A month later, I was sitting in my Swiss hunting lodge beneath the outraged moose's head when a call came in from an even more outraged OCD. “It's a mistrial,” he sputtered. “I can't fucking believe it! How could that jury not convict? It makes no sense.”
“Did you poll the jury afterward?” I asked.
With disgust: “Yeah, why?”
I said, “Well, let me guess, there was only one holdout, right?”
Dead silence at first, then: “How the fuck did you know that?”
“Just a hunch,” I said. “And you want to hear my second hunch?”
“Yeah,” he replied cautiously.
“The holdout was that bastard in the front row, the one with the handlebar mustache, right?”
“It was, actually,” said OCD. “You're just guessing,though, right?”
“Not exactly,” I replied, and I told him my thoughts—namely, that while I had no proof of it, this very mistrial had the Blue-eyed Devil's fingerprints all over it.
“No shit!” he snapped. “You really think so?”
“Yeah, I really do. Again, I have no proof, but, I don't know—I mean, did you see Gaito just sitting there so calm, cool, and collected? He looked almost smugabout the whole thing, and Gaito is not a smug man. If anything, he's humble. Maybe I'm crazy, but the whole scene just struck me as odd, especially that juror; he seemed disinterested, like he'd already made up his mind beforehand.”
OCD agreed—as did Alonso when I shared my thoughts with him a few minutes later, via conference call. Still, there was no way to prove it, and Alonso refused to investigate, considering it to be the act of a sore loser. Besides, he hadn't actually lost;a mistrial simply meant that Gaito would have to stand trial again, which he did, precisely six months later.
And during those six months, from December 2000 to May 2001, I burned through most of the cash I had left, as well as what little patience I had with KGB. She, I was certain, held me in as much contempt as I held her. Unfortunately, I'd never been good at getting out of relationships, and, apparently, neither was she. So we remained engaged, passing our days having angry sex and bitter arguments, the latter of which had to do mostly with moon landings and such.
Sadly, Gaito was convicted this time, with the jury reaching a verdict in only a single day. I was home when I got the news, and at that very moment I felt like the lowest scum on earth. I had betrayed a friend, who would now be going to jail for the better part of a decade because he refused to betray one of his friends.
Danny, meanwhile, had already gone to jail; in fact, he never even had a chance to testify at the second trial. He had gotten himself arrested in Florida on an unrelated charge—something about telemarketing fraud with sports memorabilia—and Gleeson remanded him in early April.
When the summer came, I blew what few dollars I still had left on the kids. That was appropriate, I thought, considering they were the only good thing in my life, anyway. And when I kissed them good-bye on Labor Day, I cried inwardly, because I knew I wouldn't be seeing them again for a long time. In spite of Alonso keeping his word—getting me off house arrest and granting me unrestricted travel to California—I could no longer afford to go there.
That, however, was about to change.
CHAPTER 28
FROM OUT OF THE ASHES
Home-mortgage rates had just fallen to record lows, and Americans were refinancing in droves.
“Can you do me a quick favor?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “What is it?”
“I need you to write me a cold-calling script. There's a fortuneto be made telemarketing for refis right now.”
Interesting, I thought, but that was all I thought. I was so down on my luck at this point that his words, in regards to my own plight, blew past me like a gust of wind. “All right,” I said. “Tell me a little bit about your business, and I'll write you one this afternoon.” And, with that, he went about explaining the ins and outs of refinancing to me.
It was elegantly simple. Virtually all homeowners currently held mortgages with rates between eight and ten percent, while today's rates were hovering near six percent. So all a mortgage broker had to do was secure a new loan (at the lower interest rate) to pay off the old loan, and a person's monthly mortgage payment would plummet. And while there were some minor costs involved—the so-called closing costs—you could roll them into the new mortgage by making it slightly larger than the old one, which meant no out-of-pocket fees for the borrower. Better still, the closing costs were a mere pittance compared to the long-term savings, which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the loan.
“Hmmm,” I muttered, “it sounds pretty basic. You got leads to call?”
“Yeah, I bought a list of homeowners who are paying eight percent or higher. I'm telling you—it'll be like taking candy from a baby!”
“All right,” I said. “Give me a few hours, and I'll e-mail you a script.” Then, as an afterthought: “And why don't you send me over a few leads while you're at it to test it out with—just to make sure it flows.”
And that was how it started.
He e-mailed me the leads, I wrote a script, and halfway through my first sales pitch, a very animated Haitian woman cut me off in mid-sentence by saying, “This sounds too good to be true! When can you come over to do the paperwork?”
Right this damn second!I thought. Although, not wanting to sound like a desperate salesman, I replied, “Well, it just so happens I'm going to be in your area tomorrow”—I looked at her address and noticed she lived in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a dangerousplace. Why would I be in her area? What plausible explanation?— “refinancing one of your neighbors,” I quickly added. “I can be there around noon. Does that sound okay?”
“Perfect!” she answered. “I'll make snacks.”
The next day I found myself driving through the war zone of east Brooklyn, marveling at how a lack of money can make a man brave. The woman's house was a two-story frame affair on a grimy two-way street. From the outside it looked like a crack den. Inside, it smelled like boiled fish and mildew. There were no less than twelve Haitians living there.
She offered me a seat at her turd-green Formica kitchen table, where she immediately began serving me beans and rice and boiled fish—refusing to talk about her mortgage until I cleaned my plate. Meanwhile, I kept hearing an ungodly shriek coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms. It sounded like a small child. “Is everything okay up there?” I asked, forcing a smile.
She nodded slowly, knowingly, as if to say, “Everything is just as it should be.” Then she said, “That is my grandson; he has the fever.”
Thefever? What did she mean by that? From her tone of voice she seemed to be implying that foul play, in the form of supernatural forces, was involved. “Well, I'm sorry to hear that,” I said sadly. “Did you call a doctor?”
She shook her head no. “I am all the doctor he needs.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine. Obviously this woman had not attended medical school; she was a female witch doctor, or Moomba, as the phrase went. Whatever the case, once the Moomba and I finally got down to business, I grossed $7,000 in commission in less than thirty minutes and saved her $300 a month in the process. Or at least that's what I tried todo. What ended up happening was slightly different.