Brotherhood of Gold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY RON HEVENER

  BROTHERHOOD OF GOLD

  Copyright

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  PART II

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART III

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  A Note from the Author

  About the Author

  Ron Hevener’s

  Brotherhood of Gold

  PENNYWOOD PRESS

  1338 Mountain Road

  Manheim, Pennsylvania 17545

  USA

  P: 717.664.5089

  OTHER BOOKS BY RON HEVENER

  Fate of the Stallion (Illustrated Family)

  A classy Arabian racehorse down on his luck gets a second chance and transforms a broken family, reassuring children of divorce that they are more loved than they might ever know.

  The Blue Ribbon (Political Romance)

  Two young women rival for the affection of a handsome dog-show judge. Forty years later, one of them disappears into her romantic past and returns to seek revenge at New York City’s most famous dog show.

  High Stakes (Political Romance)

  Dog lovers who believed in right and wrong in a world of twisted politics and a society gone mad. The last hold-outs of American sentimentality. As long as they had their dogs, they had a chance. As long as they had each other, they weren’t alone.

  Bedtime Stories for Animal Lovers (Volume I) (Illustrated Family)

  A sometimes-humorous, always thought-provoking look at animal lovers from the author’s syndicated column, “On with the Show!”

  BROTHERHOOD OF GOLD

  A Novel by Ron Hevener

  Copyright 2016 Ron Hevener

  Cover illustration by Ron Hevener

  Cover layout by Ginny Glass

  Edited by K.D. Sullivan, Untreed Reads, LLC

  Distributed by Untreed Reads, LLC

  Published in the United States of America by Pennywood Press, 1338 Mountain Road, Manheim, Pennsylvania 17545

  ISBN 978-0-9679514-6-1

  PART I

  Accusations & Lies

  CHAPTER 1

  Nothing Sacred

  “Damn reporters!” the bright-haired woman spits as she slams down the phone. Pulling a slinky dress over dancing breasts and wiggling her hips like only certain women can do, she moans, “All those lies!”

  “Who was it now?” the man in her bed asks. “The Enquirer? The Times?”

  “That trashy news show of yours, Counter Attack.”

  “But, Sidney, darling,” he says with a hint of patient amusement, “I’ve been trying to reach them all week.”

  She replies with the come-hither look of a born survivor. “Forget that bitch on TV. Why don’t you walk over here and play with MY buttons?” He knows it isn’t the pink dress she’s talking about.

  Easing out from under their bedsheets, he approaches her with a hungry body showing a life of its own. “Counter Attack,” he explains as she instinctively lowers her gaze, completely missing his face, “is the one and only Diane Wallace. I’ve been playing phone tag with her all week, Sidney,” he says, confidently taking his place behind her, pulling up her skirt and rubbing himself side-to-side against her cheeks as she presses against him.

  He smiles, snuggles his face into her hair and nibbles the back of her neck. It’s music to her ears. It’s their music. And she feels the Tango of it. “Mine,” she says, reaching her hand around and squeezing him with just the right amount of hold and pull. Their eyes shine for a long and thoughtful moment; the two of them. Just the two of them against the world. “About the dress,” she reminds him. “Is pink my color?”

  “That depends on who you’re showing it to,” he reassures her, enjoying the hidden meaning as he finishes the last of her buttons. “There she is,” he sings with a grin, “Miss America!”

  Pleased, but fretting over curves more ample now than she likes, Sidney Leigh Hoover jokes, “Miss America is a lot more than she used to be, Ben.” It’s their own kind of love.

  “I love everything about you,” he says, holding her in his arms. “Every thought, every laugh and every frustrating minute,” he says, knowing he’s got one thing on his mind, but she has another. She teases him with a playful bump of her hip and they know there will be music and candles tonight. “Benjamin Hoover, you mean the world to me,” She puts on a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses and spins for the mirror. “The whole, wide world.”

  They hug good-bye.

  They kiss for luck.

  He’s on the phone for Diane Wallace.

  “May I tell her who’s calling?” a slightly nasal male voice asks.

  “Ben Hoover. Returning her call.”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  Sooner than that, he hears a cool, smooth “Ben! What a surprise. I assume there’s a reason for breaking your mysterious silence?”

  “I’ve been watching you fight the gossip mill on your show. I like it.”

  A grin filters through her. “Thanks, Ben. Surely you don’t have time for my show, when the press is keeping you so busy.”

  “You’ve been following the story,” he laughs.

  “Front page news,” she admits, glancing at an open tabloid on her desk.

  He doesn’t laugh. “Counter Attack,” he says. “Good name for a show, Diane. I’ll bet you thought of it.”

  Pleased with his compliment, she smiles. “Prime spot. Big-name guests. Guaranteed viewership. It was an easy sell to the network. Especially in this day of reality TV.”

  “Celebrities fall apart and you put ’em right back together again,” he said.

  “It’s funny, Ben. We open up a whole new market for them. This is a nation with the highest percentage of prisoners and law-breakers in the world. That’s a big audience. And, thanks to the flaws and idiosyncrasies of human nature, there’s never a shortage of new material.”

  “This is bigger,” he says.

  She smiles, perhaps at a distant memory only they share. “It’s big for everybody when they’re doing the talking.”

  “Not this time, Diane.” Something in the way he says it sends a shiver through her. Ben Hoover, international philanthropist and businessman, isn’t a lightweight.

  “I’m listening,” she says in a way that means she understands he wouldn’t be calling if he didn’t want something and let’s get on with it.

  “Exclusive,” he says.

  “Wouldn’t touch it otherwise,” is her reply.

  “Final approval,” he pushes. “For me.”

  “Come on, Ben. You know I’d have to run that by the producers.”

  He skips a beat before saying, “Am I talking to the most powerful journalist on TV? Am I talking to my friend who interviews tycoons? Generals? Presidents?”

  She weighs the odds with the kind of insight that took her all the way from weather girl at a cheap Baltimore station to queen of a major network. “Nothing’s ever simple with you, is it?” she says. Her fingers are rolling a pearl earring and his intimate silence is her answer.

  “I have to clear the family name,” he says. “Or die trying.”

  She hesitates, then takes the plunge. “If we do this, Ben, I get to bring up everything the press is saying. Nothing sacred.”

>   She can feel his warmth. “You got it,” he says.

  “Accusations. Innuendos. Rumors. All of it,” she says. She feels him shudder, but he doesn’t pull out. She presses for more. “You might not like this—but, I can’t see a story without digging up the past. I want all the dirt, Ben. And I want to throw it right out there.”

  He smiles. “Can you bring a dump truck?”

  * * *

  New York City. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

  Just picture the mob of reporters if you had been the one accusing Michael Jackson of crimes that would stain him to the end of his life.

  Think about the nasty power of choking Judy Garland’s inspiring voice by threatening to tell her adoring public how she ran out on hotel bills when she was broke.

  Consider the looks you’d get in the office tomorrow if people suddenly believed you were special: You were the secret love child of a glamorous movie star like Marilyn Monroe. And just imagine all the mileage you’d get by accusing someone beloved and dignified like Walt Disney of cruelty to animals. Welcome to the age of character assassination. Hide yourself behind vicious rumors and cowardly lies. Get drunk on mediocrity. Cannibalize real talent and splash yourself in blood. In the sport of slander, anonymous laughing nobodies are king and public accusations get you Googled. That’s what happened to Benjamin Hoover when the court of public opinion decided to stone him, hang him and damn his name forever.

  Never mind that Ben, himself, wasn’t around when the big ride was over for America. Pay no attention to the fact that he wasn’t even born yet. Crazy stalkers, trolls and hate-mongers don’t want details when they mark a target. They want dirt. The more it stinks, the more they dig. If they dig deep enough, they’ll end up in a place called Steitzburg.

  Don’t bother looking up Steitzburg on the map. You won’t see it. You won’t see any of these towns on the map except the ones too big to lie about. You won’t find cell phones in this story either, because they weren’t invented yet and nobody called people on the street hearing voices in their heads very “smart.” It was naughty parties, glittery fashions and dandy schemes we were into. Oh, yes, dear children. Your grand-mommies and grand-daddies were naughty and we had our ways to show it. After all, it was the Roaring 20s.

  Our suits were sharp in the 20s. Suspenders were snappy and shirts were pressed and ironed. Dresses were slinky by night, and by day, they were innocent. Cars were shiny and brand new, and loud-mouthed, polka-dot-bow-tied salesmen weren’t around yet to scream at us on commercials because we didn’t have television. The American Dream was precious and bright and beautiful. It was as big and bright and shiny as our cars were. And the money tree on a roller-coaster called Wall Street was bigger than any skyscraper in Manhattan.

  Back then, we had teachers and store clerks and farmers all playing the stock market. Anybody with a few bucks could make money and they could make lots of it. We laughed and drank champagne when we could get it. Dance, America! Dance! We danced so crazy we couldn’t hear a thousand cries from a thousand cities when the money tree fell off that roller-coaster. All we could feel was the music still playing on our skin.

  *

  What Ezra Hoover felt on his skin that fateful night in October, 1929, at Steitzburg Bank & Trust wasn’t music unless the drum-pounding of fists and the wailing clarinet of a police siren are what you call a song. The heat of steel-grey metal filing cabinets was boiling over him, hissing through him and burning his heart right into the floor. “Open the windows, can you?” he said, loosening his tie.

  “They’re open,” Theodore Trimble, a dark-eyed foreign student working part-time for college credits said. “And I’m finished with the names and addresses.”

  “Then start copying the deposit records,” Ezra told him. “Account numbers, dates, balances. Everything. Every cent of cash in the drawers and everything we owe—down to the penny. Check it. Double-check it. Hurry!”

  “This is going to take all night!” the young man said. The bank had never wanted him to work this late before. He had never been trusted with such confidential information.

  “It can’t,” Ezra mumbled, taking off his glasses and rubbing brown eyes that had seen too much. “We don’t have time.” The mention of time reminded the young man of curfew at his dorm in Lancaster, but Ezra wouldn’t care that his Ford had a flat and he had hitched a ride to work. Ezra was saying, “The markets are following Europe!” as if, being from a Swiss banking family, the young man could understand the urgency. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “Why not just take the files and hide them? Why copy everything?” Theodore said, but that wasn’t what Ezra Hoover had in mind. If stock brokers on Wall Street were going to destroy his town, he wasn’t going to help them. “No! We’re not robbing the bank. We’re saving it!” He would remember this night for as long as he lived. Theodore Trimble majoring in law would remember it, too.

  Scanning the list, Ezra studied the names of all the friends, relatives and neighbors he and his wife, Mary, had talked into depositing their life savings. He couldn’t forget their faces, their hopes and their dreams, no matter what he said, thought or did. Carefully now, he put every file and document back in its place. As for any cash in the safe, it was already gone.

  “It’s late,” he finally said, “I’ll take you back to the dorm.” When they reached the campus of the private college with its stately brick buildings trimmed in white, where influential families sent their sons, Ezra handed over an envelope. “Look it up in your law books, will you? I want to know the consequences of what we’ve done,” he said, before returning to the office alone. Crimes can start with the best of intentions.

  It was after midnight when Ezra finished sorting through the rest of the documents. He could still feel the chill in the bank president’s voice from that afternoon: “You’ll do what I tell you!” Mr. Fenstamacher had said, calling from the stock exchange. “Then, go home. And wait.”

  He was ready now, he decided. He would take the list of information, do what he had been told, and he would pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He would pretend it was just another late night at work. Mary would be waiting there and she would believe him. She would have something delicious waiting for him to eat: chicken noodle soup or roast beef or ham and green bean stew. Maybe, then, his breath would come easier. Maybe then his hands would stop shaking. The stock market crashing? It couldn’t be. Stock markets don’t crash. Stocks are how you make money!

  As the proud building on Steitzburg Square became smaller behind him, the names on Ezra’s list and money owed to them became heavier on his conscience, and his rented house on Main Street never seemed so far away. Across America, how many other bankers were doing the very same thing tonight, he wondered. How long were they planning this and where would the money go from here?

  *

  “Ezra?” The big woman waiting for him in her cotton nightgown switched on the light. How long he had been sitting in the darkness of their kitchen, he didn’t know.

  “Mary!” he said, shutting tight his eyes.

  “Oh!” she said, flicking the light switch on and off a few times to pester him as he blinked to see. “I’m sorry!” she said, not meaning it. “There’s chicken corn soup if you want. Are you hungry?” He loved chicken corn soup, but shook his head, no, and invited her to a chair beside him while moonlight covered them with a lover’s glow. There was something different about him tonight, she thought, and, anything troubling “her Ez” troubled her, too. “What’s wrong?” she said, to the man she loved more than anything else she had ever known.

  “I hope, nothing,” he said, without smiling as he pulled her close and rubbed her belly like a man hoping for good fortune. “How’s our baby?”

  “Fine,” she smiled. “I was thinking today, won’t it be fun if we have twins?”

  Briefly wondering if there would ever be a time when such things could be known before a baby was born, he kissed her breasts. One baby? Two? How unpred
ictable the future could be, he thought. How much he wished the moonlight could show him what more he could do for friends and neighbors sleeping in their homes tonight; innocent of the dangerous waters ahead for them all.

  “Only if they’re good kids,” he said, before asking, “Mary?” in the wondering way lovers do sometimes when it’s just the two of them. “If you could do it all over again, would you still marry me?”

  “What?” She slapped him on the arm as if surely he was kidding. “What kinda dumb talk is that, when I’m right here at your side, like I’m always gonna be.” She pulled away and took his face in her hands. “Who else would I love, Ez, but you? Who else in this whole world is there for the beautiful and grand Mary Weaver, who could have her pick of any man all the way from here to Philadelphia?” She smiled.

  As delicate and soft as the downy feathers of empty goose nests they found on their walks together along Phantom Creek, she said it. As flowing as the cold waters where they splashed barefoot beside the church, past the school and right through town, he remembered their summer so long ago. “I was putting up tobacco for your parents,” he said to her now. “And, they just ‘forgot’ to say how many acres it was. Or how many days of your lemonade and pies it would take.” His eyes looked into hers. “They forgot to tell me their kingdom had a princess.”

  She pinched his cheek playfully. “Maybe they forgot on purpose,” she laughed. “You weren’t so good workin’ in that field, Ez. But, you were good enough for me.” She smacked his hand playfully. “Maybe, he’s no farmer,” I said. “But, that one’s gonna be president of the bank one day, and I’ll be standin’ right there beside him for the whole town to see! I’m so proud of my husband! Yes, Mr. Hoover, I’d do it all over again. Should I call Mother and see if they need any more help in the kingdom?” she joked. He wanted to smile, but he felt her rough hands now, chapped sore from taking in laundry and cleaning houses for anybody she could. “Let’s go to bed and close the door, Mary. It’s cold.”

  Under the covers, he said, “I’m not going to work tomorrow,” as if someone might be listening.