Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Two

The duplex was just off Evans Avenue near the University of Denver. The upper and lower flats were identical, each running to around twelve hundred square feet, with three bedrooms and one and a half baths. The lower flat, where the owner and his family lived, had been better maintained than the upstairs rental unit, but when was it ever otherwise? The tenants, a young couple named Minnick, hadn’t abused the property too badly. They were graduate students with an infant son, and they’d made the third bedroom into a study, its walls given over entirely to bookshelves and bulletin boards, its floor space pretty much filled by a pair of desks improvised out of filing cabinets and plywood. They stood awkwardly like any tenants during a prospective buyer’s inspection, worried that they might have to move, afraid they might be blamed by buyer and seller alike for the condition of the property.

The husband was lean and gawky, with knobby wrists and a prominent Adam’s apple and a haircut that suggested his wife had taken up barbering as an economy, and a false economy at that. The wife was short, with a round face and round glasses that magnified her light brown eyes. A faded blue blouse was buttoned tight across her plump chest. Mark wondered if she was nursing the kid.

She wasn’t actually pretty, but there was something about her that stirred him.

Downstairs, he accepted a cup of instant coffee from the owner, a Mr. Bedrosian, and busied himself writing numbers on his yellow pad. He made Bedrosian wait awhile after he’d figured out what he was going to offer.

Then he said, “Well, it’s a nice piece of property, Mr. Bedrosian. I like what you’ve done with it.”

“It’s a sound house,” Bedrosian said. He’d said that before, more than once.

“But I’ll tell you,” Mark said, “I can’t quite see the numbers you came up with. Now if I’m going to create a positive cash flow for myself here, you’d have to show me some flexibility on the selling price and the financing.”

“I see,” Bedrosian said. In Mark’s experience, that was something people said when they didn’t.

“I’d like to buy her,” he went on. “And I think you genuinely want to sell—”

“No question about that.”

“—and if you’re a motivated seller, I think we can probably cut a deal that’ll work for both of us. As far as I’m concerned, the only good deal is one that’s good for all concerned. If you don’t win, I don’t win either.”

He actually believed this, and he was convinced this had more than a little to do with his success in real estate. At forty-two, he owned one-and two-family houses in four states, and his net worth was somewhere between four and five million dollars. He had accomplished all of this in, well, not quite eight years.

And he’d started with next to nothing. Eight years ago he’d been working for his wife’s father, selling hardware and pots and pans in a small store at a second-rate shopping mall in Topeka. Then he read one of those books, getting rich in real estate with no money down, and it was as if the book had been written with him and him alone in mind, as if the author had called him up and was telling him all of this over the phone. Everything was clear and simple; everything made perfect sense.

He did exactly what the book told him to do. Ten days after he read it he made his first offer for a house. It was turned down, but in the course of the following week he made a dozen more offers, and three of them were accepted. By the end of the first month he owned eight houses and was generating a positive cash flow from every one of them.

John Randall Spears, the man who wrote the book, traveled around the country teaching seminars and selling a set of audio tapes, and after he’d been in real estate for two years Mark attended one of the seminars. He got a few tips that made it worth his time, but most of what the man had to say was already spelled out in his book. Mark had read dozens of other books in the meantime, and had learned something from all of them, but you didn’t really need anything beyond that first book. If you read it and understood it and did exactly what it said, you would get rich.

“I give this seminar four times a week,” John Randall Spears had told them. “We’ve got two hundred men and women in the room tonight, and that’s about average. Last year twenty thousand people took this seminar. Now how many of them do you figure are getting rich?”

Maybe half, Mark figured. Or maybe that was high. Say a third, to be conservative.

“One in fifty,” Spears said. “One in fifty! That means four people in this room tonight are going to get rich and the rest of you are just getting another day older. And do you know what’s going to keep the rest of you stuck right where you are?” He pounded his fist into his palm. “Sitting on your butts! I’ll make a few predictions right now based on some of our data. Of the two hundred of you, sixty of you won’t even study the classified ads for more than a day or two. Maybe fifty of you’ll actually go and look at some properties. Fifteen or twenty of you’ll go so far as to make a written offer to purchase. Six or eight of you’ll keep on making offers until one of ’em’s accepted. And about four — that’s two percent — that’s one in fifty, just like I said — will keep on making offers and buying more property and those are the ones who’ll wind up rich. Now the rest of you” — and he shook his finger at them — “you can’t say you’re not getting your moneys worth out of what we’ve been doing here tonight. Because it’s entirely up to you whether you’re in that two percent winners circle. And, if you don’t get off your butt, if you don’t choose to go for it, you’ll still have gotten one thing out of it. For the rest of your life you can never really pretend you didn’t have a chance. You’ve got that chance. You’ll always have that chance, and every day you can take it or not take it.”

Mark Adlon had found the talk inspiring, but then he hadn’t really needed further inspiration at that stage. And, however inspiring the talk may have been, the fact remained that it would only inspire one person in fifty to go the whole nine yards. (Although, he noticed, it did indeed inspire a substantially higher percentage than that to shell out $398 for the set of tapes.)

It was getting dark by the time he left the duplex. He was staying downtown at the Radisson. He found a parking space in the garage for the Lincoln and took the elevator up to the VIP floor. You paid a couple more dollars for a room there and for that they gave you a concierge on the floor, and a breakfast buffet and a complimentary newspaper outside your door in the morning, and drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the evening. It wasn’t all that big a deal, but it was deductible, and it made sense to treat yourself well. The more you established yourself in your own mind as successful, the more other people cooperated in your increasing success. And, when you felt good about yourself, you had better judgment and your instincts were sharper and you made better decisions.

In the room he fixed himself a light scotch and water, drank half of it, shucked out of his suit and stood under a hot shower. He put on a sport shirt and slacks, finished his drink, and put through a call to his wife in Overland Park. (The house in Topeka had been rented out after they’d moved to suburban Kansas City; then, a year or so ago, the right buyer had come along and he’d sold it.)

He said, “Well, girl, we now own a third house in Denver. Or we will in a couple of days. The owner’s a nice old guy who wants to live in Florida. His sister has a place in Kissimmee and he wants something just like that, with orange trees in the backyard.”

He was on the phone for ten minutes. He told her about his day and heard about hers. He had a son in the eleventh grade and a daughter just two weeks away from junior high graduation, he had a big house with landscaped grounds and a forty-foot pool, he had property management firms to collect the rents and contend with the tenants, and all he had to do was keep on keeping on and he’d get a little richer every day, and have a little more fun.

Over dinner, a plate of fettuccini Alfredo and a big bowl of salad at a downtown restaurant full of wood and polished brass and hanging plants, he found himself thinking of Bedrosian’s tenant. Well, his tenant now, or in a couple of days when the sale went through.

The wife, the little pouter pigeon, with her round body and her round face and her round eyeglasses. And the round breasts, straining the front of her shirt. He found himself looking appraisingly at a couple of the waitresses and other women in the restaurant.

He ordered a cup of coffee, and while he waited for the girl to bring it he sat with his eyes closed and breathed slowly and deeply through his nose, holding the breath for a few seconds between the inhale and the exhale. He let himself tune in to his own inner rhythms and he recognized what he found there.

He drank his coffee, added a tip to the check and paid with a credit card. Outside, he walked a few blocks on the pedestrian mall where the restaurant was located. He went back to his hotel, got the Lincoln out of the garage, and drove around. Several times he saw women at bus stops and offered them rides, but they all turned him down. Only one even bothered to speak; from the others he got a stiff-lipped stare and a quick shake of the head.

In Littleton, south of the city, he stopped at a 7-Eleven. The clerk was a very tall youth with a dirty apron. Mark bought a pack of gum and left, flipping the gum into an empty oil drum on his way back to his car. He passed up two more convenience stores because there were too many cars parked out in front. The next one was another 7-Eleven and there was only one other customer, a fat woman buying ice cream. Her entertainment for the night, he thought. Then, as she was paying at the register, two young men came in for beer and cigarettes.

He stood to one side at the magazine counter, feigning interest in a copy of Car & Driver. Every few seconds he would look over the top of the magazine at the girl behind the counter. She was taller than little Mrs. Minnick and her hair was a lighter brown. Her figure looked good, from what he could see of it. And, while she looked nothing like the woman he had seen at Bedrosian’s house, there was some quality about her, something that might have been vulnerability, that reminded him of the other woman.

She would do. That was the thing: she would do.

He waited there at the magazine counter, a forty-two-year-old millionaire an inch or so shy of medium height, with wavy blow-dried brown hair that was just starting to go gray at the temples. He’d put on weight in his eight years in the real estate game; he was tons more active than he’d been in the past, but all the running around gave him a hell of an appetite and it was easier to eat what he wanted than struggle with it. His face had filled out and he was getting a little jowly, but the up side of the extra weight was that it didn’t hurt you in business. A plump man looked prosperous, and at the same time trustworthy. You wouldn’t want to be out-and-out fat, but a few extra pounds was all to the good.

The two young men paid for their Marlboros and Bud and left. He heard their engine start, turned to check the lot outside. There was only his Lincoln, parked off to the side, and a Honda Civic that must have belonged to the girl.

His heart was racing, racing. He walked to the rear of the store, pausing at the display of auto care products to pick up a quart can of motor oil. He stationed himself in front of a glass-fronted food locker full of frozen burritos and pizzas. He called out, “Miss? Could you come here a minute?”

“What’s the matter?”

“I need your help with something.”

She was not quite his height. Young — maybe twenty-six, twenty-eight. He could smell her perfume and her sweat.

“What is it?”

Her name was Cindi. It said so on her little plastic name badge.

“Back there. Do you see where I’m pointing?”

“Where?”

She looked, frowning, leaning forward, and he swung the can of motor oil in a vicious arc, connecting solidly with the back of her head. She fell without a sound, and as she dropped one leg swung out behind her and dislodged a couple packages of Beer Nuts from a display.

He thought, Now, quickly, before anyone comes in. But he wanted her awake, he wanted her knowing what was happening. He caught her up under the arms and half carried, half dragged her into the back, where two doors set in a wall of unfinished concrete block opened into restrooms. In the men’s room, he propped her up against the sink. He stood between her legs and put his hands on her body, filling his senses with her.

She was still out, and for a moment he was afraid she was dead. But he could see a pulse working in the hollow of her throat.

He tore a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, wadded them up and crammed them into her mouth. He said, “Cindi?” When she failed to respond he ran water in the sink and splashed a little on her face. He said, “Cindi? Open your eyes, Cindi. Open them.”

She stirred. Her eyes fluttered, then opened. Brown eyes, not too well focused yet. Perspiration beading her upper lip.

He leaned his lower body against her. He settled a hand on either side of her throat. Her eyes were bringing his image into focus and he saw the fear coming into them now, the terror, and he said, “You look at me, Cindi, you look at me, darling,” and he held her eyes with his and ground his hips into hers as he choked the life out of her.

He wiped the faucets, the sink, the doorknob. With a paper towel around his hand he pressed the button to lock the door behind him, and he kept the towel over his hand as he pushed the door shut. He used it again to wipe off the can of motor oil, which he returned to its proper place on the way out of the store.

Two customers were waiting at the register, another was heating something in the microwave, and one of them asked Mark if he knew where the clerk was.

“In back,” he said. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

Back at the Radisson, the concierge greeted him by name as he got off the elevator. Well, that was part of what you paid extra for, that sort of personal touch.

He showered again and put on a robe. He sat at the desk for half an hour, going over his schedule for the next day, checking through the real estate listings. He caught the eleven o’clock news and the first few minutes of the Tonight show, turning it off at the end of Carson’s monologue.

In bed, he went over the day’s events as if they were on videotape. He pushed the mental fast-forward button during the dull spots, then moved to slow-motion from the point where he walked into the 7-Eleven. He did a freeze-frame on her face at the end, the knowledge and raw fear coming into her eyes, then the light going out of them.

He clung to that image and slid off to sleep with it.