The Adored Read online

  The Adored

  By

  T.R. Connolly

  Copyright ©2015 by T.R. Connolly

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Cover Illustration: “Dream Maker,” Klisha Bomopigamago (Roberta Giallo)

  Dedication:

  For my wife Kathleen who has made all things possible with her love and her strength and her devotion to our family.

  Acknowledgements:

  -To Sister Julie Marie who encouraged me when I was 13 and said, “Thomas you should write.”

  -To my reading group who sent me back to work when I thought I was almost there – thanks Maureen Connolly, Barbara Geraghty, Judy Flagg and Mary Blackwell.

  -To the Darien Library Writer’s Group who tormented me with endless ways to improve my stories.

  CONTENTS

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART 2

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  PART 3

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  PART 4

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  PART 5

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Postscript

  Epilogue

  Epilogue II

  Connect with Tom Connolly Online

  The Adored

  By

  T.R. Connolly

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  John Walsh, the police officer who killed Curtis Strong, described it as, “self-defense, a terrible accident.”

  Curtis Strong had known Willie Stevens for thirty years, ever since they were two years old, living in the same crumbling row house on Henry Street on the Waterside peninsula of Stamford, Connecticut. The neighborhood was not much then, mostly Italian tradesmen, but by 1995 it was worse, owned by slum lords and developers, all waiting for Stamford’s redevelopment to continue in this area. It was bleak, devoid of spirit. Willie and Curtis still lived in the neighborhood, which was 80 percent black at the time of Curtis Strong’s death, a death that citizens of the neighborhood called legalized murder.

  Friday night was Strong’s night out with his friend. He would leave work at the Clairol warehouse, walk the seven blocks home through old industrialized Stamford and have dinner with his wife and son, Curtis Jr. Then he would walk the eight blocks to the pool hall on West Main Street where he and Willie would drink beer and play pool until 11:00 p.m.

  The pool hall was dark, four tables, lit by four lights, and around the room were chairs where friends of a lifetime of poverty sat in the dark talking and drinking beer. Drugs were prevalent on West Main Street, in the bars and in the pool hall. Drugs first showed up as draftees from the Vietnam War returned with their habits and increased again as soldiers returned from the Gulf War, in less numbers than Vietnam, but with the same drug addictions. The police had always winked at the illegal sale of beer in the pool hall, but a wave of drug related crimes in the area brought greater scrutiny to the establishment. The drugs were something Strong was aware of but oblivious to. He and Stevens were both veterans but had done their time without drugs and had come out of the service with only a thirst for a good night out drinking beer and playing pool.

  This night all four tables were in use, and players emerged from the darkened sidelines to place their quarters on the table to play the winners of the current game. Joe Howard ran the pool hall. Howard would just as soon spit on the floor as say hello to his customers, and most times did when they greeted him. He had two tables for singles and two tables for doubles. Willie and Curtis always played doubles and rarely spent fifty cents playing pool for three hours. The challenger paid, and Joe Howard would rack the balls and take the quarter. Most Friday nights they barely spent five dollars between them, usually betting beers for winners, which Joe Howard would get from the cooler and charge the losers $1.50 a bottle.

  The headline of the Stamford Advocate read, “One dead, one seriously injured in accidental shooting by police at Westside pool hall.” It had started simply. The two young black men who challenged Willie Stevens and Curtis Strong to the next game on the pool table were high on something other than beer. They had been abusive in victory earlier at the other doubles table. Joe Howard told them to pipe down, and they gave him some lip. Willie stepped in and invited the two to put their mouths to work “putting up some bread on the cue.” They decided to take on Willie and Curtis, who were considered unbeatable before 10 p.m. but easier after several beers had gone down. It was ten thirty on October 28, 1995, and the challengers were beating the old pros. As the younger of the challengers, Jesse Marks, the one with the scar beneath his left eye, drew his stick back; it hit the arm of a player at the other doubles table, causing him to miss a shot. And causing him to remark, “Hey, asshole, watch what you’re doing.”

  At the moment that Jesse Marks smashed his stick against the temple of the curser, a pair of white police officers entered the pool hall on a “routine drug patrol,” as the Advocate stated the next day.

  A fist fight erupted between the two players, and the police attempted to break it up. When the larger of the two officers threw the young pool player on top of the table, slamming his head onto the slate surface, his playing partner grabbed the officer’s arm. The other police officer, John Walsh, grabbed his gun and said, “Back off nigger or you’re dead meat.”

  Willie Stevens became incensed and stepped forward. “Hey, watch your mouth you white shithead.” The officer spun left at a forty-five degree angle and saw Willie advancing towards him. Curtis Strong, sensing the situation had gotten out of hand, rushed to try to grab his friend before he did something stupid. The officer jerked a half step further left on seeing Strong advance and fired a bulle
t into Strong’s heart at a distance of five feet.

  Chapter 2

  Reading the Advocate’s account of the incident the next day, Jonathan Barnes remarked to his wife, “What the hell is wrong with these people. Look at this, the guy gets killed in a fight at the pool hall and leaves his wife with a twelve-year-old boy, our Parker’s age. This place on West Main Street is a cesspool, yet these men leave their families at home and go there to drink and do drugs. I can’t understand it. I tell you, Margaret, we will live to see the day when Barnes Construction demolishes that whole blot on the city. That and the hellhole they live in right across the water.”

  Barnes looked out from the library window of his home on Shippan Point. Across the harbor, beyond the lighthouse, not more than a half mile away, there were beautiful homes, but behind them, by only several hundred yards, was part of the “blight of Stamford,” as Barnes called it. Waterside and beyond, Southfield. “A ghetto, we’ve built ourselves a ghetto, can you believe it. In Stamford, our “gateway to New England,” a quote he coined heralding the massive construction project his firm had grabbed to transform the city from blue collar town to corporate headquarters city. “It all has to go,” Barnes concluded.

  Jonathan Barnes did not have total say as to what would go and what would stay in an ambitious urban renewal plan for Stamford, but as the prime contractor for the city’s redevelopment, his advice was sought and heeded. His company’s reputation for completing quality work, on time, and under budget gave him more leverage than a contractor might otherwise have. Most contractors, in fact, were not interested in the aesthetics of the work but in the profits. Barnes, a sixth-generation Stamfordite, who could trace his roots to a seventeenth century sea captain trading tea out of Stamford harbor, had what he considered a vested interest in, if not an obligation for, Stamford’s future.

  In 1920 Parker Barnes Sr. founded the family construction business, two years after he returned from serving as an infantry officer in World War I. He rejected his parents’ wishes that he go to Yale, as each male son in the Barnes family had for four generations. Instead he chose to marry Ellen Sullivan, who waited for him for the two years he was in France in the war. He began as an apprentice carpenter and quickly learned the interrelationships that existed among tradesmen. In 1920 he built his first house with the help of five friends—two masons, a carpenter, a plumber and an electrician. By 1925 he had built forty homes and two office buildings in Stamford. Barnes Construction employed twenty people full time including the five original friends.

  In the 1920s the trade union movement was gaining momentum, but Barnes never had union problems. His company was still small, but he generously rewarded his employees with a share in the profits and established retirement plans for all employees, a unique innovation at the time.

  It was a result of his work on the two office buildings in 1924 that his business tripled in the next five years. Malcolm Leverett, a wealthy developer and financier in New York City, had decided Stamford, his home town, needed more services for a growing class of rich families. The two buildings commissioned by Leverett, both three stories tall, sat across from one another on Summer Street, just up from the Palace Theater. The town was proud of the buildings, and Leverett relished the attention he received in bringing the new office space to Stamford. A generous man, he heaped praise on young Barnes, began using Barnes Construction on all his projects and recommended him to his colleagues in New York.

  It was in 1930 that Parker Barnes took the gamble that established him as a most honorable man and employer. After the great stock market crash of 1929, new building projects came to a halt. In the last half of 1930, Barnes paid his employees, then numbering eighty-five, their full salary from his own pocket. Only one new project, a six-family house, had been built by Barnes over that six-month timeframe. It was over Thanksgiving dinner at his father’s house that he made the request for $40,000. It was enough money, he rationalized, to subsidize his employees’ pay for two years, while enabling him to be the low bidder on a government housing project in the Southfield section of town.

  His father, whose fortune was largely intact after the crash, was pleased with his son’s benevolence and pleased he felt comfortable asking for the loan. There had been no animosity between the two over Parker’s decision to mold his life on his own. His father was quite proud of what he had done in service to the country and starting a business without asking for financial help. Even now he was not asking for himself but for his employees.

  The loan was made, and Barnes did become the low bidder on the housing project. The work took two full years, and by its completion in January 1933, new construction projects had started flowing again. Barnes Construction employees never forgot what their owner had done, and as it grew in the thirties and forties, Barnes Construction never had the labor problems that beset the industry. In fact, union organizing campaigns highlighted Barnes as the type of employer all construction companies should be, but until such time as that occurred, they proclaimed, unions would always be needed. This was a fact that never sat well with Barnes’ competitors.

  Parker Barnes Sr. ran the firm until 1978 and passed the presidency over to his son Jonathan, who at thirty had been in the firm for ten years. While Jonathan had never shown a flair for the people end of running a company, he did have a good head for finance. Parker Sr. felt comfortable turning the business over to his son at this time since three of the original five friends were still with the company as vice presidents. However, when Barnes Sr. died suddenly six months into retirement, the stage was set for Jonathan to become his own man. Quietly, but firmly, from July to November 1980, he forced the retirement of all three of his father’s friends. As 1981 began Jonathan Barnes was solely in control of Barnes Construction.

  Jonathan and Margaret moved to his father’s home in Shippan in 1981 at the request of his mother. Ellen Sullivan Barnes had felt alone in Apple Manor’s eighteen rooms with no family and simply her three housekeepers. Before her husband’s death, they had planned to move to a smaller home with only one housekeeper. All that had changed and she knew Jonathan had hoped one day to own Apple Manor. This would allow him to have what he wanted and give her regular access to her infant grandson, Parker. She moved to a small suite of three rooms and kept her favorite housekeeper in a two-room apartment across the hall from her.

  Ellen Sullivan Barnes observed what her son had done to his father’s and her friends, but even as the majority stockholder she would not interfere, for this was her husband’s wish. Still she was disappointed in Jonathan, a nice enough husband and father and always a good son, but rather spineless when it came to doing the right thing by people in the business. His main drive seemed for profit and expanding the business, certainly key reasons to be in business, but Mrs. Barnes knew he did not have his father’s passion and empathy for his employees. Her husband had driven hard for profit and growth but also proved to be kind, with a loving devotion to his people. Jonathan seemed unable, she reasoned, to make the connection to the company’s employees despite the fact that it was the people who made the company strong and prosperous. Even still, in 1995, after fifteen years with Jonathan Barnes as chairman, Barnes Construction’s revenue had grown from 50 million dollars in 1980 to 2.5 billion dollars with profits of 300 million dollars.

  Chapter 3

  The summer of his twelfth year, the last summer of his father’s life, was the happiest for Curtis Strong Jr. His father had signed up to manage his baseball team after being an assistant coach for two years.

  They spent endless hours together that spring with son helping father in his new leadership role. One night in March, Curtis Sr. came home with a list of players who would remain on the team from the prior year’s roster. “CJ, I need your help,” he said to his son. “The draft for the other players for the team is this Saturday afternoon.”

  “Sure, Dad,” replied CJ, the nickname his mother had given him to eliminate the confusion of “Yes. Yes.” whenever she
called “Curtis.”

  “We need to rank all these eleven-year-olds who are coming up. With the players we’ve got coming back from last year’s team, we’ll have twelve players on a team.”

  “Let me see the list, Dad,” CJ jumped in enthusiastically. “Oh boy, Kenny Smith, pick him first, Spike Johnson second, Leroy third, Alvin fourth,” the boy rattled off in rapid succession.

  “Whoa, not so fast. These guys are all your friends.”

  “Yeah, Dad, won’t it be great.”

  “No, it won’t be, son. We want to build a winner, and I happen to be aware that Spike has a hole in his glove.”

  “He doesn’t make that many errors, Dad.”

  “Seventeen, count em, seventeen in fifteen games. That’s not many? That’s a whole bunch! Now let’s get serious. What do we need most?”

  “Pitching?” CJ guessed.

  “You got it. Besides you, and only when you’re on, we’ve got no pitchers. So our first two choices are going to be pitchers, and after that, two of the other four we draft are going to have to pitch some.”

  On into the night they plotted, arguing over the merits of this shortstop or that catcher. Finally, when their rating system was finished Strong gave a “1” rating to Eddie Sanders. “Dad, wait a minute. Not him. You’ve got him mixed up with someone else; he stinks.”

  “Well, CJ, I’m not too sure how good he is, but his father volunteered to coach. And I happen to know he goes to every game. So, that will give me and Uncle Willie breathing room if we have to work overtime some night. We at least know that Eddie’s father will be there to manage the team.”