Page 91

Her pen moves.

“From whom?”

“From the people he borrowed from. Not from a bank, not from an agent, not from an advance against my contract. I went into a shipping-services office on the waterfront. I sat in a chair and signed for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I knew exactly what that office was because my brother had already told me what they’d done to a man in Corliss Street who was late on his payments.”

Yeardley stops writing. “You knew.”

“I knew who they were before I walked in. I knew what the money was. I signed for it anyway.” My hands are on my knees. “I’ve never said that out loud. Not to my agent. Not to my brother. Not to the man who ran the account. If you take one fact out of this room, it should be that nobody made me do that part.” Saying it doesn’t make the room lighter. It makes the afternoon in that shipping office real again: the chair, the paper, my own hand holding the pen. This is the part that belongs to me.

She writes for a while.

Then she says, “Go on.”

I go on.

The eleventh of March. Pittsburgh at home, 5:52 of the first period, level score. A point shot on the glove side that I dropped a fraction early for. Three hundred thousand dollars taken off a balance of one million three hundred and forty-eight thousand in a parking lot twenty minutes later. I was never paid a dollar. The payment was a credit against a debt.

The third of April. Buffalo at home, 8:04, the same shot, the same side, the same three hundred thousand. Then two more in the same game that were nothing but a man falling apart. I tell her about those too, in detail, including where my weight was. If I’m doing this, I’m doing all of it.

The twenty-fourth of April. I refused out loud three times in a parking lot at ten past four on a Wednesday, in front of a man who wrote it in a notebook.

She takes me back over the first goal four separate times. What I was told. Who told me. Whether the instruction was specific. Whether anybody suggested to me that refusal would have consequences and, if so, in what words.

“Nobody ever spoke a threat to me,” I say. “My brother’s hand was broken before any of this started. Nobody had to say anything.”

“And you understood at the time that what you were being asked for was to alter the outcome of a game.”

“I understood I was being asked to let one shot in on the glove side in the first period while the score was level. A number would come off the balance when I did.” The window behind her looks at the back of the next building. “I’d like that written the way I said it, please. I didn’t think about the game once. That’s not a defense. It’s the opposite of one.”

She reads it back to me off the pad, and I confirm it.

At half past five, she gets up, turns the light on, and then sits back down.

At six, she picks up my legal pad and reads it front to back without speaking. It takes her nineteen minutes. At page seven, she stops for a second but doesn’t say why. Then she opens the drawer on her left. She takes out a document in a clear sleeve and puts it in front of me, square to the edge of the desk.

“You should see this before we go further. It’s a public filing as of Friday.”

It’s fourteen pages. There’s a name at the top of it that I haven’t seen written down in five weeks.

“That’s a plea agreement,” she says. “Signed. I’m not showing it to you as a kindness or to move you. It’s in the record. You’d read it in a newspaper on Thursday. I’d rather you read it here.”

Nine of the pages are about Vera Lindqvist, and I go through them fast because there’s nothing in them I don’t know.

Four of them are him. Nineteen years. The word collections. The structure. The forged instrument. He describes it in one sentence as the best work he ever did for her. I have to stop there and put two fingers on the page.

Page thirteen is me.

The subject was placed under a debt he did not incur, by a party that had already caused grievous injury to his brother.

The manager assigned to the account, being myself, controlled his bank accounts, his calendar, and his medical information, and had a key to his residence.

He received no payment for either goal. Both were applied against a balance that was never his.

He refused the third and was informed in a garage on the twenty-fourth of April what refusal meant, and refused it again in the same conversation.

The coercion of Kieran Doyle was designed by me.

I read it twice.