My Darling Husband(72)
“Oh yeah.” I stare at the masked man and the fuzzy edges of his face, and suddenly all the puzzle pieces fall into place. Storming my house, holding my family hostage, clocking my wife in the face. “You better believe I know who this asshole is.”
I also know what today is about—and it’s not money.
This isn’t about money at all.
T H E I N T E R V I E W
Juanita: What is your relationship with Maxim Petrakis?
Cam: Who?
Juanita: Maxim Petrakis. He’s the owner of a number of strip clubs in town, a man who moonlights as a loan shark and criminal matchmaker. The Greek mob version of Match.com, though you won’t find that job description on his website, by the way. That’s just the word on the street. According to the police, his only transgression is speeding.
Cam: Never heard of him.
Juanita: There’s a picture of the two of you looking pretty chummy on the celebrity wall at Club at Chops. Slicked-back silver hair, impeccable dresser, big smoker.
Cam: Now that you mention it, I think I may have cooked for him a couple of times.
Juanita: But you’ve never borrowed money from him.
Cam: I’m pretty sure loan-sharking is illegal, Juanita.
Juanita: So that’s a no?
Cam: [smiles]
Juanita: Two people said they saw you jogging across the parking lot of his Cheshire Bridge club on August 6. One claims it was late afternoon, the other says it was more like dinnertime. That puts you there an hour, maybe more before you were supposed to deliver three-quarters of a million dollars to your Buckhead home.
Cam: We’ve already established I was desperate.
Juanita: Desperate enough to borrow three quarters of a million from a known loan shark?
Cam: Sure. I would have robbed a bank if I’d thought about it while they were still open.
Juanita: So you were there.
Cam: I was a lot of places. The whole afternoon is a blur.
Juanita: [sighing] Did you or did you not go to Maxim Petrakis’s strip club on the afternoon of August 6 and ask him for a loan?
Cam: I can promise you this, I don’t owe Maxim Petrakis a penny.
J A D E
6:36 p.m.
The Android chirps from somewhere deep in the man’s pocket, and my frustration feels limitless. An interruption, and right when we were getting somewhere. I bear down on the ground below my feet and concentrate on the two words he just used: attorney fees. I latch on to them like a pit bull.
“So you and Cam were litigating something—what?”
My voice wobbles with a hammer throbbing in my cheek, with fear of the force of his backhand. I glance at Beatrix, watching silently from her recliner next to mine, her hands sticking out from the duct-tape bonds in tight, hard fists.
The man watches me from the other side of the coffee table.
“You’d think I would have learned. After everything that I’d heard from his former chefs and partners, I should have known Cam would pull some kind of dirty tricks. I should have known he’d find the biggest shark in town and sic him on my lawyer. He crushed us, found somebody who could win on might rather than merit.” The stupid phone chirps again, and he reaches down to unbutton the flap on his cargo pants, his eyes flashing. “And it wasn’t just me he took down. He took down my whole family.”
My mind flips through what I can remember of Cam’s legal issues. The problem is there have been so many. Beyond the basic hazards in serving the public—falls, broken glass, burns and cuts and food poisoning—there are a million things that can go wrong. Labor laws, noncompetes, immigration issues, liquor licensing, noise and traffic. Most of them frivolous enough he doesn’t bother to share, or if he does, it’s only to vent and complain. I hear him out, but I rarely remember the specifics.
“Did you go to trial?” I ask, because those are the only disputes I know something about, and miraculously, there have been only two. The first was ages ago, a leasing dispute when Cam opened his second shop, which became the impetus for his strategy of owning the real estate for his restaurants whenever possible.
The other was almost two years ago. A location on the outskirts of Atlanta that fell through at the last minute, a disgruntled almost-partner Cam dismissed as sour grapes. He sued, Cam won. The end.
Or so we thought.
“Hell yes, we went to trial. There is something seriously wrong with the legal system in this country when the only way to win is by having the deepest pockets. My attorney went up against a whole team of Cam’s hotshots, who buried her in paperwork and nonsense. They froze my bank accounts, put a lien on my house and intimidated my family with an armed private investigator who followed us all over town. They played every dirty trick in the book, and it worked. I’d lost before I even stepped foot in the courtroom.”
The phone rings again, and he pulls it from his pocket, but he doesn’t look. Not yet.
I keep his attention on me. “So that’s why us. That’s why this house.”
This—all of this—it’s about Cam. About resentment and animosity. The kids and me, we’re just pawns.
The phone rings for a fourth time but my questions have him too riled up. He doesn’t so much as glance down at the screen.
“Do you know what happens when your bank account is frozen? You can’t pay your bills, that’s what. You learn real quick how to space them out, to borrow money from the mortgage in order to pay the electric bill, until your bank tries to take back the house, so you swipe the phone money to pay the mortgage. My point is, that shit catches up with you eventually. They come after you then. Your house, your cars, your assets. They take everything, and they don’t stop until the only thing you’ve got left to your name is the clothes on your back and a credit score that’ll get you laughed out of every bank. They even took my daughter’s medical vest. They took her oxygen tank!”