I did not ask him what she saw. I asked him to start at the beginning, the way he had always reported to me, in order and without decoration.
«Start at the beginning, Vince,» I said. «You always told things in order.»
He did not start at the beginning. He started with the envelope, and that was how I knew he was lying about everything else.
Forty-two thousand dollars
The girl’s father owed me forty-two thousand dollars. He ran a small restaurant in Cicero, the kind of place with a cash register that never quite balanced, and every month he paid me a little less than the month before. I had sent Vince to collect, and Vince had come back with the numbers he wanted me to hear.
«He paid six thousand on Tuesday,» Vince said. «The book says four.»
«And the other two?»
«Expenses.»
He said it to the floor, not to me. In twelve years Vince had never once looked at the floor when he talked about money.
Her father came to my house on Monday night with his hat in both hands. He sat at my kitchen table and told me that his daughter had watched the collector count the cash in the back booth. She had been doing her homework under the lamp, and she had told her father in the car on the way home. She had also drawn a picture of the envelope on the back of her spelling sheet, and then a horse beside it, because she drew horses for everybody.
I told him I would look into it. I had not yet looked into anything when Vince came to my office on Tuesday morning with nothing in his hands.
«Bring me the collection book tonight,» I told him. «All of it, the real one and the one you show people.»
He nodded and went out. That evening at six, a seven-year-old named Sofia Marin stepped off the curb in front of her school in Cicero, her backpack bouncing against her shoulders, and a black car came around the corner too fast.
What Rex knew
At the wake, Sofia’s mother did not look at me once. She sat in the front row with her hand on the lid of the coffin, and her eyes went again and again to the dog, lying across the carpet at my feet with his chin on his paws. I understood that look. She was trying to decide whether a dog could have known something that her own child had not been able to say.
I should say something about the dog, because the men still talk about him. Rex had come to me as a pup from a breeder outside Joliet. He was a black-and-tan Doberman with ears I never cropped and a thick silver chain collar that I had put on him the year he saved my life the first time.
Dogs do not lie, and they do not have agendas. They know who is standing too close to what they were sent to guard. That was why Rex had gone rigid against the white coffin, why he had growled at a man he had walked beside for twelve years, and why he had refused to take his eyes off Vince’s face from the moment we came through the door.
The car that hit her had a crushed front fender on the passenger side. Sal found it in the garage behind the bakery on Fifth on Wednesday, with the mirror still hanging by its wires. Sal did not tell me on the phone. He came to the funeral home that evening and showed me the photograph on his screen while the organ music played through the wall.
The confession in the room
Vince was still talking when I stopped listening to the words and started listening to the tone. He had called my dog a liar. He had called the child’s father a thief. He had called the bakery owner a man who owed us money, which was true, and which had nothing to do with anything.
«What did she see, Vince?»
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. «Me. Counting.» His voice dropped. «I put two thousand in my coat. She saw me do it, and she told her father, and her father told you.»
«And you went to her school.»
«I went to talk to her. I wanted her to forget what she had seen.» He swallowed hard. «I was on the corner with the window down, and she looked at my car, and she ran into the road because she was scared of me.»
«And you drove away.»
«It was an accident, Boss. I swear to God it was an accident.»
The room was silent, except for the low sound Rex made in his chest, like machinery warming up.
The ledger and the wife
Sal had phoned Vince’s wife that morning, as I had asked him to. She told him that Vince had not come home until after midnight that Tuesday, that he had been drinking, and that he had sat in the kitchen with the light off for an hour before he went upstairs. She had not known why he was angry, and she told Sal that she had not asked.
I did not hide him. The men wanted me to. Two of them offered to take him out to the lake and let the water decide, and I told them no. I was not going to let the men handle him in the dark, and I was not going to let his death become another story about how the Boss handled his problems.
Sal asked me on the steps whether I was sure. I told him I had never been more sure of anything in my life, which was a lie, but it was the kind of lie a man has to tell on a morning like that, and Sal knew it and let me tell it.
I drove him to the state’s attorney myself. I put the real collection book on the table, the one with the two thousand dollars missing, and I put beside it the statement from Vince’s wife, and the photograph of the fender, and I told the attorney everything in order, the way Vince should have told it to me.
In the car on the way to the attorney’s office, Vince sat in the back with his hands between his knees and did not speak for twenty minutes. Rex lay on the seat beside him with his head on the window, watching the traffic and nothing else.
«You should have brought me the book on Monday,» I said.
«You didn’t ask for it on Monday.»
«I asked for it on Tuesday, and you went to the school on Tuesday. I gave you the whole day to decide what to tell me.» I kept my eyes on the road. «That’s on me, and I will carry it.»
He did not answer. At a red light he asked whether his wife would hear the truth from me or from the newspapers. I said she would hear it from the attorney, the same as everyone else.
He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident. The judge sent him to a state prison for the next twenty years. His name came off the list of men who were welcome at the bakeries and the lounges, and no one I knew sent him a card.
Forty-two thousand dollars, torn up
Two days after the funeral, I went back to the restaurant in Cicero. Her father was wiping down the counter when I came in, and he saw my face and stopped.
Sofia was sitting at a table in the back, drawing with a pencil on the paper placemats. She looked up when she saw me and went quiet, the way children do when they know a grown man is about to speak about them.
«She asked me if you would punish the man,» her father said. «I told her you would make it right. Is that true?»
«It’s true,» I said. «The man will answer for it, and not to me.»
He nodded, but he did not seem comforted. He only looked at the drawing, which showed a girl and a horse and a long black car at the edge of the page.
I took the ledger from my coat and found the page with his name at the top. Then I tore it out, slowly, and folded the paper in half, and set it on the counter in front of him.
«It’s paid,» I said.
He did not understand at first. Then he did, and he put his hand over his mouth the way people do when they are trying hard not to cry in public, and he could not thank me in any words at all. I did not want him to try.
The last walk
On the morning of the burial, Rex walked beside the small white coffin all the way from the car to the grave, and he did not pull on his lead once. When the men lowered her into the ground, he lay down on the wet grass at the foot of the stone, with his chin on his paws, and he would not get up until I knelt beside him.
Sofia’s stuffed bunny was still tucked into the coffin, where her mother had put it. I did not ask for it back. I said a short prayer in Italian, the one my mother used to say on the first day of every winter, and I was surprised to find that I meant every word.
When I stood, Rex stood too. He walked ahead of me down the gravel path, the way he had not walked in front of me since the night he first saved my life. At the car door he sat down and waited, looking back at the small stone, until I came close enough to open it for him.