4. Russ
RUSS
Ipulled fourteen months of the firm’s originals and laid them next to the copies Dana had sent me. The fraud was so plain it almost insulted me, because I had trusted Genevieve with my name on the door.
Here was a run of reclaimed oak flooring, billed to the Whitlock job on the eleventh.
Here was the same run of reclaimed oak, billed again three days later to a job I had never heard of, an address across town.
Here was the bathroom tile Dana had chosen at midnight, happy enough she couldn’t sleep, she’d told me, ordered twice, installed once in her house and once somewhere else.
Every fixture that woman picked out for her own home, she bought a second time for the home her husband was building to leave her in.
And Genevieve billed both to Dana, and skimmed the overage into the firm, and skimmed the firm into herself, and I had signed the quarterly statements without reading them because that was the part I trusted her with.
The address repeated. I ran it. A condo, recently purchased, and the buyer of record made me set the page down.
The fraud was not hidden or clever. It was the same eleven-digit lot number typed twice by someone who assumed no one would ever lay the two pages side by side.
Genevieve was a talented designer but a lazy thief.
she stole the way she trusted her own taste, on instinct, certain she’d never be checked.
Every duplicate was a small bet that the careful people in her life would stay busy being careful about the wrong things.
She lost every one of those bets the night Dana laid two stacks on a kitchen island and counted twice.
For a year I’d been quietly robbed by my own partner and called it a slow quarter. Dana had spent fourteen months building a house for a man who was using her receipts to build his exit. The same woman did both to us, with the same pen.
I scanned the matched pages, the oak on the oak, the tile on the tile, the second address under the first, and I sent them to Dana with one line. It is worse than the wet bar. Bring everything you have, and let me bring everything I have, and we will only have to do this once.
After I sent it, I sat in the dark office I co-owned and did the one thing I’d avoided for a year. I totaled it.
Not the Whitlock job.
All of it.
Every duplicated line across every client since the incorporation date, because once you know the pattern you find it everywhere, the way once you learn a face you start catching it in every crowd.
I am not as fast as Dana. But I am thorough once I finally decide to look. The number was two hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars.
Skimmed out of the firm I built with her, over twenty-six months, while I signed the quarterlies without reading them.
In the morning I made one call I did not strictly need, because the invoices already proved it, but I wanted to hear a person say it out loud.
I called the flooring vendor, the one who shipped the oak twice, and got a rep named Dale who remembered the job, because nobody orders that much reclaimed oak twice in a month.
“Yeah, two drops,” Dale said. “Same product, two addresses, three days apart. The designer set it up. Nice lady. She said the second place was a surprise for the client’s wife, so keep it off the client copy, bill it quiet.”
“A surprise for the wife,” I said.
“That’s what she told me. We do it for anniversary remodels all the time.” A pause. “Why? Something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “You did everything right. It was the instructions that were wrong.”
I hung up and sat with it. They had not just stolen.
They had dressed the theft up as tenderness, used the word surprise, used the word wife, made a stranger at a flooring warehouse into an accidental accomplice to the joke of her.
Up until Dale I had been a man recovering a number.
After Dale I was something with less mercy in it.
I sat with the originals a long moment, out of something closer to grief than habit. My name, second on the door. My signature, under every statement that lied.
Then I stopped. Spread them back out. Dana would need them messy, side by side with hers, and a thing you intend to use in public you do not file.
I left them across the table all night, unfiled.