Chapter 2 - The Paper Trail
“You're saying I killed my brother?” I asked.
Nora didn't raise her voice. “I'm saying he asked you for help, and you never answered.”
That was worse than an accusation I could angrily deny. I remembered a missed call from Paulie on the day before his fall. I'd watched it ring out while Kent Barlow explained why delaying a multimillion-dollar sale would be financial suicide.
A patrol car slowed by the sidewalk. One of the neighbors must have called. I was suddenly grateful for the interruption, although the officer's first question made my face burn.
“Do you have a court order for this removal, sir?”
“No,” I said.
The officer spoke evenly. “Then nobody's going inside to remove her possessions. If there's a tenancy dispute, you handle it through the proper process.”
He recorded our names and photographed the scattered belongings. Nora explained that the framed photographs and two boxes were hers. The officer helped her carry them back to the steps and asked whether she wanted to make a report about damaged property.
“Yes,” she said, not looking at me.
For once I didn't interrupt.
When the patrol car left, I called Dennis. He answered with the relaxed voice of a man expecting good news.
“Is she out?”
“Where is the lease?”
A pause. “What lease?”
“The one my brother signed with Nora Perrone.”
“You've been talking to her? Viktor, that woman's playing on your grief.”
“Send me every occupancy record for Unit 3B. Right now.”
“I can't get into the office until—”
“Now, Dennis.”
I hung up and turned to Nora. She had carried most of the things upstairs without asking me for help. I was standing in her way by the door, still holding the ring.
“Let me see the papers.”
“You can call my lawyer.”
“I didn't know you had one.”
“I didn't, until your company put a notice on my door.”
She gave me a business card for a neighborhood housing attorney named Marisol Vega. Her hand had steadied. She was no longer begging me to leave her belongings alone. She was setting terms, and I was the man who had made that necessary.
Marisol answered on speakerphone fifteen minutes later. She confirmed that Nora held a signed eighteen-month lease, had paid rent into a separate account when the office stopped accepting it, and was entitled to due process. She also reminded me that being the building's majority owner didn't mean I owned my tenants' furniture.
Nora almost smiled at that. Almost.
“Can I speak with her privately?” Marisol asked.
I stepped outside.
A message arrived from Dennis: Unit 3B was listed in the company system as vacant, with an unsigned lease draft that had been archived. The last update had been made two days after my brother's funeral.
I called him back. “Who archived it?”
“Standard cleanup after a death.”
“Whose instructions?”
“Ask Kent. He brought in the consultants.”
Kent wasn't supposed to have access to our property management records. He was a prospective buyer, not a partner.
Nora opened the door. “Marisol says I shouldn't talk to you alone about the apartment.”
“She's right.”
“You don't sound happy about that.”
“I haven't had a lot of practice being told no.”
“That isn't my problem anymore.”
She was about to close the door when I held out the ring. She stared at it. I'd kept it in my pocket while we spoke, rubbing the scratches on its edge with my thumb.
“Paulie always wore that,” she said. “When he was worried, he'd turn it three times. I used to tease him about it.”
“He lost it once in a river when we were young. I spent half a day finding it.”
“I know. He told me.”
A detail Paulie had shared with her but not with me. It was an ordinary small theft of intimacy, and I deserved every inch of it.
She took the ring and turned it once. “He said you weren't always like this.”
“Maybe he remembered wrong.”
Nora handed me a thin photocopy from a folder beside the door. It was a maintenance request from eight months earlier: REAR STAIRWELL—HANDRAIL LOOSE, TREAD 6 MOVING. A second page contained a signed recommendation for immediate closure and repair.
There was a handwritten note at the bottom: VIKTOR, PLEASE DON'T DELAY THIS ONE. CALL ME.
Under that was an approval block bearing my initials.
“That's not my signature,” I said automatically.
“It's not a signature. It's a checkbox marked APPROVED FOR DEFERRAL.”
I remembered signing a stack of capital-expenditure authorizations without reading every line. Kent had said all nonessential repairs could wait until the sale closed. I had nodded because the bank deadline mattered to me more than another meeting with Paulie.
Then my phone lit up with a message from the company bookkeeper, Maureen Price.
Viktor, please don't approve any more documents from Kent. I found two different versions of the stairwell inspection.
May you like
Underneath, she had written one more sentence.
The older one lists Paulie's death as a foreseeable hazard.
