Читать книгу The Shyster's Daughter - Paula Priamos - Страница 7

PROLOGUE:

A LESSON IN MORAL TURPITUDE

The last time my father calls is shortly before the anniversary of his disbarment to tell me he’s just cheated death. On his end, there’s background noise—a restaurant, a bar or somewhere far sleazier. Since the divorce he licks his wounds at a topless strip club in Garden Grove called the Kat Nip.

“This malaka in a ski mask tried to carjack me. He had a gun to the window and told me to get out of my own goddamn car.” My father slows down, hanging on to the moment as if speaking to a jury. “But I gave him the finger and backed the hell out of there.”

Considering my father’s Greek temper, it doesn’t surprise me that he flipped off a gunman before thinking of the possible consequences. Carjacking a middle-aged man for his old diesel Mercedes seems beyond desperate, more like a junkie looking for an easy mark. The days when my father tipped big from a money clip of C-notes in his pocket are gone, along with his law license.

Now he carries ones and fives to slip under the g-strings of his favorite girls at the Kat Nip.

“You’re lucky he didn’t kill you,” I say. If death didn’t get him in the form of an actual bullet, it could’ve gotten him from shock. Priamos men are known for strong minds and weak hearts. My grandfather died at fifty-nine, my father’s age. I hear it in his voice. For once, my father sounds scared.

As his daughter, the one child out of three who stuck around, I stay on the line. I listen. It’s what I’ve always done.

“Where were you?” I ask. From my Uncle Dimitri I’ve learned my father is seeing “a burlesque dancer” known as Sugar Brown. She lives in Compton, the neighboring city of Lynwood where my father grew up.

“In the parking lot at the Bicycle Club.”

With the card casino’s security cameras and well-lit lots, the evidence is stacked against him. He’s lying. After more than two decades spent as a defense attorney heatedly releasing himself and his clients of any wrong doing, my father is cool to the truth. I doubt he’d even know how to recognize it.

“Look,” he starts. “That isn’t why I called, Paula Girl.”

“It isn’t?”

“I know you’re in love. Things are all good and well. That’s great.” My father huffs, always the lawyer, leading up to his point. “Just don’t let him make you lose sight of what you really want.”

He’s referring to my fiancé, Jim, whom he recently met at dinner. Right after the salads were served and before Jim came back from the restroom, my father told me he saw the signs, the signs that instead of warning me away, only drew me closer. “Be careful, Paula Girl. I like him, and it doesn’t really matter that he’s older and already has kids. But his face is bloated. He’s an alcoholic. Things trouble him too much. That’s probably why his first marriage broke up.”

I take the cordless phone into the family room where I check the cuckoo clock, a rather obnoxious engagement gift from my father, suggesting I’m crazy for wanting to marry this guy. We live in Lake Arrowhead, over an hour’s drive from the Kat Nip. And that’s exactly where he’s at because I hear the D.J. announcing “Naughty Natalie,” the next girl up on stage with classic Billy Idol belting out, “In the midnight hour, she wants more, more, more . . . ”

After another five minutes, I’ll come up with an excuse, a late dinner I need to cook or a moonlit walk to the water with my fiancé.

“Jesus, Dad,” I say. “So what if I love him. It’s not like I’ve had a lobotomy.”

Jim sits in the other room, chasing down a half-pint of Smirnoff with a Killian’s Irish Red. Too sensitive for his own good, he is a writer, my former professor. My father’s summation of him is dead-on. Alcohol only makes Jim feel more, and if he catches me talking so bluntly about him, he might launch into a rant. Or just the opposite and begin to cry. It’s more than just the beer and the vodka that’s making him so emotionally reckless. Our love for each other has proven devastating. He’s left his family to start a new life with me. No matter how miserable things may have been at home, the guilt and the shame for selfishly thinking about his own future happiness over theirs are undoing him in painful ways. He sees himself as a bad husband, a bad father. My father knows better than anyone how a man has to bottom out before he can rebuild.

He laughs at my lobotomy crack. Sarcasm has always been our private language. It’s how we reach out to each other.

“Okay, okay. Just promise me you won’t get knocked-up. You’ll get your degree first. As soon as a woman gets barefoot and pregnant, she’s vulnerable.”

My father is proud that I’ve been accepted to graduate school where I’ll earn a Masters of Fine Arts degree. At this point in time I’m only twenty-nine and changing careers. Instead of high school with its juvenile detention slips and parent/teacher conferences, I’ll be covering Chekhov, Hemingway, and Morrison to adults in college. Not only am I the child that stayed after my mother left, I’m also the one who has followed in his footsteps by pursuing an education. I’ll be the first professor in the family.

My father talks like he knows something I don’t, and it bothers me. He couldn’t be more wrong.

“Who said I wanted a kid, anyway? Jim already has three. Don’t worry, Dad. I’m off the hook.”

Just as I’m hanging up, Jim comes into the room. He shakes his head.

“Why don’t you ever say goodbye? He’s your father.”

“We never do. It’s just our way.”

How we speak to each other may be unclear to Jim. But I’m only too aware of the change in my father’s voice and what I’ve just done by making him this promise. By breaking away from my father, I’m somehow breaking him. Many would argue he’s been broken for some time, both financially and morally. Over a million dollars of his clients’ money is missing. What can be accounted for had been invested in speculative ventures, undeveloped property in Hawaii and Nevada, a horse farm in Tennessee, thirteen purebreds, all in my father’s name to “protect his clients from liability.”

The State Bar Review Board didn’t buy it and in revoking his license, a generous judge found my father had “committed acts of moral turpitude,” instead of calling it for what it is: embezzlement. After I read the ruling on the State Bar’s website, I looked up the word “turpitude” in the dictionary and found beside the definition synonyms like “vileness, depravity, shame.” For any more information it suggested I look up the word “evil.” My father maintains he did nothing improper. He had power of attorney. Although I have my doubts, I know for certain his conduct was no more or less moral than other lawyers who distort the truth to suit their own ends.

For better or worse I am a shyster’s daughter and regardless of my father’s guilt, I will defend him.

Even now, after years of struggling to come to terms with what happened that night, his phone call replays over and over in my head. He expected me to keep my promise of not getting pregnant, but unlike his word, mine can always be trusted. His timing can’t be ignored. What he saw as a wake-up call is a warning of another kind. In less than eight hours after that phone call, my father was found dead.