The Last Goodbye Page 3

  Doug Townsend was as firmly on the side of life as anybody I’d seen. For one thing, he had something other than drugs that he was passionate about, a key survival ingredient. Watching him talk about computers was like watching Sammy Liston talk about Blu McClendon. I used to buy Doug coffee just to listen to him rattle on about what the future would look like. He saw a world where computers were in everything, even people, making sick people well, making old people young.

  I cast off the memory and went back through the living room to the remaining room, the back bedroom. I opened the door and stopped cold. Most of the opposite wall was covered with pictures of a woman. I walked in, drawn forward by the photographs. The woman was black, late twenties, and strikingly beautiful. What the hell is this? The pictures were a mélange, some professional, others cut out of magazines and newspapers. At first I thought she must be an actress, because several of the photographs had been taken on stage, the woman dressed in a variety of ornate costumes. But one picture was a simple headshot, and there was writing beneath the photograph: Michele Sonnier, mezzo soprano. I stared at the photo, thinking. Michele Sonnier. Sounds French, upper crust. Or maybe a stage name.

  I tore myself away from the pictures to get a handle on the rest of the room. There was a twin bed, a small chest of drawers, and an old, wooden desk and chair. I pulled out the chair and sat down. There were some papers on the desk, business ideas, mostly, and some printouts of what looked like computer code. To my surprise, there was a framed snapshot of the woman—casual, with a lot of people in the background. She was smiling, although it wasn’t clear if she was smiling at whoever took the photograph. I looked for an inscription, but there wasn’t one. I tried to place the face, but I drew a blank. If you had ever met this woman, I thought, you would definitely remember. I set the photograph down and opened the main drawer of the desk. Inside were the usual paper clips, rubber bands, and pens. To the left was a row of three more drawers. The first had more nondescript papers; the second was nearly empty. I opened the third, the deepest one, and saw it was nearly full; on top was a stack of rectangular papers tightly bound by a rubber band. I picked up the packet and pulled off the bands. Airplane tickets. A lot of them.

  I fanned out the tickets on the desk before me. Baltimore. New York. Miami. San Francisco. I counted the tickets, then sat back, stunned. Townsend had made more then twenty trips in the last year, all paid for in cash. After defending him so many times, I was intimately aware of his finances; basically, there weren’t any. What is this? And how the hell did he pay for it?

  I reached down into the drawer, pulling out the rest of the papers. On top were at least twenty more photographs of Sonnier, again, from a variety of sources. I looked through the remaining papers: more Sonnier, everywhere I looked. Beneath the photographs were press clippings and performance reviews, almost all of them glowing. Mixed in was a set of playbills, all apparently originals. I glanced back through the plane tickets, mentally calculating the cost. Maybe the guy was stealing for this, not meth. Maybe she was his real drug. Eventually, I was just seeing more of the same; not content with one photograph, Townsend had accumulated several copies of each. I stuffed the plane tickets and photographs in my valise and stood up. This is beyond being a fan. This is definitely some kind of obsession.

  The computer equipment was the only thing of obvious value, so I loaded that into the trunk of my car. Knowing Doug, it would take a security expert to find out what was inside it, and I didn’t have those skills. I walked back to the apartment and stood in the doorway, taking a last look. Opera. Rich people’s music. Connecting that world to the world of Doug Townsend was a problem I had no idea how to solve. I locked the door, recognizing it as a gesture of futility. It wouldn’t take long for people to figure out Townsend wasn’t coming back, and his place was certain to be looted.

  I got back in my car and started the drive back toward town. Presumed suicide. That was what Sammy had said was on the police report. Which brought me back to why Doug would have picked that moment to throw his life away. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make that make sense.

  The thing about cops is that half of them are crooked. I don’t mean bad crooked, just bent a little. I’m not judging them. And I’ll tell you who gave me the fifty percent figure: a cop. But here’s the deal: they’re so underpaid that most of them work extra security jobs just to make ends meet. Say you’re young, you’ve got some school loans, and you can choose between a hundred hours of babysitting the parking lot of a rowdy bar in the middle of the night, or just picking up the two thousand dollars in cash that’s staring you in the face in the crack house you just busted. Like the man says, you do the math.

  Which is not to say there aren’t good ones. Billy Little, who was handling the paperwork for Doug’s death, is one of those. Here’s how much I trust him: I’d pour him two bottles of Scotch, tell him I’d screwed his mother, hand him a loaded gun, and beg him to shoot me. Billy Little plays by the rules.

  Don’t let his name confuse the issue. He’s Samoan—the whole dark hair, slightly wide face thing—and six-two, every bit of two thirty-five, and percent body fat of six, maybe. He could subdue the average man while calmly eating a cheeseburger. He started in the projects, on the bike squad; incredibly enough, they patrol those monstrosities on bicycles, at least during daylight hours. That way they can haul down alleys that cars would never make it through. After about three years of that, Billy finished college at night with a business degree and made lieutenant. He made detective four years later. He was barely thirty, and as far as I was concerned, he knew more about the Atlanta drug trade than anybody in the department. He was, as they say down here, the shit that killed Elvis.

  Billy worked at the Atlanta PD headquarters in the City Hall East building, which is where I went from Townsend’s place. He always looked impeccable, and when I went to see him about the Townsend case it was no different. He looked like he was ready for a screen test, in nicely pressed tan slacks, a green golf shirt, and brown leather shoes. Predictably, he was also up to his well-muscled arms in paperwork. When I walked into his office, he looked up and smiled. “What brings you to the slums, Jack?” he asked.

  I shook his hand and took the chair opposite his desk. “Sammy Liston tells me you’re handling Doug Townsend’s case,” I said. “Anything special I should know about it?”

  “Other than the fact he’s dead?”

  “Townsend was a friend.”

  Billy’s smile faded. “Sorry, Jack. I didn’t know that. Were you guys close?”

  “We were friends in college. I lost track of him, until recently. His life took a bad turn, and he needed a lawyer.”

  “So you were representing him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Billy nodded. “Well, it’s still provisional, but it looks like he killed himself.”

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out the picture of Michele Sonnier. “Does this ring any bells?”

  Billy glanced at the photograph. “Yeah. I heard about that. Lots of pictures, apparently.”

  “You know her?”

  “The lady’s an opera singer. Supposedly she’s some big thing in the music world. She’s also the wife of Charles Ralston.”

  I looked up, surprised. “Charles Million-Dollar Ralston?”

  “No, Charles Hundred-Million-Dollar Ralston. But yeah, he’s the one.”

  “No kidding.” I stared at the picture. Ralston, founder and CEO of Horizn Pharmaceuticals, was a poster boy for the new African-American South. Pick your stereotype, and he blew it up: he was a superbly educated scientist, an impressive speaker, and a brilliant, hard-nosed businessman. And he was just as aggressive about solving Atlanta’s social problems, even when it bought him controversy. He had achieved near-sainthood with the city’s peace-and-justice activists by instituting—and eventually paying for with his own money, because he couldn’t find anybody with the guts to push for it in city hall—a clean-needle exchange program in the projects of A
tlanta. Considering he had made his fortune with a hepatitis treatment, there wasn’t much point in arguing about whether or not his motives were pure. Every addict he saved cost him a potential patient, and that wasn’t the kind of behavior most people expected from pharmaceutical companies. Not content with his millions—the kind of money most people find sufficient—he was preparing to take his company public and walk away with something under a billion. Everybody decent in Atlanta business was pulling for him to make a killing, simply because he had a superb track record of reinvesting in the cultural and social life of Atlanta. Billy was eyeing me warily. “So what’s his wife got to do with Doug Townsend?”

  “Her picture was all over Doug’s apartment.” I pulled out the plane tickets and tossed them on Billy’s desk. “These were in a drawer. There’s about twenty of them.”

  Billy looked through the tickets a moment, then back at me. “That wasn’t in the report.”

  “Tell me something, Detective. Can you get your people to give a damn about the underclass in this city for a change? You know, actually do a real investigation?”

  “Don’t start with me, Jack. The city’s broke, and I’m doing the best that I can.”

  I let it go, out of respect for Billy. “The trips correspond with her performance schedule,” I said. “They were all paid for in cash.”

  Billy drummed his fingers on his desk. “Looks like he was a fan.”

  “You could say that. He had built a chapel to Saint Sonnier.”

  “My daughter’s got four pictures of some rap group up on her wall.”

  “Come on, Billy. This is a little different.”

  Billy leaned back, considering. “Are you saying your friend might have been harassing her? Trying to get too close?”

  I thought back, remembering Doug getting decked by frat boys for trying to protect a woman. “Doubtful. Not his personality.”

  “Okay. Then unless it’s illegal, it’s not really my problem. People have weird passions.”

  I paused, thinking. “What did pathology say?”

  “The EMTs did a Valtox on the scene, confirmed the cause of death. The medical examiner on call came out and saw no reason to contradict.”

  “So that makes it a suicide?”

  “No, the formal victimology report we get back in about a week makes it a suicide. Believe it or not, we actually have procedures for that kind of thing.”

  I nodded. “So until then he’s in the morgue?”

  “We’ll hold the body until the report’s final. But look, Jack, I’ve read the preliminary. There was depression, a long history of drug abuse. There was the failed businesses, no apparent social life. Frankly, not a lot to live for.”

  “No suicide note?”

  “Big myth, that. Suicide notes are pretty rare. More likely it’s a DBS.”

  “DBS?”

  “Death by stupidity,” Billy said quietly. “Accidental, in other words. Happens all the time.” He opened a file and flipped to the EMT report. “No evidence of foul play, no body trauma. No forced entry, no upset furniture, items of value left in place. So sure, we’re going to jump through the hoops. But unless you have some connection between these tickets and your friend’s death, I’d say you’re back at square one.”

  “Did your guys take anything from the scene? Any papers or anything?”

  “Lemme see.” Billy flipped further through the folder. “Yeah, a few things. The drug stuff, obviously. But papers . . . yeah, a notebook. It was on the floor, right by the body.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Blank, except for one page.” Billy pulled a cheap notebook out of a plastic bag. He opened it up and showed me the first page. There were three letters printed near the top.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “‘LAX.’ Los Angeles Airport. Makes sense, considering how much flying he was doing.”

  I looked at the letters, thinking. “Whoever wrote it didn’t have the best penmanship in the world. Pretty bad scrawl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So are you following up on it?”

  “Follow up on what? Last time I checked, the airport’s still there.” Billy looked at me sympathetically. “If the final victimology report turns up something, you’ll be the first to know.” He rose. “Let’s you and me get a beer sometime, okay, Jack? Maybe over at Fado’s.”

  I rose with him. “Yeah, we’ll do that,” I said. I started to leave, then turned back. “You said they found drug stuff,” I said. “What kind?”

  Billy looked back down at the folder. “Looks like the usual stuff, couple of vials, a needle . . .”

  I stiffened. One thing Townsend had told me repeatedly: he had never shot up in his life. “What did you say?”

  “A needle.”

  “There’s got to be some mistake there. Doug was terrified of needles. He told me that himself. About a hundred times, actually.”

  “A lot of people get over that when they’re addicts,” Billy said, shrugging. “Anyway, maybe it’s all he could get his hands on.”

  “He lived a block from the Glen, Billy. He could have just stuck his head out of the window and yelled, ‘Drugs, please.’”

  “Look, I’m not arguing with you, but the fact is we found the guy with a hole in his arm and a needle.”

  I shook my head. “It’s like a phobia, Billy. If a guy’s going to kill himself, he doesn’t pick that moment to get over a lifelong fear. And anyway, Doug was a meth addict. You don’t even have to inject it, for God’s sake.”

  Then Billy Little looked up in surprise and said five words that changed everything. “Who said anything about meth?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “TWO THINGS CAN LEAD A MAN to make a commitment.” Sammy Liston, clerk of the court of Judge Thomas Odom, was chewing steak, which always put him in a good mood. He was not yet seriously hammered, the place where his brain became inert; instead, he was in the in-between state, which made him philosophical. He was holding forth on why I should follow up on Doug Townsend’s death. “Number one: intuition.”

  “You mean like, ‘The second I saw her, I knew she was the girl for me’?”

  “No, I mean like, ‘The second I saw it, I knew it was the right pickup truck for me. Or maybe the right dog.’”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said there were two things.”

  Sammy cut a perfect slice of sirloin off his plate and held it on his fork up to the light. “Beef,” he said. “It’s what’s for dinner.”

  “Sammy.”

  “Oh, yeah. Loyalty, Jack. The code of honor.”

  “The guy thing. Somebody messes with your friend, you got to step in.”

  “Damn right.” Sammy took the bite, chewing slowly, savoring the taste. Suddenly, his face turned serious. He chased the beef down with a swallow of Seagram’s. “But how do you know?” he asked. “That he got messed with, I mean. The guy was a junkie. Bad things happen.”

  “It was fentanyl, Sammy. Fentanyl.”

  Sammy whistled. “No shit. I didn’t know that.” He took another bite. “What’s fentanyl?”

  The trouble with alcohol—and I say this with considerable personal experience—is that it makes people feel like they’re getting more brilliant, when it’s actually having the opposite effect. “Fentanyl,” I answered, “is the place where man’s capacity for greed and disregard for human life reach their current apex. Some pharmacist figured out that by subtly changing the molecular structure of morphine, he could make something four hundred times stronger. It’s so powerful there’s only one legitimate use for it, and that’s anesthesia.”

  “Wow. You mean it just knocks your ass out.”

  “Yeah. But then some inventive little bastards started cutting it down for recreational use. You know, playing with the parameters. And what they got was real smooth, both up and down. No jagged edges. The perfect drug, especially since you didn’t have to deal with any of those nasty p
eople in South America to sell you the raw materials.”

  “The ones who kill you if you piss them off,” Sammy said.

  “Yeah, those.”

  Sammy shrugged. “But?” he asked.

  Sammy was referring to the one immutable law of pharmacology: there is always a “but.” No matter how perfect a drug seems, a down side always lurks. It’s as if God has decreed that pleasure and pain must be kept in a cosmic equality. The more beautiful a drug makes you feel, the more certainly it will crush you in the end. “But,” I said, “it’s so powerful that a typical dose weighs about the same as a postage stamp. It’s almost impossible to cut accurately, especially by somebody who’s probably an addict himself. And if you get too much, it does the damnedest thing.”

  Sammy shrugged. “It kills you?”

  “If you take enough. Mostly, it just makes you wish you were dead.”

  “Which means?”

  “It gives you an instant case of advanced Parkinson’s disease.”

  Sammy stared. “Jesus, Jack. You serious? What is that, some urban legend, right? Like a street myth?”

  I shook my head. “Billy Little laid it out for me. People are screwing around with the universal elements, Sammy, cosmic forces. They’re going into labs and making things the human body never encountered before. All hell is breaking loose.”

  “Yeah, but, shit, Jack. Parkinson’s?”

  I nodded. “The whole range of tics and tremors, the uncontrolled bodily functions. Everything. Nobody knows why, except maybe the bastard who invented it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Than that? Jesus, Jack.”

  “You can’t tell it from heroin by looking at it.”

  “It looks like heroin?”

  “Not like heroin. Exactly like heroin. But it’s between four and six hundred times more powerful.”