S Is for Silence

department. I walked down a short hallway, passing the restrooms and a lounge with comfortable chairs, where two people sat reading magazines. Doughnuts were available and a vending machine dispensed tea, hot chocolate, coffee, cappuccino, and lattes without charge. I found the cashier and told her I had an appointment with Mr. Cramer. She took my name and rang his office to tell him I was there.
    While I waited, I wandered back to the showroom floor, moving from a Corvette convertible to a Caprice station wagon. The best-looking car was an Iroc-Z Camaro convertible, bright red with a tan interior. The top was down and the leather seats were soft. Try tailing someone in a car that slick. I turned to find Mr. Cramer standing with his hands in his pockets, admiring the car as I did. I knew from counting on my fingers that he was in his early eighties. I could see he’d been handsome in his youth, and I sensed, like an aura, the volume of air he must have displaced before he shrank from age. His suit was a size that a young boy might wear. He said, “What kind of car you drive?”
    “1974 VW.”
    “I’d make you a pitch, but you look like a woman knows her own mind.”
    “I’d like to think so,” I said.
    “You’re here about Mrs. Sullivan.”
    “I am.”
    “Let’s go on up to my office. People see I’m down here, I never get a moment’s peace.”
    I followed him across the showroom floor and up the stairs. When we reached his office, he opened the door and stepped aside to let me in. The room was plain—a straight-legged wooden desk, a couch, three chairs, and white walls on which he’d mounted numerous black-and-white photographs of himself with various local bigwigs. The Cromwell Chamber of Commerce had given him a citation for community service. The furniture might well have been the set he started business with. “Did you graduate from college?” he asked as he rounded his desk and took a seat.
    I sat down across from him, putting my shoulder bag on the floor at my feet. “Hardly. I had two semesters of junior college, but I don’t think that counts.”
    “Better than I did. My father dug ditches for a living and never saved a dime. My senior year in high school, he was killed in an auto accident. It’d been raining for a week, highway was slick as glass, and he went off a bridge. I was the oldest of four boys and I had to go to work. One thing my dad taught me was never do manual labor. He hated his job. He said, ‘Son, if you want to make money, find a job where you have to shower before you go to work instead of when you get home.’ He maintained there was always someone for hire when it came to the dirty work, and I’ve followed that to this day.”
    “How’d you end up selling cars?”
    “Desperation. Everything turned out fine in the end, but it didn’t look so promising at first. The only fellow who’d hire me was George Blickenstaff, owner of the local Ford dealership. He was an old family friend and I guess he took pity on me. I started selling Fords when I was nineteen years old. That was 1925. I didn’t much care for it, but at least I wasn’t working with my hands. Turns out I had a knack for sales. Four years later, the stock market crashed.”
    “That must have put a dent in the business.”
    “Some areas, yes, but not as much out here. We were always small potatoes and we didn’t take the same hit the bigger dealers did. By the time the Depression came along, I was doing pretty well, at least compared to what a lot of other folks endured. By then, I’d turned into Blickenstaff’s star salesman. You’d have thought it was something I was born to do. Of course, I was full of myself and thought I deserved a dealership of my own.”
    “Is that when you bought this place?”
    “Took me years. Problem was, every time I had money in the bank, something came along that took the wind right out of my sails. I put my brothers through college and just about had my mother’s house paid off when she got sick. The hospital bill alone was enough to wipe me out. Factor in the funeral expenses and the headstone and I was flat broke. I didn’t marry till I was thirty-two years old and that set me back again because suddenly I was saddled with a family.”
    “But you did persevere,” I said.
    “Oh, I did better than that. By 1939, I could see what was coming. The minute Germany invaded Poland, I talked old man Blickenstaff into stockpiling tires, car parts, and gasoline. He