"She says hello. She says to tell you she's still got the dish."
Starla laughed again, properly this time. "That dish. Lord. I still feel bad about that dish."
From the double doors Kade could see all of it, though he could not hear every word. He saw Starla Beasley's hand on the old man's sleeve. He saw her face. He had worked for her for seven months and he had seen her be warm with customers, and fair with the floor, and furious exactly once, at a finance manager who had lied to a widow about an extended warranty, and he had never seen her look the way she looked now. She looked like somebody's kid.
Outside the Tahoe honked, short and friendly. Kade did not move.
Starla turned her head and saw him there, and then looked at the old man, and then back at Kade, and Kade watched her put it together in about the time it took to read a license plate. The empty space beside the old man. The brochures by the door. The salesman at the far end of the showroom with his hand on the bar.
Her face went still.
"Mr. Johnson," she said, not looking away from Kade, "has somebody been helping you this morning?"
"A young man came over," the old man said. "He's busy. It's the end of the month."
"It is the end of the month," said Starla Beasley.
She held Kade's eyes for one second longer. Then she turned her back on him, entirely, and took the old man's arm properly, the way you would take the arm of someone at a wedding, and said, "Come up to my office. Come on. I have a coffee maker that cost more than my first car and nobody ever uses it. You're going to sit down and let me make you a cup of something and you're going to tell me everything."
"I came to buy a car, Starla."
"Then you'll tell me about that too."
They went up the three steps into the tower. The glass door closed behind them. Through the glass the whole floor could see her pull out the good chair, the leather one she kept for people signing big deals, and sit him in it, and then go and do something at the coffee maker on the credenza with her back to the room, and stand there for longer than it takes to make coffee, with her head down.
Gert Daws walked over to Kade at the double doors. She did not hurry.
"Your Tahoe's here," she said.
"I know."
"Burkharts. The wife's got her checkbook out. I can see it from here. You going out there?"