The Last Goodbye Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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.”

  “They probably weren’t that close, Jack. The guy’s a junkie.”

  “Was a junkie, Sammy. Was.”

  “Stop by the courthouse on the way over and pick up a key. And listen, Jack, take it easy over there. It’s not exactly a great neighborhood.”

  That was putting it mildly; Townsend had traveled the well-worn path, spiraling downward to pay for his habit, eventually landing in a crap apartment building called the Jefferson Arms. “I know, Sammy. I’ll be in touch.”

  A pointless, futile death for Doug Townsend was laced with irony, because ten year
s earlier, I had watched him do the bravest thing I had ever seen. We met in college—I was a freshman, he was a senior—through the intracampus tutorial service. Doug tutored me through calculus, about which I had little aptitude and less interest. But it was a hoop to jump through, so I had to buckle down. We were both busy during those days—I, grinding through the freshman flunk-out courses; Doug, who was three years older, with his computer science classes—and we usually met late at night, around ten.

  Doug had confided to me that he had pledged every single fraternity on campus his freshman year, and been turned down by them all. He had the kind of overeager, wide-eyed social style that doomed him to loneliness. He was as well-rounded as a ruler and as awkward as a one-legged bird. But he could be brilliant in a narrow range of subjects. Chief among these was the application of computer technology. He loved computers, adored them, opened them up to expose their inner workings. They were, for him, friend, lover, and savior. It was just as well, because his human friends could be numbered on a single hand.

  Late one night, Doug having finally explained to me the difference between tangent and secant lines, we were walking back across campus toward the dorms. I was staring down at the concrete, trying to work out what he was saying, when Doug sprinted out ahead of me. What Doug saw, and I did not, was a girl involuntarily vanish into the bushes beside the walkway. While I was still trying to figure out what was happening, all 130 pounds of Doug Townsend leaped into those bushes with a high-pitched, bloodcurdling wail. He was all arms and legs with no particular strategy, but it was impressive to see.

  There were two frat boys in the bushes with the girl. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken them about ten seconds to waste Doug Townsend. Because they were drunk, it took about twelve. By the time I got there—and believe me, I was hauling—Doug had already taken a couple of significant clips to the body.

  I dropped one of the frat boys with a decent right. I turned to see what was happening with Doug, and saw him take a smack to the side of the head. On the point of impact he had a strange, almost detached smile on his face, like a baby held in his mother’s arms. There was the crunch of bone on bone, the peaceful, satisfied smile, and Doug crumpling into a little heap at his attacker’s feet. Who then leaned over, vomited into the bushes, and passed out, saving me the trouble of finishing him off.

  The girl was no more sober than the frat boys. She crawled back out onto the sidewalk in a drunken, four-legged, crablike move and fell to one knee. I tried to help her up, but she refused, eventually righting herself. She muttered something incoherent and careened down the sidewalk toward the dorms. Strictly speaking, I should have seen her home. But I didn’t, because Doug Townsend, her forgotten, damaged hero, was groaning at my feet, and between the two of them, I knew who I was going to help.

  No charges were filed. The girl let the bastards off, which wasn’t a big surprise. But that night was a watershed for me. It was the moment adult concerns first entered my young mind, the time when my adolescence ended and I discovered that some things were truly important and worth fighting for. On that night I left Dothan and high school behind, and I decided that if there were frat boys and drunk girls and people as weak and brave as Doug Townsend in the world, there were going to be quite a few thorny inequities to be made right. In a fit of hubris that makes me wince to remember, I decided there and then to become a lawyer, and I’ve been trying to save people ever since.

  We stayed friends through Doug’s last year, but we lost track of each other when he graduated. I plowed through my prelaw classes, went to law school, and ended up in Atlanta. I had nearly forgotten about him, until from out of the blue, he called me. He sounded changed—agitated, like he had drunk too much coffee—but a lot of time had passed, and for all I knew, I sounded different, too. We agreed to meet for lunch. The man who walked into the restaurant that day was a shell, a thin capsule of skin barely capable of holding a human soul. Thanks to my new, inglorious line of work, it took me about ten seconds to recognize his problem: Doug Townsend had become a drug addict. From his amped-up, frazzled look, the problem was some kind of uppers.

  The first question was how, and he refused to answer. He had more immediate needs: he had been arrested. Bail had been set at two thousand bucks, and scraping his ten percent together for a bondsman had tapped him out. He had nothing to pay an attorney, but I agreed to defend him. He was, after all, the reason I became a lawyer in the first place.

  It was a first offense, and I pled him down, like most of my clients. There was time served, a stern lecture, a hand-slap. None of which served to slow down his wicked meth habit. He relapsed; he relapsed again, risking serious incarceration. But a few months later he had made a turnaround. He had reached the all-important bottom, and, having discovered himself doing and thinking and feeling things he would have previously considered unimaginable, he was determined to live. Weeks had gone by, his resolve taking root. The last few times I had seen him, he had seemed like his old self again; full of dreams and optimism. Now, inexplicably, he was dead.

  All of this was on my mind as I drove across Atlanta toward Doug’s apartment. I exited off I-75, making sure I didn’t miss the Crane Street flyover. If you miss it, you and your formerly valuable car are dumped into one of the largest public housing developments in the Southeast: the McDaniel Glen projects. I took the flyover and looked down on the Glen—as it’s referred to by its lamented residents—as I headed farther south. I had been there a few times with a uniform, looking for testimony on a drug case. But I never went there without a good reason.

  Townsend’s place was only two streets past the Glen, which gives you a good idea of where it stood on the desirability scale. It was called the Jefferson Arms, but it sure as hell wasn’t Monticello. It was a sad, two-story brick affair, and the row of beat-up cars out front in the middle of the day told me welfare checks paid a lot of the rent. But even at the Arms there were better and worse units, and Townsend had told me how he had swung a second-story, corner two-bedroom: wiring up the manager with untraceable cable TV. A lot was possible in the black market economy if you had skills.

  I pulled into the lot, parked, and looked around. Doug had drifted a long ways down from the college kid with dreams I remembered. He had started and failed at a couple of small-time computer businesses, but his bad habits undermined any chance of success. I pictured him fighting his demons, struggling against the compulsion, then giving in at last. I could picture him going out and making the buy, or worse, uncovering the secret stash he had kept around. I could see him talking it over with himself, going through the self-justification, the delusion. Then the whack, the horrible surprise, the struggle to breathe.

  I stepped out of the car and walked up to Doug’s door. I took a breath, turned the key, and walked into the very still, very quiet airspace of a dead man. I looked around cautiously. The first thing I noticed was the neatness of the place. The police usually left a place worse than they found it, but Doug’s apartment was immaculate. There was something defiant about how everything was in its place, especially so close to the chaos of the Glen. I could picture Doug straightening the magazines on his table, just before he decided he couldn’t live another second without meth.

  The furniture was predictably worn: a sofa, a couple of chairs, a coffee table. I opened the miniblinds, standard apartment issue. The window unit air-conditioning snapped on, probably from the blast of warm air when I opened the front door. I’d have to get the electricity turned off, one of the little details nobody thinks about when a loner dies. Electricity, phone, cable, magazine subscriptions, all continuing on, oblivious, all assuming that the body of Doug Townsend was still warm, still filled with moving fluids, still dreaming up business plans for his little company.

  I walked into the kitchen, looking at the three dishes and the silverware resting upright in the drying rack. I opened up a cabinet: Rice Krispies, Ramen noodles, couscous—which made sense, because Townsend, like a lot of computer
geeks, had been slightly built, as thin as a blade of grass. I moved through the apartment, switching on lights. The first bedroom was fairly large, and doubled as his office. The bed sat simply on a frame, no headboard, but the covers were pulled taut. At the other end was a desk with a computer, a file cabinet, a couple of phone lines. It dawned on me that the phones were probably not in the database of Southeastern Bell; or if they were, they were being paid for by some company that had never heard of Townsend. We had talked a few times about hacking, and Townsend had played it down, but like I said, he had skills.

  I opened the filing cabinet, flipping through the index tabs of projects. I knew Townsend had been busy; as a part of his defense we had discussed his business prospects at length. Townsend was pure geek, down to the cheap rayon shirts and the black-frame glasses: he once told me he could write programming code like some people hum melodies; almost improvisationally. As expected, there were a good number of folders, and I opened a few at random. Most were bids for programming work: small-time stuff, customizing databases or a networking job for a small business. Townsend could have done far better working for a company that could handle the business end, letting him be free to create. But he kept dreaming about a big score, coming up with something revolutionary enough to flip or turn into an IPO.

  Junkies fall off wagons. It happens every day. But after two years of defending small-time drug offenders, I had acquired a nearly infallible sixth sense about that. Not just me; everybody who works in Odom’s court gets it. We wonder: Is this guy fucked? Or will he look back on this as his dark hour, secure and comfortable on the other side? I can see it in a defendant’s eyes, in his posture, in his damaged, unredeemable soul. Judge Odom could see it, that was certain. He was doing his best to hang on to a shred of humanity, a pretty considerable task for somebody who spends eight hours a day sending people to hell. But the fact was, for some defendants, he and everybody else knew he was merely delaying the inevitable. Maybe there’s a value even in that.