Along the left wall of the showroom, beneath a row of large framed photographs of Cadillacs through the decades, there were a series of open workstations where the salesmen sat with customers. Each was a long, low desk of dark polished walnut, with a computer and a few brochures and a small cut-glass dish of mints, and beside each desk, angled toward it for conversation, a pair of low armchairs upholstered in soft leather, a warm grayish beige the color of a fawn's back. Derek's desk was the first one, nearest the front doors, because he was the senior salesman, and he had earned it. On it, this morning, in a small wooden tray by the keyboard, he set out the keys to the two vehicles he planned to show Anthony Pellegrino: a black Escalade, fully loaded, the top trim, with every option on the order sheet, and a smaller crossover in white for the son. He put the keys in the tray, side by side. He straightened them so they were parallel. He set a fresh brochure beside them. He looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the computer screen and adjusted the knot of his red tie.
Behind him, at the back of the showroom, near the coffee station and the door to the service department, the three junior salesmen were standing in a loose cluster, the way junior salesmen always stand at the beginning of the day, drinking coffee and pretending not to watch the front doors.
Tanner Voss was the tallest, twenty-seven, blond, a former high school quarterback with a big laugh and a gray suit that fit him a little too tightly across the shoulders. Josh Kim was twenty-nine, quiet and careful and very good with numbers, in a charcoal suit and a dark green tie, who had sold the two cars to the surgeon in scrubs and had never once mentioned it to Derek, which Derek found more irritating than if he had gloated. And Eli Brooks was twenty-four, the newest of them, five weeks on the job, a skinny young Black man with a soft voice and round wire-rimmed glasses and a black suit that he had clearly bought for his college graduation and that was a little too big for him in the sleeves. He had sold exactly one car in five weeks, to his own aunt.
Derek liked Tanner, because Tanner was easy and laughed at his jokes. He respected Josh, grudgingly. He did not think about Eli Brooks very much at all, except to think, occasionally, that the kid was too soft for this business and would not last another two months.
"Big morning, D?" Tanner called across the floor. He had heard about Pellegrino. Everybody had heard about Pellegrino. Derek had made sure of that.
"Big morning," Derek agreed. He smiled. It was the first time he had smiled in several days and it felt strange on his face, stiff, like a muscle he had not used in a while. "Eleven o'clock. Two units. Cash."
"Nice," said Tanner. "Save some for the rest of us."
"Sell your own cars, Voss."
Tanner laughed. Josh Kim did not look up from his coffee. Eli Brooks, standing a little apart from the other two, glanced at Derek and then quickly away, the way junior salesmen glance at senior ones.
At nine o'clock exactly, Rick Halloran came out of his office, unlocked the big glass front doors, propped them open with a rubber wedge, and said, as he said every morning, "Okay, gentlemen. Fairway's open." And then he went back into his office and closed the door.
The morning began.
It was a slow morning. Tuesdays were always slow. A young couple came in at nine-twenty and looked at the electric crossover for ten minutes and left with a brochure. A man came in at nine-forty to complain to the service department about a rattle in his dashboard. A delivery driver brought a box of brochures. Derek sat at his desk and made more phone calls and watched the doors and looked at the clock and thought about Anthony Pellegrino's two cars and the conversation that Rick Halloran was not going to have with him on the thirtieth.
He did not see the old man come in.
* * *
Eli Brooks saw him.
He would think about that afterward, a great deal. That he was the only one who saw him come in. Tanner had gone outside to move a car on the lot. Josh was in the finance office, helping the business manager with a spreadsheet. Derek was at the back of the showroom on his cell phone, pacing up and down beside the coffee station with one hand pressed against his ear, talking in the low urgent voice he used when he was trying to get somebody to commit to something. So it was only Eli, standing alone by the brochure rack near the middle of the floor, pretending to tidy brochures that did not need tidying, who looked up at two minutes past ten and saw the old man walk in through the open glass doors.