Paper Gods

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  This book is dedicated to my grandchildren,

  Taylor-Marie, Brandon, and Nasir

  For Mary Alice

  God: one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe

  god: one of several deities, persons, or objects, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs

  A ship rotting at anchor meets with no resistance, but when she sets sail on the sea, she has to buffet opposing billows.

  —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Paper Gods is a work of fiction. While surnames, personalities, places, and circumstances may ring familiar, this story is a creature of my imagination.

  PROLOGUE

  March 2013

  Hampton Bridges almost slipped away that night. Were it not for the steady, decisive hands of a trauma surgeon or the boundless grace of a God he had not known, folks might’ve said it was a shame he died so young. A multidisciplinary team was already assembled and scrubbed for surgery by the time paramedics wheeled his mangled body through the doors of the Northeast Georgia Regional Medical Center emergency room. The Reverend Gilbert Cárdenas, one of only two Catholic priests in all of Barrow County, was summoned from his rectory at Saint Matthew Catholic Church to issue a final viaticum.

  There had been an explosion, one so devastating that it shook the pastor’s house some three miles away. And then came the call. According to the charge nurse, the patient was clinging to life and intubated to stabilize his breathing.

  “The Lord is with thee,” Cárdenas prayed over the open phone line.

  Hampton had dragged himself over the brush, toward the lights coming from the top of the ivy-walled ravine, until the pain got to be too much. His clothes were soaked in blood and muck, and his head was foggy with cheap liquor, a marriage gone bad, and visions of his mama claiming his corpse from a county morgue.

  Splayed out in knee-high kudzu, sucking his wind, Hampton struggled to remember the moments before the crash. The locked steering column. The way the car seemed to accelerate through the leftward curve, even as he frantically jammed both feet against the strangely loose brake pedal until it hit the floorboard. The terrified screams of the beautiful girl in the passenger seat and the blinding high beams of an oncoming vehicle. Maybe a pickup or an SUV, he couldn’t say with any certainty. Suddenly the brakes grabbed and he felt his car skidding, its full fuselage veering right, then left again.

  Boom!

  The carriage soared, nose-up, across the highway and sailed over the guardrail.

  Hampton awoke, ten yards or so from the wreckage, his left leg wedged under a felled loblolly pine. He was alive, then, though not sufficiently liquored to stave off the agonizing pain. He wept like a hound in the darkness until the sweet scent of gasoline wafted beneath his nostrils. Hampton struggled, yanking his leg until it felt as if it would come off. He gave up and furled himself into a ball mere moments before the chicane yellow 370Z burst into flames. Trembling, he felt the searing heat against his back. The roar of his own cries filled his skull. He called out for Shoshana. Again and again, until he started choking and coughing up blood.

  There was no answer.

  He was fading in and out of consciousness now. At some point, through the thickening haze, he thought he heard the wail of sirens and then heavy voices shouting over the embankment.

  It’s too late.

  He surrendered himself to whatever fate had stored up and blacked out.

  Earlier that night, Hampton had tooled northeasterly along Highway 78, crossing over McNutt Creek and into Athens-Clarke County. He floated through a blinking traffic light and onto the University of Georgia campus. Hampton checked his smartphone for messages, for the fifth time that hour, and let the disappointment well up in his chest.

  How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?

  Hampton weaved through the expansive grounds until he found an empty visitor’s space on the far end of the packed lot behind the Administration Building, three full country blocks from the Main Library. By the time he entered the Ilah Dunlap Little Memorial Library, it was around 10 P.M., four full hours before closing time. He strode into the massive redbrick structure, fronted by grand Greco-Romanesque columns, and surveyed the vastness before him. He dutifully checked in at the curved reception desk, staffed by a couple of bleary-eyed work-study students, and glimpsed the rows upon rows of books set upon metal shelving. Dedicated on November 19, 1953, and now holding more than seven hundred thousand volumes, the Little Library was anything but small.

  Hampton was growing nervous when the phone finally chimed and a flood of emails streamed in.

  It’s about gawd-damn time.

  He stuffed the phone into his backpack and pulled out a day pass.

  “Any study rooms open?”

  “Sorry, full,” a sleep-deprived underclassman told him, half examining the guest permit. “Midterms. But there’s still some space upstairs in Special Collections if you don’t mind ghosts.”

  Legend had it Mrs. Little, a bridge-playing, twice-married, twice-widowed socialite whose only reported occupation was “capitalist,” felt so strongly about her half-million-dollar posthumous bequest to the university that she never left its halls. The benefactor, over the years and long after her recorded death in July 1939 at a hotel situated in the present-day Czech Republic, had been reportedly spotted in the archives thumbing through the biography of Button Gwinnett, the state’s British-born second governor.

  Hampton chuckled and said, “I hope she doesn’t mind such pedestrian company.”

  He jotted down the wireless password and shuffled up the stairs. A motion detector tripped as he stepped inside, and the room lit up. He slid his laptop onto a table near a round-top window, opened his email account, and clicked a message marked APPROVED FOR PUBLICATION.

  A mischievously satisfied grin crept across his face. He’d more than expected a rigorous vetting. After all, the story was as complicated as it was controversial. The proverbial dams would break. Hit dogs would surely holler and a passel of fish would fry. Fact-checkers had rung his phone a half dozen times or more in the last twenty-four hours alone. Corporate minions in the legal department, concerned more about protecting profits than journalism, dispatched drafts filled with the obligatory red flags. It took three full weeks to obtain final editorial clearance.

  His reporting was meticulous, Hampton knew. The four-part investigative series, detailing the exploits of an indicted drug kingpin and his ties to the mayor’s office, took more than a year to compile. He dug into decades-old court documents and nearly drowned himself in newspaper archives, campaign finance disclosures, and reams of government emails to chase down a pay-for-play scheme.

  Predictably, precious few sources were willing to talk on the record, which complicated matters, but thanks to court transcripts and several well-placed requests citing the Georgia Open Records Act, Hampton was able to stitch together a blockbuster corruption sto
ry that would surely draw the mayor’s rebuke.

  Victoria Dobbs was a masterful politician, with equal parts grace and guile, Hampton was forced to admit. She was beloved and feared, and Hampton knew the mayor’s meteoric rise relied on both. She knew when to push and when to pull, giving exclusive interviews to her favorite reporters and doling out political favors like a busted piñata, and, as a result, her campaign war chest was among the largest held by a sitting mayor anywhere in the country. But the way she sashayed in and out of infrequent media avails, without answering a single question on any matter of substance, was legend among the Atlanta press corps. Her squadron of aides kept all but the most dogged among them at bay.

  Hampton was tossed out of City Hall thrice in as many weeks, a badge of honor he wore with glee. Written questions about city contracting were often answered with a two-line statement pledging the mayor’s devotion to transparency and public accountability. If he was lucky, some gibberish about financial stewardship got tossed in for good measure. Hampton got a rare taste of her volcanic temper when he’d ambushed her after a public speech.

  The incident was six weeks gone, and now, with the stroke of a few keys, the first story—one that threatened to bring her entire administration to its knees—would make the morning edition. Subscribership was dwindling, but print copies would grace the racks at every Starbucks coffeehouse in the city. Hampton planned to have the entire series framed and hung in his office. There was even talk of national journalism awards, and Hampton was already rehearsing his acceptance speech.

  He read through the final story copy once and again. The headline, as proposed by the metro desk copy editor, was as deliciously tantalizing as he’d hoped. DEN OF THIEVES: HOW DID A SUSPECTED DRUG KINGPIN GET THE KEYS TO ATLANTA’S CITY HALL?

  Despite his best efforts, in the end he had not been able to tie Richard “Dickey” Lester directly to Mayor Dobbs. The paper trail between them was as thin as unsweetened tea. On the other hand, evidence of her younger brother’s relationship with the Givenchy-clad gang leader was clear. Prentiss “Chip” Dobbs, who managed his sister’s campaigns for statehouse and mayor, was now the chief deputy in the city’s contract procurement office and controlling billions in public spending. That wouldn’t hold for long, Hampton figured. At least not after his secret investments in Lester’s string of strip clubs and his role in greasing the skids on the liquor licenses were revealed. There was also the issue of Chip’s new car—a $90,000 Porsche bought for cash right off the showroom floor—his son’s tuition at an exclusive Buckhead preschool and courtside season tickets to witness the Atlanta Hawks get skinned by one visiting team or another. Chip had also developed a fondness for Givenchy tracksuits, a fact not lost on Hampton.

  Chip was living a big life thanks to Lester, who was now awaiting trial on tax evasion and wire-fraud charges, as well as his alleged participation in a multistate drug-running enterprise that flooded the streets with fentanyl-laced heroin, prescription opioids, and cocaine. Eighteen months her junior, the mayor’s brother was an all-too-willing sycophant—a petty crook who, last-season couture aside, wore the family’s good name like an ill-fitting bargain-basement suit. But Chip’s days of lording over billions in city contracts were numbered now. The mayor would no doubt dump her own brother in the nearest river, if need be. It was only a matter of time, Hampton believed, before he could make the case that the Great Torie Dobbs was as mendacious as her crooked brother. His editor shut down the initial story pitch without so much as a full hearing.

  “The decision is above my pay grade,” he remembered Tucker Stovall saying.

  “This is the work,” Hampton responded. “This is why we come into this newsroom.”

  “So, bring me a stronger story or quit and start a blog.”

  That night, in a university library, as he scanned the mayor’s most recent campaign finance disclosure report, he became even more convinced that she, too, had a price and that somebody was more than willing to pay it. That brewing story, if it ever saw the light of day, threatened to destroy the city’s most powerful political machine, and the mayor would be but a runt among the pigs in the poke. He might’ve stayed there all night, perusing potentially illicit campaign contributions. But it was a quarter past midnight, and he was now late for a decidedly more pleasurable appointment.

  Hampton shut down his laptop and rushed out of the building. Minutes later, he pulled up to the curb in front of the Standard, an off-campus student housing complex, and waited in the darkness. It wasn’t long before his date for the evening, a long-legged coed with waist-length ebony hair and crystal blue eyes, exited the lobby doors, walked up to his car, and tapped on the driver’s-side window. Shoshana Weintraub was all of twenty-one, a senior in the renowned Grady School of Journalism who’d interned on the Atlanta Times-Register metro news desk the previous summer. It took some cajoling, but before long, Hampton and Shoshana were sneaking off for midday trysts at a roadside motel up off of I-85. When the internship was over, Hampton decided he hadn’t had enough. He was now making frequent road trips up to Athens.

  He popped the lock and Shoshana climbed into the passenger seat.

  “You’re late,” she said with a smile that lit up the night sky.

  “Sorry. A bit of work to do.”

  “When aren’t you working?”

  “You wanna be a reporter? Expect long nights and short paychecks,” Hampton replied. “My story goes live tomorrow morning.”

  “Can you tell me what it’s about now or do I have to wait?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” she said, reciting his mantra. “I bet you told Claire.”

  “There’s a lot my wife doesn’t know,” Hampton said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Shoshana reached for the door handle. “I should go.”

  “It’s alright if you do, but I sure wish you wouldn’t,” he said. “At least have one last drink with me, then you can tell me good-bye.”

  Hampton reached behind her seat and pulled a gym bag from the rear floorboard. He snapped open a bottle of make-do rum and a Diet Coke, tossed some ice cubes into two red Solo cups, and mixed the cocktails.

  She shook her head and said, “I’ve got class in the morning.”

  “C’mon, I came all this way to see you.”

  “And you can come again at a decent hour.”

  “Oh, I promise to come again,” Hampton joked. “And it won’t be decent.”

  Shoshana unwrapped her ponytail and let her bounty of hair fall over her bare shoulders.

  “Atta-girl,” he said.

  An hour, six rum and Cokes between them, and several turns around campus later, Hampton got onto Highway 138 heading south and kicked it into high gear. Ninety minutes later, his body was rolled into an operating room where a surgeon worked to save his life.

  ONE

  A small commotion kicked up when Ezra Hawkins entered the sanctuary. Church folks laughed, hugging deep and glad-handing as they greeted him with effusive good mornings. The happy sounds from happy people washed over the gentleman from Georgia like the ripples of the bent creek he played in as a boy. He took his usual seat on the end of the center-front pew and laid his Bible on his lap.

  Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, polished hardwoods, and various and sundry dignitaries, he knew his mama, the late Julie Esther Hawkins, would be proud to see her son on the cover of the July issue of Ebony magazine. Be it not for her husband’s sister, Miss Julie’s boy would’ve been slinging roasted duck sandwiches out at the Lake Club over in Greensboro. He was now, by the grace of God, an esteemed member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a living legend and civil rights icon known the world over. But here in Ebenezer Baptist Church, the place he called home, he was simply known as Brother Hawkins.

  He was overcome with a sudden rush of joy when he saw her coming his way. At just over five feet eight, her slender yet curvaceous frame filled out a tan li
nen dress to perfection as she strutted across the altar. Perfect, too, was her shock of coral brown hair, swooped up and pinned into an elegant bun just above the nape of her neck.

  “Good morning, Congressman,” Victoria said with a bright, expectant smile.

  He leapt up and wrapped his arms around her.

  “I am so happy you could come,” he whispered in her ear. “I didn’t think you would make it this morning.”

  She kissed his meaty cheek and said, “There is no place I’d rather be.”

  An usher made room on the already crowded bench. A pianist opened with a selection, as the mayor smoothed the back of her dress and took her seat.

  Hawkins, still beaming, leaned over and said, “And where is the good doctor?”

  “‘Good’ is being generous. He’s probably walking the fifth hole over at East Lake by now,” she said with a shrug.

  It was the kind of indifference that came with a decade of marriage, two children, and the rigors of running the city, Hawkins figured. A trivial remark, yes, but one he did not miss.

  “Indeed,” he said with a slight grimace.

  “We’re fine. I promise,” the mayor assured him. “If they outlawed golf clubs, my husband would gladly do twenty years in the federal penitentiary.”

  After the call to worship, two selections from the Mass Choir, and a reading of the morning announcements, the Reverend Dr. Benjamin P. Melham took to the pulpit. The air-conditioning unit was on the fritz, Melham explained, and a repairman was working on it. The pastor apologized for the heat as a team of ushers dutifully handed out cardboard fans emblazoned with the face of a decidedly black Jesus.

  Hawkins had been on the search committee when the bookish-looking preacher from Osceola, Arkansas, turned up at the annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting a few years back and put his name in the running. The son of a junkman and part-time preacher, Hawkins found the young minister mesmerizing at the time, and the trial sermon a few weeks later drew two dozen new members.