The Last Goodbye (2 page)

The next morning there was a rustle of sheets beside me, her exquisitely feminine scent creeping over me as I woke, making me dizzy. She sighed deeply and turned over, her light brown backside coming up against my hip. I closed my eyes and felt something like euphoria, only deeper, earthier. Her sleeping was so deep, so untroubled, that I marveled once again how God, with His infinite capacity for irony, so often paired angels like Violeta with losers like Caliz. Maybe I was romanticizing. I'm certain that I was, because at that point in my life I still had that capacity. Maybe she had a bad-boy complex. Maybe she was working through some father issues by dating a guy like Caliz. Maybe she was like me, and just wanted someone of her own to save. Caliz certainly fit that bill. The mind is infinitely complex.

Lying awake beside her in bed, I didn't know if what happened between us was romantic or cheap. There was so little context, and I never had the chance to find out. One of God's tricks is to cloud the human mind at the moment of mating with so much angel dust that it's only in looking back at things that you can discover what they really meant. We fall in love and then, on the fourth date, we wonder who the hell we're with. I do know that when Violeta finally awakened and started to dress, she looked even more beautiful to me than the night before. It hit me how extraordinary sex was, that she was walking around with me inside her, every strand of genetic code containing the purest essence of myself. Inside her warm body was every detail of who I am, and I felt extravagantly, marvelously happy.

We didn't speak much before she left. She dressed and slipped away gracefully, without imposition or demand. She left me with my task: in other words, to get Miguel Caliz out of jail. If nothing else, I owed her that. And after what had just happened, I owed
him
that.

I had to buy him clothes. I paid for them myself, probably out of a sense of penance. I knew I had crossed an ethical line, although lately the lines were moving so quickly that I wasn't sure where they were. I only knew one thing for certain, that winning was the most ethical thing of all.

I met Caliz at the jail to give him the suit, and he accepted it without a word. I waited for him to dress to go over his testimony. He looked good, but not slick, which was the idea. I didn't want the jurors to know I had dressed him, so the suit I brought was cheapish, nothing too stylish.

Ten minutes into the trial, I realized it didn't matter. I had planned carefully, ready to cite the most cutting-edge legal opinions on constitutional law, from search and seizure to racial profiling. I never had the chance. Everyone in the courtroom was spellbound as they watched the police officer on the stand blowing up, his face covered with ill-concealed loathing for all things brown in the inner city of Atlanta. I actually wondered how long the prosecuting attorney would let it go on. But she had no choice. The policeman was the arresting officer, and without his testimony, there was no case. In spite of his angry, narrow eyes, sarcastic tone, and generally hate-filled countenance, she had to keep asking him questions. The jury—there had never been a question in my mind whether or not to ask for a jury—was more than half Latino, and they were hating him back with a combined hundred years or so of built-up resentment.

Caliz himself had helped; like a lot of cons, the kid could act. His expression, with me suspicious and dangerous, transformed itself into victimized fear. His voice trembled. The officers had pulled him over because of his skin. He was humiliated. They had searched him because they didn't like his accent. Of course he knew about drugs. Everybody in his neighborhood knew about them. But he had never taken them in his life.

It took less than an hour for the jury to acquit. There was some satisfaction in that, I suppose. I had to take satisfaction where I could get it, because I didn't get any from Caliz. He didn't shake my hand when he heard the verdict. Instead, he turned and looked at Violeta, who was sitting quietly behind the two of us. Which was the moment I began to wonder who was driving the train I was on.

I thought about her that night, missing her. I was confused, wondering what she was doing. Was she flat on her back, happily letting Caliz replace my heritage with his own? Or was she declaring her independence, telling him having her man in and out of jail wasn't acceptable anymore? I wanted to will her back into my bed, to feel her legs wrapped around me, to lose myself again in her dark hair and eyes. The next morning, submerged into my normal life, she floated in and out of my mind, coalescing in my memory. I very nearly called her, formulating some banal question to ask, some bit of paperwork needing to be signed.

I did not yet understand the chasm between normal and criminal thinking. To Caliz, it didn't matter whether or not Violeta had sacrificed herself to get him the kind of legal expertise he could never afford on his own. It only mattered that he was the kind of angry young man who beats the woman in his life. If she had seduced me on his orders, maybe he just suspected that she had enjoyed herself too much. I never found out. I only know that two days after I got him out of jail, he beat her to death.

The coroner explained to me that when he broke her jaw she would have stopped begging him for mercy. But it was when he broke her ribs that she stopped breathing. Respiration wouldn't have continued for long, what with the punctured lung, the rapid and inevitable buildup of fluid around the heart. He testified that she would have survived between four and six minutes.

No one was able to testify what Miguel Caliz had on his mind while he was beating the hell out of Violeta Ramirez. He might have been taking revenge on her for breaking the foremost rule of dating a thug: never cheat. He might, on the other hand, have felt nothing at all. He might have been as calm as a hot, airless Atlanta day in summer. But either way, Violeta Ramirez was dead.

I learned what happened when I was served witness papers in the middle of a lunch with clients at 103 West, a trendy and expensive restaurant in Buckhead. I smiled apologetically for the intrusion, set down my glass of pinot noir, and read the handful of lines that were to blow up my world. Caliz's lawyer this time was cheap—I had never heard of the firm—but not so cheap that he didn't know there was sympathy for his client in the fact that I had just slept with his girlfriend. So my deposition would be required.

Some weeks later I put my hand on a Bible and swore that my name was Jack Hammond, and these were my sins. But a judge isn't a priest, and he didn't offer any penance. I would have to find that on my own. He did, however, use the word
reprehensible
in his admonishment to me before I was excused. That word was powerful enough for the firm of Carthy, Williams and Douglas. They did not desire to have a person who committed that word in their employment. The tawdriness of what happened to the girl was not a positive reflection on the firm, and I was on the street.

For several weeks, I didn't turn off the lights in my bedroom. I simply sat, watching the hours click by slowly. Eventually, my body demanded its due, and I closed my eyes. But it was a dangerous sleep, and there was no protection in it.

It means nothing at all to me that Miguel Caliz will spend the next several decades in a federal penitentiary. Locking up Caliz did nothing to restrict the memory of Violeta Ramirez. That memory continues to haunt me, both in daylight and dark.

The complete overthrow of my principles.
That was what I had done. And here I make confession, for the benefit of my soul. But even as I confess, I know that the scar remains. Until I make this one thing right in my life, I will have no peace.

Two years later

MY EYES WERE CLOSED,
and I was remembering. The venerable Judson Spence, professor of law, was repeating his ceaseless plea, beating into our young, idealistic heads his most fervent bit of advice:
Avoid criminal law like the plague. It is one of the principles of life that once you get involved in the shit of another human being, you become magnetically attractive to the shit of others.
Again and again, he steered his most talented students toward the vastly more profitable, and sanitized, world of torts. He made his entire class memorize a little aphorism: “Spend your time around the successful, and you will be successful.” Otherwise, he cautioned, a huge code-pendent cycle of human excrement would rain down on us, as the damaged of the world flocked to the enabler.

I, Jack Hammond, am living proof that Judson Spence, professor of law, was an absolute genius. After a considerable tour of duty in the world he warned against, I have discovered my own magnetic powers to be considerable. Not that this has made me rich. My law offices are utilitarian, beginning with the location—a mostly vacant strip mall in a spotty part of southwest Atlanta—and continuing to the furniture, which is cheap, leased, and unsupportive. The paint scheme of the walls—a semigloss eggshell with an unfortunate tendency to reflect the harsh overhead light onto the linoleum floor—is so uniform across doors, walls, and ceilings as to give a visitor vertigo.

There is a sign on the constructor-grade, single-frame door that says, “Jack Hammond and Associates.” This is an embellishment, since other than myself, the firm's only employee is Blu McClendon, my secretary. Having associates makes the phone listing look better, so I do it. This is not the time in my life to be overly scrupulous about details. This is the time in my life to survive.

To be honest, describing Blu as a secretary is itself a kind of embellishment. Although she is nearly devoid of skills, she is happily provided with both a living wage and a very comfortable chair in which to sit and read
Vogue
and the catalog for Pottery Barn. How can I describe her? She is the love child of Marilyn Monroe and somebody who doesn't speak English that well, like maybe Tarzan. Her hair—dark blond with highlights, although only at the moment, this is an ever-evolving thing—frames a face of mystical symmetry. The way the gentle, downward curve of her back meets the rounded uplift of her backside is capable of cutting off a man at the knees. Only one pair of knees is essential for the survival of Jack Hammond and Associates, however, and those are the knees of Sammy Liston, the clerk of Judge Thomas Odom.

The words that enable me to pay three dollars more than minimum wage to the beautiful Miss McClendon are these: “If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you.” Although the drug problem in Atlanta is thoroughly equal opportunity, the criminal justice system is not. It specializes in low-income, black defendants. Because the court of Judge Thomas Odom—the very cesspool where I destroyed my once impressive career—is overwhelmed with such cases, the good judge is forced to utter that beautiful, rent-paying phrase several times a day. He leaves the actual appointments to Sammy Liston, his trusty clerk, and the unrequited lover of my secretary. Sammy and I have a deal: I am unceasingly available, I am affably predisposed toward plea bargaining, and I look like I believe him when he tells me he has a chance with Blu. Sammy's love for her is all-consuming, impressively one-dimensional, and utterly hopeless. Blu McClendon wouldn't date Sammy in a post-nuclear holocaust. In exchange for ignoring this fact, I am free from the burden of putting my face on bus stop benches, and I will never have to figure out how to make my phone number end with h-u-r-t. Let me put it plainly: when the phone rings at Jack Hammond and Associates, I always hope Sammy is on the other end. A phone call from Sammy is worth five hundred bucks, on average.

At about ten o'clock in the morning on a day in May hot enough for July, the phone rang. Blu twisted her perfect torso and said, “It's Sammy, down at the courthouse.”

I opened my eyes, left behind my memories, and came back to reality. “Our regular delivery of government cheese,” I answered. I picked up the phone and said, “Sammy? Give me some good news, buddy. I got Georgia Power and Light on my ass.” Other than the fact that Blu thought he had a face like a horse, I kept no secrets from the clerk of Judge Thomas Odom.

Liston's southern-fried voice came across the phone. “You hear the news?”

“News?”

“So you haven't heard. It's one of your clients. Actually, he's more of a former client. He's dead.”

I have a mantra that I repeat to myself for news like that; lately, I had been using it more often than I liked.
Strip it down, Jack. Let it go.
“Who is it?” I asked.

“You aren't going to like it.”

“You mean there are some of my clients I wouldn't mind finding out they're dead?”

“If most of your clients were dead, the entire justice system would be grateful.”

“I'm waiting.”

“It's Doug Townsend. He fell off the wagon, big time, and ended up in overdose.”

And so the irony that is my life cranks up a notch. Doug Townsend, the very reason I became a lawyer, is no more.
“Overdose?” I asked. “Are you saying he tried to kill himself?”

“Who knows? You know how it gets, Jack. The body readjusts after a while, and they can't take the whack.”

“I just spoke to his probation officer three days ago, Sammy. The guy was glowing.”

“I'm sorry, Jack.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, Jack, the old man wants to know if you'll stop in on Townsend's place.”

“To do what?”

“Go through his stuff. See if there's anything to salvage for the estate.”

“Does he have any family coming? He's got a cousin in Phoenix, I know that.”

“Just got off the phone with her. She doesn't want to know.”

“Charming.”

“What can I tell you? You get a black sheep, family gets scarce.”

“All right,” I said, “maybe there's something of his I can salvage. I'll make sure to send it to his loving cousin, who can't be bothered to get on a plane and bury her relatives.”