Chapter 116: What Each of Them Paid
The last instalment was posted on the ninth of March 2028.
The docket says PAID IN FULL, and that is the only place in this account where anything is.
Serena Montigue left Illinois in November 2027, with the court’s permission. She is in Fort Wayne, Indiana, keeping the books for a plumbing supply company.
I looked her up twice and then stopped, and stopping cost me more than looking.
Thirty months of probation. It ended on the sixteenth of October 2029.
Two hundred and forty hours of service at a food bank in Cicero, nine weeks early.
The other thing does not end.
The indicated finding of the fourth of November 2026 sits on the State Central Register for fifty years.
She will never again work in a day care, a school, a hospital or a camp.
She was thirty-four when she signed the plea. That is not a sentence. It is a shape cut out of a life.
Montigue Advisory LLC was dissolved on the eleventh of August 2027 for failure to file.
Eighty-five thousand went in. One thousand three hundred and forty was left after ten weeks. Kessler’s bill was larger than both.
Then, in November 2027, unasked, she did one thing.
She swore an affidavit before a notary. Eleven pages. The lunch of the twenty-fourth of September 2025, and everything after it.
She posted it to Doyle.
There was no proceeding and nobody to give it to. It has never been used.
Doyle keeps it in a fireproof cabinet and says it will still be good in 2035.
That is Serena’s ending, and it is not the same shape as the other one.
She has never written to me. I would not have answered.
Roz Achebe left Astor Street on the thirty-first of August 2027, at sixty-three, four days after the binders came back from the clerk.
She was not dismissed. Nobody said one word to her about the citation.
The household was reduced. A house with one child does not need four in staff, and Victor was selling it anyway.
Twenty-eight years and eleven months. A lunch, a card, and a dish.
Here is what she paid.
The paragraph in the letter of wishes, signed by Constance Blackwood in 2011, was enforceable by nobody.
Roz had said so herself, out loud, on Clark Street, before I ever asked her for anything.
It was worth nothing.
COBRA at nine hundred and six dollars a month for eighteen months. Then fourteen months of nothing. Then Medicare at sixty-five.
She did the fourteen months with a six-thousand-dollar deductible and did not have the knee done.
And she never worked in a private house again.
Not because anybody blacklisted her. There is no list.
There is a network of about forty women who place staff in nine city blocks, and all of them read the Tribune in July.
She works Tuesdays and Fridays at a church on Ninety-Fifth Street, doing the accounts.
She is very good at the accounts. She keeps carbons.
Victor did one thing about it, on paper, four months late, which is how he does everything.
In October 2027 he had Doyle buy an annuity in her name.
Eleven hundred and forty dollars a month for life. Irrevocable. No conditions.
She cashed the first payment and did not thank him.
When I asked her about it she said: “It isn’t a gift. It’s twenty-eight years, late.”
Marco Ruiz stopped taking my calls in September 2027 and started again in February 2028. I did not ask why either time.
He applied for eleven positions in late 2027 and got two interviews.
Head of security is a job you get by reference.
His last reference was a family office that had handed his file to a court.
He never used the word blacklist. He said, “They don’t have to say no. They just don’t call.”
In January 2028 he took a facilities post at a community college in Elgin. Fifty-eight thousand a year, and an hour and ten minutes each way.
Here is what he actually paid, and it is not the money.
His daughter came out of UIC after her second year and did a year at Harper to save money.
She went back in 2029 and graduated a year late.
She has the degree. I will not make that into a tragedy.
But she paid a year of her life for a man who told the truth about a corridor.
He knows it, and he has never once said so.
I tried to apologise for the fifth time, in a car park in Elgin, in March 2028.
He let me get four words out.
“Mine,” he said. “I keep telling you. It’s mine.”
Then he asked when I was going to get the piece of paper, so I could stop asking permission.
Then he asked after the boy, the way he always does. Second question. Never first.
I told him that on the fourteenth of March a lawyer had posted me a form with my name on it, and I had not opened it for two days.