Chapter 5

The entire situation ought to have been resolved quickly, simply and relatively painlessly. But, since we're talking about my father, security and audacity ruled instead. As usual! I wouldn't normally argue or disagree, it had made him one of the richest corporate lawyers in New York City, where even the surgically placed rumor of a phone-call from his firm could raise or drop your stock value 25% percent overnight.

It's good to be the king - but there is sometimes the drawback of whom can the king really trust. In my father's case that was no one until after I graduated from Yale Law School and then the South Texas College of Law by age 24.

Just daddy's little girl following in his very large footsteps? Ha! I was already more like daddy's little pit bull. Within the first five years after I joined his law firm I was a perfect 20-0 in the courtroom and made a Full Partner without even a hint of protest and since his severe illness, I have hopped right into the Managing Directorship chair running the firm smoothly ever since.

Smart? Darn tooting! It also helped that I inherited my eidetic memory from my mother who had never forgotten a single thing ever, in her entire life. This let me race through a succession of elite and very private schools at an unusually early age. I was 15 when I graduated from my Prep School, an ultra-snobby private academy that catered only to New England's finest families. I think the bribe just to be able to submit an application for admission was nearly one million dollars.

My mother had been a former Miss Connecticut and fifth runner up in a Miss America pageant. Her talent act was to roll out a full shelf of encyclopedias, almanacs and other reference books and have each of the judges randomly select a book and a topic for her to recite back to them, repeating back perfectly what each book stated. She never missed a single word. She told me just before her death that she had began to consider her gift as more like a curse than a blessing, and now even as I hit the age of thirty I was starting to agree with her.

"There are many things in life that are meant and supposed to be forgotten." She told me from her hospital bed. "Careless words said in anger especially. If you can never forget, it makes even the smallest slights nearly impossible to forgive."

She was beautiful and more than a little odd when she met my father at a party in New York. He was handsome, brilliant and more than a bit odd himself. Together, they were a perfect match. Their marriage was constantly rocky but it somehow held together. Father never even considered remarrying after her death when I was about six. She was "absolutely irreplaceable", he said ... and he meant it.

I was already 'unusually pretty' even from a young age but my looks never won me any friends in school ... In fact I was resented as being altogether the prettiest, smartest and youngest girl of my classes and was shunned accordingly. Needless to say, I was never invited to any of the hen parties or late night discussions with the older girls where the 'important' lessons of school were learned, namely how to interact with your peers and learn the subtle lessons of bargaining and give and take. I missed most of the other slightly less important lessons that I should have learned there as well, how to smuggle in and smoke cigarettes and liquor without getting caught, how to apply makeup, how to fall in love with a boy and sneak out of the grounds at 1AM to meet him in his car and give him the perfect blow or hand-job that would leave him begging for more.

My mother would have been able to correct many or all of these deficits. I can remember her telling me once, when I was just a child, that she had been quite a 'woman of the world' in her day. My father did his best but without her as his anchor in life, he was soon quite morally adrift. He had made his reputation as one of the finest defenders of the underdog and within a few short years had turned it around 180 degrees and was now considered one of the lowest and meanest corporate raider sharks in an already very murky and bloody ocean. Once he had lived for justice — now he only lived for the kill.

We had never hurt for money. Even as a girl we had a big weekend house in Connecticut where I had my pony but soon money became his only measurement for success and he constantly sought even richer and fatter deals. Money is a decent way of keeping score but it's not very warm to snuggle up to on a cold night and all the money in the world won't replace your cancerous lung or restore your health after three heart attacks and a massive major stroke.

The first two heart attacks didn't even slow him down but a third massive one and the discovery of severe lung cancer left him either bedridden or confined to a wheelchair for good. He spent the next year enduring four operations, experimental chemo and other drug treatments for the cancer that just managed to stabilize his health enough that he could be released to a hospital bed at home. They couldn't cut out or kill all of the cancer but it had stopped spreading for now and seemed to be manageable. Managing corporate takeovers was now quite out of the question but that duty now fell to me and I found I had an aptitude for it.

In the words of an old Alan Sherman comedy song my father used to love,

"Now I have a big office at the end of the hall,

With very fancy carpeting from wall to wall.

I keep my mouth open and I keep my ears shut,

And I've got a little palace in Connecticut.

So I thank old Yale and I thank the Lord,

And I also thank my father who was Chairman of the Board!"

So, I had the big corner office with all of the trimmings and the fancy 'weekend' homes that I never managed to find time to ever visit and more money in my own personal bank accounts than I could ever spend. I was a 'success', right?

I had indeed won the genetic super-lottery. I had the beauty of a professional supermodel with the brains to be one of the very top lawyers in this ultra-competitive city but every night I slept alone in my huge bed surrounded only by law books for bedtime reading and my cats. I thought I had 'friends' but their lives were as screwed up and meaningless as mine was and our conversations utterly vapid. The cheapest article of clothing in my huge walk-in closet was still designer made and I had a choice of haute couture outfits for any formal occasion. There was a reserved seat with my name on it at every New York City fashion house show.

It still didn't help; I might have looked like a million dollars but inside I felt like a rusty war era steel nickel. I didn't even have a boyfriend. Heck, I couldn't even find a date that I could tolerate being with for a second time. My looks and fortune had put me on every Top 10 "Most Eligible" list and there was no shortage of men seeking to add me to their portfolio. I became very good at identifying the gold-diggers, mostly former frat boys looking for a rich heiress but I was less adept with handling men who had moderate fortunes of their own and might be willing to accept me as an equal partner in their lives. Mostly they were already banging their secretaries, or soon would be.

My sexual education had been a tad neglected. I graduated from Yale still a virgin and remained a technical virgin throughout both Law Schools. I might still be a virgin today if I hadn't drunk a bit too much at a wedding and had found the nerve to drag my paid escort back home with me. Yes you heard me right. I had to resort to having a paid gigolo take my virginity. I've done some embarrassing things in my life but that probably was my worst ever admission that my life was already screwed up nearly beyond repair. It didn't solve much — I still have to pay for an escort for my arm at most highbrow functions. If I show up alone too many times the word would get out and the rumor mill would start grinding and I'd much rather keep my privacy.

It was my father's own love of secrecy that got me into this entire mess in the first place. Now that he was getting slightly better, I found that I had inherited from him a lot more than his fortune and a job position. I now was in the position of starting to learn his darkest and most hidden secrets but they were revealed to me only in cryptic pieces and even those, gradually.

It started just after my father had been released home from being in the hospital for just over a year. His strength and energy, even to sit up let along to attempt to walk, was very limited and he tired extremely easily. He asked to be given some routine work to do but this was mostly forbidden by me. I suspect his longtime secretary gave him some simple stuff behind my back to keep him quiet and occupied. I worked 'okay' with her and she had no complaints about how I had managed things in his absence but her loyalty remained exclusively with him. During his long illness and convalescence, she had handled 99% of his personal affairs.

As I was about to find out, his own loyalty remained strictly with family and that remaining 1%, that no 'outsider' could ever be allowed to see, was now about to be entrusted permanently in my hands.

One rainy spring morning my father bade me to get him his key ring and then handed me two keys from it giving me these simple instructions: Take one key to a certain bank and open the safety box and bring him the contents. Then take the other key to a Post Office branch in New York City and collect up 'some personal mail' that he hadn't been able to get since his illness. This was quickly accomplished. The bank box contained a large and thick leather legal briefcase with a sturdy lock that I had no key for. The mail that had been saved for him mostly seemed to concern various County Tax notices, several of which obviously appeared to be of the 'Warning' and 'Final Notice' variety. As directed, I delivered all of these items to my father. I watched him open up the large leather case with another small key from his keychain and, after placing the mail into the case, he securely relocked it.

"Thanks, I'll attend to it all later." He said and had his secretary chain the case securely to the side of his hospital bed, locking it with yet another key. That night he had his major paralyzing stroke and it was over six months before he was well enough again to discuss any of the contents of this case with me.

He could speak now only very slowly and with great difficulty but his hands were mostly useless now and his handwriting was utterly indecipherable which made note writing pretty much impossible. It took several brief talks with him for me to fully understand my instructions.

I was given an old hand-written list of four addresses, all near Victoria, Texas that had been compiled some time before his illness. My father owned these properties but 'possibly' some of them were now past due and in arrears for payment of their annual County Property Tax. I was to go down to Texas and quietly check on the status of each of those properties and report back to him. If I could fix any of the past-due payments bringing them up to date, good. The first three properties were 'relatively less important' than the last one, which he insisted over and over was 'the most sensitive' and requiring careful tact.

With copies of the deeds and all of the other relevant paperwork for those four properties in hand, off I went to Texas. I was licensed to practice law in both Texas and New York (as well as 8 other states) but it was, in fact, at the insistence of my father that I had attended South Texas College of Law in the first place. I had wanted to either stay at Yale or go to Harvard Law School for my advanced degrees but my father convinced me that 'someday it would be important' and apparently now was the time.

I could already tell that something very unusual was up. I didn't know more than 10% of the facts but I'm sure my father was hiding something. From childhood conversations I had overheard between my parents, I knew my father had done something as a young man in south Texas that he was very ashamed of and that he had tried to wash away his guilt as a Marine during the World War but the 'blood stains lingered' apparently. My father might not be quite ready to tell me everything but at least now I was in the position to gather some more of the facts for myself.

Resolving the issue of the first three lesser properties was actually quite simple. I probably could have handled each of these transactions over the phone from the city. Two of the properties, the ones in Calhoun and Refugio Counties, were still considered only as 'Past Due' for their taxes and I was able to make swift and complete payment. No problems and the County clerks barely blinked an eye.

"Times are hard." We all agreed.

Both properties were small ranches that consisted of little more than a barn and some pasture land and were registered under names other than my father's. My father apparently had also made long term grazing right agreements with nearby owners that generated some trivial profits after taxes.

The next property, an old long abandoned gas station/garage inside the city of Victoria was slightly more complicated. It had gone to foreclosure a few months ago but the winning bidder for the property now had 'financing problems' and was now trying to back out of the deal or find another buyer. The buyer had wanted the property solely for the old vintage 1936 Packard Twelve Dietrich Victoria car that had been locked up inside the garage untouched since the 1940's and really had no interest at all in the actual physical real estate. I phoned home for instructions and they were emphatic: "Must keep the car!" He croaked repeatedly until he was sure I had understood him.

It took a little doing but frankly the buyer was currently stuck in a corner. He had no financing now, couldn't take possession of the car without it and his final extension for full payment was due in less than two weeks. In the end, I paid him to release his claim back to me and I wrote him a check for most his prior earnest money payment. It helped that a phone call to my usual private investigators quickly revealed that the would-be buyer also had a long-term mistress that his wife (who had all of the money in the family) would not at all be pleased to find out about.

After writing a check out to the County for settling the deed to the property (and a minor bribe to the head County Clerk and equally modest 'campaign donation' to the County Judge), the status quo was restored. I had made a note to myself to try and get a good look at my father's car to see what all of the fuss was about but I got badly distracted dealing with the final property in a little town further south near the coast called Lovett.

All of the indications were bad from the very start. The property had been two years overdue on taxes and had recently been sold at auction. The buyer had paid promptly in full. No problems. Done deal - Thank you Sir!

No hint of any irregularities, none of the usual payments under the table. It was all legal and done step-by-step by the book. No obvious loopholes. Worse, the Courthouse staff was all-supportive of the new buyer, 'a handsome young fellow' who was wanting to restore the property, a 1940's era diner and a 1950's era drive-in motel, to its original condition.