Here's another commission I did for Ruthie's Club back in 2006. Check out the teaser and the story bellow:
Teaser:
Getting half now and half later was still more than John Jamison had bargained for.
A Godly Feast
by J. Troy Seate
John Jamison disliked being called J. J. and discouraged its use by the few people he considered friends. Like most New Yorkers, he had any number of grievances concerning the way life was, as opposed to the way it should be. But, on this day, he ignored some of those irritants as he hurried along Fifth Avenue. He skirted the barricades protecting pedestrians from the white-hot sparks of a welder’s torch near Forty-ninth. The pounding rhythm of a jackhammer assaulted one sense while the smell of giant roasting pretzels whetted another. The grit of New York, he mused. Nothing like it anywhere else.
Although his mood was upbeat as the result of a curious case just completed—the results of which he held inside a manila envelope—there was no intrinsic love affair between he and the city. If anything, a feeling of alienation had taken root. It was a sentiment similar to what he felt after he had been shacked up with some spurious woman for too long, or the pang of culpability from some dirty job he had taken on. In fact, he was beginning to abhor doing what he was paid good money for: to dig up dirt on people who would prefer to keep their secrets buried. Blackmail, plain and simple. By any other name, it would smell just as foul, but that part of the game was not his call. He left it to his clients to extract a payoff for reburying surreptitious activities. Once, all it took was a photo of a well-known personality smooching someone other than his wife on the Central Park carousel to land a substantial paycheck.
He saw little of the big loot, being no more than the middleman or go-between, the guy who stuck the shovel beneath personas, turned up the worms, and then passed them on to third parties to deposit in the right places. But Jamison had a weakness: he loved his electronic toys and expensive nights on the town to chase away whatever misgivings he might have about his role in the universe. His skullduggery for wealthy clients paid for the extravagances that his cruddy, everyday PI capers could never procure.
This time around, his assignment had been some rich-bitch wife from uptown. Jamison had candidly captured her on film. She liked to show up at galas, premiers, charity functions—that sort of thing—but she also took pleasure in picking up bums off the street and rewarding them with a glance into a world they could never have imagined. That was her real charity work.
Jamison had brushed against numerous perversions and addictions in his occupation, but this case had a new wrinkle. No hunky health club employee or cute waiter to satisfy this affluent damsel. She preferred her pleasure down-and-dirty with some booze-or-drug-infested low-life that most people would cross the street to avoid.
As he strolled up Fifth, he observed the buildings across the avenue, above street level, above the drugstores and T-shirt shops to the corniced stone and filigree, where Old New York still survived. The shops at street level reminded him of his work—quick service and turnaround for the quick buck. Of little value—nothing that would prove lasting or meaningful.
“What the fuck?” he mumbled as he entered a revolving door just off Fifth that led to the man wanting proof of his wife’s dalliances—a wealthy stock commodities husband, Bernard Dalworth II.
As Dalworth studied the light-sensitive photos Jamison had taken of his wife dragging some rummy into a fancy midtown hotel in the middle of the night, his nostrils flared as if the smell from Vivian’s companion emanated from the 8×10 glossies. “My wife, a woman of supposed class and breeding, seeking men off the street… the indignity of what might be taking place…”
Jamison stood quietly, allowing the big-shot to contemplate his and his wife’s future.
“I want something else from you, Jamison,” Dalworth said with a sneer directed at the pictures, or Jamison, or both. “These photos beg for further investigation. I want you to playact. Make yourself known to her, and see if she’ll pick you up. I want to know exactly how far she goes with these skuzzballs.”
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