Paper Gods

by Goldie Taylor

  “Put your hands on the table,” she said coolly.

  Haverty was visibly trembling now.

  “Tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll say it,” he said, slumping down in the metal chair.

  “I said put your hands on the table.”

  “They are going to kill me.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  He took his time. There was no need to rush now. He traced his fingers down her spine and over the small of her back—that gentle touch lovers do when they want to stay with you a little while longer. Marvin Gaye was on Pandora, singing something about morning dew and throwing away his pride.

  “Just relax,” Hampton whispered, tenderly pressing the meat of his palm into her back.

  You’re all, all the joys under the sun wrapped up into one

  You’re all, you’re all I need

  You’re all I need

  Claire let out a soft moan as he slipped on top of her, firmly massaging the back of her neck with his thumbs.

  “I’ve missed this,” she said.

  Hampton swore to himself, with every thrust and as the thrills exploded through his body, that he wouldn’t let go this time. He was becoming a new man, the kind of man Claire married. When it was over, when they had given all there was to give, he caressed her shoulders and nibbled on her neck as they walked to the shower. Claire turned on the water and nudged Hampton in first.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Let me take care of you. I’ll grab some fresh towels.”

  She slipped into a silky white kimono and knotted the belt at her glorious waistline.

  “I like you better naked, you know,” Hampton said with a sly grin. “I’m going to tell your grandmother that you took advantage of me.”

  “She wouldn’t doubt a word of it,” Claire said with a snicker, pausing to lean on the doorframe.

  Hampton loved the way she laughed.

  It was morning now, and Hampton had been up working all night.

  “Oh, and hey, thanks for the cash and clothes,” Hampton said. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

  Claire waved him away. “I’ll get us some coffee,” she said.

  “Cream and no sugar, please?”

  “As if I forgot. I know everything there is to know about you, James Hampton Bridges.”

  “Then you know that I love you.”

  Claire smiled and turned away.

  “Hey, what’s that on your back?” Hampton called after her, getting out of the shower. “What is that fancy design on your robe?”

  “This is a kimono,” she said, twirling around. “And it’s a Japanese dragon. You remember that big assignment at the U.S. Embassy? I got it in Tokyo. I would’ve brought you something back too, but you were a naughty boy.”

  Claire dropped infrequent reminders about his previous infidelities, but Hampton let it pass. They were together now, and that’s all that mattered.

  “It looks sort of like something my source gave me,” Hampton said, drying himself. “It scared the hell out of her. And me too, if I’m being honest.”

  Hampton wrapped a bath towel around his waist, went back to the den, and relistened to a portion of his interview with Chanel. He yanked off his earbuds.

  “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My source said something about a small, upstart construction company, and I think I know which one. The CEO is Whit Delacourte’s son, Coleman.”

  “Cole?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, he runs Resurgens Properties and his company just won a piece of an Atlantic Station project,” Claire said. “He’s a nice guy. They beat out six other firms in the city procurement process. They rang in late with the lowest bid. It’s almost like they knew the numbers. You know how these things go, right?”

  “I guess I do.”

  Hampton opened his laptop and tapped the keys.

  “For a relatively new player, they’ve got an impressive track record, even with all the connections,” Claire said, hovering over his shoulder. “I’ve seen their capabilities statement. New commercial projects in three states, and a handful of government contracts. Fifty-one percent minority-owned.”

  “Coleman is still white, last I checked,” Hampton said. “Who’s the minority?”

  “Coleman’s wife, Rafaela. Cuban, I think. Mostly silent, though. She only shows up for big presentations. Everybody calls her Raffi.”

  “My source didn’t remember the name of the company, but I’m sure that’s the one.”

  “And you trust this source of yours?”

  “Yeah, mostly. And look here,” Hampton said, pointing to a PDF he downloaded from the company’s website. “Prentiss Dobbs is listed as cochairman of the community advisory board.”

  Hampton did a quick Google search on Rafaela Delacourte. He pushed himself back from the desk.

  “Her maiden name is Vasquez.”

  “So?”

  Hampton started tapping the keys again. He found a ten-year-old obituary in the Times-Register for Gloriella Vasquez, who had eight surviving children. Among them were Rafaela and Caleb, who was then a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Hampton kept clicking until he found Caleb’s name in the archives on the Stars and Stripes website. Sergeant Vasquez was a highly decorated scout sniper, with several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a story posted three years ago.

  “If this is the same Caleb Vasquez, and I have every reason to think it is, he was killed in that SWAT team raid a month or so back.”

  “The guy who shot up Ebenezer Baptist?”

  Hampton clenched his teeth and stared at the screen as he did the mental math.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you all of this,” he said.

  Caleb was the brother-in-law of Coleman Delacourte, who was the son of Whit and the nephew of Virgil Loudermilk. Suddenly Hampton understood why the Delacourtes might’ve been interested in that transportation bill and the construction contracts that came along with it.

  “You don’t honestly think they killed anyone,” Claire said, reading his thoughts. “Well, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think right now,” Hampton said without looking up. “All I’m saying is that it was a fuck of a lot of money to watch go circling down the drain. The only thing standing in their way was Ezra Hawkins, and now he’s rotting in a grave out in east Georgia.”

  “And Chip Dobbs too?”

  They traded somber glances.

  “I don’t know. My source seems to think they are connected. But Chip Dobbs had a bunch of enemies. Let’s not forget that he was tied up in that drug gang too. I published a story about him and a kingpin named Richard Lester last year, right before my accident.”

  “Who’s this source?” Claire asked.

  “I can’t say right now.”

  “Okay, fine. Let’s forget about Richard Lester for a minute. For the sake of argument, let’s say this guy Caleb was working for the Delacourtes and murdered Ezra Hawkins. Chip Dobbs was helping them, right? Why kill him too?”

  “I don’t know, Claire.”

  Claire frowned. “This sounds crazy,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Tell me about it,” Hampton said. “Tucker has been saying the same thing for years.”

  “He knows about this?”

  “He gave me the green light to follow the money trail, but Tucker has no idea about any of this.”

  “You should be talking to the FBI or the GBI right now.”

  “I don’t have enough, and I promised my source I wouldn’t go to the police. Anyway, they’d laugh me right out to the street and bolt the door behind me.”

  “Well, if people were tailing your source, don’t you think they know that you’ve been meeting with them?”

  You don’t know what kinna people you messing with.

  He dug into his backpack and pulled out the piece of construction paper.

  “Hand me your kimono,” Hampton said.

  Claire slipped off the she
ath. Hampton laid it out over the desk, then matched the curious design with the origami Chanel had given him.

  “What’s that?”

  “My source called it a bird, but it looks more like this dragon,” Hampton explained. “You’re the professional designer. Which is it?”

  Claire shrugged.

  Hampton checked his watch. It was after 10 A.M., and Chanel’s train should’ve made it into Chicago by now. He hadn’t heard from her since the train crossed into Indiana.

  “This is what your book is about, isn’t it?”

  Hampton didn’t respond. He let his head fall into his hands.

  THIRTY

  Victoria felt a familiar surge of adrenaline as she stepped from the SUV with blacked-out windows and onto the curb in front of 235 Perimeter Center Parkway. Though she had weathered far more than a dozen editorial board meetings over the course of her public career, this one promised to be more contentious than all the others combined. She would be asked pointed questions and forced to defend her record; in turn, she would demand that they defend theirs.

  There would be questions about the omnibus transportation bill that died in a congressional committee, despite her previous assurances that passage was all but guaranteed. She had done the hard work, she’d tell them, of crossing the aisle to work with Republican leaders in the statehouse and members of the Georgia congressional delegation. They wanted, quite frankly, more than she was willing to give. Questions about the city’s contracting practices and her late brother’s conduct in the procurement office were also likely to come up.

  Roy Huggins was nervous about her plans to push back on the morning’s story, and he’d said so at least twice along the ride up Georgia 400. Roy had spoken to the managing editor, Tucker Stovall, earlier in the day and briefed the mayor on their conversation as they drove to the meeting. The decision to publish the Franco story was made after consulting with the in-house legal team, Roy explained. Their chief counsel, Virgil Loudermilk, signed off moments before it went live.

  “Stovall is satisfied with the sourcing,” the press secretary said as they exited on Abernathy Road. “He says it’s rock solid.”

  “That’s because it is,” Victoria admitted. “The problem is the rock they turned over to get it.”

  “You actually hit Dr. Overstreet?”

  “With everything I could lay my hands on.”

  “So the public statement your office put out about that boating accident was a lie?”

  “It isn’t something I came to easily.”

  The news was out, and she’d put away any hope of getting the Times-Register endorsement, despite the fact that Whit Delacourte was still chairman of the umbrella company. He was a decent man, she told herself, unlike his wayward cousin-brother.

  Victoria once counted Whit as a friend of her administration, a bridge she could count on in troubled waters. It was Whit Delacourte who stepped up with the first check, for $200,000, written to the Ezra J. Hawkins Memorial Foundation after the carnage at Ebenezer. Even so, Loudermilk would almost certainly see to it that Reverend Goodwin, the slick-as-duck-fat televangelist and political neophyte, got the nod from the editorial board. She’d wanted to cancel the meeting and ordered Roy to make the call the night before. The morning paper changed everything.

  Hours after Detective Haverty was forced to turn in his badge and service revolver, the mayor arrived for the scheduled 3 P.M. meeting sporting a fresh suit and a devil-may-care attitude. The day had finally come when she could extract a long-overdue pound of flesh.

  Situated in a glistening office tower, behind a sprawling shopping center and luxury condominiums, the new home of the Atlanta Times-Register was a departure from the aging, concrete-faced mid-rise it had once inhabited downtown on Marietta Street. Victoria had led the delegation that lobbied against the move to the suburbs. Dunwoody boasted cheaper rents, and the lion’s share of subscribers lived north of the city limits.

  Victoria folded and tucked the day’s paper under her arm. Huggins followed her up the walkway and through the revolving doors. She waved happily at two security guards seated behind the reception desk.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Mayor Dobbs, and I’m here to see Tucker Stovall,” she told them cheerily.

  Minutes later, she got off the elevator and entered the bustling newsroom, where she was greeted by a news assistant, a familiar young face not more than a year or so out of college.

  “Hi, Mayor Dobbs. I’m—”

  “Olu Gatewood!” she said, beaming. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You remember my name?”

  “Of course I do. That was one heck of a valedictorian speech you gave last year.”

  “Morehouse was good for me, ma’am.”

  “And you were good for Morehouse, young man. Did you pledge?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Alpha Phi Alpha.”

  “Good choice. You’re a Morehouse man now, walking in the footsteps of giants. My father was an Alpha.”

  “Yes, ma’am. The editorial board is waiting in the conference room, if you will follow me. Can I get you some coffee? Maybe some water?”

  “Water would be good, thank you.”

  “Done deal. I’ll get you situated in the fishbowl and bring you a bottle.”

  “The fishbowl?”

  “Sorry, I mean the conference room,” Olu said. “We call it the fishbowl because it looks like one.”

  “Naturally.”

  The newsroom fell into a hush as the mayor made her way through the cubicles and into a second corridor lined with glass-enclosed offices. The mayor waved courteously at some and nodded menacingly at Kathy Franco, the crime-beat reporter who’d written not one but two stories about the incident at her house.

  The “fishbowl” was a beautiful box fronted with semi-frosted glass. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a clear view of Stone Mountain to the northeast and Kennesaw Mountain to the northwest. Every seat, save for one, was occupied by stern faces along the table that stretched the full length of the room. Victoria reflexively raised a brow when she spotted Hampton Bridges seated on the left.

  A knife fight in a phone booth.

  Huggins took a seat among a bank of reporters who were stationed along a wall in overflow chairs, while the mayor greeted each of the attendees personally. She circled the table, shaking hands and trading niceties until she came to her last stop.

  “Mr. Bridges,” she said, extending an open palm. “Please, stay seated. Don’t stress yourself.”

  “A pleasure to see you, Mayor Dobbs,” Bridges said politely.

  Wish I could say the same.

  “Likewise,” she said. “Glad to see you’re back on your feet.”

  Victoria took her appointed seat at the head of the table and clasped her hands. She placed her right hand over the left, guarding the six-carat diamond wedding set against gawkers. Taking it off would’ve confirmed their suspicions. The questions came gently at first, with Stovall flinging the initial round like hardened pellets of cat shit that missed their mark. Bridges chimed in with a few relatively innocuous queries.

  It went on like that for an hour or more. Victoria studiously answered with a litany of talking points as the reporters furiously scribbled on their notepads. A digital recorder positioned in the center of the table captured every word. She stuck to her script, mostly, veering away only to make a side joke here or there, to which she received respectful laughter. Stovall thanked her for her time.

  “If you will indulge me, I have a few questions of my own.”

  Stovall frowned and scanned the room.

  “Shall we take this to my office, Mayor Dobbs?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Stovall. In fact, I think your full team should be present. For reporting purposes, of course.”

  Stovall was visibly bothered. Bridges readjusted himself in his seat.

  “I had the displeasure of speaking with my police chief about a personnel issue this morning,” she began. “Detective Shaun Ha
verty has been employed with the Atlanta Police Department for sixteen years. Over at least the last two, as far as we can determine, he has been splitting his time conducting, shall we say, undercover work.”

  Bridges was wide-eyed now, Victoria noticed.

  “I have recused myself from the process. However, I can tell you that Detective Haverty has been placed on administrative leave pending a departmental hearing, and I expect that soon after that, he will be terminated. City Attorney Armand Daou will ask both the Fulton County prosecutor and the U.S. district assistant attorney general to review the case and take any evidence to a grand jury. A separate investigation, led by the GBI, is being launched as we speak.”

  “Mayor Dobbs, what is this about?” Stovall asked.

  “It appears that Mr. Haverty has admitted sending Mr. Bridges here a copy of a 911 tape from one of my neighbors, Mrs. Edna Gaffney. Now, I won’t dispute the legality of the disclosure. I’ll let that go out with the wash. A simple Freedom of Information Act would have given Mr. Bridges access to that recording at some point, if he knew to ask for it.”

  Stovall chimed in again. “Our story was well sourced and you are a public official who, it appears, was involved in a domestic violence incident. Kathy Franco is one of our very best.”

  “That is true enough,” Victoria said in return. “However, this is more about your chief legal counsel, J. Virgil Loudermilk, who we believe orchestrated the disclosure.”

  “That is a serious allegation, Mayor Dobbs,” an opinion columnist, Deanna McCaskill, interjected.

  “Absolutely. And I would not make it if I did not have definitive proof of his actions. Let me tell you a story, Ms. McCaskill. A little more than two weeks ago, two days before I formally announced my candidacy, a package arrived at my home. It was addressed to me and contained, I am sorry to say, incontrovertible evidence of infidelity by my husband.”

  “Is this on the record?” Bridges asked.

  “You can print every word of it, Mr. Bridges. Keep the tape running.”

  Victoria stood and began walking around the table, gesturing with her hands as she spoke, as if teaching a classroom full of schoolchildren.

  “As this paper reported,” she said, pointing at Bridges, “there was indeed an altercation that night. My husband never struck me, as Ms. Franco implied in her article. I was angry, as any wife would be, and I hit him, and, yes, I sprayed him with a pressure washer. There was no boat accident. I asked my office to issue a preemptive statement in an attempt to protect my family’s privacy.”