The Shyster's Daughter, page 12
“So you retake the class. Big deal.”
After my father blew his knee his senior year at high school, he lost his free ride to play guard at Stanford. So he attended UCLA for his Bachelor’s Degree instead. He finished his Master’s in Business in one year instead of two. Then right afterward, he earned his law degree at USC. All before he turned twenty-seven. I know all this because my mother used to tell me. My yia yia brags about it too. He’s a legend in this family where his own father, in order to help pay for his sons to attend college, sold fruit out of the flatbed of his pick-up and his mother took in the neighbor’s ironing.
Besides, I know better. I know failing a class in my senior year is a big deal and what he’s accomplished by this pep talk is damage control.
“I only have one more semester before I graduate. I’ll have to go to night school.”
“So you’ll go to night school.”
I think of what Mr. Duvane said about me, how I’ll need to get married after I graduate, how my only worth is in my looks. How I don’t even have that since Trevor readily admits wanting to keep a girl like me hidden away from the rest of his life. The hole in my chest seems like it’s filling up again. I’ve never cried in front of my father, and I take a couple of deep breaths to keep from starting now.
“I’m a loser, Dad,” I blurt out. “There’s no way I’ll get into a four-year school.”
My father swerves into the emergency lane and kills the engine. Cars move their fastest in the lane next to us and the glass of the side window trembles at their speed. It’s clear he could care less about the danger. He looks angrier at me now than he did at the man who’s threatening to have him disbarred.
“You have no idea how strong you are. Look at what you’ve survived. Not many girls your age have their mothers leave. And you stayed.” That part always gets him, the fact I’m the only one in the family who didn’t abandon him. He starts up the car again and looks ahead as if he must.
“You’ll retake that class in adult school. You’ll earn your diploma in June. Your mother and I will call a truce and watch you receive it from way up in the stands. You’ll attend a community college and you’ll transfer to the four year of your choice.”
When it looks clear, my father guns the gas, and we merge in with the flow of traffic.
“But you won’t stop there. You’ll earn your Master’s. Then you’ll shove your degree in that psoli’s face and show him you now hold one higher than his.”
I fight not to smile at his ranting monologue in my defense. My father is an expert at closing arguments.
STUN
During my third semester at a community college Uncle Dimitri makes amends with my father and me behind Yia Yia and his brother’s back. After his wife threw him out of their home for having fronted the tuition for his former mistress to attend the Fashion and Art Institute in L.A., what heart he had left inevitably failed him. He needs someplace far removed from his own to recover from the subsequent surgery. To pay him back, Aunt Lorna had waited until he won big on an exacta at Hollywood Park and deposited the winnings in their joint account. Then she promptly served him with divorce papers in her brand new fully loaded, fully paid for Porsche 911.
He also needs my father’s help in preparing for an upcoming trial, a shocking sexual assault case involving a man, his ex-girlfriend, and a stun gun. Seeking thirty plus years for felony kidnapping and assault for something so perverse it’s made the papers and the local news, the D.A.’s office is in no mood to settle for anything less. As a criminal lawyer, Uncle Dimitri rarely steps foot inside a courtroom. The majority of his cases are plea deals, reached under the table at an expensive lunch on his dime with prosecutors or out on the green with judges, playing eighteen holes, letting them win.
On the morning Uncle Dimitri is to be released from the hospital, he waits in a chair, not in his bed, wearing a track suit and new white tennis shoes that look like this is the first they’ve ever touched the ground. In the seven years I haven’t seen him, he’s lost more hair, more weight. My father says his four sons visited but there is no sign of them now, no flowers or get well cards. I have come with my boyfriend, Erick, while my father impatiently circles the parking lot.
“You’re gorgeous, honey,” Uncle Dimitri says like he says to all women. He shakes his head, smiling. “Thank Christ you look nothing like your father.” But we both know I look everything like him and my father looks everything like his, which is where the jab comes from. Uncle Dimitri has always been a little sore that he took after his prematurely aged mother—the yearly rise in more forehead, the deep-set dark eyes. I lean down so he can kiss my cheek, and just below the zipper of his jacket his chest is stained not with blood but with iodine, used to keep the incision clean after surgery.
I introduce him to my boyfriend Erick and Uncle Dimitri sizes him up too soon. Short. Pale. Long hair. Quiet. He is no Greek.
Uncle Dimitri isn’t impressed and tells Erick to wait like a child, like a nuisance, in the room while he takes me over to the one next door and introduces me to a fellow patient, the big and bald Telly Savalas and his entourage of fellow Greeks. If Erick is offended, it isn’t in his nature to voice it. He’s in a grunge band called The Chronic Cult and writes his own lyrics, including an embarrassing ballad about me called “Picturing Paula,” comparing my big brown eyes to tiny TV screens, both sets apparently addictive to watch. In a few weeks they’re playing a gig, their biggest yet, at Bogart’s, a club in Long Beach, with an actual marquee out front and a mosh pit inside for fans to bodily collide or sway in slow unison, gripping cigarette lighters above their heads.
Telly Savalas used to play a New York City cop on TV who somehow pulled off looking tough busting criminals while sucking on a trademark lollipop. After I tell him about the catch phrase “kickback Kojack” we used in high school whenever somebody was too nosy, he insists on autographing a coffee stained paper napkin I don’t ask for. Celebrities are nothing new for Uncle Dimitri considering he used to live in Toluca Lake, the town right next to the TV and movie studios in Burbank.
Only when he is wheeled out curbside and scrunches up his face at the wheels that will take him all the way to Chino, a hay truck idling in the red, do I see my yia yia in him. My father must see his reaction too because water squirts out at the windshield and the wipers smear, not clear, the dirt that’s collected on the glass from being parked in the backyard. Obviously this is a step down for Uncle Dimitri even though he specifically requested a vehicle he would have to climb up in since he can’t bend over so well.
“Jesus, Paul,” Uncle Dimitri says, struggling out of the chair, struggling not to laugh because the staples have just come out and it hurts too much. “At the very least you could’ve driven my luxury limo through a set of sprinklers on your way over.”
Having his tougher older brother in the house balances my father in a way I haven’t been able to. Unlike Psycho Gil, who needs full armor and artillery, Uncle Dimitri has no understanding of physical weakness and actually tried to walk off his heart attack while it was happening. For a couple of hours he was successful at it, meeting all of his court appearances that afternoon before the throb in his arm thrust through other parts, through organs and bone, blurring his vision and seizing his stomach. He collapsed on the floor in his office where his assistant called the paramedics. Tests showed he needed a quadruple bypass. “A blocked artery for every pack a day I smoked,” Uncle Dimitri likes to joke.
My father needs the money Uncle Dimitri is going to split with him from the trial. The financial upkeep off his investments proves too much. The other night, before Uncle Dimitri came to stay, we ate dinner by lantern light because he remembered to pay the hefty monthly stable fees for his fleet of Walking Horses yet neglected to take care of the seventy five dollar past due electric bill. Twice I’ve had to pull off a neon orange warning taped to the front door notifying us that our home will be auctioned if the mortgage payments are not up to date by the end of the month. The ex-husband is still after him too, having lodged a formal complaint with the State Bar. But my father isn’t as concerned as he should be. “You know how bogged down they are with clients throwing a tantrum in the goddamn sandbox about us no good shysters? We’re always doing something wrong,” he said, laughing. “Winning too much. Not winning enough. Relax, Paula Girl. It’ll take years before they ever get to that poutsos’ fairytale allegations.”
With Uncle Dimitri here I no longer have to worry about other things, nightly things, like my father and his Savage, his putting down too many bottles of ouzo, his relentless need to relive a life that is no longer his through a projector and slides. I no longer have to rattle my door knob before coming out of my room, pretending not to see him on the couch retracting his hand out of his sweatpants and changing the Playboy Channel.
While my father is researching cases on kidnappings and sexual assault at the law library, I drive Uncle Dimitri to the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Haven Avenue in the upper middle-class community of Rancho Cucamonga where it all started, where the woman apparently flagged down her ex. Although Uncle Dimitri is getting around better, he doesn’t feel up to driving.
After she came out of the bank, her car wouldn’t start. Her ex just happened to be driving by. For some reason this raised in her no red flags. He offered her a ride back to her place but took her to his instead. In the driveway is where the prosecutors claim the kidnapping began. He dragged her inside. He tied her to a chair. For three days in the same room where they’d made love, he electrocuted, he burned her breasts and between her thighs at whim until somehow she was able to get away, diving head first through the bathroom window. Six stitches in her forehead. Lacerations across the palms of her hands. Palpable but not significant damage to the breasts and genital area. The clinical way my uncle and father discuss her injuries is enough to excuse me from the table, enough for me to cover up the graphic photos with a magazine or a book whenever I see them left lying out.
“The cuts could’ve been self-inflicted,” Uncle Dimitri poses when I bring up her injuries. “Six stitches is kid’s stuff. She could’ve hurt herself on purpose. Nobody was in that bathroom with her. Or she could’ve been coming off a bad drug trip and didn’t realize she could leave through the front door.”
“Does she have a history of drug use?”
Uncle Dimitri shrugs.
“Does it matter? All it takes is for me to put it out there.”
From his coat pocket he pulls out a ticking stopwatch. “Make a right at the next light,” he says. We’re timing the trip, scrutinizing every second for possible discrepancies in the testimony she gave at the pretrial hearing.
“They had that kind of relationship,” he insists.
“Break up, get back together. Break up again. Several 911 calls. ‘He slapped me. She kicked me in the balls.’ God knows how many times the cops came out to find one of them saying it was just a disagreement that got out of hand. From what he tells me, she’s no innocent. Those two were into some kinky shit.”
“I’d hardly call a stun gun a sex toy.”
“Okay,” Uncle Dimitri concedes. “We’re kind of fucked there.”
Part of me regrets coming even if I do get to spend time with Uncle Dimitri. I am to play the woman, the victim who bears in the most personal places the physical scars of over seventy-two hours of torture from the man she used to love, the man she trusted enough to give her a ride to her home. I am supposed to retrace her steps, pretend to be tied to the same chair, wriggle my chest, my pelvis, and legs, through the same shattered window.
The Peter Tasakas rape case happened on a sunny morning like this, only on a residential street. Darkly good looking. Suit and tie. Audi. He had all the makings of the kind of guy you’d give your phone number to, maybe even get in the front seat of his car to flirt, just flirt. Both men must’ve known they were clear to attack. No woman is expecting danger in broad daylight. That was how Erick and I met—idling in our cars during rush hour traffic, side door to side door, on the 57 freeway. For miles, inching past exit after exit, our eyes were on each other, on our opportunities that were slowly passing us by, until finally he exclaimed, “Okay, okay, you win. I can’t take it anymore. Please, pull over!”
Uncle Dimitri knows his way around a neighborhood he’s never been in. His client told him the way. When we arrive at a condominium complex made of stucco, the roof of terra cotta tile, he knows the combination for the gate to let us in. He clicks off his stopwatch.
“How long?” I ask.
“Nearly three minutes. She said a little over two.”
Good. Her testimony withstands the test of time.
Part of me wants her to be telling the truth. At the front door of his client’s condo, he has me get the key from under the welcome mat. He uses it to break the police tape and we let ourselves inside.
Nothing is out of place, which is somehow sinister in and of itself. But he’s an accountant by trade who tidies up numbers all day. A clean house only makes sense. The kitchen is immaculate, the counter wiped down. No dishes in the sink.
A picture of a man is on top of the entertainment center. He’s scrawny and pasty in a pair of swimming trunks, plastic visor and one dopey grin. A t-shirt covers his chest to protect him from the sun or from the scrutiny of other beach goers. His ex-girlfriend is with him in a bikini, her chest flat, her brown hair teased big. Neither one of them is particularly attractive. They are about the same height, the same frame. It’s obvious how their fights became volatile. Just above her breast, she has an unmistakable bruise, the size of a silver dollar.
“What’s the name of that little rocker you’re seeing?” Uncle Dimitri asks.
“Erick,” I say insulted at how a picture of his sex fiend client reminds him of my boyfriend.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I don’t want you getting hurt by a man like me. Make no mistake, they’re all like me.” Uncle Dimitri takes the picture off my hands of the couple during happier times before things turned, before the police, lawyers and the State of California barged into their relationship with handcuffs and court orders, before they became the prosecution’s star witness and the defendant standing to do serious prison time. “He may not act like it, but he’s one arrogant little prick,” Uncle Dimitri says. “Don’t let him fool you. It’s none of my business if you’re having sex with him, but you make damn sure you beat his ass to the door afterward. That way you’ll always have the upper hand.” Uncle Dimitri zips up the picture in his jacket to discard later—possible evidence the cops have now lost since they didn’t think to bag it on the first round.
The trial lasts for less than two weeks and my father and Uncle Dimitri exploit the coverage, talking to the press enough times for my father to clip the articles and blot out the entire freezer door of the fridge like a kid with A papers.
Every night at Yanni’s restaurant over flaming cheese and stuffed vine leaves for appetizers, lemony Avgolemono soup and moussaka, flaky and meaty, for the main course, Uncle Dimitri and my father give me a rundown of what happened in court. I cancel two dinners in one week with Erick. He says he understands. He needs the extra time to practice for the band’s big gig at Bogart’s.
“The prosecution lost points today,” my father says, switching from ouzo to coffee. He needs a clear head for court tomorrow and cuts himself off right after dinner.
“The D.A. should know better than to bore a jury with facts. Who cares if there were rope burns found on her wrists. She already admitted to having rough sex with him in the past.”
Uncle Dimitri laughs, digging into his pocket for another toothpick to contend with the craving for an after meal smoke.
“I can’t read that little fucker in the back.”
My father crosses his arms across his belly that’s getting bigger and bigger every year without my mother.
“We’ve got an ace in the hole with that poutsaki.”
Uncle Dimitri nods and it’s as if I’ve missed something.
“That reminds me, Paula. We need you at closing arguments on Friday.”
“Why me?” I ask my father.
“Moral support,” he explains. “Besides, you’ve never seen the Priamos brothers in action.”
Uncle Dimitri pulls out his wallet to cover the check.
“For putting up with us,” he says offering me up two C-notes, and I feel like I am being paid for services yet to be rendered.
The prosecutor is a woman in her fifties, seasoned at the job and talks freely, assuredly to the jury, without benefit of notes. “This isn’t a case of domestic abuse or even experimental sex as the defense would like to lead you to believe. What happened to the victim in this case is sadistic and cruel.”
In the box the jurors watch her intently and an Asian woman in the front is writing something down. At about this time my father, who sits at the defendant’s table with his arms folded at his chest, drops his head, nodding off.
The judge notices. He frowns, but says nothing. If he does, if he reprimands my father it will only draw attention to what my father wants the jury to see—the prosecution’s closing argument is boring him to sleep.
And if the jurors aren’t catching my father catching some Z’s, then there’s Uncle Dimitri to look at, who is up out of his chair and is motioning for me to meet him at the waist length gate that separates the players from the spectators.
“Paula,” he says. He’s close enough for me to know he’s drunk entirely too much coffee today. “I need you to go downstairs to the lobby and buy me some spearmint gum.”
Gum? He’s just gotten up in the middle of the prosecution’s closing argument, the prime time for him to throw her off rhythm with random objections, to have me buy him gum? No. There’s another reason for this and that’s when I see “the little fucker in the back,” the guy with the neatly trimmed hair, wearing a Cal Poly sweatshirt. He’s around my age. He’s checking me out in the bright white dress I bought with the money Uncle Dimitri gave me at dinner. He’s putting it together that I’m working somehow with my Uncle, that I’m for the defense. I’m for the weak kneed accountant who gets a sick sexual charge off electricity, who sits in an expensive suit, between his two intimidating Greek lawyers that will stop at nothing to win, not even if it means pimping out to the courtroom their own flesh and blood.
