Heart And Soul

We knew the strikes were coming...Just not as soon.....As we suspected...Elizabeth Mercy used her television show to address the fact that she was being sued.. She didn't talk about what she was being sued for at all...Which was making false statements on her show about a man after she was told the story was false and possibly driving this man to suicide after he faced embarrassment on his job,in his community et al...

Instead she made it about us...

She ran a story about Olivia as if they were old friends...True they had worked as Public Defenders around the same time, but Olivia barely knew Elizabeth Mercy...and soon she was working in the D.A.'s office...Their paths never crossed then...Even though she managed to come up with an old photo of the two of them at a party for the Mayor.. "BETRAYED BY AN OLD FRIEND"was the story...

She also portrayed Olivia as a wiley and brilliant attorney who befuddled and tricked seasoned prosecutors time after time after time and got known felons off and back on the streets...Olivia steadfastly refused to comment or appear on her show...

Next she ran a story on me...

 

How I valiantly  betrayed my fellow officers in the N.O.P.D. and turned in states evidence that put 22 people away for corruption and murder charges, which was true and then was fired from the N.O.P.D..Not true...I resigned and retired.. She said that Olivia Alexander met me at a party in New Orleans and was so mesmerized by my stories of how I brought down the evil NOPD that she fell in love with me....Not true at all.....I actually met Olivia about a year before I brought those guys down...

Then there was Beverly....Olivia's niece..

Beverly was described as the troubled niece of Attorney Olivia Bennett-Alexander , Who she rescued from an immature father, Mrs. Alexander's older brother...Now married to a Hollywood starlet and helped through law school..and who was now her partner...She talked about her mother...who suffered a nervous breakdown and who was once involved with a shadowy drug dealer who abandoned her and who vanished mysteriously....Wow!  She had bent the truth a little bit ,but had gotten really close to home...

Olivia was furious, she didn't take kindly to anyone talking badly about her niece...but she recorded the shows....She said was going to use this as evidence against Betty Mercy..

Things got worst....They next ran stories about Josie Boyd....Our office manager and Attorney Nelson East....Neither of whom had anything to do with the case....

 

She brought up their gangster past....Josie's father was the late gangster,Joe Boyd who I was told used to run Black Philadelphia back in the day....Despite the fact that Josie and her mother did not live with him and actually had nothing to do with him and his business...It was implied that Olivia hired Josie as a favor to Boyd's associates...

Nothing was farther from the truth...Olivia had never met the man...and had actually hired Josie as a favor to her good friend and mine,Fellow Private Investigator, Kevin Morris..who had actually worked for her father and had promised him as he was dying....that he would always look out for Josie...This was a story,Kevin himself cleared up for the media.

Then there was Nelson East....Beverly's boyfriend....The nephew of reputed and former gangster...Arthur "Fathead"Newton.. It was reported that his college tutition  and law school tuition was paid in full by his gangster uncle..The Older brother of Nelson's sister....True..but Nelson had no knowledge at the time of what his Uncle actually did for a living...Though he did find out much later in life.

Finally, Olivia looked at me...

"Donnie Ray...I can't let her go on like this....She's turning this lawsuit into a public relations nightmare.." she said.

"What can we do?" I said.

"She's not the only one who can use the media.."said Olivia...

II-

Olivia called our friend, Kevin Morris...He had a television station after all....and a magazine as well that was read by a lot of African-Americans and Latinos in the city....as well as Asians and hip young whites...He had a story done on us and run on the first page of his popular Magazine..HYPE...

Olivia next  called a major press conference with all four of the major news outlets....Her good friend and former legal adversary ,ADA Keith Wallace agreed to speak in her behalf..along side her...

She spoke at length about her life..She showed the clips from Betty Mercy's show and quietly and eloquently explained away each lie and each half truth and then began talking about the law suit and how this actually proves what she was saying about how this woman bends the truth and persecutes people on the air...

Beverly did a great acting job...She got teary eyed when she talked about how her aunt practically raised her ...which was no mean feat considering she was very young herself...Only nine years older and had helped influence her to take up a career in law....and how her boyfriend and her girlfriend's relationship to bad people didn't make either of them bad...."You can't help who you're related to."she said.

It worked..After the press conference and the Television broadcasts....Ratings for Hard Bottom dropped steadily..and for the first time, people openly criticized Betty Mercy....and openly questioned her law suit...The public is fickle...Olivia played on it's fickleness...

Olivia appeared on the cover of PHILADELPHIA Magazine and all of a sudden , my wife had become a media sensation....The law suit and the suicide death of Charles "Chucky" Thomas was now the talk of the city and sympathy was shifting their way....Olivia was pictured as "A female David going up against the Goliath that was Betty Mercy."

Strike one..Strike two, Score Olivia...She had turned public perception on it's ear..

III-

My wife,Olivia smiled and sipped on a tumbler of coffee....We were at the courthouse one day the next week for an unrelated case..

She looked great....I smiled at her...

"Wow!" I said..

''What?" she said smiling..

"In just a few weeks...You have completely turned the conversation around." I said.

"Yes...Now Betty Mercy knows we are serious." said Olivia...

"Exactly ,now what do you think her next move is going to be?" I asked..

"She doesn't have any next move"said Olivia...

"Baby....I'm surprised at you....Of course she does....She's going to retry this nasty case all over again...She's going to say she was justified in saying Chucky Thomas was a pervert and that he terrorized this girl...You see the number she almost did on us by just bending the truth a little...Think what she can do to a dead man who can't speak for himself?  That's why I'm going to investigate him thoroughly....Your friend Celeste too....She couldn't discredit us...but she doesn't need to...That was just intimidation....She's going to discredit your entire case...Which is what you would do if you were her....The thing is , to beat her to it...To be a few steps ahead of her on the chess board."I said.

Olivia smiled and looked around...There was no one in the hallway of the courthouse..

"You would have made a good lawyer..."she said...

"Well I was a detective...I had to know the law somewhat and strategy when I was arresting a suspect.." I said...

She kissed me long and softly...

I pulled her to me and returned her passionate kiss....

"Ummmmmm...there any empty rooms in here?"I asked..

"Yes...I'm sure they are....but would you really want to risk us getting caught doing that in here?"she asked, smiling at me and rubbing her index finger across my lips..

"As usual, you're always right." I said...Kissing her again..

Olivia smiled and eased out of my embrace...

"I'm not always right......You don't know how wrong I want to be right now."she said.

"You could fool me." I said...and I stood there and watched her as she walked away...

We had spent most of our energy defending ourselves...I knew my wife and I knew she made her reputation as a great lawyer by never being surprised...Instead of daydreaming about...What I needed to do was give her some heart and soul...I needed to give her all the information available on the deceased Charles Thomas and his accuser, Beatrice Priestley...
IV-

Beatrice Priestly was the person I decided to investigate first....On the show Hard Bottom and in much of the media she was described as an innocent young girl, victimized by a serial stalker who broke into her house and snapped a photo of his huge bulge in his pants on her very phone...

To think that such a simple case had been blown out of proportion like this was a testimony to the power of social media and the media in general..And the fact that the public was still willing to believe the worst when it came to a Black man involved with a White woman...Even in this day and age.

I had but one photo of her, a photo of a very attractive and shapely young woman clad only in her panties and a green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt...The t-shirt seemed too small...Her huge breasts were practically busting out of the shirt...

Yet on Hard Bottom she appeared in a skirt that came to her calfs..A very conservative blouse and her hair in a bun....A closer look at Beatrice Priestly showed she was anything but the poor victimized young lady shown on television.

She had been born Beatrice Younge in Philadelphia Pa.  Had been educated in Philadelphia Public and Catholic Schools...She had been thrown out of Catholic school in the 10th grade after being caught giving the Principal a blow job....

She got pregnant in the 11th grade and had an abortion...Another pregnancy in her senior year ended in a miscarriage...

She attended Dartmouth University...In her Sophmore year she accused a professor and a male student she had been involved with ,with sexual harassment and stalking... The Professor settled out of court...The student was arrested , but later released and kicked out of school...

She graduated with honors and returned to Philadelphia...She worked at and was let go from three firms in one year...The reason given was her repeated claims of sexual harassment and" relationship drama" with several males at these jobs..

She met Micheal Priestley soon afterwords and after a brief courtship..They married. The marriage lasted little over a year and then the two amicably separated...

It was around this time that she actually met Charles "Chucky" Thomas...an attorney and investment banker, who was separated himself from his first wife...

The two lived together all of one month....For reasons never explained..Charles "Chucky"Thomas moved out and ended the relationship...

He divorced his wife a few months later and soon after began dating ,Attorney Celeste Tate who he had met on a trip to New York City..

I checked his phone records and it showed that she texted him and called him repeatedly...Often sending him racy photos of her in her panties and bra...or in lingerie...

Sometimes he returned the texts with a racy remark or two...and then after awhile...He stopped accepting her calls or texting at all..

His relationship with Celeste was getting deeper and they had moved in together and had gotten engaged...

This was when the reports of stalking began to circulate....

Police reports showed that she called them on a record 17 occassions and each time ,they could find no evidence that anyone had been across the street or on her property....Until they found the selfie on her phone of Charles "Chucky" Thomas...

He admitted to having a previous relationship with her...but said that he had broke it off and had not been in her apartment complex...

Despite the fact that police could find not one person who placed him in the neighborhood or on her property and a thorough investigation proved that the photo in her phone was from his Facebook page and thus taken elsewhere...Betty Mercy continued to air the story...

I talked to one of the Detectives that worked the case...We met in a diner..

"Hey look...At first I wanted to lock this guy up...I thought he was a perv...but the evidence cleared him..We couldn't find one neighbor,one store owner that put him in that neighborhood...We checked the ATM Cams, the crime stopper cams, everything..nothin...No fingerprints or DNA...and to make matters worse...His debit and credit cards put him halfway across town at the time she claims he was in her house...All that and the fact that the photo was taken somewhere else..It just wasn't this guy...That's why we never arrested him or charged him with anything..The guy was innocent...We told Betty Mercy that...She wasn't interested in the facts...She didn't care...She kept airing the story...Even after ADA  Keith Wallace and a judge told her to knock it off..." he said.

"Yeah well....It's not your fault...But because she kept airing it...People labeled him a pervert,a weirdo, a sicko and what not on Twitter,Facebook, at his job, Church...etc..He was publicly humiliated...He took his life about six months ago." I said.

"Damn...Yeah..I heard that...Damn shame..." said the Detective..

Charles "Chucky "Thomas was no walk in the park either....

Born and raised in Philadelphia PA.  He was educated in the Philadelphia Public School System...Drove a Beverage Truck for the Coca Cola Bottling Company and put himself through night school at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of business.....Later on he moved to New York ,and got a job at a Tony Investment firm and decided to go to St.John's...Nelson's alma -mater and get his J.D. (Law Degree),now both a lawyer and an investment banker..He began to rake in the big bucks...

He suffered the first of two nervous breakdowns shortly afterword....He moved to Philadelphia and got another high paying job and married a young woman who he worked with...They were married for three years and agreed to amicably seperate..It was around this time he began a torrid affair with Beatrice Priestly...Who was herself recently divorced...

The two broke up, he returned to New York briefly and he got involved with successful New York Lawyer Celeste Tate who like him was from Philly...This time the relationship clicked and he found himself engaged...

His therapist agreed to talk to me  and revealed that Mr. Thomas had extreme feelings of Anxiety and Depression and that this was putting a strain on his relationship with Celeste and plus the stress of being badgered by Beatrice Priestly...

I could see Elizabeth Mercy arguing that this man was disturbed anyway and that he was destined to take his own life anyway...Olivia had to try and conter act that.argument.

V-

Surprisingly enough...Beverly was driving up to our Office/Slash Domicile the same time I was...She had a portfolio full of photos...

"I did a little snooping on Beatrice Priestley today." she said...

"Me too..Let's compare notes with your Auntay." I said as we both walked upstairs to our flat..

Olivia had changed into jeans and was looking over legal briefs and going through some law books..

"Hey guys...I'm glad you're here..Want to go get something to eat?" she asked..

"In a minute...Let me share my information.." I said..

I told her all about Beatrice Priestley...Which was basically the same information Beverly had except that Beverly had something more..

Beverly had photos lifted from her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts...Nearly 300 photos and in all but two ,Beatrice Priestley was clad in only Panties and Bra and had some silly come hither expression on her face....

''Does the girl ever wear a dress or pants?" asked Olivia..

"That's not all "said Beverly...

She showed the transcripts of text after text sent to Charles "Chucky" Thomas after he asked her not to contact him...They went from begging him to come back to threatening to ruin him to showing him what he was missing...

"You two did some great work......This is the heart and soul of our lawsuit...But I know this woman..She's as meticulous as we are...Are you sure we are not missing anything?? She has to know all of this...We must be missing something...What we can't have is any surprises...The hearing begins next week."she said.

"Jury trial or Judge?" I asked.

"I wanted to argue this before a Judge...She demanded and got a jury trial....Six jurors...Four whites, two blacks...Five women...One guy...It was the best I could do.."she sighed...

"She is good..She got everything she wanted...She's going to turn this into a show trial Auntay..."said Beverly...

"If we let her....She's not the only one who can put on a show.." said Olivia...

"Where we goin tonight?" I asked.

"Let's go to Jakes...Get one of his fantastic Hot Dogs..." asked Beverly...

"Yeah good idea Bev...Trust me Donnie Ray....You'll love these .."said Olivia taking one arm and Beverly taking the other...


All in a days work ,I wagered and smiled.

(TO BE CONTINUED)