Nolan's folder was thinner than I expected for a man who had spent his working life inside purchase orders. He set it on my desk the next morning with the careful hands of someone presenting a will rather than a wine collection, and sat back while I opened it.
The top layer was good — auction receipts from the nineties, a few insurance appraisals, a letter from his late father describing a cellar built over decades of hotel conferences and grateful vendors. The kind of paper that photographs well in a catalog.
Underneath, the record thinned fast. A gap between 1998 and 2004 with nothing but a single typed inventory list, unsigned, undated except for a handwritten year in the corner that didn't match the letterhead above it.
"This list," I said, turning it toward him. "Where did this come from?"
Nolan frowned at it like he was seeing it for the first time, though I doubted that. "My father kept his own records toward the end. He wasn't always precise about dating things. He trusted his memory."
"I understand that. But for the catalog, I need more than memory. I need something that shows the bottles moving from hand to hand, not just sitting in a cellar someone remembers well."
I pulled a clean sheet toward us and made two columns, one for a bottle or group of bottles and one for the document that actually named it. Nolan leaned forward when I put the first receipt beside the inventory. He found the matching entry before I did and tapped it with his forefinger.
"There," he said. "That ought to help."
"It does." I entered the receipt date, then moved to the next group. The description was broader, and the quantity differed. I left that space empty rather than carrying the first receipt's authority across the page.
Nolan reached for his folder. "Perhaps I should take this away and put it in better order. I didn't realize it would be examined like an expense account."
For a moment I almost let him. A polished replacement would be easier to discuss than the little failures of correspondence accumulating between us. Instead I asked whether I could copy the papers in their present order and note his explanations separately. He kept his hand on the folder while I explained that I needed to distinguish a document from what either of us remembered about it.
"You can copy it," he said at last. "But don't put a question mark beside my father's name."
"The question belongs beside the missing record," I said. I changed the column heading from proof to supporting document before making the copies.
"You said sixty to eighty thousand," Nolan said again, and this time there was an edge in it, not anger exactly, more the discomfort of a careful man watching a number he'd trusted start to wobble.
"I did," I admitted. "I said it because you're a serious man from a serious house, and because the bottles themselves look right. But I realize now that I built that number on your reputation more than on this paper. That's on me, not you."
He didn't answer right away. Outside the window a delivery truck idled, someone shouting instructions to a driver, ordinary noise against the quiet of the room.
"I'm not accusing you of anything," I went on. "Nothing here suggests fraud, nothing here connects you to that man in the news or anyone like him. It just doesn't connect the dots the way I told you it did. I need the rest of what your father kept. Ledgers, letters, anything with a date on it that isn't a guess."
Nolan nodded slowly, the offense draining out of him and something more sober taking its place. "There's a box in the attic. I hadn't thought it mattered. Bills, mostly. Christmas cards from suppliers."
"Bring it all," I said. "Even the Christmas cards. I'd rather have too much than stand behind a figure I can't explain."
He left with a handshake instead of his earlier confidence, and I sat alone afterward with the thin folder open in front of me, aware that the gap I'd found wasn't evidence of anything sinister in his collection — only evidence of how easily I had let a well-dressed man's certainty stand in for my own diligence.