Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“Nothing.”

“Lauren,” I said, and when I used her real name, she made eye contact for the first time. “It’s okay. Whatever happened last night, it’s fine by me. It was maybe going to be something, but it wasn’t. It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re not … mad at me?” she asked, gazing up at me with what the romance writers would call imploring blue eyes.

“Mad at you? No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Good!” she said buoyantly. “I have a present for you.”

“You do?”

“Two, actually!”

“I can’t wait.”

“The first is, I couldn’t sleep last night, and I felt bad you never got to taste the banana bread I made for Bertie. So I made you some. I used buttermilk. I hope that’s okay.”

She reached into her bag and extracted a Saran-wrapped loaf so large she needed two hands to grip it.

“Oh,” I said, surprised more than anything.

“Don’t worry. This isn’t bread with strings attached. It’s just friendship bread,” she added.

“Right. Friendship bread. Thank you.”

“The second gift,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a stapled document, “is this.”

She handed it to me. My eyes scanned the first page, which I immediately recognized as a mortgage-mostly because the word MORTGAGE was written at the top.

“Chuck called me this morning,” she said proudly. “He found it in a filing cabinet last night. I went over to the courthouse on my way in and got it from him.”

“Great work,” I said, glancing up at her to see a proud smile form on her lips.

I turned my attention back to the document. The mortgagee was, of course, Wendell A. Byers Jr. The mortgagor was a bank from Indianapolis. The mortgage amount was $324,000. But it was when I got to the part about the interest rate that things got, well, interesting.

The rate was a mere 3.15 percent. I went to an online mortgage calculator, which told me that made the monthly payment about $1,400. That, plus an escrow payment-call it $500 for property tax and $100 for homeowners insurance-brought the total payment to $2,000.

It was a sweetheart deal. And I would imagine Windy, who was paid $80,000 a year as a Newark councilman, plus whatever work he could boondoggle on the side, could swing $2,000 a month.

But as I read further, I saw it didn’t last. The initial rate was just for thirty-six months. For the remaining 324 months, I had to refer to something called the “adjustable rate rider,” which was attached hereto in Exhibit B.

Lawyers always make things so clear.

I turned to the back of the document, where Exhibit B told me that the rate was “LIBOR plus 8.99 percent.” Like I said, clear as mud.

“Do you know what LIBOR is?” I asked Sweet Thang, who did not attempt an answer.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Go over to Buster Hays and ask him. He’s the kind of guy who knows this sort of thing. But don’t tell him I’m the one who wants to know. He’ll give you a hard time.”

Sweet Thang went over to Buster who, as one of the legions of older men enamored of her youthful beauty, was all too happy to help. They had a brief conversation-Buster was lit up like Christmas Eve the entire time, the horny old goat-and Sweet Thang returned.

“It stands for London Interbank Offered Rate,” she said.

“That really doesn’t help me.”

“It’s an index,” she explained. “It has something to do with an average of a bunch of things and I guess it’s something bankers worry about a lot.”

“Okay. So LIBOR plus 8.99 means … what?”

“Well, he said the LIBOR fluctuates, but lately it’s been below two percent,” she said.

That meant once the introductory rate on Akilah’s house expired, the new interest rate would reset to somewhere around 11 percent. I turned to my mortgage calculator and typed in the new number. The monthly payment was now more than $3,000-more like $3,600 with the escrow factored in.

I went back to the beginning of the mortgage and looked at the dates. The reset, I realized, had happened December 1.

Windy Byers’s booty call had just gotten a lot more expensive.

* * *

It was the great Nora Ephron, penning lines for the Carrie Fisher character in When Harry Met Sally, who observed that everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor-and not everyone could possibly have good taste and a sense of humor.

The same could be said in the sad-but-familiar case of Wendell A. Byers. Everyone thinks they’re smart enough not to get swindled in real estate deals-and, clearly, not everyone is. Certainly not Windy Byers.

It turns out that the all-powerful councilman was not much different from so many other Americans at the peak of the subprime boom: he allowed himself to be sold an overpriced house with a bad loan, and then, when the financial feces hit the fan, he got stuck with it.

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Windy Byers,” I said. “Getting suckered by a teaser rate, then panicking when it runs out. I guess keeping a woman on the side suddenly wasn’t as fiscally sound, so he told her to take a hike.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“Well, only two people know for sure, and one of them is now a corpse stinking up a rental car,” I said.

“And the other…” Sweet Thang began.

“… is Akilah Harris,” I finished. “Think you can find her?”

Sweet Thang looked down at the desk.

“But where do I-” she began whining, and I cut her off.

“Let me rephrase: you have to find her. You’ve got her cell number. She slept in your apartment two nights ago. You’re best friends with her mom. You’re pretty tight with her sister, too. If anyone can locate this girl, it’s you. I know you can do it.”

“You really believe in me?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

She grabbed a notepad off her desk, stood up, stuck her chest out like the proud young woman she was, and walked out of the newsroom-leaving me alone with a massive loaf of banana bread.

I walked to the break room, grabbed a plastic knife and paper plate, and sawed off a nice slice of mid-morning snack. I took it back to my desk but had barely gotten the first bite in my mouth when Tina was standing in front of me, scowling at what remained of the loaf.

“What the hell is this?” she demanded.

“It’s … it’s friendship bread,” I said meekly.

“And what the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. That’s what Sweet Thang called it.”

“ Friendship bread? That little sorority girl is giving you something called friendship bread ?”

“I suppose some would call it banana bread. Would you like some?”

“All that refined sugar and bleached flour?” Tina mocked. “I think not.”

“Come on. Bananas have potassium. And there are nuts, too-think of all the protein.”

Tina narrowed her eyes at me further. I felt like she was reading the bottom line of an eye chart that was printed on the inside of my skull.

“You were with her last night, weren’t you?” she said at last. “That’s why you couldn’t make our dinner.”

“No,” I said, unconvincingly.

Lips pursed, Tina stared me down.

“I told you, I got caught in traffic,” I said. And strictly as a matter of fact, that was true: at the time our date was canceled, I was caught in traffic.

“I know when you’re lying,” she said, in a low, scary voice that suggested demonic possession had just occurred.

“I’m aware of that. And it terrifies me.”

“And you want to tell me you weren’t with Sweet Thang last night.”

“I never said that.”

“Aha!” she shouted, like the courtroom lawyer who had just scored a major point on cross-examination.