I had expenses and a fourteen-year-old kid in private school who talked about USC whenever the subject of colleges came up. I had to do something and so I did what I had once held as unthinkable. I went civil. The only growth industry in the law business was foreclosure defense. I attended a few bar seminars, got up to speed on it and started running new ads in two languages. I built a few websites and started buying the lists of foreclosure filings from the county clerk’s office. That’s how I got Mrs. Pena as a client. Direct mail. Her name was on the list and I had sent her a letter-in Spanish-offering my services. She told me that my letter happened to be the first indication she had ever received that she was in foreclosure.
The saying goes that if you build it, they will come. It was true. I was getting more work than I could handle-six more appointments after Mrs. Pena today-and had even hired an actual associate to Michael Haller and Associates for the first time ever. The national epidemic of real estate foreclosure was slowing but by no means abating. In Los Angeles County I could be feeding at the trough for years to come.
The cases went for only four or five grand a pop but this was a quantity-over-quality period in my professional life. I currently had more than ninety foreclosure clients on my docket. No doubt my kid could start planning on USC. Hell, she could start thinking about staying for a master’s degree.
There were those who believed I was part of the problem, that I was merely helping the deadbeats game the system while delaying the economic recovery of the whole. That description fit some of my clients for sure. But I viewed most of them as repeat victims. Initially scammed with the American dream of home ownership when lured into mortgages they had no business even qualifying for. And then victimized again when the bubble burst and unscrupulous lenders ran roughshod over them in the subsequent foreclosure frenzy. Most of these once-proud home owners didn’t stand a chance under California’s streamlined foreclosure regulations. A bank didn’t even need a judge’s approval to take away someone’s house. The great financial minds thought this was the way to go. Just keep it moving. The sooner the crisis hit bottom, the sooner the recovery would begin. I say, Tell that to Mrs. Pena.
There was a theory out there that this was all part of a conspiracy among the top banks in the country to undermine property laws, sabotage the judicial system and create a perpetually cycling foreclosure industry that had them profiting from both ends of the process. Me, I wasn’t exactly buying into that. But during my short time in this area of the law, I had seen enough predatory and unethical acts by so-called legitimate businessmen to make me miss good old-fashioned criminal law.
Rojas was waiting outside the car for Mrs. Pena to return with the money. I checked my watch and noted we were running late on my next appointment-a commercial foreclosure over in Compton. I tried to bunch my new client consultations geographically to save time and gas and mileage on the car. Today I worked the south end. Tomorrow I would hit East L.A. Two days a week I was in the car, signing up new clients. The rest of the time I worked the cases.
“Let’s go, Mrs. Pena,” I said. “We gotta roll.”
I decided to use the waiting time to call Lorna. Three months earlier I had started blocking the ID on my phone. I never did that when I practiced criminal, but in my brave new world of foreclosure defense, I usually didn’t want people having my direct number. And that included the lender attorneys as well as my own clients.
“Law offices of Michael Haller and Associates,” Lorna said when she picked up. “How can I-”
“It’s me. What’s up?”
“Mickey, you have to get over to Van Nuys Division right away.”
There was a strong urgency in her voice. Van Nuys Division was the LAPD’s central command for operations in the sprawling San Fernando Valley, on the north side of the city.
“I’m working the south end today. What’s going on?”
“They have Lisa Trammel there. She called.”
Lisa Trammel was a client. In fact, my very first foreclosure client. I had kept her in her home for going on eight months and was confident I could take it at least another year further before we dropped the bankruptcy bomb. But she was consumed by the frustrations and inequities of her life and could not be calmed or controlled. She’d taken to marching in front of the bank with a placard decrying its fraudulent practices and heartless actions. That is, until the bank got a temporary restraining order against her.
“Did she violate the TRO? Are they holding her?”
“Mickey, they’re holding her for murder.”
That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear.
“Murder? Who’s the victim?”
“She said they’re charging her with killing Mitchell Bondurant.”
That gave me another great big pause. I looked out the window and saw Mrs. Pena coming out through her front door. She held a wad of cash in her hand.
“All right, get on the phone and reschedule the rest of today’s appointments. And tell Cisco to head up to Van Nuys. I’ll meet him there.”
“You got it. Do you want Bullocks to take the afternoon appointments?”
“Bullocks” was what we called Jennifer Aronson, the associate I had hired out of Southwestern, a law school housed in the old Bullocks department store building on Wilshire.
“No, I don’t want her doing intake. Just reschedule them. And listen, I think I have the Trammel file with me, but you have the call list. Track down her sister. Lisa’s got a kid. He’s probably in school and somebody’s going to have to take him if Lisa can’t.”
We made every client fill out an extensive contact list because sometimes it was hard to find them for court hearings-and to get them to pay for my work.
“I’ll start on that,” Lorna said. “Good luck, Mickey.”
“Same to you.”
I closed the phone and thought about Lisa Trammel. Somehow I wasn’t surprised that she had been arrested for killing the man who was trying to take her home away from her. It’s not that I had thought it would come to this. Not even close. But deep down, I had known it was going to come to something.
Two
I quickly took Mrs. Pena’s cash and gave her a receipt. We both signed the contract and she got a copy for her own records. I took a credit card number from her and she promised it would withstand a $250-a-month hit while I was working for her. I then thanked her, shook her hand and had Rojas walk her back to her front door.
While he did that I popped the trunk with the remote I carried, and got out. The Lincoln’s trunk was spacious enough to hold three cardboard file boxes as well as all my office supplies. I found the Trammel file in the third box and pulled it. I also grabbed the fancy briefcase I used for police station visits. When I closed the trunk I saw the stylized 13 spray-painted in silver on the lid’s black paint.
“Son of a bitch.”
I looked around. Three front yards down, a couple of kids were playing in the dirt but they looked too young to be graffiti artists. The rest of the street was deserted. I was baffled. Not only had I not heard or noticed the assault on my car that had taken place while I was having a client conference inside it, but it was barely past one and I knew most gangbangers didn’t get up and embrace the day and all its possibilities until late afternoon. They were night creatures.
I headed back to my open door with the file. I noticed Rojas was standing at the front stoop, chatting with Mrs. Pena. I whistled and signaled him back to the car. We had to get going.
I got in. Message received, Rojas trotted back to the car and jumped in himself.
“Compton?” he asked.
“No, change of plans. We’ve got to get up to Van Nuys. Fast.”
“Okay, Boss.”
He pulled away from the curb and started making his way back to the 110 Freeway. There was no direct freeway route to Van Nuys. We would have to take the 110 into downtown where we’d pick up the 101 north. We couldn’t have been starting off from a worse position in the city.