The Last Goodbye Page 7

Sammy shook his head. “He’s got a girlfriend, though you’d never know it to watch him operate. But I’ve seen her three, maybe four times. Real sophisticated. I think she’s a college professor or something. Anyway, she walks like she’s got a Ph.D. up her ass.”

  “Uptight?”

  “Oh, yeah. Walks on tiptoe, like she doesn’t want to get her feet dirty. She’s got a ring, too.”

  “You mean they’re engaged?”

  “Guess so. But she’s high-maintenance, lemme tell ya. That’s probably why Stephens likes slumming at the courthouse for secretaries.” Sammy took a drink. “Even though they know he’s a jerk, they still follow him around like puppy dogs. Then comes the crying.”

  “Maybe he’s a challenge. You know, tame the beast.”

  “Yeah, and maybe it’s because he’s rich. Do you know he actually got somebody to give him an underground parking pass so he wouldn’t have to expose his damn Ferrari to the elements?”

  “He drives a Ferrari?”

  “Only on perfect days without a visible cloud. But that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “The point is that Derek Stephens can basically talk anybody into anything.”

  I nodded, picturing him putting his powers of persuasion to work on Blu. I shouldn’t have interfered. At least I had no specific right to do so. But opportunity so perfectly aligned rarely presents itself. When it does, you almost feel obliged to take advantage of it. Having done my due diligence, I opened the bomb-bay doors. “Sammy boy,” I said, “you have a new reason for living.”

  “That so?”

  I nodded. “From this moment forward, there is only one reason for you to get up in the morning, and that is to make the life of Derek Stephens miserable.”

  “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

  I took final aim and released the weapon. “Because the person he’s going to make cry next is the woman you love, Blu McClendon.”

  Sammy Liston’s face told me everything I needed to know. There was going to be war.

  My secretary deserved to know about Stephens, but that didn’t nominate me to perform that task. For one thing, the employer-employee relationship didn’t cross that line. Second, she was twenty-eight years old, spectacular to look at, and I had to assume getting hit on by attached men was a natural occurrence in her life. The truth was, I didn’t know how seriously to take Stephens. Between chewing up weaker competitors for Horizn and hitting on all the other women in his life, he was probably pretty busy. At any rate, I had just let Sammy loose on him, which would keep him busy for a while.

  My own business at that point was to find out what I could about how Doug had died. Working on a case with practically nothing to go on is simplicity itself. All you can do is shake whatever trees you have, and hope to God something falls out. No matter what had happened to Doug, one thing was certain: somehow, he had got his hands on enough fentanyl to end his world. So at two-thirty that afternoon, I took the Ralph Abernathy exit off I-75, turned left on Pollard, and headed toward the McDaniel Glen projects.

  Atlanta is a city in the constant throes of simultaneous destruction and reconstruction, and the area around the Glen shows that as clearly as anywhere. While limitless sums of money continue to flow ever northward, everything built in midtown seems to have turned to rust. Some sections—located far away from the suburbs, with their soulless starter mansions and perfectly manicured lawns—are classic ghetto, with buildings that look like they belong in bombed-out Beirut. Then came the Olympics, and a black mayor insisted that the worst of the housing projects be torn down and the residents moved farther south. As a result, a few whites are returning to reclaim and gentrify the largest and most structurally sound of the midtown monstrosities. Old factories are being turned into chic lofts, while rusting cars and condemned houses sit a block away. The result is an odd kind of incoherence as classes of people are crushed together. The Olympic investment skipped McDaniel Glen; it survives, stoic and unchanged, a relic from an uglier time. It is not, generally speaking, a happy place. A breeding ground for hopelessness, crime has settled on it like a plague.

  You approach the Glen by turning left at the Pollard Funeral Home—your first sign that all is not well—and drive past Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a retirement and nursing home also with a name made for the area. You cross Pryor Street and drive past the lucky few who grabbed the nouveau-project units built for the Olympics, decent town houses with vinyl siding and reasonable landscaping. But one more turn brings into view the looming, ten-story-tall sign for the defunct Toby Sexton tire factory. The enormous, empty buildings beneath the sign are crumbling, windowless, and covered with graffiti. This is the point where anybody who doesn’t live in the Glen silently mouths the words, “No, no, no,” and begins looking for an inconspicuous way to turn around. The self-preservation instinct, having been finely tuned by a thousand television shows and news reports, is dropping adrenaline into the bloodstream at its maximum rate. You pull into the first place you can, nice and casual, like you just dropped off some muffins to your cousins. Then you head back toward the well-patrolled, clean parts of Atlanta.

  Most of that adrenaline would have been wasted. Everybody knows to be afraid in public housing, but people who never go there are usually afraid of the wrong things. Assuming it’s daylight and you aren’t driving a four-wheel-drive pickup with Confederate flag license plates, there’s not much chance of getting capped. In battered Buicks like mine, people try to sell you drugs for the first ten blocks, then just think you’re a social worker and pretty much leave you alone.

  The monster of McDaniel Glen is sameness, numbing and soul-killing. The place is enormous, over eleven hundred units of identical, reddish-brown brick housing. Block after block, alley after alley, each the same drab, filthy brick, the same rusting cars parked along the streets, the same sad laundry hanging on wires. If you lived there long enough, even dreaming of the outside world would be difficult.

  I drove down the Glen’s main street looking for Pope, letting the eyes of dealers and bored kids linger on me until I pulled in and parked. I had a pretty good idea where to find him. If by some chance your life should become utterly insupportable and you need public housing, let me give you the rule: every large project has a federal Metropolitan Department of Housing Authority office, and the closer a unit is to it, the better. Those units actually get repaired occasionally and the streetlights mostly work. This is because when the big shots come down from Washington, they like to see the Rainbow Coalition walking around paradise arm in arm. So try to get next door, if you can.

  Because of Pope’s position in the local drug trade, he is at the top of the food chain in his small, scary world. Jamal is also a government employee, so you can be gratified in the knowledge that you pay his salary. He earns $640 a week as head of maintenance for the Glen, and there is a watermark picture of the Capitol Building of the United States on his twice-monthly check, rendering it impossible to counterfeit. This technological feat is wasted on Jamal Pope, however, because $640 is tip money compared with $30,000 tax-free a month he earns as the CEO of McDaniel Glen Pharmaceuticals.

  You might think that there is no job in the world of government housing that you would like to have. But give yourself a second, and look deep into your heart. If you would rather be the king of hell than a slave in heaven, then you should reconsider. The power you would wield as the head of maintenance at an MDHA property is as close to total as available to a person outside certain third world countries. The job requires that you live at the property—a definite negative—but on the plus side, the sad, dilapidated, scary world inside those walls would be your oyster.

  The source of your power is a set of keys. Behind the doors they unlock is every lightbulb, every doorknob, every faucet fitting, every gallon of paint, every foot of electrical wire, every toilet bowl gasket, every sheet of drywall—and, since we’re in Atlanta, let us not forget every air conditioner available to the ever
-needy residents over whom you rule. The shine on your ass would be world-class. And this would only be the beginning of your power, because of a second set of keys.

  This other set of keys—the nexus of your power—opens the doors to the apartments themselves. You can enter any of the dwellings at will. To disrupt lives—or suddenly make them easier—is at your whim. And yet you have still more power. This is because of the third set of keys, the keys that open the empty apartments.

  In the drug business, both supply and demand prefer to be hidden. You, the keeper of the keys, provide the space for each: show-room floor to the left, abandoned crack house to the right. You are wholesale, you are retail, you are middleman. Jamal Pope controlled it all.

  I got out of the car and started walking down the street that ran beside the MDHA office. Within twenty steps, Pope, keeper of the keys of the Glen, turned a corner to look at me warily, trying to decide if I was a customer or a problem. He had a solution to each. Jamal didn’t look rich. In his late thirties, he wore baggy work pants and a light blue T-shirt that said, Glock Around the Clock. We stood about twenty feet apart, staring at each other.

  “You hear about Doug Townsend?” I asked.

  Pope looked at me awhile, ignoring the question. He wasn’t threatening; he was just looking for clues. Then a smile broke over his face. “You that man got Keshan out the joint.” It was nice knowing that doing my job well earned me the gratitude of someone like him. But for the moment, he was available, which was what mattered. “Haven’t seen my boy Dougie for a while,” he said. “Outta circulation.”

  “Half a gram isn’t exactly your kind of transaction,” I said. “Maybe you could ask down the chain a ways.”

  “Point-four-nine,” Pope corrected. I nodded; anything under point-five-oh was considered a misdemeanor citation, with time served. Most deals carefully avoided going over that line. “I’ll ask Rabbit,” he said. “He’ll know.”

  Rabbit, Pope’s chief runner, had gained his job, his nickname, and his renown in the projects for instantly killing a man who tried to usurp Jamal’s territory. He earned a thousand dollars a week, and had as many as ten runners working under him at any one time, an interoffice delivery service exchanging money for packages. He was also Pope’s fourteen-year-old son.

  Pope pulled out a cell phone and punched numbers, apparently to a beeper. About five minutes later Rabbit came from around a corner on a bicycle. “Zup?” he asked. He was a typically eager, hyped-up kid, except that he was dead behind the eyes. In spite of the heat, he wore a black, long-sleeve Oakland Raiders sweatshirt.

  “Answer the man’s questions, niggah,” his father said. “Till I say stop.”

  The father-son affection was touching. “Listen, Rabbit,” I said, “I’m trying to find out what happened to Doug Townsend.”

  “He dead.” Rabbit shrugged. “Been dead a few days now.”

  “That’s right. I need to know if he was clean or not the last few months. Don’t worry, it’s not about you. I just need the straight answer to find out about Townsend.”

  Rabbit looked over at Pope, who nodded his head. “He was clean,” Rabbit answered. “I hadn’t seen his white ass in some time.”

  “You never saw him try to buy fentanyl, did you?” I asked.

  Pope interrupted with a scowl. “I don’t move that kinda product,” he said. “It don’t help to kill your customers.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Rabbit said. “My boy Dougie was into some weird shit.”

  “Weird?”

  “Shit I couldn’t even pronounce. Real pharmaceuticals. It ain’t a buzz, I know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I know everything a motherfucker can take, and I never heard of that shit. Smoke, crack, crank, fine. Otherwise, get off my stoop.” In spite of his age, Rabbit was completely comfortable talking product, as though he were a businessman discussing wheat prices in the Ukraine.

  “He had fentanyl in his system when he died,” I said. “So you don’t sell it. But suppose somebody did want to find some. Where would he go?”

  Rabbit thought a minute. “Up Dilaudid Avenue, I guess.”

  I nodded; Seventh Street, nicknamed Dilaudid Avenue because it was where all the prescription business went down, was across town in the Perry Homes projects. “You know anybody over there?” I asked. Rabbit looked at his father again, but this time Pope shook his head. “Somethin’ like that pretty tough to find on the street,” Rabbit said vaguely. “That prescription shit ain’t our line of work.”

  I thought about the possibility of Townsend selling drugs himself, a theory I could never afford to completely discount with an addict. If Doug had gone that route, it would certainly have taken him into a deeper darkness. I turned toward Pope. “If somebody wanted to get into prescription pharmaceuticals at the wholesale level, where would he go?”

  Pope thought a moment. God only knew what kind of experiences and connections were running through his mind. His solution, however, was simplicity itself: “I’d find myself a doctor,” he said. “Make a deal, you know, a percentage. Or better, a pharmacist. Depend on how much you want to move. A pharmacist could move more.”

  I nodded. “I don’t suppose you know of any—”

  “Time’s up,” Pope said. He didn’t seem angry; it just didn’t help business to have a white guy with a battered briefcase standing next to him.

  “Last question,” I said. “You ever hear of a woman named Michele Sonnier?”

  “Sonnier?”

  “Yeah. She’s a singer. Opera.”

  Pope grinned. “Hell, yeah. I just love to chill to that shit.” He looked at my Buick. “See that, niggah?” he said to Rabbit. “That what the straight life get you.” The two of them laughed, and disappeared back into the labyrinth of identical rectangular buildings.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SO IT’S COME TO THIS. My life is a cautionary tale for a drug dealer’s son. Beautiful. With Pope’s words ringing in my ears, I put myself into that detached state of indifference necessary to endure Atlanta’s midday traffic. I took the on-ramp back up onto a bloodless, choked artery of concrete built before the word “freeway” became ironic. I was heading south, back toward my office, but I had a stop to make first. I had a shrine to visit. A shrine with a congregation of one.

  I trickled south at thirty miles per hour, watching Atlanta change beneath my tires. After ten minutes I turned off on Martin Luther King, a busy urban thoroughfare that takes you deeper into the older, crumbling part of Atlanta. I stopped at a little shop and picked up my usual parcel, my offering. After a few more minutes I climbed the long, gentle hill leading to Oakland Avenue, and saw the entrance to my destination.

  Like the street, Oakland Cemetery was named for the trees, and was built long before an acre of untroubled Atlanta grassland cost half a million dollars. To walk onto its serene expanse—dotted with graceful water oaks, hemlocks, and gently bowing willows—is to step out of the clanging noise of messy urban living and into a place where your soul can rest. It is nearly ninety acres of tranquility, and it offers the solitude of a place steeped in history. Whatever noise intrudes from the surrounding city dies in the tremulous leaves of trees as old as Abraham Lincoln.

  I parked, got out, and let the peace of the place settle over me. It took a few minutes, but I was in no hurry. I walked out on the green grass, a warm wind on my face. This was familiar ground to me now, and I scanned the names on flat gravestones as I walked. They were a history lesson in southern Anglo heritage: Andrews, Sullivan, Franklin, Peery. Row after row, I passed a hundred and fifty years of southern blood. There was a time when midtown Atlanta was the center of the southern universe, and the rich and connected have been buried at Oakland since before the Civil War.

  At a large mausoleum—built by a family wealthy enough to ensconce their dead in a fortress of solitude—I turned left for the short walk to my destination. I counted six gravestones up a short hill, stopped, and looked t
o my right. Inscribed into a pale marble headstone were these unlikely words: Ramirez, Violeta. 1977–2001. La flor inocente. Bella como la luna y las estrellas.

  That plot of earth and headstone had cost me nearly every cent I had when I left Carthy, Williams and Douglas. I didn’t care. What mattered was that there, surrounded by Atlanta’s moneyed elite, lay Violeta Ramirez, innocent flower, as beautiful as the moon and stars.

  I laid tulips down across her gravestone, bright red as blood. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for her soul, and another for my own.

  Back at the office, Blu had a list of messages waiting for me: one from the DA’s office, wanting to set up a deposition; the usual distraught phone calls from clients, some rational, some not; a particularly irate call from the mother of somebody who had been convicted the week before. I had met her son thirty minutes before his trial, so it’s theoretically possible he didn’t receive everything he deserved in terms of legal representation. But of course, everybody in the room knew he was guilty, so that’s academic.

  I felt a little guilty about Blu; all that ruminating about ethics made me wonder if unleashing Sammy on her new boyfriend was the right thing. Stephens was cheating on his steady girlfriend, and that made him slime, of course. And God knew he could take care of himself. But Sammy was southern and Stephens wasn’t, and that put Stephens at a disadvantage in the game they were about to play. If you ever find yourself the third wheel in a relationship, pray to God the other person is from Wyoming or somewhere. If they’re from Georgia—or, God help you, Alabama, like Sammy was—it’s time to assume a defensive posture.

  I ignored them all and sat down to think. Rabbit’s reference to pharmaceuticals was a definite curve. I knew of no reason why Doug would want them, legitimate or otherwise. There was nothing distinctive about Townsend’s decline: he had started with ecstasy, which completely fit his personality, and then had become mixed up with coke because of the increasing tendency to blend X with it. That was the insidious thing about playing drug games; people get creative when they should leave things alone. There was smack-ecstasy, coke-ecstasy, speed-ecstasy, and God-knows-what-else ecstasy floating around Atlanta with cartoon names like Daffy Duck and X-Men. One thing led to another, and eventually Townsend decided that what he really liked was the coke, and he could do without the ecstasy. Which probably made him happy for a few months, until his life started to fall apart. At that point, the tragic arithmetic of addiction drove him downmarket. The fact was, Doug Townsend couldn’t afford pure coke and he wasn’t the type for crack, which is the poor man’s alernative. So like a lot of geeks, Doug went for methamphetamine. It was cheap, and for people who like to stay up all night and write computer code, it has magical powers.