Page 88 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“I understand that.”

“Say what you want. You’ve been sitting there for six hours giving us a case. People don’t do that for nothing.”

The strip light at the far end of the room stutters.

“I want the case against her to stand without one word from him,” I say. “It’s documents: her instructions, her bets, her structure. None of it needs him in a witness box. Build it that way, and you don’t need a deal with him. If you don’t need a deal, he isn’t a defendant. He’s a man who was threatened. That’s what I want.”

Weiss looks at me for a while. “That’s not up to you.”

“No,” I say. “That’s why I gave you everything instead of half.”

Yeardley caps the pen. “I met him twice,” she says. “Once in a video room with forty other people. Once in a hallway. Both times, he answered exactly the question I asked and not one syllable past it. I’ve been doing this nineteen years, and that’s not what an innocent man sounds like. It’s not what a guilty one sounds like, either.”

“No.”

“What does it sound like?”

“It sounds like a man who’s been the only adult in his family since he was fifteen,” I say.

She writes that down, which I didn’t want. Then she draws a line under it and turns the page.

The lawyer I get is called Halloran. She’s very good. She costs money I no longer have, and she takes it in installments.

She gives me the same advice four times over five weeks in four different ways. The last time, she has her hands folded on the table.

“You have the only complete account of a nineteen-year operation. That’s the most valuable evidence anybody has brought into that building this year. They’ll take a plea. They’ll cut the sentence. The size of the discount depends on how much weight you put on other people. Doyle is the weight. He’s a name. He’s sympathetic. He took money. He threw two games. Put him at the center of it and you’ll walk out with probation.”

“No.”

“Marek. You didn’t take a dollar off him?”

“Not a dollar. It went the other way.”

“Then say that, at least.”

“That’s what I’m signing.”

The plea runs to fourteen pages. I read every line in her office with my reading glasses on. A green bruise runs down the left side of my face and into my jaw.

Nine of those pages are Vera Lindqvist.

Four are me: nineteen years of collections, the structure, the forged instrument, the fact that I entered a licensed profession to commit crime.

One page is him. I write that page myself in longhand, and she types it up without arguing over a word.

It sets out that Kieran Doyle was placed under a debt he didn’t incur by a party that had already put his brother in a hospital. The manager assigned to him controlled his accounts, calendar, and medical information. An intermediary told him the consequences of refusal after being instructed to keep him cooperative. He was never paid a dollar for either goal; both were applied against a balance that was never his. He refused the third. In a parking lot on the twenty-fourth of April, he was told what refusal meant. He refused again.

It says: The coercion of Kieran Doyle was designed by me.

Halloran reads it twice and takes her own glasses off. “You know what this does to your allocution.”

“Yes.”

“It puts you in the aggravating column on your own paperwork. I can state the same facts without handing the judge the word designed.”

“No.”

“I’ll write it in an hour.”