"There's an audit," Odell said. "Mine. Of my own flagship, to start, and then of all eleven stores. It began Monday. It'll take some months. I wanted you to hear the shape of it from me before you hear it from the wind, because you've dealt straight with me and I keep my accounts in that column too."
Ellery listened. He listened well; it was his profession. Odell told it the way he'd told Zeke — flat and complete: the floor's pencil codes, the aquarium's discretion, two hundred fourteen reconstructable jackets and an average markup pattern that sorted human beings by their clothes and charged them for the sorting. He did not dramatize, and he did not spare his own name in the telling: the memos his GM had sent, the two years it had run, the owner who had been busy with boards and harvests and the pleasant fiction that a thing built right stays built.
"You're describing," Ellery said carefully, when Odell had finished, "a compliance exposure. One that Crownline's diligence, frankly, would have surfaced in the ordinary course, and which can be priced. There's a version of this conversation, Odell, where the number adjusts, the indemnities adjust, and we remediate post-close under our compliance umbrella, which I don't mind telling you is the strongest in the Southeast. Companies buy problems every day. The question is only ever the discount."
"I expect that's true."
"What isn't standard — forgive me — is the seller discovering the problem himself, two days before signing, and narrating it to the buyer. I'm trying to understand the strategy."
"There isn't one," Odell said. "There's just the sequence. I found out what my yield was made of, Howard. Let me be exact about what that means, because the word's been doing a lot of work in my building. A portion of the number your models love — not all of it, we're a good operation, but a portion I can now measure, because a twenty-six-year-old in my finance office measured it — that portion is money taken, quietly and individually, from the customers my floor had already decided were worth less. Nurses on night shifts. Farmers in the wrong jacket. Young people building the credit we told them to build. Your deck says Crownline will scale the playbook to forty rooftops. I read that page in February and thought it meant our training. It doesn't. It means this."
Ellery sat back. The pleasantness left his face in an orderly fashion, like staff leaving a building in a drill. "Every group in America has rate participation, Odell."
"Every group in America doesn't have my name over the door," Odell said. "And every group in America isn't about to sign my name to the exporting of it." He slid the folder, still unopened, back across the table with two fingers. "I'm not selling, Howard. Not to Crownline, not this year, not at any discount that turns my two hundred fourteen customers into a line item called exposure. The sale's off, and I'd rather lose the whole of your number than launder this through it."
"The board of your own group—"
"Is me, mostly, and Earline, entirely, and she read the spreadsheet Sunday night and asked me one question, which was what took me so long. Whatever I owe my bankers in explanations, I'll pay. What I owe those customers comes first, and it gets paid first in a way your compliance umbrella would never have permitted either of us: in the open."
Ellery stood, and buttoned his jacket, and for a moment the two men regarded each other with the respect that exists only between people who have each declined, at cost, to be bought in a way the other understands. "You'll report it," Ellery said. It wasn't a question. "That's the part I can't model. Sellers don't report themselves, Odell. It will make the papers. It will cost you more than the restitution."
"I know what it'll cost," Odell said. "I've been in this business sixty years. I know the price of everything in it except the price of being the man who knew and sold it anyway. That one, I believe, comes due in a currency I don't hold."
He walked Ellery down himself, through the showroom, past the red car at rest on its platform — Crownline's VP paused, despite everything, to look at it, because car men are car men — and out into a bright noon where the lot stretched away in rows of shining hoods, every one of them washed that morning by somebody's hands.