My Former Partner Changed The Lock And Tagged Our Customers' Signs

My key went halfway into the lock and stopped.

I tried it once more. Through the window, I saw my bending torch on the bench. The rubber hose hung where I had left it Tuesday night.

Someone had put a red price tag on the bench.

At forty-two, I was a broad Polish American man with pale skin, gray at my temples, and thick hands mapped with small white burns.

I bent neon glass for a living. Before I heated a tight curve, I held my hand under the pattern lamp and checked the bend against its shadow. My thumb gave me one curve. The space between two fingers gave me another.

That Thursday morning, I stood outside Kettle Bend Neon with both hands in my coat pockets.

Wet snow lay along the curb. A salt truck scraped past toward the Menomonee Valley. Inside our Milwaukee shop, my former partner drank coffee from my cup.

Alden Vick was a trim white American man of forty-five, with sandy hair, pink cheeks, and a smile that made every room feel like his kitchen.

He opened the door six inches.

“Key trouble, Pete?”

“My name is Piotr. Open the door.”

He used Pete when he wanted an audience to think we were close.

“We need to settle the buyout first.”

“We settled it Tuesday.”

He lifted his cup. “You made some payments. You never finished.”

Across his shoulder, I saw June Vale at the office desk. June kept our books two days a week. She had always brought extra muffins and called both of us honey.

She looked down when she saw me.

“The last payment was forty-two thousand dollars,” I said. “You got it.”

Alden's smile went flat.

That was his habit. He could joke through a bad furnace, a late order, or a flooded loading bay. Mention a receipt and the easy part of him left the room.

“Show me in the books.”

June shut the laptop.

“The payment folder isn't there,” she said. “Neither are the old exports. I checked.”

“Then check the bank.”

“We're not doing this on the sidewalk,” Alden said.

He had chosen the sidewalk. I had chosen an escrow officer eight months earlier, when he first suggested that I buy his half of the company.

Those were different choices.

The price had been $126,000. I had paid $84,000 in two stages, then borrowed against my house for the last $42,000. Alden had insisted on holding his signed transfer until the final money cleared.

I had insisted that neither of us hold it.

“Call Noor,” I said.

“She's an escrow clerk. She doesn't run my business.”

He shut the door.

I heard the new deadbolt turn.

My phone rang before I reached my truck.

It was Bev Lasker, who owned the small market on Howell Avenue. We had her father's old pink DAIRY sign. Three tubes were original, made when he opened the store in 1964.

“Alden said you walked away,” she said.

“I didn't.”

“He said I should take the refund before everything gets sold.”

I turned back toward the window.

“What gets sold?”

“The unclaimed stock. That's what he called it.”

Bev had paid a $1,200 repair deposit. Her sign had never belonged to us. None of the eleven customer signs on those racks belonged to us.

I asked her to send me his message and her intake slip.

Then I called Noor Haddad.

She was thirty-seven, an Arab American escrow officer who had read every page of our sale agreement twice. At closing, she had found a wrong date that both lawyers missed.

“Please tell me he hasn't said the transaction didn't happen,” she said.

“He changed the locks.”

There was a pause. Paper moved near her phone.

“I take that personally,” she said.

“Can you send the confirmation?”

“The disbursement confirmation, the bank trace, the release notice, and the membership-transfer instrument. Which part of Tuesday would he like erased?”

For the first time that morning, I breathed all the way in.

“All of it, apparently.”

“Come here. Bring your identification.”

Before I drove away, I photographed the red tags through the window. My hands shook, so I rested the phone against the glass.

Our intake numbers were on blue paper loops tied to each sign. I had drawn a small outline of my hand on those loops. It let me find my own jobs at a glance.

Now someone had turned several loops inward.

Alden came to the window and pulled down the blind.

My phone buzzed with Bev's forwarded message.

Under his claim that I had defaulted, Alden had attached a sale sheet. Eleven signs. One lot. Balance due Friday morning.

At the bottom was a line for a $9,600 deposit, marked RECEIVED.

Then a flatbed truck backed into our alley.