Corridor Man: Auditor Read online

  Nick James

  Corridor Man

  The Auditor

  A Corridor Man novella.

  Published by Credit River Publishing 2016

  Copyright Mike Faricy 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior and express permission of the copyright owner.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Corridor Man: Auditor is written by Mike Faricy under the pseudonym Nick James.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their help & support:

  Special thanks to Tim, Julie, and Roy for their hard work, cheerful patience and positive feedback. I would like to thank family and friends for their encouragement and unqualified support. Special thanks to Maggie, Jed, Schatz, Pat, Av, Emily and Pat, for not rolling their eyes, at least when I was there. Most of all, to my wife, Teresa, whose belief, support and inspiration has, from day one, never waned.

  “Sometimes in life, sweetheart. The bad guys win.”

  ― Ashley Jade

  Nick James

  Corridor Man:

  Auditor

  Chapter One

  “Care for another, ma’am?” the bartender asked. He was a middle aged guy, maybe fifty, grey at the temples, pleasant, in a white shirt. A gold nematic was pinned to his black vest that read Tom.

  “Sure Tommy-boy, thanks,” Mira said. She slid her empty glass across the bar and followed up with a sexy smile.

  “Sir.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine for right now,” Bobby said and gave a nod toward his half finished glass of wine.

  Mira Allery had just ordered her fourth martini. Everything Bobby had heard about her seemed to be true. The top student in his law school class, the woman who clerked for a Federal judge then got hired by one of the top five firms, the homecoming queen, now twice divorced and an absolute mess.

  He’d fantasized about her when he was in law school, not that she’d ever spend a second talking to him. He knew for a fact she’d laughed at him behind his back. He’d somehow managed to gather up the courage to ask her out once, only to be given the response, “Are you kidding? No, absolutely not.”

  But time has a way of healing wounds and if you wait, revenge can be sweet.

  “You know him, the bartender?”

  “No. Why, what makes you say that?”

  “You called him Tommy. I figured maybe you knew him”

  “Humph, one of the few bartenders I don’t know. Hey, I just want to tell you that I really appreciate you reaching out to me. Things kinda went in the toilet there for awhile, but I’m getting it put back together.”

  “Yeah, leaving the firm and then your divorces, not fun.”

  “Well, my second one hasn’t been finalized, so technically I’m not divorced. Brian just left me, exactly when I could have really used his support. He just beat me to it, I was going to ask him to leave anyway, he was cramping my style. Still kept the diamond rings, two of them,” she chuckled. “And the firm, they….Oh, thanks,” she said and flashed another smile at the bartender then took a healthy sip. “The firm, God, screw them, I can get plenty of gigs. I figured I’d just wait a couple of weeks let the word get out I’m available then take my pick. You’re with the DASH folks aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. As you probably heard I ran into some tough sledding myself a while back.”

  “Oh, it’ll work out, You’ll see,” she said rubbing his thigh. “God, the last two places that fired me, hell, they did me a favor. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. You know, I was in the top five of my class, our class, and they treated me like shit. Would of filed a discrimination suit, but didn’t want to take the time. Plus, I need the bastards for a reference,” she said then took another sip.

  “So you don’t have anything lined up?”

  “No. I was busting my ass on a case, probably would have won, in fact I’m sure I would have, but at the last minute they pulled me off. Handed it over to some rookie, got her degree in night school if you can believe that. Course she won after I did all the work. Like I said, I was ready to leave and they just helped me out. Fine. No hard feelings, get screwed,” she said and shrugged.

  “Brian still practicing with the Thomas firm?”

  “Yeah, he’s done okay for himself, made partner a few years back. God,” she took another sip. “He had the balls to tell me I was an embarrassment. Told me he was gonna put me in treatment. What? I can’t work my ass off and then relax once in a while? Anyway, it was over way before that. Guess that’s just how it goes sometimes. So, I might as well ask. You guys over at DASH looking for a top attorney?”

  “Actually, I don’t think they are.” She seemed to visibly sag at the news. “But, I have an idea and I wondered if you might be interested.”

  “Could be.” She shrugged and took a sip.

  “Let me call my driver and we can discuss this at my place.”

  She smiled at the thought, but was too drunk to pick up on the ‘driver’ part of his statement. He sent a text message to Miguel while she sipped.

  Chapter Two

  It had taken the two of them to get her up to his apartment. He and Miguel had both taken an arm and eased her onto the elevator. Just now she was stretched out on one of the couches in the living room. Her shoes were on the floor, she’d undone the button on the side of her skirt and was dribbling pizza crumbs onto her blouse. She was also really drunk.

  “Just where in the hell would we office?” she asked.

  “That’s the beauty of it, it would be a sort of private undertaking. You know, you working on your own.”

  “Yeah?” She tossed the pizza crust back into the box then reached for her drink, sloshed a little down the front of her blouse, but didn’t seem to notice. “But what would I do? Where are the clients gonna come from?”

  “I’ll get them for you.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah. I think I’ve discovered a real need that’s not being met out there. I envision…”

  “This isn’t gonna be a bunch of pro bono stuff is it? Cause I gotta tell you, Bobby, that don’t pay the rent very well.”

  “Mira, what if you could make five-hundred a day?”

  “A day? Are you kidding me? I was billing that per hour just three years ago.”

  Time for a reality check. “Maybe you were, but you were salaried and only making thirty-four-nine in your last position when they just let you go.”

  “Those bastards didn’t appreciate me. I was in the top five of my class and they let me go,” she drained her glass then held the empty out to him. “Make me another little drinky-poo, will you?”

  “Yeah sure, but don’t go anywhere, I want to tell you about this opportunity.”

  “Go anywhere? Isn’t that why you brought me up here? So you could get me drunk and screw me. Oh relax, not that I couldn’t use it,” she said and laughed.

  He poured her a glass of Carnaby’s London Dry gin out in the kitchen. The plastic bottle ran about nine bucks and it was over priced. But he’d be damned if he’d give her the good stuff. He could hear her singing, maybe a rendition of Norah Jones, ‘Sunrise’, although she sounded so awful he couldn’t be sure. He skipped the vermouth, a waste at this stage anyway, threw four olives in the stemmed glass then carried the drink out to her. She was still singing off key, oblivious to his return. He stopped and studied her while she repeated the same verse two more times.

  In school, on top of being one very brilliant law student she’d also been d
rop dead gorgeous. The men’s room had been covered with graffiti comments regarding her looks and what her capabilities were hoped to be. She’d never had time for him back then, couldn’t be bothered. Now, she was forty-one looking like she’s ready to qualify for medicare. He noticed a pair of black panties wadded up on the floor next to her shoes.

  “That was beautiful, Norah Jones?” He interrupted and handed her the glass.

  She attempted to focus on the drink, sort of lurched toward it, and almost fell off the couch before catching herself on the coffee table at the last second.

  “Careful, don’t spill,” he said laughing at her, not with her.

  She took a long sip, then grimaced, shook her head, sort of gasped and took another sip.

  “Mira, you were about to tell me why you’re such a mess.”

  She glanced in his direction, but he didn’t think she really saw him. Her eyes were glazed and she seemed to be fighting to keep them open. He stood and watched her for a few minutes as she began to nod off. “You better finish that drink or I’ll have to take it away from you.”

  She sort of snapped awake for a moment. “It’s my drink.”

  “Then you better finish it.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” she said then put the glass to her lips and gulped it down. She grimaced, shook her head a few times and looked like she was going to say something, but only gibberish came out of her mouth and in another moment her head was tilted back and she was snoring.

  “Mira, Mira, “ Bobby called, but got no response. He walked over to the couch, squeezed her breasts and she sort of snorted, but didn’t attempt to brush him away. He picked up her purse from the floor then went out to the kitchen and sat at the counter.

  He opened her billfold, made a note of her three Visa credit card numbers and the security code number on the back of each card. He wrote down her checking account number, then took four blank checks from the middle of her checkbook and two deposit slips. She had nineteen dollars cash in the billfold and he took eighteen. He rifled through her purse and came across an envelope from an insurance company. It contained a one page letter canceling her car insurance. There were two small, airline-size gin bottles in the bottom of her purse. He opened them, poured the contents down the sink, screwed the caps back on, and tossed them back in her purse. Satisfied, he returned the purse to the floor next to the couch then carefully undressed her. He took a number of photographs of her with his cell phone. She was large breasted and had a small bird tattooed on her right hip. Her thighs and stomach were layered with stretch marks. He shook her awake two or three times until he got a picture with her eyes open, then let her fall back asleep. He left her sprawled out across the leather couch, snoring while he went off to enjoy the comfort of his own bed.

  Chapter Three

  He woke a little after seven and tip-toed out to the living room. She was still asleep on the couch although she’d pulled her skirt up over her as a sort of cover, more for warmth than anything resembling modesty. He went back to the kitchen, brewed a pot of coffee then poured a mug and brought it out to the living room. He shook her shoulder to wake her.

  “Not now, I’ll catch you later, Dennis,” she said. She swatted his hand away two or three times, eventually shouting, “Stop it, damn it. Don’t.”

  “Come on, Mira time to wake up.”

  Her eyes slowly opened and she looked around then sat up, oblivious to her naked body. “Where the hell are we? God, my head.”

  “You’re at my place, you passed out last night.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Just down that hall,” Bobby said and pointed in the direction of the bathroom.

  “You know what would help? Maybe if you could make me a screwdriver, just to get me going. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said then stood and walked down the hall. She ran her hand along the wall for support until she came to the bathroom. She closed the door, but only part way. He picked up the black panties from the floor, tiptoed into the kitchen and threw them in the trash.

  A good ten minutes later she walked back to the kitchen. She was dressed, more or less, barefoot with her blouse buttoned wrong. She made some furtive glances around the kitchen then said, “Did you make that screwdriver?”

  “No, you drank all my gin last night and anyway, I’m out of orange juice.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “You want a coffee?”

  “No, I really need a drink, it helps to end the hangover. What time does that place open up across the street?”

  “The Bistro?”

  “Yeah, they open now?”

  It was twenty minutes past seven. “I don’t know, they might be open.” He knew for a fact they didn’t open until lunch.

  “I should probably just head home. I got a busy day ahead of me.”

  Bobby nodded, and wondered which was the bigger lie, the heading home or the busy day.

  “Promise me you’ll give me a call once you’ve had some time to think about my offer.”

  “Offer?” she said with a blank look on her face. “Oh yeah, let me think on it and then we can talk a little further. Sound good?”

  “Yeah, I appreciate it, Mira, thanks.”

  “Yeah, sure. Hey, fun night, great to catch up after all this time,” she said and headed for the door.

  Bobby followed her, got a gin-infused kiss on the cheek for his trouble and then watched as she made her way to the elevator. He looked out the window as she dodged early morning traffic and hurried across the street. She pulled on the locked front door to the Bistro then kicked the door. He couldn’t hear her, but her movements and the stomping down the street to wherever she was headed left little doubt to how she felt.

  Miguel suddenly appeared in the hallway, raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

  “A long term plan,” Bobby said in answer to the look. “I’ve waited a lot of years.”

  Chapter Four

  It was three days later before he heard from her. The call came through a little after two in the afternoon.

  “Bobby Custer.”

  “Hi, Bobby, it’s Mira. You free to talk?”

  “Mira, nice of you to call back. I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Oh, I was helping out some clients and…”

  “Clients? I thought the firm let you go?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve still got people calling me.”

  Collection people most likely. “Have you had a chance to consider my offer?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I mean I’m a little fuzzy on the details.”

  “Well it’s pretty basic. We set up a business where you offer to represent people who are in mortgage arrears. You tell them you may be able to get their loan modified.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that. I mean get the loan modified? Everything I know about the system seems to suggest it’s more or less rigged against the mortgagee. The lenders have pretty much demonstrated they aren’t really that interested in working with folks. I mean look at…”

  “None of that’s important, Mira. We’re just collecting the fee. We’ll wait a couple of days, then get back to them and tell them we can’t help.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. You tell them that for twenty-five hundred bucks you’ll get their loan modified. A week later you return two grand to them and tell them there’s nothing you can do.”

  “But they gave you twenty-five hundred, you mean to tell me…”

  “It’s your nonrefundable fee.”

  “They go for that?”

  “They signed your contract. You’re just trying to help and it didn’t work.”

  “Sounds illegal as hell.”

  “Yeah, sure that’s one way to look at it.”

  “What’s another?”

  “You clear fifty percent of the fee, two hundred and fifty bucks. You enroll two people in a day and that’s five hundred bucks. You enroll four, well that’s a grand.”

  “I used to bill f
ive hundred an hour.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you did. In fact, you told me that the other night. But let me ask you something. When was the last time you billed that?”

  “That’s irrelevant. Do you have potential clients lined up?”

  “Not in so many words. The idea is still in the planning stages, but we could get it up and running in short order. Get a PO Box, and have you work out of your home. You search the local government records and send a personalized letter offering your services. You call the folks forty-eight hours later, set up the appointment and leave with a check. How hard can it be?”

  “So far it sounds like I’m doing everything, where do you come in?”

  “I’m the idea man, oh and the bank roll. I’ll pay for your PO Box, postage, the letters, give you some cash to get going.” He happened to know she had less than five hundred bucks in her bank account. “But you gotta prove yourself. We get things going, get the operation off the ground and we’ll bring some other folks in. They can do the client end of things and you can be the manager. See how it could grow?”

  “Yeah, maybe. It sounds like something that would be reported to the attorney general almost immediately. I don’t need anymore trouble with the the Bar Association.”

  “That’s the beauty of this, you don’t advertise anything regarding the practice of law. You…”

  “What?”

  “You’re a mortgage loan auditor, or a foreclosure prevention auditor. Your job is to review their loan documents to see if their lender complied with the law. Then you just sit on the documents for seventy-two hours, once their check clears you keep the five hundred and return the rest. You do that by mail, all they’ve got is a PO box. In short order you could be knocking down six figures, easy, Mira.”

  “I suppose it could work.”

  “Suppose? Come on, it’s a sure thing. Look, if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. No hard feelings. I got a number of folks I wanted to talk to about it. I just thought, well you having just been let go, again, I thought maybe you could use a break. Like I said, you don’t want to do it, no hard feelings. But look at it this way, over the course of the year if you find just four hundred people who need a review, guess what? You made a hundred grand. Sound good?”