Look Closer

Mom was home, requiring extensive care, and Dad was without money to pay for a caregiver.

After the money was gone, Mom learned the truth. Dad confessed to her. She wasn’t the same after her stroke, but there was enough of her left for me to see how much it crushed her to know that her husband had strayed from her.

And I’ll never know this for certain, because my mother was far too proud a woman to ever say it, but I think she knew that I knew, too, and never told her. I can’t even fathom the humiliation she must have felt, the utter devastation.

My mother killed herself because she had nothing left of the life she thought she’d had. She was married to a man she no longer recognized, who no longer loved her.

And now . . . what am I doing?

I’m cheating on my wife.

I have become the man I despise.

28 Christian

I don’t need to know much about Vicky’s husband, Simon. I probably don’t need to know anything other than he’s loaded, and his wife is going to take his money and give it to me. But a little due diligence never hurts.

I didn’t expect this.

Born and raised in Grace Park. Check. Childhood, nothing of interest. Went to Hilltop Elementary, Grace Park Middle School, Grace Consolidated High School. Valedictorian, okay, and apparently quite the cross-country and track star. He finished second in state his junior year in cross-country and broke the school’s record for the two-mile in track. Good for Simon.

But this is more interesting. Simon graduated Grace Consolidated High School in May of 2003. But he didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago undergrad until May of 2010.

Seven years to graduate college, Simon, Mr. Valedictorian? Did you take some time off? What were you doing during that time?

Flag that and move on.

His father, Theodore Dobias, hits it big twenty years ago, in 2002, a thirty-million-dollar verdict in an electrical-injury case, which I assume means someone got electrocuted. Theodore was the guy’s lawyer, and they got a big pot of cash. Hooray for them.

In 2004, Glory Dobias—Simon’s mom, Theodore’s wife—a law professor at the University of Chicago, dies of a painkiller overdose. Suicide? The news reports and the U of C’s press release are vague. Seems she’d had health problems, a stroke, but nothing concrete.

Then Theodore leaves town. He leaves Grace Park and the Chicago area and moves to St. Louis. He works in a law firm in Alton, Illinois, near the Illinois-Missouri border, where he ends up banking serious dough doing asbestos-exposure cases. The bio from his law firm that I was able to drag up from a long time ago said he netted over two hundred million dollars in recoveries for his clients. That’s a lot of money for the lawyer, who gets a third of the recovery usually.

And that explains where Simon’s big-dollar trust fund comes from.

But the really interesting part is twelve years ago, in May 2010. Theodore Dobias, by now a mega-wealthy, well-established attorney in Alton and the St. Louis area, a leading advocate in asbestos litigation, ends up dead. Murdered, found dead in his swimming pool with a stab wound to the stomach. And guess who the police suspected?

They never arrested him, from what I can tell. They brought him in for questioning multiple times and confirmed to the press that a “person of interest” was being interviewed, which the media had no trouble figuring out meant his only child.

“Simon Peter Dobias,” I whisper to myself. “Did you murder your father?”

I remember what Vicky said to me. That insane trust language that kept Simon’s wife away from the trust money until ten years of marriage.

Simon’s father didn’t trust me, she said.

Ol’ Theodore thought you were a moneygrubbing whore, Vicky. And it seems like he was right. How’d that make you feel?

What were you doing, Mrs. Vicky Lanier Dobias, on the night Simon’s dad was murdered?

29 Simon