Chapter 4 - A Ledger With Two Names
The clipping was twenty-five years old. A warehouse office on Fulton Row had burned during a winter protest over evictions. A tenant organizer named Teresa Reyes had died helping people escape through a back stairwell. The official report blamed faulty wiring and an unapproved space heater.
Lila recognized the street. Her mother had taken her there once when she was little, stopping outside an empty brick building without explaining why she cried.
She wanted to ask Salvatore what he knew. Instead she went to the diner.
Ray Alvarez, the short-order cook, let her in through the delivery door before the breakfast rush. Ray wore his apron knotted high and had worked for Curtis since Curtis's father owned the place.
“Your suspension is nonsense,” he said. “But I'm sixty-one and I can't afford noble gestures.”
“I didn't come for a gesture. I came for the shift sheets.”
They found the duplicate register tapes in a box above the freezer. The missing $380 had been marked as a voided catering deposit. It had never belonged in the tip register.
“Curtis knows that,” Ray said.
“Then why accuse me?”
He stared at the floor. “Last Thursday a man in a brown jacket asked when you worked. Curtis told him to leave. Later Curtis got a phone call and started acting scared.”
Lila photographed the tapes while Ray held the ladder. For once the evidence was ordinary: paper, dates, a manager's initials. It steadied her.
Then Curtis came through the kitchen swinging door.
“Get out,” he said.
“It's your handwriting on the void.”
“You're trespassing.”
Ray stepped between them. “I let her in.”
Curtis's face tightened. “Then maybe you can both lose your jobs.”
Lila walked away rather than give him the physical confrontation he seemed to want. From the sidewalk she emailed the documents to herself, Tasha, and a labor attorney whose legal-aid website she had found that morning.
An hour later, Curtis called.
“You don't understand what you've started,” he said, voice thick with panic.
“Then explain it.”
“They own the note on this place. If they call it due, thirty people lose their paychecks. You think Moretti's people care about your little payroll problem?”
“You could tell the truth.”
“Truth doesn't make the bank wait.”
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He hung up.
Lila stood outside a corner grocery with the phone in her hand. She had found proof of the false accusation, but she had also learned something worse: the man bullying her was afraid of somebody else.
