Judge’s building was at the top.
And he had an end unit at the top of that.
Which had the best view of them all.
I walked from my car toward the path to his door, thinking of this at the same time trying to prepare myself for the day (most especially seeing and then spending time with Judge). And with all of that, I was trying to wipe my mind clear of not only the research I’d done the last two days whenever I’d had the chance to do it, but the fact that I’d done it at all.
Yes, I had seen pictures of Judge as a little boy with my dad on a tennis court.
They reminded me how ridiculously gorgeous Dad was when he was young.
They also showed me how adorable Judge was when he was a toddler.
I had further seen photos of Belinda Oakley, his stunner of a mother. Strawberry blonde hair, ice-blue eyes and freckles that proved there was a God, because only God could dot those so perfectly across her upturned nose.
These pictures, however, included two mugshots that showed her at times when she was a fair bit less than stunning.
And last, there was Andrew Jefferson “AJ” Oakley, a second-generation oil baron who’d sired four children on his first wife, a woman he scraped off when she was in her early forties. He’d since married three others, all in their twenties, including his current wife, who was younger than me by a year.
She was twenty-three.
He was eighty-seven.
According to AJ, he was well aware of the age discrepancy, what it looked like on all accounts, and the small fortunes he had to pay when he was ready for a new model.
“In one way or another, a woman is always a whore. One thing I can say about these gals, they’re honest about what they want, they got ambition, and they’re willin’ to go the extra mile. Gotta hand ’em that.”
Yes, he’d said that.
And yes, he’d said it between wives two and three, and regardless that he had, he’d earned another one after that.
Apparently, AJ Oakley had a personality nearly as big as the vast amount of acreage he owned, was notoriously opinionated, loud-mouthed, mulish, chauvinistic, old-school, and as such, he was roundly hated by anyone who had no reason to stick their nose up his ass.
His first son and vehemently touted heir, Andrew Jefferson the Third, took an inebriated fall off a yacht on which he was partying somewhere off the coast of Greece, struck his head along the way, was not noted missing for hours, and washed ashore days later.
He’d been thirty-nine.
All Andy’s life, up to his death, his doting sire had dismissed his laddish behavior as “any real Oakley will be sowin’ his oats until the day he dies” (which, in Andy’s case, was prophetic).
Andy died competing with his father in one area, and that area was absolutely not AJ’s aggressive tactics to remain a wildly successful tycoon by any means necessary.
No, when Andy had died, he was in the midst of his third divorce and engaged to his fourth fiancée.
Not quite finished with branding the family name stamp on his offspring, AJ’s second son was named Jefferson Billings Oakley, Billings being AJ’s mother’s maiden name.
But he was called Jeff.
He was also frequently referred to by AJ as “the Waste of Space,” and by frequently, I meant that I read an article from last year where AJ again did just that.
On Jeff’s part, he’d spent a fair amount of his life earning this moniker, including, in his early thirties when he’d done some time after, in a drunken, coked-up haze, he’d pistol-whipped to within an inch of his life some poor barkeep in a busy honkytonk who’d had the audacity to tell him to hang on a second for his drink.
The sentence Jeff had served for this assault was four months.
The barkeep lost an eye, partial control of the left side of his face, full use of his right hand, but he gained the ire of AJ when he’d lodged a civil suit for damages.
“Probably asked for that whuppin’, tryin’ to make a dollar off the Oakleys,” was AJ’s supposition.
In his one court appearance, the victim’s one attorney faced off against AJ’s five.
Needless to say, he got his ass beat again.
AJ’s third child, a daughter, Patricia, clearly the second most intelligent of the bunch (if not the first), had moved to New Zealand when she was nineteen, and she never looked back.
His fourth, Jameson Morgan, Judge’s dad, had been entirely dismissed by the whole family, except his mother, whose maiden name he was granted as his first, her mother’s maiden name his second.
She reportedly adored him.
This earned him the erroneous reputation of being a momma’s boy. Or at least the erroneous part of that was that it was bad to be as such, because apparently, he was. And in so being, he’d made sure she lived like a queen after his father disposed of her. And at her end, he was photographed with a tear running under his sunglasses while attending her funeral five years ago.