Crowne of Lies Read online

  “It’s fucking inconvenient, but yes. And I want to take the wind right out of Byron’s damn sails. Send him back to the real estate business where he belongs. Let him”—I waved to indicate the repurposed space—“renovate more warehouses.”

  She pursed her lips as if she was considering it, and I sat straighter to receive a little good news for a change. She took her time, pausing to drink wine, shake her head a little, take a breath.

  “You know,” she said, “I think I can help you.”

  “So you will?”

  “There’s someone I’m thinking of.”

  “No way. I don’t want just anyone off the street. It has to be plausible.”

  “You know her from Wildwood School.”

  “It can’t be some hippie, Mandy. She has to have social credentials and she has to need something. So if it’s some desperate woman who wants children or just wants a ring on her finger, forget it. The divorce has to be clean. You’re the only one.”

  “No.” Mandy cut the air with her hands. “The more you talk, the more I know it’s true. She has everything you want. Single. A solid name. A definite need. And she’ll never fall for you, trust me. You’re too boring for her. She’s perfect.”

  Mandy was selling me when I was supposed to be selling her.

  “Who is she?” I asked, hoping to regain control of the situation. I could dismiss this person if I knew who she was.

  “I’m going to ask her first. Feel her out.”

  “When?”

  “I’m seeing her tomorrow morning. If it looks good, I’ll tell you who she is so you can do some background, then you can meet, negotiate, kiss the bride. Boom. You’ll make a huge mistake so fast you won’t even know what hit you.”

  “Tomorrow.” Because I’d have to run background, the time frame—even if she was perfect—was still tight. “Crowne Jewels is Saturday. I want to announce there.”

  Crowne Jewels was Mom and Dad’s celebration for finally moving to the Bel-Air house, which Lyric had christened Crownehome. Some days, I wished for a name less prone to easy wordplay.

  “I’ll work it into a conversation and call you as soon as I know. Hopefully, by then you’ll talk yourself out of this stupid idea.”

  Fat chance of that.

  “When you talk to her, don’t say my name.”

  “I’ll just say you’re a young, stunningly gorgeous rich man. The name Crowne will not pass my lips.”

  “Fine.” I raised my glass and we clicked in agreement.

  3

  ELLA

  The marine layer hung over the city, cutting the bright power of the sun.

  The forecast had promised clear skies by seven o’clock, but the forecast had clearly lied.

  “They’re gonna start on time. Promise you that.” Amilcar took the binoculars from his brown eyes and squinted at the sky. The sides of his head were shaved, and a cluster of short dreadlocks stuck up from the top.

  My watch said it was three minutes to seven thirty in the morning, the legal start time for any construction in Los Angeles. We were on a rooftop with dozens of other gawkers. A lot of people had showed up to see the destruction of this particular little house in Westlake that sat between apartment buildings. The crowd lined the sawhorses protecting the property, all called by a Twitter account owned by the Guerilla Arts Collective. By design, no one knew who was in the GAC, because what they created involved a host of illegal activities. Trespassing. Vandalism. Maybe a little theft if you wanted to get technical.

  “NPR just retweeted,” Tasha said. She was sixteen, in tight braids with beads on the ends, and her brother Amilcar’s legal ward. He didn’t let her contribute to the piece when, late at night, we broke in and worked on it. She did the social media in secret, keeping her hands clean so she could go to college.

  “It’s not going to work without the sun.” I held out my hand for the binoculars and Amilcar handed them over.

  “It’s gonna work, Fance,” he said, using his nickname for me as if he was making a threat. It was short for Fancy, my terrible tag name from back in our graffiti days.

  “But it won’t be perfect.” I scanned the crowd through the binoculars. The construction workers were getting into their big yellow machines. Mandy was in the crowd with her sister and a few people I didn’t recognize. Socialites, probably. In a separate group, a white-haired woman of Hispanic descent held a notebook, her eyes on the house. “Selma Quintero’s here.”

  “Damn,” Amilcar said when he saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic. “Tasha’s good.”

  “Damn right,” she said, poking her phone.

  “Damn, damn.” I looked at the sky. The marine layer had thinned a little.

  The bulldozer rumbled to life, belching smoke.

  “It’s on,” I said.

  Our first really big piece. Not well-placed graffiti and street art, but a statement. Something beautiful in the rubble. A city turning hidden treasure into garbage.

  At exactly seven thirty, the bulldozer moved. Suddenly, as if the atmosphere had conspired with the forecasters to stress me out, the haze cleared and the sun shone brightly on the little boarded-up house. The crowd went silent, waiting for something. Delight or boredom. The unexpected thrill of art or the inevitable disappointment of raised expectations.

  I grabbed Amilcar’s sleeve as if I was about to fall. He didn’t move.

  The bulldozer pushed into the building and it crumbled, exposing the interior walls, which were covered corner to corner in multicolored rhinestones that sparked in the sunlight. The floors, the ceilings—everything came down and exposed the glittering insides.

  The crowd gasped.

  In three minutes, it was over.

  Geode House was a success.

  * * *

  Projects like Geode House were rewarding, but they didn’t put bread on the table. In fact, they cost enough to impoverish even Basile Papillion’s daughter.

  Which isn’t to say I started the GAC with much money to my name.

  My mother had built my father’s fashion empire and managed it until the day she died. Basile designed every gown and accessory until the day he joined her, but not before marrying a stepmother who hated me.

  Use your gifts. My name is your responsibility now.

  Those were his last words to me, uttered in halting breaths while cancer ate the last of his life. The last thing he heard in this world was my voice telling him he didn’t have to worry. I’d use my gifts for the Papillion name.

  So I stayed at the company I knew like the back of my hand.

  When his widow, Bianca, demoted me, I stayed.

  When she brought on the moody but well-known Jean-Claude Josef as design director to rescue the couture business, I stayed because I was the only one who knew how to turn his nonsense drawings into garments that would not only work in the real world, but actually honor the Papillion name.

  When I was relegated to the fit room, pinning up garments I couldn’t afford for people who weren’t worth my time, I stayed.

  When Bianca added a cheap branded T-shirt line for discount stores, I fucking stayed.

  Also, I needed the job, and sometimes I met nice people, like Olivia Monroe, who stood on the raised platform in front of a bank of mirrors while I perfected the hemline of her blue gown.

  “You’re all set,” I said, standing. “Just don’t lose another half a size while you sleep.”

  She’d had Byron Crowne’s baby six months before, and I’d had to take her dress in three times as she lost her pregnancy weight. The waist kept sagging and the hem kept dropping, but this was the last alteration, and she looked pretty damn good if I said so myself.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you so much for getting another fitting in.”

  “No problem.”

  She looked at me in the mirror as I made sure the neckline hadn’t dropped. “They’re working you pretty hard.”

  “Crowne Jewels is the biggest event of the year.” The pa
rty at the new Crowne place in Bel-Air had supposedly started as a small affair, but had exploded into the event of the year. “Everyone wants to look good for the paparazzi. When you move your arm, does it feel tight across the back?”

  “You look tired.” She lifted her arm to the side, then the front. “The back feels good. Fits like a Papillion.”

  I didn’t address her comment about how I looked. She didn’t need to know I’d spent half the night in a crystal-encrusted abandoned building.

  “That’s my name,” I said. “Wear it out.”

  Olivia smiled when I quoted my father. Basile Papillion didn’t have a sense of humor as much as a charming way with puns.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come to the party?” Olivia said as I unzipped her dress. “I can get you an invitation, you know.”

  “Nah, I don’t have anything to wear,” I half-joked. I didn’t have anything to wear, but I didn’t feel the urge to go either. Small talk gave me hives.

  “You’re surrounded by gowns,” Olivia said from behind the dressing room curtain.

  “They’re all spoken for.”

  “Ella!” Bianca cried from the other side of the outer door, adding a quick knock. “Ute Wente’s waiting.”

  I opened the door. My stepmother waited on the other side with her arms crossed as if my problem was laziness and she’d caught me slacking again.

  Laziness wasn’t my problem. She was.

  “Just finishing up with the Monroe gown.”

  “Done!” Olivia said, coming out from behind the curtain, fully dressed.

  “Oh,” Bianca said, stopping in her tracks. “Mrs. Crowne! It’s so nice to see you.”

  “Monroe,” she corrected with a smile. “My mother’s name.”

  My stepmother’s skull-short black hair hugged her head like a swimming cap, but she’d managed to tuck a Swarovski crystal comb behind her ear. Her skin was soft leather, consistently winter-tanned as if she’d just jetted back from a vacation in St. Croix.

  “Of course,” Bianca singsonged with a kind smile, banishing the horror of anyone not taking the Crowne name as she turned her glare to me. “We have Theresa and Fiona Drazen both waiting forty minutes for your attention. And Ute, of course.” She turned back to Olivia, still smiling. “I hate to rush you, but we’re in such a crunch over your celebration.” She pressed her palm to her chest and bowed ever so slightly as if she was praying in her direction. “Will you have lunch with me though? We have a spread all set out.”

  “I have to get to work,” Olivia replied, buttoning her jacket. “I’ll show myself out.”

  “I won’t hear of it!” She turned her back on me to lead Olivia away. “This floor can be such a maze, and you don’t want to get lost in the sample room. It’s like those dirty, loud back streets in Fez where me and June got lost this one time? It was absolutely…”

  “Hellish,” I grumbled, finishing her sentence to myself as I rolled my eyes.

  * * *

  On Highland Ave, a billboard sat on the roof of a single-story industrial building wedged between two galleries. A mural with the words BREAK SHIT took the entire front wall. The permits to demolish the building had expired when the owner couldn’t buy the adjoining spaces. He rented it to me for a fraction of the market rate as long as I didn’t ask him for repairs or refuse to vacate once he could tear it down.

  Commercial zoning meant I couldn’t officially inhabit it, but it had everything I needed. Two thousand square feet divided in the middle. A bathroom. A hot plate and refrigerator on the side I lived in, and a workspace for the dozen or so artists in the GAC.

  Mandy climbed the telescoping ladder I’d hooked to the back of the building. There, in the shade of the billboard, on a patch of Astroturf, I had a little table and chairs set up. Every first of the month—most months—I heard men clonking around the roof to change the ad. They left my seating area alone.

  “Thank you for the retweet,” I said to Mandy, putting a bag of takeout on the table. “The GAC accounts were on fire.”

  “Any excuse to look like an edgy influencer,” she replied, taking out a plastic clamshell of salad.

  “It was amazing,” I said, reclining on the chair until I faced the night sky. Though we were on the back side of the billboard, its lights drowned out the stars. “The sun. The stones. The construction guy getting out of the bulldozer to check it out. The whole thing.”

  “It was. Were you late for work?”

  “Yeah, and I got in trouble. Blah blah.”

  “If you worked for me, you could come in any time you wanted.”

  I waved away the offer and cracked open my chicken sandwich container. Mandy had offered me a hundred jobs and she’d offer another hundred, but her clothes would never say Papillion on the label.

  This name is your responsibility now.

  “Gotta keep my eye on the evil stepmother.”

  “For how long?”

  “I’m not wishing for anything, but she’s gotta die someday. Then it’s mine.”

  “And you still want it? After this morning?”

  I tilted my head to get a bite of my sandwich. I was starving. I was always starving. The bomb of a chicken salad hero was no match for my appetite.

  “Twitter fame don’t pay the bills.” I wiped my mouth. “Art with nothing to sell doesn’t either.”

  “What if…” She shoved salad in her mouth. “Just for kicks, let’s say you had a piece that made… I don’t know, let’s say…” She crinkled her face as if calculating. “Ten million. Would you start buying up shares?”

  I was right. She’d been calculating. She knew her competition’s share price to the penny. “Like a hostile takeover?”

  “They call it activist investing now.”

  “Of my own company? Basically… buy my birthright?”

  “You could murder Bianca, I guess.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head as if the idea wasn’t just morally bankrupt, but icky.

  Ten mill? Fifteen? If I had it, would I scoop up shares and kick the bitch out of the corner office? Return the Papillion name to its former glory?

  In three more bites, I had most of the sandwich down and the idea mostly digested.

  Juggling the GAC and a full-time job was hard enough. If I ran Papillion, the collective wouldn’t fit into my life.

  “Maybe,” I said, deciding to play the game. “First thing I’d do is fire Jean-Claude, then I’d kill those ugly fucking T-shirts.”

  “Interesting.” She nodded into her salad, and when she looked at me with a gleam in her eye, I realized we weren’t playing.

  “Mandy,” I said with a thick layer of suspicion, “you already have your own fashion house, and I know you don’t have that kind of cash lying around.”

  “Well.” She chewed, swallowed, and pointed her fork at me. “Here’s the thing…”

  * * *

  After work the next day, I met Amilcar in his Downtown loft. Still in his creative business casual suit. He ran the tech department for a marketing firm, doing microtargeting and other less savory stuff I didn’t understand, which was why he was my go-to as soon as Mandy called and told me who my potential husband was.

  Logan Crowne.

  I hadn’t seen him since ninth grade, but least he wasn’t a complete stranger.

  “The first guy I hacked for you was doing shit to you I can’t even talk about,” Amilcar said, tapping the keyboard in front of four huge screens. “So if this is a similar situation, I want to know now so I’ll be ready to kill him.”

  “It’s not even close.”

  “And you’re not telling me why I’m looking up the dark web’s asshole for Logan Crowne? Because he’s rich as fuck. The GAC should be drone-bombing his house.”

  That was a possible next project. Dropping art from the sky. The idea wasn’t quite fully formed. It had to be more than litter.

  “Not yet.”

  “Huh, well…” Pictures of Logan flashed on the center screen. “That is on
e handsome motherfucker.”

  “He is.”

  He’d always been handsome, but the years had strengthened his jaw, hardening his gaze, and turned a nice-looking adolescent into a stunning man.

  “He makes me wanna fuck.” Amilcar leaned his chair all the way back to take in the visuals. “True story.”

  “Since when do you admit you want to fuck a guy?”

  “No, no.” Tap tap on the keyboard. “Not a guy. I want to a fuck a woman. A beautiful woman.”

  “He doesn’t look like—”

  “Fance. Stop. You’re killing me.”

  “What?”

  “Look at him! Damn. All right. Here it is. Business. He likes his privacy.”

  A scarcity of images and mentions on my Google search had told me that. “Okay.”

  “He’s a hundred percent single for a while now. Was on LA Seeker’s list of Los Angeles’s Most Eligible Bachelors until two days before it went to print. Then he was pulled.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Right here.” He tapped a side screen with rows of code he knew I couldn’t read. “He doesn’t like attention. His profile’s in this folder and the added date is two days before. Here’s a Vanity Fair article on rich dudes at Harvard. Early draft, he’s there. What they printed? Poof.”

  “How are his finances?”

  Amilcar turned to me with an incredulous look.

  “Can you see that or no?” I asked.

  “He’s a Crowne.”

  “You never met a broke rich person?”

  “Actually, no. I only know broke broke people and broke people trying to act rich because they think the universe is gonna be fooled into believing it.”

  “If, let’s say, he wanted to buy something for… I don’t know… ten million dollars? Does he have the cash to do it?”

  “That is stupid money.”

  “I know, can you—?”

  “What’s going on with you and this guy, Fance?”

  I shook my head. “Something. It’s harmless.”

  “You pulling off a heist or something?”

  “No. Amilcar. Trust me. Okay?”

  He shook his head and looked at his watch before turning back to his typing. “I gotta pick up Tasha from school in half an hour, so if I can’t pull it up in fifteen, I’ll get back to you.”