28 Hearts of Sand (3 page)

“You’ll be going away for a while,” Tibor said. “Maybe she’ll get a lot done and you’ll come back to perfection. What is it they say when they work out? No pain, no gain.”

“Today, I tried to turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink, and I blew off this little cap thing and water went spurting all over the ceilings. And you know those ceilings. They’re twenty feet high.”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “Well.”

Linda Melajian came back to the table. “Do you want a breakfast menu, or shall I just get you your usual cholesterol bomb? Bennis isn’t here, so I assume we’re going for the whole bacon, sausage, hash browns, three scrambled eggs extravaganza.”

“At least I come here,” Gregor said. “I could go to Denny’s or IHOP and get bacon ice cream sundaes, whatever those are.”

“There isn’t either of those close enough for you to get to unless you start driving, and I’m not expecting that anytime soon. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Linda took off, and Gregor watched her go. She was the youngest of the Melajian girls, but that didn’t mean she was very young anymore. And she ran the entire restaurant for breakfast.

Gregor looked back at the papers. “So?” he said.

Tibor nodded. “We’re up to six now. The Arkanian family out in Wynne. I remember when they came from Armenia. That was maybe five years ago.”

“Speak English?”

“Yes and no, Krekor, you know how it is. They spoke English well enough to get by. And we told them when we came that we would be there to help them if there were things they wanted to do. Things like buying a house. I don’t understand why these people don’t come to us and ask for help. Russ Donahue would have looked over the loan papers for them. I would have looked over the loan papers. I know nothing about the law, and I could see what was wrong with these.”

Tibor pointed his finger at one of the little stacks, and Gregor picked it up. He read the entire page through, stopped, and then read it again.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“That’s what I said the first time I saw one of those,” Tibor said. “It doesn’t make any sense. But of course it does make sense, you just don’t believe it. And it gets worse, the more of the document you read. This is not a matter of people taking on more mortgage debt than they could handle, getting greedy for a house bigger than they could afford. I think this amounts to deliberate fraud.”

Gregor picked up the stack of papers again, read through the page again, then turned to the next page and read about half of that one. He put the stack down again. “It certainly is something,” he said.

“And it gets worse,” Tibor said. “There is the matter of the ownership of the loan.”

Gregor picked up the papers again. “NationReady Mortgage Finance,” he said.

“Maybe,” Tibor said.

Gregor cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe?”

Tibor sighed. “For hundreds of years, Krekor, if you bought real estate in this country, you got the deed and you took it to your local assessor’s office and you filed it. With pieces of paper, you understand. But these people, these people like NationReady, they did not do that. They used instead a national digital database of deeds.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “That’s not necessarily awful. It’s a digital age. Something like that was going to happen eventually.”

“Yes, possibly, Krekor, but in this case, it does not seem to have been competently run. The mortgages were all bought and sold in packages, and they were bought and sold very quickly, sometimes several times a day. And not all the transactions were properly recorded. So in some cases, nobody knows who owns the mortgage or who owns the house or who has a right to foreclose.”

“Well, that could be good news,” Gregor said. “If they can’t figure out who owns the mortgage, then it shouldn’t be possible to foreclose on the house.”

“Shouldn’t be, but that is not the way it is working out,” Tibor said. “We have been warned by the state attorney general’s office that NationReady and some of the banks have tried to foreclose on properties they could not prove they owned. If the buyer and his lawyer are not very sophisticated about these things, they sometimes miss that. People are forced out of their homes by people who have no right to force them out because they don’t own the mortgage to begin with, and nobody knows who does. But if you get forced out, it’s almost impossible to get back in again.”

“My God,” Gregor said. “This sounds like a Monty Python sketch.”

“Yes, Krekor, I know. But without the funny. And that’s not the end of it, either.”

“What more could there be?”

“The loan officers who set up these mortgages got paid on the basis of how many mortgages they made. So sometimes, when the buyer didn’t have the right credentials for a mortgage, the loan officer would change the application so that the numbers fit. They would change the income, for instance, or say there was no credit card debt when there was.”

“You’re sure the loan officers did this? People didn’t just lie on their applications?”

“First the loan officers tried to get the people to lie on the application themselves, but if they wouldn’t, the loan officers would make the changes themselves later.”

“That’s bank fraud,” Gregor said. “You can go to Federal prison for that.”

“Yes, Krekor, I know,” Tibor said, “but nobody is going to prison for it that I know of, and I have six families in foreclosure, all of them here from Armenia less than a decade. And we helped to bring them to America, Krekor, we are responsible to them. Two of these families are out on the street already, and we’ve had to find them accommodations elsewhere. And everybody has been very good about pitching in, but this is getting to be more than we can handle. And the legal things—
tcha.
”

Linda Melajian came back with two plates, both of them the full cholesterol extravaganza, as she put it. She looked at the papers strewn everywhere and hesitated. Gregor and Tibor hurried to push papers out of the way.

“Don’t worry about getting them out of order, Krekor,” Tibor said. “There is no such thing as ‘in order’ with these things.”

Linda put the plates down and looked into their coffee cups. “I’ll be back with the pot,” she said, “and if that’s the mortgage stuff, I still say you should just dynamate NationReady and get it over with. We’ve got a whole family staying in our back apartment, and the grandmother keeps threatening to commit suicide. Not that I think she means it, mind you, but this is ridiculous.”

“It is criminal,” Tibor said.

“Be right back,” Linda said.

Gregor watched her go and then looked back at the papers. “You’d think there would be something you could do about outright fraud,” he said. “I know half a dozen first-rate Federal fraud investigators from at least four agencies who would love to bring down a big operation like NationReady.”

“NationReady has been bought by CountriBank.”

“They’d love to bring down that, too. You don’t know what these guys are like. Woman, in one case. They live to bring down big operations, especially if the operations are supposed to be respectable banks. They really hate banks.”

“They can hate banks all they want, Krekor, but that will not get these people back into their houses. And we are now stuck trying to make sure no more of them are forced out. It is not so simple as it sounds like it ought to be.”

“Maybe I’ll go talk to one of those people for you,” Gregor said.

“I would much appreciate it,” Tibor said. “I don’t think you will do much good, you understand, but I would appreciate it.”

“Of course it would do some good,” Gregor said positively, picking up his fork and attacking his sausage.

He always went for the sausage first, because it was the first thing Bennis wanted to take away from him when she saw he wasn’t breakfasting on fruit.

3

An hour later, with no sign of Bennis or Donna at the Ararat, Gregor walked back home to pick up his briefcase. The storm had died down. The wind was no longer violent. There was no more thunder. There was no lightning in the sky. The drizzle was still coming down, though, and it still felt cold.

Gregor went in through the front door of the house, because that was the place where the house looked most “done.” It was a beautiful entry, really, with a glass-inlaid door and a brass knob and knocker. As far as he could tell, Bennis didn’t intend to do anything at all about the building’s facade.

He let himself into the foyer, stepped over a stack of tiles, and took his Windbreaker off. There was an old-fashioned coat stand right there in the corner. Bennis had picked it up at an antique store somewhere or the other. He put his Windbreaker over that and headed for the back of the house.

“Bennis?” he said. “Are you all right? You never made it to the Ararat.”

He went past little mounds of bathroom fixtures, puddles of carpet samples, stacks of “home plan ideas” magazines that he was sure Bennis had never read. He let himself into the kitchen and heard a sudden, inhuman shriek.

Bennis was sitting on one of the chairs, holding a small, impossibly frantic animal in her lap. It looked like nothing Gregor had ever seen before. It was skeletal and matted. It was twisting around like it had no bones at all.

Bennis stood up and thrust it under a pile of blankets on the table. When Gregor looked again, he could see that the pile had actually been shaped into a little blanket cave. Shrieks came from the center of it, and the whole pile seemed to shake.

“What was that?” Gregor asked.

Bennis sat down again. “It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a very small cat, and it’s half dead. Donna and I found it under the back porch with what was probably its mother and two litter mates. They were all dead.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “So you brought it in here. I didn’t think you liked cats.”

“I don’t mind them,” Bennis said. “And we couldn’t just leave it out there to die. We called the vet, and we’ve given it something to eat, but Donna went to get a cat carrier so that we can get it some medical attention. The vet says it sounds like it might be feral.”

“Which means?”

“Cats that have gone back to the wild, who have never lived with people. But if the mother cat had the litter under our front porch, the kittens might not have seen people but the mother cat might have, so—”

“All right, I can see that.”

“It is all right, Gregor, I promise you. I don’t intend to stick you with a cat. We’re just going to take it to the vet’s and then when it’s all right medically, we’ll feed it for a while and find somebody to adopt it. Maybe Tibor can adopt it. He likes cats. And the apartment is big enough.”

“You’ll have to ask Tibor about that,” Gregor said. “And the cat seems to be reemerging.”

Bennis got up to look. The cat was coming out on very wobbly legs. She picked it up and held it close to her chest, stroking its head. It curled up against her, and its shaking seemed to get less violent.

“Well,” Gregor said.

“Oh, I know,” Bennis said. “You think I’ve gone completely out of my mind. But it’s really not anything like that. And I promise you, the house will not take forever.”

The kitchen door rattled and Donna Moradanyan Donahue burst in, carrying three cat carriers and another pile of blankets, and being trailed by a small boy who looked as if his day had suddenly become not boring.

TWO

1

Gregor Demarkian always thought of Patrick Hallihan as living “in Philadelphia.” Technically, however, Patrick lived in a township just past the proper city limits, in a big apartment complex that stretched out across blocks like an upscale housing project. The name of the apartment complex was Drexelbrook, and Gregor tended to think of the entire town by that same name. He had no idea if this was right or not. The cabdrivers knew how to get him to Drexelbrook, and that was all that mattered.

Of course, a cab all the way out here was enormously expensive, but for some reason Gregor didn’t care this morning. This morning the sky was black and everything looked apocalyptically dismal. Gregor was sure that somewhere, somehow, Cassandra had returned in the flesh to warn the populace about the coming doom.

The cab left him at the curb. The building was a bit of a walk down a narrow concrete pathway. Gregor wished he’d brought his Windbreaker as well as his umbrella.

He went down the path and into the foyer. The fresh flowers were really there. The air-conditioning was on much too high. He went to the call board and buzzed Patrick’s apartment, only to get a lilting female voice saying, “If that’s you, prove it.”

Gregor said, “Good morning, Lillian. I don’t know how to prove it.”

“Honestly, Gregor,” Lillian said. “You wouldn’t know you’d been in the FBI for twenty years. You wouldn’t know it about Patrick, either. Don’t either of you ever watch television?”

Gregor made his way across the lobby to the elevators. When the elevator doors opened, he punched the button for the third floor. The lobby itself was absolutely empty, and it had been absolutely empty every single time Gregor was ever in it. In fact, now that he thought of it, every apartment building lobby he had ever been in was empty, except the ones with doormen, and those didn’t count. It made him wonder why there were apartment building lobbies.

When he came off the elevator, Patrick was standing in the hall waiting for him, holding open the door of his apartment. Gregor shook the water off his shoulders and hurried up a little.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” he said. “I’m thinking about apartment building lobbies.”

“What?” Patrick said.

“And Bennis has a cat,” Gregor said.

Patrick stepped back to let Gregor through the door. “I wouldn’t have thought Bennis was a cat person,” he said.

“She isn’t,” Gregor said. “She found it under our porch. It looked half dead, so she brought it inside. It was pitiful.”

Lillian was putting out a coffeepot and cups on the living room coffee table. She was all dressed up like a housewife in a ’50s sitcom.

“You two should watch television,” she said. “You’d find out how you’re supposed to behave. I’ve never known a law enforcement officer in my life who knew how to behave.”