The Shyster's Daughter

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE:

  PRISON WITHOUT WALLS

  THE FIRST SOUNDS OF FAMILY

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  THE INSANITY DEFENSE

  RIDE

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  SAY UNCLE

  WHITE ELEPHANT

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  RED EYE

  FAMISHED FRAT BOYS

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  BIG BIRD AND OTHER FOUL TYPES

  CLOSING ARGUMENTS

  STUN

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  STRUCK

  THE OPENING

  WEIGHT AND MATTER

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED

  CONDUCT UNBECOMING

  LIKE MARROW

  LATE SHOWING

  CASELOAD

  EPILOGUE

  About Paula Priamos

  Books from Etruscan Press

  Etruscan Press Is Proud of Support Received From

  Copyright Page

  For my father

  S’agapo

  Shyster (U.S. slang.)

  1. A lawyer who practices in an unprofessional or tricky manner; especially, one who haunts the prisons and lower courts to prey on petty criminals.

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to Philip Brady, Robert Lunday, Starr Troup, Julianne Popovec, and Jim Cihlar at Etruscan Press. For their friendship, wit, and humor, I would like to thank Annica Jin-Hendel, Mary Ann Brown, Michelle Seward, Naoko Kato, and Betty Pires. Special thanks goes to my teaching colleague Jackie Rhodes. With much love, I would like to thank my family—my mother, sister, and brother Nick who lived many of these stories with me along with my stepsons. This show of thanks also includes my niece and my sister-in-law Jennifer Priamos. And lastly, with deep appreciation to my husband Jim Brown for his affection and unyielding support at all the right times.

  An excerpt of The Shyster’s Daughter has appeared in ZYZZYVA and in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in different form.

  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.

  PRISON WITHOUT WALLS

  I am twelve years old when Kevin Cooper escapes from the California Institution for Men less than three miles from our home. That it is late and a school night does
n’t matter. My mother is six months pregnant, and I help her drag our royal-sized dining room chairs in front of the sliders, blocking the glass with lumbering wood. Of course these heavy chairs will not stop him. But they may slow him down and give us those few seconds to either get out of the house or give my father time to aim.

  My father is outside in his T-shirt and boxers, barefoot, yet armed with a hunting rifle. He checks the front and back doors, and inspects the garage, to make sure it holds nothing more than his diesel Mercedes and our Schwinn bicycles.

  On the loose for less than seventy-two hours, Cooper is already suspected of bludgeoning a family in the hills. The carnage, the bodies, the blood, are all too grisly for the local networks to show. We only hear the details, which somehow makes them worse. Cooper has used a knife and hatchet. These are hands-on murders, the personal kind, though Cooper is a stranger to this family.

  We see his mug shot—a black man in an orange prison jumpsuit with the start of dreadlocks springing from his head. I’ve seen enough prison photos from the files my father brings home to know that Cooper’s smirk is nothing more than a pose. What I see is the face of a coward.

  A weakling who rapes a woman with a screwdriver against her throat.

  He is no man.

  My mother must see it too because she turns off the TV. Her face is pale but it’s always that way against her dark hair.

  We live in a ranch-style home surrounded by oleander bushes, perfect for hiding.

  My mother parts the curtains.

  “He could be watching us right now,” she says.

  At age forty, her pregnancy is high-risk in more ways than one. An accident, she and my father say, but I know having another child is a last ditch effort at keeping our family together. My older sister and I are no longer enough.

  It was my father’s idea to move us from L.A. to Chino. He’s moved his law practice too. A change is supposed to do us good.

  “An alarm should’ve sounded,” my father says, coming back into the house. His shoulders are nearly as wide as the doorway, and his neck is as thick as a linebacker, which he was, having once been recruited to play for Stanford. My father is not a man to be messed with. “It’s supposed to go off every fifteen minutes when someone’s escaped.”

  My mother laughs at this, at him, and places a protective hand over the hard mound of her belly.

  “Who’s supposed to hear it? Other prisoners?”

  “What the hell kind of comment is that?” The gun lags at my father’s side. “I’m doing my best.”

  “I know, Paul. I know. While that sick son of a bitch is hacking up me and the girls, you can hand him your card. He’ll need a slick pro like you to spare him from the chair.

  On that first night I sleep between my parents. Too frightened to stay, my sister Rhea is given permission to visit some family friends in San Diego. Sixteen and with a driver’s license, it’s easier on my parents if they just let her go. The house feels empty without her, consumed with the sound of my father’s snoring that even the tissue crammed into my ears doesn’t muffle.

  Leaning against his side of the bed is his .300 Savage, fully loaded. If I reach over I can touch the cool barrel.

  My father is a generic lawyer, taking on everything from divorces to drug offenses. I doubt if he is a good shot, considering he only hunts on occasional trips to Wyoming or Montana with one of his clients, the business ones, the ones he courts—like the handsome restaurateur from Bel Air who used to cart me on his back, table to table, making the candle-lit rounds, checking on things in the kitchen, until one night during dessert he returned me to my family’s table, my breath smelling of wine from my first tasting, a trace of white dust in the man’s dark mustache. Months later, his mind spun from all the cocaine and alcohol, he rolled his Jeep into a sand dune and never came out from the wreckage. My father also represents criminals and typically visits them behind the safety of bulletproof glass.

  As I lie in bed, I think of the boy, a few years younger than me, who the night before lay awake in his parents’ bedroom—only his mom and dad weren’t sleeping. They were dead. His sister and a neighbor friend who was sleeping over had been murdered, too. They were ambushed in their sleep by a man with a hatchet in one hand, a knife in the other.

  The boy was stabbed in the chest. He was stabbed in the head. Then his throat was slit. The only way he made it through the night, the eleven hours it took until help found him, was by plugging four fingers in the slash to stop the bleeding. He was airlifted to ICU at Loma Linda Hospital. I wonder who’s sitting with him now while he fights to breathe. How hard it must be for him to want to live, knowing the rest of his family has been killed.

  The next morning at school, there is no talk of Cooper’s escape. Yet the door to the classroom isn’t propped open with a doorstop. Instead Mrs. Lincoln pulls on it after the first bell, making sure it’s locked. None of us are allowed to use the restroom by ourselves. Not even with a buddy system. We have to be accompanied to and from there in a small group by the teacher’s aide.

  Recess is on a rainy day schedule, as if it’s not clear and warm outside. After lunch, we sit on the floor in the multi-purpose room and watch the animated mice movie, The Rescuers.

  When we return to the classroom, we’re stuck watching another film. This one is very different. We needed to get our parents’ signatures for it. The boys are sent to Mr. Kroger’s class to watch their own. The movie is actually a slide show with a drawing of a woman; her insides are reduced to a wide tube that leads to two narrow pouches on either side of her hips. These are her ovaries.

  Mrs. Lincoln flips the slide. It’s the same drawing, only now there’s a tiny circle with a curvy tail in the middle of the woman’s tube. Mrs. Lincoln narrates from a stapled packet.

  “The sperm swims up the canal and breaks through the woman’s egg, fertilizing it. A man and woman have intercourse when they want to produce a child.”

  In the next slide, the egg has suddenly come to life and bats a set of long eyelashes. The tiny head of the sperm grows a face and puckers up for a whistle.

  All the girls giggle, except for me.

  I picture something else. I picture my parents naked in bed, my father sweating and heaving on top of my mother, purposely releasing microscopic live things hidden in slime. While my sister and I may not have seen them, we heard them in our room late one night at the Desert Rose Hotel in Palm Springs when they thought we were asleep. We heard our father’s heavy grunts, our mother’s thin cries. He was smothering her in the sheets. When I tried to get up out of bed to help her, Rhea pinched my ear hard and whispered that I needed to go back to sleep. It was no big deal. Mom was all right. They were just making a baby.

  Apparently it’s an act of love. It’s called making love, having sex. In time it will no longer sicken me. It will be something I’ll want to do when I’m older, when I’m in love. But as I sit listening at my desk, even in Mrs. Lincoln’s clinical terms, it still sounds unclean.

  My mother seems dirty for letting my father do that to her, especially since they spend most of the time arguing.

  After the slide show, Mrs. Lincoln informs us about our monthly friend who will likely appear in the next year or so. She holds up a small cylinder of cotton with a string and instructs us on how best to insert the plastic applicator so that after its removal, what’s left inside will soak up the blood.

  My best friend Tomoko makes a face at me. Although she’s Asian, her mother tells her she’s a Japanese girl before she’s anything else. We’re not allowed to play at each other’s houses, not because I’m Greek, but because I’m white. Her mother doesn’t see the difference. Tomoko’s hair is hard to manage, so her mother braids it into two thick pigtails. This style doesn’t make her feel very pretty, so at recess she’ll take a couple of tiny white flowers from the weeds in the grass and tuck them behind one ear.