Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 23

Skye looks up at me in shock. “You bagged it?”

I shrug. “I watch a lot of true crime.”

She sets down the stapled pages and picks up the freezer bag by two corners, holding it up toward her window to better catch the light. The bag’s got that letterhead in it. V HAVEN HOLDINGS, LLC, the first word mostly burned off. PROMISSORY. The undersigned. And the signature over the line marked BORROWER.

Delilah A. Dorsey.

“It’s definitely a forgery, though,” I continue. “That’s not my signature. The loop on the D closes at the wrong angle. And the dash over the i in Delilah goes the wrong way. I go up to the right. Whoever did that went down.”

“Show me yours.”

I write my name for her on the corner of her legal pad. Then I write it again, just to prove my point.

She sets the bag beside the pad and looks at both of them for a long time. Long enough that I hear the deaf secretary out front answer a phone with a screeching, full-volume “LAW OFFICE.”

“Huh,” Skye says.

“Is that a good huh?”

“For you? No.” She taps the bag with the end of her pencil. “It’s a good forgery. Somebody had a real sample in front of them when they did it. But it’s a forgery. I can tell.”

“But can a jury?”

“Juries are fickle. But we can get a good subject matter expert to testify.” She sets the pencil down and raps her fingernails on her desk while she thinks. “I know a few good analysts in the city who do handwriting for a living and don’t embarrass themselves on cross. Any one of them would look at that and your samples and say what you just said, under oath, in front of a judge. I’d bet money on it.”

I’m starting to feel something dangerously close to hope.

“Okay,” I say breathlessly. “What about the pledge? He put up my building. I never signed anything. I never even heard of these people until Christmas Eve.”

“You can’t encumber real property you don’t own,” replies Skye. “So if you’re being honest with me and you never signed, never authorized him to sign, never took a dollar of the money, and never did anything afterward that looks like you approved it—no payments, no correspondence, no cashing anything—then that guaranty is void as to you and their lien on 4412 is a piece of paper somebody wasted a lot of good money to draft.”

“Mrs. Brewer, you’re starting to make me feel optimistic.”

“I’d never go that far. Optimism is dangerous in my profession. But you’re not the most hopeless case I’ve ever seen.” She leans back and looks at me. “Honestly, Ms. Dorsey, most people who walk in here are either empty-handed or full of s**t. You brought me a vetted chain of custody. Whatever you do for a living, you’re wasted on it.”

“I bake.”

“Well, I bet you’re damn good at it.”

For the length of one breath, maybe two, I feel like I might be okay.

Then Skye leans forward again, and that silly little feeling goes fluttering out the window.

“Now, let me tell you what being right is gonna cost ya.”

I cringe. “Hit me.”

“When I’m done telling you my fees, you’ll feel like I did.” She starts to count things off on her fingers. “We’re working on one hell of a time crunch here. You said 15th of January, right? Today’s the 28th, so that gives us less than three weeks until they foreclose on your bakery. To stop that, first thing I gotta do is file. Order to show cause, ask the court to stop them from doing anything to the building while we fight about whether they have the right to. If I get in front of a judge and I’m lucky about which one, maybe I get you a temporary restraint. Maybe. That’s the fastest good thing that can happen.”

“That sounds promising.”

“Don’t get too excited. It’s the first hour of a very long day.” She holds up the stapled pages. “Look at what they sent you. This is not a sleazeball ambulance chaser working out of a strip mall. A four-million-dollar note, drafted like this—it just gives me the heebie-jeebies, and that’s neither cheap nor good for you. To me, this screams white-shoe law firm. The good kind. I’m a good lawyer, but look around you: This building ain’t exactly Cravath, Swaine & Moore.”

I blink. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“You will,” Skye promises, “because if we fight this, they’re gonna shove their threats so far down your throat that you’ll poop Cravath, Swaine & Moore letterhead.”

“Thanks for the visual,” I mutter. I feel like a popped balloon. All the fight has gone whistling out of me.

But Skye is far from finished.

“They’ll say a lot of things. You were complicit, you told your husband what to do, how could you not know, yada yada yada. They’ll demand your bank records, your business records, your tax returns, your phone. Then they’ll depose you, and that’ll be the worst day of your life. You’ll be begging for the electric chair by the time they’re done. These guys are velociraptors in Brooks Brothers suits, basically.”

I gulp. “So say I do wanna fight anyway. How long will it take?”

“In this county? A year to a hearing on the merits. Longer if they drag their feet, and they will, because time costs them nothing and it costs you everything.”

“And if you had to assign a dollar amount to ‘everything’…?”

Skye folds her hands together and gives me sympathetic eyes. “My retainer is ten thousand, cash or cashier’s check, due before I lift a pinky on your behalf. Litigation against real counsel runs on billable hours and there is no lid on it. That handwriting examiner will run you four to six thousand for the report. If they hire their own expert—and, again, they will—we gotta do it all twice. If they take multiple depositions, that means transcripts, motions, et cetera.”

She sees me wilting and sighs.

“Look, honey, you seem like a woman who values certainty. But this is an uncertain endeavor. Best I can figure it, we’re looking at two hundred grand, easily. Quite possibly much, much more.”

I laugh so hard that it comes out as a hiccup instead. “I clear about forty a year,” I tell her. “And that’s after I pay my four people and the ingredients and the gas and the insurance that keeps going up on every f*****g renewal.”

“I hear you, sweetheart,” she says kindly. “That’s why I’m telling you all of it in one sitting instead of taking your retainer today and telling you the rest in March.”

I put my face in my hands and breathe for a moment. I was hopeful when I came in here. Not, like, radiantly hopeful, but plucky, you know? A determined heroine, ready to do battle with the forces of evil.

Now, I’m a worm getting crushed under the boot of the system.

“I don’t understand,” I protest. “You just told me the signature’s fake, the expert would agree, and the lien is a waste of paper.”

Skye nods. “All true.”

“So how do I lose?”

“You don’t lose,” she clarifies. “You just run out of time. Most of the losers in courtrooms across the country are right. They’re simply too poor to prove it.”

“That’s not—” I stop. I was going to say that’s not how it’s supposed to work, but I sound like such a whiny, naive baby that I can’t bring myself to say it.

“No,” she agrees anyway. “It isn’t.”

She writes something on her pad, tears the sheet off, and hands it to me. A name I don’t know, and a phone number.

“Volunteer clinic in Boerum Hill. Wednesdays. They’re overloaded and they’ll take four months to look at what I looked at in a few minutes. But they’re free and they’re not crooks, and if you really are brave enough to go toe to toe with the big guys, then I wish you all well.” She tucks her pencil into a holder on her desk. “The divorce, I can do. That’s a flat fee, nothing crazy.”

“Great,” I say. “So I can be single and homeless.”

“Take the win that’s available,” she advises. “You don’t know when you’ll get another.”

I put my things back in my bag. The pages. The freezer bag. It’s a sad magician’s act, like my chance at a free future is getting hidden out of sight.

Skye walks me to the door of her office. “Can I ask you something that isn’t about the loan?”

“Uh… sure?” I say.

“There’s a video going around.” She’s got her arms folded and her head tipped, and her face has changed a little, gone from lawyer to intrigued bystander. “Christmas party. Somewhere in Sunset Park. A woman with a projector.”

Everything in me halts at once. “A projector?”

“My niece sent it to me two days ago. Then my sister-in-law sent it to me. Then it was on my own feed yesterday morning, which is how I know it’s not just my family.” She’s watching me. “Was that you?”

“I, uh… I don’t know. What’s in the video?”

“It’s a little chaotic,” she says, “but from what I can tell, it looks like a woman exposed her husband and sister for cheating on her via PowerPoint. Ring any bells?”

I feel sick.