Page 90 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m not going to use you. Thank the club for me.” I stand. “I’m going to tell them what happened. There’s nothing you can do with a man who’s doing that except stop him, and I’d rather you didn’t have to try.”

He puts the pen down. “Mr. Doyle, sit down for one minute. I don’t need to know anything. That’s the point of me.”

“I know.”

“If you walk into that building without counsel, the club can’t assist you afterward. Not with the league, the contract, the insurance, or anything else. That isn’t a threat. It’s the retainer. I stop acting the moment you decline me, and I have to write that down today.”

“Write it down.”

“They won’t be able to help you.”

“They’ve been helping me since November,” I say. “That’s the problem.”

I get as far as the door before he says my name. I turn around. He’s standing up with the folder against his chest in both hands.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’ve done this for eleven years. Nobody has ever done that in front of me. I don’t know whether it’s the bravest act I’ve seen or the stupidest. And I’m not going to find out because I’ll be off the file by four o’clock.”

I drive to the league’s regional office the same afternoon with eleven pages of legal pad on the passenger seat under my coat.

It’s on the fourth floor of a building on Cormack Street with a hairdresser at street level. The elevator has a mirror. Reception has two chairs, a plant, and a woman behind glass who asks if I have an appointment.

“No.”

“Who are you here to see?”

“Frances Yeardley. My name’s Kieran Doyle. Tell her I don’t have a lawyer with me.”

She’s gone four minutes.

Yeardley comes out herself—gray suit, flat shoes, legal pad against her hip. She looks at me, then at the empty chairs behind me, then back.

“Where’s the club’s counsel?”

“I declined him this morning.”

“On the record, in front of a witness?”

“He wrote it down.”

She holds the door open with her back. “Then come through. And Mr. Doyle, before we sit down: everything you say once we enter that room is on the record. I’ll write it down. You’ll read it and sign it. It will go to a federal attorney. If you want to change your mind, you have until the end of this corridor.”

Her office is small, with nothing personal in it. She sits me down, gets a second legal pad from a drawer, and uncaps a pen.

I put my own pad on the desk.

“What’s that?”

“It’s everything. Dates. Times. Money. I wrote it out three weeks ago, then added to it twice.” I push it across. “You can have it. I’d rather you read it than listen to me, because I’m going to say it worse than I wrote it.”

She doesn’t touch it yet.

“Start at the beginning,” she says. “In your own words. I’ll stop you when I need to.”

So I start.

“The previous March,” I say. “Not this one. The one before, fourteen months ago. My brother missed a payment on a loan, and I took another loan out to cover it.”