It was not, he told himself, that he had done anything illegal. He believed that, mostly. It was that he had done what the branch had always done, what the manager before him had done, what the manager had told him in his first year was just how it works up there, Grant. North of the interstate the comps were bad. The comps were bad, so the values were low. The values were low, so the loans were risky. The loans were risky, so you ordered desktop appraisals to save the bank the cost of a walkthrough on a file that was going to get turned down anyway. And when you ordered a desktop appraisal you filled in a box marked Special Instructions, and for six years, on every order north of I-10, Grant Whitfield had typed the same six words he had been taught to type his first year: Use post-storm comparables within one mile.
Post-storm comparables within one mile, north of the interstate, meant houses with no roofs. It meant houses on the demolition list. It meant valuing Alcide Broussard's yellow house, which still had a front half that looked like 1967, by comparing it to the shell of the barbershop with the plywood on the windows.
On Ryan Street, the box was blank.
He sat there a long time. At some point he picked up the pen and tapped it against his lip, and then he realized what he was doing and put it down.
Then he picked up his phone and called Lorraine Thibodeaux.
"Grant," she said. "It's almost ten."
"I know. I'm sorry. I wanted to — about tomorrow. I wanted to get ahead of something." He took a breath. He could feel two sentences in his mouth, side by side, like two roads. One of them went: I'd be careful with this woman, Lorraine. I think she's unsophisticated. I think somebody's put her up to this. I think we can offer her a nice managed portfolio and a plaque in the lobby and make the folder go away. It was a road he knew. He had driven it a hundred times.
He looked at the files.
"There's a problem with the appraisal orders," he said. "North of I-10. I think it's going to come up tomorrow. And I think — I think it's mine."
* * *
Lorraine Thibodeaux was a compact white woman of about sixty with short silver hair and a gold cross at her throat and a handshake like a farmer's. She had driven in from Baton Rouge at six in the morning, and she was waiting in the branch's small conference room at nine-forty, with the twenty-three files stacked in front of her and a legal pad covered in her own handwriting and a look on her face that Odessa, coming through the door at nine fifty-eight, recognized at once. It was the look of a principal who had already read the incident report and was now waiting to see whether the children would tell the truth.