The DUI Guy

By W.E Patterson

Tormented defense attorney Norman Chalmers has become a virtual recluse in his suburban Chicago home. With his legal practice in shambles and his family gone, he is living by himself, subsisting on food prepared by his housekeeper and quarts of bourbon delivered from a neighborhood liquor store. Chalmers’ despair has pushed him to his mental limit, driving him to depths from which he might never return - until a friend from his past and his young girlfriend appear on his doorstep. A sudden desire to help his old pal helps lead Chalmers out of the house for the first time in months, an outing that results in a booze-fueled night on the town, that may or may not culminate in the attorney’s redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.E Patterson
• Release date: Apr 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476086699

W.E Patterson

I was born in Winterset, Iowa and have since lived in several places, all of them on the east coast of the United States, including the Washington D.C area, New Jersey, Rochester, New York, Long Island, and since 1999, South Florida. I am a technical writer by profession with over 30 years experience. I currently work for a very large international software company (one which must remain nameless here). While I enjoy researching and writing technical documentation, it is not enough to satisfy my desire to create. Several years ago I began to 'branch out' into fictional works, and even poetry. I live with my wife and my golden retriever, Bailey, in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

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THE DUI GUY

By

W.E. Patterson

SMASHWORDS EDITION

****

PUBLISHED BY:

W.E. Patterson on Smashwords

The DUI Guy

Copyright © 2012 by W.E. Patterson

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events or situations is coincidental.

THE DUI GUY

CHAPTER 1

I can’t recall when I decided to become an attorney, but it wasn’t a childhood dream. As the only child of a third generation baker, it was generally understood that I would follow in my father’s flour stained footsteps as the eventual proprietor of the Chalmers Bakery in downtown Peoria, Illinois. Such a future might have awaited me if my father’s heart hadn’t stopped one morning as he was preparing to remove a tray of freshly baked cinnamon buns from the bakery oven. He was three days short of his forty- fifth birthday, and I, being sixteen at the time, was preparing to enter my final year of high school, on course to complete my academic career with a record that was lackluster to say the best.

Reflecting on these events, I think it a curious fact that I might be baking rolls, and frosting cakes today had my father been the pious, hard working, tee totaling Presbyterian that he pretended to be in public. Instead, however, he was a philanderer, a closet drinker and a gambler with an affinity for horse races, all facts that did not surface until after his death. At that time, my mother discovered that the family business was in arrears, and their life savings drained.

Being a lady with few marketable skills and with the Chalmers Bakery operating heavily in the red, my mother opted for the only path open to her, which was to sell the business, and to move us both to Chicago to live with her older sister Margaret. There, she would find suitable employment and I would complete my final year of high school, a year that I had already decided would to be my final year of formal education. After graduation, I was determined to see what lay past Peoria, and Chicago, and all of Illinois, and although I had no plans for financing my travels, I was certain that as soon as I could put my school days behind me, everything else would fall into place. So it is with certainty that I can say, that I had no plans then of ever practicing law.

At that time in my life, lawyers fell into one of two categories. The first were those lawyers like Gordon Kidwell, a stogy old attorney who combed his long grey hair over his balding head and wore dark colored suits and reeked of whiskey and cigarettes. He came to our house a couple of times after my father’s death, ostensibly to drop off paper work for my mother to sign. When I was older, I would find that his motives were less about ensuring the timely submittal of legal papers, and more about seducing my grieving mother. After she repeatedly rejected his advances, finally with a slap across the face, he slunk away leaving us to flounder in our financial disarray, and we never heard from him again.

A second category of lawyers was of the clever television and movie variety. These lawyers usually lived in Southern California, and drove glitzy cars and drank martinis. They had blonde secretaries and solved capital crimes at the last minute, rescuing their clients from the electric chair by petitioning a pajama clad Governor at midnight for a stay, based on an overlooked piece of evidence that proved their client’s innocence. At least that is how I saw the legal profession at that age.

I passed my final year of high school friendless and alone in a strange city. I recall no more than a half dozen casual conversations with any of my classmates during my entire senior year. In such a cold environment, it is quite remarkable that my grades suddenly improved. Perhaps I was more focused upon my studies as they afforded me a place to hide from the pain caused by my father’s death, or perhaps since I hadn’t a friend in the world, I had nothing better to do than to spend endless hours in the library studying trigonometry and biology. In either event, by graduation, I was not only earning first honors, but I had a plan for my life.

The week after I received my diploma, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. My mother was pleased with my decision, thinking it a prudent way for me to receive an education and to see the world. It was peacetime then, and the military was a safe enough place to be. The war in Vietnam had long since ended, and wars to come had not yet begun. The primary threat came from over the North Pole, from missiles that might be fired from ten thousand miles distant, sent to vaporize cities and kill all of mankind in a sudden nuclear holocaust that people referred to as the ‘bolt from the blue’.

It is unfortunate that my Air Force years did not take me to the exotic locales that I longed to visit. After my basic training in Texas, I moved on to the California desert, and then the high wind swept plains of the Dakotas. It was not exactly what I had in mind when I had joined, but two good things grew from my days of military service. The first was that