A Signature in Blue Ink
Chapter 03 - A Signature in Blue Ink
Eleanor Pike had been a notary for thirty-two years, mostly on the North Side, mostly for people who wanted no fuss. She liked blue ink because it showed a wet original, and she brought her own pen to funerals and property closings alike. She had witnessed Luca and Grace's divorce papers five years ago. She'd been pleasant, efficient, and disappointed by none of it.
Now Grace sat opposite her in a cramped office above a dentist, listening to Eleanor explain that the declaration bearing her stamp had never passed through her hands.
“The stamp was replaced last February,” Eleanor said. “Someone stole the old one. I filed a report.”
“Did Aldo know?” Luca asked.
“He got a copy.”
Aldo had failed to mention it at midnight.
Eleanor placed two documents together. “Look at the embossed edge. The forged one is half a millimeter wider. Your signature wasn't witnessed by me, Mrs. Calder. I can swear to that.”
Grace let out a breath. It didn't make her happy. A forged document meant there was no longer any way to pretend this had been an unfortunate clerical error.
Outside, Luca asked whether Grace wanted him to call the attorney general. “I already have,” she said. “Yesterday. I also have a housing lawyer filing our emergency petition. I didn't wait for your permission.”
He wondered what their marriage might have been if he'd understood that independence was not an insult.
Back at the mansion, Olivia found Vanessa waiting beside the laundry room. In daylight the red gown was gone; Vanessa wore gray cashmere and pearl studs, an appearance calculated to suggest reasonableness. She held an envelope.
“Your doctor's fee,” she said.
“Mr. Moretti's office paid it.”
“Then consider this compensation for a terrible misunderstanding.”
Olivia did not take it. “A misunderstanding doesn't leave bruises.”
“I never touched you.”
“No,” Olivia said. “You only told me what would happen if I spoke.”
Vanessa turned the envelope edgewise against her palm. For a moment she looked less like a socialite than a tired woman who had rehearsed this exchange badly. “You have no idea what you're involved in.”
“I know there were photographs of older people who didn't consent to being followed.”
“They're public sidewalks.”
“And I know a man pushed a door into my face.”
“William was frightened. That's not an excuse. But you're making it into something it wasn't.”
Olivia said nothing. Vanessa had finally supplied the man's first name without being asked.
“I want you to understand,” Vanessa continued, “Luca's mother left him a very complicated estate. Grace enjoys making everything difficult. She's held that property hostage for years.”
“Hostage to what?”
“Her moral superiority.”
Olivia looked at the envelope. “Please leave it on the table. If it's an apology, I don't want it. If it's payment, I won't accept it without knowing what for.”
She carried clean towels past Vanessa and closed the linen closet herself, gently.
That evening William Mercer sat in his office on West Madison looking at two invoices on his monitor. One was for ordinary surveillance: times, dates, who came and went. The other was for work he didn't want recorded. It had been billed to Bellini Urban Renewal as “resident readiness verification.” The photographs included Mrs. Bell leaving a cardiologist and Mrs. Alvarez walking her grandson to school. In the margins somebody had written observations about mobility, medication, family visits, vulnerability.
Mercer had told himself he was only gathering facts. The truth was uglier: he'd known what his clients meant to do with them.
His phone rang. Vanessa.
“You said the maid wouldn't be a problem.”
“She isn't your problem. The documents are.”
“William.”
“Don't use that voice with me.”
“You told me Grace was meeting Luca secretly. You told me the pictures proved it.”
“They proved two people talked outside a hospital. What you wanted them to prove was your business.”
He hung up before she could reply. He took out the original negatives from an old-fashioned locked drawer, a precaution he'd adopted when his clients started preferring evidence that could be altered. The digital originals were on two memory cards. One stayed with him; the other was at his sister's apartment in Milwaukee, for reasons even he didn't like to examine.
At seven, the Moretti house manager called Olivia into the library. Not Luca. Aldo Rinaldi, sitting behind a desk he'd occupied as a visitor so often that he seemed to believe it belonged to him.
“Miss Hayes. My client's generosity shouldn't be mistaken for an invitation to discuss private family affairs.”
“Which client?” she asked.
Aldo's mouth tightened. “Mr. Moretti, naturally.”
“Did he ask you to speak to me?”
“I'm authorized to act on his behalf.”
Olivia had heard that sentence from debt collectors, landlords, and the receptionist at the hospital where her grandmother died. It always meant the person she needed to talk to was somewhere else.
“I've given a statement about my injury,” she said. “You can request it through my lawyer.”
“Your lawyer?” Aldo repeated, unable to hide his surprise.
She had called a legal aid clinic that afternoon. A volunteer had taken her account and agreed to help if anyone tried to buy her silence. It wasn't a lawyer yet, not in the sense Aldo meant, but she allowed him to wonder.
As she left, she saw a receipt sticking from Aldo's leather folder. The letterhead bore the same Bellini company name as the papers at St. Agnes. Beneath it was a line for a courier charge, dated last week: Delivery to W. Mercer — original residential assessments.
She did not touch it. She had learned that recording what one had actually seen could be more powerful than stealing a page one could never authenticate.
At the top of the stairs Luca met her. “Has Aldo questioned you?”
“He told me to be discreet.”
“Did he?” Luca said, and something in his face closed.
Olivia wondered whether to tell him about the receipt. She decided she could trust the truth without trusting the man just yet. “He had an invoice in his folder. Your fiancée's father's company. Mr. Mercer.”
Luca thanked her and walked past without another word.
In the library, Aldo was closing his briefcase when Luca stopped him. “Show me every paper you delivered to Mercer.”
May you like
Aldo's face went pale enough to answer the question before his mouth did.
But the page that fell from his folder held a worse answer: next to Grace's forged consent was an application to have Mrs. Bell declared incapable of managing her own affairs.
