Mean Justice (5 page)

Not long after that conversation, Sandy left her job at the clothing store and Pat stopped seeing her waiting for buses. The next thing he heard, Patrick Paola—nearly thirty years Sandy’s senior—had left the wife he so jealously cared for and had begun courting the twenty-six-year-old sales clerk from Manhattan. They married a short time later, in 1961. Sandy told friends of how she tried to resist Paola’s advances, fretting that everyone would think that she was some kind of gold digger interested only in Old Man Paola’s money. But while Sandy tended to be intensely concerned about what others thought of her, proud and acutely conscious of what she considered to be her lofty station in life, her new husband cared little about what people thought of him. He was, according to one contemporary, a fast-talking deal maker with huge ambitions and a modestly proportioned conscience. “That’s okay, honey,” he had told Sandy with a laugh when she mentioned her fears about being seen as a gold digger. “Tell them, hell, yes, you’re after the money. That’ll shut them up.” From that moment on, this anecdote became her lifelong foil—she would tell it as a kind of preamble to describing her years with Pat Paola, just in case someone really did think she was a fortune hunter.

Pat Dunn lost touch with Sandy after her marriage to Patrick Paola, though he would occasionally hear reports from his mother-in-law about the courtship and marriage, and how Mr. Paola had begun doing everything for Sandy just as he had for his first wife, right down to selecting her shoes and underwear. Pat’s in-laws knew the Paolas—in fact, Pat and Nancy Dunn held their wedding reception at his restaurant, gratis. But the Dunn family did not move in the same circles as the Paolas, who went about building a number of Bakersfield landmarks, from
housing developments to bowling alleys to shopping malls, and accumulating several million dollars in cash and real estate in the process.

Twenty-five years passed without them crossing paths again, except for one time when Pat helped his father-in-law—then a Paola employee—measure the square footage of the Paolas’ home for an appraisal. In those twenty-five years, Pat and Nancy Dunn raised three children, Patrick Jr., Danny and Jennifer. Pat taught elementary school and junior high math classes in the Bakersfield school system, later becoming a counselor, then taking a job as principal for a tiny school district at the windswept top of the Grapevine Pass, in a historic community called Tejon Ranch. He eventually left that position on an early retirement in 1981 after taking the losing side in a heated political battle with the school board over the size of the faculty at the district’s two schools.

Seizing on California’s sky-high real estate market at the time—and the record number of defaults that the high prices were causing—Pat entered the mortgage-foreclosure business the following year. He cleaned, repaired and boarded homes that had been repossessed—sometimes, he did the evicting and repossessing, too—so that the properties could be resold by the banks or federal housing agencies that held the notes on them. The homes of the dispossessed were rarely left in pristine condition, and Pat soon had more offers for work than he could handle. His company quickly grew from two trucks and crews into nine and handled business throughout the broad valleys and boom towns of Central California. It was a dirty, sad business, and Pat took pity on some of the people whose houses he seized, particularly the wives
and mothers who had been abandoned and left holding a bad mortgage and a mailbox full of bills. He would help them pack up, take their possessions to storage and drive them wherever they needed to go—the one part of this thankless work Pat enjoyed. “It takes some of the sting out,” he’d say when a less charitable colleague would ask him why he bothered. Of course, not every soon-to-be-homeless person was so easily mollified, and some were unwilling to simply hand over their house keys to this bluff, big man with his sheaf of legal papers. But when trouble arose, Pat’s standing instruction to his crews was to avoid any altercation and simply call the police. “You can always depend on the man in blue,” Pat would preach. “He’s on our side.”

Pat also worked on the side with the city and county fire departments, clearing overgrown lots that had become fire hazards. Altogether, this sort of slapdash work on houses and empty lots proved to be quite a lucrative business, and Pat began making more money than he had ever before known. The
Bakersfield Californian
even profiled him in an article that depicted him and his foreclosure work admiringly, even quoting his philosophical musings on why so many homeowners ran afoul of their mortgages: “Demon rum and failed marriages,” he said sagely.

His observations, however facile, were bitterly applicable to his own life.

Pat’s marriage to Nancy had deteriorated over the years as his drinking increased. His decline had started during his flap with the school board, a career change that he claimed to take in stride, never admitting even to himself that his abrupt departure from education left him disappointed and depressed. As his foreclosure business
expanded, Pat let his crews do the field work while he conducted most of his business from home—making it easier to start drinking earlier and earlier in the day. His consumption became prodigious; he could gulp down a six-pack in one sitting with little effort. This reliance on booze only intensified when two of his three children began having problems of their own.

His oldest, Patrick Jr., had always been an easy kid, a quiet and respectful young man who effortlessly earned A’s in school and gained admission to Stanford University. Jennifer and Danny, however, were quite the opposite, providing continual sources of heartbreak for the family. Jennifer not only became an unwed teenaged mother, but she lost her infant son, Jordan, to crib death. Despite his anger at Jennifer over the pregnancy, Pat had loved his little grandson dearly, and the baby’s death marked the only occasion Jennifer ever saw her father cry—until Sandy disappeared.

Danny, the middle child, was another matter. As a teenager and young adult, he had constant scrapes with the law—drug problems, thievery—and he had a quick temper. Fed up, Pat finally ordered Danny out of the house, and they had a fistfight that night—the only time that Nancy and the two other children say they can remember him striking anyone, no matter how much he had to drink. Pat and Danny never spoke again after that night. “I have only one son now,” he would later tell Jennifer. Danny, it seemed, remained furious at his father, accusing him of all sorts of abusive behavior.

By the mid-eighties, whenever Pat Dunn was at home, he had a can of Coors glued to his right hand, or a tall whiskey and soda in front of him. In the Dunn household, there was a standing, if unspoken, rule that no one
got in the car with Dad after three o’clock in the afternoon. Pat, however, stubbornly refused to acknowledge any problem and would grow irate at the mere suggestion that he drank too much, vociferously arguing that he never missed work or failed to provide for his family—all true, if beside the point. Pat’s model of manly virtue was drawn strictly from the Hollywood idols of his youth—the silent stoicism of Wayne, Cooper, Bogart. A man who provides for his family, who makes a home, who puts meals on the table, who builds a better life for his kids than the one he enjoyed by definition shows he loves his family. You didn’t actually have to say it aloud—your daily life said it all, Pat believed. By those standards, Pat thought his drinking irrelevant, and he couldn’t see that, to his family, he checked out every time he emptied a bottle. He really did love his family, deeply, but he didn’t see the need—and, in any case, couldn’t find it in himself—to actually utter those three words,
I love you,
unaware of just how much they would have meant to his wife and children. Speaking of such things was far more difficult for Pat than taking a heavy sledgehammer to a ruined house—or, for that matter, showing kindness to an evicted stranger.

Pat could be a warm and witty companion, and his family and friends knew him to be a well-meaning man, but he also seemed arrogant at times, particularly when he “had a few,” the family’s term for heavy drinking. Then he became something of a know-it-all, sitting back in his chair and dispensing lofty opinions and advice, usually preceded by the words, “When I was a principal . . .” The way he said it at times, he might as well have been a member of the Cabinet, and it became clear, then, just how much he missed his former career. In time, Pat’s drinking
left him with few close friends and a world that extended beyond his armchair with increasing rarity. Always a big man, he grew overweight and sedentary, his beer belly hanging low over his waistline, the slightest exertion leaving him breathless.

Predictably, Pat’s drinking gradually tore the family apart.
⁴
As the kids neared and reached adulthood, Nancy professed a desire to go back to college, to take up hobbies, to widen her horizons. Pat, meanwhile, wanted to sit home and drink, maybe shoot the occasional game of pool. He never wanted to go out; the last movie he left the house for was
The Guns of Navarone.
Twenty-five years together and Nancy, who had always been the glue of the family, the one who planned the events and forged the friendships, increasingly felt like a stranger to her husband. It’s not that she stopped loving him—there was just something about Pat, she would insist, that shone through even in his darkest moments, something kind and good—but it was no longer enough. In a decision that was a long time coming, but which still seemed to take Pat by surprise, Nancy filed for divorce in 1985. She moved out of the house, taking with her Jennifer, the only one of the couple’s children still living at home.

Without really thinking about it, Pat gave everything but his business to Nancy and wished her well. He harbored no ill will toward her, no bitterness, though he was bewildered and hurt and wished she would change her mind. Yet he couldn’t find the words to ask her to stay. He thought them, heard them in his head, but just couldn’t make them come out. He didn’t know how. He rented an apartment and lived alone.

A year or so later, his foreclosure business still thriving (even as the California real estate market was crashing),
the fire department called and told him about some acreage in East Bakersfield choked with weeds and trash. The landowner being cited for the violation was a difficult middle-aged widow who had been totally uncooperative, distrustful of all the contractors the fire department suggested, yet unwilling to do the work herself. “How about you give her a try?” Pat was asked.

“Sure,” he said. “What’s the lady’s name?”

“Paola,” the fire official told him. “Alexandra Paola.”

3

T
HAT SAME AFTERNOON
, P
AT WENT TO THE
P
AOLA
Development Company office at the College Center mall in East Bakersfield. The sixties-era strip mall had begun to look a bit ragged by then, he noticed, with several vacant storefronts and an air more gritty than prosperous. Pat Paola’s big dreams hadn’t quite panned out: Decades earlier, he had snapped up property all over East Bakersfield, betting heavily that development in the city would move in his direction and make his land worth far more than what he paid for it. Instead, most of the upscale shopping and higher-end neighborhoods went the opposite way, to the northwest, and many of the Paola properties remained vacant after twenty years, his visions for that part of town unrealized and now in the hands of his widow.

The College Center had aged poorly in the process. The proprietor’s office was dingy and dark, with battered metal desks and stained carpeting on the floor. The surroundings shocked Pat. An older man sat playing solitaire at a scarred table stacked high with old papers. He ignored Pat, flicking cards and frowning at his hand, not bothering to respond to Pat’s greeting. And then Alexandra Paola stood up from behind another desk. She looked radiant in a blue sundress with lace around the
collar, her short hair silver now. Pat hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years, but he thought she looked more lovely than he remembered, the only note of brightness in that shabby little office. Whenever he told the story of their meeting that day, he would always remember thinking Sandy didn’t look like she belonged there. The place and the woman simply did not fit. The dismal office’s gray pallor could not touch her.

Alexandra immediately remembered Pat from those long-ago rides home from the dress shop, and they spent nearly an hour catching up, first in the office while the old man continued playing solitaire with a sour look on his face, then while driving out to see the acreage that the fire department wanted cleared. Pat Paola, Sandy explained quietly, had been sick since 1975, first with heart disease, then cancer, and finally senility. Sandy had taken care of him throughout, finally having to dress and feed the man who had once done everything for her. At the end of his life, he would either sit in his easy chair, recognizing no one, or he would be seized by sudden bursts of energy that saw him stripping his clothes off and running outside, cackling madly, then telling neighbors his wife had locked him outside with no clothes. To Pat’s surprise, Sandy described these incidents with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “You must miss him a lot,” Pat said, and Sandy nodded silently.