Chapter 46 - Ben Pruitt

Chapter 46: Chapter 46 - Ben Pruitt

The law offices of Pruitt & Hale were on the eleventh floor of an old limestone building on lower Broadway, a few blocks from the courthouses.

Jesse arrived at 8:52. He gave his name to the secretary at the front desk, a gray-haired woman with half-moon glasses and a cardigan buttoned to her throat. Her clipped voice matched the one he’d heard on the phone yesterday.

"Mr. Byrne. Mr. Pruitt is finishing a call. Please have a seat."

He sat down on a stiff leather bench beside a potted fern, the folder of documents resting on his knees.

He’d done some reading this morning, lying in bed after he woke up thinking about Angie. It was mostly just Googling. Ben Pruitt had been practicing property and real estate law in New York for thirty-one years. He’d taken on some of the biggest landlords in the city and some of the biggest developers, and he’d beaten most of them. One article in the New York Law Journal called him "the last man any landlord wants to see across the table."

In more than three decades, he’d lost exactly one case. It was in his second year out of law school, and he’d lost it on a filing technicality.

He was also famously picky. He turned down far more cases than he took. One profile said he’d once rejected a billionaire client because he didn’t like the way the man spoke to his secretary.

Jesse glanced at the secretary.

She was typing steadily, her eyes on her screen. He made a mental note to be very polite to her.

Nine o’clock came and went. Then nine-ten.

At nine-twenty, the phone on her desk buzzed once. She picked it up, listened, then set it down.

"Mr. Pruitt will see you now."

*****

Ben Pruitt’s office was smaller than Jesse expected.

He’d pictured something like Andrew’s office, with floor-to-ceiling glass, a view of the river and a desk carved out of some rare tree. Instead he found a plain, square room with a worn green carpet and a single window looking out at the building across the street. Law books filled the shelves from floor to ceiling, their spines faded and cracked. Stacks of case files covered every flat surface. An old radiator hissed under the window, and the only decoration was a framed photo of a sailboat on the wall behind the desk.

It looked like the office of a man who spent his money on things other than offices.

The man himself filled the room.

Ben Pruitt was in his early sixties, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a thick white beard trimmed close to his jaw and a full head of white hair swept back from his forehead. He wore a rumpled blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pair of reading glasses perched low on his nose. He was sitting behind his desk with a fountain pen in one hand, and when Jesse walked in, he looked up over the top of his glasses.

He had the kind of presence that made you straighten your back without meaning to.

"Mr. Byrne," he said. His voice was deep and slightly gravelly. "Sit down."

He gestured at the chair across from him with the pen.

Jesse sat.

Ben took off his reading glasses, folded them and set them on top of a file. He leaned back in his chair and studied Jesse for a long moment, his dark eyes moving over Jesse’s face, his suit and the folder in his hands.

"Marie Goldfinch doesn’t call me often," he said finally. "In fact, she’s called me exactly twice in twenty years. The first time was about her divorce. The second time was yesterday, about you." He folded his hands over his stomach. "So I’m curious. Tell me what’s going on."

Jesse opened the folder and laid the eviction notice on the desk between them.

"My mother was Emma Byrne," he said. "Emma Goldfinch, before she married my father."

Ben’s eyebrows rose slightly. He clearly knew the name Byrne. Everybody in New York did. But he didn’t comment on it.

"She died last week," Jesse went on. "She lived in a three-story building in Astoria for the last thirteen years. After my father ran, we lost everything, and that building was the only thing the family let her keep. I grew up there. I still live there." He tapped the notice. "Two days ago, her brothers, Leonard and Mason Goldfinch, served me with this. They want me out in seven days. I have five left now."

Ben picked up the notice, put his glasses back on and read it carefully, all the way through. Then he read it again.

"Whose name is on the deed?" he asked without looking up.

"The Goldfinch family holding company. Goldfinch Properties."

"Not your mother’s?"

"No."

"Was there a lease? A written agreement? Anything that gave her a legal right to live there?"

"Not that I know of."

Ben set the notice down and took off his glasses again.

"Then I’ll be straight with you, Mr. Byrne," he said. "This is going to be very difficult. On paper, your mother didn’t own that building. Her family did. When she passed, whatever arrangement she had with them passed with her. Legally, you have no claim to the property at all. As far as a judge is concerned, you’re an occupant in a building owned by someone else, and the owner wants you out."

Jesse had expected that. It still landed like a stone in his stomach.

"She collected the rent," he said.

Ben paused.

"Say that again."

"My mother collected the rent," Jesse said. "From every tenant in the building. Every month, for thirteen years. Nobody from the Goldfinch family ever came by. Nobody ever asked for a cut. She kept every cent, and she used it to pay for the repairs, the water bill, the electric bill and the property taxes. She paid the plumber, the roofer and the exterminator." He pulled a thick stack of papers from the folder and set it on the desk. "These are her ledgers. Every rent payment she received and every expense she paid. And these are her bank statements going back eight years. That’s as far back as I could get."

Ben looked at the stack.

He put his glasses back on and pulled the ledgers toward him. He started flipping through them slowly, page by page. His mother’s neat handwriting filled every line: the tenant’s name, the unit number, the amount, the date. Rows of figures that she’d kept up even in her last months, when her hand had started shaking so badly the numbers drifted off the lines.

Ben read for a long time. The radiator hissed. Somewhere outside, a siren rose and faded.

"She paid the property taxes," Ben said finally. "Herself. Out of the rent."

"Every year."

"And the Goldfinches knew about this? They knew she was collecting the rent and keeping it?"

"They had to. It’s their building. They just never cared about it. It’s the smallest property they own. My grandfather was alive at the time." Jesse paused. "Now my grandpa is gone and my mother followed suit a year after and now they want it."

Ben set the ledgers down very carefully, like they were made of glass.

"Well," he said. "That changes things."

Jesse leaned forward.

"Your mother wasn’t a tenant, Mr. Byrne. Tenants pay rent. Your mother collected it." Ben tapped the stack of papers with one thick finger. "For thirteen years, she managed that building, maintained it, paid its taxes and kept its income, with her family’s full knowledge and without a single objection from any of them. In every sense except the deed, that building was hers. And she wasn’t some stranger. She was the daughter of the late Goldfinch patriarch."

He sat back in his chair.

"I’ll need to see the father’s will. And the estate filings. If Emma was left out of the will entirely, or if the building was meant as her share and nobody ever bothered with the paperwork, that’s a very different conversation. Either way, thirteen years of open, uncontested ownership in practice gives us something real to stand on." He paused. "The Goldfinches have a lot of lawyers. But they’ve also got thirteen years of looking the other way. That’s hard to explain to a judge."

For the first time since the yellow envelope landed in his hands, Jesse felt the knot in his chest loosen.

"So we have a case."

"We have a solid case," Ben said. "Not a guaranteed one. Nothing’s guaranteed. But a solid one." He picked up his fountain pen. "The first thing I’ll do is file for an emergency stay on the eviction. That freezes the clock, so your five days stop counting down while we fight this. Then we go after the will and the estate."

"When can you start?"

"Today. Right after you’ve paid my retainer."

Jesse nodded. "How much?"

Ben looked at him over the top of his glasses, like a man who’d delivered this news to a great many people and watched a great many faces fall.

"My rate is eighteen hundred dollars an hour," he said. "For a case like this, against a family like that, I’ll need a retainer of seventy-five thousand up front. And I’ll tell you now, it won’t be the last bill. Leonard and Mason will drag this out as long as they can, because they’re betting you’ll run out of money before they do." He set the pen down. "That’s how families like the Goldfinches usually win, Mr. Byrne. They don’t out-argue you. They outspend you."

Jesse smiled.

He reached into his inside pocket and took out his checkbook. He’d picked it up from the bank on his way over, the first checkbook he’d owned in his life.

"Money isn’t a problem, Mr. Pruitt."