“I must go,” he said. “Many thanks. It was a pleasure to meet you both.”
“Thank you, Cesar,” said Gillis.
“Thank you,” said Ed.
Romero shook their hands. “This is very interesting. This development will be for trailers?”
“Some mobile homes, some houses,” said Ed.
“Well, I wish you nothing but the best,” Romero said, backing away. “We say in Spanish, !Te la comiste, hoy!” He looked at the sky, breathing in through his nose. “It means, ‘You ate it!’ ” He smiled. “But really it means, ‘You’ve had a great success.’ Really, a great success today. !Un triunfo grande!”
He walked away, and Ed and Gillis didn’t say anything.
“He actually thinks we’re stupid,” Gillis finally commented.
“I guess it would be hard to blame him.”
“He bats for the other side, you know. That’s basically an open secret.”
Ed’s secretary, Sharon, brought them over some plates of food once the prospective buyers had finished helping themselves. There was very little you would want to eat. Sharon herself had found some cottage cheese, but she would never have considered offering that to a man, so Ed and Gillis did their best with the gray hamburgers and the sweet beans in their puddles of sauce.
“Maybe I’ll take you up on that drink after all,” said Gillis.
They headed over toward the clubhouse. The sales team was offering door prizes to a dozen of the prospective buyers. The prizes were S & H Green Stamps, sheets of little stamps you pasted into a book and redeemed for merchandise. The winners of the stamps were also given blue ribbons — the salesmen pinned the ribbons onto their shirts, as if bestowing an honor, smiling at their own guile. The winners had been selected not at random but after the salesmen had had a chance to observe what they were like. The blue ribbons indicated easy marks—“mooks,” in the parlance, “Mickey Nothings,” “Johnny Zeroes.” These were the ones you tried to sell not one but four or five lots, working out a financing plan, tying their heads in knots with complicated discounts and plans for resale with an eighteen-month option.
“I think you can see why we’re interested in getting out of the retail side,” Ed said.
Gillis nodded as he followed Ed into the shade of the clubhouse. He was chewing his burger and looking at his fact sheet for Chino Grande, holding it awkwardly beneath his paper plate. “You think we’re better off just driving to Grande today after we see Meadow?” he said. “That way I could skip the plane ride tomorrow with Ross, maybe catch an earlier flight back to L.A.”
Ed shrugged. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know how to get there. I think they’re still working on the road.”
It came to him as they stepped into the clubhouse: the emptiness of Gillis. The sales meetings, the dinners in hotel rooms, the auditoriums, the airports. It was always better not to think too much about the lives of other men, especially those you didn’t know very well, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Gillis with a Scotch in a plastic cup, flying to California from Japan, then on to Phoenix — his toilet kit, his Robert Ludlum novel — all so that he could report back on this sales program in the desert. Six thousand acres at two hundred per brings you to a million two plus commissions and fees. He realized then that Gillis was not crooked but perhaps so bored and apathetic that he was in his own way a kind of risk.
Cesar Romero, with the author’s grandparents, Louis and Belle Lazar
8
Not long after the AHI merger, Ed had come back to the office one afternoon to find one of his former sales managers, James Cornwall, waiting for him in his office. Cornwall’s Rolls-Royce had been sitting in the parking lot, a white Silver Shadow with UK plates, a car he’d bought from Warren not long before this. Cornwall stood up when Ed came in, holding a hand to his stomach to keep his tie in place as he rose from his seat. There was something studied about the gesture, along with the expensive silk tie that picked up a deep navy thread in Cornwall’s sport coat. He was tall, with a blond crest of hair slicked back with brillantine. It occurred to Ed that the more compromised a person became, the more compelled he was to draw attention to himself. Or perhaps it was the opposite: the showiness made you a “character,” so colorful that no one, not even the authorities, took you very seriously. Cornwall was a deputy in something called the Sheriff’s Posse, a fund-raising group whose members were entitled to wear silver stars and ten-gallon hats like the lawmen to whom they wrote their checks.
“We missed you at the party last weekend,” Cornwall said in friendly accusation.
Ed nodded, shaking his hand. “How was it?”
“Forty, fifty people. Janet King in a very interesting top.”
They sat down, both of them unhappy, both of them trying to conceal it. A year ago, Cornwall had been the head of one of the least successful sales offices at Consolidated Mortgage. Now he had a house in Paradise Valley not far from Warren’s, a house with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a view of Camelback Mountain. He had been installed by Warren as president of something called the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company, a business that since its inception a year ago Ed had been doing his best to stay out of. Great Southwest had been the genesis of Warren’s Consolidated Acceptance Corporation, a way he could bill Great Southwest for all the help it was getting with its operations — its billing, its articles of incorporation, its HUD applications. But the advice and help had never seemed to stop.
Cornwall had heard about the AHI merger.
“It sounds like you and Mr. Warren are going your separate ways,” he said, crossing his legs.
“Not really. It’s just a merger. We’ll still be in charge of our own offices.”
“But you won’t be working for him anymore.”
“He won’t have the same control he had, if that’s what you mean.”
Cornwall cocked his head to one side. “I told Ned that’s the kind of deal that would really help me, and he just smiled.”
“Yeah. The smile.”
“I could use the financing more than you could — you know that. If there’s any way you could put in a word for me, I would appreciate it.”
“We both know how much good that would do.” He looked at Cornwall. “I told Ned that you and Great Southwest should be searching for ways to refinance, but he’s not listening. We both know how that is. I think the real problems are going to come down the road, in six or seven months, so right now the best thing you could do is probably start pulling out.”
“I was thinking something like that.”
“I don’t know how much you’re on the hook for personally.”
“I’ve got a lot of loans out there. A lot of notes with my signature on them.”
Ed just stared at him. Cornwall smiled ruefully down at his knee. He seemed to be ruminating on his own foolishness but without taking it very seriously. The chain of mistakes was regrettable, but how could he have known, he was just an ordinary person, Mr. Warren had been making the real decisions. That was what he seemed to be telling himself, as if this would somehow mitigate the consequences. Never mind the house in Paradise Valley, the Rolls-Royce, the tennis court and pool. Never mind the huge salary package Warren had offered him right from the start, a man with little business experience and little ability with numbers. It was just dumb luck, the ill fate of someone giving things a go, seizing the main chance.