Page 74 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

Instead, I sit in a cold cab on Alder Quay with the heater on and work out four separate reasons why a man might not answer his phone for two days. Every one of them is reasonable. I choose the most reasonable one, drive home, and sleep six hours.

Thursday morning, Roth is standing beside my truck.

He’s between it and the pillar, his hands in his coat pockets, his back to the wall. When I come out of the stairwell, he takes them out.

“There’s a car.”

I get in the gray car in the second bay. He shuts the door on me like a man closing a fridge.

We drive along the harbor road—cranes to the left, the water flat and brown, a container ship being walked in with two tugs on its nose. Roth drives at exactly the speed limit and doesn’t put the radio on. He doesn’t speak. I sit in the back with my bag between my feet.

The office is a shipping-services company on the third floor with a real receptionist and real invoices in real trays. There’s a plant and a framed photograph of a dry dock. Somebody’s kid’s drawing is stuck to the side of a filing cabinet with tape.

The heat in here is unbelievable. It always is.

“Sit down,” Vera says.

She has the glasses on when I come in. She doesn’t look up for eleven or twelve seconds.

Her desk is covered.

Paper, in rows, squared at the corners, in date order left to right. My stomach goes before my head does, because I’ve seen a desk laid out like this once before, at one in the morning, in my own apartment.

“You’ve had a difficult fortnight,” she says. “I won’t keep you long.”

“Okay.”

She waits. “Do you know what these are?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll take you through them.” She turns the first row around with one finger so it faces me, and squares it again once it’s facing the right way. “This is a retirement account belonging to Brandt Financial Services, held nineteen years. On the twenty-eighth of February, it contained a hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars. On the second of March, it contained forty-one dollars and a closure fee.” She moves to the second sheet. “A personal savings account. Twenty-two thousand, closed the same afternoon. The operating account of the practice, nine and a half thousand, closed the day after. A man doesn’t close the operating account if he expects to be trading on Monday.”

She hasn’t looked at me yet.

“A bill of sale from a dealer on Corliss Street. Seven thousand dollars for a car he owned outright and needed, and has replaced with a bus pass. I understand you worked that one out for yourself in March and said nothing about it.”

The room is very hot and there’s a clock ticking somewhere behind me.

“And this.” She turns the last sheet in the row. “A moving company. Four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars, paid on a personal card, in the second week of February, for the relocation of your brother from an address on Alder Street to a rented property two hours north of here.”

I keep my hands flat on my thighs.

“Your brother is alive and working,” Vera says, “because of a decision that was made in this office. The money that moved him is on that invoice, and the name across the top of it isn’t yours or mine.”

“I know about the movers.”

“You know about the movers.” She studies me over the top of the page. “Yes. He told you the cost wasn’t added to your balance. What he didn’t tell you is what it was added to instead.” She moves to the second row. “Now this one is more interesting, and it’s the one I’d like you to look at properly.”

It’s a statement I recognize. It’s mine. There’s a highlighted line in the middle. I’ve looked at it before and told a woman who’s represented me since I was eighteen that it was a local deal I arranged myself.

LICENSING: HARBOR & MAIN CO. Q1. 40,000.00.

“Harbor and Main is a coffee roaster on the quay with eleven employees and no marketing budget whatsoever,” Vera says. “It has never paid an athlete a dollar in its life. That money came out of an account that closed the same week.”

“That’s endorsement income.”

“Mr. Doyle.” Faint, almost kind. “You lied to your agent about it in February and you’re lying to me about it now. I’m the one person in your life who already knows about this, so let’s not.”