Then Odell went back upstairs, sat alone in the conference room with the screen gone dark, and made the telephone call he had been composing since Monday. It was not a long call. The consumer protection division of the state attorney general's office employed a woman whose job it was to receive such calls, and her professional calm did not waver when the founder of the Barnes Motor Group introduced himself and said that he wished to report a pattern of discriminatory finance pricing at his own company, that the affected customers numbered at least two hundred fourteen, that restitution was already being computed by an outside accounting firm at his instruction, and that the complete file — the spreadsheet, the jackets, the worksheets with the pencil codes, the March memo with the phrase about disciplined qualification — would be delivered to her office by courier on Friday, and that he would make himself and every employee and every document available, and that he was, as the phrase went, self-reporting.
"I want it in whatever record you keep," he said, near the end, "that the file came from the owner, before any complaint, because if my company has to be taught the difference between a customer and a mark by its own government, then at least let the lesson be entered correctly: we weren't caught. We were informed — by a nurse's contract and a young woman in our own office who did the arithmetic nobody asked for. Caught is what happens to people who were hiding. We were worse than hiding, ma'am. We were printed and penciled and filed, in plain sight, for two years. Put that down."
He hung up, and sat a while in the quiet room with his yellow legal pad, and below him, through the floor, he could hear the faint percussion of the service department and the chime of the front door opening for whoever came next.
The accounting firm from Atlanta that Odell hired to compute the restitution arrived with the brisk neutrality of people who price floods, and for six weeks the upstairs conference room became a country whose only industry was arithmetic. They widened the net beyond Keisha's 214 — the full system, once a person knew what to look for, yielded 389 jackets across the flagship in two years, and when the same query ran across the other ten stores, letters went out of Odell's mouth and came back into the room as silence: the flagship had been the worst, but it had not been the only weather. The final number of customers owed money was 614, and the final number of dollars was one million, eight hundred and forty thousand, and change. Odell read the summary twice and then asked the accountants the only question he had asked them since the first day: "You're certain no one is left out because their paperwork was thin?" They said they were certain within the limits of records, and he said, "Then widen the limits. If a jacket can't be reconstructed, reconstruct the buyer from the lender's side. I'll pay the hours. I won't pay myself the compliment of a tidy number at the cost of one nurse."
The letters were his idea, and their wording cost him more effort than the money. Every affected customer received the same letter, on paper, signed by hand — his hand, 614 times over nine evenings at his kitchen table, while Earline read the names aloud and refilled his coffee and occasionally said, of a name, "That's the Oduyas' girl, she sings at Greater Mount Zion," or "His daddy bought the green sedan from you in '88," because to Earline a customer list was a parish register. The letter said what the company had done, in plain sentences, without the words yield or participation or industry standard anywhere in it. It said the price of their loan had been raised above the lender's price because of judgments made about them in the store, that the difference with interest was enclosed, that their contract had been rewritten at the lender's original rate, and that the Barnes Motor Group was sorry in the specific way that has a check attached. It gave a telephone number that rang, not in a call center, but in the upstairs conference room, where Keisha Boateng and two of the accountants answered it for a month, in their own names.
Randy Cobb was dismissed on the Friday the first letters mailed. It was not a scene. Odell did it in the small office off the aquarium, with the group's human resources director flown down from Atlanta and a box already provided, the way the industry does it, and Randy — who had been reasonable for two weeks in the steadily diminishing way of a man whose facts are being priced — finally located, at the end, a sentence that was not about yield. "I never once looked at a customer and decided," he said. "I priced paper. The paper came to me already—" He stopped. He looked at his own folio, at two years of initials in his own hand, a small RC in the corner of jacket after jacket. "I priced the paper that came to me," he said again, more quietly, and it was as close as he would come, and Odell let it stand as his confession and his defense both, because Odell had run out of interest in the exact size of other men's blindness.