Chapter 6
Gideon
The lawyer's name was Beth Ann Corrales and she charged four hundred an hour and she gave me the bad news in eleven minutes, which I respected, and then spent the other forty-nine minutes making sure I understood it, which I resented.
"It's clean," she said.
"That's what the last one told her."
"Then the last one was competent." She turned the folder around.
"Look. Here's the transfer. Signed, witnessed by a hospital notary — a notary, Mr. Marsh, at nine forty at night on a med-surg floor, which tells me somebody in that family had their act together — and there's a physician's note in the chart from six p.m. that day recording him as alert and oriented times three. "
"He was on a morphine drip."
"Half the estate documents in this country get signed on a morphine drip.
That's when people sign things." She flipped a page.
"Marital property passes to spouse. Spouse remarries.
Spouse dies intestate. Arizona intestacy gives the surviving spouse the community property outright, and this was community by then.
Thorne owns it. He owns it the way you own your boots. "
"And the debt?"
Beth Ann's face did something for the first time.
"The debt is garbage," she said. "The debt is the only part of this that's garbage.
There's no written agreement, no wage statements, no W-2, no 1099 — he's been running an unpaid full-time employee out of a commercial premises for nine years and calling it a training arrangement.
If she walked into the Industrial Commission tomorrow with a shoebox of dates, she'd have a wage claim that would make his eyes water. "
"So we do that."
"You could do that." She closed the folder.
"Here's what happens. It's an eighteen-month process, minimum.
He countersues for the room and board, which he'll document beautifully because men like this document beautifully.
She has to establish an employment relationship, which means going on the record that she has been living in a parts loft above a building with her father's name on it, in front of an administrative judge, several times, describing the wood stove. "
"She'd do it."
"I'm sure she would. And at the end of eighteen months, if she wins everything, she gets a judgment for back wages against a man whose only real asset is the building — which he will have mortgaged by month four, because he's not stupid, he's an insurance man.
" Beth Ann folded her hands. "She'd get money.
She would not get the shop. She'd never get the shop.
And she'd spend a year and a half of her life in a room describing the worst thing that's ever happened to her to people who are checking their watches. "
I sat with that.
"There's got to be something in the transfer. He couldn't read past paragraph two, everybody who knew him says so, it was a joke in that family—"
"Mr. Marsh." Beth Ann took her glasses off.
"I've had four clients in this chair with the same sentence.
'He never read anything.' 'She'd have never signed that sober.
' 'He didn't understand what it meant.' And every one of them was telling me the truth, and not one of them had a case, because the law doesn't ask whether a man read a page. It asks whether he could have."
"That's obscene."
"It's the only rule that works." She put the glasses back on.
"Think about the alternative. If not-reading were a defense, then every contract in America would be voidable by anyone with a bad memory and a good lawyer, and the first people to use it would be men exactly like Gerald Thorne.
The rule that's currently ruining your friend's life is the same rule that's the only thing standing between most people and total predation.
" She shrugged. "That's the trade. Nobody likes it on the day it lands on them. "
"So there's nothing."
"There's nothing in the transfer."
"You said that like there's a comma coming."
"There's a comma coming," said Beth Ann Corrales, and pulled the second folder over.
"What gets her the shop?"
"Money," said Beth Ann Corrales. "Just money. He's got no attachment to it. He's got a business he doesn't understand generating a modest return via free labor. Offer him a number he can't refuse and he'll be gone by Friday and he'll shake your hand and mean it."
"What's the number?"
"Building, land, equipment, goodwill, on the 40 with highway frontage, in this market?" She wrote it on a legal pad and turned it around.
Three hundred and ten thousand.
"He'll take two-eighty," she said. "He'd probably take two-sixty in cash tomorrow.
And Mr. Marsh — I want to say this part clearly, because I've done four of these.
If you offer him two-sixty, he will know exactly why, and the price will become three-forty, and it will keep going up as long as he can see your face. "
"So somebody else offers."
"Somebody else offers, and it's somebody with no visible connection to a motorcycle club, and it's a boring LLC with a boring name and a boring reason.
" She wrote something on a sticky note and pushed it across.
"That's a title company in Prescott who'll do the shell for eleven hundred dollars and won't ask you a single question, because they do this nine times a month for orthodontists buying strip malls. "
"And the money?"
"Ah." Beth Ann leaned back. "That's the part where I stop being useful and you go be a president."
I sat there looking at a sticky note with a phone number on it, which was, at that moment, the only concrete object I had.
"One more question."
"Go on."
"If somebody else buys it first — somebody with more money and a reason of their own — what happens to her?"
Beth Ann Corrales gave me a long, flat, professional look, and I understood that she had thought about that possibility before I walked in, and had decided not to raise it.
"Then she works for whoever owns the roof," she said. "Same as she does now. The only thing that would change is the name on the arithmetic."
I got out to the parking lot before I let my face do anything.
The Ash Fork charter has eleven full patches and forty thousand dollars.
I want to be honest about that, because it's the part of this that people skip.
We are not the Hollow Ash charter. We do not have a foundry.
We have a clubhouse with a lien on it, a tow contract with the county, a shop bay full of forty years of junk, and eleven men, four of whom have kids in school.
I put it to the table on a Tuesday and it went about how you'd expect.
"Two-sixty," said Tuck.
"Two-eighty realistically."
"We have forty."
"We have forty."
"So this is a conversation about two hundred and forty thousand dollars," said Tuck, "that we don't have, for a building in another county, that would be owned by a woman who is not a member of this club."
"Yes."
"Okay," said Tuck. "Just wanted it said out loud so everybody could hear how it sounded."
Bear, from the end of the table: "How'd it sound?"
"Bad, Bear."
"Yeah," said Bear. "That's what I thought."
The Hollow Ash contingent were still out west, which is why this became a two-charter fight instead of a small sad one.
We did it over a table in our own clubhouse on the Thursday, with Roman Kade on one side of it and Ash Delacroix beside him with a legal pad, and Cricket standing by the door because Cricket has a policy about chairs.
I laid it out. All of it. The signature, the intestacy, the nineteen percent, the shoebox, the eighteen months.
Roman listened without moving. He's got that trick.
Then he said: "No."
"Roman—"
"I want to do the whole thing, so you don't think I did it fast." He leaned forward.
"Hollow Ash is sixty thousand short on the foundry note.
That's not a cash flow problem, that's a default in November problem.
Ash has been rolling it since February. If we go into that note ninety days late, the bank calls it, and then the club owns nothing and eleven families in Pennsylvania lose the only building any of them have ever had their name on. "
"I know the number."
"Then you know the answer." He spread his hands. "You're asking two charters to put two hundred and forty thousand dollars into buying one woman's inheritance back from a man who came by it legally. Not a member. Not a member's family. A mechanic you met three weeks ago."
"That's not what it is."
"Then say what it is, and say it in a way I can take back to my table, because my table is going to ask me exactly what I just asked you and they are going to be much less polite."
"It's a shop," I said, "with the best ear in four states standing in it, and a man in the office who owns her by arithmetic."
"That's a moral case."
"Yes."
"I know," said Roman. "I've made about nine of them at that table and I've won maybe four, and every one I won cost somebody in that room something real, and every one I lost was the right call and I still hate it.
" He rubbed his jaw. "Gideon, do you know what the foundry note actually is? Not the number. What it is."
"Tell me."
"It's Birdie's father's land, and Odile's roof, and Fitz Boyle's grandson's school district, all sitting on one signature I made in February when I was too proud to call you and ask for help.
" He said it flatly, which is how Roman says the expensive things.
"So when I tell you no, I want you to hear that it isn't caution.
It's that I already spent this. I spent this exact thing eight months ago on my own people and there is no second one of it. "
Nobody said anything for a second.
"That's fair," I said.
"It's not fair, it's true. Fair would be having the money."
And here's the thing — he was right. That's what nobody ever writes down about the worst arguments of your life. Roman Kade was completely right, sitting there, being reasonable, and I have never wanted to put a man through a wall so badly.
Ash put his pen down.
"Can I say the other version," he said.
"Ash."