Virtually Dead

Chapter Four

It was a fifteen-minute drive from the house in Dolphin Terrace to the Lido, where the lawyer’s office stood at the end of a wooden landing one floor up, opposite the marina. Michael could smell food cooking in the waterfront restaurants. Fresh fish. Garlic. The warm, yeasty scent of hot bread.

Huge yachts and seventy foot MV’s rose and fell on the gentle swell, tethered to moorings that cost twenty thousand a month to rent.

Jack Sandler was smooth in every sense of the word. He had a voice like velvet, a face shaved to a shiny finish, and a bald head that seemed to have been polished to reflect the sun. Michael guessed that he earned big bucks, even for a lawyer. He had a huge desk, as polished and shiny as his skull, and an unparalleled view over the harbour. He ushered Michael into a seat by the window and sat himself down behind his big desk, peering at his client over orderly piles of files and papers.

“How are you doing, Michael?” he said as if Michael were his best friend. “You’re looking well, my man.” But behind the facade, Michael was certain he must be wondering if his client was going to have the wherewithal to pay the bill.

Michael had no interest in exchanging pleasantries. “What’s the news, Jack?”

“Not good I’m afraid, Michael.” Sandler’s smile seem to fix itself on his face, before finally he allowed it to morph into something like a frown. “Looks like the judgment’s gonna go against you. Best we can hope for is that they’ll accept some kind of a deal and settle out of court.”

Michael had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, like a stone slowly sinking through quicksand. He had seen this coming since the funeral. Mora had inherited her money from her husband, whom she had met when she went to work for his newspaper and magazine publishing empire in San Francisco. Originally she had interviewed for the job as his PA. He told her later she hadn’t got the job because he had known immediately he would fall for her. She went to work at first for one of his executives. But she had still drawn him like a magnet, and he had spent more time in her office than in his own. In the end they had fallen in love. He had divorced his wife, made a settlement, set up trust funds for his kids, and married Mora. They should have lived happily ever after. But just five years later he died from a rare form of brain cancer, and she inherited the company.

For a year she had tried to run the operation as he had, but she hadn’t the heart or the gift for it, and in the end sold up — for a staggering fifty million dollars. Which was when her late husband’s ex-wife and his kids made their first attempt to grab a slice of the cake. On that occasion the courts had thrown out their case, but Mora’s guilt had led her to gift cash to each of the kids, and ten million to the former wife. A mistake. For it had created a precedent, established a recognition by her that the family of her late husband had some entitlement. Certainly more than Michael. Which was the argument they were making now.

The trouble was that Mora had been no businesswoman. She had made a series of bad investments, spent money like water, and what had started out as a small fortune had dwindled to just a few million, most of which was tied up in property. Her stocks and shares provided barely enough income to cover the running costs of the house and pay the home loan.

“Well, I don’t know what I can offer them, Jack. A few dodgy investments, a lot of debt.”

“We’ll have to do a valuation, Michael. Get a figure on what the stocks and shares are worth, how much you’ll get for the house. You’ve put it on the market, haven’t you?”

Michael nodded. “But things are slow. Real estate is in a slump right now. People are making silly offers that would put me into negative equity. I’m going to have to ride it out if I want to get the best price.”

“Well, if the valuation on the property is equal to or less than the size of the home loan, they can’t argue that one. Unless they want to take on the debt. But I think you are going to have to wave goodbye to the stocks and shares.”

A sigh of pure frustration forced itself through Michael’s lips. “That’s all that’s feeding the loan repayments, Jack. And the cost of running the place. You know that house costs thirty thousand bucks a year in taxes alone?”

Jack canted his head apologetically and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “Then you’re just going to have to sell it for what you can get, Michael. I’m sorry.”

They say that death always comes in threes. And that bad news never comes alone. Mora’s money seemed tainted. It had brought only fleeting happiness to her husband, and then to her. Now both of them were dead, and it flashed through Michael’s mind that maybe he was next. The third in the death cycle of three. Or maybe the money would take its death curse with it. If so, the greed of Mora’s dead husband’s family would bring them more than they were bargaining for.

As for the bad news. The next instalment wasn’t long in coming.

Michael sat amongst the potted palms in the office allocated to the manager of the State Bank of Southern California, Newport Beach branch. It was a fish bowl looking out across an open-plan office where customers bargained with bank staff over loans and overdrafts. His meeting with Jack Sandler had been a little over two hours earlier.

Michael was not on first name terms with Walter Yuri, who liked to be called Mister. Mr. Yuri was a short, avuncular man with a fine head of dark hair going grey, a neatly trimmed moustache, and the bedside manner of a family doctor. He breezed into the office, a busy and distracted man.

“Sorry to keep you, Mr. Kapinsky. This subprime lending debacle is putting everyone under pressure. God knows where it’s all going to end. Vicious cycle, you know. Vicious cycle.” He sat down behind his desk. “I’ve been saying it for years. The government can’t prop up the economy with consumer spending that’s financed by credit. Sooner or later people have to pay back the loans. Or default on them. Which is what’s happening now.”

Michael shrugged. “Of course, I don’t suppose the banks can shoulder any of the responsibility. I mean, who can blame them for offering unsecured loans to people who couldn’t afford them?”

Yuri glanced up sharply. Michael’s penchant for irony often baffled native Californians. It was something he had learned during an East Coast upbringing at the hands of an acerbic-tongued Scottish mother. Yuri pursed his lips and opened the file on the desk in front of him. “Well, fortunately, this bank had the good sense to secure your loan with the house in Dolphin Terrace, Mr. Kapinsky.” He drew a short breath. “Which is just as well, since I’m going to have to call in our collateral now.”

Michael frowned. “You can wait till the house is sold, surely? I mean, it’s not going anywhere.”

“We can’t afford to wait, Mr. Kapinsky. You are several payments behind, and at $16,000 a month, we’re already looking at a shortfall of over $100,000. Just imagine where we’ll be in a year’s time if you still haven’t sold.”

Michael had no answer to that.

“Which, I’m afraid, leaves us no option but to take possession of the house as soon as possible. We’ll be sending someone over to do an appraisal and put a value on it.”

“But I stand to drop at least a million if you do that.”

Yuri adopted the sympathetic smile that doctors reserve for giving bad news to terminally ill patients. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kapinsky, but unless you can find... ” he glanced again at his folder, “... $3,173,000 by this time next week, I’m afraid we’re going to have to take your house and sell it ourselves.”