Murdered by Success

by Dianne Harman

  “So, how’s it going with your silver fox?”

  “Oh, Tom’s just wonderful,” Hannah said, dreamy-eyed.

  Tom was a California businessman in his sixties who came to town occasionally on business and stayed in the hotel across the street from the bar. He was married with grown children.

  “Yeah?” Danica said with a grin. “Has he bought you anything nice lately?”

  “You doubt? Of course,” Hannah said. She pulled the sleeve on her blouse back to show off an expensive gold bracelet.

  “Wow, Tiffany, he definitely gets points for that,” Danica murmured.

  “I know.” Hannah shook her head, returning her mascara to her makeup bag, and said, “I want more, Danica. I’m not putting in all my devotion, attention, and this,” she said as she wiggled her body and made Hannah laugh, “in exchange for a darn bracelet.”

  Danica nodded. “So what you’re saying is that you want something more substantial.”

  “Yep. At least a house. I mean, my ideal is that he stays with his wife, buys me a home, pays all my expenses, and adds me to his will.”

  “Then dies as soon as possible,” Danica said with a laugh.

  “Well,” Hannah said, shooting her a warning look, but then she broke into a grin. “Give him a couple years to take me on exotic vacations first. And he has a great stock of Viagra, you know, Danica.”

  Danica giggled. “Connor doesn’t need Viagra.”

  “You and your young men,” Hannah said with a disapproving shake of her head. “They’re too disrespectful for me. And I really don’t want to deal with them when they’re having a midlife crisis. I mean they’re okay if you’re just after a little fun, and they’re ready to spread a little cash around. But if you’re looking for something long-term and some big bucks, then I think the older ones are the best bet.

  “They’re not going to freak out and go running back to their wives, full of apologies. They’ve learned how to be discreet, and how to manage it all. They’re likely to stay with their wives, but set you up very nicely on the side. No drama, no fuss.”

  Danica shook her head. “I want a man to leave his wife. I want to be the main woman in Connor’s life and nothing less.”

  “You’re a fool,” Hannah said. “As soon as you’re his wife, he’ll start treating you like dirt, and before you know what’s what, he’ll be getting it on with the nanny. It’s much better to be a spoiled mistress forever and get perfume, roses, vacations, jewelry, and be lavished with attention until he dies.”

  Danica paused. “I see what you mean, but don’t you get jealous of his wife?”

  “Nope. I know she’s the one getting a bad deal. I’m the one getting a good deal.”

  “But what about love?”

  Hannah scoffed. “What about it? Love is something only teenage girls should believe in, Dani. It’s not real to men. Stroke their egos, give them wonderful loving sessions, look gorgeous, and the feeling they get is love to them. Unfortunately, most men aren’t capable of going beyond that. It’s sad but true.”

  “No, it’s not true,” Danica said hotly. “Men can fall in love. True love.”

  “Yeah, right. While you still look hot on your wedding day and for the honeymoon. But once you have his children and put on weight and all that, it’s over, trust me. His heart is G-O-N-E, waiting for another glamorous, accommodating woman to fill that gap. You’re just a housemate now. If you want to take my advice, let Connor stay with his wife, and you’ll get the best of him on the side.”

  “No,” Danica said. “That’s not going to happen. Look. He stopped contacting me because he said he felt guilty cheating on his wife. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? It means when we get together, he won’t cheat on me.”

  Hannah sighed. “You’re living in a dreamworld, Dani. Stop being so romantic and start getting realistic.”

  “Love can work. I know it can,” Danica said firmly.

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “I think we better get out there and start working,” she said. “Otherwise the boss is going to wonder where we are.”

  “Fine,” Danica said. “But this conversation isn’t over by a long shot.”

  They went out to the front of the bar, which, during the day, was more of a café, with light meals served for lunch. It wasn’t very busy, so they had time to talk to each other without being interrupted. All they had to do was clean the shelves behind the bar where the bottles were, wipe off each one, and rearrange them.

  “You don’t understand,” Danica said to Hannah softly. “I love him.”

  “Give me a break,” Hannah said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I do. I can’t stop thinking about him. Every waking moment. I imagine if he was here what he would say, what he would do, where we would go.”

  “That’s just the initial rush,” said Hannah. “It’s nothing to get worked up about.”

  “I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I’d follow him wherever he wanted to go. To the ends of the earth, if I had to.”

  Hannah took her by the shoulders. “Wake the heck up, Dani.”

  Danica pushed her away. “I am awake, Hannah. I feel more awake than I’ve ever been in my entire life. It’s like, it’s like…” She tried to think of a good way to describe it.

  “It’s like my whole life has been in black and white. And now, all of a sudden, everything is in technicolor. I can’t wait to see him. I think about him first thing when I wake up, and last thing when I go to sleep. When he doesn’t reply to my letters, I feel like my heart is breaking.”

  “No,” Hannah said, looking disturbed. “No, no, no, no, no. This requires an intervention. You are going down a very dangerous path that leads absolutely nowhere.”

  “It leads to him.”

  “No, it leads to you losing your mind,” Hannah said. “Stop believing the illusion. There’s no such thing as love. Get that in your head, and get it in now. We need to find you another guy to…”

  “I don’t want another guy,” Danica interrupted. “Even if I can’t be with Connor, I never want another man again.”

  Hannah backed away from her, shaking her head. “Dani, what’s gotten into you?” she said quietly. “It’s like you’re going crazy.”

  “You’re just being cold-hearted,” Danica spat. “You don’t know what love is, because you’ve never experienced it.”

  “There’s no such thing as love,” Hannah said, exasperated. “Why are you being so dumb?”

  “Dumb? Dumb?” Danica shook her head. “You know what? Forget you. And forget this shift.” She grabbed her jacket from the counter. “I’m going to find Connor right now. I need to be with him.”

  Hannah tried to grab her wrist as Danica hurried past her, but Danica pulled her arm away and stormed out to her old wreck of a car in the staff area of the parking lot. She didn’t know where Connor was, but she was going to find out.

  CHAPTER 6

  Joe Treadwell took out his secret bottle of whiskey, which had its home in the bottom drawer of his desk, and took a long swig from it. He enjoyed the burning sensation in his throat as it slipped down, and then he burped loudly.

  His assistant, Nathaniel, came in just as he was hurriedly putting it back in the drawer. He looked at the young man suspiciously, wishing he’d just go away. These days he wished everything and everybody would go away.

  “Mr. Treadwell,” Nathaniel said.

  “What is it?” It annoyed Joe that Nathaniel couldn’t just come out with whatever he wanted to say. He always had to be so darned respectful.

  “You asked me to advise you on the movements of Connor Moynahan.” Nathaniel looked down nervously at the piece of scrap paper he was holding.

  Joe was so annoyed by Nathaniel’s reticence that he stood up from his desk, walked over, and snatched the piece of paper from Nathaniel’s hands. He skimmed it quickly. What he saw was just a bunch of notes he couldn’t make sense of, not with as much whiskey as he’d had. “Well, go on,” he snapped. �
�What about Connor?”

  “Well, Sir, it looks like he’s struck a deal with the Hamilton Hotel & Spa.”

  A rage rushed through Joe’s veins. “And you are telling me this, why?”

  “Sorry, sir, but you asked me to.”

  “Get out,” Joe spat.

  Nathaniel sighed and looked at Joe wearily. “Sir, I’m thinking of getting out altogether. You’ve changed a lot, and the atmosphere around here is getting, well, untenable for me.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Joe said. He began to organize the papers on his desk, even though they didn’t need organizing. “You young men these days don’t know anything about loyalty.”

  “Sir, that’s not fair!” Nathaniel protested. “I’m trying my best here. You told me I’d learn everything by being your assistant, and it was going along great, but now you block me out of meetings and never give me any meaningful work. Plus, you’re constantly angry at everyone and everything, including me.”

  “You ungrateful little parasite,” Joe growled, turning on him, his eyes in slits. “You’re just like Connor, aren’t you? You millennials and generation XYZ or whatever you’re called, you all disgust me.”

  Joe realized how out of character his words sounded, even to him, but he couldn’t stop himself. Connor’s betrayal had started a fire of revenge inside him that just kept on burning and burning.

  “All you think about is what’s in it for you. You know, in the old days, people used to join a company and stay with it for life. We bonded. We were a team that worked together to make the company succeed. Now all that millennials want is to flit about from job to job, only thinking of yourself and your own selfish advancement.”

  Nathaniel, to his credit, was very calm. He nodded. “I understand, Sir, and you’re right. Employee migration is much higher than it used to be. But that’s because the economy has changed. People need to move to where the money is these days. It’s not enough to have a regular wage to support a family anymore. And usually both partners have to work. It’s not the same economic environment as it was when you started out.”

  Joe sneered. “Oh yes, very clever, Nathaniel. Well, that doesn’t change the facts, does it? That you’re all in it for yourselves.”

  “I’d argue that everyone’s always primarily concerned with themselves, and altruistic…”

  “I didn’t ask you in here for a philosophical debate!” Joe exploded, interrupting him.

  “You didn’t ask me in here at all,” Nathaniel said evenly. “I came in myself, to report on Connor Moynahan, which was what you told me to do.”

  “Fine. Yes. Wonderful.” Joe went over to the window and looked out at the city. He felt a burning in the area of his heart, and didn’t know if it was the whiskey or the pain of the betrayal by Connor. Perhaps it was both.

  “Sir?” Nathaniel said gently, after a long silence.

  “What do you want?”

  “Like I said, I’m considering leaving. I wanted to tell you before I handed in my notice.”

  “What, to get me to beg you to stay? I’m afraid that won’t be happening.” Joe continued to stare out the window. He heard the door to the office open and close as Nathaniel left the room.

  He didn’t want Nathaniel to leave. He was a good worker, very intelligent, and had a lot of promise. He’d taken to real estate like a duck to water. If Joe had been in his right mind, he’d have seen Nathaniel for what he was, a great asset to his company, and a hardworking, honest young man who had what it took to go far.

  But Joe wasn’t in his right mind. Far from it.

  He’d gone from a five-times-a-week gym person who did “clean eating” and took his teenage sons sailing on the weekend, to a fast food addict with a secret whiskey habit. The closest thing he got to exercise these days was walking from his car, where he dropped it at the office door for the valet, to the elevator that would take him up to his office.

  And it had all happened so quickly. He’d felt so comfortable working with Connor. Joe had loved being a mentor and taking promising young men under his wing. The ones with enthusiasm, but little know-how, were his favorites. They reminded him of himself when he was younger.

  Then, before he knew what was happening, Connor began morphing into something quite different right before his eyes. He lost his innocence and acquired a razor-sharp edge, which he wasn’t afraid to use on Joe himself.

  They’d disagreed on the terms of an investment in a commercial building, an office block, and the fallout had been spectacular. Joe had emailed the seller one set of figures, and then Connor had undermined him by sending an email saying Joe had made a mistake, and here were the correct figures. It ended up to be quite a circus, and the seller had dropped them. That was after five years of Joe trying to get that piece of property in the first place.

  But that wasn’t what had hurt the most.

  What hurt the most was Connor’s rejection of Joe. The thing was, Joe was at heart, a very friendly soul. He was generally slow to anger, until now, and quick to forgive and make amends. After the office block deal had fallen through, yes, he’d been annoyed, but he could easily understand how it could happen.

  He’d gone out to the lakeside cabin he owned with his wife for a weekend and thought it all over as he boated and fished and hiked. Connor had been in the wrong and should have accepted Joe’s judgment as his superior. Then again, he’d reasoned with himself, every great businessman wants to break free and be independent when he thinks the time had come. No doubt Connor’s missteps had been just that, a bid for independence.

  When he was at the cabin Joe had decided not to fire Connor. In fact, he decided to give him the position of Commercial Real Estate Manager in his own company. Up until then, Connor and Joe had been working in a personal capacity, apart from the workings of Joe’s business. Joe was excited about it. On Sunday night, as he drove back from the cabin, ideas of expansion and brilliance filled his head, and he could barely sleep thinking of what they could do as a team.

  But when he called Connor the next day, he didn’t pick up his phone. In fact, Connor never picked up the phone again. He also didn’t answer Joe’s emails. Joe would have thought Connor had fallen off the face of the planet if it wasn’t for seeing his face in every single real estate investing magazine in the business, lauding his success at such a young age. To add insult to injury, Joe had been responsible for Connor getting most of those magazine pieces, and Connor hadn’t even mentioned his name in the interviews.

  But still Joe gave him the benefit of the doubt. “He’s young and brash and arrogant and living the dream,” he’d said to his wife when she’d been angry on his behalf. “Leave him be for now. He’ll come around.”

  Privately, he was sure Connor would get back in touch with him at some point, if for no other reason than they had assets tied up in property together, with Joe contributing over twenty million. And he continued to stay cool, calm and collected, wishing Connor well from afar.

  But Connor had never gotten in touch with Joe. Weeks passed, then months. When a year had gone by without hearing from him, Joe began to worry. His sons were going away to college, and he wanted to buy them houses. It would be a good investment, far better than spending money on apartments and getting no return on his investment.

  Although he had enough money to buy the houses, without the money he’d invested with Connor it was going to leave Joe and his wife a little tight on cash, and they were near the age where retirement was definitely on the horizon. He needed to get his money out of his and Connor’s investments.

  He had his legal department draft a letter to Connor. Connor sent a letter back. It was mostly legalese, but the meaning was very clear: Hell no, old man. Crawl back under your rock.

  When he’d gotten that letter, Joe had downed a large glass of whiskey. And that had been the beginning.

  It wasn’t as much the money as it was the betrayal.

  Now, the passion for mentoring he’d had for fifteen years or so had been replaced by
a deep distrust, especially for ambitious young men. He’d even looked at his sons sideways from time to time, although normally he was the most doting father anyone could meet. He and his sons were becoming more and more distant by the day.

  That wasn’t the only relationship that was affected. Connor used to come to Joe’s home for dinner on a regular basis, and the whole family enjoyed his company. Joe’s wife, Alicia, had begun to think of him as her third son, feeling sorry for him because his mother was dead. She’d asked Joe why Connor had stopped coming over to the house, but Joe didn’t want to tell her the truth and worry her about their financial future, so he’d made up a story that Connor was taking some time off due to the impending arrival of his child.

  Unfortunately, Alicia had found some papers lying around regarding the investments, and had forced Joe to tell her what was going on. She was heartbroken. Not because of the money, but because of the fact Joe had hidden it from her. She’d become very distant, and he didn’t have the emotional strength to go chasing after her like he normally would have done when she was upset with him.

  His depression was taking its toll on his work, too. He spent much of his time at his desk, daydreaming about the good old days. He thought about the former partners he’d had when he’d been a young man. They’d grown up together in the same company and had remained friends for over twenty years. There was Roy, Bill, Heston, Calvin, and Sandra. All of them were good people he still spoke to at least once a month. And they got together annually for a barbecue with their spouses.

  Unfortunately, their yearly barbecue had taken place just before everything had fallen apart with Connor. He wished he could ask for their support, but he was too ashamed to pick up the phone and tell any of them what had happened. The shame of betrayal buzzed through every cell of his body, and the only thing that seemed to help was whiskey. He’d even stopped making deals, because his confidence was ebbing away.

  The only thing he found pleasure in was his dog. Nova was a beautiful German Shepherd who stayed by Joe’s side and wouldn’t go away. When Connor had first betrayed Joe, and he’d been holed up in his office at home, drinking, he’d tried to keep Nova away from him, which was completely out of character for Joe. But Nova wasn’t buying it.