“How’d you do?” I asked as I sat down. “Where do you want me to start?” “The eviction,” I said, “seems like the most pressing.” She agreed. “I talked with the city attorney—a man named Mark Tressman. A dedicated letch of the first order.” “Really?” “Mark, as he insisted I call him, assured me that he and his wife had”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“an ‘arrangement’ about such things. I asked if he’d mind if I called her and chatted and all of a sudden he got all professional on me.” “Do tell?” “Anyway…according to Mark”—she bobbed her eyebrows up and down—“the tax rules for homesteads differ radically from those which cover regular property.” She waved a hand. “Did you know that a homestead reverts to the county if it’s not continuously occupied by the owner or his agent?” “Really?” “According to Casanova. He went into all this legal mumbo jumbo, but the deal is this: There’s an old law, still on the books, that allows cities or counties to foreclose on homesteads after the taxes are more than ninety days in arrears.”
