“Is this where…” he asked.
I pointed at the other side of the island. “Right there, and I was over there.” I pointed towards the archway. “He had a Bowie knife, for God’s sake! Who the hell has one of those? It’s like a small sword!”
“Christ!”
Dinner was coq au vin, my signature chicken, ham, and wine sauce over rice meal. While I was preparing it, we opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and shared it around. Bucky and Charlie kept wandering through, and they got some crackers. We were still talking about Hamilton and the stalking and attacks, and Tessa wanted to know why they had been questioned by the cops.
“I think it was standard operating procedure for them. They had this detective talking to everybody! We had no idea who was doing this, and they kept asking us questions? Who did you go to school with? Who do you do business with? Who knows Marilyn?”
“And you had no idea it was your putz of a brother?”
I simply shook my head. “No clue! I hadn’t seen him since May, at my sister’s college graduation.” I hooked my thumb over at my wife. “She and my sister decided I needed to be reunited with my family. Boy, did that turn out to be a bust!”
“Don’t blame us! We were just trying to get you back with your father,” protested Marilyn.
I snorted. “Yeah, look how that worked out!”
“What happened?” asked Tusker.
“Hamilton lost it and went crazy. Then my father punched him out, and when my mother tried to stop him, he threw him and my mother out of the house. Now Hamilton’s dead, my mom’s in the loony bin, my folks are divorced, and my sister won’t talk to me. Please, nobody try to fix my family again.”
Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me and gave me a raspberry, which Bucky noticed and imitated. That got him a mild rap on the noggin by one of his father’s knuckles, and then he was sent off to play in the living room with Charlie and the dog.
Tessa asked, “So what was Hamilton’s problem? Was he really crazy?” Everyone looked at me.
I nodded. “Pretty much. We have a psychiatrist’s report from a few years ago that said he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and that he had a fixation on me. I was the cause of all his problems. The older I got and the more successful I got, that just meant I was doing something to hold him back. If I had just been some routine schlub, he’d have probably ignored me.”
“Tell them about the pictures,” prompted Marilyn.
“What pictures?” asked Tessa.
I shrugged. “This part actually made some sense. My mother removed all the pictures of me from around the house, like I didn’t exist or something. Suzie and I thought she did it to calm him down, pretending I wasn’t around. That’s probably why he freaked and broke down when he saw me in the spring. It pushed him over the edge.”
“And you never connected the dots?” asked Tusker.
I shook my head. “No. It wasn’t like it started the next day. His car wasn’t seen at the house for another month, and it wasn’t even his car. The first vandalism didn’t happen until July. We had no idea what he was up to. I think he was either building up his courage or just getting crazier over time. Nobody knows.”
“Damn!” he muttered lowly.
We promised that our next meal would be at their new house after they moved, and that if they needed help moving, to just give us a call. Tessa offered to give us Bucky for the day, which we laughingly agreed upon. At five, he was more nuisance than help. At least they didn’t have a dog to help mess things up!
Chapter 83: The End Of The Year
And thus ended 1983, a momentous year for so very many reasons. Tusker and Tessa had a new place to call home by Christmas. We helped them move in and kept an eye on Bucky as needed. By the time they moved in, Tessa was visibly showing; she’s slimmer than Marilyn to begin with, so when she shows, everybody knows!
My hopes that the death of my brother had finally been put behind me were just that, hopes. My mother sued me in civil court for his wrongful death. Every reputable lawyer in town turned her down, already knowing what had happened and who they would go up against, but she found a shyster ready to take the case on a contingency basis, and he had me served one day at the office.
Q: What’s the difference between lawyers and lab rats?
A: There are some things even lab rats won’t do!
I dumped it on John and DeAngelis. DeAngelis promptly invited the shyster to his office and explained the facts of life. Specifically, he laid out the evidence and said we would countersue my mother, since she was the person who had bought Hamilton the knife he had brought to the house and loaned him the car he used to stalk us. The crook promptly dumped my mother’s lawsuit. I got another bill from DeAngelis, for another five grand.
I kept him on retainer, though, since my parents then started suing each other, with me being named willy-nilly. That was when we learned that my parents had managed to secretly disown me back in the fall of 1978, shortly after I married Marilyn, without letting either me or John Steiner know. I guess they really didn’t like my wife. That was very upsetting, for both of us. I tried to stay in touch with Suzie, but she told me that our parents were trying to use her to fight each other and me, and she had stopped returning any calls from them and was getting an unlisted number and a new apartment. She would call me when she could talk, but otherwise it was best to leave her alone for awhile.
The Buckman Group kept moving forward. After a year and a half of operation, I was noticing several interesting trends. Jake Junior was definitely ambitious. He really wanted to grow the outfit and do bigger deals, and wanted to hire some specialists from Wall Street to help. I kept an eye on him, but otherwise let him. I still did the strategic guidance — I kept an eye on which companies he wanted to work with and red-flagged some that I knew would be a disaster. I did let him lose a little money on one or two that I knew wouldn’t work out, simply so he would learn from the experience. Missy’s role was interesting. Technically she was just a stock broker, but she had the world’s biggest Rolodex. If we needed to find somebody, the odds were she knew someone who knew someone. Very useful. After the collapse of her marriage, she was supporting three children. She could afford decent child care now, as well as some good vacations with them. What she did about male companionship, I never asked. About once a quarter we would travel to the west coast to confer with people in Bellevue and Silicon Valley.
At Christmas time I took a few weeks off and we went up to Utica, all four of us. Charlie and Dum-Dum stayed at the Lefleurs while Marilyn and I started our vacation early. We spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to Marilyn’s family what had happened that summer and fall, and I got some pretty strange looks from some of her family. It was one thing to know that I had been in the Army, and that the Army was involved in killing, but that was a whole different level of abstraction than sitting down to dinner with a guy who had shot his brother. I worked my way through it; it was still better than being on the news for a week.
Marilyn had taken care of all the arrangements with Taylor, simply stating that we wanted something about as private as we had done on that first trip to the Bahamas, but on a larger island with some night life on it. Other than that, it was all supposed to be a surprise to me, and for once, Marilyn kept her mouth shut. Two days after Christmas, we got Big Bob to drive us over to the Oneida County Airport, where a G-II was waiting to whisk us away.
By that time, the need to fly away for a Mommy-Daddy vacation to make a new little Buckman had vanished. The incredibly potent combination of Buckman spermatozoa and Lefleur ova had done its usual magic and Marilyn had caught in late October. Marilyn had insisted on going, however, since (her words, not mine) it was her last chance to wear a swimsuit without looking like a beached whale! I figured I would be delicate about it and simply said that meant there would be more of her to love. She replied, “Does that mean I can stop exercising with you?”