Chapter 7 — GRANT MERCER
Alma Ruiz has an office above a nail salon on Glenwood and a waiting room with four chairs and a coffee table with nothing on it.
She is fifty-one and she talks the way people talk when they bill in tenths of an hour.
I gave her the drive, the legal pad, the deed printout, the WakeMed discharge summaries, and the freezer bag with the bottle in it.
She looked at the freezer bag for a second and then set it aside without comment, which I appreciated.
She watched twelve minutes of footage.
Then she stopped it and took her glasses off.
"Okay," she said. "Three separate things are happening and you need to stop thinking of them as one thing."
"They're the same people."
"They're the same people and they are three different proceedings with three different standards of proof and three different clocks. If you mix them up you will lose all three."
She held up a finger.
"One. Child neglect. That's Wake County DSS. That's Nadine Okoro. That is happening whether you want it or not and your job in that one is to be the boring parent. Not the angry parent. The boring one."
Second finger.
"Two. The money. Forged deed of trust, forged notarization, unauthorized transfers. That's a criminal referral and a civil action to quiet title. Different clock. Slower."
Third finger.
"Three. Your marriage. Custody, support, equitable distribution. Slowest of all and the one you care about most, which is why you're going to want to rush it, and you're not going to."
"What do I do first?"
"Nothing dramatic. You file a notice of lis pendens on the deed of trust so nobody can transfer anything, and you file a police report on the notarization, and you go to the Secretary of State's notary division, because that is a completely separate agency with its own investigators and they move faster than anyone in the courthouse."
"Why do they move faster?"
Alma put her glasses back on.
"Because a notary commission is a privilege granted by the state and taking it away doesn't require a jury. It requires a form and an investigator who is annoyed."
I filed the notary complaint on a Wednesday.
On Friday, Grant Mercer came to see me.
I was on a ladder at a self-storage facility off Capital Boulevard, running conduit along a soffit, when Wes called up and said somebody was in the office for me.
He was standing in the gravel lot beside a grey Tahoe.
Charcoal jacket. No tie. In person he is bigger than the camera makes him and he has the easy, unhurried way of a man who has been the tallest person in most rooms since he was fifteen.
"Danny."
Nobody calls me Danny.
"Mr. Mercer."
"Grant." He smiled. "Come on."
I came down the ladder and stood in the gravel with a spool of conduit in one hand and did not put it down, because holding something is useful.
"You've had a rough week," he said.
"I have."
"I want to say two things and then I'll get out of your way." He put his hands in his pockets. "First. What happened with those kids is not okay. It's not. I've told Corinne that."
"You've told Corinne that."
"I have."
"When?"
He kept smiling.
"Second thing. There's a filing you made about a notarization."
"There is."
"That's a mistake."
"Which part?"
"Judith Vance is sixty-one years old and she's got a commission and a job at an insurance office and she teaches Sunday school." He shrugged. "You take that from her, she's got nothing. And you don't get anything. You don't get your house back faster. You don't get your money back faster. You just take an old woman's life away over a piece of paper."
I want to describe how good he was at this.
He did not threaten me.
There was nothing in that conversation that would sound like anything on a transcript.
He stood in a gravel lot and made a moral argument, in a reasonable voice, about mercy.
"There's a number," he said. "There's always a number. Tell me yours and let's be done."
"A number for what?"
"For the paper to go away and everybody to go back to their lives."
"The paper says I borrowed four hundred and twelve thousand dollars."
"The paper says a lot of things."
"Your wife's LLC is the lender."
That did land. Not much. A quarter inch.
"Priscilla handles some investments," he said.
"Does she know?"
He looked at me for a second and the easy thing went out of his face, and what was underneath it was not angry. It was patient, and slightly interested, the way you look at a machine that has made a noise you did not expect.
"Danny, let me tell you something for free, because I like you." He nodded at the ladder. "You're a guy who does what's in front of him. That's not an insult. The world needs guys who do what's in front of them. But you've spent eleven years looking at buildings, and a building is a thing that stays where you put it."
"Okay."
"People don't."
He got into the Tahoe.
Before he pulled the door shut he said the last thing, and it is the only sentence of his I wrote down word for word that same hour, in the truck, with the door open and the gravel dust still hanging.
"Ask her why she couldn't hold the baby."