Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

Time to change that. Chick shoved the sales reports into a desk drawer and popped a Certs breath mint. He loved the Certs jingle— Two. . two. . two mints in one! — and when he strode out onto the lot he knew instantly it was going to be a good day for selling cars. The sun was out, making the ’68s look a littler newer and the used cars a little less old. It was humid but not too hot, a kiss of breeze coming off Lake St. Clair and stirring the pennants. Lately he’d noticed that more and more of the people wandering around the lot peering into windows were eager to talk about the Tigers. It was the kind of small talk every salesman loves, a superb lubricant. The team’s inspired play was lifting the city’s shaken spirits, bringing people together again and, best of all, making them less reluctant to part with their money.

Within minutes Chick was pounding on an old black couple from Highland Park, trying to get them to open their eyes and see why the four-door ’65 LeSabre with only 32,000 “original” miles on the odometer was an irresistible deal even though the body had a little rust and there was a hairline crack in the windshield. (Chick didn’t bother to mention the hairline crack in the engine block.) That rust had them worried. Just as Chick was about to throw in a cosmetic paintjob to nail down the deal, his eye caught a flash of black and silver easing onto the lot from 9 Mile. He kept talking, but his eyes stayed on the black car, an immaculate ’54 Buick Century. “If you’re so worried about a little rust,” he told the black couple, “then I’ll paint the car for free. What do you say to that?” They were mulling it over as Willie Bledsoe unfurled himself from the driver’s seat of the black ’54 Century. He was wearing sunglasses, sharp clothes. A man who’d come here to deal.

As expected, the offer of the “free” paintjob clinched the sale, and Chick sent the old couple off to the finance office to get their pockets hoovered. He’d forgotten all about them by the time he turned on the smile and walked up to Willie Bledsoe with his right hand out.

“You finally made it!” he cried, pumping Willie’s hand.

“Yessir. Finally.”

Chick looked at his car. “Where’d you pick up the hearse?”

Willie chuckled. “It was a gift, actually. From a friend of my brother’s.”

It had a cheap paintjob on it, but there were no dents or visible rust, the chrome sparkled like new, and the red-and-black interior was perfect. Cars didn’t hold up this well in Michigan. This one would fetch a pretty dollar. “Looks like you’ve been taking pretty good care of her, Willie,” Chick said.

“Oh, yes sir. Car spent its whole life in Alabama — till I drove it up here last spring. I kept it in a garage all last winter. Isn’t a speck of rust on it.”

“How many miles she got on her?”

“Not even twenty-five thousand — all original.”

Right, Chick thought, and I was born last Tuesday. His suspicions were confirmed when he walked around behind the car and saw the chrome nameplate of the original dealer bolted to the trunk lid— Tucker Buick, Levittown, Long Island —which meant this was originally a New York car and Willie had already told at least one major lie and therefore it was open season. Chick slid behind the steering wheel. The odometer read 24,767, and he wondered if that meant 124,767 or something else. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he wouldn’t even have to run the car through the Fountain of Youth — the windowless room at the back of the lot where the boys rolled back odometers, changed the oil, gave used cars a cheap paintjob and a fresh set of shoes. The interior had that moldy smell common to old cars, a smell Chick had loved since he was a boy. “Why you want to give up a classic like this, Willie?” he said, climbing out of the car. “She’s a beaut.”

“Ever since that day my Uncle Bob took me for a ride in the Deuce and a Quarter you sold him, I knew I had to have me one.”

“So you got your eye on a Deuce?”

“Yessir. A used convertible, if you’ve got one.”

“As a matter of fact I just got a ragtop in Friday. It’s a repo, practically fresh off the assembly line. Let’s go have a look.”

Fifteen minutes later Chick was sitting in the passenger seat of a ’67 Deuce convertible, its top rolled back, its pale blue skin gleaming in the morning sunshine. Willie was driving, his left elbow resting on the driver’s door, his right wrist on top of the steering wheel. He looked right at home.

They were sailing out Jefferson, the lake glistening like Turtle Waxed sheet metal off to their right as Willie described how Jose Cardenal had tried to outrun Mickey Stanley’s drive to deep center in the ninth inning yesterday but couldn’t catch up with it. Chick pretended to listen as he lit a cigarette. There was something he wanted to get off his chest before they got down to business. When Willie got through with the play-by-play, Chick said, “Listen, Willie, I want to apologize for Saturday night.”

“Apologize, Mr. Murphy? For what?”

“For my wife. You saw her. She was drunker’n a boiled owl.”

“No need to apologize, Mr. Murphy. We all have a little too much now and then.”

“I swear to Christ, she gets a load on and you can’t even talk to her.” The cigarette tasted terrible and he tossed it toward the lake. “Tell me something. You ever see her flirt with anybody at the club, members or guys on the staff?”

The answer came back so fast Chick knew he was lying. He almost sounded scared. “Flirt? You mean, like, come on to? I. . Mr. Murphy, I. . wouldn’t know a thing about any of that.”

“Ah, let’s drop it. Sorry I said anything. So tell me, you like the blue color?”

Chick could tell he was relieved by the change of subject. Willie’s lie, the fear in his voice, his obvious relief — it convinced Chick that there was something to his suspicions about Blythe. He’d heard whispers that Dick Kowalski got run out of the Flint Golf Club for sporting with a member’s wife before he washed up at Oakland Hills. Chick made a note to keep an eye on that Polack weasel.

Willie said, “The color’s fine.”

That sounded a little lukewarm, like he was still wrestling with this, the most crucial question in the average car buyer’s mind. Chick said, “The factory calls it ‘Bahama blue’—whatever the fuck that means.”

“Means driving the car’s supposed to feel like a Caribbean vacation. Which it does. I look at this car and I see a tropical sky on a sunny day.”

That sounded a lot more promising. “You look like you were born sitting there, Willie. It’s a great fit.”

“I really like these white seats and red carpet. And I love the way it drives. Practically steers itself.”

Chick knew then that the car was sold, so he asked Willie if he’d given any more thought to coming to work at the dealership.

“Tell you the truth, Mr. Murphy, I don’t really know much about cars.”

“I’ll teach you. The main thing’s how you deal with people. Selling cars to people is all about the people, not the cars.”

“I might be doing some traveling soon.”

“Ahh, must be nice.”

“What must be nice?”

“To be young and single, not a care in the world.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

Chick noticed he didn’t smile when he said it. They rode in silence for a while. Chick knew what Willie was thinking. He was wondering how much money he would need to cover the difference between the value of his trade-in and the price of this Deuce. To get the ball rolling Chick said, “How much you think your Century’s worth, Willie?”

“Gee, Mr. Murphy, how much you think—”

“You ever heard of G.M.A.C.?”