The Empire Clothing Company’s executive offices were on the fourth floor at the front, the showrooms at the fourth-floor rear. The company’s head of sales was named Sonny Lieberman. The small Plexiglas cubicle that Sonny called his office wasn’t much bigger than a medium-size walk-in closet. The only good thing you could say about the cubicle, if one deigned to say anything about a cubicle, was its proximity to the Empire Clothing Company’s owner, Max Lieberman. Sonny’s claim to fame, at least around the Empire Clothing Company, was being the boss’s son.

Max Lieberman, the owner of the Empire Clothing Company, was a short, squat, rather displeasing man with blotchy skin, thick eyelids, and a red, bulbous nose. Max added insult to injury by wearing his suit pants almost under his armpits. Max had inherited the business from his father, Abe, a tough immigrant with a full head of hair parted in the middle and always slicked down with a greasy, sweet-smelling balm he bought somewhere in the South. Abe Lieberman, when he was alive, had given off a lasting offensive impression like an unpleasant odor. The man adored himself, which was a good thing because nobody else did. He was quite short, had a Hitler-like mustache, a long nose, mean eyes, and pencil-thin lips. His temper had been known up and down the East Coast and he was quick to anger, two traits his son Max would inherit. All in all, Abe Lieberman was your average mustachioed tyrant with a slit-eyed stare that could peel paint.

A week after Abe Lieberman arrived in New York from Prague, he was pushing a pushcart around the Lower East Side of Manhattan hawking used men’s clothes. The pushcart led to a small store. The small store grew to a chain of eighty-six retail establishments located from New England to Florida. Abe Lieberman spent every day of the week visiting those stores. Abe never had an office. He worked out of an old leather briefcase. He lived a parsimonious, almost miserly life and died a millionaire many times over. Abe Lieberman succumbed on a train that was taking him back to New York from one of his retail outlets in Nashville, Tennessee. He was ninety when he collapsed, suffering a massive heart attack on his way to the dining car.

For the last twenty-plus years, Empire Clothing had grown big enough to go public and land on the New York Stock Exchange. Max Lieberman had a gigantic office on the southeast corner of the building’s fourth floor. The office overlooked both Lexington Avenue and Twentieth Street and was referred to by employees as “Little Madison Square Garden.” His son’s cubicle was called the “Garden’s broom closet” or the broom closet for short, as in: “Sonny wants to see you in the broom closet.”

About a week after Billy Constable became an employee of the Empire Clothing Company, Luther something-or-other whispered in Billy’s ear, “That’s one of the bosses standin’ over there. The tall one. The one standin’ with them other dudes. That’s Sonny Lieberman, the big boss’s son.”