There was always paperwork. He intended to start reading his own.
The finance offices at the back of Barnes of Macon were glass on three sides, which the architect had called transparency and the staff called the aquarium. From inside, Keisha Boateng could see the whole showroom — the turning red car, the doors, the weather coming in with the customers — and she had long ago decided that the glass was the most honest thing about the department, because from inside the aquarium you could watch exactly how a deal changed as it swam toward you, depending on who was carrying it.
She was twenty-six, two years into F&I, promoted from the business office where she had reconciled lender statements with a speed that made the older staff slightly nervous. She liked numbers the way her grandfather liked cars: as things that told the truth if you knew where the panels met. Her desk held Tiana Ross's deal jacket, and the jacket was telling her a truth she had been reading, in jacket after jacket, for months.
The mechanics were simple, and their simplicity was the camouflage. A lender approves a buyer at a buy rate — the real price of the money. The dealership is permitted, within limits, to contract the buyer at a higher rate and keep the difference; the trade called it reserve, or participation, and in moderation it was as old and as legal as the business itself. Randy Cobb's office did not do it in moderation. Randy Cobb's office did it as a philosophy. The markup — a point, a point and a half, two points where the jacket would hold it — was discretionary, and discretion, in the aquarium, had developed a pattern so regular that Keisha had first noticed it the way you notice a dripping tap: not all at once, but at three in the morning, in her own kitchen, with her own laptop, wondering why she could predict a stranger's interest rate from the salesman's handwriting on the worksheet.
She could. That was the thing she had been being sure about, for months, at midnight. The jackets that came to her from Blake Thornton's desk and from the two salesmen who had been trained in Blake's weather were not priced by the buyers' credit — the buyers' credit was in the jacket, and it frequently said, in the lender's own bureau language, that the buyer had earned better. The jackets were priced by the floor's first impression. Young buyers: up. Women alone: up. Buyers in work clothes, buyers with accents, buyers who had been migrated to the leftover cars as if that closed the question of what they were worth: up, up, up. And the jackets of the couples in good clothes, the repeat customers, the men Blake had decided were serious — those came through at the buy rate or a whisper above it, clean as communion.
Tiana Ross had a 712 credit score. Keisha had the bureau printout in the jacket and the lender's approval beside it: buy rate, 6.4. The contract Randy Cobb had initialed for the young salesman's desk to present: 8.3. On a five-year note on the discontinued sedan, the difference was a little over eleven hundred dollars — not a fortune, not nothing; eleven hundred dollars of scrubs and night shifts and a nurse's rent in Macon, reassigned by discretion to the Barnes Motor Group, because a young man with a tablet had read her tote bag and decided what she was.
"Room on it?" Randy said, passing her glass door with a coffee and the air of a man inspecting a garden he owned.
"On what, Mr. Cobb?"
"Ross. The nurse. Plenty of room on that one, I expect." He did not stop walking. "Paper's out with her already, I hope."
"She signed twenty minutes ago."
"Good girl." And he was gone down the row of glass, bestowing the garden inspection on the next desk.
Keisha sat for a long time with her hand flat on the closed jacket. She was not naive; she had grown up in her grandfather's kitchen listening to lot stories, and she knew that car deals had shadows and that shadows were not automatically sins. But she had also run the numbers nobody asked her to run — 214 deal jackets pulled across two years, every one she could reconstruct from the system, coded by buyer and by salesman and by the delta between the rate the bank offered and the rate the human being signed — and the numbers did not describe shadows. They described a sorting machine. The average markup across all 214 was 1.9 points. Across the jackets the floor had liked, it was 0.3. She had checked her arithmetic four times, on four different nights, hoping to be wrong with better data, and the arithmetic had declined to help her.