Chapter One
I cocked the Beretta, the sound reverberating through the warehouse.
He laughed at me. He writhed on the cold concrete floor in pain from the wound in his side and laughed at me with disgust and scorn and hate in the sound.
While I wondered if doing this would make me feel whole again.
As if that even mattered.
Three weeks earlier, the first of November had dawned dark and blustery in my window overlooking Lake Merritt, turning by noon into a cold drizzle that accompanied me to the cemetery. The politician they were burying that day was not as corrupt as some, but more dishonest than others. The storm paused for the grave-side ceremony, dark clouds boiling overhead awaiting the preacher’s last words to die in the wind. The crowd of city officials, business moguls, and assorted luminaries, befitting their class, wore dark overcoats over expensive suits or dresses, the women prudently huddled under umbrellas, paying somber respects to a wealthy man they mostly disliked or thought a buffoon. But he was one of theirs. The dead man had not played a prominent role in my life. I’d embarrassed him once by writing a front page story revealing his dubious investment in a tract of Oakland waterfront he had participated in re-zoning. No one much cared. I stayed well back of the throng, dressed less for success—jeans, hiking boots, battered trench coat.
I knew three quarters of the large turnout at the cemetery by name. In the recent past half would have called me an acquaintance, a handful friend, two had once whispered words of love and lust in my receptive ear. Now they mostly didn’t acknowledge my presence, a few quick nods here and there as they moved past to their proper places. The preacher called on the Lord Almighty to forgive and love one and all gathered together. I considered why part of me still wanted to be in the middle of this crowd, notebook in hand, acknowledged as a player if not beloved.
I looked forward to my next drink of the day.
As the first shovels of dirt fell on the casket, the crowd broke into small pieces and began moving off, mourners resuming their usual roles as power brokers and supplicants. The mayor and two congressmen gathered under umbrellas next to the tall obelisk marking the grave of a pioneer governor. Two corporate CEO’s and their brother the U.S. Senator bunched near the family mausoleum, where two judges, a mayor, another governor, and two newspaper publishers lay in their crypts. Receiving lines formed at the Widow, the Senator, the Mayor.
I watched two men detach themselves from the crowd and move up the hill, deep in conversation. The older man, ponderous in his bulk, thick white hair uncovered, an aged hand clutching the elbow of the other in a fatherly fashion, was Bertrand Buckington Baer, millionaire financier and eight term ex-Congressman, more influential than all of the others gathered around the cemetery combined. In business he ruthlessly pursued money, and in politics power, using one to get the other. People were pawns to manipulate or obstacles to be bulldozed. I’d experienced the bulldozer. The second man was unknown to me, blandishly handsome with a short brown $75 haircut, wearing a dark silk suit cloaked with a charcoal gray London Fog raincoat that fit well around his leather shoulder holster. A cop.
They paused on a grassy knoll, and turned back towards the crowd. Bertrand Buckington Baer stared not at the grave, but at me. A short sharp tug of animosity struck my bowels. But I was past blaming others for my own considerable sins. Or so I thought.
Turning to go, I was intercepted by a tall, patrician woman, Mrs. Mabel Addington, the one person I most wanted to avoid. Nine months ago she called me into her office at the Oakland Daily Telegraph, told me I was her best writer, her best investigator, but that I was too ethically challenged and insubordinate to work for her any longer. I told her as usual she was half right, half wrong, and half assed, took her severance check, and disappeared into a bottle of Jameson.
“You disappoint me, Jackson.” A 65-year old beauty, she gripped my forearm with a cool white hand veined with blue blood. I could feel the eyes of her brother the U.S. Senator boring into the back of my head.
“Mrs. Addington.” I held on to a bare civility.
“I never thought you would break so easily. That almost saved your job, my fear you would show me up.” Challenging me.
I wanted none of it. “I decided there had to be a better way to spend my adult years than working for people who destroy innocent men because the truth doesn’t fit their needs.”
“By painting that horrid set of canvases you displayed at that low rent gallery last year?” she scoffed, ignoring the deeper implications. Derwin Johnson would not be a topic she’d enjoy pursuing. “Badly rendered juvenile visions from a depressed mind? You’re not a painter.” She stepped close, her voice sharp. “You’re a tool for others to point and use. A damn good one.”
“It was nice to see you again, too, Mrs. Addington.” I attempted to pull away but her grip was fierce. The storm renewed its slow soaking of the earth.
“My boy, you’ve always stood in haughty judgment of everyone else. You never understood about money. Or power. Didn’t you ever stop to think maybe you could be wrong?” She considered me. “No, you thought you should Be Someone.”
“Someone like you?” I snapped. “Or your fellow mourners, who care only because of the size of someone’s bank account? I’m a little long in the tooth for role models, Mrs. Addington.”
“I’d hoped you might have spent some time in the past few months taking an accounting of your reality.” Her tone mocked me. “But I can see, dear, you still haven’t figured out why you’ve become, well…” She stopped. “Nothing.”
“I am someone, Mrs. Addington. Someone who won’t be your tool to point and use.”
“You’re a fool, Jackson Avery,” she said in a low, cutting voice. I knew that manipulative tone. My skin prickled. “People are made for certain roles. You threw yours away, Jackson Avery, but it’s there for you, still.” I turned my back on her, forcing the publisher of the Daily Telegraph to raise her voice to finish her message to me. “You’re wasting your talent. You’re wasting paint.”
I stalked blindly down the slope through the rain and wet gravestones to the cemetery gate. I didn’t care about her opinions about my paintings. Hell, she was right.
I was a journalist, without a platform. Nobody cared to pay me to report stories they didn’t want to hear about. And I refused to continue writing their version of unreality. But her words stung, tumbled about repeatedly in the synapses of my brain. Fortunately for me, a block away from the cemetery stood the Kona Club, all bamboo and torch light and tiki, with a bar stool I was intimate with...