Part 3 — Kyle And The Closet
The note on the legal pad said Friday, 10 a.m., and under it, in the same careful handwriting, a street address downtown. The young officer read it aloud twice, and Walter sat very still at his kitchen table with a towel around his wet cardigan.
The address belonged to a notary office above a tax preparer. The officer called the detective unit, and the detective made one phone call. The notary confirmed that an appointment was booked for Friday morning to sign a transfer deed for a house on Fairview Avenue. Walters house.
Kyle was not a nephew. He was a young man who had met Walter at the grocery store months earlier, called him Uncle at the second visit and let the old man believe it. Walter was a lonely widower, and a polite voice at the door had been enough.
The closet had been Kyles base. He slept there during the cold nights, siphoned heat from Walters furnace and read Walters mail. The legal pad was his practice sheet for copying Walters signature, line after line, until it looked right.
Kyle needed only one sentence from a lonely man, and Walter gave it to him freely: I have no family, and the house goes to the church.
At eleven that night, the back door key turned in the lock, and two detectives were waiting in the dark kitchen. Kyle came in whistling and stopped mid note. He was arrested without a struggle and charged with attempted fraud, forgery, trespass and exploitation of an elderly person.
The notary, who had been told only that the signer was a bit hard of hearing, cooperated completely. A second man, who was to pose as the buyer, was arrested at a diner the next morning. Both pleaded guilty within weeks.
Adult Protective Services visited Walter with a gentle social worker named Denise. She helped him change every lock, set up mail forwarding to a post office box and name two trusted people at his church to call if anything seemed wrong.
I came back Saturday on my own time. I spliced the cut duct, sealed it properly and ran the heat to the back bedroom. I did not charge Walter a dime, and I took out the brass padlock and the foil tape and put them in a bag for the detective.
The back bedroom warmed up in forty minutes. Walter put his hand on the vent and smiled the way a man smiles when he feels a house breathe again.
The church ladies started a Wednesday casserole schedule for him after that. Walter has more nephews and nieces now than he can count, and every one of them knocks first.