The Last Goodbye (16 page)

“How did you find all this out?”

“An acquaintance,” I said. “Someone from that world. And he says Doug was well known there.” I paused. “Listen,” I said, “it isn't rocket science to imagine your husband as a possible employer. Horizn is in the same business.”

She looked stricken. “Charles? He doesn't know anything about Doug.”

“You're sure about that?”

“As sure as I can be. Anyway, Doug would have told me if Charles had approached him.” She sighed, suddenly tired. “I have to go out of town tomorrow,” she said. “It's what I was rehearsing for. It's in St. Louis.”

“Will you be gone long?”

“No. It's a quick turnaround. It's very casual, just one night. We're doing
La Boheme.”

“A casual opera?”

She smiled. “It's a festival. The crowd doesn't dress, not like what you saw. No tuxedos. People come in shorts. Stripped-down staging. Complete chaos backstage.” Suddenly, she brightened. “Come with me,” she said. “I'm flying alone, and I hate that.”

“You're not serious.”

“Of course I am. A couple of hours up, the same back. Can you?”

Not for so many reasons.
“I don't actually shop in the last-minute-ticket price range,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I'm taking the Horizn jet.”

“Jesus.”

“We can talk about Doug.”

“Doug.”

“Yes. We'll be . . . friends.” She paused. “I need that right now, Jack. You can't imagine what it's like to have someone to talk to who knows everything. It's like air.”

I looked away, just to give my eyes somewhere else to land than her extraordinary, caramel skin. “I'm not sure that's such a great idea,” I said.

“Come with me, Jack. I'm singing something so beautiful it will break your heart.”

“That's the last thing I need.” The second I spoke, I knew I had made a mistake.
God help me, she's going to want to know everything. She's not going to rest until she knows what happened to me, how the guilty pain of what happened to Violeta Ramirez makes me understand her so well.

“I knew there was something,” she said. Her eyes were looking into mine, and I prepared for an assault onto my private history. But to my surprise, she released me.

“It doesn't matter,” she said quietly. “It always comes to the same thing.”

I looked up at her. “And what's that?”

“L'amore non prevale sempre.
Love does not always prevail.” She smiled softly, her mouth warm and glossy. “Think about tomorrow,” she said. “I want you to come. We'll be ... friends.”

The merciless traffic of late afternoon Atlanta was in its conspiracy against movement, so there was no point in trying to get home for a while. The area near the university plays host to a variety of cheap, decent restaurants, and I pulled into one for an early dinner. I was three forkfuls into something cheap and forgettable when my cell phone rang; it was Sammy, telling me Odom had let out court early, and asking me to meet him at The Rectory. Thanks to his previous employment there, Sammy has a very tolerable arrangement with the bartender that puts Chivas in Sammy's glass at Seagram's prices. When you drink in sufficient quantities, such niceties add up. By the time I finished my dinner and made the drive over, he was several glasses deep into his special privileges. For Sammy, the perfect night was one in which his credit card limit and his capacity to drink converged in a perfect
x-y
axis. It was early, but at the rate he was going, tonight was going to be a math teacher's dream.

“He took her to Nikolia's Roof,” he said, before I sat down.

“Who took who?” I asked, pulling out a chair.

“He
did,” Sammy hissed. “To Nikolia's.”

“The one on the top floor of the Hilton?”

“For God's sake, Jack, there's only one Nikolia's. And
he
took her there.”

Recognition flickered; Sammy was talking about Blu. “Damn it, Sammy, how did you know that?”

“A guy owed me a favor,” Sammy answered. “It's his line of work.”

“Don't go over the edge on me, Sammy.”

Sammy stared into his drink. “The first rule of revenge is to know your enemy.”

“I know, but having the guy tailed . . .” I trailed off, wondering again if I had made the right decision telling Sammy about Stephens's designs on Blu. But it was too late now. “Look, Sammy, Nikolia's is pretty public,” I said. “Maybe he'll get busted. Somebody will see him and tell his so-called girlfriend.”

“Naw,” Sammy said, shaking his head. “I asked around. He had a little private room. He's pals with Nikolia or something.”

“Listen, the guy's not married. So technically he's in the market.”

“Yeah. He's going to technically get his ass kicked, too.”

“Sammy, I'm begging you, don't go psycho on me. Keep it reasonable.”

Sammy looked at me, his eyes bleary. “You know what's annoying about you, Jackie old pal?”

“I assume there's a list. You can start with the As.” I caught the waitress's eye and ordered a scotch.

“Wrong,” Sammy said. “There's only one thing wrong with you. You ... how's it go? You cast your pearls before swine.”

“Do tell.”

Sammy set his empty glass down hard on the table. He tried unsuccessfully to make eye contact with the waitress for a refill, then turned back to me. “Look at you, Jackie boy. You're a genius, and you spend all day down in Odom's court.”

“Pays the bills,” I said.

“I'm down there watching you every day, and I ask myself, what's a guy who talks like a million bucks, looks like a million bucks, knows more about procedure than anybody I ever saw ... I mean, shit, Jack. You win ninety percent of your cases.”

“I plead more than half of them down, Sammy,” I said quietly.
Great. Now Sammy is giving me the speech I gave Nightmare. Beautiful.

“Yeah, but they're all guilty.”

“They're not all guilty, Sammy.”

“They're
all
fucking guilty, and you know it.”

“All right. They're mostly guilty.”

“And you get them off, you bastard genius bastard.” Sammy looked at me blankly. He was a couple of drinks past fine distinctions in language.

“What is this, harass Jack Hammond night? I got a lot on my plate already.”

“My point,” Sammy said, gathering his thoughts, “is that compared to you, I'm a moron.”

“Sammy—”

“No,” Sammy interrupted, “I'm a moron. And even with my limited fucking capabilities, I am going to extract a revenge on Stephens so beautiful it would make a grown man cry.” He looked down at his empty glass. “Him, hopefully.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. A worried feeling was growing in my gut. Stephens was way, way out of Sammy's league.

“None of your damn business,” Sammy said.

“Sammy—”

“Leave it, Jackie boy,” Sammy said. “It's gone beyond you now. All you need to know is this: I see a very bad day coming for Blu's new boyfriend.”

NICOLE FROST WAS NOT
aptly named. She was, for a securities broker, remarkably human and warm. She and I had gone to college together, although she hadn't known Doug. She had flown in different skies, the elite group of pretty people who did acceptably academically but even better socially. It was a foregone conclusion she would be successful, and she hadn't disappointed anybody. She had managed my modest investment account in happier days, until I was forced to withdraw every penny just to survive. I called her the next morning after talking to Michele, looking for information about Grayton Laboratories. “Hello, Jack,” she said in her unflappably cheerful voice, “great to hear from you. What's new?”

“I've got a big pile of money to invest,” I said. “It's all twenties, and you might find a little residue on some of the bills. Hope that's okay.”

“Very funny.”

“I could take a walk on the dark side. You never know.”

“Just defending those people is bad enough, Jack, but that's another story. Since you're not going to make either of us any money, what do you need?”

“A little information.”

“You're broke.”

“Thanks, I already knew that. Anyway, it's not about me.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“What do you know about a company called Grayton Technical Laboratories?”

There was a pause, while Nicole riffled through her immense mental Rolodex. “Small biotech company, haven't made a lot of noise. I probably wouldn't know anything about them if they weren't local.”

“Nothing spectacular in their pipeline?”

“Maybe,” she answered. “I don't follow biotech much.”

“Any idea who runs it?”

“Umm, I think the family members are on the board now. Grayton himself is more a figurehead. The stock doesn't do much. Just sits there, mostly.”

“All right, next topic. How about Horizn?”

She laughed. “What about them? They're about to make a lot of people a lot of money.”

“Going to be big?”

“Huge.
The hepatitis patent is going to pay off for decades.” She paused. “It's the perfect disease, you know. Not to be heartless about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you have to take dear Dr. Ralston's medicine for the rest of your hopefully long life. Fantastic, from an investment point of view. Which is funny, really.”

“Why?”

“Don't you know how Ralston made his millions?”

“Not a clue.”

“A mere ten years ago, Ralston was a lowly human like you or me. He was heading a research team at Columbia.”

“Yeah, I'd heard he was a scientist.”

“His team came up with Horizn's treatment of the disease,” Nicole said. “Naturally, the university claimed the patent. Ralston was acting as an employee. He had the standard percentage, but he wanted it all.”

“He disputed?”

“Right. Nobody gave him a prayer, of course. That kind of contract is usually airtight. But that was before he hooked up with some lawyer—”

“Derek Stephens.”

“Yeah, Stephens. Supposedly he's some kind of intellectual property genius or something. Nation's leading authority. He's always getting quoted on
Wall Street Week.
Anyway, thanks to him, Ralston walked out with the patent, and they were both millionaires.”

“Both?”

“Ralston didn't have any money, so Stephens got paid with a percent of the patent. So he closed his practice, and they more or less ran off to run the world together.”

“Very enterprising.”

“Yeah, and now the price of that drug is three times what it would have been.”

“Screw the little people, that's what I always say.”

“It's a cruel world, darling.” Nicole paused. “Listen, Jack, why the sudden interest?”

“Just something I'm working on.”

I could hear Nicole's wheels turning. “Jack, you wouldn't be holding out on me, would you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something brewing on the street that you somehow discovered through your colorful friends.”

“Umm, maybe,” I said. “Not sure.”

“It's not nice to play hard to get when you're asking for favors, Jack. Tell Nicole what you know.”

“I can't do that, actually.”

“So it must be good,” she said, her voice respectfully hushed.

“Nothing would make me happier than to pay you back for all your kindness with a little insider information. But I'm flying blind at this point.”

“Considering your . . . um . . .
professional milieu,”
she said, “it would probably be something sordid. You realize that Horizn's offering is in less than two weeks. Bad news would be very, very unwelcome.”

“Easy, Nicole. I've got nothing right now. You start passing out unfounded rumors and you'll be selling stocks in outer Siberia.”

I could feel the quiet settle on Nicole. “So what are you saying?”

“I'm just asking questions.”

“Okay.” There was a pause, and her voice suddenly brightened. “Listen, Jack, Ralston's going to be on the Georgia Tech campus next Friday. I just saw a press release on it.”

“What for?”

“Because he's brilliant. Check this out. He's in the quiet period, so he can't make any comment on Horizn between now and the IPO.”

“SEC regulations.”

“Correct. But he's days away from a public offering, and he wants to put Horizn's name in the mind of every investor in the country. So what does he do, darling?”

“Got me.”

“He gives away a building. The Charles Ralston School for Biomedical Engineering. It'll cost him four million, and he'll get twenty in publicity. And then he'll write the four million off. I'm telling you, the man's a genius. Anyway, a bunch of us are going. Knowing Ralston, he'll figure out a way to sneak in a comment about Horizn. We can go together.”

“You don't mind?”

Nicole laughed. “Of course not. Besides, you make such lovely arm candy.”

“Don't kid me, Nicole.”

“On the contrary. You have no apparent interest in women, which makes you irresistible. And anyway, there's an adorable guy at Suntrust who's going to be there, and I want to make him miserable.”

“Ah. You're using me.”

“He needs motivation. So when I hang all over you, don't misunderstand. The ceremony starts at eleven. Meet me out front at ten till?”

“Deal.”

“Wear something nice. See you Friday. Ciao, sweetie.”

Come to St. Louis
, the voice had said.
We'll be friends.

I spent the rest of that day in court, hearing that voice in my mind. I heard it while Odom gave a pained look during one of my arguments, in which I maintained that, contrary to the arresting officer's opinion, offering to sell marijuana to a stranger who hadn't brought up the subject constituted entrapment. I heard the voice while I blankly stared at a girl who had made the final descent into the hell of prostitution in order to pay for her coke habit. I heard the voice while I worked through lunch, trying to get on top of a DUI on somebody who spoke only Croatian.