The Last Goodbye Read online

  None of which connected him with Dilaudid Avenue and the Perry Homes projects. I seriously didn’t want to go down there. For one thing, I didn’t have any contacts, and just asking the wrong person the wrong question can dry up an entire segment of society. Word spreads through that kind of place so fast if you blink you miss it. But for now, at least, there was an alternative, and it made sense on a lot of levels to pursue it.

  Townsend’s computer was set up on a small table in my office. Inside it, I assumed, were a great many answers to my questions. And it occurred to me that the more information I found there, the more unlikely it was that he had killed himself. If he had known in advance the time of his death, he certainly would have deleted anything too horrifying. Even people on death row don’t like the idea of being humiliated after the fact.

  I picked up the phone and called Michael Harrod. An answering machine answered. Harrod’s voice said, “Make it good, you’re slowing down my data transfer.” Then there was a beep.

  “Michael?” I said. “Listen, that favor I needed, it’s time to collect.” Silence. “I know you’re in there, Michael. You never go anywhere when you’re not out ripping off Radio Shack.” More silence. “Nightmare?”

  Harrod picked up. “Yeah,” he said. “What up?”

  “Remember that little job I had for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it would probably go a lot better if you were here.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Let me refresh your memory. I saved you from being the pool boy at the Fulton County Country Club. It’s time to pay up.”

  More silence. After a long pause, Nightmare said, “Whose computer is this, anyway?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, because I don’t want it to suck.”

  “A former client of mine. You wouldn’t know him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Doug Townsend.”

  Dead silence, at least fifteen seconds. Then, “I can see where you’re calling from,” followed by a dial tone.

  I didn’t have a chance to figure out what Nightmare’s response meant. Before I could put the phone down, I heard Blu rummaging around on the other side of the open door. I hung up the phone and walked in, curious; she was pulling her stuff together, like she was preparing to leave. I looked down at my watch; there was nearly an hour left before closing. For all her faults, she was usually prompt, both coming and going. I walked in, flopping down in one of the waiting room chairs. I watched her push a magazine into her purse, thinking again about how different our lives were. What, I wondered, would it be like to possess such a limited set of assets, but to have those few in such spectacular abundance? What would it be like to be a woman like her, walk into a bar, and have every straight guy in the place check his pulse? And what, I especially wondered, would it be like to know that you had a handful of chances—moments of destiny—when your assets intersected with one of the small number of men with the legitimate power to fulfill all your dreams? Would it matter, strictly speaking, that the guy was an asshole of epic proportions? Blu raised her face to mine, giving me a smile. “Off early today, if that’s not a problem,” she cooed. Even her voice was like compressed sex.

  “It’s not actually closing time,” I said. “Strictly speaking.”

  She smiled. “You don’t mind, do you, Jack? The phone hasn’t rung in an hour.” That, I had to admit, was true. “Anyway, I have a date.” She pushed a foot into a navy blue, strapped pump. I hadn’t noticed she had been barefoot.

  “You seeing that guy Stephens?”

  Her smile deepened. Time stood still, as I waited for the pronouncement. Four words told me everything I needed to know. “Such a nice man.” She picked up her bag and moved toward the door. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Good-bye, Jack.” With that, she floated out the door. I was alone in my office, left with thoughts of Blu being whisked away on the Horizn corporate jet to New York for a no-expenses shopping excursion.

  I paced around in my office until Nightmare showed up. He had, against all odds, changed his shirt. The new one had a picture of a surprised-looking sheep, with the logo, Dolly Lama—Our Spiritual Leader. His expression was changed, too: I could feel his excitement the moment he walked in the door. “Where is it?” he asked, without saying hello.

  I nodded toward my office. “Apparently I said the magic words.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you saying you knew Doug Townsend?”

  “I never met him. But I can give Killah his props.”

  “Killah?”

  “Doug.”

  “Doug Townsend went by Killah?”

  “Look, man, this is an alternative universe. Goin’ by Killah doesn’t mean he owned a gun. It means file killer.”

  “But you’re saying that Townsend had a reputation in the hacker community.”

  Nightmare smiled. “What hacker community?”

  I stared at him a moment, then said, “Computer’s this way.”

  Nightmare followed me into my office, where I had Townsend’s computer set up on a small table. Nightmare took a seat, then opened up a valise containing dozens of zip disks. It only took about five minutes for him to discover that the trip inside my former client’s computer was no walk in the park. “Shit,” Nightmare said.

  “Problem?”

  “There’s hardly anything here. He was working through someone else’s mainframe. From the looks of it, Georgia Tech.”

  “Why them?”

  “Because they’re huge, and they have a relaxed attitude. The grad students manage the mainframes.”

  “Are we screwed?”

  Nightmare smiled. “All it takes is time.”

  “Can I get you something?” I asked. “A Coke?”

  “Got any spring water?”

  “Nope.”

  “See you when you get back.” Apparently, Nightmare was a health nut when it came to beverages. I rose and headed for the little store on the corner near my building. By the time I got back, Nightmare’s smirk had faded.

  “This is some serious shit,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning this is some serious motherfucking shit.”

  “That clears things up. Thanks.” Nightmare scowled, and I asked, “Are you saying that whoever he was hacking had massive defenses or something?”

  “I have no idea who he was hacking,” he answered. “But whoever it was, Killah was taking them seriously. The defenses are the other way around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he definitely didn’t want them crawling back up his DSL lines and identifying him. This stuff is protected. It’s passwords, which I figured, since Killah wouldn’t have had the resources for a hardware lock, like hand or iris recognition. But whatever it is, it’s the shit, man. Most passwords are six characters, maybe eight. This one is twenty-six. It’s just crazed.”

  “Twenty-six?”

  “Yeah. It gets worse, though.”

  “Great.”

  “Killah was using the new 4096-bit encryption. So the number of possibilities is like ... I don’t think calculators go that high. Like a billion billion.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Or maybe more. It’s so mind-boggling, I can’t actually imagine it.”

  I stared at him, trying to believe in whatever magic guys like him possessed. “So what do we do?’

  Nightmare paused, thinking. “I could set up a brute force program,” he said, “the kind that just tries everything. But there’s a downside.”

  “Which is?”

  “It would take about six hundred years to run.”

  “How about all that stuff in the movies, where the guy just pushes a few buttons and it’s, bam, we’re in?”

  Nightmare’s face showed pure derision. “Pure Hollywood. You work for weeks to break something like this down. To get into this we have to aim better, not waste our efforts. I’m running
the latest version of Crack right now, but it’s probably futile.” Nightmare didn’t give me a chance to ask. “Automated dictionary attack. It’s got every word in the English language in it, so it just hammers away with word combinations. But this encryption is over the top, even with my computer at home working simultaneously.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah, you can spread Crack across multiple platforms, and you get an exponential increase in power. Maybe if I could get the mainframe at Tech working on it, we’d have a shot.”

  “Can we?”

  “Umm, maybe.”

  “Look, Michael, is this going to work?”

  Nightmare shrugged. “You’re makin’ too much noise, man. Lemme think.”

  Four hours later, it was almost nine-thirty. Nightmare said he was hungry. I said I would call a pizza delivery company. He said, and I’m quoting him now, “Fuck this shit, I’m going home.”

  “You’re giving up?”

  Nightmare stood and began pacing back and forth in front of Townsend’s computer. It seemed best not to disturb him, so I just let him do it. “Look,” he said after a couple of minutes, “I need to think this out. I’ll meet you here in the morning.”

  “To do what?”

  Nightmare looked at me. “Killah was good,” he said. “But he ain’t Nightmare.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IF YOU WANT TO ROMANTICIZE ATLANTA—and most of us who live here do—see it at sunset. In the dim half-light of dusk—those precious few minutes—it teeters among its various personalities, sublime and untouchable. It is a city built in a forest, its hard edges softened by the tips of hickories, sweetgums, white oaks, and red maples. There is a fragility to the loveliness of it, particularly for those of us who spend our days and nights with the undergrowth that lurks beneath its surface. But as night grows, its sense of history becomes murkier; the tone becomes more urban, less distinctively southern. It is a city caught between sunlight and dark, between history and tomorrow.

  The city’s past is held captive by the sweet fragrance of magnolia blossoms, which despite the crush of automobiles and skyscrapers, continues somehow to survive. This is a world in which the Confederate flag can be seriously considered a romantic symbol. It is badly fraying along its edges, but its resilience has shut the mouths of a lot of cultural observers, few of them southern. In that world, there are still cotillions for young white girls, as long as they have parents who are sufficiently wealthy and nostalgic. They cling to those conventions because they feel what’s coming: Nightmare’s new economy. That version of Atlanta is the center of the high-tech South, an essential node in a faceless, soulless world without borders or history. That world will come soon enough. When it does, combining words like “southern” and “gracious” will be as anachronistic as the Sons of the Confederacy. But in between, tenuous and trying desperately not to fall apart, is Atlanta’s present, its daylight: urban life in the South of these United States. I have seen its diversity better than most. I grew up in the rural South, so I know the world people come to Atlanta to get away from, which is an important part of their psyche. I went to Emory, so I know what southern children are like who grow up so sheltered and privileged that their idea of a crisis is overspending the limit on their gold cards. I have worked at Carthy, Williams and Douglas, so I know the particular ways the parents of those children screw and reward each other, courtesy of the American legal system. And because my soul failed its most important test, I was now spending my days with the city’s refuse, the people whom the combined brilliance of the city’s ruling class can’t figure out anything to do with except rope off like cattle. For better or worse, I have become an unwanted expert on the damaged southern soul.

  In the fifteen miles between my apartment and the Fox Theater, I drove past it all. From south Atlanta you take the loop northwest, into the suburban industrial parks that ring the city, congregating every few miles in glass and steel, twenty stories high; then you hit I-75 and go north, up through the converging railroad lines and truck depots that make Atlanta the largest distribution center in the Southeast; then out over McDaniel Glen, the human cattle pen; and finally, you take the Eighth Street exit, downtown, where the banks and old money do business. From there it’s only a few blocks to the Fox.

  I was going to the Fox for the same reason I went to the Glen: because it was the only thing I could think of doing. It was the last night of the three-night engagement of Capulets and Montagues, and I knew that for a little while longer, Michele Sonnier would be inside those walls. As I drove by the Fox, I glanced at my watch; it was after eleven. The show had ended a half hour earlier. I pulled into the private parking lot without any problem; the security was long since gone. I parked and got out, walking up toward the stage exit. There was a small crowd there of about twenty people, dressed nicely, but different from the crowd at the Four Seasons. These were the diehard opera fans, mostly college students.

  I walked up and asked a young woman if they were waiting for Sonnier, and she brightened and nodded. She didn’t know how long it would be; Sonnier took her time, apparently. That was fine by me. I would wait as long as it took.

  Every few minutes the door opened and someone stepped out, the crowd deflating over them like a popped champagne bubble when people realized it wasn’t the star. I actually felt sorry for a couple of the singers, emerging with smiling faces, only to feel the sudden disappointment over who they weren’t. But eventually the door opened again, and the man who had escorted Sonnier through the party at the Four Seasons emerged. I moved into a shadow by the side of the building, content to watch for a while. The man looked bored; he lit a cigarette, absently watching the people in the crowd. A few minutes later Sonnier appeared, wearing a cotton muffler around her neck, in spite of the heat. The crowd applauded when she walked out, and she smiled, but I was surprised by her appearance. She looked very tired, much more so than she had at the party. Apparently doing the opera three nights in a row took a toll.

  The little crowd pressed in around her. A couple of people spontaneously embraced her, and the man traveling with her put his hand out, creating a little space for her. She looked like she needed it. She was seriously exhausted. A few people asked her questions about singing; I could see the fatigue behind her eyes as she listened. She had probably heard them all a hundred times. But she answered everybody, and signed autographs. When there were three or four people left, I quietly stepped into the periphery of her vision, although still partially in shadow. Sonnier was looking down, signing an autograph. She felt someone new, and I saw her eyes glance upward. She finished signing her name, and looked up. I was in the half-light, and I don’t think she recognized me at that point. She signed another autograph, but I could sense her feeling around for me in the dark, wondering. She had the radar that famous people get, an inner detector for people who want something. A car pulled up, a limo to take her to her hotel. The man went to the car to speak to the driver, and I stepped full into the light, to her left. She turned and saw me clearly, her pen stopping in the middle of her name. Our eyes locked for a second; then she turned her head.

  Maybe it was the shock of seeing me again. If there had been the illusion in her mind that I had been deceived the first time we met, that was now over. She was rigid and tense. I stayed to her side, about five feet away, not pressuring her. She kept talking to the last couple of people, but she was rushing now, getting through it. When there was one person left, she called over to the man by the limo. “Bob,” she said, “ready to go?”

  The man turned to look, and seeing me, walked briskly over to Sonnier. I don’t know if he remembered me from the Four Seasons, but he was definitely tuned into Sonnier’s tone of voice. Ignoring me, he smiled at the woman Sonnier was with and said, “Walk with us, won’t you?” Sonnier was signing her final autograph in mid-walk; the limo door was open, and suddenly she was entering the car. I didn’t pursue her. There wasn’t a point. There was only one question to ask her, and she
wasn’t going to answer it in the parking lot of the Fox Theater: “Why did you lie about knowing Doug Townsend?”

  When Sonnier’s door closed, the car pulled out, turning onto Peachtree. I watched the limo’s taillights recede into the Atlanta night for a while, then walked across the lot to my car. At the Four Seasons, Sonnier had done a pretty good job of covering, although not good enough. But whether it was fatigue from the show or the shock of seeing me again, she had shown me a lot more in those few seconds behind the Fox. No matter how far apart their worlds were, Doug Townsend had been much more than just a fan.

  When my phone rang, it was about one-thirty in the morning. I wasn’t blurry, exactly. I was in the dangerous place, drifting in that highly suggestible state between wakefulness and dreams. But that didn’t prevent me from recognizing the voice the second I heard it. I’d felt the shiver it sent up my spine once before. “Mr. Hammond?”

  My eyes opened. I played the sound over in my mind, just to be sure. “Well,” I said quietly, “if it isn’t the great Michele Sonnier.”

  There was silence for a second, then, “Is this Mr. Jack Hammond?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know it’s late. I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home.”

  “Not at all.” A longer pause, and I asked, “Would it be safe to say you have something you’d like to talk about?”