Day 2: 11:05 AM continued
The purpose of a right cross is to surprise your opponent. Hit you with a punch from a direction you are not expecting and with any luck drop them to their knees if not knock them out. A week before we were to leave to pick up Con in California, I got a call from Liam. He wanted to know what I knew about his father’s one-million-dollar life insurance policy. I said I knew that he had one it had been a bone of contention in their parents’ divorce and the last time his dad and I had spoken about it he had been trying to change the beneficiary of the policy from Delilah to him and his brother. Why? He explained that his mother had received a phone call from the broker who had issued the policy. Someone was attempting to buy the policy and change the beneficiary. The transfer of beneficiaries required her signature as well. I told him I knew nothing about it, but I would call his dad, see what I could find out,
Conor was only too happy to discuss the situation. He explained, since his diagnosis, he had grown increasingly concerned about the fully vested one-million-dollar life insurance policy that named Delilah as the sole beneficiary. It had been taken out when the boys were small when his death would have caused a major upheaval in their life. The divorce, still on going and more bitter than ever and his own death foreseeable he wanted to make sure the boys, not Del, would benefit from the policy’s payout.“
I said “So why didn’t you just change beneficiaries on the policy.”
He replied “I tried that, but the broker told me that a change of beneficiaries required both my signature and Del’s. I knew she would not do that.”
“So how did you come up with the idea of selling of the policy?”
“Oh, people do that all the time.:”
“Well, I am not really smart with this stuff. Insurance and financial stuff are your bailiwick. But from what the boys tell me that the person who is buying the policy is not a company but an individual. What is going with that.”
“Oh, he is a friend of Lil’s.”
Growing wary I replied “Why are you trying to see the policy to a friend of Lilith instead of to a company that specializes in buying up folk’s insurance policies? Wouldn’t that have been easier.”
In a tone that suggested I had asked a very stupid question he said “Then Del would have found out. I would have needed her signature again. Lil said she had a wealthy former boyfriend who did this sort of thing all the time. He would buy the policy at a discount and take care of any legal problems that arose.”
I didn’t like how this sounded at all and asked “How would he get around changing the beneficiary? Wouldn’t he have the same problems that you had?”
“I asked him about that. He told me he did this thing all the time and that what typically happened is that in lieu of fighting a prolonged legal fight where only the lawyers make money a settlement is reached. He makes a little money off the policy, and everyone walks away happy.”
I blurt out “Didn’t that seem a little sleezy to you.”
“A little but at least it would keep Del from getting some of the payout.”
Concerned I say “Okay, how much was he going to pay you for the policy.”
“$500,000.”
“So, he was going to pay you one half of the value of the policy and what were you going to do with that money. You know Del has a lien on all of your bank accounts and would have put an attachment on the cash. How did you plan to get around that?”
He replied in a matter-of-fact tone “I was going to give it to Lil to hold onto and if I died before the divorce was settled, she promised to give it to the boys.”
Beginning to see a pattern I said “Oh. Let me ask you this. What happened to this deal? Did you ever get paid by Lil’s friend.”
“Oh no. We signed the papers assigning him the policy contingent upon him placing a claim on the policy. The insurance company denied him siting an injunction that Del had in place on the policy, so we tore up the contract.”
Curious I replied, “When did all this go down?”
“I can’t remember exactly. A couple of weeks ago maybe?”
The puzzle was complete, and I did not like the picture it displayed. Lil’s interest in Conor had died the minute the minute she could no longer shake any money from the tree. It was breathlessly heartbreaking. The woman my friend had called the love of his life was little more than a parasite. When there was nothing left to feed on, she left to find her next victim.
How could this have happened? Two and half years ago, my friend was living the life he had dreamed of since he was a boy. His home was in one of the most beautiful beach communities in the world where every night he could sit on his porch watching the sunset, hoping to see the miracle of the green flash. He had a job which was prestigious and offered him an opportunity for real wealth. More importantly he had a wife, who by all appearances loved him, and two boys who would fight over who would rush into a burning building to save him. He was the paragon of health, spending an hour almost every day swimming laps in the pool or in the surf just outside his door.
I had known for some time that there would be no happy ending to my friend’s ballad. Tragedy was inevitable. But this betrayal by Lil and facilitated by George’s indifference and neglect was beyond the pale. How can a brother abandon a brother? I did not always love my brother Levi. He often infuriated me to the point where we would go months without speaking with each other. But if he needed my help, I would beat a path to his doorstep. How can anyone, let alone a woman who professes to be the love of your life, try to steal all your money, and then throw you to the curb when there is nothing left to steal
These are the stories of Greek myths and Russian novels. It should not be the story of the ending of your best friend’s life. I would love to say this adversity strengthened my resolve to help my friend and give him the best possible ending. And perhaps it did, later. But in the moment, hearing about Lil’s and George’s betrayal, and wondering how we got hear from the hope and glory of only a few years ago, broke me.
I did not tell Liam or Duke what had really happened with the insurance. It would only serve to throw gasoline on the bonfire of hate they already had for Lilith and make the job of extracting Con from her grip more contentious. I never confronted George about the type of man he was. He already knew. Me letting him know that I knew would only be spitting in the wind. Instead, I let it guide my expectations and plot my course more fully aware of the situation.
Con’s room at Eagles Rest was dominated by a king-sized bed he insisted on taking from his apartment. The room was small, maybe 12 x 10, and the bed made it difficult to maneuver as it ate up most of the available floor space. Opposite it was a gigantic fifty-five-inch television. Like the bed, no doubt a Costco purchase made after Del had left and salvaged from his apartment. The room was a mess. The floor was littered with various chargers for phone, iPad and laptop and clothes that he had discarded after wearing. There were candy bar wrappers strewn everywhere and a tray that contained the remnants of some past meal on the nightstand next to his bed.The small closet had more clothes on the floor than were hanging. The state of the room was not a surprise. Con had never taken to housekeeping. But his appearance was. A man who used to be spend more time in front of the mirror than super models, whose hair needed to exactly right before leaving the house was a mess. He was unshaven with a four-day beard. His hair looked dirty and was uncombed. He had visibly aged, looking more seventy-five than fifty-five. While his face had finally readjusted to his skull his eyes looked blank and confused.
It was a shock for me. But for the boys, it was far worse. The father they had last seen was young, vibrant, gregarious, and bold. The man they were seeing for the first time in almost two years had no resemblance to that person. In front of them was a zombie whose soul was slowly being leached away. It made them freeze as they entered the room. Even though they had been prepared to see an altered version of the man who guided them all their lives the reality blew every circuit breaker that governed them. I understood. Dads are immortal to their children. Seeing that they are not, is 9.0 on the emotional Richter scale.
I said to Con in the most ebullient tone I could muster. “Buddy boy! We are here! How are you.”
He looked at me and with a disturbed look on his face replied, “You are late!”
I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30 in the morning. Exactly the time I had told him the night before we would be arriving. I said “No Con. We are right on time. Don’t you remember I told you would be here at 8:30 am last night? It’s 8:25. We are even here a bit early.”
“No, it’s not. It’s 11:30. I went downstairs at 8:30 and was waiting for you.” Pointing to his iWatch he said “See.” I looked and replied as kindly as I could “Buddy, the watch says 8:26.”
Con looked at his watch. Uncertainty rippled across his face. Then he laughed and said “I guess I was confused. That happens a lot these days.”
Had I not been in the same room with him I may have allowed myself a tear or two. This was my friend, my wingman in adventure and mischief, a man who in the past had no problem juggling three dates with three different women on the same day, getting confused over telling time. Instead, I changed the subject. I said, pointing to the boys “Look who I found hanging out on the street.”
Duke and Liam walked around me and for the first time in almost two years they hugged. It made me feel like an outsider. But not in a bad way. This was their tribe. Their relationship. I had mine with my father. A relationship that had always been good but had grown as we aged and understood better the man he was and the sacrifices he had made so I could be the man I wanted to be. A relationship that had reached its zenith when he had become ill, confined to a wheelchair when we used to hug like Con and his boys were hugging now. I wanted to tell the boys to savor every second of this hug. To rejoice in it because as I knew from my own well of sadness that when those embraces are gone, they will never be replaced.
We had breakfast in the dining room at Eagles Rest. It was a small room off the main lobby with about a dozen Formica topped tables for four and about half that for two. It was nearly empty when we entered. As Con explained, here most folks were finished with breakfast by eight. As we made our ways through the tables to one near the window looking out onto the courtyard, Con introduced us to some of his “friends.” They were all in their eighties, in various states of decline and treated us as if we were aliens visiting from a distant galaxy. Which I suppose, from their point of view, we were. It made me wonder, not for the first time whether or not placing a middle-aged man in the middle of a health crisis in a dormitory of death, was a good idea. Wasn’t there a place available where the focus was on moving forward and not giving in to the inevitable?
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
My friend did not need to be here. He should have been somewhere the default was waiting in the lobby for the grim reaper to pick you up. He could have been living with Liam or Duke or me. And he would have had it not been for Lil. Had not been for her, he would have been and Liam’s wedding. If not for that, his boys, not her, would have been in control of his health. The outcome might not have been different. A the very least the boys would have had more time with their dad and Con would have spent more time with those he loved instead of gradually fading into the Formica.
Packing up Con’s room took surprisingly little time. With the exception of his oversized television and his king-sized bed, all he owned fit into two large boxes. Between Del returning to their apartment while Con had been on a business trip and shipping most of their possessions to their new home and Lil’s haphazard dissolution of his last apartment there was not much left. Just clothes that no longer fit and a few family photos. Less than three years earlier he had enough “stuff’ to fill a 4,000 square foot home. I found everything about this terribly depressing.
I am feeling my sadness overwhelm me when Liam taps me on the shoulder and says “Look what I found” and hande me a clear acrylic block with a black and white photograph embedded inside. It is of two young men about the same height, dressed identically with untucked Lacoste shirts, straight leg Levi corduroys, and Topsider boat shoes. The boy on the left, is very waspy looking and has long blonde hair and a leather thong around his neck. He is resting his arm on the other’s shoulder who is sporting aviator glasses and a six-inch Isro. They are both staring into the middle distance with the semi-serious look young men wear when they want to be taken seriously.
I smile and laugh and say “Jesus! This is a picture of your old man and I that was taken right before we graduated high school. When I found a copy of it, I don’t know a dozen or so years ago, I had this made up and sent to him.” My voice trails off and I mumble “I can’t believe he still has it. I would have thought he lost it a couple of moves ago.”
The picture snaps me back to the mission at hand. I am not here to get angry at anyone. It is not my job to judge anyone. It can’t be about regret. Not that I wouldn’t want to change things if I could but I cannot, so regret is useless.
I need to leave judgement, regret, and pity at the door. I need to remember the reason that we are here. Con needs us. If I spend my time judging Del, Lil, and George for what they have or have not done, relitigating a past I cannot change, or feeling sorry for myself I won’t be able to do one thing I am here to do which is to help Con with whatever he needs, everything beyond that is nothing but a waste of energy.
My phone buzzes. I look at the screen and see it is Lil calling me. Not wanting to have a conversation with her in front of Liam and Duke I stepped out into the hall. and say, “Hey Lil, whatup.”
“Hi Danny. Umm. I am downstairs in the courtyard. I know the boys are here and I don’t want to see them. Will you come downstairs and meet me? Please.”
The courtyard is a large patio surrounded by different wings of the facility. It . I find Lil sitting in a far corner of the courtyard in chairs that are facing away from the doors and looking towards the haze shrouded Pacific.
I say, “Hi Lil” and give her a kiss on the cheek before sitting down. She is dressed what my father would have called “full battle gear.” Her make-up is perfect in the way that stencils are perfect. She appears to have a flawless sun kissed complexion, with puffy red lips, and eyes that are shadowed well enough to appear in a Margret Keane painting. Her dress is brick red, form fitting with a plunging neckline that calls full attention to her surgically enhanced breasts.
She hands me a letter size manilla envelope and says “Connie gave me this to hold onto when he moved in here.”
The envelope is heavy, and I say, “What is it?”
Lil replies “It’s okay. You can look?”
I open the envelope and reach inside and pull out a Rolex Sea Dweller Deepsea with a stainless-steel band, and bezel and deep blue face. I say, “Isn’t the watch you bought Con when you two went to London together.”
She smiles ruefully and replies “Is that what he told you?”
“Yeah, he said that that he had taken you to Harrods to do some window shopping and were looking at watches for the hell of it and you surprised him by buying him this.” As a watch lover, but never wealthy enough to own a watch like this I add “He told me what you paid for this watch. It was like twelve grand. Don’t you want to keep it? You bought it after all.”
Lil chuckles and says “I didn’t buy him this watch. He bought it for himself.”
“What?”
“Yes. We were in London, and it was right after Del had all of his bank accounts frozen. You know how he was back then Danny. He wanted to do whatever he could to fight Del. Didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong. All that mattered was keeping money out of her hands. And that meant no liquid assets. No money that could be traced back to him. I don’t who gave him the idea, but someone suggested buying things that either didn’t go down in price or if they did it wasn’t by much. He decided to buy a watch. You know how he is about watches. We went to Harrods and bought the watch. Our cover story was that if anyone asked, I bought it for him.”
I was a little stunned. I thought Con always played it straight with me. I thought I knew all his secrets but obviously I did not and that stung a little. I looked over at Lil and mumbled “I thought Con told me everything.”
“He told me not to tell you. He said he wasn’t going to tell anyone who could be deposed.”
“Then why did he tell you?” I said with a little jealously creeping into my voice.
Lil held up her left hand showing me a ruby and diamond ring and said “We were engaged. If Del’s lawyer wanted to depose me, we would have claimed spousal privilege.”
“Okay. I get it. But how did he get the money to pay for the watch without sending off alarms and flashing red lights to Delilah’s attorney? I thought they had him boxed.
Lil grinned “Oh he didn’t tell you about that either?” she said in a superior tone.
I replied, “Tell me what.”
“He had a secret bank account. One that he had been keeping from Del for years. He called it his “get on jail free” account. I think it had about one hundred and fifty grand in it. When Del’s lawyers started freezing his bank accounts and seizing the money. He cashed it out before they could get to it.”
I sat there in stunned silence. I knew none of this. This man had been my friend for decades, I had talked to him at least once a day since the beginning of the divorce. And I knew none of this. Lil must have seen the surprise on my face because she said “C’mon Danny. You can’t be surprised by all of this. You know how secretive and sneaky he could be.”
It was true. I used to joke with Con about his name. How he would love to play games with people. Whether that was pretending to be an Irish immigrant when picking up girls in bars so the fun they had together would be limited to one evening only. Or, back in the days when cocaine was king in New York, and he would buy for a group of us and skim a couple of grams for himself. But I thought that had faded with age. Now he was the guy that would say what he would do and do what he said. But clearly, I was wrong about that. Normally, I would have gotten in his face about this. Confront him with his lying to me. But that ship had sailed. Challenging him about anything now was worthless
I said “Yeah, I am surprised” and then with a fake chuckle “But not entirely astonished. It fits a pattern. So now he has all this cash that Del knows nothing about. He is trying to hide with physical things that can be located with a search of his financial records, or he can have some plausible deniability about. Do you know what he did with the rest of the money? I am not asking to be nosey. I just think the boys may want to know to pay some of his bills and things.”
Lil paused. It was clear from the look on her face that she was trying to decide whether to share the information with me or if I were cynical what lie to tell me. She says “Some of the money he used to buy diamonds. I think he spent like forty-five thousand dollars on them with a jeweler I know. And the rest he gave to me to hold on to for him.”
“Would you mind me asking where the diamonds and the money are now. Honestly, I am not trying to be pushy, but the boys have some hefty bills coming up and if it can help them pay them it would be great.”
Lilith paused for a second and said “I don’t mind you asking. The diamonds were stolen.”
“What!?”
“Yeah, he kept them in a little safe he had in his apartment. If you remember right after he got out of rehab the first time we thought, that is he thought, he could live on his own the apartment with some assistance. It was a bad idea. I arranged to have someone come in and spend a few hours with him every day. A nice woman named Laetitia whose husband worked for me and did this type of work. She made sure that he took his meds, showered, and took care of himself, light cleaning and things like that. She was terrific and took good care of Con. Then one day she didn’t show up and it was shortly after that we discovered that the diamonds were missing.”
“Fuck. How did she know about the diamonds.”
“I don’t know. At the time Con was not making a lot of sense. You talked him then. There were times he was there and times he was on a different planet. He says he doesn’t know but I think he showed them to her for some reason or perhaps he had them out and she saw where he was keeping them. Who knows? “
“And of course, they were not insured because Del could then discover that he had them and was hiding money from him?”
“Yes. Which is also why we could not file a police report.”
“Fuckity, fuck fuck. So, what did you do?
“What could we do? I tracked down Laetitia. She claimed not to know anything about the diamonds. She told me that she quit because Con kept on asking for sex and her husband told her she had to quit.”
“Did you believe her?”
Lil shrugs and says” Who knows? I had nothing to prove it so I had let it go. But not before I fired her husband.”
“Jesus. What a fucking mess.” We did not say anything for a few moments. What was there to say? Did I believe Lil? Yes, I believed her about the diamonds and the watch. I had no doubt that Con had done what he could to hide things from Del. He had been at war with her and she with him. The rule book for propriety and doing the right thing, as far as he was concerned, had been tossed the minute she had walked out the door. He would not lose this fight. Did I believe Lil about the diamonds being stolen? I wanted to. But I could not. Not after the insurance. Not after abandoning my friend after promising undying love. It made a plausible story seem unlikely which made my next question both more difficult and a necessity.
I said“Lil, is there anything left. I don’t mean it to sound that way. I don’t mean to be pushy or question you, but the boys will ask, and I would like to have an answer for them.”
Lil’s face hardened. A muscle just below her left eye twitched ever so slightly. She said “If you are asking if there is any cash left, there isn’t. Between paying for this place and all of Con’s other expenses it has all been spent.” She hesitated for a moment and then added with a bit more defiance than I thought necessary “And if you don’t believe me, ask George. He has been managing all of Con’s other expenses.”
This was a path that led nowhere. George relied on her for information. GIGO. Garbage in garbage out. If she was lying, which was likely, there would be no way to prove it.
I said “Let me change the subject. How are you doing? I know this has been hard on you. And him leaving isn’t the outcome you had hoped for?”
Lil visibly relaxed and proceeded to go on at length at what sacrifices she had made for Con. How demanding it had been. How demanding he had been. That she had found her “true love” and how now she was losing him. That she was living in a tragedy worthy of a Mexican telenovela. After a few sentences, I stopped listening. Her words were white noise. This was not her tragedy and everything she was saying, as far as I was concerned, were as hollow as a prostitute’s promises.
I had enough of Lilith. My ability to remain polite was waning if not already at end. I said “Lilith, would you like to come up and see Con.
“Are the boys up there?”
“When I left, they were. They were packing up the room. Not that there was much to pack.”
She contemplated it for a second and replied “I do not want to see them. I will come back later to say goodbye to Connie.”
Lil never saw Con again. She did not visit him that night. She did not visit him in Carolina. She had gotten what she wanted from him and when there was nothing left, she disposed of him of like an unwanted household item, placed him on the curb hoping someone would come along and pick him up. Whether she really was the devil’s bride before she met my friend or whether circumstances had created her, I will never know. It did not matter. I did not care. She was what she was, and I never needed to deal with her again.
Blame it on Rio 