My Partner Changed The Locks Before The Morning Piano Deliveries

I heard the bad soundboard before I saw the new lock.

A delivery man had struck a low note inside our Peoria shop. The note buzzed against the glass door. Loose bridge pins could make a thin rattle. This sound had a wide, dry edge, like paper tearing under a blanket.

“Crack near the bass bridge,” I called through the glass.

Then my key stopped halfway into the lock.

I was thirty-six, a Japanese American man with straight black hair, a narrow face, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

My name was Hiroshi Matsuda. I restored pianos. Most days, my hands smelled of hide glue, felt, and the orange soap I kept beside the sink.

Conrad Phelps opened the door just far enough to fill it.

Conrad was a broad white man of forty with sandy hair, pink cheeks, and a smile that made every price sound like a favor.

“We need a clean break, Hiro,” he said.

“From what?”

“The confusion about your role.”

Behind him, two movers waited beside a walnut upright. Our old sign, Phelps & Matsuda Piano Rooms, lay facedown against the wall.

“You changed the locks.”

“I had to protect the business.”

Conrad had always said protect when he meant keep.

Three years earlier, we had formed a small showroom company. Conrad handled sales and rent. I handled repairs. Before that, I had run Matsuda Restoration alone, and I had kept that business open. The showroom paid my business for bench work.

I also owned half the showroom company. My signature sat beside his on its agreement.

“You can collect your hand tools Friday,” he said.

“And the instruments?”

He laughed softly, for the movers.

“You were hired help. Everybody knows that.”

A bus sighed at the corner. Across the street, someone scraped frost from a windshield. I waited until both sounds passed.

“That isn't what our papers say.”

“You took old pianos instead of money. Half the time there wasn't even a cash receipt.”

He had watched families sign instruments over to Matsuda Restoration to cover work they could not pay for. He had never watched me file the bills of sale afterward.

“No cash receipt,” I said. “That's true.”

His shoulders eased.

“See? We can handle this like adults.”

Through the gap, I saw a red wool loop beneath the lid of our concert grand. I tied those loops to my inventory tags. Red wool stayed soft against old finishes. Wire could scratch.

That grand had come to me from a retired teacher who owed $11,400 for work on three family pianos. We had set its trade value at that amount. After eighteen months of work, an independent appraiser had valued it at $96,000.

Conrad had called it our crown jewel.

I had called it MR-091 in my ledger.

“Where is Estelle's upright?” I asked.

“Storage.”

“Which storage?”

“Don't start.”

He began closing the door.

“Don't move anything with a red loop,” I said.

He smiled again.

“Get yourself some rest.”

I stood on the sidewalk long enough to photograph the new lock, the fallen sign, and the delivery truck's plate. Then I drove home past the bare trees near Bradley Park.

My workshop had once been my father's garage. It still held a bench, a drill press, and a cabinet I had never moved into the showroom.

In its bottom drawer lay my serial-number ledger.

Every page had a number, a description, an owner, and a trail to a signed document. Nine valuable pianos belonged to Matsuda Restoration. Five belonged to customers. Three belonged to our joint showroom.

Conrad had signed a separate bailment agreement for each of my nine. The word sounded grand, but it meant something plain: he could display and care for them. He could not sell them or pledge them without my written leave.

My phone rang while I laid those agreements on the bench.

“He called me,” Estelle Baptiste said.

Estelle was sixty-eight, Black, and retired from playing accompaniment for school choirs and church singers. She remembered instruments the way other people remembered birthdays.

“What did he say?”

“That you left in a temper. That he would finish my upright himself.”

“He told me it was in storage.”

She went quiet.

“Hiroshi, he invited me to see that piano on Saturday. He said it was on the floor.”

I turned to her page. Walnut case. Serial 44182. Three small marks beneath the music rack.

“I have your agreement,” I said.

“So do I.”

After we hung up, an envelope slid through the garage mail slot. Our mail carrier waved from the drive.

Inside was a lender's notice addressed to me as a showroom owner. Conrad had closed a $140,000 expansion loan.

The attached collateral list began with concert grand serial 70631.

I looked across my bench at MR-091.

The lender wanted my signature by Friday.