Part 3 — The Cashed Check
The clerk adjusted her glasses and read the figure into the record in a flat, clear voice.
“Twenty-six thousand, five hundred dollars, Your Honor. Water damage to the bathroom wall at the Hess Street property, paid to Mr. Hollander and deposited the same week. No repair invoice was ever filed.”
Hollander looked at his lawyer. His lawyer looked at the table.
The judge was a woman named Okonkwo who had listened to six months of landlord testimony without changing her expression. Now she took off her glasses and set them down.
“Mr. Hollander, you were paid to fix this wall two years before a child lived behind it. You wrote on the back of the board that new renters should not be told. You painted it white.”
Mason mother was holding my hand so tightly that my fingers went numb.
I had cut a square out of that wall with a utility knife in the dark, and it turned out to be the loudest voice in the courthouse.
Judge Okonkwo ruled from the bench. The lease was void because the unit was unfit to live in. Hollander would return the deposit of fourteen hundred twenty-five dollars. He would reimburse the hospital debt of thirty-one thousand four hundred. And because he had concealed a known hazard and pocketed the repair money, he would pay a further judgment that brought the total to a little over seventy thousand dollars.
She forwarded the file to the Saginaw health department and the state attorney generals office. She said that every rental he owned would be inspected within the month.
Hollander did not shout. He sat down slowly in his chair and put his hand over his eyes.
It took a long time to collect. His lawyer arranged for a payment from the sale of two of his buildings. But the hospital called me in June to say the balance on Mason account was zero.
We moved to a clean two-bedroom on the other side of town, with new windows and a landlord who came by in person to ask if the heat was working. Mason slept with his window open.
By September he could climb the stairs again, one at a time, counting.
Saturday morning he rode my shoulders to the corner and counted the mailboxes out loud. Forty-one.
He drummed my bald spot with both hands. “Good job, Grandpa.”