Carriage Trade (61 page)

“Which brings us to the store's Accounts Receivable, another item in the assets column: what our customers owe us. With Tarkington's famous liberal credit policy, we really show an
imposing
Accounts Receivable figure on the plus side—over eighteen million dollars! The banks seem to practically lick their lips with glee when they see this non-asset asset of ours! If they could figure out a way for us to collect these Accounts Receivable, it would be more helpful than handing us another loan, it seems to me!

“And now I'd like to introduce you to a mystery woman, Peter: Señora Lopez-Figueroa of Caracas. Every store should have a customer like Carmelita Lopez-Figueroa. She spends hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in the store—forty-two thousand in April, for example, seventy-three thousand in May. She shops in all departments, always by phone, but she seems particularly fond of precious stones, and she's given Smitty's department an enormous amount of business. No wonder Smitty's figures looked so great!

“There really is such a person. I checked Carmelita out. Her husband isn't just the president of the Banco de Venezuela, he owns it. And other Lopez-Figueroa relatives seem to own the rest of the country. I even found a letter from Carmelita's husband, authorizing her to charge as much merchandise at Tarkington's as she wanted. I think I sort of get the picture. Her husband probably has a mistress, maybe several. To keep Carmelita off his back and out of his hair, he gives her absolutely unlimited spending. Her bills are always promptly paid, with international money orders drawn on her husband's bank. Any store would kill to have a customer like Carmelita.

“But here's the thing that worries me about Carmelita. Her purchases are always marked ‘Phone Order/Charge/Send/Signature on File.' But when I went through the shipping orders in these records here, I couldn't find anywhere near enough shipping orders to match these sales slips. I began to wonder how many of these orders were actually shipped to her, how many were actual orders, and, if the merchandise was never shipped, what happened to it.”

He rises from the sofa and walks to the window, his hands thrust deep in his jeans' pockets, and stands there, looking out.

“Did Bonham have any explanation?” he asks her.

“He said that unfortunately a lot of the computer disks that the shipping department kept its records on had been accidentally erased,” she says.

He nods. “The Rose Mary Woods defense,” he says.

“He was vague on other questions that I asked him, too. He kept changing the subject. He'd interrupt to tell me how the strong yen was hurting us. About how the South Koreans and the Vietnamese, with their cheap pelts, along with the animal rights activists, were killing the American fur business. How the downturn in the economy was hurting retailers all over. How interest rates had to come down before we'd see a real turnaround. When I asked him why we had to do so much borrowing—or ‘leveraging,' as he calls it—he launched into a long lecture on how the Gulf War had affected our first-quarter profits.”

“When in doubt, blame the Japanese. Or George Bush.”

“The thing I didn't ask him was this: Peter, do you think that—with so many of the Lopez-Figueroa purchases coming from Smitty's department—Tommy and Smitty were somehow in collusion to cheat my father? If it's true, I'm in a terrible spot. I promised my mother that if she'd vote her shares with mine, I'd hire Smitty back. But if Smitty's a cheat, I can't possibly do that.”

He turns and faces her. “I don't think that's true,” he says. “I think Smitty is basically an honest woman. And I don't think she's really clever enough—or good enough with figures—to get involved in a rip-off scheme like that one. Besides, I think she and Bonham actively disliked each other.”

“I thought so too. But suppose that was just an act, to throw everybody off?”

“No, I tend to believe her. I also think she was genuinely in love with your dad. I don't think she'd knowingly take part in a plan to cook the store's books and skim profits from your dad's store. But I think she was naïve enough to let Tommy Bonham use her department to post false sales.”

Then what was a bottle of her perfume doing in his bathroom medicine cabinet?
she almost asks him, but stops herself, the next question being,
What were you looking for in that medicine cabinet, Miss Miranda?
Instead, she says, “I did get Tommy to concede that the store might need some—financial restructuring, as he put it.”

“Financial restructuring! My God, Miranda, that's what banana republics are always doing. That's what they're doing with the Texas S&L's. Financial restructuring is just a polite term for bankruptcy.”

“Bankruptcy! Don't say that awful word, Peter!”

“Well, things don't look that great, do they?”

She nods and studies the backs of her hands, now ringless. “No,” she admits. “And I haven't even mentioned the employees' retirement pension fund.”

“Tell me about that,” he says.

“As of the first of June, there was about three and a half million dollars in the pension fund account. But then there was another of these little cash-flow problems, as Tommy calls them. Some vendors were demanding to be paid and were refusing to make fall shipments until they were. And so it was decided—and Tommy insists that all these decisions were made jointly, between him and Daddy—that the pension fund should be subsumed—Tommy's word—temporarily into the store's general operating account. No one expected anybody to be retiring soon, least of all Pauline O'Malley, our oldest employee, who everybody assumed would be staying with the store forever, so I suppose it seemed like a practical move at the time. But now Pauline's very upset. Her brother-in-law, who's a C.P.A., wants her to hire a lawyer.”

“And what does our friend Tommy Bonham propose to do about that?” he asks her.

She sighs, discouragedly. “He says we just may have to do some more leveraging,” she says. “But I've saved my biggest shocker for the last. The two ill-fated suburban stores. I found out that the contract to build the Morristown store was given to something called the Peterloon Construction Company of Paramus, New Jersey. I thought: Peterloon—that's a strange name. I decided to find out what I could about them. Well, I didn't find out much, except that Peterloon Construction declared bankruptcy in nineteen eighty-nine. But I did find out that the C.E.O. of Peterloon was a man named Saturnino Salas. I also discovered that the land on which the store was built was leased from an outfit called Wellington Partners. Wellington Partners is still in business, and guess who owns Wellington Partners? Saturnino Salas.”

“Same guy!”

“Apparently. And how many people do you know named Saturnino Salas?”

“Nobody.”

“Saturnino Salas is the name of Tommy Bonham's Filipino houseboy, Nino. Funny coincidence?”

“My God, you mean he's the brains behind—”

“Hardly. The boy can barely speak English, much less work out a deal like this one. The land lease was for ten years. Our company is still paying rent to Wellington Partners—to the tune of a million dollars a year.”

“Dummy corporations.…”

“Exactly. And now we can see why Tommy was so eager to open those suburban outlets.”

“And it didn't matter to him whether they succeeded or not. Either way, he'd collect his money on the lease.”

“That's right,” she says. “And this only involves the New Jersey store. What do you suppose we'll find when we look into what happened in White Plains?”

“Probably the same damned thing!”

“That's what I'm assuming,” she says.

“Damn it, Miranda, you've got enough evidence already to send this guy to jail!”

“I thought of that,” she says. “But is that what we want at this point? The publicity alone could kill us.”

“Okay, so let's talk about assets for a minute. What are the store's tangible assets?”

“Well, we do own the Fifth Avenue building. It's prime business property, on one of the most desirable street corners in Manhattan. Unfortunately, we seem to have taken out another million-and-a-half-dollar mortgage in January.”

“Oh, me, oh my.” He shakes his head.

“Oh, and I almost forgot one other minor mystery, the E.K. bonus. With Tommy's accounts and Daddy's accounts and the store's accounts all mixed up in here, I began to notice deposit tickets—to Tommy's account—with monthly items marked
E.K bonus
, always for five hundred dollars and always in cash. Tommy got really testy when I asked him what that was all about. At first he said it was a private arrangement he had with my father and he couldn't discuss it. When I pressed him, he said that E.K. stood for Extra Kindness. He said that whenever a Tarkington's employee demonstrated a little extra kindness to a customer, he or she was rewarded with an E.K. bonus at the end of the month, always in cash, prorated according to salary. He said it was a little system my father had worked out to improve employee relations and keep the unions from trying to move in on us. I must say I didn't find any evidence of any other employees getting E.K. bonuses, but Tommy seems to have gotten his every month for years—from the summer of 1970, not long after he joined the store, through the end of 1986. I know five hundred dollars a month isn't much, but over more than fifteen years it adds up to quite a bit.
I
never got any E.K. bonus, but then of course I never worked directly with the customers.”

He frowns. “Look,” he says quickly, “why don't you let me go through all these figures and papers you've got here and see if I can find a bottom line to all of this.”

“Oh, that would be a big help, Peter,” she says. “Maybe you can uncover some assets I couldn't find. And while you're doing that, I'll fix us a pot of coffee. No, wait. I've got an even better idea. Why don't I fix some dinner for us? Can you stay for dinner?”

“Hey, I'd love that!”

“Good. I make a mean lasagna.”

“I don't want you cooking for me, Miranda. Why don't we just send out for pizza or Chinese, like the yuppies we are?”

“I'd rather cook,” she says. “My head's so full of figures. I need to do something that will really drain my brain. For me, that's lasagna.” She stands up. “If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen.”

And Peter tackles the big box of records, out of which, he quickly sees, Miranda has already managed to create some sense of order and design.

Cats, when they are in doubt about what to do next, wash themselves. Women like Miranda Tarkington, when they are in doubt, cook. In her kitchen, she lines up her ingredients from her refrigerator and pantry shelves in the order in which they will be needed: Ground beef, olive oil, tomato sauce, pasta sheets, ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan. She is a very orderly cook. As soon as she finishes using a utensil or a pot, she washes it and puts it away. There is never any mess when Miranda cooks. Orderliness makes the act of cooking seem that much more brainless, comforting, relaxing. System is the opposite of despair. A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

It is very land of Peter, she thinks, to offer to make some sense out of a boxful of loose papers, numbers and cryptic notations on file cards of different sizes and colors, and all the rest of it, the sorry detritus of her father's dream. But then Peter seems to her a very kind man, a very nice man. If you were looking for a nicer, kinder man than Peter Turner, that nicer, kinder man would be hard to find. She likes that healthy, curly, dark head of hair of his, and the fine brain beneath it. Yes, you are a fine fellow, suh!

She shapes the meat into balls the size of marbles, ready to brown them in the heated olive oil. Her pasta water has come to a boil.

Ten minutes later her baking dish is ready, its bottom covered lightly with tomato sauce. Now it is time for the layering to begin—first the pasta, then the cheeses, then more sauce, then the tiny meat balls, then another layer of lasagna—and I am doing all this for this fine, kind man whose name is Peter … a layer of pasta, then a layer of Peter, then …

She stands, a potholder in her hand, ready to place the completed masterpiece of Peter pasta into her preheated Thermidor when she realizes he is standing at the kitchen door and watching her. His expression is difficult to read.

“Could you come into the living room for a minute?” he says.

She puts the dish on the countertop and follows him wordlessly into the next room, the potholder still in her hand.

“I've done some figuring,” he says. “It's worse than we thought. It looks as though the store is in the hole for at least twenty-seven million dollars—if this one box is really all there is.”

She sits down hard on the white sofa. “In the hole …”

“In the red.”

“Twenty-seven million …”

“At least.”

“Well,” she says with a little shudder. “That's that.”

“I'm afraid so, Miranda.”

“Tell me something,” she says. “How much of this do you suppose my father knew about?”

“That's hard to say, isn't it? But toward the end I imagine he knew quite a bit, if not everything. But by then he was trapped. He was in a corner. He was between a rock and a hard place, with no place to move. He was trapped by those two.”

“Two?”

“Tommy Bonham and Moses Minskoff.”

She gestures vaguely toward the cardboard carton. “I didn't see Moses Minskoff's name on any of those papers.”

“Neither did I. I didn't expect to. Moses Minskoff kept a very low profile in his dealings with your father.”

“The two of them.”

“Not that they were working as a team. Just the opposite, in fact. Each of those two men was out to get whatever he could from your father, each on his own, each guy out for himself. Minskoff started years ago. Bonham started later, but they were both bleeding your father, each in his own way. You see, what seems to have happened is that about four or five years ago your father began turning full control of the store's finances over to Bonham. He let himself look the other way while Bonham handled things. That's when the shenanigans started with the R.C.C., and the banks, and the phony sales to South American ladies. Then, six or eight months ago, something—it may have been something Smitty told him—made your father suspicious, and he started looking into things. But by the time he found out what was going on, it was too late. He was trapped. The debt was too big. When he died, I imagine he was looking for some way out—some honorable way out.”