External Affairs — Book IV — Chapter 1
Back to Business
“He killed his own brother?” I said to Rob while sitting in The Oasis, or Teddy’s, over three-quarters of a century after the murder. The original Teddy is long gone, but this bar lives on. Rob is a lawyer who I met here about one month ago. We’ve come across each other here from time to time since then. It’s not entirely social though. I’m an accountant, so we’ve connected on LinkedIn and even met for lunch once in Stamford, where we both work, to see if there were any opportunities for us to do business together. Tonight however, business is the furthest thing from our minds. It’s a Friday night in late June and Rob has just finished telling me the story of Theodore, the original owner of the bar and how he was killed by his brother, Michael, who inherited both the bar and Theodore’s wealth as a result.
“That’s the legend anyway, but it does have some teeth to it. Theodore Weston was found lying against his wife’s tombstone, his clothes soaked in alcohol, a single bullet to the head and his hand still clutching the gun. The story told itself. It was no secret that he never got over his wife Millie’s death. Looked like a textbook grief stricken suicide.”
“How do you know it wasn’t that instead of his brother?” I asked.
“Oh, that was the official story at first, for years really. The fact that his brother was the sole heir to his fortune, coupled with the fact that Michael was known to be a pretty unsavory character around here, did raise more than a few suspicions.”
“And?”
“They could never pin anything on him. Couldn’t make it stick. Never found the gun. Never found the Will. The lawyer that supposedly drafted it left town unexpectedly after Teddy’s death, never to be heard from again.”
“It could all be a coincidence, right?” I said. “Suburban legend taking on a life of its own? Whatever happened to Michael?”
“Aha, that’s where it gets interesting,” said Rob motioning to the bartender. We had been working our way steadily through a pitcher of beer and were due for a refill.
The blonde haired, blue-eyed bartender of the evening came over. Her name was Madison, but Rob, who had a definite thing for her, called her Tangerine.
“Hey Baby,” she said in a slightly husky voice. “Another pitcher?”
“Oh, yes,” said Rob, who had arrived before me and already had a decent start.
Madison refilled the pitcher and returned it to us.
“Thank you my sweet Tangerine,” said Rob.
Madison smiled. “Are you going to play my song for me later?”
“Oh, you can count on it,” said Rob. Madison smiled again, ruffled Rob’s hair and moved down the bar to another customer. She was quite pretty.
Rob turned back to me. “Man, I love her.” He said it in a way that you might say, ‘She’s great’, or ‘She’s so cool,’ but after watching Rob interact with Madison on more than one occasion in this bar, I wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t mean the real thing. Rob is divorced, so I’ve wondered why he doesn’t just ask her out sometime, but I don’t know him well enough yet to ask.
I, on the other hand, am still married with three kids, and despite having an affair with another married woman, Kelly, have managed to stay that way, at least for now. In fact, things with Kelly and I have cooled somewhat since Memorial Day weekend. After spending the Friday night in a hotel, I then saw her later that weekend with a man I presumed to be her husband at a movie theater. For reasons I have not been able to fully understand, this bothered me. I fled the scene and ended up here at The Oasis where I met another woman, Naomi, who I proceeded pick up and go back to her place with, thereby cheating on my wife and mistress all in one shot.
I don’t know if Kelly saw me at the movie theater, heard about me and Naomi, or just felt that our fling had run its course, but whatever the reason, our relationship seems to have halted. We haven’t seen each other since then.
Rob finished filling my glass, then filled his. “So, you want to know what happened to Michael Weston.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, he got really, really rich. Spent money like it was about to be banned or something. Divorced his wife, left her with the kids, but still fathered two more children with two separate women. Turned this place into a rather seedy little den.”
“Really, how so?” I said.
“He still had a bunch of friends from his bootlegging days, so they all started hanging around here. This bar went from the place where everyone was supposed to feel comfortable to a place where if you said the wrong thing or looked the wrong way, you got the shit kicked out of you.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Michael used Teddy’s former office to run illegal gambling out of there. He had hookers too. They’d make arrangements in the back room and take clients up to the studio apartment. Michael made good use of that room too. He moved into the two bedroom, let the one bedroom out to one of his cronies and the two of them had some wild parties up there.”
“And nobody could stop him?”
“He was charged from time to time,” said Rob with a wave of his hand. “But he had so much money, he could hire the best lawyers, bribe officials. Word was he bribed most of the cops in town, so they left him alone for the most part. He was living large for more than ten years.”
“A decade of debauchery,” I said.
“And then some,” said Rob.
“What happened after that?”
“Well, his drinking eventually caught up with him. Liver cancer. It’s still no joke today, but back then it was death sentence. He tried lots of treatments, and did manage to hang on for three more years, but that’s what finally got him.”
Something didn’t make sense to me. “I still don’t get how it is assumed he killed his brother.”
“Patience, patience, I’m getting to that,” counseled Rob as he filled my glass once again. We each took a long drink and he continued.
“Okay, so it’s near the end for old Michael. He knows it’s over, he’s all hopped up on morphine, lying on his death bed and he starts asking for a priest. Says he wants to make his last confession.” He paused here waiting for me to say something or connect something that I really wasn’t getting, so all I managed to say was, “and…..”
“And they get him a priest and he confesses to everything.”
I shook my head and blinked. “He confesses to the murder?”
“The whole shebang,” said Rob. “The murder, the Will, everything.”
“That’s insane.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did they arrest him?” I asked. “I mean, I realize he’s dying, but they could still charge him. Murder is murder, right?”
Rob tilted his head and said, “Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean yes, they could have charged him if the priest actually told someone, and no they didn’t charge him, because the priest was the only person in the room and said nothing.”
I threw up my hands. “How could he say nothing?”
Rob shrugged and said almost with a laugh, “This scared the shit out of him. He was an old priest who spent his career listening to confessions of people taking the Lord’s name in vain, or some bored housewife having lewd thoughts when she sees her neighbor mowing the lawn without his shirt on. He’s not used to deathbed confessions from a murderer.”
I started to say something, but Rob went on.
“Plus, you have to understand, Michael is pretty well juiced with morphine at this point. That’s another sight the old priest was not used to seeing, so he doesn’t even know if he’s telling the truth or not.”
“So he hears this confession, tells Michael to say a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers and leaves?” I say in disbelief.
“Apparently,” said Rob. “Something like that anyway. Michael dies two days later, taking his secret to the grave. The old priest dies a few years after that and he never tells anyone.”
“Then how,” I start to say, but Rob cuts me off.
“He wrote it all down.”
“He — -What?”
“He kept a diary, a very detailed diary about the daily goings on at the church. When he died they went through his things and found the diary which recounted Michael’s confession. They also found details of a few other juicy confessions, mostly adultery, which caused more than its share of embarrassment for some of the local citizens. Some theft and embezzlement too, but the murder was the topper. Nobody had ever heard one of those confessions before.”
I sat back and exhaled. “So what happens after they find the diary?”
“As you can imagine, this all caused quite an uproar in the community,” said Rob. “There were all sorts of cries for justice, that all of Michael’s property should be taken away from him, sold and the proceeds donated to the community. Or it should all be put in trust the way Theodore wanted. But the reality was that nobody could do anything like that.”
“Why not?”
Rob shrugged. “At the end of the day, there really wasn’t much of a case. At this point, Michael had been dead over three years. All his property had passed to his kids. Theodore had been dead close to twenty. There was no actual evidence. No gun, no Will. All they had was the diary of a dead priest who says he listened to the confession of a dying, morphine soaked man. That’s not a lot to go on.”
“I guess not,” I said. “So that was it. Nothing more ever came of it?”
“Pretty much. It all just died down once people realized there was nothing they could do. It passed into legend I guess you could say. Some questioned whether it was even true. I believe it’s true. I’ve read as much as I could find about Michael Weston over the years. I’ve read that diary. You also hear stories about him that have been passed down from people who have lived in this town for generations. Everything I’ve heard about him convinces me that he was capable of something like that.”
Our pitcher of beer was gone, so I motioned to Madison for another. She came up to us and said, “Settling in boys? For a long summer’s night?”
“Could be,” said Rob. “I’m a free agent now. No need for me to be anywhere. I can’t speak for my partner in crime here,” he said motioning to me.
I gave a sort of half smile.
Madison said, referring to me, “Well, you never know what this one is going to do on any given night.”
I realized my actions in this place have not gone unnoticed these last several months. When Madison returned with the pitcher, I filled our glasses and said to Rob,
“Why do you care about this so much?”
Rob took a healthy gulp of beer and said, “Well, for one it’s a great story. And a story that I don’t think is over yet. All of Theodore’s original properties that Michael inherited and that were then passed to his kids have been sold off over the years. Sometimes to raise cash, sometimes to buy out relatives. There are quite a few stories about that drama, but I’ll save that for another time. The point is they are all gone. Except this place. This is the only property still held by that family, and that fat fuck who owns it now is running it into the ground.”
“He calls himself Teddy, but that’s not his real name. He just uses it for the connection to the original owner. Though he is related to him. He’s a descendant from Michael’s second son from his wife. Michael would be his grandfather. Theodore would be his great uncle. If you look at him, and you look at pictures of Theodore, there is a resemblance. But the similarities end there. The rest is all Michael. Drinks all the time. No head for business. He’s a fucking mess.”
“What I’m afraid is going to happen is that this place will go belly up, some stranger will buy it and change it completely or even gut it and turn it into something else. Like I said, it’s not just the bar, it’s the whole building. This is a nice piece of property. If it falls into the wrong hands, Poof, Teddy’s could be no more. That would be a crime.”
“All right,” I said, “but what can you do about it?”
“I want to take it away from him before someone else does?”
My eyes widened and I leaned forward. “Take it away? How do you propose to do that?”
“If I could find a copy of that Will. That would show what Theodore had originally intended. Maybe I could convince a judge that the property should never have been transferred in the first place. That it should have been put in trust for the community. If I can show that, plus Michael’s deathbed confession, and the fact that this place is in such bad financial shape, maybe it could be put in trust, run by a board of trustees and the profits used for charitable purposes as the original Teddy wanted. It’s long shot I know.”
“How can you find the Will?” I said. “I thought it was burned.”
“It was. At least that’s the story. But what if there was another copy?”
“Where?” I said.
“Remember I told you about the lawyer skipping town shortly after Theodore’s death. That wasn’t by chance either. Michael threatened him. Said if he ever mentioned the Will to anyone, he’d kill him.”
“I guess the threat worked,” I said.
“Oh yes. The lawyer wasn’t even from around here. He was from the Midwest. Decided to give the East Coast a try, but he never really cared for it. When Michael threatened him that was all the final convincing he needed that the East was not for him. Packed it all in, went back to Ohio, opened up a practice there and stayed there the rest of his life.”
“You think he took a copy of the Will with him?”
“It’s possible,” said Rob. “I know this is the proverbial needle in the haystack, but I found this guy’s grandson. He still lives in Ohio. He told me when his grandfather died, his father packed up all the legal papers from his office, put them in storage and forgot about them. He recently died too, so all the papers were left for the grandson to deal with. He had no idea what to do with them and was about to just toss them when he got a call from me. You can imagine how that call went. He must have thought I was some crackpot.”
“No doubt,” I said.
“I managed to convince him I was sane and that I had a legitimate reason for wanting to pore over boxes and boxes of legal papers of a long dead lawyer. He said if I came out there he would let me into the storage place where I could search to my heart’s content. So I’m likely to be taking a little trip to the heartland.”
“Are you really going out there and search through those boxes?”
“Why not,” Rob said with a shrug. “What have I got to lose?”
Maybe your sanity, I thought, since what Rob was telling me was bordering on obsession, but I said, “What if you don’t find it?”
“Then I guess it’s on to plan B,” said Rob.
“Which is?”
“I’ll try to buy this place out from under old tubby Teddy. Problem with that is I don’t have that kind of cash. Or credit, for that matter. It’s a big nut. I’d need investors.”
At this moment, Trevor Hunt walked into the bar. I met Trevor over Memorial Day weekend by chance. He lives in Manhattan, but was up here on a date. The date fell through and he ended up with a woman named Gayle, who happens to be my next door neighbor. When Kelly and I left for our hotel, Gayle and Trevor followed. Gayle is also married. She thought it was a one time fling and that she’d never see him again, but apparently she has something Trevor likes because he’s been up here almost every weekend since. He came up and slapped me on the back.
“Hey, Dan the Man. Back in the saddle I see.” He also gave a nod of a greeting to Rob who he had met once or twice before.
“Hey Trevor, what’s going on?”
“Another weekend up here in the burbs. Do you know if Gayle is here?”
“I haven’t seen her,” I said.
“Maybe she’s at that other place up the street. I can’t remember where she said we were meeting. Listen though, I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve rented a place up here on the water for the month of July. I’m having a big 4th of July party. You guys should come.”
I was a bit surprised by this. I knew that where things had cooled with me and Kelly, they had continued to heat up with Trevor and Gayle, but I didn’t realize the extent. I told Trevor I would try to be there. Rob said the same, and Trevor left to go find Gayle.
After he’d gone, Rob said to me, “That guy’s in the money game, right?”
“Trevor? Yeah, works in private equity I think? Or something like that.”
“Hmmm,” was all Rob said, but I had a good idea what he was thinking.
I got up and told Rob I had to go to the bathroom.
He said, “All right. It’s kind of dead here. I think I’ll head up the street and see what the female clientele looks like this evening. You want to come?”
The bar up the street was called The Place To Be, and it was more of pickup place than Teddy’s. Lots of divorcees, and those teetering on the edge. I generally avoided it like The Plague.
“Not tonight,” I said. “I’ll probably just finish my beer and call it a night.”
“Okay, cool. Let’s do this again.”
“Definitely,” I said. We shook hands, Rob left and I went to the bathroom. I liked Rob even if he was wound a little tight. I thought that story about Theodore and Michael was interesting, but his idea of trying to chase that Will down seemed like a dead end. It wasn’t that late, but Rob was right, Teddy’s was pretty dead tonight. I was kind of tired, so I did plan to finish my beer and head home.
I walked out of the bathroom. Standing at the bar near where I had been sitting was Kelly. She was wearing a sleeveless sundress with swirls of blue and white. Her hair fell on her bare shoulders and caught flickers from the lights overhead. She didn’t look surprised to see me. I walked up to her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said back.
There was a few seconds of silence where we just looked at each other. Then she said,
“Buy a girl a drink?”
To Be Continued…..
External Affairs is a serial story currently consisting of four books. A link to each of the other chapters in the first three books can be found below. If you enjoyed this or any of the other chapters in the story, please consider clicking on the heart. Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for reading.
