Lisa Scottoline - Dead Ringer

“I’m not listening.” Sam was about to tear the completed check out when Bennie snatched the checkbook and chucked it across the room. It bounced off of Daffy Duck, knocked him into the furry lap of Foghorn Leghorn, and landed on the handmade Heriz rug.

“Oops! ‘Ah say, Ah say, Widow Brown,’” Bennie said, doing a lousy Foghorn Leghorn, and Sam shushed her.

“I don’t see why you don’t just take my money.” He was hurrying across the rug to the windowsill, where he righted Daffy and retrieved his checkbook from the rug. “You can pay it back if it makes you feel better.”

“No thanks. Now, are you gonna give me some free legal advice or do I have to find myself another bankruptcy duck?”

“You mean, treat you like a client?” Sam went to his desk, tossed his checkbook on the desk, and flopped into his black leather chair. “That’s why you came to me?”

“Yes. I have to stay in business until this class action settles. I have a house, an old Saab, and a golden retriever. I need only the golden.”

“God knows why.” Sam shuddered. “Dog sheds like a mother.”

“It’s part of his charm.”

“Before we begin, what did your accountant say about all this?” Sam slid out of his jacket, hung it around the back of his chair, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A fashionably oversized watch looked like a weight on his wrist. “You hired an accountant, didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t afford one. It’s a catch- 22.”

“You need an accountant. You can hardly add.”

“It’s all subtracting anyway.” Bennie edged forward on the chair. “So, be my lawyer. I’m going to my last resort. What do you think?”

Sam’s eyes flared in alarm. “Don’t be insane. There has to be money in the business.”

“There isn’t. And no bank will give me another business loan, with my payment record. I’ve gone from slow pay to crack addict.”

Sam frowned. “You know, you’re a great lawyer, but you don’t have a head for this. How much money do you need to get through the next month? How much do you pay in salary, legal and support staff? Are you current on your taxes? On withholding payments? Status on credit cards, business and personal? What are your accounts receivable?”

Bennie’s mind reeled.

“Have you gotten all the bills out you should have? Can you offer a discount for payment in seven days? Can you make commitments to work on fee arrangements which may not be attractive for the long term? Do you have a lender? Can we offer the lender a security interest in the fixtures of the office? The receivables? Well?” Sam took a breath. “Gimme, gimme, gimme.”

“I don’t know the answers off the top of my head.”

“You should. Grow up. Find out. Call your office.” Sam grabbed his desk phone by the receiver and pushed it at Bennie. “I need the paper. Tax returns, account statements, check registers. You should have that together already, it’s tax time. Get everything else sent over. Messenger it all here. We’ll work all night if we have to, but we won’t have to.”

“Do you have time, now?”

“If I didn’t, what kind of girlfriend would I be?” Sam asked, and Bennie gathered the question was rhetorical.

An hour later, the glass surface of Sam’s desk was cluttered with all of Bennie’s financial records. Slippery stacks of smooth canceled checks, piles of trifold bank statements, thin rent bills, and time records on Rosato amp; Associates stationery. Sam sat behind the debris, ignoring the near-constant ringing of his telephones and expertly hitting keys on his adding machine. He frowned at the numbers on the white tape, which curled onto the rug. Styrofoam cups of coffee dotted the mess, and Bennie drained the cold brew from the closest cup just as Sam looked up from the tape, his eyes reddish from strain.

Bennie knew it was bad news. “How bad is it?”

“It could be worse.”

“How?”

Sam thought a minute.

“Told you.”

“You were right. You can’t get another cent out of this business. You have old receivables that total at most two hundred eighty-three dollars and thirty-four cents. You missed three quarterly tax payments, which you have to get current immediately, the interest and penalties will kill you. Your firm is overextended, heavily leveraged.” Sam was shaking his head, looking as forlorn as if it had been his own business. “Frankly, if you file, you can reorganize. Start over. Get back in business. Viable business.”

“You want me to file for bankruptcy?” Bennie felt a pang. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“It’s failing.”

“It is not!”

“Then it’s cheating.”

“It’s not that either.” Sam’s eyes softened, their corners tilting down. “Honey, your business was in trouble before Finalil stiffed you, and now you have nothing. The bankruptcy laws were enacted for people like you.”

“I never understood the bankruptcy laws. What about my creditors? I leave everybody in the lurch? We wave a financial magic wand and presto? I don’t pay what I owe?”

“No, especially not with these new changes in the law. In simplest terms, your creditors get parked, in a way. You give them payout schedules. They settle or they wait for the full amount is all. Life goes on. It’s not personal, it’s just business.”

“Business is personal.”

“No it isn’t. You always confuse the two.”

“It’s easy to do when your name is on the front door.”

“You have no other choice!” Sam flushed with frustration. “Your office fixtures won’t secure another line of commercial credit. Nobody will lend you another nickel with the business as collateral.”

“What about my house? I can put it up, can’t I?”

“For a business debt? Why would you? You don’t want to do that.”

“Looks like I have to.” Bennie shuffled though the papers on Sam’s desk and found her mortgage note. “This is my mortgage, what does it tell you?”

Sam looked it over. “You should have refinanced when the rates went down.”

“Can I borrow against it?”

“Okay, there is equity in the house.”

“Equity is good, equitable and all. I bought the house as a shell, what, seven years ago?”

Sam glanced at the paper. “Six, it says here.”

“Okay, and I renovated it completely, increased its value. And the neighborhood, which wasn’t that hot when I bought in, is trendy now. A house down the street went for sixty grand more than I paid.”

“I don’t think you should even consider doing this, Bennie. It’s deadly to commingle your assets, to use personal funds to pay business debts.” Sam set the mortgage aside. “You’ve been doing it for months now, buying office supplies on personal credit cards. Paying your associates out of personal savings. You’re eating your seed corn. Robbing Peter to pay Ramon.”

Bennie smiled. “You’re seeing him again?”

“No, usually it’s dark. Can’t see a damn thing.”

Bennie laughed, which felt momentarily good. “Now. How much can I get if I hock the house?”

“Ballpark?” Sam punched some numbers into the adding machine, then checked the tape. “I bet you can raise forty-five grand in a hurry, maybe fifty.”

“Fifty grand!” Bennie felt happy and sad, at once. She was pretty sure the word for this was “ambivalent,” but that didn’t begin to convey her internal conflict. “That would be enough to solve my cash-flow problems and keep me in business until the class action settles.”

“Don’t do it. It’s too risky.” Sam was shaking his neat little head. Behind him, outside his large office window, the sun was dropping in the sky, singeing the top of the skyscrapers and making fuzzy silhouettes of the Looney Tunes on the windowsill. Sam leaned forward. “This is a business debt, Bennie. Fold the business and start a new one. Keep your house. You love your house, and for Christ’s sake, you have to live somewhere. Are you even making the payments now?”