Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out to a farmhouse on County Road 300 East to see an eighty-three-year-old man eat his breakfast, because Harlan Britt still owns that dealership no matter whose name is on the sales manager’s door.
He put his fork down and said: Ford, tell it to me in order and don’t leave anything out to spare anybody.
So I did.
That safe is a 1971 Mosler with a dial and a handle, and it has been sticking since before that sales manager was born. If you don’t lift the handle a quarter inch while you turn the last number, it won’t come. New people can’t open it. New people don’t even try — they use the drop slot and let a manager get it out Monday.
Four people in that building can work that lock. Harlan. The office manager, Doreen, who’s been there thirty-one years. Me, because somebody has to get the bank bag into it when the closers work late. And Tyler Nusbaum, the young closer Harlan’s grandson brought on, who I taught myself, on a Saturday in March, because he asked nice and I’ve never been able to say no to a kid who asks nice.
I told Harlan that part too. That was the part I’d been sick about all night.
Then Doreen backed it up with paper. That cash deal was written on a Saturday and the receipt was posted to the system at 9:40 that night from her terminal under a login she wasn’t sitting at, and the Monday deposit went in eleven thousand four hundred short, and the bank’s own count slip and the deal jacket didn’t agree with each other by exactly that.
Harlan drove himself into town in that old Silverado. He does not go in there anymore except Tuesdays.
They pulled the whole thing apart in the sales tower with the doors open. The kid folded in about ninety seconds. He’d covered a bad weekend at the boat, is what he said, and he was going to put it back Friday, which is what every one of them says.
And here’s the thing that’s kept me up worse than being called a thief. When Harlan asked him why he didn’t say anything when they came for me, he said he figured a janitor wouldn’t fight it.
Harlan called every person in that building onto the showroom floor at ten o’clock in the morning, salesmen, service, the girls in the office, and he said the whole thing plain and used the boy’s name and used mine, and then he said something I have written down.
Twenty-four years this man has had the run of my building at night and never a nickel out of place, and that is not a small thing, that is the whole thing, and any manager of mine who can’t tell the difference between a record and a hunch can go sell cars somewhere else.
The sales manager was gone before the end of the month.
They gave me back pay, a new set of keys, and a plaque by the parts window that says the floor has been kept by the same man since 2001, which I told them was foolish and which I look at every single night.
The kid wrote me a letter from Tipton. I wrote him back. He asked nice.