“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills.”
Chinese proverb
“Colette Collins is a twenty-six-year-old interior designer. How does she afford that address?” my colleague at Cipher Security, Shane, said through the sound system in my car.
“You should see it in person. People give left testicles and firstborn children just to get on the waiting list for a place like this.” I’d parked across the street from the graceful old brownstone and was sipping cold coffee as I debated my next move.
The computer keyboard clacked through the speaker. “The apartment is part of a family trust from the mother’s side,” she said.
“Those are the kind of trusts that usually require break-ins at attorney’s offices to dig into.” I winced at the prospect as I took another sip.
“She’s not a suspect though, right?”
The irrefutable evidence of Colette Collins’ innocence had been replaying in my mind since I saw the footage of her having sex with Sterling Gray.
Once I’d determined it was, in fact, Ms. Collins’ perfect naked ass that Gray had in his hands, I’d shifted my gaze to the timecode and kept it there until they’d dressed and left the room. At no time did he leave her alone, nor did she even excuse herself to use the bathroom. In fact, there was never a time during Ms. Collins’ visit to the mansion that she was out of sight of Gray or a camera. She came, she came, as it were, and then she went. Apparently in that order.
“She was with Gray the whole time she was in the house.” Was it the coffee that was so bitter, or my suddenly foul mood?
“Well, if you need any B&E, I know a guy,” Shane said. I could hear the grin in her voice, and then the sound of a kiss.
“Hey Gabriel,” I said, because no one else would be kissing Shane.
“Masoud. Everything okay?”
“Stolen painting from a system I designed. Just trying to tie up some loose ends.”
“Good luck,” he said.
“Let us know if we can help,” Shane added brightly.
I hung up, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” continued playing through the car speaker. My phone was playing all its music on random shuffle, and I just let it play. The only thing I couldn’t abide was Christmas music at any time other than between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve; otherwise, the randomness just felt like a soundtrack to my life.
If I was completely honest with myself, and I generally was, I had found the shimmery blonde intriguing – a strange and wonderful party bulb in a room of designer recessed lighting. She was lovely to look at, but so was every other blonde Gray had ever chosen. It was her utter disregard for convention – a recklessness in her conversation that I could imagine spilled over into her everyday life – which had captivated me.
I had thought her unconventional, but sleeping with Gray had been a conventional choice.
So I’d put the spark of interest I felt into a box and tucked it into a dark corner of the mental closet in which I compartmentalized my life. Except that when I saw her round the corner from the alley that connected to the back of her building, that box tipped over and her strange light came spilling out.
I was out of my car and across the street to intercept her before I’d made up my mind to move.
I dimly registered her outfit – a white T-shirt under a motorcycle jacket, jeans with a rip at one knee that looked like it was from wear, not fashion, and low engineer boots. On another woman it might have been fashionably rebellious, but these looked like her everyday clothes. This was who she really was.
“Colette?” I said as I neared her. She was lost in thought and didn’t seem to hear me. “Miss Collins?” I tried again.
She looked up suddenly and stopped dead in her tracks. Her expression did something I’ve never seen a human face do – every emotion on the spectrum from fear to pleasure bloomed on her face at once, and the moment was somehow the longest single second I’d ever experienced.
“Hello,” she said a little breathlessly.
“Hello.” My answering smile was reflexive, and I could feel an odd giddiness bubble up at the delight on her face. But then her eyebrows wrinkled in a frown.
“Why are you here?”
“Why are you?” I said quickly.
“My—” She cocked her head sideways and studied me. “You’re here for me.”
“Why do you say that?” My parents were journalists, and our dinner table conversation had been an education in information gathering techniques.
“Because you know my last name, and you know this address.” She started walking again, and I realized she was heading toward the L train.
“I have questions about last night,” I said, as I fell into step beside her. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”
She stopped and stared at me. “You have a horse?”
“What?” I stared back, a little incredulous. “No.”
“You don’t?” Her expression fell. “I love horses. Bicycles are harder with two people, and I don’t think you meant for me to ride you like a cowgirl.” She almost seemed to be talking to herself, and my sudden burst of shocked laughter seemed to snap her back to our conversation.
“My car is parked just there.” I pointed at the Land Cruiser across the street.
“Then you should have said drive. You don’t ride a car. You ride a horse, or a bicycle, or a bull. Well, I don’t ride bulls, they’re too big and mad, and rodeo clowns scare me almost as much as sewer clowns do.”
I didn’t even try to hide the grin on my face. My interrogation skills may have been excellent, but her answer-avoidance ones were off the charts. I surrendered. “Sewer clowns are definitely worse.”
She nodded, as though this required agreement. “What kind of questions do you want to ask? I mean,” she continued before I could answer, “are they specific questions that you’ve already thought of, or are they more general, like about the weather in Dawson City, or the price of gold, or what exactly are woodchucks? Are they marmots, or ground squirrels, or groundhogs? And why would they call a groundhog a groundhog when he’s no relation at all to a pig?”
“Are you done?” I finally asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Probably not. How much more distracting can I be?”
I pointedly avoided looking at her curves. “I won’t be distracted,” I lied, since I’d been nothing but distracted by her since I’d called her name.
She sighed, as though every conversational twist and turn had been a deliberate attempt to confuse me. “Of course not. Well, then, where are we going?” she asked, as though our meeting had a quality of unwelcome inevitability.
“I assume you’re on your way to work?” I said, as we crossed the street toward my truck.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then finally spoke. “No one’s clamoring for me to find them today.”
Most people had their designers on speed dial, or at least the people I knew who had designers. Though to look at Colette Collins in her jeans and boots, with a messenger bag slung over her chest and some sort of harness on her shoulders, she didn’t appear to be about to visit design clients.
I opened the passenger door of my Land Cruiser, and she unslung her bag, and hauled herself in. “Nice truck,” she said, with an impressed nod at the exterior.
I was not susceptible to women in the way they often wished I were. Perhaps it was because the women I encountered in Chicago were so aware of how I spoke and how I looked that it felt as though I’d been assessed for my non-existent fortune in Middle Eastern oil reserves before a proper conversation was ever had.
Some might say I read too much into others’ reactions to me. Maybe. Maybe not. I had learned, however, to build three extra hours into every airplane travel day so the inevitable questions by TSA didn’t cause me to miss my flight, and I carried my passport with me as my daily identification in the event either my direct manner of speaking, my 1990s truck or my brown skin warranted a closer look.
Somehow, the fact that this woman was even less inclined to pretension and social graces than I, was far stranger than anyone I’d ever met, and admired the Land Cruiser rather than sneered at its obvious age made my mouth open of its own accord, and then words fell out that had no business being said.
“Do you want to see my boat?”