“No, I’m going to my attorney’s. You can meet me there if you’d like. It’s Sunset and Twelfth.”
I had waited long enough to get the attorney involved – probably too long. I had to get him and the private investigator figuring this mess out. My life was falling apart right before my eyes. Delilah hadn’t returned my calls all week, my house had been broken into two additional times, and now my money was all frozen. It didn’t seem like this was my life – it seemed more like I was living a nightmare.
When I arrived at my attorney’s office, he was waiting for me. My frantic call to him before calling Josh had been enough to get him to cancel whatever else he had scheduled for the day and get me in.
People of my stature just didn’t get their accounts frozen for no reason. No agency wanted to be involved in such high-profile cases and when they were, I was certain they would follow all the rules. Something outside of the rules was going on with my life at the moment and I needed all the help possible to figure it out.
“Okay, sit down, tell me what’s going on,” Dick Anderson, my lawyer, said as I walked into his office.
I went over everything with Dick, and the private investigator came in and filled him in on the other details I hadn’t learned yet. My life was an absolute disaster and neither man could figure out what had started it all or how we were going to get my accounts unfrozen.
“You haven’t received any notices in the mail regarding your accounts being seized?” Mr. Anderson asked.
“Seized? What do you mean seized? Holly hell, is the government going to take all my money? What’s going on here, Dick? I’ve done nothing. I’m not guilty of anything, except maybe a little stupidity. Billy, tell him what you found out about the official investigation.”
“Yeah, it’s not official, as far as I can tell. From what I’ve been able to find out, it’s something more personal. I’ll need access to someone at your bank to confirm who froze the accounts, though.”
“Is your brokerage account connected to the bank?”
“Yeah, it’s connected to my savings account,” I said.
“Well, at least that solves a little bit of this. It all seems to originate at the bank, or at least that’s one of the big areas we need to look.”
As Billy and Dick started to coordinate their attack, I sat quietly and let them work. None of us knew exactly what was going on, but I was becoming more and more confident that it was going to come out very soon.
“Hey, guys, my ex-wife is calling; I’m going to take this out in the hall,” I said when Rose’s number popped up on my screen.
“Hi, Brandon. I hate to bother you but I’ve got some forms I need you to fill out before I get married next month.”
“Sure, what are they about?”
“I’m not sure, just some stuff that Carlos and his lawyer put together. You can come get them and have your attorney take a look, if you like. I think it’s about stock options or something.”
“Stock options?” I asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “You’ll have to look at it. You know I’m not technical like you are.”
“Sure, I’ll come grab them later today. I’ve got to run for now.”
“What was that all about?” Dick asked when I returned.
“I’m not sure. Rose said she needed me to sign something before she married Carlos. Do you have any idea what it is?”
“She probably wants to keep her alimony. It’s no big deal; I’ll take a look at it. Now, let’s get back to the problem at hand. Billy has the bank on the line and they need to confirm your identity before they will answer any questions.”
“Sure, but I was on with them before and they weren’t very helpful,” I took the phone from Billy and flipped it to speaker. “This is Brandon Baker; what do you need to verify?”
The woman was nice enough, but she went on and on with verification questions for at least five minutes before she would actually answer anything we had to ask. It was comical to me how hard it was for me to get information about my own account, considering how easily someone seemed to be able to block my account.
“Mr. Baker, your account was flagged for fraud last week; is that correct?”
“Yes, but it was a misunderstanding with my ex-wife. Everything was straightened out.”
“Okay, well, it appears an outside agency has frozen your accounts. They accessed them through your credit cards. So, you could start by looking for who had access to your card ending in zero-two-seven-eight.”
“Wait, so it’s fraudulently frozen and you can’t unfreeze it?”
“At this point, I’m going to ask for an investigation because I can’t tell who has actually activated the freeze. Normally if it was activated by a court order or government agency, we would have that legal document on file. So, from what I’m seeing, it appears to be an illegal freeze.”