The Door on Fourth Street

Amos Whitlock took his Sunday walks with his young colleague Teo Vasquez for the reason most men take walks with anyone: the other one did the talking. They went north out of German Village, up through the Short North, and then along the river where the water lay flat and brown and did not pretend to be pretty. Teo walked fast. Amos walked as if he had all afternoon, which he did.

They had been at it most of a year before Teo told him about the door.

It was on Fourth Street, he said, near where the loading docks go behind the older buildings, the ones put up when this part of town still made things. Teo had been leaving a late deposition in February, walking to his car with his collar up, and the street had been empty except for three people: a girl of eight or nine coming out of a corner store with a bag of ice, a small man in a dark coat walking toward her, and Teo himself, half a block behind. The man did not see the girl. Or he saw her and did not slow. He did not go around her. He went through her at a kind of running walk and knocked her flat on the sidewalk, and kept going, and the ice went skidding into the gutter and the girl lay there screaming, not from any injury, Teo thought, so much as from the suddenness of it.

Teo ran. He got hold of the man's coat, brought him around, and found himself looking down at a face he could afterward describe only one way: a face nobody keeps on purpose. Not ugly. Not marked. Just quick, and wrong, and angry about being looked at.

There was a doctor's office on the corner, and the girl's mother came running out, and in five minutes the street had seven people on it, which is how these things go. And the small man, instead of bolting, had reached into his coat, taken out a checkbook, and written a settlement in the child's mother's hand, as calm as a man paying for a tire. The signature, Teo said, was of a name he knew. Everybody in Columbus knew it. It was the name on the wing of the new research building at the hospital, and on the letter that comes every spring asking people with money to give some of it to biology.

Amos had stopped walking. He asked what Teo did with the check.

Cleared it, Teo said. He had thought about it for a week first. Then he walked it into his own bank and asked them to run it, and it was good. And that was the end of the story, except that once a year or so Teo went down Fourth Street at night to look at the service door the small man had come out of, and the door was always shut, and the lights were always on behind the frosted glass above it, and nothing about the building ever said a word about any of it.

"What did the girl's mother do?" Amos asked.

Took the money, Teo said. What else was there.

They walked on. Amos asked the name. He asked it twice, the second time because he had not wanted to hear it the first time, and Teo gave it both times. It was the name of a man Amos had known for twenty-two years, whose estate documents he had drafted himself, sitting in a leather chair in an office with the door closed, and that name was Adrian Voss.