during a poker game at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he immediately recognized what she was. He grabbed her wrist and looked her in the eyes and said, “You can do better than that, can’t you?”
But she couldn’t, not without him. She was spinning rapidly toward her fifties and men’s eyes slid over her at the bars now; they wanted the younger prettier ones and increasingly she knew she gave off a whiff of desperation. Lachlan seemed amused by the determination in her hustle, though. He enlisted her to help him in his cons, using her as a wing-woman to lubricate the path toward his female marks: lovelorn types gullible enough to hand over credit cards and account numbers. (The women on those cellphones, I realize.) After all, women trust men who have female friends to vouch for them.
For the first time in years, she had enough to cover her rent and more.
And then she got sick. She ignored it as long as she could, hoping it would go away on its own; but then she fell and got the fatal diagnosis. Cancer. Who was going to take care of her when she couldn’t take care of herself? Lachlan would certainly move on without her once she wasn’t useful to him anymore. She knew I would come when she summoned me, but how was I going to pay the bills? She wasn’t stupid; she knew what kind of salary the second assistant to an interior decorator was making. She sensed, in my hedging phone calls, my own financial desperation.
Her solution was to offer me up to Lachlan. Her smart, pretty, sly daughter, conversant in billionaire and learned in fine art: Surely Lachlan could find a use for me, surely he would seduce me with just the right kind of con, train me up. He was intrigued, amused; and when he met me in person that day in the hospital, a little smitten, too. She told him the words to whisper in my ear: Only people who deserve to lose what they have. Only take what we need. Don’t get greedy.
And it worked. I was a natural. There was grift in my blood.
“There’s no grift in my blood,” I tell her, my face tight against the creeping nighttime damp, my eyes fixed on the dark gravel of the driveway. It hurts to keep my eyes open. “You made me this way because you wanted me to be like you. If I was like you, then you’d feel better about yourself.”
Her words are so small, they are nearly drowned beneath the groan of the freeway traffic at the bottom of the hill. “I wanted you to go make a grand life for yourself, far away. But you didn’t, so what was I to do? I had bills. I was sick. I needed your help, and you couldn’t help me out with the way you were living.”
She hadn’t quite anticipated that the hospital bills would be so huge, or that she would come so very close to death, or that I would get so wrapped up in the escalating costs of her illness that I would end up taking as many risks as I did. She also didn’t anticipate that I would start sleeping with Lachlan—
“Although, of course, I could see the appeal,” she says with a sly glance in my direction. I wonder if this is true; or if my seduction by Lachlan was an unacknowledged part of her plan. After all, it kept me closer to her and it kept outsiders away.
“Of course it was alarming,” she continues, to see me slipping so easily into the lifestyle that she had spent so long trying to help me escape. When she didn’t need my help anymore, she promised herself, she would make me leave. She would send me back to the East Coast a little savvier, a little wiser in the ways of the world, and free to make a clean life for myself. Except that last October when the test results came back negative, and the bills were almost paid off, she found that she couldn’t let me go. She would lie in bed at night, feeling the poison finally ebbing from her blood, and ask herself: What now? Once I left she would be back where she