CHAPTER 11: THE TEMP

Fail again, fail better.

Samuel Beckett

The sun was low on the horizon by the time I got back to East 14th street and Discount Furniture. Nick met me at the door with his hand out. No man in the history of sales stuck his hand out faster than Nick. He was looking at me as if I had dollar signs on my forehead.

According to Nick Parsegian, there was nothing more manly in furniture than a leather

La-Z- Boy. He pointed to black, brown, and a tan one. He had one arm around my shoulders.

“Think of it, Victor, my friend. You’re in front of your television. The 49ers are playing. John Brodie is in the pocket preparing to pass. The coffee table in front of you is filled with Bowls of chips and guacamole and bottles of Schlitz.”

“I can’t afford this chair Nick. Besides, Schlitz tastes like piss.”

“We can make a deal. My daughter, Sarah, is looking for an automobile. You sell her a good low mileage vehicle at cost, I sell this Cadillac of easy chairs to you for cost.”

I should have known Parsegian was up to something. He almost ran toward me, grabbing my arm, steering me in the direction of the La Z Boy section of his store, which is more the size of a warehouse, probably because, at one time, it was a warehouse. It was so big, voices echoed. The building was divided into sections for different types of furniture. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I’d bought a bedroom set from Nick. The bedroom section and the mattress section took up the entire back of the store. Nick Parsegian was the salesman. Ron Sharifi his partner, was the business manager. Sweets called Ron, Abdul, which the Iranian resented because Abdul is an Arab name and Sharifi is a Shiite Moslem, a sect that believes the Sunni brand of Moslems from Arabia are heretics, information Nick had explained to me one time in Flynn’s when the subject had turned to a less than sober discussion of world religion. When I’d passed that information on to Sweets, he’d said it was gross to name their religion after shit. Sweets, who looked as if he was the long-term result of the blending of least three different races, never passed up the opportunity to slam Moslems. When I asked him about it once, his only response was crazy people. I thought this was pretty damn hilarious since Sweets was the craziest fucker I’d ever known.

From what I could tell, the owners of Discount Furniture have done very well. Nick lives in Kensington, which has some of the highest priced real estate in the Bay Area. I didn’t know where Sharifi lived, but he drove a brand-new silver Cadillac Coup de Ville.

As for the deal Parsegian was referring to, ‘cost’ means different amounts depending on the business. Vincent and I keep our costs per car a secret except from Sylvia. And there’s so many ways to hide true cost that whatever Parsegian would sell me the chair for - for his so-called cost - would most likely have a profit playing hide and seek with the IRS somewhere in their accounting system. And, more power to him. Profit is profit. I’m not a Communist, which is what Vincent accuses me of when he thinks I sold a car too cheap.

Parsegian slapped me on the back. “What do you say to that, Victor?”

“I say I’ll be happy to sell your daughter a car, Nick, but I really don’t need a chair. That’s not what I came in here for.”

“You want a new mattress? That Sealy you bought is passé. I brought in some firm ones you’ll love. Any back pain, poof, gone.”

“My mattress is perfectly fine.” Before he could go on to another item, I held up my hand. I’d prepared and rehearsed my story. “I’m trying to track down a car Winona Davis bought from us. She temped for you, remember a couple of months back. The address she gave us was a phony. I’ve asked the police. They have no known address. Her friends tell me she moved around.”

He screwed up his face, thinking. “Winona, you mean that poor young Negro lady that was murdered?

I nodded. “She worked for you for two months, Nick. You were the one who recommended her to us.” I wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “In fact I saw you two in Jack London Square. Seemed as if you were real friendly.” It was a lie. I’d never seen them there, but if they were having an affair, Jack London Square had a lot of bars and restaurants they could very well have frequented. The minute I saw Nick’s mouth open and close, the set of his jaw, I knew I’d hit a nerve.

“Victor, Victor,” He finally said. “Victor, my friend, Victor.”

“I’m right here, Nick, standing in front of you.”

“It was a business lunch.”

“With a temp?”

“She was very good with accounting. A surprise to Ron and me. You know how meticulous Ron is with our books. He couldn’t believe Winona discovered such errors.”

Aha, I thought. Well, people don’t really say aha, but possibly detectives do when something is revealed. Errors, in this case might be the hidden profits I was explaining. Maybe Winona’s murder had nothing to do with an affair, but was about money. Didn’t my detective book instruct me to follow the money? I took another shot in the dark.

“So Winona found out some irregularities. And what? She said she’d overlook them if you guys paid her a bonus. Like that?”

“Victor, my boy, what are you suggesting? That Winona was blackmailing us? Don’t be ridiculous. The fact is Winona saved us a ton of cash. Ron is getting a little old, you see. He overlooked a number of factory discounts that we could have taken advantage of. We got in just under the wire for application. The factory kicked back 10% on all the items we bought for the last six months. It added up. When you saw me with Winona I was taking her to lunch at Fisherman’s Grotto. I gave her a check for two hundred dollars. So you see you have everything mixed up.”

Easy enough to check. Pop knew Tony, Michael and Andy, the owners of the Grotto. There was still a problem in my mind. “How in the world did a temp get her hands on your books?”

“Now that did constitute a bit of dilemma. Ron keeps the accounting in the bottom drawer of his desk. It’s clear she was snooping. But once we learned that her snooping had made us a bunch of money, we overlooked the rest. Of course, we never used her again. Snoops don’t stop snooping, in my opinion. Ron wanted to keep her on.”

“Why was that?”

“She always wore these low-cut neckline blouses. It gave Ron an erection. Not healthy for an old man like that. In any case I put my foot down. No more Winona.”

It was hard to imagine old Ron, who had to be pushing eighty, with a woody. The conversation was going nowhere. There was no way I could prove or disprove Nick’s version of events without talking to Ron. Ron wasn’t in, and by the time I got a hold of him, Nick, if he was lying, would have persuaded his partner to back him up.

“You weren’t suggesting that I had anything to do with Winona’s murder, were you Victor?”

I didn’t answer, let him sweat. “Did she give you guys an address?”

“Temps don’t do that. The temp office does all the personnel work. We fill out the W-4’s. We pay the temp office, and they pay the temp. But you know that, since she worked for you.”

“Yeah, all right. Look, we’re trying to find where she stashed our wheels. Vincent is on my ass. When in trouble, I blame my twin. He does the same to me. “Sorry to bother you.”

“You sure I can’t convince you to purchase this La Z Boy?”

“Nah. Maybe in another year.”

“I’ll send my daughter to see you, okay? A car with a good engine. Something low mileage. A good price would make her poor father very happy.”

“You’re rich as Midas,” I said as I headed for the door having discovered nothing that would help me solve the murder of Winona Davis. My next stop was the Oasis and JR.