Chapter 63
VI
We bring him to an old storage closet at nine p.m.
I hear Rogue outside, casual and friendly like always. “Hey Tommy, Sting wants to talk to you about some trade stuff. You got a minute?” Tommy says sure. Of course he says sure. He’s Tommy. Helpful. Agreeable. Always got a minute.
He walks in and sees all of us.
Me at the table. Sting to my right. Armen to my left. Mara on the couch against the wall. Rogue closes the door behind Tommy but he stays in front of it.
Tommy’s eyes move across the room, quickly reading the situation. I watch him take in the configuration. Five people. One door. Rogue blocking it. This isn’t a trade meeting.
His face doesn’t change, that’s the tell. A normal person would look confused, would ask what’s going on. Tommy’s expression stays exactly the same. Open and calm.
“What’s this about?” he says, easy and relaxed.
“Sit down, Tommy,” I say.
He looks at me. For the first time since I’ve known him, I see something behind the friendly face. A flicker. It’s just a fraction of a second. Then it’s gone and he’s pulling out a chair and sitting across from me with his hands folded on the table.
“Sure,” he says. “What’s up?”
I put the two pages on the table, side by side. The property transfer from the city and the trade requisition from the Rot. I don’t say anything, I just let him look.
He looks.
His expression holds for about three seconds, then twitches. It’s subtle, something I might not notice if I hadn’t been looking. But it’s there, no doubt about it. He knows what he’s looking at and he knows what the two pages mean.
Regardless, he shrugs. “I don’t understand.” He remains friendly but his hands, folded on the table, have gone still in a way that folded hands shouldn’t. They’re the forced stillness of a man trying too hard.
I keep my voice level. “The handwriting on the left is from a property transfer signed by L. Fischer, city development officer. The handwriting on the right is from a trade requisition you signed last week. They’re the same.”
“That’s—” He laughs and shakes his head. “That’s a stretch. Handwriting? Lots of people write the same way.”
“Slashed sevens. Unique fours. The same lean on every capital. The same crossbar on the F.”
“Coincidence.”
“Is it a coincidence that you’ve been asking Mara about my father’s papers?”
His eyes move to Mara where she’s sitting on the couch with her arms crossed, her face hard. He sees the red eyes and knows what they mean.
“I was making conversation,” he says. “Mara’s my friend. I asked how her friend was doing. That’s normal.”
“You asked about missing pieces. How the story ends. Mara didn’t tell you about those things. She didn’t know about them. So where did you get that information, Tommy?”
Tommy’s posture changes. He sits back, his friendly lean gone. What replaces it is straighter, harder, the posture of a man who’s done pretending.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” he says, his voice is different now.
The warmth is gone and what’s underneath is colder, the voice of a man who spent decades in city government, not a man who counts boxes in a supply room.
“You think you’ve figured something out.
You haven’t. You’ve pulled a thread and you have no idea where it goes. ”
“Then tell me where it goes,” I say.
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“You owe my father. You owe everyone in Rothwell whose life you destroyed. You signed the contracts that funneled public money into shell companies. You blocked the audit that would have exposed it. You approved the property transfers that turned stolen money into real estate. This building. This place. You bought it with money that was supposed to fund schools and hospitals and nursing homes.”
Sting stiffens beside me. Dorothy’s nursing home. His mother’s job. I didn’t plan to say it that way but the words came out and they’re true.
Tommy—Fischer—looks at me. The friendly mask is completely gone now. What’s behind it isn’t evil. It’s tired. It’s the face of a man who’s been hiding for years and is suddenly sick of it.
“You think I was the architect,” he says. “But I wasn’t. I was just a cog. A useful one. I signed what I was told to sign. I blocked what I was told to block. The people above me, the people actually running the operation, they’re not in this building. They’re not even in Rothwell anymore.”
“Who are they?”
“People you don’t want to find. People who make me look like a clerk. Which is what I was. A clerk who got in too deep and couldn’t get out.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” I say. “You signed the papers that destroyed my father.”
Something crosses his face. Fast. Controlled. But not fast enough.
“Your father, the mayor, knew what he was getting into.”
“He was investigating corruption. He was doing his job,” I say.
“He was doing more than his job. He was building a case, methodically, for a year. And when it became clear that the case was going to reach the people who couldn’t be reached, he made a decision.”
“What decision?”
Fischer leans forward. “Your father is a smart man, Vi. Smarter than the people he was investigating. Smarter than me. When he realized what he was up against, he didn’t fight. He didn’t go public. He did the one thing none of us expected.”
The room has gone completely still.
Because he said is.
Your father is a smart man.
Not was. Is.
Present tense.
I stop breathing and the words replay in my head. Your father is a smart man. Not the past tense you use about a dead person. The present tense you use about someone who’s alive.
Fischer sees it on my face. The moment I catch it, his mouth tightens. A micro-expression. He knows he slipped. He knows I heard it.
“What did you just say?” I whisper.
“I said your father was a smart man.”
“No. You didn’t. You said is.”
Five people stare at one man across a table.
Fischer doesn’t respond. His face has closed. The tired openness from a moment ago is gone. What’s left is locked, sealed. He’s a man who realized he said too much and is never going to say anything again.
“Is my father alive?”
Nothing.
“Fischer. Is my father alive?”
He looks at me and holds my gaze. And in that look, in the refusal to deny it, in the way his mouth sets and his eyes go flat, I see the answer he’s not going to give me.
He doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t say anything at all.
He doesn’t have to.
Sting’s hand finds my knee under the table, not a gesture but an anchor. He felt the room change. He heard what I heard.
I look at Fischer across the table. The man who signed the papers. The man who hid in the Rot for years. The man who just told me, in one careless verb tense, that everything I believed about my father’s death might be wrong.
My father is a smart man.
Is.