Bel-Air Dead (Stone Barrington 20)

“That’s a very odd thing to say to a dinner guest,” she said.

“Forgive my rudeness. Again, who are you?”

“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if I left,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be more comfortable,” he said, “but you might.

If you wish to leave, then, by all means, do so. But if we should meet again, my first question would still be, who are you?”

She stared into her brandy glass. “All right,” she said, “I fudged my resume to get my job. Is that so terrible?”

“You did a great deal more than fudge your resume,” Stone said. “Everything you told me-and, no doubt, Terrence Prince-was a bald-faced lie. You made yourself up out of whole cloth.”

“Sometimes in life,” she said, “there is a need to just start over from scratch.”

“I suppose,” Stone replied. “But usually people who start over begin with the same name and credentials, then try to improve on those credentials as time passes.”

“All right,” she said, “I’m not proud of my past.”

“Are you a fugitive from justice?” Stone asked.

“No,” she replied. “No one is looking for me.”

“So you got away clean?” Stone asked, taking a leap.

“I’m not a criminal,” she said with some heat.

“Not in your own eyes, anyway,” Stone said. He was flying, now, making it up as he went along.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know what a sociopath is?” Stone asked. This just might push her over the edge, he thought.

But she sat perfectly still. “A person with no conscience,” she replied.

“Correct. A person who thinks only of herself and no one else. A person who could never admit wrongdoing, because she figures that, if she did it, it couldn’t be wrong.”

“That’s a very harsh judgment of someone you hardly know,” she said.

“Don’t know at all,” he responded. “Why don’t we start over. Who are you?”

“My name doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It matters in that was your first opportunity to tell the truth, and you passed on that.”

“All right, my name-at birth-was Olga Chernik. I was born in Chicago of Polish parents, I attended the public schools through the eighth grade, and then I ran away from home.”

“Where did you go?” Stone asked.

“Eventually, to Las Vegas.”

Stone thought he knew where the rest of this was going. “And you came under the aegis of a pimp, who got you hooked on heroin, and thereafter you led a life of degradation. Come on, Carolyn, you can do worse than that.”

“Worse?” she asked, incredulous.

“That’s a standard con; you get caught in a lie, so you make up something so much worse that the mark figures it must be true.”

She looked defeated. “Are you going to tell Terrence Prince about this?” she asked.