wanted, without any luck.
“Merger? Well I don’t keep up with the news very much.”
“I don’t suppose you do.” She spoke without thinking.
“Suppose I don’t do what, Margaret?” The tone of his voice remained conversational, but the hairs on the back of her neck stood up; she was on the third arm now, still no luck.
“Keep up with the news, mergers and things like that.” She was trying very hard to be very careful.
“And things like that?” he said. “Just what do you think I’m doing when I should be keeping up with things like that, Margaret?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But you think you know, assume you know,” he said. “By your response, you implied that you have knowledge of what I do with my time. So tell me, what is it that I do with my days and nights that keeps me so busy, Margaret?”
I will not turn around, I will not let him see my face, she kept telling herself. “Young people like you wouldn’t find business news very interesting, I thought.” It seemed like an innocuous enough answer.
“I don’t believe that’s what you thought at all, Margaret.” She froze; he was speaking right into her ear after moving without a sound. Hot breath scorched her lobes.
For a brief moment, she seriously considered screaming, but some inner voice spoke an old rule of retail, if you don’t have what they want, sell them what you got. Margaret pulled a 38 regular from the rack, it was not exactly what he wanted; the shade of blue wasn’t as dark and the lapels were narrower, but it came awfully close to matching what he was wearing.
Turning around to stand face to face with him, she held the coat up, “I think this is the closest we can come to what you want. It’s hardly a perfect match, but when you consider that your original is now probably more than 50 years old, making it impossible to find an exact equivalent, then I think you’ll agree this will be an excellent replacement for the soiled rag you’re wearing now.” Her heart was pounding.
For a very long minute, the young man stood there only inches from her, so close was he that she got a good look at the spidery black veins under his alabaster white skin. Then he took his dark glasses off, blood red eyes met hers. “I bought that original Howlin & Stritch sport coat in the fall of 1959,” he said. “Since then, it has been replaced seventeen times. Every one of those times, I went into a store, just like this one, and asked a sales lady to help me find an exact match and I always left with what I came for, but I never paid for it, not one penny, not one time. You want to know why, Margaret?”
Customer service, customer service, her mind repeated. Agree with them on anything as long as you get the sale. “Yes, please tell me,” she answered.
“They were about to scream, every damn one of the bitches, when they saw what I was.” He smiled, giving another brief glimpse of razor sharp incisors. “But the thing is: I was going to pay cash, every time; just a simple transaction and I would leave with my merchandise, but I smelt the fear on them. It oozed out of their pores the way juice does out of a broiling steak and I couldn’t help myself.” He made a gesture, indicating their surroundings. “Clothing stores never change, not down through the years, the racks are still at least four feet high and when you pull someone down to the floor in the blink of an eye, nobody notices.”
The monster that wore the young man’s face, took a step back. “I can smell the same fear on you, Margaret,” he said, “and the scent is thick.”
Customer Service, Customer Service. She looked right into his eyes filled with hell’s fire and said, “This coat was originally $175.00, but it’s now been green lined to $125.00. Will that be cash or do you want to put it on your Wilk Brothers card?”
Those crimson eyes regarded her for a moment, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Like I said, I always pay cash.”
“That’ll be fine, I will ring it up for you,” she said, and with coat in hand, headed for the register, not wanting to look at those eyes any more than necessary. That was when she noticed Mike Rose heading down the hallway to the public restrooms, she had completely forgotten about him and frankly no longer cared what he might be hiding under his overcoat. With shaking hands, she punched in the transaction number and prepared to wand the bar code on the tag, hoping that was all it would take to get rid of this particular customer.
“I’ll be right back in a minute.” Margaret jumped; without a sound, the young man had followed her. He then proceeded down the same hallway Mike had walked seconds before.
I could run for it, right now, she thought. I could be out the front door and across the parking lot to the car in two minutes. Get the hell out of her and don’t look back, let those little snips in ladies sportswear handle that thing.
But she did nothing of the kind, except to ring up the coat for a $125.00 plus tax cash sale. Then she waited, and waited. Minutes ticked by and Margaret watched the hallway that led back to an antiseptic pair of customer restrooms, but still no one returned. Finally, she picked up the phone to call the floor manager’s number; he’d be found where he usually spent every evening: back in his office on the other side of the store, talking on an outside line to his girlfriend. She had punched the first two digits of his pager number, when the creak of the restroom door was heard from down the hall, followed by the sound of footsteps on parquet. Her customer had returned.
Only when he was almost back to the register did Margaret notice he was carrying something in his left hand, a couple of Ralph Lauren tee shirts. “Thought you’d want these back,” he said and tossed them down on the counter, at the same time he reached into his right hand in and pulled out the wad of bills and proceeded to peel off four fifties.
“It only came to $130.63, that’s way too much,” she protested.
“Keep the change, Margaret,” he replied. “You earned it.” With that, he reached over and picked up the bag containing his purchase. “Got to get going, believe it or not, there’s a poker game waiting for me,” he said, turning to leave.
“Why?” she asked.
“You were afraid, but you didn’t try to scream,” he said with his back to her. “In all these years, you are the only one who ever looked right at me, saw the truth and still treated me like I was still human.”
“What about these?” She held up the Ralph Lauren tees.
“Don’t like vermin,” he was walking away now. “Don’t matter if it’s the kind that scurries around on four legs or walks upright on two. Take care, Margaret.” Then he walked away, leaving through the front door. Only when he was gone did she realize that she had forgotten to finish ringing up the sale and give him the receipt. She quickly dismissed the idea of chasing after him; it seemed highly unlikely this sale would end up as a return.
She looked down at her watch and was surprised to see that barely ten minutes had passed since she had first noticed Mike Rose browsing among the Ralph Lauren shirts. Again, from far across the store came the laughter, nobody had seen a thing.
Thinking of Mike, Margaret remembered that he had yet to return from the Men’s room; she looked back down the hallway that lead to the public toilets, and saw no sign of him. The proper procedure would have been to call the manager on duty, they handled all suspected shoplifting incidents, but morbid curiosity got the better of her. Knocking on the Men’s room door got nothing more than silence. “Coming in,” she said and pushed the door open, only to find an empty room with a sink, a stall, and a urinal, side by side against a tile covered wall.
Then she saw it, bright crimson and the size of a quarter, on the floor just inside the stall and directly below a ceiling vent that was part of a heating system that led to the roof. It was blood and she had no doubt to whom it belonged. Making haste, she cranked the towel dispenser and tore off at least three feet of coarse brown paper. Slightly wetting it at the sink, she knelt down and washed the drop of blood away then threw the towel in the trash. If I’m asked
no questions, then I won’t have to tell any lies. In all her years in retail, she had never had a $70.00 tip, so wiping up that drop of blood seemed like the thing to do.
Days later, police officers investigating the disappearance of one Mike Rose, would question her about reports that he was seen entering Wilk Brothers about an hour before closing on that Monday night, the last time anybody saw him.
Margaret identified a picture of Mike and yes, she had seen him come in the store, browse and walk back in the direction of the public restrooms. Truthfully, she could answer that she had no idea where he had gone after that.
“People come in; people go out,” Margaret told the officers. “Some buy and some do not. You never know what’s going to come through the door.”
The End
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