This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The viewing room at Bellweather Auction Rooms smelled of cardboard and cold coffee that morning, the lots still under their felt wraps, waiting for the lights to be adjusted for photography. I had come in early to finish the catalog notes on a run of Bordeaux that was, by any measure I could offer, the best thing I had cataloged all year.
Grant Ellery found me there with his phone in his hand and that particular stillness he got when something had already gone wrong somewhere else and was about to become our problem too.
"Have you seen this," he said, not really a question, and turned the screen toward me. A wire story. Arrest. Fraud charges. A name I recognized because everyone in the trade recognized it, attached to words like loan and multi-million-dollar scheme.
"Charged," I said, reading it twice. "Not convicted."
"No," Grant agreed. "But you know how it goes. Every bottle in a certain price range is going to get a second look this week, whether it deserves one or not."
I thought of my own lots downstairs, none of them from the collection in question, none of them touched by that name in any way I could point to. Still, I felt the cold edge of it settle over the room like a change in weather nobody had forecast.
Nolan Perrin arrived at ten, punctual as always, a retired man with the bearing of someone who had spent thirty years making sure hotel deliveries matched hotel invoices to the penny. He wanted, mostly, to talk about his sale again.
"You said sixty to eighty thousand for the group," he reminded me, settling into the chair across from my desk. "I've already told my daughter that figure. I'd hate to walk it back."
I had said sixty to eighty thousand. I had said it with the ease of someone who trusted a client's bearing and his family's reputation more than she had examined the paper behind it.
"I stand by the estimate," I told him, and meant it, mostly. "But given this morning's news, I think it's worth us going through your documentation together, line by line, before the catalog goes final. Not because anything about your collection is in question. Just because everyone's going to be asked to show their work now."
Nolan considered this, his jaw working slightly the way it did when he was deciding whether to be offended. "You think there's a problem."
"I think I'd rather find nothing when I look than have someone else find something when they do."
He nodded slowly, a man who had spent a career on the other side of exactly this kind of request. "Bring the folder tomorrow," he said, more to himself than me. "I'll bring everything."
After he left, Grant lingered in my doorway. "You didn't have to open that up," he said. "The estimate's fine. Nobody's asking."
"I am," I said.
He studied me for a second longer than the conversation required, then nodded and went back to his office, and I sat alone with the weight of a number I had given too easily, and the promotion that number was supposed to help pay for, piece by piece, until my sister finally had her share of the house back in cash instead of hope.