“Thanks.”
“Well Mr. Sage, it would appear that you are in pretty good shape. I am a bit concerned with your blood pressure. Is there a history of high blood pressure in your family?
“Yeah, my dad took blood pressure medication every day for years.”
The doctor scribbled on a white pad and spoke without looking up, “Well, looks like you’ll do the same. One of these every morning, come back in a month when they run out and we’ll see where we’re at.” The man in the long white coat handed Cole the prescription and was out of the room before he could respond.
As Cole made his way to his car he felt the slick unnatural feeling of the KY jelly with every step. He had a meeting back at the Chronicle in fifteen minutes and it would be a long time until he could get a shower and wash away the extra glide in his stride.
The editorial meeting with Chuck Waddell lasted for almost two hours. The publishers wanted a tightening of editorial content. Chuck was eager to get input from his chief columnists and department editors. The bottom line was the publishers felt the paper drifted away from hard news features in favor of more editorialized commentary. This shift was no problem with the World and State desks, the City Desk editor couldn’t quite figure out what it all had to do with him and the Arts and Entertainment guy kept nodding off while pretending to doodle on his yellow legal pad.
Cole and the three other featured columnists offered ways to appease the publishers without giving up what made their special brand of journalism unique, their opinion. Such shifts in policy were nothing new and came with clocklike frequency when the readership figures came out. If the numbers went up, it was “stay the course,” but if the numbers went down, the publishers cried out for a change of direction usually back to basics, “news and nothing but news, that’s what the people want”.
The truth is that readership has been shrinking since the dawn of the Internet. Instant news from around the world made the printed page “yesterday’s news,” no matter how fast they tried to get the paper on the street. What made the local newspaper a viable source of news was opinion. Local writers with a local twist on major news stories. Issues that were of concern to the varied groups that made up the city’s diverse population needed to be balanced and not favor one over the other. Left or Right, Gay or Straight, Black, White, Asian or Hispanic everyone needed a voice.
Cole Sage’s career was built upon his willingness to cover any story, listen to those it touched and give them a voice. He often found himself in the uncomfortable position of providing a platform for issues he was opposed to. That is not to say he betrayed his beliefs, far from it, it was the way that he told the story that gave the balance between his feelings on the matter and those he interviewed. Love him or hate him, Cole was never accused of bias or unfair representation of the facts. His secret was in presenting the facts. If both sides of an issue were clearly represented by the facts, as their proponents saw them, fairly and directly, no matter what Cole’s read on the issue, both sides of the argument felt they were heard. “Let the facts speak for themselves” was often the opening of any opinion Cole offered.
His opinion was never seen as taking sides but as one man’s evaluation of the facts as he saw them. The coin was always shown by Cole to have two sides and the decision as to who was right or wrong was left in the hands of the reader. It always amused Cole how both sides of an issue would call him and ask him to cover their story. It was the humanity of Cole Sage that Chuck Waddell valued so much as editor.
Cole found a home at the Chronicle and the fit was good. After the meeting he went to his office, grabbing a chocolate glazed doughnut as he passed the long table in the break room. Cole was a sucker for a pink bakery box and never missed the chance to investigate its contents.
The mail holder on the front of Cole’s door was bulging with letters, catalogs, magazines, newspapers and inter-office manila envelopes. How could so much paper accumulate in just one weekend? Cole pondered as he struggled to hold the mail and the doughnut, and open the door. He tossed the mail on the clutter atop his desk, took a bite of doughnut and began thumbing through the stack.
His system for sorting was simple: Newspapers and magazines in one stack, letters in another and office mail in a third. He took another bite of doughnut as he scanned the periodicals. Nope, he thought, no time for those, and he scooped them up and tossed them into the recycle box in the corner. The office mail received closer inspection. Accounting, must be expense account; marketing, requests for stories with corporate advertising accounts, Cole always declined the opportunity to yield to requests for product placement. Well, those can wait too.
One last gooey bite of doughnut and a quick lick of the fingers, and Cole picked up the stack of letters. Two months before, in his hurry to sort the mail he tossed, an invitation to a dinner where he would have met Al Pacino. A week later, he threw away tickets to the opening night of American Buffalo at the American Conservatory Theater. Since then he began to take his mail more seriously and gave it the scrutiny it was due.
Down deep, Cole was a mail hater; it was an invasion of his time and privacy. Personal correspondence excluded, of course. All other mail was an intrusion; if he wanted to buy something he would. He never made purchases from mail solicitations. He paid all his bills online. In his younger days, he would stuff the contents of a mail advertisement, envelope and all, into their self-addressed, prepaid, return envelope and send it back. The novelty of this soon wore off when he realized he was wasting additional time dealing with it. On some level they were still winning; this too was unacceptable. Still, the memory of returning junk mail to the sender delighted Cole.
Today there were two offers of credit cards, an invitation to speak, a burial insurance advertisement, an update of his retirement fund, a bunch of political advertisements and an oversized envelope from the Chicago Sentinel.
The retirement fund update went into his top drawer; the mutual funds he invested his retirement money in dropped nine percent so the report would be read later, when he felt worse. The envelope from Chicago was oversized for a letter and felt like something smaller was enclosed within it. Cole took the letter opener, given him by the Sunrise Downtown Rotary Club for speaking to their group at the ungodly hour of five a.m., and slit the top of the envelope. Inside was a second envelope. On the front was a yellow return sticker stating that the forwarding on his mail expired. Over it was a white sticker addressed to Cole at the Sentinel. The return address was C. W. Langhorne, Attorney at Law, Lawton, Oklahoma.
Cole carefully looked the envelope over. The expensive buff linen stationary showed the wear of the thousands of miles it traveled and re-traveled to get to him. He slit the end of the letter open and withdrew its contents and frowned as he began to read:
Dear Mr. Sage,
It is my sad duty to inform you that your second cousin Doreen Sage, late of the Oklahoma Home for the Mentally Disabled, has passed way. She died in her sleep after a short illness. The autopsy report gave kidney failure as the cause of death. Let me offer my sincere condolences to you.
The purpose of this letter is to inform you that you now are the sole beneficiary of the estate of your late cousin George M. Sage. As the oldest, and as far as we can tell, the only surviving member of the Sage family, all properties real and monetary are passed to you.
Please contact me at your earliest possible convenience for the swift and complete resolution of this matter.
Yours truly,
C. Winton Langhorne
Attorney at Law
“Well Whaddaya know!” Cole said, with a chuckle.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Micheal Maxwell has traveled the globe on the lookout for strange sights, sounds, and people. His adventures have taken him from the Jungles of Ecuador and the Philippines, to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge, and from the cave dwellings of Native Americans to The Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler’s Eagles N
est! He’s always looking for a story to tell and interesting people to meet.
Micheal Maxwell was taught the beauty and majesty of the English language by Bob Dylan, Robertson Davies, Charles Dickens and Leonard Cohen.
Mr. Maxwell has traveled the globe, dined with politicians, rock stars and beggars. He has rubbed shoulders with priests and murderers, surgeons and drug dealers, each one giving him a part of themselves that will live again in the pages of his books.
Micheal Maxwell has found a niche in the mystery, suspense, genre with The Cole Sage Series that gives readers an everyman hero, short on vices, long on compassion, and a sense of fair play, and the willingness to risk everything to right wrongs. The Cole Sage Series departs from the usual, heavily sexual, profanity laced norm and gives readers character driven stories, with twists, turns, and page turning plot lines.
Micheal Maxwell writes from a life of love, music, film, and literature. Along with his lovely wife and travel partner, Janet, he lives in a small town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
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ALSO BY MICHEAL MAXWELL
Diamonds and Cole (Cole Sage Mystery #1)
Cellar Full of Cole (Cole Sage Mystery #2)
Helix of Cole (Cole Sage Mystery #3)
Cole Dust (Cole Sage Mystery #4)
Cole Shoot (Cole Sage Mystery #5)
Cole Fire (Cole Sage Mystery #6)
Heart of Cole (Cole Sage Mystery #7)
Cole Mine (Cole Sage Mystery #8)
Dara and Dupree: A Novel
The First Chapter: The Collected Short Stories and First Novel:
The Whistler 1964-2017
Three Nails: (A Tale of Tragedy, Testing and Triumph)
The Time Pedaler
Copyright © 2018 Micheal Maxwell
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Micheal Maxwell.
Helix of Cole Page 25
