Warren was not naturally given to the life of an investigative reporter: gathering facts, checking and re-checking sources, and digging through files. But Alma was pushing him to lead the effort to expose Randolph and press for his expulsion.
It wouldn’t hurt if he came to the battle armed with a few facts.
Chapter Four
Grant Randolph and his wife, Barbara, had moved to Sausalito less than two years earlier. They were still newcomers in the eyes of their long-established neighbors.
They managed to create a minor buzz upon their arrival. Grant had run a successful art gallery back in New York City and sold it for a handsome profit.
This was a part of his backstory, but certainly not all.
Randolph was a native of Providence, Rhode Island. Degreed at Brown University in art history, he came to New York City during the struggling economy of the early1990s. After two years of working at a long-established Upper East Side gallery, he, along with two equally young and adventuresome partners, made a bold move into the emerging art scene in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo. The area, south of Houston Street and north of Canal Street, was in transition at the time, with one block showing the promise of a coming new century and another block still suffering from the neglect of the 1960s.
Their gamble turned out to be a wise one. As the city began to emerge from a decade of slow growth, their gallery, The Discerning Eye, became a destination for artists on their way up, and for buyers looking to purchase the art of a select few painters and sculptors with promising futures.
Barbara Stevens came to work as a sales associate for The Discerning Eye just at a time the gallery—thanks to a feature in The New York Times—was gaining awareness. She had a newly minted degree in art history from nearby New York University. That, and her twenty-five-year-old body, soon attracted the eager eyes of the then thirty-year-old partner and gallery director, Grant Randolph.
They were both attractive people. Grant had thick, dark, wavy hair, brown eyes, and a sweet smile that, to Barbara, seemed to say, “I’m a lot more dangerous than I look.”
And Barbara was a young woman who defined the word “Wow” to her legion of admirers. Her light brown hair was cut short in the style of the times, and her dark green eyes held the stare of anyone who looked her way. In very little time, she became a topic of admiring comments and conversation in the tight circle of New York’s art gallery world.
Barbara’s carefully presented appearance—proper, but with a hint of mischief—attracted Grant’s intellectual and carnal appetites. At the same time, Grant’s intelligence, charm, and purposeful demeanor were wildly attractive to Barbara.
Within six months of Barbara’s arrival at the gallery, Grant had kicked his Jamaican artist girlfriend to the curb and moved Barbara into his lower-Manhattan condominium. It was in one of a crop of new high rises that offered views of the harbor and the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Years later, on the day before 9/11, Grant begged off an eight o’clock breakfast invitation for the following morning at Windows on the World with a London art broker. He and Barbara had planned to sleep in, take in an exhibit at yet another new SoHo gallery, and then enjoy a leisurely day in celebration of their fifth wedding anniversary.
Because of the double-paned windows that helped soften the din of a city that never sleeps, the Randolphs never heard the plane that crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 AM. But the scream of sirens that began moments later caused both Grant and Barbara to bolt out of bed. They didn’t think to turn on the TV until eighteen minutes later when they looked on in silent horror as a second plane flew directly into the 80th floor of the South Tower.
“Oh my God!” Grant screamed as Barbara’s knees buckled watching the unfolding horror. The South Tower fell first in an explosion of dust that gave it the appearance of an upside down volcanic eruption. Both were staring in stunned silence, mumbling tearfully, “Oh God! Oh God!”
Thirty minutes later, they gasped and held their breaths with the same sense of stunned disbelief as the North Tower collapsed in an equally thunderous roll, releasing a second mushroom cloud of dust that added to the particles of gray powder accumulating on Grant and Barbara’s windows.
Barbara wept, tormented by the senseless destruction of human life, a short walk from their home.
Grant remembered as a college student coming down from Providence for a weekend trip to Manhattan. Walking the quiet streets of lower Manhattan on a Sunday when all the bulls and bears of Wall Street had gone home to rest, he looked at the ancient gravestones next to Trinity Church, then walked toward the massive twin towers. They were viewed at that time as grossly out of scale with their surroundings. But over the years, the twin giants became an accepted, if not welcome, part of the landscape of lower Manhattan.
On weekend walks through their Tribeca neighborhood, Grant and Barbara often made it a point to stand at the very foot of one of the twin giants and look straight up while shaking their heads in wonder. Against a deep blue sky, the endless structure of shining steel and glass seemed like a stairway to heaven.
The horror of that day was something neither of them could forget. It was one thing to watch the disaster on television hundreds or thousands of miles away. It was an entirely different experience living so close to ground zero.
For two additional days, they stayed inside their home thinking of nothing else. The gallery remained shut for the balance of the week.
On Friday, they made their first venture outside. Both were prepared with cloth handkerchiefs to place over their mouths and noses, fearing potentially toxic particles that were still floating through the air. Their
