"The officer didn't say a name," Lin said.
"He didn't need to. I can find it. Police reports turn into court filings eventually. Court filings are my job." She looked at Walt. "And I want to know if he's ever done this before."
"You think it's the same man?" Bernice said. "As your father?"
"I don't know. I don't know if it's the same man. I know it's the same move." Nadia zipped her jacket. "My father had a receipt too. He had a photocopy of a license. He had a phone number. He did everything right, and the police took the guitar anyway, and the State charged him, and the guy who said it was stolen walked into the Southeast District with a bill of sale and an appraisal and walked out with a 1964 Jazzmaster. And by the time anyone checked that the license was fake, the guy was gone, and the guitar was gone, and my dad was a sixty-eight-year-old man with a criminal case and a lease that was up." She swallowed. "He didn't renew it. He said he couldn't look at the wall where the guitar used to hang."
Walt came around the counter. He did it slowly; his left knee was bad and the space between the end of the counter and the regulator case was narrow. He stood in front of her. He was not a tall man and she was not a short woman and they were almost of a height.
"Your father," he said, "said I was the last honest watchmaker in Baltimore."
"Yes."
"I'd like to meet him again. After this. I'd like to tell him he's wrong. That there are two of us. Him and me." He put out his hand. "Small things for a living."
She took it. His hand was dry and very warm.
"Small things for a living," she said.
* * *
Nadia's apartment was on the second floor of a rowhouse in Remington with a radiator that clanked like a man falling down stairs. She took off her jacket and put the kettle on and opened her laptop at the kitchen table at four-fifteen in the afternoon and did not get up again, except once to turn on a light, until a quarter to eleven.
The Maryland Judiciary Case Search was a public website with the user interface of a 1997 tax form. Nadia used it eight hours a day. She knew that the criminal docket entries for Baltimore City showed the defendant's name, the charge, the dates, the disposition and almost nothing else, and that the almost-nothing-else was where you had to look.
She started with her father.
State of Maryland v. August Henry Brandt. Baltimore City District Court. Charge: theft/receiving, $1,500 to under $25,000. Arrest date. Trial date, postponed. Trial date, postponed. Nolle prosequi, eleven months after the arrest. She had read it so many times the screen seemed worn. The complainant's name didn't appear on the public docket; complainants' names rarely did. But she remembered it. She remembered it from the charging document her father had spread out on his kitchen table, hands trembling, the summer of the case. Curtis A. Lyle. She remembered thinking even then that it sounded like a name somebody had picked off a cereal box.