The City Under the Skin

13. SUIT

Billy Moore’s parking lot, early morning, the air pigeon-gray with haze, the lot empty except for his two trailers. There were no cars there because a dump truck was currently depositing a load of white one-inch pea gravel at the lot’s center and a small gang of day laborers were waiting with shovels and rakes. Billy Moore stood in the street watching, next to his Cadillac, with his daughter beside him: a man in a leather jacket, a girl in a camouflage hoodie and graffiti-patterned sneakers. Quite the family group, he thought. Billy Moore: landowner, entrepreneur, patriarch. Carla Moore: heiress.

“How’s it going, Sanjay?” Billy shouted to a young man in a short-sleeved pink shirt with a crimson bow tie, black suit pants, shoes glossy as a freshly buffed eggplant, who was supervising the laborers and largely being ignored by them. Sanjay raised two overoptimistic thumbs.

“Who’s Sanjay?” Carla asked.

“He’s my employee,” Billy said, pleased though not yet comfortable with the term. “The world’s best-dressed parking attendant. He’s from one of those loser countries that had to change its name, used to be a student back home, now he’s here trying to better himself, paying his way through college. Eventually I’ll get him a little hut with a chair and a baseball bat in case of trouble. He’ll collect the money, keep an eye on the cars, and he can read his textbooks or whatever when things get quiet.”

“Like all great plans it’s really simple,” said Carla.

“You know, sarcasm is really unattractive in a twelve-year-old.”

“I don’t do it to be attractive.”

A part of Billy was still fretting gently about having hit the guy and the girl at the map store. It had been necessary, sure, but it hardly fell within the boundaries of keeping out of trouble, let alone going straight. And behind that, there was a more shapeless kind of fretting about what Wrobleski was going to do with Genevieve and maybe Laurel, and the other women he might be told to haul in. It was better to be concerned with something practical and uncomplicated: the graveling of a parking lot.

“You really think you’re going to make a fortune in the parking business?” Carla asked.

“Yes and no.”

“Then why?”

“Let me explain,” said Billy, thinking it was no bad thing for a man to explain himself to his daughter. “Look, I know this isn’t the most desirable bit of land in the world. But that’s the whole point.”

“Yes?”

She walked deliberately along one edge of the lot, as though she were pacing it out. Billy found himself trailing after her, explaining.

“Yeah, see if you own a nice piece of land, something with grass and trees on it, or a nice old building, and then you want to develop it, put a big new building on it, well then, people get all upset because they think you’re screwing up the environment or something. But if you own a parking lot, well, everyone thinks the environment is pretty screwed up already. Everybody says, ‘It’s just a parking lot; anything’s better than that.’”

“Maybe,” said Carla, less than convinced.

“So that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ll run this place as a parking lot for a while, but then at some point I’ll sell it on to a developer who wants to build some butt-ugly apartment block, and it’ll be easy to get planning permission because everybody says, ‘Well, it’s a butt-ugly apartment block, but at least it’s not a parking lot.’ And then I take the profit from that deal, buy another parcel—”

“Parcel?”

“Yep. That’s what they call it, a parcel of land. Then I’ll make another parking lot and start again.”

“So we’ll be moving?” said Carla, a flare of alarm in her voice.

“That’s the beauty of a mobile home,” he said, as reassuringly as he could. “In the meantime, I’m trying to make it a really good, secure parking lot. There’s a crew coming this afternoon to put up a fence. And I’ve got a chance of a city contract. A subcontractor wants to park his trucks here while they’re working on the Platinum Line. How about that?”

“Kudos,” said Carla blankly.

A fast-food box blew across the street toward the lot. Carla stomped on it, then picked it up, doing a little light housekeeping.

The dump truck was ready to depart. Sanjay was shouting something incomprehensible to the driver, and Billy watched the guys with the shovels and rakes as they began to spread the gravel. They were working a lot harder and with a lot more enthusiasm than he’d have been able to muster.

“And does this all lead to riches and luxury and world domination, Dad?” Carla asked.

“It leads to me being able to live with my daughter,” said Billy. “That’s the main thing.”

She looked at him with a seldom-seen sweetness.

“You know, Dad,” she said slyly, “if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you might want to lose the leather jacket.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t want to be less well-dressed than your parking attendant.”

He could see her point.

“Yeah. I can see you in a really nice suit,” said Carla.

“Pinstripe?”

“No,” said Carla, “pinstripe is way too obvious. I see you in elephant gray, exposed stitching, two-button, notched laps, front flap pockets, side vents, vermilion lining.”

“You really see me in that?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you don’t just want a different kind of dad?”

“I want the same dad, I just want him to look good.”