What You Sow

by Wallace Ford

  Also by Wallace Ford

  The Pride

  Published by Dafina Books

  WHAT YOU SOW

  WALLACE FORD

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ROCK WITH ME

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF

  CHAPTER 1 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 2 - Sture

  CHAPTER 3 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 4 - Sture

  CHAPTER 5 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 6 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 7 - Paul

  CHAPTER 8 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 9 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 10 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 11 - Sture

  CHAPTER 12 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 13 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 14 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 15 - Paul

  CHAPTER 16 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 17 - Sture

  CHAPTER 18 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 19 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 20 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 21 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 22 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 23 - Paul

  CHAPTER 24 - Sture

  CHAPTER 25 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 26 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 27 - Paul

  CHAPTER 28 - Sture

  CHAPTER 29 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 30 - Paul

  CHAPTER 31 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 32 - Sture

  CHAPTER 33 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 34 - Paul

  CHAPTER 35 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 36 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 37 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 38 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 39 - Paul

  CHAPTER 40 - Sture

  CHAPTER 41 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 42 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 43 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 44 - Paul

  CHAPTER 45 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 46 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 47 - Paul

  CHAPTER 48 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 49 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 50 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 51 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 52 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 53 - Jerome

  CHAPTER 54 - Gordon

  CHAPTER 55 - Paul

  CHAPTER 56 - Kenitra

  CHAPTER 57 - Paul

  CHAPTER 58 - Diedre

  CHAPTER 59 - Paul

  CHAPTER 60 - Kenitra

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  To my mother, Carmen Ford

  (1926–)

  ROCK WITH ME

  I can’t even remember a time

  When loving you

  Was not a part of my every day

  And my every tomorrow

  And I cannot wait to feel the rhythm of your heartbeat

  Turning on the syncopation of my heart

  And I know that our souls will continue

  To dance

  For

  Ever

  —WF

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wanted to avoid clichés in writing every aspect of this book, including the acknowledgments. But some things simply cannot be avoided. And I really must thank my friends, family and colleagues for their support and inspiration.

  I want to especially acknowledge my son, Wallace III, who is only nine years old as this book is going to press. It will be a few years before he will be reading this and understanding what the great hopes and promises that are a part of his present and his future really mean.

  It is a simple truth that children are our future. But children are also our present and the evolution of our past. This book is about hopes and excellence and dreams that don’t come true and some dreams that actually do become reality.

  So it is only fitting that I acknowledge my son, who is a dream come true and his cousins: Amina, T.J., and Brian; Wallace’s friends—his peers—who have blessed the reality that is the planet Earth: Adonay and Hanna and J.J. and Zoë and Chad and Dejanee and Amanda and Graham and Jared and Justin and Julian and Gibran and Zara and Laila and Emily and Nico and Alex and Miles and Brandon and Max and Danielle, and all the other little dreamers who have already made this world a better place and who will do even more as they make their own dreams come true.

  Of course this book would not have been written without the support of my agent, Marie Brown, and the patience of my editors at Kensington Publishing, Karen Thomas and Stacey Barney. To each of them I offer my eternal gratitude.

  IF

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too;

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your

  master;

  If you can think—and not make thoughts your

  aim;

  If you can meet with triumph and disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

  And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings

  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  And never breathe a word about your loss;

  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

  To serve your turn long after they are gone,

  And so hold on when there is nothing in you

  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

  Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

  If all men count with you, but none too much;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  —Rudyard Kipling

  CHAPTER 1

  Gordon

  Come See About Me

  I guess that this must be a pretty close approximation of what hell is going to be like. I don’t remember a whole lot about what I have taken to calling the Battle of New Orleans. As best as I can tell, it was about four years ago when I passed out in a hotel room in New Orleans while sampling cocaine, champagne and four of the freakiest bitches that New Orleans had to offer.

  I have had a lot of time to think. In fact, all I have had is time to think. My newfound friend Ray Beard was in the hotel room with me, and I’ll be damned if I know what happened after I felt something like an elephant kick me in the chest before I fell face first into the carpet. I do remember Ray making what sounded like a bubbling, gurgling-type noise before he collapsed and fell down next to me.

  I could not move a muscle, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ray mumbling and drooling with his eyes rolling around in his head like jet-propelled pinballs. I also remember hearing glasses breaking, champagne buckets being knocked over and the unmistakable hiss of cocaine being snorted and scraped into various bags and other highly mobile receptacles. And I will never forget seeing two of those bitches arguing over the c
ontents of my wallet: probably four or five thousand dollars and a few credit cards.

  It was one hell of a way for a celebration to come to an end. After all, Ray and I were on top of the world. He had helped me engineer the sweet, sweet, sweetest, sweet double-cross of Diedre Douglas, Jerome Hardaway and Paul Taylor. Smart-ass Paul had encouraged Diedre, Jerome and me to merge our firms and start up something called Morningstar Financial Services. One of the first projects that my new partners and I were to announce to the public was our support of the incumbent mayor of New Orleans, Prince Lodrig, in his quest for reelection.

  But Diedre, Jerome and Paul hadn’t counted on the sweet backdoor move that I engineered, with a little bit of help from Jerome’s former protégé, Ray Beard. We secretly supported the challenger, a manipulating, pliant and totally corrupt knucklehead by the name of Percy Broussard. By raising money through Ray’s new firm and getting some outright lies about Lodrig published in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans’s leading newspaper, Broussard won the primary in an upset.

  I sometimes spend entire days thinking about what Paul’s face must have looked like when he saw Ray and me standing behind Broussard on the stage at the victory celebration that night. I bet his eyes popped out like they do in the cartoons—replete with springs and that “boing” sound effect.

  I thought that I had thought of everything. I had moved funds from my former firm, G.S. Perkins, out of the reach of my Morningstar “partners.” I also made sure that there was no way that my scheming bitch of a wife, Kenitra, would be able to get anywhere near the Bahamian bank where my funds were located—at least, where I had put a good amount of my money. I never have believed in having just one backup plan.

  But that night, in the Presidential Suite of the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, Ray Beard and I decided we owed ourselves a private party of epic proportions. So I arranged for the cocaine and the champagne and the women. Actually, Ray had to be persuaded to join in, and I remember wondering if his hesitancy was due to guilt—he had recently married a New York City television reporter, Monique Jefferson—or to an aversion to being around too many women, or women at all.

  Frankly, I could care less, but lying in a hospital bed for God knows how long gives a person time to think about damn near everything. Like I think about the fact that I can see and hear everything going on around me, but I cannot speak or move a muscle. I feel like I have been suspended in amber.

  And because I must seem like I am in some type of goddamn coma, people walk and talk around me like I am just a piece of furniture. Nobody looks at me except as some kind of clinical experiment. I have tubes and wires stuck into every part of me, and every day, someone comes in and washes me, changes my bed linen and moves my arms and legs so that my muscles don’t atrophy completely. I have to say that the care is pretty good. The staff here even lifts me up and moves me around so that I don’t get bedsores or infections.

  I pay special attention when the doctors come in the room, trying to listen for a clue, a hint, a shred of information, that will let me know when I am going to get back to being myself. I have heard words like “catatonic” and “long-term coma” and “suspended animation,” but I have not heard a syllable that lets me know when I can get up out of this bed and start kicking some ass again. And there are some asses that will be kicked, that’s for sure.

  I just can’t wait to get started. I have a lot of plans and bright ideas that I am only too happy to share with all of my so-called friends and my lovely, faithful, loyal wife, Kenitra.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sture

  Standing in the Shadows of Love

  Since I came to America, romance has been a somewhat elusive element in my life. I have had my fun, flings—amorous adventures that make me smile as hints of their memories cross the horizon of my mind. It’s pretty hard to be young and single and not have fun in New York City. When you are involved with running a place like Dorothy’s By the Sea, it’s almost impossible to avoid having fun.

  But romance ... that has been more elusive. I have thought that I have fallen in love on more than one occasion. But I have always found that the woman that I loved was not the person who I thought she was, and reality has come crashing over my head like some persistent, eternal wave that has been intent on beating some sense into my head.

  This state of affairs—no pun intended—has not had a melancholy effect on me. I have seen too many good people do too many bad things in the name of love. While I have been curious about immersing myself in the experience of true romance, true life has made me something of a cynic when it comes to the sometimes-opposing axes of love and happiness.

  Of course, the reason that I mention any of this is that I am now officially, truly and absolutely in love. I tried to deny it to myself. I tried to deny it to Kenitra. And we tried to deny it to each other. But I now know what those love songs are all talking about—the power of love is an undeniable power, and I am loving every minute of it. I am particularly enjoying the delicious improbability of it all.

  After all, I had seen Kenitra with Gordon, and with Gordon’s driver Alex, over the past few years, and I was witness to the misery and the contrived passion that seemed to form an imprisoning web that she no longer tried to escape. It would be hard to miss the signs of degradation of her body and spirit, and it was hard to believe that she could ever find her way back to herself.

  After all, Kenitra Perkins used to be Kenitra, the media star, supermodel, fashion icon and internationally adored personality. Born Kenitra Simpson in a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago, she combined beauty, ambition and a disarming personality into a formidable arsenal that left men helpless and women growling with envy. She became famous, wealthy and worshipped. She also became one of those one-name icons like Madonna and Michael and Cher and Naomi and Aretha. You would be foolish to inquire as to her last name.

  I just cannot begin to remember when I fell in love with Kenitra. But I know that during one of her infrequent visits to check on Gordon, she stopped at Dorothy’s and asked me to sit with her, as she didn’t want to drink alone.

  Like it was yesterday, I can remember when I sat down on the banquette where she was sitting, delicately sipping from a flute of champagne and then licking her lips like some kind of impossibly beautiful fairy whore. Working at Dorothy’s, I was used to maintaining my composure in all kinds of impossibly bizarre situations. But there was something about Kenitra’s subtle but obvious tongue, flicking its tip my way, that turned my mind in the direction of twisted, sweaty sheets and moans that echoed into the universe. And up to that point, she had not said a word.

  “How have you been, Mrs. Perkins?”

  “Sture, please, call me Kenitra. And I’m fine.”

  It was amazing how a few innocuous words could hold such power and inference that they carried my very soul to the far corners of the universe of passion and longing. What was even more amazing was that I had seen and spoken to Kenitra Perkins for years and had never felt even a tremor of desire or passion.

  But when she focused her golden eyes of love on me, I was simply helpless. From that moment, I was putty in her hands. I was her slave for life. A sledgehammer would have been less subtle.

  I tried to pretend that I still had some control over the situation—and myself. Of course, I didn’t. I remember wondering what it was about Gordon Perkins that he could so totally dominate a woman who seemed to have the power to control any being on the planet that she chose for her own. It was a mystery then, and it remains a mystery to this very day.

  “You look lovely, as always. How long are you in town this time?”

  “How long would you like for me to stay in New York, Sture? And please, be honest.”

  Before I could think, my heart overruled my head. And then I spoke. But it was as if this wondrous world of love and lust beckoned me, and her words and her eyes and her tongue extended to me a very special one-time-only invitation to go to heaven.

  “If you could stay
for one week, Kenitra, and I saw you for one hour, it would be the most wonderful week of my life.”

  She smiled. I thought I might have blushed. I certainly had shocked myself.

  “In that case, Sture, I will stay for a week. But you have to make me a promise.”

  “A promise?”

  “Promise me that you will let me be your friend and your lover for one week. After that ... we’ll see.”

  “It’s an offer I can’t refuse ... Kenitra.” I had such a collision of feelings and emotions that I could barely choke out the words. In my dreams, I might have been desired by Kenitra Perkins, but not in my life, not in my lifetime. And now, here she was, wanting to be my friend and lover.

  “What time are you finished at Dorothy’s tonight, Sture?”

  “One o’clock.”

  “I’m at the Waldorf. Can I expect you to knock on the door of room thirty-two thirty-two at one-thirty?”

  “The hounds of hell couldn’t stop me” was the best riposte I could offer. After all, my heart was alternately threatening to stop and to burst out of my chest. My hands were sweating, and my loins—well, let’s just say that my loin area was just about out of control.

  And so, she left Dorothy’s a few minutes later and I started to count the milliseconds until it was one o’clock. In the story of my life, the best, and the worst, was yet to come.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jerome

  Just Ask the Lonely

  After my wife Charmaine died, it amazed me how lonely a person could be in a city of eight million people. And, I personally knew thousands of those millions, and thousands more of those millions knew me.

  Yet, when Charmaine passed away, it was like I was cast into a personal dungeon of loneliness. Nothing was the same without her. The movies, the cafés, the restaurants, the plays, the concerts, the very streets of the city—they all reminded me of the times that we had spent together, the moments that we had shared. And those reminders just plunged me into depths of depression and loneliness that made me feel as if some primordial monster was sitting on my chest, making my every breath an ordeal.