Page 47 of The Picasso Heist

“HI, DADDY.”

“Hi, sweetheart.”

Technically, I’m not supposed to hug my father in the visiting room, but technically, I stopped giving a crap about that prison rule a few years ago. About six months after that, the guards finally gave up and stopped scolding me.

“How do you feel?” I ask as we sit down. My father creaks louder than our old metal foldout chairs. He’s only fifty-eight.

“Pretty good,” he says, looking away for a moment.

When I was little, maybe six or seven, my father began teaching me about tells, the things people told you without saying a word.

Body language speaks volumes, he often said, you just have to pay attention.

For example, people who have a hard time maintaining eye contact are probably not leveling with you.

My father isn’t feeling “pretty good.” I’d know that even if he hadn’t looked away when he answered.

Still, I don’t call him on it. He doesn’t want to talk about how he’s feeling or how he needs better care than what he’s getting from the poor excuse for a medical staff here.

His heart attack was six months ago; he needs angioplasty and a stent and possibly a bypass, but the attending cardiologist is content to “monitor” the blockage in his right coronary artery and put him on blood thinners.

Meanwhile, my father is getting weaker and weaker.

What the prison is really monitoring is their bottom line.

Heart procedures are expensive, and a cost-benefit analysis never favors the prisoner.

I’ve adapted to my father being here. The prison part, I mean.

I’ve gotten used to the long drive north from the city and the stench of this place, to waiting in line for the metal detectors, then waiting in more lines to see him.

The regimen has become habit, and the habit has become numbing, so much so that I almost don’t feel the crushing sense of loneliness and regret that fills every corner here.

But what I’ve never made peace with is how a place designed to let nothing and no one escape permeates every aspect of my own life.

Who I was, who I was embarrassed to be—it all changed as fast and loud as the crack of a judge’s gavel.

I was the daughter of none other than Conrad Greer, the man convicted of perpetrating a massive art scam, among various other crimes.

Money laundering, wire fraud. And the hits just kept on coming.

“Greedy Greer!” read the headline in the Post when he was arrested. Then, when he was convicted: “Guilty Greer!”

Was he in fact guilty? Yes.

And no.

It wasn’t his scam, and he was taken advantage of by someone whom he had trusted.

There came a point, however, when my father figured out what was happening and had the opportunity to put a stop to it.

He would’ve been destroyed as an art dealer, his reputation ruined, but he almost assuredly would’ve suffered the consequences as a free man.

In what should have been a moment of clarity for him, when he had the chance to clear his conscience, he allowed his fear and pride to trample his sense of right and wrong.

Instead of taking action, he froze. Then he rationalized, thinking if he just went along with the scam and saw it through to its end, he could live with the guilt.

Instead, he now lives in a federal correctional institution.

The prosecution portrayed him as the living example of the rich just trying to get richer with no regard for the rules.

If I were them, I’d have made the same claim.

But in reality, my father was a man who desperately didn’t want to be an embarrassment to his family.

It was his worst fear, a nightmare in his mind, and the irony is inescapable.

In his efforts to protect us, my father made the nightmare come true.

And when my mother couldn’t handle the Greer family’s epic fall from grace, she added pills to her drinking regimen. Then, one night, she mixed a deadly concoction of both and managed to make the nightmare even worse than any of us could’ve imagined. She went to sleep and never woke up.

I still remember shaking her that morning, waiting and waiting for her eyes to open. Her skin felt so cold.

Maybe that’s the reason for what I’m doing: to get this nightmare to end once and for all.

The hour passes. Even when I’m with him, I miss him. “I’ll see you next week, Daddy.”

I hug my father goodbye and leave the prison, walking through the same corridor and out the same door as I always do. Only this time, when I get in my car, I do something I haven’t done for years.

I cry.