She’s Not There by Steve Perry
Nobody is immune to Glamour.
In the ten years she’d had the talent, Darla had never come across anybody who had seen through it, far as she could tell. Old, young, men, women,-it fooled everybody, every time.
Not that she’d need it here: Fifteen feet away, the widow Bellingham snored fully-dressed upon her bed. The old lady had put down a bottle of very expensive champagne earlier at the party, and Darla could probably could bang a Chinese gong and not rouse her, but still…
She opened the last drawer of the jewel box, her movements slow and careful. The smell of cedar drifted up from the intricately-carved wooden box, which was probably worth more than Darla’s car.
Ah. Here we go…
It was an oval pin about the size of a silver dollar. Inset into the platinum were thirty-some diamonds, fancy yellows, the majority of them a carat or so each. Not worth as much as clears and nowhere near the value of the intense pinks or fancy blues encrusting the pieces in the top drawer, of course, but that was the point. These were good stones-good-but not outstanding, and with what she could get from her fence, plenty to keep her going for six months.
One-carat gems of this grade were easy to move.
She limited herself to a job every three or four months, enough to keep her below heavy police radar-or at least it had done so for eight years.
Truth was, it had been almost too easy. Never a really close call. At first, it it had seemed a grand adventure, but it wasn’t long before it turned into just a part-time job, no more exciting than shopping for fruit at New Seasons Market. Go in, pick out the organic apples you like, leave-without paying-and take a few months off, ta dah!
Disappointing in a way how easy it was, though certainly better than working for a living…
Six or seven million in fine jewelry here, and that just the dailywear stuff. The really good pieces would be in a bank vault somewhere…
Darla wrapped the pin in a square of black velvet and slipped it into her jeans pocket. She slid the jewelry box’s drawer closed.
As always, she was tempted to clean the box out, but she knew better. Unique pieces were hard to move, worth only what the loose stones would bring, unless you wanted to mess around trying to find a crooked collector, and that was risky. This particular pin? It might not be missed for weeks or months. The top-drawer stuff sure; the bottom drawer? Maybe the widow would never even notice. When you could go in and plunk down a million bucks for a brooch or a necklace without having to look at your checkbook balance? A pin worth a couple hundred grand? Shoot, that was practically costume jewelry…
So, she’d take just the one piece.
The perfect crime, after all, was not one where the cops couldn’t figure out who did it; it was one the cops never even heard about…
Darla uttered the cantrip just before she pushed open the stair door into the apartment building’s lobby. When she stepped through, she looked the same to herself, save for a slight bluish glow to her skin that told her the Glamour was lit.
The guard at the desk looked up. “Morning, Mr. Millar. Early start today, hey?”
Darla grinned and sketched a two-finger salute at the guard.
The armed man touched a button on his console and the building’s door slid open. As she left, Darla waggled one hand over her shoulder, in what she thought was a friendly gesture. Silently, of course. Her Glamour fooled the eyes, but not the ears-if she spoke, she would sound like a twenty-something woman and not the sixty-something man she picked as a disguise.
She had been careful coming down the stairs to avoid the surveillance cams, too, since her trick wouldn’t fool them, either.
When the real Mr. Millar exited for his morning walk, the guard wouldn’t say anything-he wouldn’t want anybody to think he was crazy…
It was a fantastic thing, her trick, even if it had a couple drawbacks: She had to touch somebody before it would work on them, and do that within a day, since the effects of the touch faded away after that. Still, it was impressive.
She had no idea why or how she had come by it. She had been found in a dumpster as a baby, raised in an orphanage. The words to the cantrip were from a dream she’d had on the night she turned sixteen. Eventually, she had come to realize that, somehow, the dream had come true.
Magic? No such thing, everybody knew that. But here she was. She’d wondered about it over the years. She’d cautiously nosed around in a few places, but never found any other real magic, only people faking it. Why did it work? How? She didn’t know. Still, you didn’t have to be a chemist to strike a match, and apparently you didn’t need to know jack about magic to use the stuff. Case in point.
Worrying over the reasons might drive her nuts if she let it, so she didn’t try any more. She just thanked whatever gods there might be for bestowing it upon her and that was that.
She had a car, but she seldom used it on a job where public transportation was available. She walk to the bus stop. The TriMet driver would see her as a white-haired Japanese man, since she had touched his shoulder earlier in the day when she’d ridden the bus in this direction. She would exit six blocks from her apartment and walk home. Nobody could connect Darla Wright to the expensive Portland penthouse occupied by the widow Bellingham, even if the woman ever did notice she’d been robbed.
Smooth as oil on glass, no muss, no fuss, just like always, and she planned to sleep in until at least noon.
Life was good.
Darla strolled into her neighborhood Starbucks, next to Fred Meyer’s, and inhaled the fragrances of brewed coffee and freshly baked pastries. She was scouting for a fattening cherry turnover she figured she’d earned, when she bumped into a good-looking guy about thirty who stopped suddenly ahead of her in the line.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, turning to steady her. “My fault.” He smiled. Nice teeth. Black hair, blue eyes, rugged features, pretty well-built under a dark green T-shirt and snug jeans. Three or four years older than she was, but that was nothing.
“No problem,” she said. She returned the smile.
Ice cream, she thought, looking at him. To go with the pastry, hey…?
No… She couldn’t. Not today. She had to meet Harry at two, and she’d slept past noon, so Ice Cream here would have to wait. Business before pleasure.
There were plenty of other men in the pond, and she was going to have free time to do a little fishing, lots of time…
Nothing as obvious as running a pawn shop, Harry had a guitar store, a hole-in-the-wall place twenty minutes from Portland, in Beaverton. Beaverton was where Portlanders went to buy fast food and shop at the 7-Elevens, a bedroom community that had once been swamps and filbert orchards and beaver-dammed streams.
The guitars at Harry’s ran from a few hundred bucks up to ten or fifteen thousand on the high end, mostly acoustic and classicals, and the place actually did a pretty good business. Today being Sunday, the shop was closed, but Harry answered the bell at the back door. She waited while the four big and heavy locks snicked and clicked, bolts sliding back, and the door, made of thick steel plate, swung quietly open on oiled hinges. Trust a crook to know how to protect his own stuff.
The shop smelled of wood, and some kind of finish that was not unpleasant, a sharp, turpentine-y scent.
“Layla. How nice to see you, as always.”
Even Harry didn’t get her real name. Darla was very careful.