Chapter 12

Delilah and Bridget ended up going to Vegas with me. Leslie begged off from the trip, telling us that she didn't feel up to spending all that time in a vehicle.

I paid an extra hundred dollars for another ticket to the show over at the Bellagio, and it was a good thing I did. It was a great show, with a lot of aerial things, and people diving into this big pool of water. We went to the nite club at the Bellagio afterwards, and Bridget and Delilah finally saw some famous people who were there. I didn't see any famous people that I knew anything about, but there were at least forty or fifty girls there that were absolutely gorgeous. I saw Delilah and Bridget checking out all the foxy ladies too.

I did some gambling at the Bellagio too, getting one of their player's cards so they could rate my play. I had spent six hours on Friday playing "21" at Caesar's. I'd been lucky at the beginning, winning at least two thirds of all the hands I was playing for the first four hours. My luck changed after that though, and I watched my big pile of chips shrinking for the next two hours. In the end, I lost a thousand dollars. The supervisor of the blackjack pits came over and introduced himself during my lucky streak, handing me his business card and telling me to let him know if I needed anything. At the time, I'd been betting either five hundred or a thousand dollars a hand. I'd been up over twelve thousand when he'd come over to introduce himself.

On Saturday, playing at the Bellagio, I was never up enough to start playing bigger than one hundred dollars a hand. Later, back at Caesar's, I played some Pai Gow Poker and won eight hundred in about an hour.

We went up to our room at about three on Sunday morning. We got an early start heading back on Sunday, getting up at nine, and then having the breakfast buffet before we checked out of the hotel and left. We drove straight through after leaving Las Vegas, getting back home just after two o'clock that afternoon.

During the drive back to Hesperia, Delilah and Bridget were both asking me if there were other places, besides Vegas, where we could go for a weekend. I think they were starting to get a little bored with Las Vegas, wanting to go somewhere that they hadn't been before. We discussed San Francisco, and going to the Colorado River. No one was too excited about seeing either of those places. It ended up with them telling me to look for someplace we could all go to for a weekend. I let them out by Delilah's car over in my driveway. Leslie's van was missing, so the girls just got their travel bags and transferred themselves and their stuff over to the car.

Thinking about how we'd left things, I decided that the girls and I might need a break from each other. Maybe spending so much time together over the past ten days had been too much. I decided that I'd be better off concentrating more of my time and energy in my business, letting the girls come to me whenever they started missing going places with me. Vegas had been fun, and I'd enjoyed the time we spent together, but I couldn't see myself enjoying too steady of a diet of that either.

My relationship with Leslie had settled into a nice groove. There was none of the awkwardness that I'd more than half expected from our sexual experimentation session together. She got better at her job quickly, seldom being guilty of repeating an earlier mistake. She was a better negotiator than me, as well, not as anxious to let product go as I usually was. As a result, her efforts started bringing in higher profits than I'd have gotten for the same goods. She concentrated only on the sell side, not interested in what I was doing, other than for how my efforts produced more product for her to dispose of. For a month after our little sex session, Leslie and I spoke of nothing that wasn't somehow related to business. I was relieved.

For the first month, my results didn't show a real dramatic improvement. I only ended up grossing three thousand more than I'd done, by myself, the month prior to hiring Les. I wasn't aware of it then, but Leslie had mostly been concentrating on trying to sell off the inventory that I'd had the longest. Some of what she sold had been in my warehouse for a couple of years or longer.

During that first month, I'd been acquiring about twice as much as I usually did, by dollar volume, and it appeared to me that Leslie's sales weren't keeping up with what I'd been purchasing. I wasn't running low on working capital yet, but it was less than it had been when I'd first hired her.

"Les, both the storage places are getting too full. Danny's been complaining that it takes him too long to dig through our inventory to get to what he's supposed to be delivering. Before, we kept open pathways in those sheds, so we didn't run into that problem. Do you need some help selling off part of the inventory?"

"Maybe I've been doing it wrong, Jimmy. I've been concentrating on selling off the stuff you've had the longest. I haven't really gotten around to trying to sell the stuff you've been buying lately. Is that the wrong thing to do?"

I went over the inventory list with her after she told me that. We found that the majority of what she'd been selling had been odds and ends and leftovers from bulk purchases that I'd made a long time before. She was right about almost none of the new purchases having been touched.

I tried to explain to her the problem with what she was trying to do. I told her that the new stuff was usually the easiest to sell, that the old stuff was product that people had already passed over. I always sold everything, eventually, but it didn't make sense to get on the phone to try to sell off a hundred square yards of half inch carpet padding after all the rest of the carpet and padding had been sold.

"You need to concentrate on selling all the new stuff, that's where the real money is. The older products, the leftovers, you can sell them after you've sold enough to clear up space for my new purchases to be stored. Look at some of the purchases I've made in the past two weeks. All of it should be easy for you to find buyers for. This is how I keep my working capital healthy, by getting all my purchase money back out of product sales right away. I make money based on the number of times I turn over my working capital. The way you've been going at it, I'd run out of money to buy more products soon."

I exaggerated. In fact, Leslie had already freed up several thousand dollars of new working capital that I wouldn't have available by doing things my usual way. I could see that she could really start bringing in a lot more money once she struck a comfortable balance between selling off the new, right away, and then going back through old inventory, finding a way to release the money I still had tied up in those items.

After our conversation, she and I spent the early part of each day, finding buyers for freshly purchased goods. In the later morning and early afternoons, I'd go out doing some buying, but early each morning, she and I would go over the new inventory lists, discussing who we should call to get the best prices for what we had to sell.

By the end of her second month, we had turned a big corner in the operation of the business. I'd learned a lot from seeing how organized she was, and how methodically she worked through the process of controlling the sales.

Leslie's bonus for the first month had been six hundred and change. With her thousand dollar a month base, she earned sixteen plus. For the second month, her bonus check alone was for three thousand. My expenses, not counting the costs of acquiring new products, had risen from a little over four thousand a month, to more than ten thousand a month. The good new was that my overall net was eight thousand better than it had ever been before, even after paying out Leslie's wages and bonus money.

Delilah had driven over to see me twice in the past month. Once, she spent the night with me, and the other time it was just for a quickie. That time, the reason she'd come to see me was mostly because she needed to ask me for a favor. She had a friend from LA who wanted to come up for a visit, but Bridget, who knew the girl, didn't want her sleeping over at their apartment. Delilah wanted to know if the girl could stay at my house for a few nights. Once Delilah assured me that the girl wasn't a smoker of any kind, and didn't use drugs, I gave my reluctant permission.

How to describe Delilah's friend? Flamboyant, definitely. She had long hair, dyed dark purple. She had piercing's in both eyebrows, on her tongue and on her bottom lip. I later discovered that she had pierced nipples and a ring through her clit. Connie had a very fair complexion, was about five feet five or so, and a little on the plump side, maybe twenty pounds over her ideal weight. Her face could be called cute, but it was more exotic looking than anything else. She had big boobs, and I never once saw her wearing anything other than a sports bra. She had twin barbell things through her nipples, but I found that out later on in her stay.