Cold Rain (16 page)

‘I told this guy on the phone the Mustang convertible is sixty-four hundred, and it’s seventy-four.’

‘Tell him you made a mistake.’

‘I did. He doesn’t believe me.’

Tubs held onto his smile, but it turned icy. He leaned back in his chair. Placidly, he folded his hands over his big belly. ‘Is he still here?’ I nodded. ‘What does he want to give?’

‘Five thousand.’

‘Have you got him sitting down?’

‘We’ve been at it for an hour. He won’t budge. He’s sure I’m lying.’

Tubs blinked. ‘Let me see what you have.’

I opened my hands. ‘Verbal offers. Milt told me to T.O. to you.’ A T.O. was a Turn Over, the act of bringing in another salesperson and thus splitting a commission. A good salesperson usually understood when it was time. Most people loved it when they got to make a T.O. to Tubs Albo. If they had a buyer and hadn’t gotten themselves stuck on a number, Tubs could get a signature and make a salesperson more money with half a commission than a full commission working solo.

‘Can Milt go sixty-four?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know about the car until this guy called.’

‘You mention a number yet?’

‘Just the seventy-four hundred. I’ve been trying to get him off five.’

Milt came into Tubs’s private office. He was a tall, roughed up looking man, maybe thirty-two or thirty-three years old. Milt was born ready for a fight, but he had a talent for giving back what he got, and he always treated Tubs with velvet gloves. Ask any manager in the world, when a guy sells twenty to twenty-five cars a month, he can do anything he wants. He’s the king, and Tubs was all of that. ‘Tubs, I got the invoice on that son-of-a-bitch-Mustang we bought last night.’ Milt’s voice was rotten with cigarettes. He shook a slip of paper at the two of us.

‘This cowboy doesn’t believe David screwed up on the price, and he’s not budging. Where did you get that price, David?’

‘Larry told me,’ I said.

‘Larry! And you believed that lopsided set of duck nuts?’

‘I hadn’t seen it,’ I said. ‘I had the guy on the phone, and I had to trust Larry.’

‘Next time trust that he’s lying!’ Milt turned his attention to Tubs, his voice going soft again: ‘We’re going to lose this guy if we’re not careful, Tubs. I can’t afford to go sixty-four, and five is, well, he’s just pushing David around to see what we can do.’ The way Milt said he couldn’t afford to go sixty-four suggested to me that if pushed that was a good number. Tubs could automatically add five hundred dollars to such a figure for an excellent commission, even after splitting it. I knew, too, that if I could figure this out, Tubs understood it completely. The numbers were locked in. We had to move the guy, and anything around sixty-four was good, above that, golden.

‘Does the guy want the car?’ Tubs asked. Tubs always liked to know that before he’d go make a pitch. Amazingly, not many salespeople bothered asking that question. But Milt knew people. Milt had gasoline in his blood. He smiled with big yellow horse teeth. ‘Tubs, the guy is creaming his jeans, but he’s getting mad. Now, look, I want you to take this invoice to him and show him just what I paid for it last night.’

‘I don’t need an invoice.’

Milt got just a little excited, considering he was speaking to the Zen Master of the Wastelands: ‘He’s a hard-headed cowboy, Tubs. He wants the car. He just doesn’t want us to screw him.’

Tubs rose, a man called to his sacred duty. ‘I’ll screw the son of a bitch, and he’ll like it. Introduce me, Davey.’

Tubs shook hands and sat down where I had been sitting. The two of them were laughing almost immediately. I’d worn the man down with my young man’s grim determination, and Mr Dietrich was glad just to have a man his age to talk to. ‘Now Mr Dietrich, Dan, can I ask you a question?’ Still pleasant, but Tubs’s smile had screwed down a little tighter, and Dietrich could see we were about ready to give him the car.

He nodded. I could smell eager coming off the man.

‘Do you want the car?’

Mr Dietrich waited almost sixty seconds to see if Tubs would trample over his own question, but Tubs just held his gaze and waited for the answer. Finally, Dietrich reared back in his chair and blew hot air. Last inning, he couldn’t play too coy, but he wasn’t going to throw away everything he’d won, either. ‘Maybe.

But I don’t want it for sixty-four! I told your son, I’ll go five!’

‘He told you the price was seventy-four.’

‘On the phone, it was sixty-four! I get down here, and you all raise it on me.’

Tubs’s smile was gone. ‘The moment you got here, David straightened you out. He told you he’d made a mistake, didn’t he?’

‘That’s what he said.’ Mr Dietrich was good-natured about lying salespeople. He was an old man. He had scalped plenty of liars.

‘He said it because it’s true,’ Tubs had gone just a little red in the face, the way a preacher will when he gets to his favourite verse.

‘Even if it was true—’

‘Whoa, now, wait just a minute, please.’ Tubs held one hand out to command a full stop. His other hand still held a Cross ink pen over a blank contract.

Sometimes it was his lucky pen that no one ever touched except to sign a deal. Today, it was just one of two choices: sign or swing, friend, one or the other. ‘I’m going to tell you something, and I’m going to tell it to you once. My boy’s an Albo, and Albos don’t lie, not out here, they don’t! David here will shoot straight even if it costs him. I taught him that. If anyone catches him lying, I’ll buy the deal and give the car to the person he’s lied to! Then he’ll pay me back every penny if it takes him the rest of his life!’

‘I’m sure—’

Tubs broke over Dietrich’s condescension without waiting for him to set it in stone. ‘The price on my car is seventy-four hundred dollars, and I don’t care if you put a gun in my face, it’s not going for a penny less.’

‘That’s just bullshit.’

‘You think?’ Tubs nearly came over the desk. The two men stared at one another like they were about to fight, then in total dismissal of the man, Tubs walked away. ‘Come on, Davey.’

As I followed, I heard Mr Dietrich crow, ‘You’ll have that car marked down to sixty-nine by tomorrow!’

Tubs didn’t react. I had thought he would. It had taken us some effort, but Dietrich had finally accepted that seventy-four was our list price. The fact that he had mentioned sixty-nine meant he was ready to close. All we needed to do was settle on something in the mid-six-thousand range and Dietrich had a car. And more importantly, Tubs and I had a commission.

Tubs was having none of it though. He put his back to that man and didn’t slow down. In his private office, he sat down at his desk again and resumed looking at his list. I stood next to him quietly. Milt came into Tubs’s office a minute or so later. ‘What happened?’

‘A Gun in my Face Close.’

Milt reeled back the way a kid will when someone farts. ‘Not the Gun in my Face Close, Tubs!’ Tubs lifted his eyebrows, a definite yes in his vocabulary. Milt groaned. He knew a buyer when he saw one. ‘What was your number?’

‘Seventy-four.’

‘Full pop? Not full pop, Tubs!’ Milt was screaming now, albeit in whisper mode. No sense letting the customer know the troops were divided. Tubs’s eyebrows flickered. Full pop and not a penny less. Milt kicked a file cabinet. ‘Nobody pays full price at a car lot, Tubs!’

Tubs was calm. He had gotten full pop before and he would again, but he understood Milt’s position.

Milt wanted a sale, not a long shot. ‘My man will, or he won’t get his Mustang.’

Milt invented sexual positions for the saints of three different religions. He seethed. He sighed. He prayed for someone to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Then he looked at me. ‘How high will he go, David? Best guess.’

I looked at Tubs. Tubs nodded. ‘He said something about sixty-nine. He’ll go sixty-nine, I think, or real close to it.’ I was stretching it, vainly hoping I could move my father down five hundred dollars. I wanted the sale as much as Milt.

Milt spread his hands happily. ‘Sixty-nine is good, Tubs. I can live with it. He can live with it. Can you live with sixty-nine, Tubs?’ Tubs shook his head. He was sitting tight on seventy-four. ‘Everybody likes sixty-nine, Tubs!’

‘He called Davey a liar, Milt. I won’t have that.’

‘How about I send Davey back. It’s out of your hands. You have nothing to say about it, right?’ Milt looked at me. ‘Go back and tell Mr what‘s-his-name he bought a car if he’ll go sixty-nine.’

‘Davey.’

I knew the tone, and I froze.

Milt rushed to my defence with a touch of desper-ation. ‘It’s not you, Tubs. He called Davey a liar. Not you.’

‘You can send Davey out if you want, Milt. You’re the manager. You can do anything you want. You do it, though, and I’ll be selling Buicks before the sun goes down.’

Milt kicked the empty air. ‘This close never works, Tubs! Let me go in and buy the deal for sixty-nine.

I’ll pay a commission for seventy-four. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t care if I sell that car or not. I put my word on it, and that’s that.’

Milt cussed blue smoke in a murderous rage, but he left the office. There was no dealing with Tubs when he got to the issue of his sacred word. I heard Milt on the loudspeaker a few minutes later. He started calling out the specials of the day. He read an interminable list, and then he came to the Mustang. His voice rasped in an awful car salesman’s seduction, cylinders, litres, and miles per gallon, ‘...seventy-four hundred dollars. A steal at that price, folks.’ He named a couple more cars and shut up. He paced on the makeshift tower and smoked. He smoked two cigarettes at once.

Mr Dietrich sat for thirty minutes at my desk, absolutely alone. Nobody approached him. Nobody got within fifty feet of that desk. Finally, Mr Dietrich came to Tubs’s office. He leaned through the doorway, actually. He wasn’t coming all the way in. It was a gesture that announced clearly he was about to make a last offer. ‘I’ll go sixty-nine, against my better judgement.’

Tubs didn’t even contemplate it. ‘Mr Dietrich,’ he said, ‘You need a gun in my face and another five hundred dollars.’

Dietrich was a horse trader from way back, but he laughed. He laughed hard. It was over. He didn’t have a gun, he said, but he thought he could find another five hundred dollars for a car that nice. ‘Assuming, that is, you all pick up my sales tax.’ Tubs smiled and said he could do that, he surely could.

Later, Mr Dietrich told me, ‘You got a ways to go, David, before you’re as good as your old man.’ He thought about it fondly for a minute. ‘Gun in my face and another five hundred dollars!’ Mr Dietrich shook his head and laughed again. ‘I never heard that one before!’

I WROTE THREE DIFFERENT confessions for Gail to pass on to the committee. I tore each up in turn.

Finally, I found the defence I could live with and scribbled it out: ‘I am innocent of all wrongdoing.’

The next day I took it into Gail Etheridge’s office.

‘You want to type this out or just hand it over like this?’

Gail’s face showed no reaction. She simply stared at me. ‘I take it we are prepared for the consequences?’

‘I have a verbal statement as well.’

‘Great! Let’s see it.’

‘It’s a verbal statement, Gail. I don’t have anything written down.’

Gail looked at my one sentence defence sceptically.

‘Can you give me a rough idea of what you intend to say?’

I played the English professor. ‘I can,’ I said, ‘but I think I’ll wait until the defence and let you hear it then.’

‘I don’t like this, David.’

‘I like it, and that’s what counts.’

She urged me toward ‘a more comprehensive statement’ but I told her it didn’t get any more comprehensive than innocent of all wrongdoing.

We met the VP’s committee a couple of days later.

Gail made one last pitch as we went in. She thought it might be best if I didn’t say anything at all. She would speak to the issue of a complete lack of proof, the lawyer’s preferred method of pleading innocent.

By then I had steeled my resolve and shook my head like Tubs. ‘It’s my execution,’ I said. ‘I want to tell them I didn’t do this.’

The meeting did not feel like a trial. In fact, the vice president for academic affairs, Lou Morgan, assured me repeatedly, while not quite looking at me, that I was not on trial, nor were we in a court of law. The committee had examined the evidence, he said, and they had gathered here today to discuss it. I was free to call witnesses on my behalf, but this was not a forum for cross-examination. Furthermore, he said, the administration rejected our request to interview the two women who had originally filed the complaints against me. Their statements had been investigated and verified. There was no point in involving them in what was essentially now a disciplinary action.

As things developed the meeting involved a good deal of back and forth between the vice president and various members of the committee. One prof, who I remember had consumed a great deal of caviar at my party, wondered if it was appropriate that Leslie Blackwell was on the committee. She had collected the evidence. Shouldn’t it be for others to judge it? The vice president made it clear that Dr Blackwell was sitting on the committee as a non-voting member. Gail Etheridge asked for clarification. Was Dr Blackwell to provide guidance? Certainly. Guidance and clarification of law? Of course. Clarification of the evidence as well? That seemed only logical. Gail wrote this down for a future complaint, muttering to me as she did, ‘Imagine a trial in which the prosecutor sat with the jury during deliberations.’ I nodded thoughtfully.

We had already discussed due process. Any break in procedure causing fundamental unfairness in the process would be open season when and if we brought suit against the university.

Curiously, there were no witnesses for the university. This meant the evidence Dr Blackwell presented was the complete case. None of it could be contra-dicted by oral statements made directly to the committee, nor refuted by cross-examination.

Blackwell’s notes about her interview with me had me confessing to calling the breasts of Johnna Masterson bodacious ta-tas. When Gail Etheridge complained that I had said no such thing the vice president informed Gail that Dr Blackwell was not on trial. Gail swallowed her exasperation and tried to explain that the evidence itself was incorrect. Her client, she said, admitted to using the term without explaining the context of that usage. Dr Blackwell had either wilfully or unconsciously manipulated an honest response into an admission. A committee member asked in what context bodacious ta-tas would be acceptable.