The name typed beneath the word Agent on the first page of the folder was not Wesley, and it was not Kristy. It was Maurice Landry, a notary and loan broker whose office sat above a nail salon on Desiard Street, and whom I had seen on the front of a flyer for quick cash for your home.
I read it through the glass of my own screen door, with my son smiling on the other side and the grocery store roses wilting in his hand, and I felt perfectly calm. A court reporter learns a certain stillness, and mine arrived all at once.
“Wesley,” I said, “you may leave those on the step.” He frowned. I said, pleasantly, that I was not feeling well, and that I would call him after lunch. He kept smiling, though a muscle jumped in his cheek. He said he would wait. I said that would not be necessary. Then I did what I had been wanting to do since the night before. I closed the inner door, turned the lock, and went into my kitchen, where my telephone sat on the counter beside a legal pad and a pencil.
The call to Judge Cormier took one minute. She had already spoken to the district attorney that morning. Two investigators from the parish were on their way to my house with a recording device, and a young attorney from legal aid whom she trusted. “Bobbie Jean,” she said, “you did everything right. You kept the log, you wrote it down, and you did not sign. Now we let the law do what it was built to do.” I said I would put on a pot of coffee. She laughed and told me to put on two.
A woman who has typed the testimony of ten thousand liars is the last person on earth a liar should try to fool over the telephone.
The investigators asked me to call Wesley that afternoon and invite him to come by the next day, as if nothing were wrong. I did, in a warm and slightly confused voice that I have heard on the stand a hundred occasions. He came at ten, with Kristy, carrying a casserole. I welcomed them into the living room. A small microphone, taped beneath the end table, recorded every word. I asked about the pills, and the house, and the papers. They were so eager to reassure me that they said it all again, in detail.
Wesley said that I should not worry about the house, that he would handle everything, that I could sleep late and watch my programs. Kristy said that she had already cut a dozen pills in half to make the transition easier. I asked her to repeat that. She repeated it, helpfully. When the door opened, and the investigators walked in with their badges, Kristy dropped the casserole dish on my carpet. It broke into three large pieces, and the cheese slid out.
They were arrested in my living room, and the sight is not one I would wish on any mother. Wesley did not struggle. He sat down on my sofa with his hands between his knees and looked at the floor. When the investigator read him his rights, he lifted his head and looked at me with an expression I could not read. He said, “Mama, we only wanted to take care of you.” I said, very gently, “No, baby. You wanted to take care of the house.”
The case moved faster than most. The recording was clear. The call log of my granddaughter, eleven minutes and forty seconds, was entered into evidence, along with the folder, the unsigned power of attorney, and the forged signature of the broker. Maurice Landry was arrested the following week. He had done this to seven other families. Wesley and Kristy each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to exploit an elderly person, and each received a sentence of five years, to be served, with eligibility for early release.
My granddaughter Addie came to live with me while the case was pending, along with her older cousin, a girl of twelve who babysat. We turned the back bedroom into a playroom. Addie lost her tooth in my kitchen, on a Sunday, biting into an apple, and ran down the hall holding it up, screaming with joy. I put it under her pillow. In the morning she found two quarters and a note in my handwriting. It said, Thank you for leaving the line open.
I did not sell the house. I changed my own will, and added a clause that requires any future agent to be approved by two independent persons. Judge Cormier witnessed it. When we finished, she shook my hand, and said that I should consider writing a book. I said I had already typed all of it down, in transcript form, for thirty four years, and that no one had ever wanted to read it. She said, “Then they will want to read this one.”