Fire Sale (12 page)

“What’d you and Annie Lisa feed your kids, William?” Uncle Gary asked. “Candace is a junkie and Billy is an overwrought baby.”

“Yeah, well, at least Annie Lisa raised a family. She doesn’t spend her life in front of a mirror trying on five-thousand-dollar outfits.”

“Save it for the competition, boys,” Buffalo Bill grunted. “Billy’s an idealist. Just got to channel that energy in the right direction. But don’t go threatening him like that over his trust fund, William. While I’m still on the planet, I’ll see the boy gets his share of his inheritance. When I’m in front of the Judgment Seat, God will surely want to know about how I treated my own grandson, hnnh, hnnh, hnnh.”

“Yes, whatever I say or do I can be sure you’ll undercut it,” William said coldly. He turned to me. “And you, whoever you are, I think you’ve hung around our offices long enough.”

“If she’s one of the people influencing Billy down there, I think we’d better find out who she is and what she’s telling him,” Mr. Roger said.

“Mildred? We got time for this?”

His assistant looked at the laptop and tapped a couple of keys. “You really don’t have time, Mr. B., especially if you have to take phone calls from the board.”

“Ten minutes, then, we can take ten minutes. William can call back the board, doesn’t take any great genius to tell them they’re letting the rumor mills grind ’em down.”

Pink stained William’s cheeks. “If it’s that trivial a problem, let Mildred handle it. I have a full day scheduled without Billy’s setting the house on fire.”

“Oh, don’t take these things so personally, William. You’re too thin-skinned, always have been. Now, what’s your name again, young woman?”

I repeated my name and handed cards around the room.

“Investigator? Investigator? How in hell did Billy get involved with a detective? You and Annie Lisa ever talk to the boy?” Roger demanded.

William ignored him, and said to me, “What are you doing with my son? And don’t try shuffling around with lies about girls’ basketball.”

“I have only the truth to tell about girls’ basketball,” I said. “I met your son for the first time last Thursday, when I went to the warehouse to talk to Pat Grobian about getting By-Smart to back the team. Billy was enthusiastic, as you know, and sent me up here.”

Buffalo Bill stared at me under his heavy brows, then turned to the man he’d called Linus. “Get someone on this, see who she is and what she’s doing there. And while you’re calling around, we’ll all just go into the conference room and talk this over. Mildred, put through those calls to Birmingham for me, I’ll take ’em in there.”

12

Company Practice

I
n the conference room, the party was essentially configured the way it had been for prayers, with Bysen at the head of the table and Mildred on his right. The sons and Linus Rankin sat along the sides. Mildred’s assistant, the nervous woman in the corner of the front room, came in with a stack of phone messages, which Mildred distributed to the men.

I handed Mildred the report I’d created for my meeting at the warehouse; when I told her I’d only brought two copies, she sent her assistant scurrying to photocopy it. The assistant came back in short order, somehow juggling a stack of copies and a tray holding coffee, soda cans, and water.

While we’d been waiting, the men had all whipped out cell phones. Linus was asking someone to find out about me, and William was working his way through his share of the messages, calling board members to reassure them that By-Smart was not budging on unions. Roger was dealing with a vendor who didn’t think he could meet By-Smart’s price demands. Gary held an animated conversation about a problem with a store where the overnight crew had been locked in: someone had had an epileptic seizure, as nearly as I could gather from my frank eavesdropping, and bitten off her tongue because no one could get the door open to admit the EMTs.

“Locked in?” I blurted out, when he hung up, forgetting I was trying to be supersaccharine to all these Bysen men.

“None of your business, young woman,” Buffalo Bill snapped. “But when a store is in a dangerous neighborhood, I won’t risk our employees’ lives by leaving them exposed to every drug addict walking the streets. Gary, get onto the local manager: he has to have a backup available to let people out in case of emergencies. Linus, we got a legal exposure here?”

I bit my own tongue to keep from saying anything else, while Rankin made a note. He was apparently the corporate counsel.

Roger flung his own cell phone down in disgust and turned to William. “Now, thanks to your idiot son, we have three vendors who think they can back out of their contracts because our labor costs are going to be going up, if you please, and they know we’ll understand that unless they shut down and move to Burma or Nicaragua, they can’t meet our price standards.”

“Nonsense,” the old man interjected. “Nothing to do with Billy, just the usual whiny weaseling. It’s a game with some people, to see whether we have the guts God gave a goose. You boys are all too thin-skinned. I don’t know what will happen to this company when I can’t be here in the kitchen every day, taking the heat.”

Mildred murmured something in Bysen’s ear; he gave his “hnnh, hnnh” snort and looked at me. “Okay, young woman, come to the point, come to the point.”

I folded my hands on the table and looked him in the eye, or as much of the eye as I could see below his overhanging brows. “As I said, Mr. Bysen, I grew up in South Chicago and attended Bertha Palmer High. From there, I went to the University of Chicago, having played in high school on a championship team; that earned me the athletic scholarship that made my university education possible. When you were at Bertha Palmer, and some years later when I was a student, the school provided programs in—”

“We all know the sad story of the neighborhood’s decline,” William snapped. “And we all know you’ve come here expecting us to give a handout to people who won’t work for a living.”

I felt blood rushing to my cheeks and forgot my need to stay on my best behavior. “I don’t know if you really believe that, or if you keep saying it so you don’t have to think about the reality of what it’s like to support a family on seven dollars an hour. It might do for everyone at this table to try to do that for a month before being so quick to jump to judgment on South Chicago.

“A lot of the girls on my team live in families where mothers are working sixty hours a week without overtime pay on just that wage. They may be in your warehouse, or your store on Ninety-fifth, Mr. Bysen, or at the McDonald’s, but, I assure you, they are working hard, harder than me, harder than you. They aren’t on street corners looking for a handout.”

William tried to interrupt me, but I glared at him at least as fiercely as his father ever did. “Let me finish, and then I’ll listen to your objections. These women want their kids to have a decent shot at a better life. A good education is the best chance these young women will have for that kind of shot, and athletics are a key factor in keeping them in school, maybe even giving some of them a chance at college. For you to fund a program that would give my sixteen teenagers access to proper equipment, proper coaching, and a facility where they didn’t risk a broken leg every time they tried a fast break, would be a great act of charity. Its cost would be down in the noise even for your South Chicago store; for the company as a whole, you’d never notice it, but the PR opportunity would be enormous.

“I just heard Mr. Roger Bysen—persuade—some manufacturer or other to supply you with something at six cents a piece less than they wanted to. Mr. Gary Bysen is annoyed that an employee bit her tongue off because she was locked in overnight. When these things are reported, they make you seem like the Scrooge of North America, but if you rolled out an important program in Mr. Bysen’s own neighborhood, his own high school, you could look like heroes.”

“You’ve got ten kinds of nerve, I’ll hand you that,” William said in his weedy baritone.

Bysen’s thick eyebrows met across his nose, so deeply was he frowning. “And you think fifty-five thousand dollars is ‘down in the noise,’ hnnh, young woman? Your own business must be very successful indeed if that sum seems trivial to you.”

I scribbled some calculations on the paper in front of me. “Your guy Linus will get my numbers for you, I’m sure, so I won’t detail them for you, but if there were a way to cut a dollar into forty thousand pieces, one of those forty thousand pieces would be the equivalent in my operation to fifty-five thousand dollars in yours. I think that’s trivial. And that doesn’t even include the tax benefits. Nor the intangibles, the PR benefits.”

Gary and William both tried to speak at once; Linus Rankin’s cell phone rang at the same time, and Bysen himself was starting to roar when Marcena pushed open the conference room door and danced in.

She gave me a quick wink, meant to be too subtle for the men to notice, and turned to Bysen. “I’m with Ms. Warshawski—Marcena Love—your Pete Boyland was talking to me about procurement and I got held up. Is that you next to the Thunderbolt on the wall out there? My father flew Hurricanes out of Wattisham.”

Buffalo Bill broke off midsnort. “Wattisham? I spent eighteen months there. Hurricane was a good ship, good ship, doesn’t get the respect it deserves. What was your father’s name?”

“Julian Love. Seventy Tiger Squadron.”

“Hnnh, hnnh, you and I will have to have a talk, young lady. You work with this basketball gal?”

“No, sir. I’m just visiting from London. I’ve been touring South Chicago, actually with one of your lorry drivers, I mean, truck drivers. Sorry, I can’t get the American lingo quite right.”

Marcena’s accent had become more pronounced the longer she spoke. Bysen was bathing in it, but his sons weren’t as enthusiastic.

“Who is letting you in the cab of one of our trucks?” William demanded. “That is against the law, as well as against corporate policy.”

Marcena held up a hand in a fencer’s stop. “I’m sorry. Are you in charge of the trucks? I didn’t know I was breaking any laws.”

“I still want his name,” William said.

She made a rueful face. “I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? I don’t want to get some bloke in trouble, so let’s just say I won’t do it again. Mr. Bysen, is there any chance I could meet with you before I go back to England? I grew up on my father’s aerial battles; I’d love to hear your version of those years; my father would be thrilled to know I met up with one of his old war buddies.”

Bysen preened and snorted a little and told Mildred to figure out a free time slot some time in the next week, before turning to glower at me. “And you, young woman, with your fancy cutting dollar bills into forty thousand pieces, we’ll get back to you.”

Linus had been talking on his cell phone during Marcena’s performance; he got up now to hand a piece of paper to Bysen. The old man scanned it, and scowled at me even more fiercely.

“I see you’ve destroyed a number of important businesses, young woman, and you’ve meddled in affairs that were none of your business. Do you always butt in where no one wants you, hnnh?”

“Young Billy wants me meddling in girls’ basketball, Mr. Bysen—that’s good enough for me. I know he’ll be eager to hear how our conversation went.”

Bysen stared at me for a long moment, as if weighing Billy’s needs against my meddlesomeness. “We’re through here, young woman. William, Roger, see she gets out the door.”

William told his brother he’d take care of me. When we’d left the conference room, his hand on the small of my back, he said, “My son is basically a good kid.”

“I believe you. I saw him at the warehouse and was impressed with how the men responded to him.”

“The problem is, he’s too trusting; people take advantage of him. Added to that, my father has always been so indulgent with him that he doesn’t have a good sense of how the world really works.”

I couldn’t see where this was going, so I said cautiously, “It’s a common problem with self-made men like your dad: they’re overly strict with their own offspring, but the third generation doesn’t get those same restrictions.”

He looked startled, as if I’d uncovered a subtle truth about his life. “So you noticed how the old man treats him? It’s been the same story since Billy was born: every time I try to set—not even the same limits Dad gave us, just some kind of parental guidance—Dad undercuts me, then blames me for—well, that’s neither here nor there. I am the company’s chief financial officer.”

“And obviously very good at it, to turn in the numbers you do.” We were being so lovey-dovey, I thought I’d try molasses.

“If I had real authority, we could pass Wal-Mart, I know we could, but my company decisions are just like my parental—anyway, I want to know when you’re planning on seeing Billy, and what you’re planning to say to him.”

“I’m going to tell him exactly what got said in our meeting and ask him to interpret it for me: you’re all strangers to me, so I don’t understand what you mean when you say things.”

“That’s just it,” William said. “We all say things, but we work together as a family. My brothers and I, I mean: we grew up fighting, the old man thought it made us tougher, but we run this company as a family. And we present a family front to competitors.”

So I wasn’t supposed to take dissension among the brothers to a bigger public. I had destroyed some important businesses with my meddling; I needed to know that By-Smart would fight me hard if I tried to do anything to them.

“Is Billy living in South Chicago?”

“Of course not. He may be infatuated with that storefront preacher, but he comes home to his mother at the end of the day. Just watch what you say and do with him, Ms.—uh—because we’ll be watching you.”

Our moment of palliness was apparently at an end. “Warshawski. I believe you will—I saw all the spy cams in the warehouse. I’ll be real careful what I say just in case you’ve put one in my car.”

He forced a laugh. So we still were pals after all? I waited for him to come to the point, schooling my face into the bland mask that makes people think you’re a discreet listener—not the woman who destroyed Gustav Humboldt.

“I need to know who this English woman is riding with in South Chicago. It could be bad for us, from a liability standpoint, I mean, if she got injured.”

I shook my head regretfully. “She hasn’t told me who she’s met down there, or how she’s met them. She has a lot of friends, and she makes friends easily, as you saw with your dad just now. I’d think it could be almost anybody, maybe even Patrick Grobian, since she likes to make sure the top man is in her court.”

The mention of Grobian’s name seemed to bother him, or at least put him off balance. He drummed his fingers on the doorjamb, wanting to ask something else, but unsure how to phrase it. Before he figured it out, Mildred’s nervous assistant claimed his attention: one of his directors was returning his call.

He went to Mildred’s desk to answer the phone. I walked over to the picture of Buffalo Bill and the airplane. If I stood on tiptoe and squinted down, I could see the name of a photographer’s studio with an address in Wattisham at the bottom of the matting. Marcena was not only a more skilled interrogator than I, but a cleverer investigator. It was depressing.

William was still on the phone when Buffalo Bill escorted Marcena out of the conference room, his hand on her waist. He frowned when he saw I was still there, but he spoke to Marcena. “You don’t come without those photographs of your father, young woman, you hear?”

“Absolutely not; he’ll be thrilled to know I’ve met you.”

While they did an intricate separation dance, William put a hand over the mouthpiece and beckoned me to his side. “Find out who this gal is riding with, okay, and give me a call.”

“In exchange for funding for my program?” I said brightly.

He stiffened. “In exchange for keeping it under discussion, certainly.”

I looked mournful. “That offer won’t really make me summon my best effort, Mr. William.”

Bysens weren’t used to beggars trying to be choosers. “And that kind of attitude definitely won’t bring forth any effort on my part, young—”

“The name is Warshawski. You can call me that.”

Marcena had finished with Buffalo Bill; I turned my back on young William and headed down the hall with her. Once we were clear of the office, her shoulders sagged and she dropped her perky grin.

“I am
so
fagged!” she said.

“You should be; you’ve done a full day’s work this last hour, what with Pete, and Buffalo Bill. I’m a little beat, myself. Is there really a Julian Love who flew Hurricanes in the war?”

She smiled mischievously. “Not exactly. But my father’s tutor at Cambridge did, and when I was up, I used to have tea with him once or twice a term. I heard all the stories; I think I can fake it.”