Dead Ends by Paul Willcocks

had always wanted a son. After two years together, he adopted his twenty-three-year-old partner and chauffeur. Robert Dion became Robert Frisbee. The adoption also ensured Robert would be looked after when Dwight died.
    Dwight took the new relationship seriously. It would be wrong to keep having sex with a son, he told Robert. That was over.
    But Robert had a new, odd love interest. Daniel Kazakes was a failed developer, with a mail-order certificate saying he was a reverend and claimed psychic powers, who sometimes ran struggling little import shops. Kazakes and Robert became lovers, with the approval of Dwight Frisbee and Kazakes’s wife, Irene.
    Robert continued to care for his increasingly unwell adoptive father. When Dwight died at fifty-eight, in part because of his drinking, he left Robert a house and $160,000—real money then, when the average income was $3,700. Enough to last a lifetime.
    But Robert wasn’t good with money. The inheritance was mostly gone—“squandered,” a court decision sniffed—within a few years. Robert’s prospects diminished. He found himself a man of limited means and no real occupation, living with the Kazakeses. It was discouraging.
    But around 1964, Dwight Frisbee’s ex-wife came to the rescue. She introduced Robert to her older friends Phillip and Muriel Barnett. Phillip was a successful attorney with investments and business interests, Muriel at the centre of society life. Together, the couple floated through San Francisco society, eating at the right restaurants and showing up at the charity balls and symphonies.
    Robert just drifted into the Barnetts’ employ. He was a charming, unobtrusive guest when Muriel needed an extra man to fill out the table at a dinner party, always ready to run errands or drive them somewhere. He became sort of a secretary-assistant at first, but was soon doing everything—driving them, planning parties, pouring drinks, joining them for breakfasts and dinner parties.
    Having sex with Phillip.
    Part staff. Part friend. Part pet.
    Robert was charming. Odd, with his habit of referring to himself in the third person, and his determined desire toplease. Passive, agreeable, never arguing. A gentle soul, everyone agreed. Perhaps too accommodating and easily taken advantage of, some thought quietly.
    And he was good looking, with swept-back hair and smiling eyes, although a bit the worse for the drink. With an expression, often, that made it appear he feared he would be hit if he wasn’t useful or amusing, or both.
    When Phillip Barnett died at eighty-five in 1984, Robert believed he would be looked after in the will, and that Barnett had promised a bequest that would give him independence.
    Instead, he was sentenced to more servitude. Phillip left his millions to his wife, stipulating only that when she died, Frisbee should get $250,000. Most of the estate, Phillip directed, should then go to fund a chair at the University of San Francisco Law School. Muriel had her lawyer draft her own will, incorporating Phillip’s requests.
    Robert was fifty-seven. He had become used to a luxurious lifestyle, had no money or skills, and was an alcoholic. So he continued as Muriel’s factotum, dinner date, and drinking companion, living in a nearby apartment with Kazakes. He had power over bank accounts and paid her bills. They started each day with a cocktail, and generally never stopped drinking.
    It was no surprise that in October, seven months after Phillip’s death, Muriel had a drunken fall in her bedroom and injured her neck. In hospital, Robert said later, she decided to change her will and had him draft an amendment. Two-thirds of her estate—probably $2 million—would go to him. Her signature on the handwritten codicil was witnessed by Kazakes and one of their friends.
    Their lives of socializing, spending, alcohol, and misadventure rolled on. A grand tour of Europe ended abruptly when Robert’s