She did, and he said, “We’ll track down the name and the ad. Good work. I have information for you, too. The FBI caught the accomplice. They sweated him, finally offered him a deal. According to him, Brookes put him up to it all. We got a new address, too, think it might be where she’s staged this whole mess from. Jim matched it to the phantom IP. I’m sending people there now. Good thinking there, Graham.”

“Thanks. She’s slippery. We’re going to need all the help we can get to take her down.”

“Call in from Montclair’s, let us know if he’s okay. I’m sending a couple people to meet you there. No going it alone, not with a crazy woman on the loose.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll call in. Thank you for watching my back.”

“When a case breaks, it breaks wide open. Good job, Graham. Good job.”

Lean on Me

LEAN ON ME

Then

His name was Henry Tomkins. In school, his friends called him Hank.

Hank led an ordinary life in an ordinary town in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. He was, in turns, an unremarkable student, a slightly better athlete, and a champion drinker. He also liked acting. His parents, sensing the wild streak in their son and hoping it might be the trick to keeping their only child out of jail, encouraged this interest. They attended all the plays, from first grade’s Thanksgiving festivus to the pinnacle, Hamlet, Hank’s senior year.

That’s where it all went off the rails. Hank lost the lead role to a quiet African American kid named Barent Goodson. For years after the indignity, the Tomkinses would say the school simply wanted to lay claim to having a black Hamlet, their bitterness disregarding the fact that Barent Goodson was one hell of an actor, who went on to appear alongside Denzel Washington in a cop movie, and subsequently became a star in his own right.

When Hank was shunted aside for his more talented classmate, (even though he took the role of Claudius, and played it well), the situation hit him hard. He’d worked his whole short acting career to be Hamlet, knew all the soliloquies by heart. He identified with the young prince of Denmark, probably more than anyone around him knew. And where a disappointment of this magnitude would normally send a young man of relative means to the next step regardless, like moving to New York and waiting tables and trying for an off-Broadway play, or maybe even a trip to California to take some acting classes and try writing a screenplay or two, Hank Tomkins was made of lesser grit, and was destroyed. Flattened.

This damage was irreversible.

The drinking, a pastime moderated by the acting, grew to epic proportions. DUIs followed, and a stint in jail. Drugs were next, and another stint in jail, this time for dealing marijuana.