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.