The Last Goodbye (21 page)

“It's a possibility.”

“One of about a thousand, though, is my problem. Lemme give you an example. How many drug addicts would you say you've had in your office over the last couple of years?”

“I don't know. All the ones out on bail. Maybe a hundred.”

“A hundred. And how many of those, would you say, have ever committed robbery?”

“Damn it, Billy . . .”

“Sixty? Seventy? All I'm saying, your office is a revolving door for people who need money. You've got some nice computer equipment in there. So boom, you're hit.” He shrugged. “I'm not saying that's it. I'm just saying that if I had to place a bet, I'd place it on the people who do that kind of thing for a living already.”

“It's pretty interesting timing.”

“I agree. But before I open a murder case, call the FBI, and implicate one of the most beloved figures in Atlanta in the death of a drug addict, you don't mind if I just take a second and find out, do you?”

I stood. “No.”

Billy rose and shook my hand. “I appreciate it. And for the record, I still say you're chasing ghosts.”

I stopped at the door, but only for a moment. “Maybe. But they're my ghosts.”

I was back at my office by eleven. I called Nightmare again, just to see if Dracula had come out of his coffin. Still no answer. I sat at my desk, knowing I had another call to make, one that I wanted to go away but wouldn't. Michele had a right to know about Doug's PC, as well. It was entirely possible that information about her daughter lurked somewhere on the computer drives, and went out the door with it. Maybe the thief cared about that, maybe not. But if her secret was compromised, her life as she knew it was over.

I punched the buttons on my cell phone. Michele answered, and her voice pulled me back to the night before, and for a few, precious moments, nothing else mattered. I was thrust into the seductive obliteration of our erotic dance, into the falling apart of long-held barriers. Suddenly, I wanted everything to be much simpler. I wanted time to be with this woman, time without the complications of Doug and a hidden daughter and God, there was her husband, too, what the hell was I doing? She was waiting on the phone, but I couldn't pull together a sentence. There was too much noise, all of it internal. “There's been a robbery,” I said at last.

Instantly, her voice grew serious. “What happened?”

“Doug's computer,” I said. “It's gone. Someone broke into my office. Last night, while we were together.”

“My God, Jack,” she said. “What if . . .”

“I know,” I said. “But don't jump to conclusions. Chances are, if Doug knew something, he would have told you.”

“I don't have a good feeling about this, Jack. We have to do something
now.”

“I've got her real name and birth date. That's a start. But you have to give me some time.”

“It's not enough, Jack. We have to find her. I'm afraid . . . I'm afraid she's in McDaniel Glen.”

“The Glen? What do you mean? Did Doug tell you something?”

“She's here, Doug said. Think about it, Jack. Doug lived just outside the Glen. So
here
could certainly mean that area.”

“How did you know where Doug lived?”

“He told me, obviously.
We have to move now
, he said. Like there was some kind of danger. That sounds like the Glen.”

“Listen, have you considered the possibility that she's happy somewhere? That she's doing great, and going to school, and has lots of friends, and everything is just wonderful?” I didn't believe that; it's just that in my line of work, sometimes I have had to remind myself that some stories end happily, so I wouldn't go nuts. Michele wasn't buying it.

“I've thought about that a million times. But I know it isn't true.”

“Don't let this robbery thing shake you up.”

“It does shake me up, Jack. We have to move. Now.”

“How do you propose we do that? Go door to door?”

“Why not?”

“Aside from the fact that it's probably futile, you have your own concerns. If you show your face on this, sooner or later, somebody is going to put you together with the girl. You're a well-known figure, Michele. There's no way we could keep your identity out of it. Then you have news cameras and all hell blows up.”

“For God's sake, Jack, do you actually think people in the Glen go to the opera?”

“I'm just saying being recognized is a possibility. You must have had your picture in the paper a few times. It's strange what people remember.”

There was a moment's silence. “Then I won't be there,” she said simply.

“No offense, but the idea of me doing it alone doesn't have a lot of potential. White guy in a Buick trying to find a young girl at the Glen?”

“Will you still be at your office around three?”

“I can be. To do what?”

“Just be there.”

I looked out my window at five before three: what looked like Michele's gray Lexus was just pulling into my office parking lot. The car passed directly under my second-story window, so I didn't get a view of who was driving. Whoever it was parked in a space and sat, as though waiting. I went down for a closer look; since the break-in, I was getting cautious about who was in the neighborhood. As I approached, the driver's side window lowered.

“Hello, Jack,” the woman said. The voice was unmistakable: it belonged to Michele. But her appearance had been transformed.

“My God, what are you doing?” She was dressed down, not her previous faux poverty look, but the real thing. In her transformation from diva to urban ghetto-dweller, she had systematically stripped away every shred of glamour, replacing it with a nondescript antistyle. Her pants were baggy and dirty, and she wore an oversized, faded University of Miami T-shirt. Her hair was pulled under a ratty hat. There was no makeup, and she wore cheap sunglasses. If she had looked a little more strung out, she would have been perfectly at home in a lineup of my clients. I stared and said, “You look terrible.”

“Good. We're taking your car.” She rolled up the window, got out, and locked the Lexus. She seemed shorter than I remembered; then I saw the battered sneakers, in place of her usual shoes.

“You're not serious,” I said.

“I'm going to the Glen, Jack.” She looked at me intently. “You can stay, if you like. I'm going either way.”

“There's no way in hell I'm letting you go into McDaniel Glen by yourself.”

She stared at me. “I'm probably safer without you.”

That stopped me; it was true, I had to admit. With me along, she was a walking billboard as an outsider. “I don't think this is going to work,” I said. “Let's slow down and think about it a second.”

“I'm going to find my daughter, Jack. It's taken me fourteen years to face this moment. Maybe going to the Glen is futile, but at least it's a start.”

I stared. “I'm coming,” I said. It had been a long time since I had thought about Professor Spence's principle of magnetic attraction, but I began to get a bad feeling that his words were about to bite us in the ass. When it came to attracting the shit of the criminal class, McDaniel Glen was as near to true north as made any difference. “Dammit, I'm coming.”

I was still dressed for work, so we went back by my apartment so I could quickly change. I threw on some jeans and stuffed my cell phone in a pocket. “You ready?”

“Yes. Let's go.”

We drove across town, ending up outside the Glen just after four. The traffic on the freeway was already turning into a turgid, drying cement. I rolled to a stop just outside the iron gates of the Glen and turned to face Michele. I was going to ask her something, but her expression stopped me. She was staring at the entrance to a part of her history, her horror. It hadn't hit me until that second what going back inside might mean to her.

“Have you been back?” I asked quietly. She shook her head silently. She was transfixed, the sight of the Glen's iron gates ripping a hole across fourteen years of a past built on a gigantic lie.

“It's like Auschwitz,” she said in a whisper. “I was singing in Warsaw, and I went to see it. They call it Oswiecim there. The iron gates looked just like that. I never noticed it before.”

I looked up at the entrance; she was right. All that was missing were the words,
Work will make you free.
And then I understood a part of her pain; she had survivor's guilt. She had escaped hell, and like all such escapees, she was tormented about who was left behind. “God knows if this is going to work,” I said. “But let's try it.”

I pulled the Buick back into the road, heading toward the entrance. There were a surprising number of cars going into the development, testimony that at least some of the residents had jobs. But there was also the ever-present population of teenagers, alternately listless or aggressive, depending on the winds. That was what made the projects so dangerous to outsiders; you had to live there to be able to interpret the weather. A joke could turn ugly in a second, and the warning signs were subtle. A different emphasis on a word, a change in a person's posture, and all hell could break loose. If you knew the system, you could avoid conflicts and manage a relatively safe existence. You might, with luck, actually flourish. I knew it happened, because I saw that life, sublime in its refusal to be daunted, utterly noble in its quiet dignity, could happen anywhere—even Auschwitz, theoretically. Unfortunately, because of my work, I spent all my time with people making different choices. I looked at my watch; it was after four, and we should have several hours of sunlight.

“Just drive slow,” she said. “I'll recognize her.”

“Be serious.”

She shot me a look. “All right, then we can ask. We have her name and her birth date. Maybe somebody will know something.”

I nodded, and we cruised down the main street of the Glen, rolling past the MDHA office. I suppose there must be some romantic attachment to everybody's childhood home, but I hadn't considered it possible for the Glen. I was wrong, because I could feel nostalgia filling Michele up with every block we drove. What appeared to me as identical street corners and buildings were, to her, possessed of a thousand unique details. Physically, the Glen was trapped in amber, static as a museum relic. The life that vibrated through it—laughter, tears, babies, friendships, chaos, order—had no apparent effect on the structure, in the same way the exterior of any prison stays the same. The units were like cells, and the individual stories that unfolded within them were largely invisible from the street.

“School bus met here,” she said, nodding at a stop sign. “We lined up, like little sheep.”

She told me to take a left, and I nodded a yes. “This is my street,” she said. She was so intent, she barely blinked. “There!” she said, pointing to the E building. “God, Jack. God.”

“Yours?”

I stopped, and she stared at the door a long time. I had no idea what secrets were buried in the brown bricks and rusty steel of that place. “Things happened inside those walls that should never have seen the light of day,” she whispered.

“I'm sorry.” There was nothing I could do to come to terms with her world, and I knew it. We were too different, separated by cultural chasms as wide as a canyon.

She pointed across the street, to F building. “I knew a girl there. She was nice.” She looked back at E building. A group of teenage boys walked out of the main door, laughing and cutting up. “I'm going to ask them what they know.”

“Hang on . . .” Before I could stop her, the door was open. She stepped out of the car, and the boys came to halt. They gave her that testosterone-drenched leer that young boys have, especially when traveling in packs.

“Zup, baby?” one of them asked. He oiled up toward her, looking her over, invading her space before she was fully out of the car.

“Back it up,” Michele said. Her voice was, in one millisecond, transported to another world. I almost fell out of the car. She was shrill, she was tough, and she was demanding some respect.

The boys laughed. “Bitch don't wan' any from Darius,” one of them said. “Bitch got taste, anyway.”

The oily one didn't grin. Instead, he moved even closer, nearly touching her. “Come on, baby, why you got to be like that? You gonna like me when you get to know me.”

Her voice came back like steel. “Back the fuck up,” the woman who sang arias for a living said. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was like the world had turned upside down. Or maybe it was right side up. I wasn't sure. All I know is that looking into Michele's eyes, Darius got the message. There was only way to describe what he did: he backed the fuck up.

Even though I didn't know if it was going to make things better or worse, I opened the car door and got out. Darius nodded to me. “That your chauffeur, baby?”