Chapter 89: The Personal Representative
Bernice booked it, because Bernice can get anybody into that office in four days, including people who own buildings.
She telephoned Victor’s assistant and said Dr. Moreno requests thirty minutes regarding Ethan.
He came because the word Ethan was in the sentence. Nothing else in my life has ever worked that fast, and I had been trying to buy an hour of that man’s attention since September.
The twenty-first of January, twenty to seven in the evening, waiting room dark, blinds down, the sticker jar up on the shelf where Ethan can reach it.
Marco drove me and then sat in the car park for ninety minutes on purpose.
“I’m security,” he said. “If I’m in that room I’m a party to it. Outside I’m a witness that you were both in there.”
Moreno did the talking. I had been told to say nothing unless somebody asked me a question of fact.
So I counted things instead, which is what I do with my hands when they are not allowed to be useful.
Victor never took his coat off. He sat with an envelope on his knee and did not open it once in an hour.
Moreno laid it out in the order it happened and not in the order it hurt, which took him twenty-two minutes.
Ethan’s file. The nineteen episodes. The two-column sheet. The fourteen faxed pages.
The death certificate, face up, turned round so it was the right way for the reader.
Victor read it the way he reads everything, thoroughly and eleven months late.
He stopped once. I watched his eyes stop, the same as I had watched them stop on a form in a hallway in December.
“Who is Kolar,” he said.
“He delivered Ethan,” I said.
That was the first thing I was allowed to say and it cost me something to say it flatly.
He did not answer. He squared the certificate against the edge of the desk with two fingers and left it there.
Then he asked four questions. I have them numbered because I wrote them in the car afterwards.
One. “Is my son in danger tonight.”
Moreno said no, carefully, and then said that he could not say that about any night in general and would not pretend to.
Two. “Are you telling me somebody did this.”
“No,” Moreno said. “I am telling you nobody looked.”
Three. “Who else knows.”
Moreno listed them. Himself. Me. Marco Ruiz. A paralegal. A retired pathologist who has written nothing down.
Victor said, “That’s five people,” and Moreno said, “That is why I asked you here at seven o’clock.”
Four. “What do you want from me.”
“Nothing tonight,” Moreno said. “Read the letter. I am not going to be the man who tells you what to do with it.”
Then I was asked a question of fact and I answered it, and it was about the estate.
He wanted to know why a physician could not simply request the record.
I said there was no personal representative, because there was no estate, because nobody had ever opened one.
He looked at me for a moment.
“There was nothing to probate,” he said. “It was all held jointly. I signed a stack of things in January.”
“I know.”
“So legally she is —” He stopped and started again. “So legally there is nobody.”
“There is a widower,” I said, because that is the word Anthony used and I could not improve on it.
He looked at the certificate on the desk for what I would put at fifteen seconds.
Somewhere in the building a cleaner’s cart went past in the corridor and none of us moved. You can hear the wheels change note where the carpet stops.
Then he said, “Is there a recording of her.”
Moreno looked at me. That look was permission and also a warning and I have thought about it since.
“Yes,” I said.
“How much.”
“Four minutes of her talking. Then eight hours of a room.”
“From when.”
“The eighth into the ninth of December 2025.”
He put his hand flat on the envelope on his knee, which he still had not opened, and did not look up.
“I want to hear it.”
Moreno said, “Not tonight.”
“Why not.”
“Because you will not sleep, and there is a child in that house who wakes at ten to seven.”
I have never respected a man more than I did in that four-second pause.
Victor took out his phone and looked at it and put it back in his coat without unlocking it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Eight o’clock. Here.”
Then he stood up and thanked Moreno by his full name, which nobody does, and went out through a dark waiting room.
I sat there for a minute after the outer door closed.
Moreno screwed the cup back onto his thermos.
“He asked four questions,” he said. “Do you know which one he did not ask.”
I did. I had been counting them for an hour and I had the answer before he finished asking the question.
He never once asked who.