Con Crazy

by Addison J. Chapple, Danny Kravitz, Eliza Marsh

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

The con is on.

Prewitt Patry is an expert in European art and antiquities, and he used to be the best con artist in New York City. But fate has left him divorced and broke, with his glory days behind him.

Then a golden opportunity falls into his lap.

Ranger du Courtemanche is the aging patriarch of the centuries-old French aristocratic Courtemanche family. The family resides in their ancestral chateau, and they haven’t been outside the property in years. Enter Prewitt, who cozies up to the reclusive family—Ranger and his two sisters—and warns them that their chateau and wealth have been targeted by an obscure secret society. Panicked and desperate, Ranger enlists Prewitt in the fight to defend his family’s honor and fortune. Et voilà! The trap is set.

With his team of eccentric Parisian con artists, Prewitt gets to work. But the closer he gets, the more the con unravels. Ancient betrayals, priceless jewels, and forbidden loves—the Courtemanches turn out to be a lot more than Prewitt bargained for.

Inspired by the outrageous true story of a wildly audacious con.

Release date: August 29, 2023

Publisher: Level 4 Press, Inc.

Print pages: 306

Sample

1

Prewitt Patry leaps over a four-foot gap in a metal gangway, brown water rushing below. His headlamp sweeps down the right side of a slimy cement wall illuminating a teeming mess of pipes. The New York City sewer tunnel is murky beneath the weak security lights and smells like a wet garbage dumpster left in the sun. The steady river of trash-laced water has inched up in the last fifteen minutes—zero percent chance of rain, my ass.

Prewitt finally sees the opening he has been looking for and jumps across the water into an alcove. He nearly sticks the landing but has to grab onto the rungs of a ladder to keep from falling back out into the wet tunnel. He climbs up, his headlight illuminating the steel rungs as he goes. At the top, Prewitt carefully balances on the ladder. With both hands free, he reaches above his head, pushes upward on a heavy manhole cover, and peers out. He only sees the glare of headlights of a massive truck barreling his way. In one swift move, Prewitt lowers the metal cover and brings his head back into the tunnel before a string of tires rumble across the manhole. He hangs in a backbend for a moment, rather nimble with his athletic dad bod, his few extra pounds worn well. Prewitt grabs the ladder, sets the balls of his feet against the outside poles, and slides down to the base. He angles his headlamp down and drags a hand-drawn map from his pants pocket.

He realizes he was looking at the map upside down and turns it. Prewitt steps back into the sewage tunnel, straddling the water, and there, on the opposite side of the main tunnel, he sees the ladder he should have gone up. He hustles.

Prewitt’s black-clad form emerges quietly through the heavy metal grate at the top of the ladder into a large utility room. A check of his watch shows he’s four minutes behind. He stows the headlamp, but his ski mask stays in place because every common room in this luxury midrise has security cameras. After his eyes adjust to the dim lighting, he looks past the ordered piping conduits and sees the tell-tale green light in a far corner. They’ll know someone was here eventually, but he’d rather keep his identity to himself. He disappears out the door into the hallway and enters a stairwell.

Prewitt checks his watch while lunging up three flights of stairs. He’s going to miss the gap in the security patrol if he doesn’t get his ass moving. He eases the door open to the third floor. Just as he’d hoped, it’s empty. He runs to the far end of the hall, where there is an impressive set of oak doors.

Two weeks of creative surveillance secured Prewitt the six-digit code he punches into the electronic door lock. He lets out a relieved breath as he sees it go green and hears the deadbolt click over. He steps in, closes the door, and hurries through the lavish condo to the corner office. After a quick search, he finds what he came for.

Under his mask, Prewitt grins at the safe.

“And hello to you,” he says as he draws his safecracking kit from inside his jacket. The following minutes pass for Prewitt in a flow state of focused yearning, unchanged from those first tries as a kid when one rainy night, a bored, escape artist carny at the traveling fair taught Prewitt and

let him keep trying until long after the rides quieted, and the colored lights shut off. The talent is still there, but his confidence is shaky. It’s taking too long. “Come on, baby.”

Finally, there’s that sweet click as the lock yields. Prewitt reaches in, past several scant stacks of papers, and pulls out a bank deposit bag, zipped and locked. He slips it into his jacket beside his kit and straightens as he looks around the office. Prewitt scans the rows and rows of elegant shelves, searching. He recognizes many of the volumes as classics of literature, large format art books, and collections on histories of the world.

Then he sees it. One slim leather book sits alone on the desk. Prewitt knows it was placed there in a staged, casual manner. He also knows it’s the most valuable book in the whole room. It’s why he took the job in the first place. Well, the second place. He took the job because he needed the money. But as he always does, once his research revealed the mark was a legitimate bad guy and in possession of something Prewitt valued, he was game for real. In an instant, the book disappears into Prewitt’s jacket.

After another quick check of his watch, Prewitt dashes back through the condo and out into what should have been, at least for another ninety seconds, an empty hallway. But the chime of the elevator announces the arrival of two guards. The shock of seeing a guy in a ski mask running down the hall freezes them in place for a moment before they break into a sprint. Prewitt has to beat them to the stairwell, or it’s game over. He’ll be going away if he gets caught now. Prewitt gives it all he has and barely gets through the stairwell door before the guards can get their hands on him.

But he’s not in the clear yet. Flinging himself down the steps like a competitor on middle-aged American Ninja Warrior, Prewitt bypasses the utility room and another romp through the sewer in favor of a sprint through the building’s ground floor parking garage. He can hear a guard yelling “Close it!” into his walkie-talkie. Soon enough, the garage attendant has punched the button on the heavy metal door, which is now shuddering its way downward. Prewitt has a moment to consider the bruises he’ll have on his ass for the next two weeks before throwing himself into a feet-first baseball slide and just clearing the garage door as it hits the ground.

Hauling himself back

 to his feet, Prewitt can’t stop to catch his breath as he takes off at a jog. Running of any kind was not what he’d planned for tonight’s adventure.

Prewitt keeps a steady pace as he pulls his mask off and wipes his sweat-drenched face, rounding 78th Street onto Lexington. The rain is now barely a drizzle. He jams the mask in his pocket, keeps the jog up for a few blocks, then slows to a brisk walk and rubs the sting from his right butt cheek. He continues up Lexington against traffic, past little shops under sidewalk scaffolding, past an old drugstore with a vintage RX sign and a case of pinned butterflies in the window, past a little hippie espresso shop with smells of coffee and incense wafting from its open front door, and past all the red awnings and dirty roll-up storefront doors until the rain stops. The street is empty of cars for a moment until an old Honda Civic, its back bumper scraping along the pavement, claws by and turns onto 87th sparks rolling and bouncing around the corner. At 88th, Prewitt turns west then heads up the sidewalk to a break in the buildings and finds his way to the back door of The Gaf, the Upper East Side’s finest late night dive bar.

“Gonna need a drink,” Prewitt says, as he drops the deposit bag onto a desk.

Dripping sweat in front of this banged-up metal desk in a room full of liquor boxes, Prewitt kneads the familiar tightness at the small of his back with his right hand, his face a grimace of pain.

Behind the desk, Judith “Mace” Duncan reaches over and picks up a cigar from the lip of a black marble ashtray. A once hardcore party girl, she went out clubbing a lot in the late ‘80s, and her hair got so spiky with thick, silver barbs that her head looked like a medieval weapon, thus the nickname. Mace takes a full draw and blows out the smoke with a little retrohale from her nose that makes her look like a dragon.

“Get whatever you want,” she says as she waves an arm toward the other door in the office, the one that leads to The Gaf’s long, tidy, and always-filled bar. “It will take me a sec to get this bitch open anyways.”

Prewitt stares hard at Mace for a moment. She fits every middle-aged, female dive bar

owner cliché, down to her blunt haircut, men’s jeans, and flashy high-tops. But Mace adds a tough, punk-era flavor to her strut, and to the way she barks at Prewitt. She flips the bank deposit bag over and starts rummaging through the drawers for the right tool to open its lock.

Wiping the last of the sweat from his forehead, Prewitt heads out to the bar and helps himself to a glass, ice from the chest, and water from the gun. He drinks half the glass, adds more, then heads back. Shutting the door behind him again in the office, he sees Mace picking the lock. She’s capable. He watches her as he sits, noting a little gray at her scalp where her hair has grown since the last dye job. Trying to ignore the growing pain in his lower back, he thinks about how Mace has aged in the fifteen years since he’s known her.

What one wouldn’t suspect just looking or listening now, Prewitt muses, is that Mace happens to be one of the most adept criminals and con pimps in the country. Mace has run jobs and managed crews with the best of them. Her work as a bottom-feeder, as of late, is just how the ball bounces in life. A sting that stung back, a heartbreaking breakup, and the personal problems and bullshit that comes with it. Watch out, hubris, ‘cause bad luck is always looking to crack a winning streak. Mace went down hard. Real hard. With tears. It was a year before he saw her in person and another before she did anything other than watch drag racing while sipping whiskey at her bar. Which is why she and Prewitt are simpatico right now. But Mace is also one of the toughest cats Prewitt knows. She sprung back into a low hunter’s crouch, and redemption, in the form of a great con, a back-in-the-game grand grift, has long been on her mind. The lock clicks open. Mace reaches in and pulls out an unimpressive stack of bills.

“Fucking dumb bastard,” Mace says. “What happened to keeping dirty money at home?”

Prewitt’s shoulders slump. Two weeks’ work. The owner of those solid, oak doors sells stolen goods on the street through a network of hustlers, one of whom is in hock to Mace. That hustler was her narc, just another of the degenerate gamblers Mace carries and milks like sick cows. This mark supposedly makes five figures monthly and launders the cash through

his laundromat business. But the money doesn’t move until the end of the month. The cash was supposed to be in the safe.

Mace’s lips move as she divides the haul in half. “$2,430 each,” she says.

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“That’s all that’s here. Maybe I got the dates wrong.”

“Great.”

“Well, what can I tell ya?”

“I’ve become a petty thief,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “Just give me my money.” Prewitt stands and places his half-empty water glass on the desk and holds out his hand.

Mace barks out a laugh. “For now. Stay sharp, Prew. The big one’s coming.” Mace hands him his cash. “And answer your damn cell phone when I call.”

Prewitt shoves the cash in his jacket and pushes open the back door.

“Not staying to chat?” Mace calls from behind him before the door slams shut. 

 

2

As he walks along the puddled sidewalk, Prewitt wonders if it was wise not to call out the four C-notes he saw Mace palm. It’s so pathetic, and why embarrass her? Even though he knows he needs the money more than she does.

Prewitt hears drunken laughter. A group of kids in their early twenties, dressed like they come from money, are taking up the whole sidewalk and heading right for Prewitt. They don’t notice him until it’s almost too late. The closest guy sees Prewitt and doesn’t change course. Instead, he purposely hits him, then bounces off Prewitt’s firm shoulder.

“Damn bro, what the hell?” the kid spits out as he raises a hand to his own shoulder like he’s wounded.

Prewitt says nothing. He just stands there at his full height of five feet eleven inches. Even at fifty years old, he’s still got most of the muscle that helped him in more than one high school parking lot fight and has no interest in backing down to some punk whose entire generation boggles Prewitt’s mind with their “I’m the shit, so look at me” attitude. Gone are the days when a guy might risk getting punched in the face to make a point or manifest some machismo. And those are days Prewitt misses.

“Come on,” whines one of the girls. She pulls at the punk’s hand and almost falls off her high heels, which makes her grab at his arm and laugh. He allows her to drag him past Prewitt and down the sidewalk to catch up with their friends, who didn’t even stop.

Prewitt watches them go, not because he’s thinking about a fight, but because of the girl’s loose-limbed elegance. Her lean frame and honey hair reminded him of someone. Like a ghost from a previous life. That someone had floated down these sidewalks once, holding his hand as they laughed their way from bar to bar.

A window display catches Prewitt’s attention as he turns back around. He’s standing in front of Sotheby’s Auction House on the out-of-the-way path he chose to take home tonight. He steps into the foyer and looks at the catalog for an auction of English and Continental silver and furniture from the estate of Andrew Hartnagle, including a matched pair of late Louis XV gilt bronze-mounted kingwood and Chinese lacquered bibliotheques. They start at $100,000. And an Italian silver flamingo starts at $80,000.

“Have yet to see an Italian flamingo,” says Prewitt.

He reads the next auction announcement for the McCallan fine and rare collection of single highland malt scotch whiskey. He finds a bottle listed with a starting bid of $30,000, distilled in 1971. “You and me both.” And I’m worth about ten bucks without the score from tonight. Of course, Prewitt isn’t counting the thousands he is in hock to Mace.

Prewitt wishes he could laugh at it all like he did when he was out in Manhattan past midnight with his ghost. But that was long ago. As he leaves Sotheby’s Auction House behind, the city sheds its wealth, neighborhood by neighborhood, until a long while later, Prewitt works his key into the grimy exterior door to his rent-controlled apartment building. He kicks a mountain of moldering newspaper circulars out of the way as he heads to the stairs. Like always, it smells like cat piss and the corpses of a million dead cigarettes.

Four flights later, Prewitt’s back has had enough of his unusually active night. He lets himself into his cramped studio and manages to lock one of the deadbolts before he walks past the tiny kitchen area, with its one counter and peeling 1970-era wallpaper, and collapses on the tidy bed against the back wall.

Eyes closed, Prewitt lays there for a few minutes. Then he starts hearing it. It’s a slow creaking at first, above his head, the complaints of a worn-out box spring and commiseration of old floor joists. As the beat on the ceiling increases in tempo, muffled moans sink through until Prewitt can make out a voice yelling “baby, baby, baby.” He forces himself to sit up. His back is not pleased with the decision, and he closes his eyes for a moment against the pain. He’s lived with sciatica for so long; it seems like an unwanted roommate: won’t move out, always loud when you’re trying to rest, always annoying. He heads into the kitchen. There is a lone plate in the sink and an empty glass on the counter. He fills the glass with water from the faucet, takes four Ibuprofen from a bottle in the cabinet, and throws back the pills. He finishes the water and puts the glass down.

The kitchen counter serves as his table and divider from the bedroom slash living room slash office. A cell phone, plugged into the charger, sits right where he left it. Prewitt picks up the phone. There are three voicemail messages.

Two are from Mace. “Prew, why haven’t you called me?” and “Answer your damn phone.” The third message is from the laughing, lanky, honey-haired ghost girl. Though that girl is long gone. In her place is his angry ex-wife scolding him for missing yesterday’s support payment. But she’s wrong about why he missed the payment. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to; he couldn’t afford it. He isn’t making that kind of money anymore. He’s lost his mojo. But Honey Hair, he still thinks of her by that pet name, has refused to believe him since the day eight years ago when she lawyered up and left.

Prewitt exits voicemail

and clicks through to the photo album in his camera roll. There’s a picture of Honey Hair holding their baby boy. The next image is all three dressed up for someone’s wedding. Their boy is a five-year-old in a tuxedo holding a little pillow with pride even though there aren’t rings tied to it anymore. They really were all stunningly handsome back then. Even me. People had said it all the time. What a beautiful family.

No one knew, not even his wife, that that was when he was the happiest he had ever been. But it was an unsustainable high. He was playing the longest con of his entire life, keeping his wife convinced that he wasn’t a criminal. And why? Why would he do that? He just never knew she’d actually fall for him, a guy who didn’t deserve to take her for a drink, let alone take her arm for life . . . and keep falling for him. She was so out of his league, the dogs in the park knew it when he would take her there, and they’d look at him as if to say, “Dude, are you serious with this? There is no way. You’re pushing your luck,” and all he’d say back to them with his happy eyes was, “I love her. I really love her. More than I love myself, I love her. And I’ll make it work.” He just had to hide what he thought he’d never have to explain because he never thought she’d love him too. But she did. Until she didn’t anymore.

Back then, he was living in two worlds: a family with the love of his life, and a secret existence of artistic thievery, the life of the con. And Prewitt had woven his two worlds together with an impressive and intricate web of lies. But it couldn’t hold. As much as he’d wanted them to stay together, at any moment, she could discover who he really was, and those worlds would float apart, zero gravity, lost from each other and drifting.

Prewitt looks at his texts. There’s a message from her too:

Listen to your voicemail.
Your payment is late, and
don’t forget his birthday.

Shit. His son’s birthday. It’s tomorrow. Prewitt checks the time on his phone: 1:25 a.m. Correction, it’s today.

There is a knock on the door, which startles Prewitt. Prewitt goes over and looks through the peephole. It’s Ed from across the hall. He’s always hauling film equipment up and down the stairs and occasionally burning food, but he’s not a bad guy.

Prewitt opens the door a foot and sticks his head in the gap.

“It’s a little late, Ed.”

“Sorry to bother you, man, but I heard you come home. I was up rendering some footage of . . .” Ed realizes Prewitt probably doesn’t give a shit about what he was doing. “Anyway, I thought I should tell you some scary-looking dudes were here banging on your door a couple of hours ago. One of them had a screwdriver and went at a few of your locks, but they gave up pretty quickly and left.”

Prewitt swings the door all the way open, and sure enough, one of the locks has scratch marks, but then there are two more, the ones Prewitt installed himself that can’t be broken through so easily. Those are fine.

“Thanks, Ed. I appreciate you letting me know. They must have the wrong address, because there’s no reason anyone would want anything from this place.” Prewitt puts on his most wholesome smile and gives Ed the gentle laugh of complete innocence.

“Okay, man, just wanted to tell you . . .” Ed’s already heading back into his apartment.

“Thanks for keeping an eye out. Have a good night,” Prewitt says quietly as he gives a little wave.

Prewitt closes the door and locks all the deadbolts. Who the fuck? He arches his back and feels pain shoot down his leg. Prewitt pulls out the meager earnings from his little caper. What a disappointment. He’s not sure how he’s going to come up with the money to pay his rent and the ex-wife. He isn’t looking forward to seeing her in person with a balance on the books. He shoves the money away into a drawer. Why suffer more tonight?

Then Prewitt sits on his bed, reaches into his jacket, and pulls out the small leather book he liberated from the office earlier in the evening. Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. First edition. His research showed it went for $11,500 at Sotheby’s Rare Books and Manuscripts auction last year. It wasn’t hard for Prewitt to discover the mark had bought it. It turns out Laundry Man had a history of purchasing all manner of things at auction with no specific areas of interest. Also, Prewitt knew from the sale records that the mark over-paid for everything he won. Prewitt has spent a lifetime learning the value of rare pieces, not to steal them, but because he loves few things more.

He reaches over to the compact, deep-hued walnut bookcase beside his bed. The top half

is a lawyer’s case, each shelf protected by a piece of glass that louvers open from the top on slides like a tiny garage door. The bottom half is a series of drawers, graduated in size from top to bottom to a pleasing effect. Prewitt had bought the thing when he was in college from a nearly forgotten junk shop in the small town of Mt. Lebanon, outside of Pittsburgh, where he went to school. Shortly after that, he dropped out of school, fell into his current line of work, and started filling the bookcase with little treasures.

Dropped out. It’s a term he’s used when the conversation can’t be avoided, but only because it’s easier to say than “forced out” or “kicked out.” Of course, even “kicked out” can’t fully capture the utterly fucked-ness of what happened just before; as a twenty-six-year-old grad student, he was set to defend his dissertation for the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon. At the finish line. A doctor-to-be in Art History and Museum Studies. An academic star who came from the gutter.

At CMU, Prewitt had indulged his love of foreign languages, early modern European culture, furniture, and architecture. He’d been paid to do it. And he’d found a mentor. Professor Dylan Watkin Standish taught, inspired, and cared about Prewitt. He’d supported him and encouraged him and gave leeway for Prewitt to make artifacts his main area of study.

Prewitt pulls open the top drawer of the bookcase. On a wool pad sits restoration tools. Also capable of being used for forgeries, but not this time. Prewitt selects two linen cloths from a neat stack and carefully wipes clean all the surfaces of the book to remove any oils from his hands or the careless paws of the previous owner. He holds the book tenderly with a cloth and flips through a few pages. He smells the paper and examines the ink, and the edges of each page, gauging the amount of foxing.

It was Standish who’d introduced Prewitt to society and privilege. He’d shown him wealth, and the wealthy. Real wealth. Prewitt grew up dangerously

 poor, and Dylan Watkin Standish, being extraordinarily rich, was the only well-healed person he’d ever known. Prewitt always thought the wealthy were aliens, snobs. Standish appeared to not be. He took Prewitt under his wing. And he made him feel loved. Until he’d destroyed Prewitt’s career and shredded his heart for good measure. Professor Dylan Watkin Standish was a pillar, and he was a con artist.

Prewitt closes the book and holds it another moment. Evangeline. Then he opens a shelf on the bookcase. Prewitt nestles it in with several other volumes he has rescued over the years.

Carnegie Mellon. Prewitt knows he was pushing back against some karmic plan by even believing he could be a winner in the other people’s game, let alone a professor. And when it was all over with Standish, Prewitt had been left right where he always knew he belonged, outside. Except he’d let his guard down and had believed otherwise, so there was a sting now. How did I not see it coming?

He looks at the little digital clock by the bed. The red numbers read 1:46 a.m. Time to say goodnight to his modest collection of purloined artifacts, his books on philosophy and politics, and subjects like architecture and world history and flowers from the different continents. Prewitt crawls into bed, turns out the light, and returns to his worries about the support payment conversation coming tomorrow and what fresh hell will be visited on him by his ex-in-laws, all shit he will put up with without hesitation so he can see his son on his birthday. ...