The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [29]
“You doing okay?” I asked Hayley.
“Sure.”
“Are you almost finished?”
“My food or my homework?”
“Both.”
“I’m finished eating but I still have social studies and English. But we can go if you want.”
“I still have a few other files to look at. I have court tomorrow.”
“For the murder case?”
“No, other cases.”
“Like where you’re trying to let people stay in their houses?”
“That’s right.”
“How come there are so many cases like that?”
Out of the mouths of babes.
“Greed, honey. It all comes down to greed on everybody’s part.”
I looked at her to see if that would suffice but she didn’t go back to her homework. She looked at me expecting more, a fourteen-year-old who was interested in what most of the country was not.
“Well, what happens is that it takes a lot of money to buy a house or a condo most of the time. That’s why so many people rent their homes instead. Most people who buy a home put down a big chunk of money, but they almost never have enough to buy the whole house, so they go to the bank for a loan. The bank decides if they have enough money and make enough money to pay back the loan, which is called a mortgage. So if everything looks good, they buy the home they want and pay back the mortgage with monthly payments for many years. Does this make sense?”
“You mean like they pay rent to the bank.”
“Sort of. But when you rent from a landlord you don’t get any ownership. There is supposed to be ownership involved when you have a mortgage. It is your home and they say the American dream is to own your own home.”
“Do you own yours?”
“I do. And your mom owns hers.”
She nodded but I wasn’t so sure we were talking at a level understandable to a fourteen-year-old. She didn’t see much of the American dream in her parents having separate mortgages to go with their separate addresses.
“Okay, so a while back they started making it easier to buy a home. And soon practically anybody who walked into a bank or went to see a mortgage broker was being given a loan on a home. There was a lot of fraud and corruption and there were a lot of loans given to people who shouldn’t have been given them. Some people lied to get loans and sometimes it was the loan makers who lied. We’re talking about millions of loans, Hay, and when you have that much going on, there are not enough people or rules to control it all.”
“Was it like nobody made anybody pay?”
“There was some of that but it was mostly that people were taking on more than they could handle. And these loans had interest rates that changed. These rates dictated how much the home owner had to pay each month and they could go up by a lot. Sometimes they had what’s called a balloon payment where you have to pay it all back at the end of five years. To make a long and complicated story short, the country’s economy went down and the values of the homes went down with it. It became a crisis because millions of people in the country couldn’t pay for the houses they bought and they couldn’t sell them because they were worth less than what was owed on them. But the banks and other lenders and these investment syndicates that held all the mortgages didn’t really care about that. They just wanted their money back. So when people couldn’t pay they started taking their houses.”
“So those people hire you.”
“Some of them do. But there are millions of foreclosures going on. These lenders all want their money back and so some of them do bad things and some of them hire people to do bad things. They lie and cheat and they take away people’s houses without doing it fairly or under the law. And that’s where I come in.”
I looked at her. I had probably lost her already. I pulled over the second stack of files I had on the table and opened the top one. I spoke as I read.
“Okay, now here’s one. This family bought a house six years ago and the monthly payment was nine hundred dollars. Two years later when the shit started to hit the—”
“Dad!”
“Sorry. Two years later when things started going wrong in this country their interest