The clerk was a tired looking man with a name badge that said Delbert, and he did not raise his voice. He only stood in the open door of the courtroom and said it again, slower, as if saying it twice might make the old man in the three piece suit decide to turn around. “Mr. Pfaff, the judge says you know you cannot be in this building. Please step away from my courthouse.” Mr. Pfaff did not step away. He smiled at me, a thin, tidy smile, and tapped the lid of his briefcase.
I am seventy five years old, and I spent thirty two years looking at men who smile like that across a kitchen table in the aftermath of a fire. It is the smile of someone who has already counted the money. Carol took my hand. Brandon, beside her in his tie, was shaking so hard I could see the knot move. “Aunt Bev,” he whispered. “I did not know who he was. I swear it. He told me his name was Mr. Pfaff, and that he had a contractor license, and that he could put me to work.”
It came out in the hallway, in whispers, with the clerk standing guard like a bouncer. Brandon had been laid off from a cabinet shop in December and was too proud to tell his mother. He answered an ad in the back of a flea market flyer. The man behind it was Pfaff, a retired lawyer who had lost his license in 2003 for stealing from clients. He had a drawer full of old contracts from a firm called Hobart Home Services. Lyle Hobart, its founder, had died in 1996. Pfaff still had his stationery, his stamp, and his signature.
“He told me the name was just a formality,” Brandon said, so quietly I had to lean in. “He said a licensed contractor had to be on the paper, and Mr. Hobart was retired. He said we would split the profits, and he would handle the permits. I did the demolition myself. I thought it was fine. Then the money came, and he said there was a hold up with the supplier, and then he stopped answering. By March I had nothing but a stack of papers and your bathroom in pieces.” He started crying.
A swindler never needs to break down your door. He only needs to find the young man you love and tell him what he wants to hear.
The old photograph was the clincher. Pfaff had bought the files of Hobart Home Services from the estate of the widow of Lyle Hobart in 1996 for fifty dollars. Every job the old firm had ever done was in those boxes, with names, addresses, and pictures. Lyle Hobart had really built our pink bathroom in 1979. Pfaff used the old customer list like a hunting map, picking out widows and retirees whose houses were getting old. He sent Brandon, a sweet faced young man who needed work, to knock on their doors. I was the third woman on that list, but the first one who kept a binder.
I had to laugh when the judge asked to see it, because that three ring binder with the colored tabs became the most important paper in the courthouse that day. Every text, every receipt, every phone call with a date and a time. The assistant district attorney, a young woman in a navy suit, went through it page by page with a yellow highlighter. Twice she looked up at me over the top of it with something close to awe. I told her thirty two years in insurance claims teaches you to write everything down.
The hearing that day was not about Brandon at all, as it turned out. It was a bond hearing for Mr. Pfaff, who had been arrested on Monday for fraud against nine elderly homeowners in three counties. He was supposed to be in jail. A friend with a good lawyer had somehow gotten him released, and he came to the courthouse on purpose, to watch me and Brandon at the throats of each other. He wanted to see whether the nephew would crack. Instead, the nephew turned to the old man in the hallway, in front of the clerk and the deputies, and said, “I am done with you.”
Brandon told everything to the prosecutor that afternoon. He handed over his phone, his texts with Pfaff, and a notebook of the names and addresses he had been given. Because he came forward on his own, the judge gave him a chance to make restitution rather than serve time. I dropped my lawsuit that same week. My lawyer, a sensible woman on Sycamore Street, said it was the right call, and she returned half of my retainer without my asking. I will say that for the legal profession. Sometimes it behaves.
Pfaff had spent most of the money, but not all. The state froze eleven thousand dollars in an account in the name of his wife, and I received it by certified check in June. Brandon took on the rest, seven thousand dollars, as a debt of honor. He took a job at a lumber yard and sent me two hundred dollars a month with a note in every envelope. At first the notes said, I am sorry. After a year they said, I hope your garden is doing well. By the second year, they were mostly drawings of tomatoes.
Carol came over the Sunday after the hearing with a casserole and a bag of her own grout tools, which I had never known she owned. We sat on the edge of my new shower and she ran her hand along the wall, a little shy. “Bev, did you really do this yourself?” she asked. I said I did. She said it was the prettiest bathroom in Howard County. We cried a little, and then we ate the casserole sitting on the floor, because the chairs were in the kitchen.
I am seventy five years old. I have a new shower, a three ring binder, and a nephew who comes by every Sunday afternoon to mow my lawn. In May I taught him how to set a ceramic border at the free workshop at the hardware store, and he turned out to have a better eye than I do. He is thinking about getting his real license. I told him to put his name on every contract and keep a copy for himself. And to never, ever, sign anything with a dead man.
