She smiled. “That’s the tedious part. It took my friend years to build up his stable of upper-crust retail outlets. He did it himself, not like some who hire people to do it. He traveled to every store in person, and each place he went he had a different disguise, a different name. He was a master at disguise. He told people he was an agent for the manufacturer, and for one retailer he’d put on a wig and beard, then go bald and with fake teeth to call on the next. He was good with words, too. He’d get people talking, and when he left nobody could remember exactly what he looked like.”
For a second, I had a disastrous urge to laugh. A slick criminal had spent years building a list of secret markets where his counterfeit goods were sold. When he was arrested, he had double-crossed his partners by giving the list to a sexy model—the same sexy model who had turned him in to the police for the reward. The man had been killed in prison for his double-cross, and the sexy model had come to Florida to introduce herself to the retailers on the list, expecting to carry on the business and make billions. But because she had come to believe in a false memory she’d created of being Cupcake’s close friend when they were sixteen, she’d broken into his house. While she was inside, she’d lost the list. A transnational counterfeit business had been thrown into disarray because of a false memory and a woman’s carelessness.
I said, “You know, you could have saved yourself a lot of grief if you’d made a copy of that list.”
She looked ashamed. “I’m not used to the clerical end of business.”
I felt a stab of pity. With no family, Briana had been forced to create herself, and the self she’d created was truly amoral. With her blend of nuttiness and slyness, life was a game to her, a chance to become involved in intrigue and manipulation of other people. Her sense of self was so slippery that she broke into other people’s houses to see how normal people lived. She was obsessed with Cupcake for the same reason she’d been obsessed with her Serbian gangster friend: They both exuded power and self-confidence. Reba Chandler had been right about Briana’s addiction to drugs released by danger. Getting the list of contacts had been so scarily satisfying to her that she hadn’t given any thought to the practical, mundane, ordinary ways that people held on to important papers. Instead of making a copy of her precious list, she’d carried it around the same way Elvis carried his pilfered papers.
Cupcake had been right about Briana, too. The woman had a bag of unusually lustrous marbles, but she wasn’t playing with all of them.
I pulled my hand away from my gun. Briana was dishonest and cunning, but she wasn’t a physical danger.
I said, “Somebody told me that you did something outrageous at the Milan fashion show last year. What was that about?”
Her eyes rounded in surprise again. “One of the men trying to take over my business was in the audience. He made a gesture toward a reporter, a way of telling me he was going to expose me. He wouldn’t have, of course, because he would have been exposing himself at the same time, but the threat made me furious. I leaped off the runway and beat at him with my fists. It got me good publicity because I told the reporters he had made an obscene gesture that I found highly offensive. I was the injured innocent.” With a world-weary roll of her eyes, she said, “That’s the way it is in this business. The competition is cutthroat.”
“Aren’t you afraid of being caught?”
She shrugged. “My modeling career would be ruined, but I’m close to a time when I’ll have enough money to live without sucking up to prime ministers and wealthy playboys.”
She sounded as if she were talking about grabbing a bargain at Marshalls.
Suddenly defensive, she said, “I’m not the only famous person selling copies of top fashions and distributing them under fake labels. It’s a way to make millions, and the risk isn’t great. If someone is caught bringing in a container of fake sneakers, they lose their goods and get a mark on their customs records, but that’s all. It’s not like getting caught with three kilos of coke in a shipment of Gucci watches like my friend did. That was a stupid thing to do, because it gets you a four-year prison sentence. I’d never do that.”
I heaved a huge sigh and stood up. The cats circled around me eying the peacock feather that was now at my shoulder height.
“Briana, you have to leave now. These cats have to be fed, and then I have other pets to call on. Don’t follow me, and don’t come in another house after me.”
Confusion moved across her face like spiderwebs. “What about the list?”
“I run a business, Briana. Business people make copies of important papers. I’ve made several copies of your list. One of the copies is in my safety deposit box at the bank. If anything should happen to me, the list will go to every newspaper editor and law enforcement agency in Florida.”
She shook her head. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying to leave me the hell alone. Leave me alone, leave Cupcake alone, leave his wife alone. We are not a part of your world, and we don’t want to be. And if you’re in contact with your rivals, pass the word along to them. If they come after me again, that precious list of contacts will be spread all over the world.”
I left her sitting on the arm of the sofa and went to the kitchen, where I fed the cats and gave them fresh water. When I went back to the den, Briana was gone.
21
Sometimes being a good pet sitter means that you do the same thing a good parent does: You fake it. You pretend that everything is fine and dandy, that everything is normal, that there’s nothing to get anxious about, when all the time your knees are trembling and your tongue is cottony with abject panic. But children and animals always know when you’re lying, so even though I pretended to be calm when I told Gumdrop and Licorice good-bye, their eyes said they knew better and their ears pointed forward in a show of uneasiness. Briana had not only scared the bejesus out of me, she’d caused me to upset the cats. The woman seemed to create discord and destruction everywhere she went.
By the time I arrived at the next client’s house, my whirling mind had arrived at a plan. I parked in the driveway and called Cupcake from my cell.
I said, “I don’t have time to go into all the details now, but please call Steven and ask him to meet me at your house in three hours. Tell him I have a list of local businesses selling counterfeit designer goods.”
“You do?”
“Well, sort of. I’ll explain when I see you.”
I galloped through the rest of the pet visits, looking over my shoulder before I went into every house, listening for footsteps while I played with cats. I didn’t expect Briana to come after me again. She had nothing to gain from accosting me again if I had copies of the list of contacts, and she’d looked as if she believed me when I said I did. But I wasn’t sure the men with the sap and the asp baton would be as easy to manipulate. If Briana had sent a message to them that I’d made copies of their stupid list, they might kill me just out of spite.
Since I had reversed my usual pattern and started at the north end of the Key, Billy Elliot was my last call instead of my first. He and Tom were waiting for me with anxious faces.
I said, “I’m sorry I’m so late. I had to take some hot water bottles to Cora Mathers, and since I was coming from the north end, I worked my way south.”
Tom watched me snap Billy Elliot’s leash on his collar. “How is Ms. Mathers?”
“She ate some carrot cake that gave her a tummy ache.”
“She’s a nice lady.”
What he meant was that Cora was an innocent lady. Tom handles Cora’s finances, and he knows as well as I do that the money her granddaughter left her didn’t come from shrewd investments the way Cora thinks. It came from a clever blackmailing scheme that was never exposed because the granddaughter was murdered. I appreciate Tom’s discretion in the way he keeps Cora innocent. She’s had too many hard knocks in her life to learn this late that her beloved granddaughter was a phony.