He had a nine-year-old daughter named Lily who lived with her mother in a nice house in Naperville and came to stay with him every other weekend and asked him, every time, why his house was so small. He had child support payments of two thousand one hundred dollars a month, and a car payment on a vehicle he could not really afford but had to drive because a man who sells luxury cars cannot show up to work in a used hatchback, and a lawyer's bill from the custody hearing that he had been paying off at two hundred dollars a month for three years. He had, as of that morning, eleven hundred and forty dollars in his checking account. If Rick Halloran had the conversation with him on the thirtieth, he would have about six weeks before he could not make his rent.
So on Tuesday morning, Derek Lawson came to work with exactly one thought in his head, and the thought was: no more time-wasters.
He was at the dealership by eight-fifteen, forty-five minutes before the doors opened. He made a list on a yellow legal pad at his desk of every lead he had, every customer who had come in or called or emailed in the last month and not yet bought, with a phone number and a note beside each one. He called nine of them before nine o'clock. He left seven voicemails. He spoke to two people, one of whom said she had already bought a car from another dealer, and one of whom said he was still thinking about it and hung up.
And then, at eight-fifty, his cell phone rang, and it was Anthony Pellegrino.
Anthony Pellegrino owned eleven apartment buildings on the North Side and a chain of car washes and a very large house in Winnetka, and he had bought four cars from Derek over the last six years, always the top of the range, always fully loaded, always for cash. He was exactly the kind of customer Derek had built his career on. He was calling, he said, because his wife wanted a new SUV for her birthday, and his son was turning sixteen and wanted something to drive to school, and he was thinking he might as well do them both at once, and he was going to be in the neighborhood later that morning, around eleven, eleven-thirty, could Derek have a couple of things ready to look at?
Derek said that he could have anything ready that Mr. Pellegrino wanted. He hung up. He sat at his desk for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing slowly. Two cars. Top of the range. Cash. If Anthony Pellegrino bought what Derek thought he was going to buy, it would put Derek over his target for the month by itself, with two weeks to spare, and Rick Halloran would never have the conversation.
He opened his eyes and got up and went out onto the showroom floor to get ready.
The showroom at Prestige Cadillac was the reason, Derek sometimes thought, that he had stayed in this job as long as he had. He loved it. He had loved it from the first day he walked into it, at twenty-six, with a cheap suit and no idea what he was doing. It was a long, wide, open room, two stories high, with a floor of large square tiles in polished pale gray stone that gleamed under the lights like the surface of a still lake, so that every car on display stood on its own reflection, and every person walking across it walked on theirs. The ceiling was smooth white plaster, and set into it at regular intervals were great round disks of LED light, three feet across, each one blazing a clean, even, cool white light down onto the floor below, so bright and so even that there were almost no shadows anywhere in the room. It was a light designed to make paint look perfect. Every curve and crease of every car shone under it as if it had just come off the line that morning.
The cars stood in a long curving row down the center of the floor. The new Escalades, the flagship, four of them in a line, black and white and silver and a deep metallic red, huge and square and gleaming, their chrome grilles like the faces of very expensive robots. Two sedans. An electric crossover that nobody wanted. And at the far end of the row, under its own particular disk of light, the jewel of the showroom: a low, wide, black sports car, sleek and aggressive, with a long sculpted hood and enormous wheels and a price tag that was more than most of the salesmen made in two years. Nobody had bought it. Nobody was ever going to buy it. It was there, Rick Halloran said, to make the Escalades look reasonable.