Chapter 60 Dante
The seller finally calls me. It’s the first time he’s dialed my number instead of ignoring me.
“Reyes.” His voice is Atlanta, unhurried, vowels sanded smooth by money. There’s a keyboard going under his hands. “Jonathan’s people sent the paperwork over. Offered full ask.”
“That is correct.”
“On a twenty-million-dollar house. In a soft quarter. Excellent work. Truly. I had that house on the books eighteen months and three agents before you, and every one of them told me my number was a fantasy.”
“It wasn’t a fantasy,” I say. “It only needed the right touch.”
He laughs, and moves on. He doesn’t ask anything. He has no idea any of it happened. Both calls I ever made to him went to voicemail.
“One housekeeping item.” The keyboard stops. “The monthly rental. I want the tenant damage netted out of my side before closing. Send the itemization over and I’ll have my girl handle it.”
The list is already open on my phone. It’s been open since the first Saturday, in a note titled with his address.
The tequila-soaked rug. The throw. Twenty-four hundred in remediation, two crews, the service calls.
Every line of it real. Every line of it recoverable from the seller.
It’s his money and reporting it is the job.
“There isn’t a list,” I say. “No damages that I found.”
“No damages at all?”
“None,” I lie. “Easy tenant.”
“Well. That’s a first.”
He never mentions the letter. Three paragraphs I wrote the day I found Levi in the listing with enough implied litigation in it to ring a phone by Monday. It never rang. I doubt he read it. I suspect it went in a folder with everything else about a house he’s never stood inside.
“I’ll have another one for you by spring,” he says. “Bigger lot, worse bones. You’d have fun with it.”
“Send it over,” I tell him.
Then I sit with the phone in my hand and finally do the arithmetic I’ve spent a month not doing.
Twenty million, the commission split and taxed, is still the biggest number that has ever had my name anywhere near it.
It’s the exact number I wanted the morning I walked into that house and found a stranger asleep on the sectional.
And I paid the damages myself. All of it, so that no one would ever have a number to hold against Levi.
I’ve spent my whole career telling people what houses are worth. That’s the only time I’ve ever paid over ask and known I was getting the deal of a lifetime.
The seller wanted the damages netted out of his side. He hasn’t read a page in eighteen months and he’ll never need to, because everything he signs is drafted by people paid to know which side is his.
There’s another stack of paper on my table, signed by a boy who was never once told he had a side.
When Levi forwarded me his life, I read every page twice.
I made one column of what each page says.
A second column of what Freddie’s apparently told him it says.
The distance between those columns is everything.
The original is the one that bothered me.
He signed it at seventeen, and you can see the seventeen in it.
The signature is careful and overworked, a kid’s idea of what a serious man’s name looks like.
He pressed hard enough to dent the page.
Underneath, on the binding line — because a minor can’t sign himself away — is his father’s name.
The man who locked him in a box for being soft signed him over to the people that would do the same to him for money.
I read past it for now. The rest needs a clear head, and that one doesn’t get one.
I’ve sat across from a lot of people signing papers they didn’t read.
But those are grown adults with lawyers they’re choosing not to call.
This was a child. The terms in here aren’t a negotiation.
They’re what you write when the other side of the table has no one in the chair.
Every clause leans one direction for eight straight years, and the direction is never Levi’s.
I had to put it down twice and go stand at the kitchen window.
I came back to it because he asked me to, and because someone finally should.
Then I sent the stack to an entertainment lawyer, a contact from Miami. She read it overnight. She called me back at seven in the morning, and the first words out of her weren’t a finding. They were a question. “Who told this guy he couldn’t leave?”
That was this morning. Now Levi’s sitting across from me, waiting to hear what I found.
The paper doesn’t hold what Freddie says it holds. Not close. He watches me square the folder against the table edge. Twice. There’s no clean way to start the sentence that resets the background of his life.
“Go ahead and tell me,” he says. “Whatever it says. I asked you to look. Don’t try to pretty it up. Tell me what’s there.”
“Okay.” I open to the first page I flagged.
“We’ll start here. What Freddie’s told you is a story, not a contract.
Here are the big ones. One is that the label drops you if you step wrong, that you can’t walk, that you’re nothing without them, that every dollar you’ve got runs through his hands.
I went looking for items.” I turn the folder so the two columns face him.
He doesn’t read them. “They’re not in here, Levi.
They’re in your ear. He’s spent years telling a minor who never read the papers what the papers say.
And they say far less than what you’ve been told. ”
“Less how?”
“You’ve got far more leverage than he’s let you know.
A lot more. The money’s more yours than he ever made it sound.
There’s a lot less standing between you and it than he’s let on.
The deal you’re under now isn’t the life sentence he’s described to you.
There’s give in it, places it bends, an end on it closer than you think. ”
I tap the original, the one with his name on the bottom.
“And this one. The one your father signed. My contact flagged it right away. A minor, no real protection written in for you, signed by a man with his own stake in it. I’m not pretending it’s a key that magically springs anything open.
It’s one crack among a few. But it’s there. ”
He’s still staring at the spreadsheet I made. “He’s said it to me for years,” he says. “That without them I’m just a guy with a guitar nobody would ever book. That he’s the only reason anybody knows my name.”
I’ve heard him say worse about himself in that exact voice, and I don’t like it.
“That’s not in the contracts,” I tell him. “Freddie says it because if you’re sure you’re nothing on your own, you never walk. It costs him nothing to tell you that and it’s bought him eight years of you.”
When he speaks it’s careful. “What can I actually do though? With all of it?”
“Here’s the one move worth making,” I say. “Hire an entertainment lawyer of your own. An experienced person with no connection to Freddie or the label. A lawyer working only for you. They’ll review every page of anything you signed.”
“What about the lawyer you sent it to? Would she take me on?”
“I can ask her if you want me to. Or I can research lawyers and bring you back a list to interview first. You need counsel in your own corner.”
He nods. “I agree with you. Ask her if she’ll take me.”
“Okay, I’ll call her back today. I doubt it will be a hard sell.
You’re a big client. If she takes you on, she would be able to tell you exactly where you stand.
What you do after that is yours. I looked into it because you asked me to.
The next step needs to be from someone you’re paying to stand on your side. ”
After a while his eyes drop back to the folder. To the first page. To his father’s name on the binding line.
“He signed me over,” Levi says. “I was seventeen, scared of him, and I signed where he told me to. Then he signed the part I couldn’t, and I never once looked at what it was.”
“I know,” I say. “Anyone would have done the same thing. You were only a kid.”
“Same handwriting as the belt and the box,” he says.
I move my hand across the table until it’s covering his.
Covering his father’s name.