WALTER LAY ON MY bed loudly servicing himself, saying afterward, “You owe me.” He said, “Pay me. You’ve got some money. I’ll gladly leave,” so I signed to pay what he thought he was due on condition he leave, and then, of course, he died. On an ordinary day—Percodan and Scotch—Walter took up his worn, overstuffed folders and drove off in a taxi to the firm. His bridge-playing, genius friend, a man tilling millions, saw him take the stairs, but no one else he knew encountered him. They think Walter cabbed it downtown and up again without changing cars, but what happened after he came back to the brownstone? The depression on the far side of the bed was evidence he lay there on our sodden sheets listening to the radio. (The radio was still on when I came home.) There was evidence he drank, he took pills, he got sick. He phoned an ambulance.
Someone got the money he surely must have left.
Someone got the money I paid to his estate. … “Sign nothing with fine print,” a daddy could have warned me, but I had signed Walter’s document; I had said yes, I would pay him to move out, and then he did—forever. Only the document held up.