Page 10 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“So you speak Spanish, and what else?” I asked once I was seated.

This car was a little beat-up, but when I looked over at the instrument panel, I did see that it was full of gas.

That was something I’d always kept track of in Grant’s car, for his sake and for my own since I didn’t want to be stranded somewhere on the highway.

“What else…” Levi looked over his shoulder and then pulled out as he thought.

“Well, I won an award for courage at camp when I was eight. I picked up a snake that had crawled into our cabin and carried it out into the woods. It wasn’t very courageous,” he confided.

“The snake wasn’t that big and I knew it wasn’t poisonous because at that point in my life, I was an amateur herpetologist. That’s—”

“I know what it is,” I interrupted. “I was a biology major.”

“Yeah? Were you thinking about medical school?”

“No, I imagined that I’d be in a lab, like I already told you. I shared that before.”

“That’s right, when I was withholding the crucial information about my second-language abilities,” he reminisced.

“Let me fill in some gaps.” He told me a few more facts, like how he got into an accident while out with his driving instructor at age fifteen (“not my fault”) and how he had nearly burned down his house while trying to make a Mothers Day breakfast without his two sisters butting in (“definitely my fault, but I was eventually forgiven”).

“It sounds like your whole family is pretty close,” I noted, and he nodded slightly.

“I’d say that we are. We don’t talk every day—I don’t talk to them every day,” he corrected himself, “but I think that Ava and Liv are in fairly constant communication with each other and with our mom.”

“And they’re not mad at you,” I confirmed.

“For being a fuck-up? No, they’re not mad. They’re worried,” he said, and frowned. “They want me to be happy.”

“Which you’re not, due to your lack of achievement. We were supposed to work on that today,” I reminded him.

“Right, but my friend August and I were talking about meeting up and I also remembered him saying that he needs someone new to work on his books, that the last guy disappeared or something. I thought this would be perfect. You said you’re taking on new clients.”

“I am, because I lost several while I couldn’t work. I really could use the income.”

“Perfect,” he said again.

“Then afterwards, we can work on your stuff.” He had, as I’d requested, sent over his CV and I’d carefully read it.

One thing I already knew we had to add was his fluency in another language—actually, I would ask Hernán to quiz him more to make sure of that skill.

I didn’t like what some people called “fibs,” not even on a résumé where employers might assume they’d find them. No, lying was not ok.

I kept asking questions, mostly now about important things like his GPA, if Ava had been correct about why he’d lost his last few jobs, and the state of his finances. “You have to be honest with the person managing your money,” I admonished when he seemed evasive in some of his answers.

“I never said that you’d be my bookkeeper,” he reminded me. “I never exactly clarified what it is that I want from you.”

“Go ahead,” I offered, and now he seemed to be thinking.

I looked around as I waited for his response.

I didn’t know Detroit all that well, not every bit of the sprawling city, and I hadn’t been to this particular area before.

It looked semi-industrial and fully run-down, and not a place where you’d find a nightclub.

“Where are we going?” I asked, just as Levi slowed the car.

“Here,” he said. He stopped in front of a building and I frowned through the window. At best, it looked neglected, but I would have said that “abandoned” and “miserable” were better descriptors for the place.

“Your friend’s business is in trouble,” I announced.

“No, it’s a cover,” he said. “Come on.”

A cover? I opened the door and he came around to the side and helped me out. He walked to the crappy building and knocked hard, actually pounding.

“Everyone is downstairs,” he explained. “I want them to hear me.”

Someone did, eventually. It took long enough that I got nervous and was looking around a lot.

“Who is it?” a voice barked from inside.

“I’m here to see August,” Levi said, and stated his own name. After another long interval, the door finally opened.

“You knew I was coming,” Levi told the man as they shook hands and then hugged.

“Never can be too careful.” He turned to me. “This is the bookkeeper?” He rolled a doubtful gaze over me but I certainly looked professional in my grey pants and ivory-colored shirt, which I always wore to meet clients. I considered it my uniform.

“Emerson Mack,” I stated and held out my hand. He shook with me, too, and introduced himself in return. This was Levi’s friend August and this shabby building housed his business.

“Come on in,” he invited. First, I had to face what looked like a staircase into the bowels of hell.

“Is there an elevator?” I asked, but there wasn’t.

“I’ll help you,” Levi said. After the first few steps, he was almost carrying me, in fact, so it seemed like he didn’t spend all his time just hanging out.

He must have been putting in hours at the gym, because my weight didn’t bother him in the least. I noticed that the stairs were just about as decrepit as the outside of the building, dirty and worn-out.

“Welcome to my place,” August said and opened the door at the bottom.

It was a different world on the other side of it.

We entered a fancy ballroom with velvet curtains and velvet on the walls, animal print booths, and huge chandeliers.

They hung a little low, but we were in a basement and everything seemed compressed.

Also, while August was only a little taller than I was, Levi had more than a few inches on him.

The crystal pendants weren’t too far above his head.

At first, I was overwhelmed by the old Hollywood allure…

until I studied things a little more closely.

Probably, with the lights dimmed at night for the crowd of clubbers, the zebra upholstery wouldn’t have seemed worn on the edges, and the chandeliers wouldn’t have looked so dusty.

Probably no one would have noticed the gouges out of the dance floor or that one of the large mirrors had a horizonal crack that shot from one edge nearly to the other.

There were no windows, since we were in a basement, and the air felt heavy.

It also smelled like no one had bothered to mop up spilled drinks from the night before.

August kept walking through the main room and we both followed. He held back one of the thick curtains and we went into a smaller room set up with tables, and then he pulled back another curtain that hung on the wall to expose a hidden door, which he opened.

I blinked at the change between what was behind it and the decaying glamour of the club behind us.

This was a regular employee break room, with the fluorescent lights above us, carpet tiles under our feet, and the same cheap, aluminum furniture I’d sat on in all my jobs in college when I’d first started keeping books for other people and getting paid for it.

We took a table and August wanted to make sure I knew that he wasn’t hiring me, not just yet.

I’d brought along a hard copy of my CV but he examined it only briefly.

Instead, he asked about the security I used to protect clients’ privacy and if I kept a lot of hard copies of documents.

He tapped the paper résumé. “Do you have actual files? Do you store things on drives?”

I answered his questions and then he paused for a moment, looking at me, before he posed another one. “What would you do if you found mistakes in our books?”

“I would talk to you about them and then correct them,” I said. “Would part of the job be reviewing previous—”

“What if we don’t have receipts? What if we’re going off estimates?”

“I would do my best to be as accurate as possible,” I replied. “Why don’t you have receipts?”

“How willing are you to let it go and work with me?”

I glanced over at where Levi sat at another table.

He had brought a laptop and had put in earbuds, and he seemed intent on his screen.

“Of course, I want us to have a productive professional relationship,” I answered slowly.

“I’m not likely to ‘let it go’ if there are mistakes or problems, though. ”

August tapped his pen on my résumé and frowned as if that had been the wrong answer.

I tried to expand it, so it would sound better. “If there are existing issues in your ledgers, then I would try to determine how they occurred and work with you to correct them, so they wouldn’t happen again.”

“You really don’t let things slide.”

“No,” I said firmly. I didn’t and I’d never had a client who wanted me to. Sure, some of them wanted me to fudge…oh.

“I would never do anything remotely unprofessional, and that includes anything which falls outside the boundaries of the law,” I stated.

“Ok. Thanks for coming in.” When August stood, he handed back my CV and the interview was over. I looked over again at Levi, wondering what was going on.