Look Closer(31)

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t care.”

He shakes his head. “Why do you get all the good luck? Me, I’m busting my ass for fifty, maybe a hundred K a pop. You, you’re stealing this sexy broad’s twenty million and you get to bang her on top of that?”

“I’m banging her so I can steal it, G. She initiated it. What am I supposed to do? She unzips her dress, wiggles out of it in the middle of my office, strips down to her bra and panties, and I tell her I’m not interested? She’d be out the door in a heartbeat. I’d never see her again.”

“She unzipped her dress? Like, in the middle of the meeting? Why doesn’t that shit happen to me?”

Because your diet choices have remained stagnant since the fourth grade. Because you don’t do five hundred ab crunches a day and spend two hours daily on free weights and climbs. Because you’re a big, scary motherfucker, even if you’re my best friend.

“Number 7 is different, though,” I say.

“What, you care about her?”

“God, no. I mean, I don’t need her to fall for me, to leave her husband.”

That’s how it works. That’s the one unifying theme of every scam I’ve pulled. I need them to divorce their husbands, who don’t even know I exist, much less that I’m banging their wives. Then I can get control of the money and run off with it. It’s the perfect scam, because they keep my existence hush-hush for obvious reasons, and they’re often so ashamed and humiliated afterward that they don’t want to report it. I convince the women to keep their divorce demand low, so they can get their husbands to agree to a quick exit. Something in a lump-sum amount that their wealthy husbands are happy to give to be done with the matter in one fell swoop with a discount. The discount is the downside, sure, but it allows me to stay anonymous and allows for an easy adios.

How I do it varies, and that’s purposeful, too. I can’t run the same scam every time or I’ll develop a signature. A couple times, I’ve played the big-shot investor like I’m doing with Vicky, but the last time I did that was years ago with Number 4 in Santa Fe. I can be anything I need to be. A fitness instructor with Number 3 in Naples. A wannabe actor who waits tables with Number 2 in Sacramento. A grad student with Number 6 in Lexington. I find the woman I want—or sometimes she finds me—and I make her want me, I steal her from her husband, I get my hands on the money.

“Number 7 is different,” I say, “because I don’t need her to leave her husband. She’s got her husband wrapped around her finger. She can do whatever she wants with the money. And it sure sounds like she plans to do just that.”

Gavin gets it now, leaning forward, pointing at me. “So you don’t get half, or some fraction in a lump-sum divorce settlement? You get it all?”

“I get all twenty million,” I say. “Twenty-one million, actually.”

“Unbelievable. You are unbelievably lucky.”

“You’re getting your ten percent, pal. You’ll make out okay, too.”

Ten percent to Gavin, because I couldn’t pull off this shit without the identities he creates for me and, in this case, his financial knowledge.

“But the problem is, I have to straddle a line,” I say. “I have to keep things kosher until November, when that money is hers.”

“Oh, that trust language, right.” Gavin went through the trust for me, too—though I blacked out Simon’s name, to keep our firewall of anonymity up, and Vicky’s name never actually appears, only the word “SPOUSE.”

“If she wants to keep screwing you, you do it,” says Gavin. “And if she doesn’t, if you were just a fling and she doesn’t want it to go any further, you have to be okay with that, too. But not just okay with it—you have to make sure she’s comfortable with the whole thing. If she starts feeling guilty about cheating on her husband, and you’re a reminder of that guilt, she might just decide to take her money elsewhere.”

That sums it up perfectly. Between now and November third, I have to handle this thing perfectly. I have to keep everything smooth and comfortable with Vicky.

“But my money says she doesn’t feel one bit guilty,” I say. “She did exactly what she wanted to do. She wasn’t conflicted. No, Number 7 has paid her dues for the last ten years. Now her payoff is finally coming. She’s not gonna let a little thing like guilt get in the way.”





26

Simon

“My name is Simon Dobias,” I say to the room. Thirteen people. Two of them new—a man with hair sprouting from beneath a baseball cap, and a middle-aged woman dressed in black—and eleven returners, all seated in cheap folding chairs in the church’s dim basement.

“For those who are new, for those who are not—welcome to SOS. The main thing I want to tell you is there are no rules here. You can come and go as you please, obviously. No one’s going to make you feel guilty if you stop coming and then return. No one’s going to assign you a sponsor who hectors you to do things. We don’t have twelve steps or any steps. No one’s going to make you speak. If you’re just here to listen, then just listen. And if you ever want to call me, my number’s up there on the chalkboard.

“I know it’s the ‘in’ thing now to talk about ‘safe spaces.’ I think a lot of that is BS, to be honest, but this really is a safe place. We just want to help. I think we can. We’ve all been through similar experiences.”