Because he’d done something with his life. Not like her. Charlie Hall, spending half her time trying to blunt her fangs and the rest of it hunting.
She waited until he’d gotten his food and found a table.
“Hello,” she said, sitting down next to him. “Mind if I sit here?”
Now, some guys think that women con artists have it easy. That all they have to do is show some leg, like Bugs Bunny hitchhiking in drag, and the mark screeches to a halt, tongue lolling.
First of all, that’s not even a little bit true.
And second of all, if a woman decides a low-cut top is necessary, that’s because cons work differently for her. Offer a man a business opportunity and he’s suspicious, not that it’s a con, but that because she’s a woman she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a delicate business, to act clever enough to be taken seriously and still make him feel like he can screw her over.
And if he wants to screw her too, well that’s an even more delicate business.
But while the disadvantages that a woman con artist had were manifold, there were advantages. For instance, women seemed less threatening. If a man had sat down across from Liam, he would have reacted differently. He might not want Charlie there, but he didn’t seem worried she was dangerous.
“No,” he said, annoyed. “I mean, yes, I do mind. I really don’t want compa—”
She reached over and took his hand. He jerked it away from her. Which made sense. Who wanted a total stranger grabbing you?
Charlie let her eyes fill with tears. She pressed her fingers to her mouth in horror. “But it’s the truth!” she sobbed, loud enough for people—including nurses and doctors—to hear her.
He started to stand. No doubt he wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible. A totally reasonable reaction. The problem with reasonable reactions, though, was that they were easy to predict.
She grabbed his wrist, and this time she spoke low enough that only he could hear. “Sit the fuck down, Liam Clovin, or I am going to make such a scene that everyone in this room is going to believe that when you treated my dying father, I smelled alcohol on your breath. I am going to be loud, and I am going to be convincing. Or you can tell me what I want to know, and I will act like you’re a sympathetic doctor comforting a patient through a tragedy. You can even pick the tragedy, if you like.”
That was the other advantage women con artists had, the flip side of not being taken seriously. To the public, they looked like marks.
“Who are you?” He was obviously furious, but he sat in the chair across from her. “What do you want?”
“This won’t take long,” she said. “I just have a few questions about Edmund Carver.”
His frown deepened. “You were at my door the other day.”
She probably had only a few minutes before he managed to shake her. “Where is he?”
“Dead,” he said.
“Try again,” she told him.
He started to stand. “I don’t need to tell you anything.”
“Maybe you also got me pregnant,” she mused.
“This isn’t a soap opera!” he hissed.
“Not yet, it isn’t,” she told him, eyebrows raised.
He glared, but he sat. Put his head in his hand. Then he grabbed his sandwich and started taking it out of the plastic. “Look, he paid me to let him keep some stuff at my apartment and to use the address for mail he didn’t want his grandfather to see. That’s it.”
“What did he keep there?” Charlie asked, wondering if it could be this easy.
“He had a closet with a padlock on it. It wasn’t any of my business what he kept in there.”
“But you knew,” Charlie said, hoping that if she sounded sure, he’d believe she was sure.
“Some.” Liam looked across the cafeteria, as though hoping to spot someone who could save him. “A spare phone. Books from his father’s collection. Clothes. His driver’s license. A fucking krugerrand, if you can believe it. He was planning on leaving, I know that.”
“Then you—what? Broke in there and sold his books to Paul Ecco.”
“He asked me to sell them!” Liam said, a little too loudly.
She smiled to let him know that he’d screwed up, because the sale of those books occurred after Remy was supposed to be dead. “And when was that?”
Liam sighed. “Okay, I saw him that night, okay? He showed up absolutely out of his mind. He was practically naked, wearing a woman’s robe he told me he swiped out of a laundromat. Bare feet. Wasn’t himself. Said he needed me to sell some books for him. I did it. I didn’t know about the girl. I didn’t know about any of it.”