He came in eight minutes late in a beautiful gray suit and shook hands with his own lawyers and with Kit and sat down at the head of the table without being invited to, because men like that always take the head of the table.

He was about sixty, silver, healthy in an expensive way.

He looked at me exactly once, the way you look at a coat rack to make sure it isn’t a person.

The court reporter swore him in.

Kit spent the first forty minutes on nothing at all. His title. His reporting structure. How vendor contracts were approved.

Whether he had authority over custodial staffing, which he said he did not, and then, eleven minutes later, described exercising.