Fighting Chance(14)

Terry Carpenter seemed to be trying to get control of himself.

Gregor thought he’d head him off at the pass.

“Don’t try to tell me that American Amity sold the mortgage,” Gregor said, “because I know it didn’t. American Amity never sold any of its mortgages. I checked it out.”

“Yes,” Terry Carpenter said, “but the thing is—”

“And if you’re going to try to tell me that Mikel took out a second mortgage with J.P. CitiWells, you’re going to have to show me the paperwork. Mikel said he didn’t, and I believe him. I believe him because I know him. I believe him because there is no record of such a lien in the city records. And I believe him because less than a year ago, we had a case where this same bank tried to foreclose on a house that hadn’t had a mortgage on it for nearly thirty years. No mortgage at all. Free and clear.”

Terry Carpenter had been standing up, leaning toward the open laptops, as if he needed only a break in the conversation to jump in and get going. Now he sat down again with a thud.

“Oh, God,” he said. “You got one of those.”

“One of those?” Gregor asked.

Carpenter looked defensive. “There weren’t many of them,” he said. “I mean, hardly a thousand all told throughout the entire system—”

“You had a thousand cases where banks tried to foreclose on houses without any mortgages on them at all? None? A thousand cases—”

“I keep trying to tell you,” Carpenter said. “Everybody used to register their deeds and their mortgages at town hall, but back around 2000, people began to feel that was a really old-fashioned and time-consuming way of going about things. You had to hire people to go running all over the country. It could take weeks to get mortgage liens filed. So a group of the bigger banks got together to found an electronic filing database, one big database for the entire country. Which was not entirely stupid, you have to see that—”

“Was it legal?” Gregor asked. “Is it legal?”

Terry Carpenter looked miserable. “We don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Gregor said. “I’ve got a man with a wife and two small children about to lose his house over a mortgage he never took out, and you don’t know if the way it was filed was legal—”

“There are a lot of different jurisdictions involved,” Terry Carpenter said. “What’s legal in California isn’t necessarily legal in Nevada. What’s legal in Atlanta isn’t necessarily legal in Savannah.”

“I know about jurisdictions,” Gregor said.

“It’s easy to say that the banks should have stuck to the old system,” Terry Carpenter said, “but you’ve got to see that that isn’t going to be sustainable. We live in a digital age. You don’t type on a manual typewriter anymore, and you don’t vote by paper ballot. We really are going to have to do something about updating the recordkeeping—”

“Mikel Dekanian’s house is in jeopardy because you hired a bunch of cut-rate data entry people, didn’t hire enough of them, made them work like crazy, and they made mistakes. Lots of mistakes. Some of which—”

“After all,” Terry Carpenter said. “They really were just mistakes. The banks aren’t deliberately trying to steal people’s houses out from under them—”

“How do you know?”

“You’ve got to expect that there are going to be some glitches when a new system goes into place,” Terry Carpenter said, sailing right past anything Gregor was saying. “The thing to do, right this minute, is to get your proof together—”

“We don’t have proof,” Gregor said, “and we shouldn’t be the ones trying to prove anything. J.P. CitiWells should be producing the loan documents, which they are not, and—”

“—and then it’s just a matter of time,” Terry Carpenter said. “It’s just a matter of time—”

“We don’t have any time,” Gregor said. “The court has refused to issue an injunction. We can’t get the process stopped. By the time your matter of time has run its course, Mikel Dekanian is going to be out on the street. And then what happens?”

“You have to see it from the banks’ point of view. They have billions of dollars at stake. They’re trying to recover from enormous financial losses. They have to protect themselves if they’re not going to go down in flames, and—”

“And then I’ve got to ask what I’m doing at the Federal Reserve anyway,” Gregor said. “Why is the Federal Reserve—?”