just love. You should see the rocks some of the women wear, plus the silverware’s reeeal.” She draws the last part out long, like she’s tempting a dog to a bone.

“Governor Patton? No, thanks. I’d rather eat glass than eat with him.” I carry the phone downstairs and pour out the old coffee in the pot. I dump in new water and fresh grounds. The clock says its three in the afternoon. I have to get moving.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” says Mom.

“How can you sit there while he goes on and on about proposition two? Okay, fine. He’s a really tempting mark. I’d love to see him get conned, but it’s not worth it. Mom, things could get really bad. One mistake and—”

“Your mother doesn’t make mistakes.” I hear her blow out the smoke. “Baby, I know what I’m doing.”

The coffee is dripping, steam rising from the pot. I sit down at the kitchen table. I try not to think about her the way she was when I was a kid, sitting right where I am now, laughing at something Philip said or ruffling my hair. I can almost see my dad, sitting at the table, showing Barron how to flip a quarter over his knuckles while she makes breakfast. I can smell my dad’s cigarillos and the blackening bacon. The back of my eyes hurt.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” I say. You might think I’m crazy, telling her that. But she’s still my mother.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” The concern in her voice is real enough to break my heart.

I can’t tell her. I really can’t. Not about Barron or the Feds or how I thought she was a murderer. Certainly not about Lila. “School,” I say, resting my head in my hands. “I guess I’m getting a little overwhelmed.”

“Baby,” she says in a harsh whisper, “in this world, lots of people will try to grind you down. They need you to be small so they can be big. You let them think whatever they want, but you make sure you get yours. You get yours.”

I hear a man’s voice in the background. I wonder if she’s talking about me at all. “Is someone there?”

“Yes,” she says sweetly. “I hope you’ll think about coming on Sunday. How about I give you the address and you can think about it?”

I pretend to copy down the location of Patton’s stupid brunch. Really I’m just pouring myself a cup of coffee.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE of the day always leaves you with a slightly dazed feeling, as though you’ve stepped out of time. The light outside the windows is wrong. My body feels heavy as I force it up and into clothing.

I stop at the store for more coffee and a prop, then head over to Daneca’s house. I walk across the green lawn, up to the freshly painted door between two manicured bushes. Everything is as pretty as a picture.

When I ring the bell, Chris answers. “What?” he says. He’s got on a pair of shorts and flip flops with an oversize shirt. It makes him look even younger than he is. There’s a smudge of something blue in his hair.

“Can I come in?”

He pushes the door wide. “I don’t care.”

I sigh and walk past him. The scent of lemon polish fills the hallway, and there’s a girl in the living room running a vacuum. For some reason it never occurred to me that Daneca grew up with maids, but of course she did.

“Is Mrs. Wasserman here?” I ask the girl.

She takes headphones out of her ears and smiles at me. “What was that?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just wondering if you know where Mrs. Wasserman is.”

The girl points. “In her office, I think.”

I walk through the house, past the artwork and the antique silver. I knock on the frame of a glass-paneled door. Mrs. Wasserman opens it, hair pulled up into a makeshift bun with a pencil shoved through her mass of curls. “Cassel?” she says. She’s got on paint-stained sweatpants and is holding a mug of tea.

I hold out the violets I bought at the garden supply store. I don’t know much about flowers, but I liked how velvety they looked. “I wanted to say thanks for the other day. For the advice.”

Gifts are very useful to con men. Gifts create a feeling of debt, an itchy anxiety that the recipient is eager to be rid of by repaying. So eager, in fact, that people will often overpay just to be relieved of it. A single spontaneously given cup of coffee can make a person feel obligated to sit through a lecture on a religion they don’t care about. The gift of a tiny, wilted flower can make the recipient give to a charity they dislike. Gifts place such a heavy burden that even throwing away the gift doesn’t remove the debt. Even if you hate coffee, even if you didn’t want that flower, once you take it, you want to give something back. Most of all, you want to dismiss that obligation.

“Oh, thank you,” Daneca’s mother says. She looks surprised, but pleased. “It was no trouble at all, Cassel. I’m always here if you want to talk.”

“You mean that?” I ask, which is maybe laying it on really thick, but I need to push her a little. This is her chance to repay me. It doesn’t hurt that I know she’s a sucker for hard-luck cases.

“Of course,” she says. “Anything you need, Cassel.”

Bingo.

I like to think it’s the gratitude that makes her over-generous, but I guess I’ll never know. That’s the problem with not trusting people—you never find out if they’d have helped you on their own.

Daneca is on her computer when I come into her room. She looks up at me in surprise.

“Hey,” I say. “Your little brother let me in.” I’m already not being entirely honest by failing to mention I talked with her mother, but I’m determined to do nothing more dishonest than that. I hate myself enough already without conning one of my only friends.

“Chris is not my brother,” Daneca says automatically. “I don’t even think it’s legal for him to live here.” Her room looks exactly like I would have expected. Her bedspread is batik, studded with silver discs. Fringed scarves drape over the tops of the linen curtains. The walls are covered in posters of folk singers, in poems, and with a big worker rights flag. On her bookshelf, next to copies of Ginsberg and Kerouac and The Activist’s Handbook, is a line of horses. White and brown, speckled and black, they’re arranged like a chorus line.

I lean against the doorjamb. “Okay. Some kid who’s always hanging around at this address let me in. He was pretty rude about it too.”

She half-smiles. I can see past her to the paper she’s writing, the letters like black ants on the screen. “Why are you here, Cassel?”

I sit down on her bed and take a deep breath. If I can do this, then I can do everything else.

“I need you to work Lila,” I say. The words come easily to my lips, but my chest hurts as I speak them aloud. “I need you to make her not love me anymore.”

“Get out,” Daneca says.

I shake my head. “I need you to do it. Please. Please just listen.” I’m afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.

“Cassel, I don’t care what reason you have. There is no reason good enough to take away someone’s free will.”

“It’s already been taken! Remember when I said that I tried to stay away from Lila?” I say. “I’ve stopped trying. How’s that for a good reason?”

She doesn’t trust me. Surely she can understand if I don’t trust myself either.

The look Daneca gives me is full of disgust. “There’s nothing I can do anyway. You know that. I can’t take the curse off her.”

“Work her so that she feels nothing for me,” I say. My vision blurs. I wipe the dampness away from my eyes angrily. “Let her just feel nothing. Please.”

She looks at me in an odd, stunned way. When she speaks, her voice is soft. “I thought the curse was fading. It might already be gone.”

I shake my head. “She still likes me.”

“Maybe she likes you, Cassel,” Daneca says carefully. “Without the curse.”

“No.”

She waits for a long moment. “What about you? How are you going to feel when she—”

“It doesn’t matter about me,” I say. “The only way that Lila could be sure—that anyone could be sure—the curse was over is if she didn’t love me.”

“But—,” Daneca begins.

If I can just get through this, then nothing else can hurt me. I will be capable of anything. “It has to be this way. Otherwise I’ll create reasons to believe that she wants me, because I’d like that to be true. I can’t be trusted.”

“I know that you’re really upset—,” Daneca says.

“I can’t be trusted. Do you understand me?”

She nods, once. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it.”

I exhale all at once, a dizzy rush of breath.

“But this is a onetime thing. I will never do this again. I will never do anything like this again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I say.

“And I’m not even sure how to do it, so there are no guarantees. Plus the blowback is going to make me act all weird and emotional, so you are responsible for babysitting me until I am stable. Okay?”

“Yes,” I say again.

“She won’t care about you.” Daneca tilts her head to one side, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “You’ll just be some guy she once knew. Everything she feels about you—everything she felt about you—it will all be gone.”

I close my eyes and nod my head.

The first thing I do when I get back home is go down into the cellar. I open the cooler. Janssen is right where I left him—milk pale, with sunken eyelids and frosty hair. He looks like a demented marble sculpture—portrait of a killer, killed. All the blood must have made its sluggish way to his back before it froze. I bet if I turned him over, he’d be purple.

I strip off my right-hand glove and place my hand on his chest, pushing aside the stiffened fabric of his undershirt, letting my fingers rest against his icy skin.

I turn his heart to glass.

The change takes only a moment, but recovering from it takes longer. Once the blowback wears off, I rub my head where I smacked it against the floor. Everything aches, but I’m getting used to that.

Then I go upstairs, take the gun out of the plastic bag, close my eyes, and shoot two bullets into the ceiling of the parlor. Dust rains down on me, covering the room in a powdery cloud. A single chunk of plaster nearly brains me.

Cons aren’t glamorous. They’re hauling out the ancient vacuum from the closet, changing the bag, and making sure you get up most of the dust. They’re sweeping in the basement to hide that you were recently rolling around after a transformation. They’re fieldstripping the gun according to instructions on the Internet and carefully buffing off any fingerprints with a lightly oiled cloth, then wrapping the whole thing in paper towels. They’re driving a mile to an abandoned stretch of road and soaking the murderess’s coat and gloves with enough lighter fluid that they burn to ash. They’re waiting to make sure they burn to ash and then scattering that ash. They’re smashing any remaining buttons from the coat with a hammer, then tossing them along with the vacuum bag and any hooks or metal parts in different Dumpsters far from where you burned the clothes. Cons are all in the details.

By the time I’m done, it’s late enough to call Sam and get the next part of the plan under way.

My mother’s a purist when it comes to scamming people. She’s got her thing, and it’s pretty effective. Glamorous clothes, a touch of her hand, and most people are willing to do what she wants. But I’d never really thought about costumes or props until I met Sam. I have my computer open to Cyprus View’s website. They have examples of the layout of their apartments for prospective renters. Very helpful.

Sam’s expectantly holding up a fake wound on a thin rubbery piece of silicone. “Look, you said yourself that guard wanted to be a hero,” Sam is telling me.

It might be true that I said that. I don’t remember. I said a lot of things on the stakeout, mostly boring observations about the place or completely exaggerated claims about how I was going to beat Sam at cards. “But then we need another person,” I say. “That’s a three-person job.”

“Ask Lila,” he says.

“She’s all the way in the city,” I say, but it’s a halfhearted objection. The thought of seeing her one last time before I lose her is poisonously compelling.

“Daneca and I are still . . . I don’t know. Besides, she’s not the best actress.”

“She did fine at Zacharov’s fund-raiser,” I say, thinking of the way she smiled in my brother’s face moments after she slipped me a fake blood packet.

“I had to give her a pep talk on the way,” he says. “How about if I’m the one who calls Lila?”

Mutely I hand him my phone. I want her to come. If I resist this, I don’t think I will have any resistance left.

We pick Lila up at the train station in Sam’s hearse. He works on her in the back while I fiddle with the radio nervously in the front seat and eat a slice of pizza.

“Almost done?” I call, looking at the clock on the dashboard.

“Don’t rush the artist,” Lila says. Her voice goes through me like a knife, leaving a wound so clean I know it won’t even hurt until the knife’s pulled out.