Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2)

by Shelley Singer

  “They’d send the coupon in to the company, and the company would send them out a brochure. They were then a prospect, and their name was given to a salesman in their locality.”

  “Sounds effective,” I said. His patronizing look turned to one of affectionate pity.

  He laughed softly. “I’ll tell you, Jake, back in the days when costs were low and business was a whole different ball of wax, methods like that got by. But they don’t anymore. These days, a guy has got to hustle. We’re hustling now, and we’re growing fast.”

  I thought about the company’s history, its apparent belt-tightening, its move to smaller quarters in California.

  Pre-hustle. And pre-Morton.

  “I can tell,” I said brightly, “that you’re a hustler.”

  He liked that. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right, Jake. And that’s what I’m doing here. I was brought in to modernize the operation, make it flow, get this company the kind of business it deserves.”

  I put on my most eager face. He got up and began to walk around the office. “It’s all in the way you organize things, Jake, and I’ve got one hot sales organization, let me tell you.” Desperately, I tried to think of a way to get him onto the subject of his dead colleague. But it looked like I was going to get stuck with his sales pitch instead.

  “I guess everything depends on the product, doesn’t it?” I was hoping to steer him around to things academic, but he wasn’t having it.

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “Absolutely. You take a good product and a right-on sales structure and you’ve got something, absolutely. And the right kind of sales materials.” He scooped the old advertising album off the coffee table and returned it to the bookshelf. He brought back a loose-leaf binder and opened that up. “See that? This is the kind of support we provide for our people. Entry-level people, so they can move right on up the ladder.” I glanced at the pages he was flipping for me. Sales talks or something.

  “That’s terrific,” I said. “What ladder?”

  He looked sly. “That’s the thing. That is the thing. With my organization, a man in the field can move right on up. He sells enough and shows enough promise, he can increase his commissions and get himself a whole new ball game of supervisory duties and privileges. Absolutely. I’ll show you something.” He scooped this book off the coffee table, and, like the first, replaced it neatly on the bookshelf. He came back this time with a chart.

  The chart seemed to have something to do with the navy. At the top was a box labeled CSO. Below that were several little boxes, each of which had the word “admiral” in it. Under each admiral were several little boxes called “commodores.” Under those were captains, and under the captains were commanders and lieutenants. There were various percentages stuck beside each tier of boxes. The lowest percentages showed up next to the lieutenants.

  I showed polite interest. “What does this mean?”

  Morton leaned toward me, very earnest. “A man starts out as a lieutenant,” he said. “As he moves up by showing his stuff, he gets a bigger cut of the pie. At the very top, here, an admiral, well, he runs a whole damned region of the country and he reports directly to me.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “And what’s CSO?”

  “Well, that’s me, of course. Chief of Sales Operations. Get it? Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Sales Operations.” He smiled broadly.

  “There’s a lot of numbers here, percentages. But I can’t quite tell how much a salesperson makes. Say a guy sells a two-hundred-dollar course. What’s his take?”

  “Depends. The average retail profit margin here is twenty, twenty-five percent, but there’s a lot more to it than that. And that’s what the ladder’s all about, Jake. The higher you go, the bigger the profits, in volume and in percentages.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. All I’d wanted to know was how much a guy made when he sold a course and I was being fed a can of worms. “So admirals and commodores get retail profit, a share of sales, and a bonus, captains and commanders get retail profit and shares, and lieutenants get retail profit.”

  “That’s right, Jake!”

  I could see he was proud of me.

  “But why does everybody make a different retail profit?”

  He got impatient. “Well, they’d have to, wouldn’t they? What you’ve got here is a differential. The admiral, he buys direct from the company. But everybody else buys direct from the guy above him. You take it on down— the commodore, he runs a statewide area, he buys from his admiral. The captain, he runs a citywide area, he buys from the commodore. And the lieutenants and commanders buy from their captains. See, the captains, commodores and admirals, they’re the middlemen. So what you’ve got here is a differential and some added incentives in the form of shares and bonuses.”

  “Very impressive,” I said, very bored. “And you set all this up? This was your idea?”

  “Absolutely.” I tried to give him back the chart. He told me to keep it.

  “This must have meant big changes for the company. How did some of the old guard feel about that? People like Mr. Bowen and Mr. Armand and Mr. Smith?”

  Morton stopped smiling and sat back in his chair, folding his arms and crossing his legs. “Well, now, I don’t know why you’d want to ask a funny question like that, Jake. Who do you think brought me in to help out? And I don’t know why you’d want to bring up poor Jim Smith at all. It was a terrible blow to us, his passing. I can hardly bear to think about that happening to a man like him. A fine, fine, man and I’ll say no more on that subject.”

  “Certainly,” I said reverently. “I understand. When did they bring you in, by the way— I mean, how long has this new system been in operation?”

  “Oh, I’m the new boy on the block, all right,” he laughed, fully recovered from his grief of a moment before. “I set up shop three years ago. Took a while to get things operational, of course. Yes, I’d say we’ve been fully operational for a couple of years now.”

  “Amazing.”

  “No, not really, Jake. We find the best and we give ‘em the best to work with. Maybe you’d want to check this thing out for yourself, smart guy like you could make real money. Real money.”

  “Money’s always interesting.”

  He laughed loudly. “You better believe it. You just give me a call any time you want to get in on the ground floor.” He got up and pulled more items off the bookshelf. “Meanwhile, you can take a look at these.” He handed me a couple of booklets. He didn’t sit down again. Arm around my shoulder, he began to steer me toward the door. Once we got there, he herded me out into the hall and took me back to Bill Armand’s office, leaving me in the care of Armand’s secretary and telling me again to give him a call any time. Armand’s secretary said it wouldn’t be a minute until her boss could see me again.

  But of course her boss had no intention of actually talking to me. He came striding out of his office and carried me off upstairs to meet the communications manager. “After all,” he said, flashing his smile, “you two are kind of in the same business, aren’t you?”

  12

  At the second floor landing, we turned to the right and entered a large, nearly bare room that held a single desk, and a single chair on which was sitting a very young, very attractive blond woman, reading a book. I caught a glimpse of the cover just before she caught a glimpse of the executive vice president and tucked the book in a partly open drawer. It was a romance.

  Armand threw her a tight little smile, glancing at the drawer, and led me across the expanse of blue carpet to an open office door.

  Unlike the outer room, this one was small and cluttered. The woman who sat behind the desk didn’t quite live up to Alan’s “burnt out” description. She was, I guessed, in her early forties. Her eyes were deep blue, and had that tired look people get from years of the wrong kind of work or the wrong kind of marriage. The lids were dark and slightly crepey. Her hair was dark brown and cut straight across at shoulder length. Armand stepped back
to usher me in. She smiled.

  “Chloe,” he said, “this is Jake Samson, the magazine writer I told you about. Mr. Samson, Chloe Giannapoulos, our director of communications.” We mumbled at each other. “I’ll just leave you two to get down to it, then,” he added, disappearing from the doorway. The director of communications waved me to a chair. She dropped her eyes for just a moment to some papers on her desk. When she raised them again they were still tired, but there was also a glint of amusement in them.

  “What are you after?” she wanted to know.

  I launched into my little spiel about the home study phenomenon. She nodded solemnly.

  “I see,” she said. “It is a fascinating story, of course. What have you got there?” I was still clutching the papers and booklets I’d gotten from Bowen and Morton. I spread them out on her desk. That was when I noticed the one with the chubby silhouette on the cover. The one that started out, “This man studied at home.” The silhouette belonged to Ben Franklin. The woman sitting across from me tapped an index finger on Ben’s nose. “Like this one?”

  “Love it.”

  “I thought you would. It has all the history in it. Of the company. There’s really nothing more to know.” She tucked all my papers into a neat pile again. I picked them up and stuck them in various pockets.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. History’s important, of course, but it’s now that counts.”

  “That’s very good, Mr. Samson. ‘It’s now that counts’.” She smiled gently. “I would have known you were a writer even if Mr. Armand hadn’t told me. Now, where would you like to begin?”

  “Communications. What does that mean? What do you do?”

  “We produce everything that’s printed. Art and copy for advertising, promotional and sales materials. All the paper you’ve collected so far.”

  “And the courses?”

  “We perform an editorial function. Editing and production.”

  “Ah hah! Is that why you’re listed under both sales and academic? As two separate departments?”

  “As two separate functions.”

  “And one of your functions is under the authority of one vice president and the other is— or was— under the authority of another vice president? Isn’t that…tricky?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, sometimes. For them.” She smiled, a woman who had everything under control. Or didn’t give a damn. “Would you like to meet my staff, see some of the things they’re doing?”

  I didn’t think she would want me to see all the things they were doing and wondered how she’d keep that from happening. My wondering didn’t last long. She poked at her intercom. I could hear the young woman at the outer desk in stereo, through the door and through the machine.

  “Yes, Ms. Giannapoulos?”

  “Would you tell the staff to stop throwing food at each other or whatever they’re doing? I’m bringing them a visitor.”

  Chloe Giannapoulos guided me first into a well-lighted room where the artists worked. No desks, just big drafting tables and those little side cabinets they call taborets. I knew an artist once who used a taboret as a night table. I’ve never been able to see one since without imagining it to be full of exotic bed toys.

  “This is Arlene Shulman,” Giannapoulos was saying. “Our designer.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said vaguely. “Nice to see you.” I doubted that she remembered my name. I thought she probably remembered that we had met, since it had been only the night before. She returned to her contemplation of a large sheet of paper with some sort of layout blocked out in rectangles, squiggles, and amorphous forms. Taped up behind her desk was a large travel poster of Manhattan.

  The next stop, across the reception area from the artists, was the editorial office. It was a smaller room than the one the artists had. The four desks were jammed against each other in pairs. All three of the people in the room had pencils in their hands and were reading pages of manuscript or paste-ups. They all had typewriters, but no one was writing anything.

  One of the three was more interested in my arrival than the other two. He sat facing the door across the expanse of two desks, one his own and the other an unoccupied one I guessed belonged to Alan. The man was about fifty, or maybe a dissipated forty-five, with greased thin dark hair, pouches under his eyes, and dark, beard-shadowed jowls. His name, Chloe said, introducing us, was Bert Franklin. Bert jumped up to shake my hand and I wished he hadn’t. He was carrying the kind of paunch I spend a lot of time and energy trying not to get. Since I figured he was only about ten years older than me, the decay of his sagging physiognomy scared me. He smelled of tobacco and booze overlaid with breath mints. I wondered where he kept his stash.

  The other two people in the office just smiled and kept on working, a woman in her early thirties and a young guy who looked about twenty-three. The writing staff didn’t promise to be nearly as much fun as the artists. Maybe they were still in shock from having one of their coworkers arrested right in front of them. In any case, the one who interested me was Bert Franklin. He looked like he’d kill for a bottle of sour mash.

  Chloe began to explain what her editorial staff was doing. At the moment, she said, they were either editing copy or reading proofs of high school course revisions. Bert volunteered that he was spending most of his time “blocking out a new ad campaign” and working on the newsletter that was sent out to the salespeople. He was in charge of it, he said.

  “So I guess you’ve had a lot of experience at that sort of thing,” I said. He nodded, grand-old-man fashion.

  We all chatted aimlessly for a while and then Chloe suggested we let her staff get back to their deadlines.

  “Would you like to go to lunch?” I asked as we returned to her office.

  She looked at her watch, and I thought she was going to say she didn’t have time or maybe that she just wanted a hot dog. She surprised me by suggesting a place in Sausalito that served good seafood and offered a view of San Francisco across the bay. Artie would not be happy with the expense bill for that day.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were pulling off U.S. 101 at the Marin City exit down by the houseboats. There’s a whole community of them there, and for years it’s been the focus of political wrangling— sewage problems, development attempts, even class conflicts between the economically divergent elements of the community itself. I never really tried to understand the issues, but I hope the houseboats stay there forever.

  We parked in one of the lots between Bridgeway Avenue and the bay. Parking was even more expensive than the last time I’d been there, and I wondered if there was nothing tourists wouldn’t gladly pay to patronize the southern tip of Marin County.

  The day was mild and sunny and the bay was decorated with sails of many sizes and colors and shapes. A ferry was docking, spitting out a lunchtime crowd from San Francisco. And Detroit. And Dallas. And Kyoto. We beat them to the restaurant, and we even got a table on the window wall. Chloe ordered Campari and soda. I thought about a nice heavy imported beer, but, with the image of Bert Franklin before my eyes, ordered a glass of Grey Riesling.

  “Well, Mr. Samson. Did you get what you needed today?”

  I answered her half smile in kind. “Call me Jake. May I call you Chloe?” She inclined her head slightly. “Are you a Chicagoan, or did you just work there for a while?”

  “Born there.”

  “Me, too. How about that.” We both shook our heads over the mild coincidence. Since I’d lived in California I had met equal numbers of natives and transplanted midwesterners, and I expected that her experience was similar. We talked for a while about Chicago, the neighborhoods, the Loop, the old days of Richard Daley and his magical mayoral machine. Then I got back to the present.

  “That’s a very dedicated staff you have there, Chloe.”

  “Yes, aren’t they? That’s because they’re working for such a good cause.” She said it with a straight face. I went along with the joke.

  “It’s importan
t to have a cause.”

  “It’s important,” she said, “to have a job.”

  “And Bert Franklin seems particularly dedicated. Has he been there long?”

  “Two or three years. He did the same kind of work for a cosmetics company back east. Do you find him especially fascinating for some reason?”

  “I find him fascinating for many reasons,” I said truthfully.

  She gave me the half smile again. “How nice. For both of you.”

  “I heard you had a little bit of drama at your office the other day. Must have been pretty upsetting to the staff. The arrest, I mean.”

  She had stiffened slightly, but she was still smiling. “We were also a little upset about the murder. Is that what you want to know about, Jake? I thought you were interested in the company.”

  “I’m interested in everything,” I told her brightly. “That’s what makes me such an interesting guy.”

  She laughed. Our drinks came and she took a sip of hers.

  “The murder,” I explained, “was what got me interested in the company. Naturally, I’m curious about it.” Naturally.

  “Just how interested are you in the company? I know what Probe is. What are you trying to prove?”

  This was going to be a confusing case, I could see that now. She— and probably everybody else at Bright Future— thought I was after an exposé of the company. There I was, an unlicensed investigator looking for a killer, pretending to be doing a story on correspondence schools, and suspected of trying to dig up a business scandal.

  “Probe does not,” I said self-righteously, “investigate murders. If you know what Probe is, you know that. But I do know that one of your executives was killed, and that one of your employees was arrested. It’s common knowledge. I was just making conversation, Chloe.”