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!’
Chapter 14
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
