“My business put food on the table and a roof over your head since the day you were born. And paid for that expensive law school you just had to go to. NYU wasn’t good enough for you. No, you had to go to fucking Harvard.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve ever done for me, dad,” I said. “And I will pay you back, every cent.”
He waved a thick hand at me. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, boy, I don’t want your fucking money.”
“Then what do you want, dad?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“I need you to come to work for me,” he said, pleading with his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a helpless look on my dad’s face. “I need you to help keep your old man out of jail.”
Over the last ten years I had managed to keep him out of jail and move him toward legitimate business interests. He was resistant at first because the business made so much fucking money. Incredible amounts of cash. The kind of money that was hard to resist, even by the most moral among us, including me.
I became his corporate and private legal counsel. I had insight into every aspect of his business, legal or not. I finally knew after all those years exactly what my dad did for a living. I learned every secret, business and otherwise.
We stayed up all night, finishing that bottle of whiskey and putting a good dent in another. He told me about every aspect of his business. And without me asking told me about every aspect of his personal life. He railed off a long list of women he’d slept with (other than my mother), how each relationship started and ended, how much it had cost him to get the scorned ones off his back, and most interestingly, how he had been having an affair with his secretary, Boozie, since before I was born.
Boozie Hamilton’s real name was Betty Anne Hamilton. Dad gave her the nickname Boozie because, he said, that was how she made him feel. Boozie. I asked him what the fuck that meant.
“You know, boozie, like drunk,” he said, giving me a look that clearly said it was a dumb question. “When I’m around her, she just makes me feel good, like I gotta slothful of booze.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. At that moment in time, ten years ago, dad was fifty-eight and Boozie was older, probably already close to sixty. She was probably 5’2 or so, a little dumpy and thick around the middle, with makeup that she applied with a trowel and a beehive haircut that she had sculpted twice a month at a salon downtown. I could imagine what she must have looked like naked, but I was pretty sure when dad looked at her he saw the thin redhead he had started banging a decade before my birth.
I’d seen pictures of Boozie back in the day. She was a showgirl at a club downtown. My dad was immediately taken with her and her with him. The only problem was, Boozie was not the type of girl a good Catholic Irish boy took home to mother. So, he set her up in an apartment and fucked her on the side and made her his private secretary so he could keep her close. I would imagine in her day Boozie could have had her pick of men. Patsy O’Connor was not the kind of man to share a mistress, so he wanted Boozie close enough to watch. And to fuck any time the urge hit.
And now Boozie was sick and leaving and dad’s heart was breaking. Forget that the feds still sniffed around the business-like hounds on a blood trail. The old man wasn’t worried about that. All he could focus on was Boozie leaving and the giant whole it was going to leave in his life.
I wasn’t overly concerned about Boozie retiring. To the contrary, I couldn’t stand her and looked forward to the day when I came into the office without doing so under her glaring gaze. I think Boozie saw my mother when she looked at me, and she blamed my mom for being the sole reason she had never been made Mrs. Patsy O’Connor.
Boozie was set to leave on Friday. Today was Monday. My dad was walking around like a lovesick pup about to lose his litter mate. Boozie was her usual self; sitting at the desk filing her nails or touching up her makeup. She was wearing a bad wig to cover up her balding head, courtesy of the chemo that dad was paying for. She was a lousy receptionist and not a very nice person, but according to dad, in her day, she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch with her lips. Just the thought makes my skin crawl.
I was hungover, as usual. I had fallen into the habit of spending every night at The White Rabbit until two or three in the morning and it was catching up to me. Like my dad’s resistance to abandoning those business dealings that put millions in his pockets, I was having a hard time resisting the lure of booze, pot, pills, and pussy that The Rabbit offered.
This was not where I thought I would be ten years out of law school, but I was sleeping in a bed of my own making. Or at least, fucking there.
I filled my coffee cup and carried it to my desk. I tried to ignore the heavy odor of mold and mildew that perpetually hung in the air inside the ancient warehouse. Sometimes it irked me, knowing that I could be working in a big law firm downtown with a plush office in a high-rise building. Instead, O’Connor Import & Export was housed in an old warehouse in the waterfront district that my dad had owned forever.
The warehouse was always stacked to the ceiling with pallets of goods that had been shipped in from China and Korea, or pallets waiting got be loaded onto a ship bound for the Orient.
I had gone out of my way to legitimize the business and the fact that there was barely room to walk down the aisles was proof that you could build a multimillion dollar operation without crossing the line.
Still, the old man hung refused to entirely shut down his old operation. I knew he still had his hand in things that I didn’t know about, but he denied it to my face. I guess it was hard for him to let go of the past, even if it meant risking twenty years in the state pen.
I had insulated myself pretty well from that side of his operation, so even if the feds busted down the door, I had little chance of getting convicted of anything more than protecting my old man, which I could probably argue my way out of.
The offices were on the second-floor that ran the length of the front of the warehouse. My dad had a large office with Boozie occupying a desk just outside his door in a small lobby area. My office was half the size of dad’s, most of it taken up with locked file cabinets containing the legitimized documents of the business’ thirty-year history. The other documents, the ones the feds would have loved to have gotten their hands on, were locked away in a vault in another building in another part of town. The feds would never find those documents and the day my dad died, the documents and the building they were in would mysteriously burn to the ground, with no record of ownership that could be traced back to the O’Connor family.
Along with the offices, there was a small kitchen, a single bathroom and shower, and a storage closet that held nothing more than office supplies.
There was a conference room where The Three Stooges hung out. The Three Stooges were two stick-thin Irishmen named Danny and Doug O’Malley, and a fat Italian who always smelled like garlic named Freddy Manicotti.
The Stooges had been friends of dad’s since grade school. Back in the day they were his muscle, his collectors, his enforcers. All that shit stopped when I came onboard. No more broken legs, no more extorting protection money, no more loan sharking.
I had wanted to fire The Stooges but dad wouldn’t hear of it. They were all old and fat, he said. Who was gonna hire them to do an honest day’s work? So, they sat in the conference room all day, drinking coffee and eating bear claws, collecting paychecks for doing nothing more than being dad’s old pals.
There is no more loyal a soul on earth than my dad, at least until you cross him or piss him off.
I knew the feds could raid the warehouse at any time, so I made damn sure there was nothing on the premises that could get us in trouble. Every pallet and every storage container held legal goods. The illegal goods were stored somewhere else and I didn’t have a clue where that was. That was dad’s bucket of shit to deal with, not mine.
“You find a replacement for Boozie yet?” dad asked, leaning in my doorway with a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. Back in the day, there was no one