“Okay then. We’ll meet tomorrow at eleven at Starbucks and give it a whirl.”
T
WO
days later I was seated in Mr. Pillory’s client chair with a gold-rimmed cup of coffee on a tray before me, feeling distinctly aware of the fact that I was the one drinking the coffee and not serving it. Frank Yamada gave me an encouraging smile as he left, closing the door.
Pillory peered at me with his steady, gray gaze. His hair spilled in midnight streams down his shoulders, making his chiseled face seem even paler. “I hope you didn’t come with hopes of getting your job back, Mr. Gaudens,” he said, his fine-boned hands steepled before him.
I sipped some of the good coffee, set the cup down, and smiled. “No. I know you don’t go back on your decisions, Mr. Pillory. However, there are two other issues I’d like to bring up.”
His eyebrows rose, beckoning me to continue.
“First, I decided to go freelance. Now I realize you’ve taught me all I know in this field, and I wouldn’t dream of poaching your clients, so I have a proposal. Those smaller companies with a small advertising budget that can’t afford you—if you’d refer them to me, I’d greatly appreciate it. In turn, when I run into a client too big for me to handle, I’ll refer him or her to you.”
At that point I shut up and rested my hands in my lap. Silence was golden, and I knew he wouldn’t take me seriously if I weren’t at my professional best. I was selling something, and you can’t sell if you talk all the time. You have to give them space to think.
One minute doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re sitting in somebody’s office, it drags on for eternity. A typical American salesman can’t shut up for more than six seconds on average; I was doing pretty well so far.
Eventually I saw him stir.
“Do you have anything worked out, or is this just an idea right now?”
I reached for a small, faux-leather portfolio and pulled out one of those paper folders with pockets. It had my business card in it and a flyer describing the services of WG Guerilla Marketing. I let him look it over. “I also brought my business plan,” I said.
He extended his hand, his eyes still on the graphic layout of my promotional materials.
I handed the bound, fifty-page business plan across the table, mentioning in an off-hand manner, “My best friend, Reyna Guajillo, helped me pull this together. I would have just been in the planning stages without her.” I saw his eyebrows twitch.
“Reyna Guajillo is your friend?”
“Since our first year in college,” I said.
“Why did she apply for a position with me?” Pillory asked, lifting his eyes from my business plan for the first time.
“She got fired by her boss for no reason of her own. Her boss is a real jackass—he yells and throws things… he’s a difficult man. Reyna got her best work done when he was on vacation. So anyway, she’s determined not to work for someone like that again, and I recommended you.”
The compliment might have been veiled, but it was still there, and Pillory’s face assumed a peaceful, almost-smiling expression. “Your friend doesn’t make the best first impression.”
“Yeah. Our first contact in college was a bar fight.” Oops, that just slipped out. “She’s not like that, you understand—it’s just that there’s more to her than meets the eye.” I saw him nod, leaf through the rest of the thick document, then nod again.
“If this is a sample of Ms. Guajillo’s work, maybe I should talk to her again.”
O
N
F
RIDAY
, I dressed like a landscaper in a loose shirt that concealed my fairly fit figure. I wore a short brown wig and a baseball cap, and with my own hair tucked underneath, it was bloody hot, but there was nothing I could do about the weather. Janet Barnaby thought it suitable to announce to her Facebook friends that she fired their gardening service. My friend Lenny loaned me his truck with his lawn mower and tools, and I went to the Barnabys’ residence. Posing as the new victim of her perfectionism wasn’t too hard.
I lowered the lift gate of the red pickup truck, attached the steel-grating bridge, and eased the lawn mower down to the street. I mowed the Barnabys’ already trim lawn and used the blower to get clippings off the paved walkways, which got me all the way to the doors and windows. The wiring I saw indicated they a security system, but probably only on the first floor. The second floor seemed to be accessible from the pergola over the backyard patio. When people departed for an extended time, they usually left a window cracked open somewhere so the house could breathe. If I could find that window, I could be in and out pretty fast.
R
EYNA
and I met on Saturday again.
“You’ll never guess,” she said, a wide smile on her strong, pretty face. “Mr. Pillory called me back yesterday. I was trying to call you, but you weren’t picking up.”
“My phone was off for a while,” I said, thinking she must have called while I was casing the Barnaby residence.
“So anyway, he wants me to work there for a month—a probationary period, he called it. If he likes my work, I can stay.”
I grinned. “Did he mention anything specific?”
“Well… he said lots of his clients don’t think strategically, and it would help to have their plans down in writing. It’s not in my wheel-house, but I could do it, I guess.”
“He liked the business plan you did for me.”
Her eyes popped wide and her lipsticked mouth gaped. “You went to see him?”
“Yep. He and I will refer clients to one another. He didn’t say so, but I think he felt kind of bad about kicking me out. I showed him my materials and mentioned that you helped me with all that. I guess he changed his mind.”
“You think?”
“Hard to believe. I didn’t think he was capable of rethinking anything once his mind was set.”
Reyna got a dreamy look in her eyes as she adjusted her hair, which was tied up in one of her bizarre retro beehives. “In that case, I’ll work my butt off. He really seems like such a nice guy….”
I rolled my eyes and gave her an ironic smirk. “Just a reminder, Reyna… I got fired on account of an office romance.”
S
UNDAY
evening was a good time to break into a suburban house; the heat was still oppressive, and the Barnaby neighborhood was humming with straining air-conditioning units. The neighbors were inside, eating dinner and getting ready to watch their favorite TV shows before they had to get ready for the upcoming workweek.
Dusk fell as I parked my bicycle in a copse of trees two blocks away. I wore simple, long black biking tights and a loose, black cotton button-down shirt over my neon-green cycling tee. My concealed waist pouch contained all I needed.
The neighborhood was deserted as I ghosted through the backyard shrubbery. The minutes I spent to reach the Barnaby backyard seemed endless. I jumped up, grabbing one of the beams of the pergola, and walked my feet up the wooden pillar. I hooked my knee around the top beam and hoisted my body up, crouched, and looked around. The neighbors were still inside. There was no traffic in the street. I balanced on a beam and walked to the second-story windows and inspected them. Sure enough, there was no sign of an alarm system—and none of them were unlocked. I sighed. I hated to leave a calling card, but there was no help for it. With gloves on, I pulled an egg of silly putty out of my pouch and I stuck it to the bathroom window. Using a diamond-tip scribing pen, I drew a careful circle around the putty, then pressed in. The windows were double-pane; the first circle fell between the two sheets of glass, leaving me with a blob of silly putty in my hands. I repeated the process on the second pane, producing a tidy opening just big enough for my slender hand. I reached in and up, unlocked the window, and made my way into the house.
The air on the inside felt stuffy. The homeowners must have turned their air conditioning off while they were gone. The bathroom window, just like the rest of the upstairs, didn’t show any wiring and I figured it wasn’t hooked up to their security system. I drew the blinds and closed the curtains before I clicked the lights on.
The house was amazingly cluttered. It must have been decorated professionally some years ago, but strata of various objects were deposited onto the formerly elegant surfaces over time. Only a few of these objects were of value, but I was fine with that. My job was to find Janet Barnaby’s secret hiding place. Almost everyone had a special place where they put their valuables while they were away. I wasn’t disappointed. The master bedroom was upstairs. Its closets were full to bursting with predominantly women’s clothing. Child-sized access panels connected the bedroom to a number of little crawlspaces. It took me two minutes before I pried the stuck doors open. I found two pieces of luggage the Barnabys chose not to bring along behind the first door. The second door opened onto a cache of round hatboxes. Some of them still had price tags on—she got them on sale at Marshall’s, mostly. I looked through their contents with care, trying not to disturb the carefully arranged surface of old gloves and scarves. There were no hats; she apparently used the pretty boxes as storage for her Hermès scarf collection. Each scarf could fetch around three hundred bucks on eBay—but I didn’t feel like dealing with the process of selling them and leaving a trail. I was after smaller, denser stuff.
Sure enough, four rectangular shoeboxes on the right side of the crawlspace contained anything but shoes. Just the fact that Janet Barnaby chose to store these particular pieces of jewelry piled in shoeboxes was telling of the fact that she rarely, if ever, wore them. I selected quickly, avoiding unique, easily recognized pieces. Soon, my quart-size Ziploc bag was full of chains and earrings and bangles. Not one of them had stones; her good gemstones would reside in her real jewelry box, which was probably in a safe under the bed. I didn’t feel any desire to crack a safe that evening. Satisfied with a pound of gold, I arranged her boxes back the way they were, replaced the crawl space cover, dusted my gloved hands off, and made my exit the way I came.
The next morning, my fence looked at the jewelry I brought in and smirked. “Looks like a good haul for one night,” he said.
“Well? How much?”
“Seven thousand,” he drawled, pushing his stringy brown hair behind his ear in a nervous gesture.
“C’mon, Slavko. We both know gold’s at over fifteen hundred per ounce. This is all good stuff.”
“Maybe so, but I have to make my profit, too. You can’t take it to a scrap dealer, not unless you want to give them your ID.”
We haggled for a bit, and he upped his offer to eight grand, which I accepted with a grudging air but a grateful heart. I deposited half the cash in my bank account and put the other half in my emergency cubbyhole. I figured I’d use some of the cash for building my website. I used a lot of the money to place advertisements in a local business newspaper, and I spent only a bit less on targeted mailings to three hundred local, smaller companies. With a three percent response rate, I was hoping for nine or ten solid leads, which would typically result in two to four paying jobs.
R
EYNA
couldn’t meet me for drinks on Saturday, as she managed to screw up some key paperwork for Mr. Pillory. She offered to stay until it was done right, and apparently she really applied herself to the task with great dedication, because she left me sipping my beer by my lonesome self. It frankly sucked. I was almost ready to go home when my phone roared in my pocket.
“Hey, Wyatt! I got it done, but I’m totally bushed. He uses a different filing system from what I’m used to.”
“You could have called for help,” I said, irritated at losing my drinking buddy to my former boss.
“No way. I gotta learn how to do it right. He won’t accept anything less.” There was an odd note of dedication in my best friend’s voice.
“So you like working for him?” I asked, nostalgic for the good old days of a steady paycheck.
“Oh man. The difference is unimaginable. He’s so quiet. He hasn’t yelled once. He’ll just explain, and if I start to space out, he’ll just say ‘Ms. Guajillo’! You know? And he came in today and brought me pizza, since I was staying on a weekend.”
I frowned. Pillory had never brought me lunch, and I stayed weekends every time I screwed something up, too.
The next Monday, Pillory called to let me know he saw my ad in the paper and that it looked pretty good. “Nice website, Mr. Gaudens,” he said in his customary, formal tone. “By the way, I felt very bad about detaining your friend this weekend. As her boyfriend, you must have been very disappointed.”
“Reyna doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I answered, the words spilling out automatically.
“Oh? A girlfriend, then?”
Shit. This was Reyna we were talking about. I really didn’t want to screw up her new job for her. There must have been a neutral way to say she broke up with Tim three months ago. I paused. “Reyna is unattached, as far as I know.”
“Ah.” Somehow, Pillory must have heard what he wanted to hear, because his next words were infused with an unusual level of warmth. “I may have a client for you—new flower shop in Lawrenceville. The owners call it ‘The Stamens,’ which means absolutely nothing to your average customer.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me e-mail you their information. You may use my name.”
O
N
W
EDNESDAY
, my landline rang. Not many people called my landline, and I had it only so I could hook up the fax machine. Expecting a telemarketer, I picked up. “WG Guerilla Marketing, may I help you?”
I heard somebody breathe on the other side, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Is Gaudens there?”
My arms broke out in goose bumps; the voice was unmistakable. “Speaking.”
“I still have that marketing proposal you prepared over two weeks ago. Do you still do that kind of work?”
Silence froze the line for an indeterminate amount of time. “Is… is that you, Mr. Azurri?”