“It’s possible, but my sense is that his father is so pissed that he wants to keep fighting it in hopes of clearing his name. I mean, from the father’s point of view, the damage is already done, so why bother settling?”
Charese was silent for a moment, studied the tabletop again. She took a deep breath. “I have some other pictures. Stuff I didn’t show to Reese. It’s a video of Roberge with some boys on a vacation we took in Mexico five years ago. The boys were maybe thirteen, fourteen years old. He thought I threw it away, and I was going to, but I never got around to it. Actually, I taped over some of it, but the end of the tape is still Roberge and the boys.”
“Is it graphic stuff?”
“Yeah, it is. It’s pretty rough. At one point, one of the boys starts crying and Roberge just slaps him and tells him to shut up and bend over. It was a side of Roberge I never saw before, but he just blamed it on too much tequila.”
“Are you in the tapes also?”
“No, young boys aren’t my style. You know, Roberge was the dominant one, always wanting to be George. I was happy being Martha.”
Shelby pondered this new piece of information. It was an effective leverage point in the litigation posturing, which was a nice way of saying it was good blackmail material. Did she want to be that kind of lawyer? Of course not. But could she make an exception in this case? Did the ends—saving Charese from AIDS or overdose—justify the means?
“Well, put it in a safe place. But don’t show it to Reese, whatever you do.”
“Come on Shelby, I’m not that stupid. Although it might be a way to get rid of him for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he might watch it and then catch the next plane to Mexico. Maybe the boys have little sisters.”
Shelby laughed, pleased to see the improvement in Charese’s spirits. She motioned for the waitress and smiled coyly at Charese. “I’ve changed my mind. Could I change my order to a burrito? I’m suddenly in the mood for Mexican.”
* * *
Shelby dawdled after lunch, popping into shops around Harvard Square and doing errands she had put off during finals. She knew she was just killing time because she didn’t want to go back to her apartment to pack. She had agreed to go visit a college friend for the Christmas break, but a week in the malls of New Jersey appealed to her about as much as re-taking her finals. The whole thing was silly—she had agreed to go because she couldn’t really think of an excuse not to, and she was pretty sure that her friend had invited her mostly out of a sense of pity.
But she was tired of pity, tired of being passed from cousin to friend to cousin during the holidays. What she really wanted was to turn back the calendar and just tweak the past ever so slightly. Maybe the waiter could stop at another table before bringing her father the check, or her mother could go freshen up in the bathroom before leaving the restaurant, or her brother could order desert, or the hotel valet could take an extra drag on his cigarette before retrieving Mr. Martini’s BMW. The randomness of the events leading to her family's death both overwhelmed and numbed her. How could the decision not to have another cup of coffee be the difference between life and death? Does every choice we make in life—what time to eat or when to cross the street or where to study—have such drastic consequences? She pushed the palms of her hands into her eye sockets, trying to force the inquiry back into the recesses of her consciousness. She knew it was the type of thing that, if analyzed too much, would paralyze her.
She sighed. The calendar would not turn back, just as it would not skip the last week of December, would not skip Ski Week.
Since she was four years old, her parents had bundled up her younger brother and her and headed for the Vermont mountains for a week of skiing during the Christmas break. The four of them would stand together arm-in-arm at the bottom of the trail after the first run on the first day and ask a stranger to take their picture, and 51 weeks of job pressures and adolescent hormones and mid-life crises became miraculously buried and forgotten under a two-foot shroud of packed powder.
For parts of the week uncles and aunts and cousins would join them, and the family would commandeer a large table near a roaring fireplace in the ski lodge and feast on hot chili and cold beer and baskets of French fries. One year, Shelby’s father had convinced a vacationing policeman to arrest and handcuff her uncle on bogus charges of not paying for a tray of food. Her uncle responded by paying a snow-plow operator to bury Shelby’s family’s car, which was countered the following year by Shelby and her brother—at their parents’ prompting—stealing their uncle’s and aunt’s towels as they sat naked in an outdoor hot tub. The practical jokes became a yearly tradition, and every year at least one member of the family good-naturedly bore the brunt of their loved ones’ pranks. Shelby’s cousins still teased her about the time when, as a fourteen-year old, she breathlessly recounted being approached on the slopes by an Olympic ski team coach who invited her to try out for the 1980 team.
She had hoped that her extended family would continue the skiing tradition even after her parents’ and brother’s death. But her parents had always been the impetus behind the event, and it was becoming more and more difficult to accommodate the group now that some of her cousins had young children of their own and the aunts and uncles were getting older and preferred warm weather vacations. In the end, it just simply didn’t get done. And Shelby was stuck going to New Jersey.
CHAPTER 20
[January 2, 1990]
Pierre turned over onto his left side, careful not to disturb Valerie sleeping peacefully next to him. The good news about the slowdown in Pierre’s business was that he had been able to spend more time with Carla and Valerie in the past four months than most husbands/fathers did in a year. The bad news was that they were unable to fill this time with any activities that cost any money. For now, cuddled up with his little girl asleep against his shoulder on a lazy Friday morning, Pierre considered it a wonderful trade-off. He drifted back to sleep.
Later that day, however, Pierre went into the office, hung up his new 1990 calendar, and forced himself to focus on the realities of their financial situation. Over the past four months, he had earned a grand total of $7,000, and the market was so slow that Pierre doubted he could even keep up that pace. The market had simply gridlocked—sellers wanted to sell, but most couldn’t—or wouldn’t—accept an offer that was less than their mortgage balance. Why bother selling your house if you have to go to the closing and write a check for ten or twenty thousand dollars? Hardly the American Dream.
In fact, Pierre was trying to broker one of these gridlocked deals right now. A young couple was trying to sell a one-bedroom condo. They had paid $130,000, and had taken a mortgage of $117,000. They now had a child and wanted to move to the suburbs, but the best offer Pierre could get them was $112,000. After paying Pierre’s commission and their other closing costs, they would be taking a $25,000 loss. As much as it killed them, they were willing to walk away from their $13,000 down payment, even though it was almost their entire savings. But they simply didn’t have another $12,000 to bring to the closing. They had asked the bank to take less than it was owed, but the bank refused. So the deal had died, even though the seller wanted to sell and the buyer wanted to buy at the $112,000 price. This type of grid-lock had a domino effect throughout the market—since this young couple couldn’t sell their condo, they couldn’t in turn buy a small house in the suburbs that would in turn allow another growing family to trade-up to a larger house. The result was that there were tons of sellers, and even a decent number of buyers, but very few transactions.
With Carla not working and a mortgage payment of over $2,000 per month, they were spending more than they earned. And they had little savings on which to draw. They had put most of their savings—$30,000—into buying the condo, and it was stuck there unless they could find a buyer, which Pierre was having trouble doing. Even then, the $30,000 had probably shrunk to $15,000. The remainder of their free cash had gone
toward furnishing the condo. The decision hadn’t seemed overly irresponsible at the time, but it wasn’t as if they could have a yard sale and expect to get much back for it now. In short, they had spent freely through the boom years, and now were suffering for it.
They preferred that Carla not go back to work until Valerie was older. But Carla had been scanning the help wanted ads the past few weeks. Unfortunately, after paying for daycare and transportation, Carla’s salary—even if she could get a job in this slumping economy—was not likely to solve their financial problems.
Carla had considered asking her parents for an advance on her inheritance, but she knew it would cost Pierre any chance he had at ever winning them over. Even then, she wasn’t sure if her parents had anything to spare. They had invested heavily in some bank stocks that had recently tumbled, and for the first time since Carla could remember they had decided not to winter in West Palm Beach with the Bordens.
Pierre sighed. For now, there was nothing to do but plug along. Bruce’s letter had successfully extricated Howie from his apartment building deal, so, with the promise of Howie’s money behind him, Pierre had attended a number of foreclosure sales over the past couple of months. He had not purchased anything yet, mostly because the banks seemed oblivious to the fact that the real estate market was slumping and still had 1988 price expectations. It was as if the bankers, insulated downtown in their air-conditioned towers and underground parking garages, were the last to know what was going on in the neighborhoods around them. Pierre imagined a chinless Chip Borden in a Brooks Brothers suit, sitting at his antique desk beneath his prep school and Ivy League diplomas, pulling out an appraisal from 1987 and stating: “But it says right here the property is worth $250,000. I’m sorry, but I can’t take less than that.” Recently, however, a few banks, mostly the smaller ones, had begun to adopt a more realistic bidding strategy at their auctions.
Pierre pulled out the auction listings from the previous week’s Sunday newspapers. He had circled the those that interested him; now, using an exacto knife, he cut out a couple of dozen listings and taped them into his new—and otherwise empty—1990 weekly planner. It was the first week of the first year of the new decade. A fresh start. It was time to buy.
He rang Howie. “Howie, it’s Pierre. How you doing?”
“Pierre! Great. Hey, I got a joke to tell you. I read they just discovered fossils of a new kind of dinosaur. Funny thing is, they were all gay males. The scientists named them ‘Tyronta-sore-ass’.”
“Let me guess,” Pierre responded. “They found the fossils out in San Francisco?” Howie laughed. Pierre knew Howie would incorporate this geographical twist into the joke when he told it again—probably within the half-hour. “Anyway, Howie, I wanted to talk to you about these foreclosure sales I’ve been going to.”
“Yeah. You bought anything yet?”
“No. But I think some of the banks are realizing they might have to take a haircut if they don’t want to get stuck with these properties. I just want to make sure you’re still on board for this.”
“Definitely. I’ll put up the cash and you do the work. We split it fifty-fifty, right?”
“That’s the deal. When I find something, we’ll probably have only a few weeks to close.”
“That’s fine. I’m pretty liquid. Just let me know. And good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.”
CHAPTER 21
[January 11, 1990]
Bruce studied his time sheets for the first 11 days of the new year. He had billed almost one hundred hours already, most of it on research items for a few large cases he was working on and the remainder on general background work for the foreclosure cases. It was mostly legitimate time—he had decided to cut back on his creative billing practices, seeing them as an unnecessary risk. Even without excessively padding his time, he was one of the top associates in terms of monthly billable hours. Not he that cared about this statistic in the same way the other associates did—that is, as a way to gauge themselves against each other in the race for partnership. But keeping his hours high was important to Bruce. First, it made him a profit center for the firm’s partners, which, he hoped, would give them less incentive to keep a watchful eye on him. And, second, it indicated to the partners that pending matters were fully occupying his time and they should not expect him to take on any more major projects. The last thing he needed right now was to be sent out of town on some major closing.
Bruce pulled out his December billing sheets. They were a little bit lower than he would have liked, especially for the last month of the billing year. He had been weighing an idea: Why not put some of the January time onto the December sheet? It was less risky than fabricating billable time—nobody would have any way of knowing whether he did the research the first week of January rather than the last week of December and, more importantly, nobody would care. As long as the work had been done, the distinction was only administrative. It would put him behind in his 1990 billing, but, if necessary, he could just borrow from 1991 next year at this time. More likely, it wouldn’t matter by then.
Bruce smiled as he worked, transferring about thirty hours from calendar year 1990 to calendar year 1989. It was like the federal government, except this was deficit billing instead of deficit spending. And it made his already-impressive 1989 billing numbers look even better.
CHAPTER 22
[January 19, 1990]
The red auctioneer’s banner, bungee-corded to a tree in front of the Victorian-era brownstone, was barely visible under a coat of dust-like snow. The snow felt more like sand on this windy winter day—small and dry, pellet-like as it whipped against exposed skin. It made Bruce smile. He loved the extremes of nature—he saw them as mythical battles between order and chaos. These battles were like prisms for Bruce, bringing back into focus the earth’s continuing conflict between the order of the landmass and the chaos of the sea. History had made it clear that there would be no winner in this battle, that the fight would continue endlessly.
But Bruce could win. He could win by harnessing the power of each, by bringing chaos to the orderly world and order to the chaotic one.
So he had hoped for a stormy day when he had scheduled the foreclosure sale, an auction process that was technical and rigid and regulated and orderly. It was a process that wanted a little chaos.
The Marlborough Street condominium unit was an ‘A’ property—prime location, in the heart of the Back Bay. Of course, Samuel Leumas remembered when hookers and other vagabonds frequented the first block of Marlborough Street, now considered Boston’s best address. “It may be popular now, Mr. Lawyer, but I remember when you avoided this part of town after dark. The city finally had to make the first block one way in the opposite direction from the rest of the street just to keep the johns from cruising up and down it all night long. Bet you didn’t know that’s why the traffic pattern is so ridiculous, did you?”
Bruce didn’t, nor did he really care. What he did care about was that Leumas had appraised the condo—a one-bedroom unit in the front part of the second floor of the building—at only $120,000. His comment to Bruce: “For Christ’s sake, it only has 550 square feet, even if it is done up all nice and fancy. How can it be worth more than that? It’s not much bigger than a jail cell.”
The unit had sold for $187,000 three years earlier. Marci was convinced she could sell it today for at least $145,000. And Nickel Bank had heeded Bruce’s warnings about the dangers of property ownership: They instructed Bruce to bid $84,000 on their behalf, equal to 70 percent of the $120,000 appraised value. Any higher bid would take the property.
Bruce was hoping that the weather would keep people away. His plan was simple—do everything he could to discourage bidding at the auction.
He reviewed in his mind the steps he had taken so far. First, he had scheduled the auction for 4:00 in the afternoon on a Friday in January—potential bidders would have to fight rush-hour traffic, and hopefully a little snow, to get to the au
ction. Second, in a purported effort to keep costs down, he had advertised the auction only in the Boston Herald, not the more widely read Boston Globe. Third, he had required a $20,000 deposit in order to bid at the auction, twice the usual amount. (“That way,” he had explained to the bank officer, “we’ll be sure to weed out bidders who don’t really have the financial ability to close.”) And fourth, he would make it clear that the bank would not agree to any extensions—close in twenty-one days or forfeit the $20,000 deposit.
But Bruce knew that the prime location of the property would counterbalance his efforts—some people were still likely to attend and plan to bid. Bruce had a plan to discourage them as well.
By four o’clock, a total of four people had registered to bid at the auction. One was Pierre, and he went right over to Bruce to re-introduce himself.
“Of course I remember you, Pierre. How have you been?”
“Great, thanks. And thanks again for helping out Howie. That was a beautiful move, the letter to the bank.”
“Don't thank me, I appreciate the referral. Are you guys still looking to buy? Actually, that’s a stupid question—I doubt you came out here in this storm just to watch my nose run.”
Pierre laughed. “Yeah, we’re actually using the money Howie didn’t spend on that last deal to try to buy some foreclosure stuff. That’s why I’m here, obviously. I was hoping the weather would keep other bidders away.”
Bruce laughed and nodded at him. “Yeah, I bet you were hoping for that.” He paused for a moment, as if weighing something in his mind. “Listen, Pierre, you seem like a good guy. I don’t want you to get burned on this one. Take a look at this.” He pulled a manila folder from his briefcase and handed it to Pierre. There was a single sheet of paper inside. It read:
Dear Potential Bidders:
I am the tenant in the condominium unit being foreclosed on today. I live here with my four-year old son. He has been diagnosed with lead poisoning. This lead comes from lead paint in the apartment. My lawyer has advised me to notify you that we will expect the new owner to de-lead the apartment immediately.
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