Mallory pulled two overstuffed three-ring binders from a shelf. “Whatever you need should be in the first one, but if not, take the second one so you’re prepared.”
“That’s all on Vongole?”
“No, this is the history of all our vendors. She’ll probably want a comparison, and you don’t want to not have the information in front of you.”
“Okay, let me get my stuff and we’ll head down.”
“We?”
“Yes. She specifically asked for you to sit in.” I paused for a second before adding, “Tony Simms will be there too.”
Mallory’s face went white under her jet-black hair. She dropped one of the overstuffed binders, which opened on impact. Sheets of paper and recaps of business spread across the floor.
19
“Come in, sit down,” Belle said.
She and Tony sat at the large, glass conference table. How much Windex did it take to keep the fingerprints off?
I sat to Belle’s right and Mallory sat to my right. Tony sat across from me. If this were a game of red rover, Mallory, Belle, and I would have the advantage. We were down to one notebook, thanks to Mallory’s shock-and-drop maneuver minutes earlier. I hoped it had the information we needed.
“Tony and I were talking about opportunities for Heist,” Belle said. “Accessories are an exploding category, and we need to identify a key vendor now and negotiate accordingly.”
Tony jumped in. “Handbags are like shoes. Women crave them. It’s crazy what women will pay for a handbag. Doesn’t matter if they need to lose ten pounds, if they’re having a bad hair day, if they’re getting over a breakup. Plus, the handbag business is a no-brainer. You don’t have to think about sizes like with apparel. Our markup structure was at the industry standard, so we took the category and tinkered with the formula. The margin exploded.”
“Tinkered with the formula how?” I asked. I was trying to keep up. Mallory was scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.
“We get a 40 percent discount from the cost, so we dropped the retails by 30 percent. Nobody else can touch our prices. The bags sell themselves. Customers come to us first because of our pricing and stay loyal because of our assortment. Every market we’ve entered, we’ve stolen Tradava’s client base overnight.”
“But Tradava has a whole assortment of Vongole’s bags on sale right now,” I offered. “Fifty percent off.”
Mallory looked up, surprised. Belle and Tony didn’t say anything. I looked between their faces.
“I was shopping the competition yesterday,” I finished, hoping they’d see that as an entrepreneurial spark and not a goofing-off streak.
“Those are last year’s bags. We bought out Vongole’s entire inventory this year so they couldn’t fill any orders for Tradava,” Tony said. He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. It was the cocky body language of a college student who had just one-upped a competitor at a debate match, and with his boyish looks he kind of looked the part. I was willing to bet he’d won plenty of battles in the boardroom, even if other executives towered over him.
We spent the better part of an hour reviewing the profit analysis for Vongole. Aware that Mallory was watching me, I didn’t point out the errors I’d caught that morning. Even if it was the perfect opportunity to correct the boss-employee dynamic, I took the high road.
More than once, Belle asked Mallory’s opinion, calling her out of her silence, forcing her to participate in our discussion. It was a humble, almost shy Mallory who spoke when spoken to, offering up valid points about Vongole’s past performances. Belle and Tony brainstormed an aggressive strategy to keep Vongole on our shelves and out of the hands of Tradava. It was with a devilish pleasure that Belle plotted to shut down her former store’s business. I wondered again what had happened to turn her away from Tradava, and what her relationship had been with Emily.
When the meeting was over, Mallory grabbed the unused notebook and stormed back to the office. I may not have known the answer to every question asked, but I’d more than held my own in the strategy meeting. I should have earned her respect by now.
“That went well, don’t you think?” I asked when we reentered the office.
“I’d hardly say that,” she spat, and disappeared into her office.
Okay, time for a take-down. I followed her to her desk and crossed my arms over my pearl necktie. “What exactly is your problem with me?”
She glared at me, slowly shaking her head. “Don’t play stupid. I know all about you.”
“Then why don’t you tell me all about me, because clearly I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Don’t play dumb. I’m friends with the PR manager, and she told me you told a room full of strangers that you made the weapon that was used to kill Emily. Then you show up here in her job. I don’t know why it doesn’t look suspicious to anyone else, but it sure looks suspicious to me.”
“You think I—” I didn’t finish the sentence. “You’re joking, right?”
“Why do they love you so much?” Her eyes widened and her voice raised.
The scent of the calla lilies, pleasantly fragrant yesterday, now caused the back of my head to throb. Mallory’s verbal attack didn’t help. I put my hands to my head to massage my temples.
Mallory continued. “I’m here on my merit. I’ve got a drawer full of performance reviews to prove it. But clearly you have some kind of relationship with Tony Simms that trumps experience and hard work. Maybe I’ll be hearing about you in the boardroom.”
“That’s enough. Whether you like it or not, I’m your boss, and I don’t appreciate what you’re implying. You have two choices: get on board with me as your new buyer, or don’t.”
We stared at each other. The office felt like someone was pressing a large balloon on top of us. Wherever Mallory’s attitude came from, I wasn’t going to stand for it.
When she didn’t say anything for several seconds, I took my hands off my temples and put them palm side down on the Monday morning vendor recaps in her inbox.
“I didn’t want to bring this up in the meeting today, but you made a couple of mistakes on the Vongole profit analysis, mistakes that significantly overstated their margin.”
“What mistakes?”
I pulled out the form and circled the blank fields in freight, theft, and markdowns. “You didn’t fill out all of the components of the margin calculation, so the profit is coming in overinflated.”
She glanced at the paper and then pushed it back toward me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I fanned out six other recaps on the desk. “These are all complete.”
“Vongole is different. We get such a high discount from Andi that we don’t take markdowns, not even coupons. It’s in the disclaimer. The bags are all locked up so there’s no shortage.”
“What about freight? Freight expense runs about 3 to 5 percent of the cost of an order. That alone will change their profitability.”
“We don’t use Ace Trucking Company with Vongole. We use Simulated Trucking, and they don’t charge us.”
“Why not?”
“I have no idea, and that’s not my job. The reports are correct. Now, if that’s all you wanted to address with me, I have other work to do.” She turned to her computer and pretended I wasn’t there. Before I left, I remembered one more thing. “Mallory, if this is such a high margin business, why didn’t Emily want you to approve any more orders?”
She stopped typing. “How do you know about that?”
I pulled the red folder marked ORDERS TO APPROVE out of her inbox and opened it up. Inside was the note that I had seen last night. She took the folder from me, the animosity gone, replaced with a furrowed brow and eyes that stared off to the corner of her desk while she tried to make sense of something in her mind.
“I told Belle about that yesterday,” she said in a normal voice. “I called her to find out why she wrote those orders when we were overstocked. If we bring in the
inventory Andi has on hand, we’ll risk our entire profit structure, and if we have that much inventory we’ll throw off the supply and demand. We’ll have to take markdowns to liquidate. And I don’t understand how Vongole even has that much inventory. Four months ago we bought every bag Heist had available so they couldn’t ship to anybody else.” For the moment, her animosity toward me dissipated.
“Have you ever asked Andi about this?”
“With Andi, everything related to one of her vendors is a great opportunity. ‘Omigod, like, totally!’”
She was right; Andi was not going to do anything to make Vongole look bad. But if Andi was able to play the ‘Omigod, you’re, like, totally my new best friend’ routine, then so was I. I returned to my desk and dialed her showroom number.
“Andi? Samantha Kidd, from Heist.”
Five minutes later I’d finagled a session of after-work cocktails and girl-talk. Mallory looked impressed, but before she had a chance to compliment me outright, we heard a male voice in the hallway. “Samantha Kidd?”
“That’s me,” I called, and stood up.
A deliveryman in a brown shirt and shorts carried a vase of pink roses into the office. “Where’d you like me to put these?” he asked, noting the two arrangements that already occupied the front of the desk. It was starting to look like Birnam Wood in here.
“I’ll take them,” I said, and transferred the vase from his grip to the bookcase behind me.
“You must be quite a woman.” He held out an electronic device that I signed with a plastic stylus.
I pulled the card out of the tiny white envelope after he left. Don’t know who sent you flowers yesterday, but here’s hoping mine are better. Miss you.—NT
I answered with a professional sounding e-mail:
Dear Nick, Your sketches look amazing, would love to see the real thing. Have you had a chance to meet with either Luta or Lussuria factories? Regards, Samantha.
I received a response almost immediately.
Dear S, Have not had time yet but they’re on my schedule. —N
I killed the rest of the afternoon with buyer-related tasks. At four thirty I shut down the computer and slicked on a coat of lip-gloss. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and polished the fingerprints off my vintage patent leather handbag.
Mallory stood in my doorway. “Before you meet up with Andi, you should know Tradava cancelled a bunch of Vongole orders, and that might be where the surplus inventory came from.”
“That sounds like confidential information. How do you know that?”
“I overheard Kyle and Emily arguing the night of the gala. They didn’t realize I was in here. I heard him say he’d cancelled his entire Vongole order, and he couldn’t believe she’d bought all of this crap, and she yelled at him that he had no right to tell her how to do her job. They were pretty mad at each other. He said she had to pick one or the other, and she didn’t answer. The last thing I heard him say was he couldn’t take it anymore and was going to end it.”
“What happened after that?”
“I don’t know. I bolted. I didn’t want to be around if they decided to make up, if you know what I mean.”
“Did you tell any of this to the cops?”
“No. When I said I bolted, I mean I bolted from the store. I wasn’t here when she was … found.”
“How did you hear the news?”
“Belle called me the next day to let me know.”
I nodded calmly. Did I believe her? I wasn’t sure. As far as workplace personalities went, she seemed a little unstable. And besides, I wasn’t willing to ignore her implication that I’d canoodled my way into this job.
I thanked her for the info and said good-bye, and left. In the past eight hours Mallory had insulted me more than once, and then she made a concerted effort to confide in me. Those two actions seemed at odds with each other, but neither action changed two very important facts:
a) Last night, Detective Loncar had played a conversation for me where Mallory had threatened someone for a promotion, and
b) Today she confessed to being right there the night Emily Hart was murdered.
And whether she realized it or not, she also told me she really didn’t have an alibi.
20
There was a limited window of time before cocktails with Andi, and I used it to meet with Nora at I-FAD. I parked in a visitor space near her lecture hall. The only other car in the lot was a highly polished silver BMW. The college was either paying more to their professors than I thought or there were some very spoiled students. When I went to school, I got around on a one-person motorized scooter that capped out at thirty-five miles per hour unless I was going downhill.
An irregular breeze wafted past me, blowing green whirlybirds from the trees. They spun in circles as they descended, landing in soft piles on the grass, to be trampled by students between classes. I picked one up, held it in front of me with two fingers, and let go, watching it spiral its way as it fell.
Students trickled out of the lecture hall, holding beat-up backpacks on one shoulder. I didn’t want to waste any more time, so I pushed through the door and followed the mustard-colored carpet runner to the front. Nora stood, leaning against a marble table, talking to Tony Simms. Surprised, I stepped backward and put one hand on the door to leave, but it was too late.
“Samantha! Perfect timing. I told Mr. Simms you were coming here today, and he wanted to talk to you.”
“Hello, Samantha,” he said, extending his hand. I grabbed it and shook, trying to anticipate the squeeze-and-pump manner he’d used the first time we’d been through this routine.
“Hi Mr”—I caught myself—“Tony,” I finished lamely.
“What brings you to the college today?”
“Nora,” I answered, opting for vague over lying.
“Aren’t you two neighbors?”
“Yes,” I said, not sure how he knew that. “With the hours I’m putting it at Heist, I barely see her anymore.” It was meant to be a joke. I hoped he saw that.
“Speaking of Heist, that’s the reason I’m here. I’m glad you showed up. You should be part of this thing too.” He checked his watch. “But I’m late for an appointment. Nora, do you want to fill her in?”
“Be glad to, Mr. Simms.”
They shook hands as a good-bye, though Nora didn’t appear to care about the business squeeze-and-pump. She looked a lot more natural than I did during the whole process. The small businessman left through a side door marked only by a red neon Exit sign.
“I didn’t expect to find him here,” I said, this time opting for the truth over vague.
“Neither did I.”
“What’s this thing he was talking about?”
“Tony has been very generous to I-FAD. As a thank you, the college is dedicating a building to him. It wasn’t going to happen for a month, but he wants to bump up the agenda to divert attention from the negativity that’s surrounding Heist.”
“Can he do that?”
“When you’ve given as much money to the college as he has, you can pretty much write your own ticket.”
“Interesting. What do I have to do with this?”
“He wants a team from Heist here at the dedication. Turn it into a story about the store, the professionalism, the career path. Help tie it to the community. He was here to meet with the academic chair on possible internships for students and a guest professor program using Heist staff. Your name came up.”
I didn’t point out that I’d worked for the store for a total of three days. It was quickly becoming a moot point. “Heist is new to the area. Why isn’t Tradava getting this kind of treatment? They’ve been in Ribbon forever.”
“Tony Simms is trying to get people to connect him with the city, to give him goodwill,” she said.
“If it didn’t seem like such a political move, I’d say it wasn’t a bad idea.”
“I get the sense that Tony Simms doesn’t have bad ideas, and if he decided to run for mayor, he’d
probably get a lot of votes.”
I turned around and looked at the door where he’d vanished. “I’m starting to get that sense too.”
“Now, what was the reason you wanted to talk to me today?”
Tony’s knowledge of my whereabouts unnerved me, and I changed my mind about sticking around to talk to Nora. I told her I was running late and made plans to have dinner at her place tomorrow night. I took the next ten minutes to sit in my car to transcribe what I remembered from my encounter with Tony.
When I arrived at Andi’s showroom, I was surprised to find Kyle there. I could tell he was on his way out, based on the dual-cheek air-kiss he and Andi exchanged. Nick used to give me those, back when he was my vendor and I was his buyer. I wondered if we’d ever get past that, if we’d transition from texted Xs to the real thing, or if the distance between us was insurmountable in terms of starting a relationship. I hated to admit that even air-kisses were better than text messages.
Andi waved to me while Kyle caught the elevator. Today she wore a black knit sleeveless dress with a cowl neck, no stockings, and flat sandals. She bounced over to me.
“Omigod, I’m sooo happy you called. It’s been a long week already and it’s only Wednesday. We can totally hit happy hour if we leave right now.” She grabbed a purple handbag and tossed in a notebook, BlackBerry, and a laptop. “I know, most people would carry a briefcase, right? Let’s get out of here,” she said, and locked the showroom door behind us.
We walked across the parking lot to a restaurant overflowing with the after-five crowd. Strong tubes of neon framed the entrance. Andi shimmied her way past several of the tenants to the bar, where she perched on a stool. She thunked her hand on the top of the one next to her. “Have a seat, girlfriend!”
The bartender came over, drying a glass with a white towel. “Your usual?” he asked Andi. She nodded. “What’ll you have?” he asked me.
Diane Vallere - Style & Error 02 - Buyer, Beware Page 12
