Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  It is early morning, and Moses Minskoff, still in his office on West 23rd Street, has been busy for most of the night on the telephone.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Moe!” Smyrna’s voice is yelling in his ear. “Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning!”

  “Yeah, but I got some important things for you to do. You writing this down? Okay. First, I want you to call Vince, the insurance agent, and take out a ten-million-dollar accident policy on Honeychile.… That’s right. Ten mil. On Honeychile. Accident policy, with me the beneficiary. Then tell him I want another ten-million accident policy on me, with Honeychile the beneficiary. Tell him it’s something Honeychile and I have worked out together, in case anything should happen to either of us, so he won’t think anything funny is going on.

  “Next get over here and I’m gonna give you a bunch of Visa cards, with their access codes, and I want you to go to as many automatic teller machines as you need to and cash out each of those accounts to the max. Got that? To the max, till the red light comes on and says ‘No more cash’ or whatever the hell it says. Okay?

  “Now, using some of that cash, I want you to go to the Bahama Airlines ticket office and buy two tickets to Nassau for Honeychile and me. First class. One way. They got a flight goes out of Kennedy at seven-fifteen P.M. this coming Friday the fifteenth, that’s day after tomorrow. Next, you’re going to Argentine Airlines and buy a ticket for me to Buenos Aires. They got a seven o’clock flight, same date. Get me on that. One way, economy.… Whaddaya mean the airlines will think it’s funny me going two places the same night? I’m talkin’ two different airlines, dummy! Two different airlines don’t talk to each other! Does Macy’s tell Gimbels? Stop askin’ a lotta dumb questions and do like you’re told. You got all that? … Okay, I’ll see you back here in the office when you got all that done.”

  He hangs up the phone and immediately places another call.

  “Eddie? … Moe here. Sorry to call you so late at night, but I got a really big job for you this time, buddy. You did so great on that tail job that I’m gonna reward you with a big one.… How big? Well, how’s ten grand sound to ya, okay? Now listen carefully. You’re gonna take Honeychile for a ride, only she’s not comin’ back, if you receive my meaning.… Yeah, I know you don’t like to do jobs like that. That’s why I’m offering you ten big ones.… Yeah, I know it’s too bad, but my mother warned me I’d have trouble when I married so much a younger woman. She told me I’d have trouble with her sooner or later, and now I got it.… Yeah, you guessed it. She’s been gettin’ it off with this Turner guy.…

  “Okay, listen carefully. Friday afternoon, around four o’clock, you’re to come to my office.… Yeah, I’ll have your tail fee for you. I’ll be giving you two tickets to Nassau.… Not Nassau, Queens. Nassau, the Bahamas. Then you go up to the apartment and pick up Honeychile. She’ll be ready. She’ll be expecting you. You’re gonna hand her the two tickets. You’re gonna drive her out to Kennedy, and tell her I’m gonna meet her there at the gate for the plane. But she ain’t gonna get to the airport, right? … Naw, I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even want to know. You figure that part out.…

  “Yeah, I know you don’t like these jobs, but somebody’s gotta do it. Here’s the deal. I’m gonna give you two grand in advance, plus your tail money, when you get the tickets. Then eight grand more when the job is done, which I should have proof of by Monday morning, right? You stop by my office Monday morning, and I’ll have the rest of your dough for you.…

  “Oh, I almost forgot. When it’s over, save those airplane tickets. Get them off her, after it’s done, and bring ’em back to my office on Monday. If I should happen not to be in, give ’em to Smyrna, ’cause there’s a chance I may not be in the office by Monday.… Yeah, Smyrna will also have the rest of your dough for you. You can trust Smyrna. Have I ever broke a promise to you? … Okay. And remember, whatever you’re gonna do, you’re gonna make it look like an accident. Thanks, Eddie, and you have a nice day till I see you on Friday.”

  Now he makes one final phone call. “Honeychile? Yeah, workin’ late at the office again. But listen, I got news, great news for ya. You know like I said we was always gonna retire and live in the Bahamas? Well, we’re finally gonna do it, Babycakes. I got two tickets, first class, for the both of us on a flight to Nassau this coming Friday night. Whaddaya think of that, Babycakes? … Yeah, your daddy thought you’d be real pleased.…

  “Now, listen, lover, here’s the deal. I’m gonna be pretty tied up down here between now and then, winding up the business and all that. So what I’m gonna do is have Eddie—you know, Eddie who does the occasional odd job for me—pick you up at the apartment about four-thirty Friday afternoon. Think you can be packed by then? … Good. Don’t pack too much, ’cause remember we’re gonna be livin’ in the tropics. Don’t bring no fur coats.… Never mind about the furniture. We can send back for what we need later, and we’re not gonna need much ’cause what I got for us down there is a completely furnished villa by the sea. Just for Daddy and you.

  “Think of it, Babycakes. A tropical paradise … us basking in the tropic sun, the breezes rustling the palm fronds, miles of sandy beaches, the blue crystalline waters of the sea, a furnished villa with a pool. I’ll show ya the brochures when we’re on the plane. Sound like heaven? It’s gonna be, Honeychile. It’s gonna be.

  “Anyway, Eddie will give you the first class tickets for the both of us, and he’ll drive you to Kennedy. I’ll take a cab from here, and I’ll meet you at the Bahama Airlines gate for our seven-fifteen P.M. flight to Nassau.…

  “Yeah, I know that’s allowing a lot of time. But you could hit traffic at that time of day, it being a Friday and all, and Eddie’s a pretty cautious driver. He wants to make sure you don’t miss that plane.

  “Listen, Babycakes, there’s just one more thing I wanna tell you while I got you on the line. I wanna say thank you, Honeychile, for being such a wonderful wife. You’ve been the best wife a guy could have, Honeychile. No, I don’t mean to sound like I’m sayin’ goodbye. I just wanna say thank you for waitin’ so long for this, which is gonna be your reward. I just wanna tell you this before we start out our whole new life together. Our new and beautiful retired life in the Bahamas. Good night, Angel Face … sweet dreams … bon voyage.”

  31

  “I’ve heard Tarkington’s described as a unique store,” she is saying to him. “And it certainly has a unique bookkeeping system.” Miranda and Peter are seated on the long white sofa in the living room of her apartment at 11 East 66th Street, with the big open carton on the cushion between them. A pencil perches in Miranda’s hair. “I spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Tommy Bonham this afternoon, while he tried to explain his so-called system to me, and he still insists that everything that pertains to the store’s business is right here in this box.”

  “What a mess!”

  “Since you’ve already got your M.B.A., and it’ll be years before I get mine, I thought maybe you could help me make some sense out of all this,” she says. “But let me tell you what I’ve figured out so far. To begin with, there are lots of different bank accounts; I’ve counted seventeen. There are a lot of checks that Tommy seems to have written to himself, marked Expenses or Operating Cash. These aren’t for large amounts—a hundred dollars here, two hundred there—so I don’t know if there’s any point in questioning him on those. But here’s another thing. The store apparently gave discounts to certain customers if they paid for merchandise in cash, or in checks written out to Thomas E. Bonham or to Silas R. Tarkington, and these checks were deposited in separate banks. But what happened to the cash is hard to tell.

  “Certain other customers were offered rebates if they paid for merchandise in cash—just another form of discounting, I suppose. If, for instance, Mrs. X bought a three-thousand-dollar dress and paid for it in cash, she’d get a rebate of ten to fifteen percent. The rebate checks were paid from one or the other of two accounts, one
called SPECIAL ACCOUNT and the other called GENERAL OPERATING ACCOUNT. I don’t know whether there was anything shady about these deals, except they make us sound like we’re in the used-car business.”

  “That would depend on what happened to the cash,” he says.

  “Again, I can’t seem to find out. Incidentally, most of these rebate checks were signed by Tommy, but a lot were signed by Daddy, and a lot of those were not in his handwriting. Tommy signed them.”

  “Faking signatures is called forgery, I believe,” he says.

  “I know, but apparently Daddy had authorized Tommy to sign his name on certain accounts. Is it still illegal then?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask a lawyer, Miranda.”

  “But I’ve also discovered something that went on that I know was illegal. Quite often, on purchases of expensive items—from Smitty’s department, for instance—customers were allowed to take the items from the store. But the sales were written up to indicate that the items were being sent outside the city, to save the customer the state and city sales taxes. A customer would have an article sent to friends in Connecticut or New Jersey, and all these friends would actually receive would be empty boxes.”

  “Wasn’t that one of the things they caught Leona Helmsley on?”

  “Tommy says that sort of thing is done all the time. He says it’s a routine favor for a good customer, that stores all over town do it all the time.”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  “Anyway, to get back to the discount-rebate business. One thing that doesn’t seem quite right is that all these sales were written up as having been made for the full retail price. That made our figures look much better than they really were, and this was evidently useful when the store went to the banks for loans.”

  “That doesn’t sound kosher to me,” he says.

  “Nor to me. Now here’s where it begins to get a little complicated. I’m not sure I understand, but this is the way Tommy explained it to me. The store tries to keep a kind of rolling inventory in every department: for example, so many sweaters, in so many styles, sizes, and colors, at all times. To finance this inventory there’s something called the Retail Credit Corporation in Atlanta—R.C.C., he calls it. R.C.C. pays our major vendors direct and gets paid whenever we sell an item of merchandise, and whenever we order new merchandise, R.C.C. adds to our credit account. But on certain months, Tommy would report fewer sales to R.C.C. than there actually were, so R.C.C. would roll over the indebtedness on this merchandise, and Tommy would deposit the proceeds in a separate bank account.”

  “It sounds to me,” he says, “as though, if this sort of thing were kept up, you’d end up with no merchandise at all and an enormous debt.”

  “That’s what I said to Tommy! I said it sounds like taking out a mortgage without telling the bank you’ve sold the house! But he assured me this is standard business practice. He calls it ‘a form of borrowing against future profits.’ He says the store obviously can’t afford to do that sort of thing all the time; only in months when there are, as he puts it, ‘certain cash flow problems.’ He says that as long as the store is paying the interest to R.C.C. on this debt, which the store appears to have been doing, R.C.C. doesn’t mind the arrangement. The only trouble is, for the last two or three years the debt has been growing, and so—naturally—has the interest cost.”

  “Naturally.”

  “The more questions I asked, the more annoyed he got. In explaining all this to me, Tommy kept saying that the most important thing a retail store has to do is to see that its vendors are paid on time. I agree. If the vendors aren’t paid, they won’t ship more merchandise, and without new merchandise you don’t have a store. Most vendors want payment within ten days of delivery. But here’s another thing I discovered, going through all these papers. Tommy has worked out different payment schedules with different vendors, depending on the size of the store’s orders. For a larger order than usual, Vendor X will agree to wait fifteen or twenty days for payment. A few of the big French fashion houses—Dior, Chanel, Le Croix—where we place large orders for very expensive merchandise, will even give us thirty to sixty days to pay, even ninety. Tommy seems to have persuaded these people that the prestige of their presence at Tarkington’s makes it worth it to them to wait for their money.

  “Of course it doesn’t seem fair to make some vendors wait to be paid longer than others, but since they’ve agreed, I guess it’s not illegal. But it throws the value of our inventory way off kilter on the books. We’re listing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise in our inventory that we haven’t even paid for! But, again, that huge inventory figure seems to impress the banks when we go to them to borrow money—which we seem to have to do every six months or so.”

  Peter Turner runs his fingers through his curly dark hair and mutters, “Good Lord!”

  “Here’s another thing I discovered,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much of our merchandise is being sold on consignment. We’re just acting as the seller’s agent on this stuff. If the goods are sold, the store takes a commission. If they’re not, they just go back to the consigner, and the store doesn’t make a penny. But, again, Tommy lists all these consigned goods under INVENTORY at full price—a mink coat listed at ten thousand dollars, for example, when it’s actually on consignment. Most of the garments in the fur department are on consignment. Those aren’t Tarkington’s assets at all, but listing them as assets—well, it impresses the banks.

  “Which brings us to the store’s Accounts Receivable, another item in the assets column: what our customers owe us. With Tarkington’s famous liberal credit policy, we really show an imposing Accounts Receivable figure on the plus side—over eighteen million dollars! The banks seem to practically lick their lips with glee when they see this non-asset asset of ours! If they could figure out a way for us to collect these Accounts Receivable, it would be more helpful than handing us another loan, it seems to me!

  “And now I’d like to introduce you to a mystery woman, Peter: Señora Lopez-Figueroa of Caracas. Every store should have a customer like Carmelita Lopez-Figueroa. She spends hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in the store—forty-two thousand in April, for example, seventy-three thousand in May. She shops in all departments, always by phone, but she seems particularly fond of precious stones, and she’s given Smitty’s department an enormous amount of business. No wonder Smitty’s figures looked so great!

  “There really is such a person. I checked Carmelita out. Her husband isn’t just the president of the Banco de Venezuela, he owns it. And other Lopez-Figueroa relatives seem to own the rest of the country. I even found a letter from Carmelita’s husband, authorizing her to charge as much merchandise at Tarkington’s as she wanted. I think I sort of get the picture. Her husband probably has a mistress, maybe several. To keep Carmelita off his back and out of his hair, he gives her absolutely unlimited spending. Her bills are always promptly paid, with international money orders drawn on her husband’s bank. Any store would kill to have a customer like Carmelita.

  “But here’s the thing that worries me about Carmelita. Her purchases are always marked ‘Phone Order/Charge/Send/Signature on File.’ But when I went through the shipping orders in these records here, I couldn’t find anywhere near enough shipping orders to match these sales slips. I began to wonder how many of these orders were actually shipped to her, how many were actual orders, and, if the merchandise was never shipped, what happened to it.”

  He rises from the sofa and walks to the window, his hands thrust deep in his jeans’ pockets, and stands there, looking out.

  “Did Bonham have any explanation?” he asks her.

  “He said that unfortunately a lot of the computer disks that the shipping department kept its records on had been accidentally erased,” she says.

  He nods. “The Rose Mary Woods defense,” he says.

  “He was vague on other questions that I asked him, too. He kept changing the subject. He’d interrup
t to tell me how the strong yen was hurting us. About how the South Koreans and the Vietnamese, with their cheap pelts, along with the animal rights activists, were killing the American fur business. How the downturn in the economy was hurting retailers all over. How interest rates had to come down before we’d see a real turnaround. When I asked him why we had to do so much borrowing—or ‘leveraging,’ as he calls it—he launched into a long lecture on how the Gulf War had affected our first-quarter profits.”

  “When in doubt, blame the Japanese. Or George Bush.”

  “The thing I didn’t ask him was this: Peter, do you think that—with so many of the Lopez-Figueroa purchases coming from Smitty’s department—Tommy and Smitty were somehow in collusion to cheat my father? If it’s true, I’m in a terrible spot. I promised my mother that if she’d vote her shares with mine, I’d hire Smitty back. But if Smitty’s a cheat, I can’t possibly do that.”

  He turns and faces her. “I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “I think Smitty is basically an honest woman. And I don’t think she’s really clever enough—or good enough with figures—to get involved in a rip-off scheme like that one. Besides, I think she and Bonham actively disliked each other.”

  “I thought so too. But suppose that was just an act, to throw everybody off?”

  “No, I tend to believe her. I also think she was genuinely in love with your dad. I don’t think she’d knowingly take part in a plan to cook the store’s books and skim profits from your dad’s store. But I think she was naïve enough to let Tommy Bonham use her department to post false sales.”

  Then what was a bottle of her perfume doing in his bathroom medicine cabinet? she almost asks him, but stops herself, the next question being, What were you looking for in that medicine cabinet, Miss Miranda? Instead, she says, “I did get Tommy to concede that the store might need some—financial restructuring, as he put it.”