Vincent Put My Pay Beneath His Glass And Named His Price

Vincent Rallo put my check under his water glass so I would have to ask for it.

I kept sorting jack springs into three porcelain eggcups. Blue rims held good ones. Pink rims held weak ones. The cup with a chip held things I had not yet judged.

"You missed something, Corinne," he said.

"I billed for thirty hours."

"You scratched a case. Four hundred and twenty dollars comes off."

The scratch had been on the intake sheet. He had signed beside it. I had the carbon copy at home.

I was a broad-shouldered woman with light brown skin, gray curls clipped above my ears, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

At fifty-one, I was a Black and white American woman who rebuilt piano actions for a living. I repaired the small wooden parts that turned a finger on a key into a hammer against a string. When work was good, I could hear a bad center pin before most people heard a note.

Vincent heard only the price.

He was a tall man with silver hair brushed straight back, soft brown eyes, and a neat white beard that made his smile look kind.

Vincent was fifty-six and Italian American. He wore expensive coats to a warehouse where everyone else wore dust. He opened doors for women who bought pianos. For the woman who fixed them, he pointed at doors and expected movement.

"Sign here," he said.

The sheet said I accepted full payment.

"I'll sign for the amount received."

His smile stayed in place.

"Don't make a little thing large."

Outside, trucks rolled toward Port Newark. Rain shook against the high windows. His warehouse stood near the airport roads, where a wrong turn could put you among freight gates instead of houses.

I lifted the glass, took the check, and wrote PARTIAL PAYMENT above my name.

He watched my hand.

"You repair what comes through that door," he said. "You don't inspect my business."

That was how he thought of me. A pair of hands. A middle-aged woman who needed her weekly check badly enough to keep her eyes down.

He had picked the wrong pair of hands.

Three weeks earlier, a broken keyboard had come to my bench without its piano. Keys nineteen through twenty-three had split under some weight. Beneath the key frame, inside a flat brown sleeve, I had found six original warehouse release slips.

Not music. Not packing lists.

They named bronze and stone sculptures, a bonded warehouse, and piano crate numbers. On the backs were ink notes that did not appear on the copies tucked into Vincent's office files.

I had seen those copies while matching crate numbers to repair tickets. My job required that much.

One sculpture weighed ninety-four pounds. The piano said to carry it had arrived without strings.

I knew what a piano weighed when its heart was gone.

I had taken photographs before touching the sleeve. Then I had called Mara Teal, a lawyer who had helped me collect an unpaid repair bill years before.

"Don't make more trips through his office," she had said.

"I haven't."

"Good. Bring what you found. I'll record how I received it."

The originals had gone into her evidence safe. She gave me a dated receipt, with six pages listed and each number written out. I kept that receipt away from my bench, too.

Vincent could empty every eggcup I owned. He would not find his papers.

That afternoon, a man waited beside the loading door. He wore a dark raincoat and held a folder under one arm.

"Corinne Mercer? Elias Ward. We spoke through Ms. Teal."

He showed me his federal credentials without pushing them close to my face.

"Can we walk?" he asked.

We crossed to a diner, where the coffee cost three dollars and the window faced the warehouse entrance.

Elias was a fifty-three-year-old Black American man, careful with his words. He let me choose the seat.

"Am I already in trouble?" I asked.

"I don't know everything yet. I won't pretend I do."

That answer eased me more than a promise of safety would have.

I told him about the empty piano and the six slips.

"A warehouse release doesn't prove a sale was lawful," he said. "And a signature needs a person behind it. We'll check each one."

"Will you tell him I came to you?"

"I won't contact him before speaking with your lawyer. If that changes, I'll tell you first."

He wrote that down, as if his own promises belonged in the file.

Back at my bench, I found Vincent waiting. He slid a photograph between the eggcups.

An upright piano stood in a narrow hallway. Its bottom panel hung crooked.

"My courier went missing with this," he said. "Find it. Repair it."

I looked at the serial number written below the picture: 44178.

"What happened to your courier?"

Vincent tapped the photograph once.

"Don't become another person I have to look for."