PERSONALITY

Positive: Charming, courageous, honest (in his own way), noble, generous, talented (in the kitchen), insightful, intelligent, charismatic.

Negative: Arrogant at times, a law breaker as well as an enforcer of it, blunt, airheaded (this is mostly feigned), flighty, promiscuous (by reputation only these days), manipulative, deceptively lazy, technophobe, secretive.

BIOGRAPHY

It was easy enough to buy a title these days. A word in the right ear in a small English country, a donation of grand enough proportions to put not only the roof back on the local parish church but to add a glorious stained-glass window that would bear the family name for centuries to come and a Lordship could quite easily be slipped in front of a name. The title wasn’t exactly as lauded in the higher echelons of New York’s elite, most knew he was the legitimate heir of any sort of title but given how fake most in the elite were it was never something that would bother Dalton Carnegie all that much. The majority of them had either been the inheritors of fortunes built on rather dubious underpinnings, their fortunes now mostly squandered away, or they were as he was, nouveau riche. Dalton just prided himself on being far less vulgar than the majority.

His upbringing had been less than auspicious. The son of a gambler and a tired housewife, saved from a life of waitressing for salubrious premises where the most she could hope for was a decent tip from the high rollers, Dalton had grown up with his family’s fortunes swinging wildly back and forth between what his father would’ve called rolling in it and digging through the sofa for a few bucks for Judson to get back into a game. Most outside the little spread Judson had bought for them in Charleston had no clue about those lows. Dalton was still sent to a private school, the boy brought up speaking right and keeping his lips buttoned about those lows. It might’ve taken a few bent arms to get him into Harvard but the win of a lifetime in an under the table high roller game of Texas Hold ‘Em kept the boy there. Judson might not’ve lived more than two months after he pocketed the two million dollar pot, his momma not lasting six months after that, but it was enough to get Dalton going.

Two years later, with fabricated stories of a gentrified upbringing in the South and claimed ties to Andrew Carnegie, Dalton arrived in New York and got himself established. A Park Avenue apartment was just out of reach but a job as a broker in the booming stock exchange got him just in the right place at the right time. The economy blossomed in a way few could have imagined and with his old man’s talent for being in the right place … for the most part, Dalton got himself at the forefront of it. By the time the latest of his occasionally living-in lovers went and got herself knocked up by him it was a penthouse for him at one of the most sought after buildings on Park Avenue and that title of the 21st Lord of Kew. He’d never imagined that Aubrey, the 23 year old daughter of one of his firm’s partner would end up being the Lady to his Lordship but as her stomach swelled and her father had found out just who had put that bun in her oven Dalton found himself at the head of the aisle in a ridiculously pompous church in Manhattan saying I do.

The marriage would become a sham not long after their son shrieked himself into the world. Dalton’s philandering ways hadn’t been curbed by the thought of becoming a father and putting a ring on his finger certainly hadn’t dampened things either. Frustrated, angered and perhaps a little jealous Aubrey tried a third way instead. A friend of hers on the Upper East side had become a doctor. It broke medical privilege in a way that could’ve gotten him in trouble but he whispered in Aubrey’s ear about a waitress whose after party activities seemed to have caused an outbreak of something vile in certain circles. Aubrey arranged an invite to a party she knew the girl would be catering and deliberately steered her husband in the girl’s direction. It nauseated her a little to think she was arranging for her own husband to cheat but it was better that she found a way to stop Dalton than have him continue his ways behind her back. Stunningly it did little to slow Dalton down, just sending half of the West Side’s eligible young women to their family doctors with whispered words of rashes and itches and indiscretions. In the end, throwing up her hands Aubrey walked away and left Dalton to his never-ending string of buxom young socialites. In a way she still got her revenge. Their sweet young baby, named Jonathan Patrick, Jack, for the ancestor who supposedly brought Dalton’s lordship to the US, would be his father’s son full time. There were visitations of course, but remarrying rapidly afterwards, Aubrey never showed a great deal of interest in her son. Dalton had been her prize, one that had slipped out of her hands with a sickening ease.

The same could of course be said for Dalton, whose freedom, it seemed, would be curbed by nothing. Jack grew up running near wild in his father's penthouse under the less than watchful eye of what was probably a dozen nannies by the time he hit five. Too young to understand that his father’s helping himself to the help, so to speak, was causing the ever rotating door, he watched each one leave with hurt in his big blue eyes. Each he had hoped would become a mother of sorts to him but it simply wasn’t to be. Instead the second to bear the title would be the French model that his father coaxed to turn him from a divorcee into a married man again. While Jack slid his way through the first couple of years at the Trinity school his ‘mother’ doted on him when it suited her, his father happily kept up pretences in public but behind closed doors Jack was little more than a near mute presence in the apartment.

He grew up watching the pattern repeat, the observant little boy noting how something shiny would always catch his father’s eye. New women, six of whom would become Lady Kew for a time over the next few decades, new boards to serve upon, the shiny brass ring that would be a police commissionership for the city, the art that would begin to fill the apartment. By the time he’d made it to tenth grade, a middle of the road student who could read all those around him like a book, it was painfully obvious that despite his position in town few of Dalton’s dealings were as legal as they looked. Poking around in his father’s home office one hot, lazy summer afternoon sixteen-year-old Jack discovered the locks on his father’s desk. An hour of work with a paperclip broke them open and he poked his way through. Letters revealing the seriously dubious provenance of many of his father’s favourite pieces, one spelling out in great detail those whose possessions had been seized during the second world war by a ruthless Nazi officer and sold on by his son.

Disgusted, Jack was still staring at them when his father came home. There was an instant flash of temper on his father’s part, a grip of iron on his son’s upper arm until Jack let that anger whip out for the first time, he swung and knocked Dalton clear on his ass. Wife number four, or was it five, heard the crash, came running screaming. Jack’s face was scarlet, his temper heaving in and out with his breath but it was all ignored. Hauling himself to his feet Dalton hissed at his son about discretion, about learning to keep his nose to himself. Storming out of the room, Jack ran for his bedroom. So much for his father’s elegant roots, Dalton was little more than a criminal, charming perhaps, but still beyond red handed. For weeks afterwards his father would corner him at home, reminding him that loyalty to family was everything. All of what they had could quite easily disappear if it got around that the police commissioner was dealing in such things. No more apartment, no private school, no bottomless coffers, certainly no Harvard in his future, just destitution. No matter how many times he tried to make clear to his father that they should already be there for the crimes he’d committed in buying those pieces, his father still turned a deaf ear to it all.

Eyeing the yellowed bruises on his arms in the mirror that night Jack came to an agreement with himself. He couldn’t out his father, not without implicating himself in some way, and, as his father had said, ruining them, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t do something about what was going on. The decision was a turning point. Where once he had been a boy to put his head down and just get by he would now be something very different. In a Bruce Wayne sort of way he went out of his way to foster the notion that he was just a rich playboy. Unconcerned with classes, or with college, happy to party, to spend his time bed hopping with the teenaged daughters of his father’s Park Avenue associates. Fast cars, fast women and the blowing of vast sums of his father’s fortune became his favourite pastimes. Two years later he was heading to Harvard, as planned, but it was going to take his father’s fortune to keep him there and buy him education. It was while Jack was there that misfortune began to strike at the Carnegie home. Not once, not twice but three times the apartment would be broken into. There was never any proof that it had happened, the thief had been slick and cautious, but each time items of the most dubious provenance had disappeared. Dalton suspected that his son had something to do with it but given the nature of the pieces lost there was little he could do about it. When Jack returned home that summer, all vacuous smiles and midday risings, he denied all knowledge of what had happened. Why, when he was listening to his father, would he do such a thing?

Because it was right. As were the string of robberies that would happen across the city and a handful of others over the next three years. The network trafficking in the stolen items attempted to put a stop to it but each time the thief somehow slipped their net. Those few robberies in the city that were reported were taken seriously by the police department, by the mandate of their commissioner but even a taskforce made of the city’s best officers failed to find the culprit. By the time Jack arrived home to the penthouse from Harvard with his purchased degree under his belt Dalton was livid. He had no evidence of course but it didn’t stop him from making his threat. Either things changed in the apartment or the money that had long funded his son’s lifestyle would stop. Jack tried to blow his father off, feigning a lack of concern but the next morning there was an application for the police academy at the foot of his bed when he awoke. He would either sign up for it and graduate or he would be disowned. Teeth were bared over breakfast, arguments tossed back and forth by both sides but weeks later Jack was starting to be put through his paces at the academy.

At first the fit seemed ludicrous, the young socialite too far removed from the work, too little concerned with the law to actually make a decent officer but handcuffed as he was Jack did just enough to get through. He’d thought it might end there, that he might get to go back to his other line of work full time, playboy by day, master burglar by night, but his father would never be that easily satisfied. A job was waiting for him at the 20th precinct. Practically under his father’s nose just a block away from Central Park West. As son of the long reigning police commissioner it was never going to be an easy ride, especially with the grizzled old training officer he was lumbered with but Jack bore the burden of it with good grace and the sort of easy charm that he’d been practising since the day his life had entered that grand U-turn. Wary of technology, supposedly lacking in the brains department he shouldn’t have been much of a cop but he’d long been a good judge of character and he had a knowledge of the city few possessed. Jack found it easy enough to start making himself indispensable in the precinct. Three years in there were whispers about him being promoted to detective-investigator with the robbery-homicide team but determined to keep his son under his thumb Dalton stuck his nose in and got his son assigned to the commissioner’s office instead.

It was a kick in the teeth to Jack but he’d long ago stopped letting his father dictate his life except on the visible and meaningless surface. Having seen enough in his other line of work to know how to capture those creeping about the city and helping themselves to what wasn’t theirs, Jack was able to put together the pieces on a bank heist crew who had been working their way around the city for a year. Just happening to be on the spot when another heist ‘went down’ Jack not only managed to stop the robbery, but taking three bullets in the process he earned himself the sort of front page press that couldn’t be ignored for three weeks straight. The hero cop earned himself his gold shield finally, a spot in robbery-homicide and three months of PT. Still wearing the scars of his battle wounds under his made to measure tailored suits Jack strolled back into the department like a victorious son returning home. Pats on the back continued to come his way, along with the sort of worshipful fan letters almost unheard of in the department. As cases were solved with the sort of breezy ways that stuck in his father’s craw, Jack sailed through to detective second grade. Groupies swooned over him as he graced galas and the private rooms at clubs alike, offering to thank him for his service but it was one of his fellow officers, one far keener to roll her eyes at his philandering ways, that would eventually convince him to settle down.

A year of warming her up, charming her, taking her swipes at his ego was all that it took to convince Detective first grade Zoelle Washington to go on a date with him. There was resistance there but whatever she saw that night convinced her that perhaps he wasn’t such a bad guy. Inevitably there were secrets in the relationship, Jack knew there had to be to keep her out of his criminal ways but genuinely there ended up being love there too. His father’s philandering might have continued but his own stopped there and then. At 27 he was back in the church where his own parents had married, his current step-mother and his father beaming for the cameras, his birth mother conspicuous in her absence. It was the sort of wedding that made the Upper East side practically proud. Making his vows Jack had absolutely intended to keep them but they inevitably just became the gloss over the already cracked surface.

Trying to escape the constant corseting Dalton tried to strap his life into Jack needed out. A run clear across the country was what his father had never expected. The Carnegies were a part of the fabric of New York’s Upper East side, even if it had only started with him. Jack wouldn’t forget the cracks that appeared in the look on his father’s face as the news broke over dinner at The Musket Room. Bile rushing up into his throat Jack sat through the entire meal with the news that they were moving on his tongue but as the cheque came and his father pushed it across the table at him he blurted out words he would perhaps later regret. Both he and Zoe had taken an offers of jobs in a smaller police department in Lethford City, beyond Dalton’s reach. The look of shock on his father’s face was one that would fade quickly but in that moment Jack knew he’d scored a point. Dalton hadn’t been expecting it and obviously disliked the fact that his son would be so far out of reach. Over the next couple of weeks Dalton tried to apply pressure to get his son to stay but the deal was already done.

Breathing a sigh of relief Jack and Zoe made their escape. Lethford City wasn’t New York, the place was smaller and quieter, the number of cases crossing their desks far less but maybe it was what kept their marriage going for longer than it might otherwise have done. Four years together, working together in the department. The move didn’t make Jack any less prolific with his ‘other job’. Lethford had its fair share of art lovers too, not all of them as scrupulous about the provenance of their pieces as they should’ve been. Jack did his best to hide what he was doing from his wife but she was a cop for a living, she investigated, she saw patterns in things and the one she spotted in their relationship slowly began to destroy what they had. Every lie that tripped off his tongue for where he was she saw right through. In the end he was standing there, practically red handed from the theft of two 17th century oil paintings, as Zoe moved out of their apartment.

He would move himself a week later, allowing Zoe to keep their shared apartment. His new place was grander in a way, a penthouse spot in one of the city’s most exclusive buildings, but it wasn’t home. That had been with Zoe, the only place he’d actually dignified with the name. The divorce wasn’t exactly friendly, questions still peppered in his direction about the lies he’d told, but it wasn’t as brutal as half of his father’s had been. A split down the middle of their joint assets, no back-stabbing for half of his family’s fortunes, Zoe never wanted that. He didn’t contest any of it, signing the papers as they came through. A week before the world went to shit. A virus that only seemed to spread and grow more insidious by the way. Law enforcement struggling to cope with it all and the populace’s rebellion against it all. Power outages, drug and tech companies that smelled fishier than a rotten flounder. Stumbling through all of that Jack’s been doing his best to try and toe the straight blue line without losing his mind in the process.

AUTHORED BY ANGE