The Last Goodbye (20 page)

We left her car in the Highlands and drove to my place. When we got there, we sat in my car outside my walkup. I warned her not to expect much. “It's not exactly the Four Seasons,” I said, understating the facts considerably. And then I thought forget it, she's here for me and not the furniture, and I kissed her on the mouth, as hard and passionate as I had in me. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around me, and for several long moments, my battered Buick was the most perfect place on earth. I got the door for her, and led her up the steps to my place.

I opened the door, and Michele walked into my nine hundred square feet of heaven, taking it in with a bemused expression: ratty, light gray carpet; a questionable mélange of furnishings, including a tan sofa and recliner, a small television, stark and watchful on a black stand; a five-piece dinette, bought well-used and not great to begin with; and above all, a decided lack of the comfortable details that make a space livable. Seeing it there with her, it looked sad, single, and male.

“It's lovely,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “There are days I just can't wait to get home and loll around in all this luxury.” I gave her a seat on the couch. “Can I get you anything?”

She shook her head. “No. I'm perfect.”

“Yes, you are. Just give me a second, will you?” I left her in the living room, slipping into my bedroom. When I came back, she was staring at a framed document I had received in an earlier life. “‘This is to certify that Jack L. Hammond was admitted to practice in the Georgia Supreme Court,'” I recited. “Signed by the justices.”

“It's an honor, Jack. Why isn't this down at your office?”

“I doubt it would make much of an impression on my current clientele.”

She stood and walked languorously toward me. “You really need to get over that,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist. “Maybe I can help.”

She kissed me then, first softly, then more insistently. “Over what?” I asked.

She pulled back a little, fixing me in her gaze. “Over everything,” she whispered, and then we were lost in each other again, and nothing else mattered. The eager, unfettered passion of the airplane was tempered now, and I found my rhythm, happy to take my time in pleasing her, content to learn her crevasses, the precise lines of her hips, her stomach, her backside.

Late in the night I put on a Billy Joe Shaver disc, the one with the song about how love fades. She sat up in bed and listened for about fifteen seconds and said, “It's so awful I can't find words to tell you how awful it is.”

“I thought you said everything was your kind of music.”

She listened another few seconds, covered her ears, and said, “I was wrong.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “It's exactly like
La Boheme.”

“You will never touch my body again.”

“Listen, all he's saying is that you take your joy and your pleasure when you can, because you know it isn't going to last.”

“Ain't
gonna last, I believe he said.”

“Yeah. Ain't gonna last. Just like Puccini and those damn bohemians. The difference is, the way he says it, I actually believe it.”

She was laughing now, flinging herself back down onto the pillows. “All right,” she said, “I will make love to that caterwauling if you promise to finish what you were doing a few minutes ago.”

“I love my work,” I said, moving toward her. I let my tongue trace her exquisite, dark legs from ankle to hip, stopping on a discreet, lettered tattoo high on the inside of her thigh. In the dark crush of the airplane, I hadn't seen it before. The letters spelled
Pikovaya Dama.
Her breathing deepened, and she turned on her side, facing away from me. She reached back for my hand, pulling me up against her until she was wrapped in my arms. She turned her face to me and kissed me over her shoulder. Then she gave me a smile of such surpassing sadness, I could only kiss her again and pull her tighter. “It's not a secret, you know,” she said. “You can see it when I wear a bathing suit. But only one in ten thousand knows what it means.” She turned her body and pressed herself naked against me, kissing me deep on the mouth. For the next few hours we forgot about the outside world, both willingly intoxicated by the presence of the other. There was the mutual rhapsody of touch and pleasure, leading to the moment of clenched eyelids and the trembling, white light of release.

Sleep followed, sleep like I hadn't felt in years. I was never a man who couldn't sleep with a woman in his bed. On the contrary; Michele's gentle breathing took me down to a place of rest I had nearly forgotten existed. It was dreamless and dark, and past memories, for that time, ceased to exist.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, she was sitting in a chair, watching me silently. I smiled and sat up. “You're dressed,” I said. “What time is it?”

“I've already called a cab,” she said. “I didn't want to wake you.”

“Don't be crazy. I'll take you back to your car.”

She shook her head. “It's better this way.”

I leaned back, letting the sheets fall down around my hips. “I could take the day off.”

She laughed, the airy musicality renewed in her voice. “I have things to do.”

And that was the moment when the first ray of reality crept through my blinders: she had another life, a life I couldn't touch. I couldn't ask,
what things?
I couldn't ask because it would have ruined everything. It would be this way or nothing.

There was a car honk outside, and she stood. I got out of bed and stood naked before her, pulling her to me. I didn't ask her when we would see each other again. There are times when questions about the future can wreck the present.

All that morning, taking a shower, getting ready for work, I was saying her name. “The great Michele Sonnier,” I said to the bathroom walls, the inside of my refrigerator, the closet where I kept my umbrella. I repeated it in the car, the wipers sweeping a sudden shower off my windshield. I substituted those words for the names of other women in the heartache songs WYAY played. I hummed it walking down the hall to my office. My mood was not to survive long after opening the door.

The first face I saw was that of a uniformed policeman, who was wearing a serious, Sergeant Friday expression. The second was his partner, a round, overweight man stuffed into his clothes. The third was Blu's, who was visibly upset. Her voice cut through the fog of images.

“Jack,” she said. “Isn't your cell phone on? I've been trying to call you for twenty minutes.”

I looked around numbly. “I don't know. I ... I guess not. What's going on here?”

The first cop answered. “A robbery,” he said in a flat, official voice. “Or at least a break-in. We haven't been able to ascertain what, if anything, was stolen.”

“A robbery?” I looked around, momentarily confused. The door between Blu and my office was open; the air felt humid, even though the air conditioner was running. I walked across the waiting area and into my personal office. The window behind my desk was open, letting the morning inside. A few papers were scattered on my desk to let me know that someone had been there.

I walked back over to Blu. “You okay, baby?” I asked. “All your stuff still here?” Blu nodded, but I could tell the idea of somebody going through her things made her queasy.

“Counselor here's got a colorful clientele,” the heavyset cop said. “Maybe it's one of them.”

“Hang on,” I said quietly. A sense that something was wrong was pushing through my initial shock.

“What is it?” Blu asked.

I looked back at the door to my office, my unease growing. I walked back through the door, looking around. Everything seemed normal. I looked at a blank space on the little desk where Nightmare had been working. Doug's computer was gone.

DREAD IS INDEFINABLE.
If you know what you're afraid of—if you can define it—it loses power. It's the unknown that climbs up your back and attaches itself there, humming ominously like a dangerous electrical current. A robbery and its sense of violation can crank that up to a rattling volume. Guilt plays into your emotional receptors, too; it heightens all your responses, making you hypersensitive. I had the fleeting sense that maybe the robbery was somehow connected to what Michele and I had been doing the night before. Was it coincidence that it had happened while we had been together? Or was it a karmic equalizer, God's way of balancing pain and pleasure?

Guilt.
That, for the criminal lawyer, is the operative word. It's no accident that juries don't find defendants innocent. They say they're “not guilty,” because somewhere in the collective unconscious roams the knowledge that nobody is truly innocent or unstained. Those words just don't fit the human race. So when you've been experiencing a kind of delirium with someone else's wife—even if you know you're falling in love with her—you start looking for rocks to fall, just to even things out.

So I was feeling the humming, the dread. The first thing I did was give Blu the day off. She was rattled by the break-in, and since I was planning on leaving, I didn't want her to be alone in the office. She looked at me gratefully, picked up her bag, and walked out the door in a near-trot. Next I called Nightmare, just to assess the damage of the loss of Doug's terminal; he didn't answer his phone, which wasn't a surprise. For him, nine in the morning was a time to go to bed, not get up. I left him a message, wondering what cyber-crack of Atlanta he had spent his night visiting. Then I went back in my office, alone, and sat down to think. Someone wanted Doug's computer. My first thought was the most obvious: whoever had hired Doug had stolen it, simply because he didn't want that information public. And it didn't take a genius to put Horizn on the list of potential customers. The theft would be a way to cover their tracks. I liked that theory; it was clean, it worked. But there was another, darker alternative: It was also possible that Doug had been killed
before
he could get the information to his employer, by someone determined to prevent that transaction from taking place. If that was true, there was a third party at work, someone determined and dangerous, willing to commit murder.

Which meant I was going to see Billy Little. If things were going to ratchet up a notch, I wanted him on my side. Industrial espionage was one thing; it was common knowledge companies eavesdropped on each other as a matter of course. If Horizn—or anybody else, for that matter—had been sneaking around Grayton's files, it wouldn't be a big shock to the business world. Even theft of computer equipment wasn't too big a stretch. But killing people was something else. So I drove over to Billy's office in the City Hall East building, a twenty-minute drive.

I practically ran him down in the hall; we both came around the same corner simultaneously. Running into Billy is like running into an impeccably dressed brick. “Listen, Billy,” I said, “we need to talk. Can we go into your office for a minute?”

“Lemme get some coffee, and I'll meet you in there.”

I walked down the hall, parking myself outside Billy's door. After a couple of minutes he came back around the corner, a cup of coffee in each hand. He handed me one, and I followed him in, closing the door behind us. “What's going on?” he asked.

“I had a break-in,” I answered. “Last night.”

“Damn, Jack, I'm sorry. Some uniforms come over?”

“Yeah. They filed a report.”

“Hell of a neighborhood over there.”

“I don't think the neighborhood had much to do with it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble, considering they only bothered to take one thing. Doug Townsend's computer.”

Billy raised an eyebrow. “Your dead client?”

“Right. My own computer was sitting five feet away and it didn't get touched.”

“Think they got interrupted in the middle of the robbery?”

“That's possible. It looked like they left in a hurry.”

“Okay.”

“Thing is, I got inside Doug's computer. What I found there was pretty interesting.”

Billy took his chair, motioning me to sit down. “Maybe you better start at the beginning.”

“Doug wasn't just another drug addict,” I said. “He had skills.”

“What kind of skills?”

“Computer skills. He was hacking a company called Grayton Technical Laboratories. He had accumulated a massive amount of information about their operations.”

Billy's expression clouded over. “Your buddy was a hacker?”

“Yeah. A brilliant one, by all accounts.” Billy started to interrupt, but I held up my hand. “Don't get pissed. I didn't know myself until after the fact.”

Billy nodded. “Go on.”

“Doug had completely penetrated Grayton's network. And suddenly, he shows up dead.”

Billy watched me silently awhile. “Addicts die at unpredictable times. But you have my attention.”

“And now my office gets broken into, and the only thing stolen is his computer. This wasn't a routine breaking and entering, Billy. Somebody wanted what was in that box.”

“This Grayton Technical Laboratories. What are they?”

“Some kind of drug company. Cutting edge stuff, like experimental treatments. I'm looking into it. The point is, it's the same line of work as Horizn.”

Billy raised an eyebrow. “Hang on, Counselor. First off, industrial espionage is an FBI matter. Police departments don't even handle it.”

“How about burglary? That computer didn't just walk off under its own power.”

Billy watched me quietly a moment. “Lemme ask you something, Jack. Why don't you just come out and tell me what's on your mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you're trying to tell me that Charles Ralston has something to do with this thing, and something to do with your friend, too. It's like a conspiracy theory or something.”