The Last Goodbye

by Reed Arvin

  “Right.”

  “So if you can just lay low for a while, you’ll be fine.” I paused. “By the time the dust settles, maybe you can have moved to Siberia or something.”

  “Yeah,” Sammy said, gradually coming to terms with his extraordinary good fortune. “I can lay low.” His smile, although still tentative, was finally beginning to gain strength. “I can lay low, Jackie boy. I can definitely lay low.”

  “Except for one thing, I mean,” I said.

  Sammy’s face froze in mid-smile. “I knew it,” he said sullenly. “He’s going to have my knees broken, isn’t he?”

  “No, no, Sammy. I mean lay low except for one thing.”

  Sammy’s face clung uncertainly to the vestiges of hope. “What are you talking about, Jackie boy?”

  “You’ve got access to all the court records, right?”

  Sammy nodded cautiously. “Yeah.”

  “Even the juvenile ones.”

  Sammy stood and pointed to the door. “Nice knowing you, Jackie boy,” he said, his smile vanished. “I got things I gotta do.”

  “Hear me out, Sammy.”

  Sammy sat back down and fixed me in his clerk’s gaze. “They’re sealed, Jack. Which means that the only person who can combine the words ‘Sammy,’ ‘access,’ and ‘juvenile records,’ is His Honor, Judge Thomas Odom.”

  “But all I’m saying, Sammy, is that you do have access. You go down there all the time.”

  “That’s right. For Odom.”

  I tried to keep it light. “Because he needs to know what the little beasties were up to before they showed up in his court. And what I’m saying is, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for you to make a request for one more person while you were down there.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Sammy, I need this.”

  “And I need my job.”

  “It’s not going to cost you your job.” Those were words I definitely needed to believe, because Sammy’s job was the single connection between him and a meaningful life. It was his reason for being, his entrance into that part of society that wore decent suits and said please and brought him drinks in clean glasses.

  “Why,” Sammy said, “should I do this for you?”

  “Because I am on the precipice, Sammy. I am being asked to help a very disturbed woman.”

  Sammy stared. “It’s that girl. Ralston’s wife.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sammy whistled. “Damn, Jackie. She is seriously under your skin.”

  “This, from a man who risked all for—”

  “I know,” Sammy interrupted. “But that was a hell of a statement. You gotta admit.”

  I nodded. “Listen, Sammy, Stephens didn’t just talk about you. He had quite a bit to say about Michele, too.”

  “So?”

  “So he says ...” I paused, hating the idea of finishing the sentence. “He says she’s nothing but a talented liar. He says I’m confused by this voodoo chemistry she has. He says she’s the special kind of sick who gets her jollies by manipulating a man to get what she wants. And the thing is, Sammy, is that even though I love her, I am not fool enough to believe that what Stephens is saying is outside the realm of possibility.” I felt nauseous, but I was determined to face things head-on. “The truth is lying somewhere in the basement of the building we’re in right now. And you have access to the records. Five minutes with that file, and I find out who’s lying.”

  “She is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. It’s just easier that way. You get to walk off.”

  “I’d like nothing better. But it turns out she’s married to a murderer.”

  Sammy exhaled. “I wouldn’t throw that kind of statement around, Counselor, not unless you can prove it.”

  “I’m working on that. What matters right now is that eight people are dead, and Ralston killed them. Well, Ralston and Stephens.”

  “Jesus, Jack. Are you sure about that?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Because seriously, Jackie, this is my ass.”

  “I know. But there’s no other way. I’ve got to know, one way or another.”

  Sammy looked at me a second, then stood. “You’re going to have to buy me a bar to pay me back for this. You realize that.”

  “Yeah. I know. Look, she had a different name back then. It’s Fields, T’aniqua.” I picked up a pen and scribbled the name on a piece of paper.

  Sammy looked at the paper awhile, then looked up. “All right, God damn it. Anything for love.”

  “Thanks, Sammy.”

  Sammy picked up his briefcase. “Shut up and wait here. Don’t talk to anybody, don’t answer the phone, and don’t open the door unless it’s me. I’ll be back in few minutes.”

  I don’t claim to have known for sure that Sammy would help me, but I was hopeful, simply because I understood him so well. On the one hand, Sammy Liston was damaged goods. His mood alternated between a poignant bitterness over his underachievement and an unrequited lechery for unavailable women. But on the other hand, when it comes to stripping things down and letting them go, he is a Jedi master. Underestimating him in that department is a serious mistake. After about fifteen minutes Sammy walked in, sweating nervously.

  “You didn’t look like that while you were doing it, did you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you were robbing a bank.”

  Sammy closed the door behind him, went behind his desk, and opened the briefcase. He tossed out an old, faded manila folder. “You got ten minutes.”

  “It’s an inch thick.”

  “Then you better get started.”

  I nodded and opened the folder. There were at least a fifty pages of material, some of it twenty years old. There wasn’t time to go page by page, so I scanned sections at a time, piecing together her life history. Born: Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton County Hospital. May 17, 1974. Mother: Tina Kristen Fields. Father: unknown.

  The pages revealed the litany of foster parents, six in all. It was, to put it mildly, the kind of horrifying childhood shuttling between miseries that inspired Dickens. Whatever pain Michele Sonnier carried on stage with her, she had earned it. But unlike what Stephens had said, there was no record of any criminal activity. I flipped to the end of the file, searching for records of the birth of her daughter. Near the back, I found the juvenile court’s decision. I scanned through the legalese until I found these words:

  Although Miss Fields may well desire to remain with the child once she is delivered, the court must act in the interest of the infant. In this case, these interests are enormously complicated by the status of the mother. She is herself dependent on foster care, and therefore, may not reasonably assume the obligations of motherhood herself. Likewise, her foster parents have made clear they cannot take on the responsibilities of a newborn, nor are they inclined to attempt to teach Miss Fields to be a mother. The court sees no viable means of keeping mother and daughter together in the same home. Placing them together in another home would be extremely difficult, time-consuming and not without its own risks. At this point, the court feels the only possible course of action is to place the child in protective custody.

  I looked up at Sammy. “Is this everything? Stephens said she had several run-ins with the police.”

  “If it’s not in there, it doesn’t exist.”

  I flipped through the pages again. “The court took her away, but there’s nothing about any drug flap. They didn’t drag the kid out of her house. She never got home with the baby.” I stood and shook Sammy’s hand. “You’re my hero.”

  Sammy smiled and picked up the folder. “Get out of here before you ask me any other favors.”

  I left Sammy’s office, got in my car, and called the direct line to Robinson’s lab. Nightmare answered. “It’s me,” I said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Everything’s okay. Robinson threw up again awhile back, but he said it was normal.”

  “Has he drawn
the blood?”

  “Yeah. He waited as long as he could stand it, because we won’t have time to do the testing twice. We’ve been at it a couple of hours. He figures maybe twelve more with both of us working to get a result.”

  “You hanging in okay?”

  “I guess. Every time he coughs, I think he’s going to explode.”

  “You’re both going to have to sleep before you can finish,” I said. “There’s no way you can run straight through and not make mistakes.”

  “Naw, it’s not like that. Robinson says the last five or six hours are just waiting on NIH to match the enzyme to the human genome. We’ll crash then.”

  “Okay. Just relax, Michael. I’ll be there later tonight. If anything changes, call me.”

  “Yeah, no problem.” The phone clicked off.

  Judging by Robinson’s estimates, there wouldn’t be a result until tomorrow morning, at the earliest. I was staring at three hours before I met Michele. The truth was, I needed the time. Given Ralston’s merciless worldview of people as nothing but chemistry, it didn’t bother me that we might be hours away from bringing his house down around him. But it wasn’t just Ralston and Stephens who were about to have their world turned upside down. Michele would be caught in the crossfire of their destruction, and that was a different matter entirely.

  The world is too big a mess to believe in unstained lovers, and I had come to terms with how she had handled her life. Born into hell, she had used her tools of survival in earnest. But she wasn’t like her husband. Whatever precious there is about the human soul remained and even thrived, in spite of what she had been through.

  And that made her more than valuable. When she sang, it made her spectacular.

  If Robinson’s theory checked out, there would be lawsuits that engulfed Horizn, certain to require her deposition. There would be publicity-hungry tabloids, anxious to expose her colorful past. But in spite of everything, I believed she would survive. There are some people who remind us of what it means to be human, even in their flaws. That was the first moment when my mind truly settled, when I knew how much I wanted to see her again. Loving Michele wasn’t a replay of Violeta Ramirez. Loving Michele was something I was going to do with my soul.

  I got to my office a little early, looking around. Michele’s car wasn’t there yet. I got out and walked across the lot, going upstairs to wait. I took the stairs to my second-floor office, opened the door, and hit the lights. The door to my private office was open, and a small light was on. I walked over, pushed the door open, and saw a figure sitting in my chair, facing away from me. The chair slowly turned, revealing Derek Stephens. He wasn’t smiling. He also had a gun.

  “Close the door,” he said. He looked at me calmly. “So Robinson got his head out of his ass long enough to figure things out.”

  “Where’s Michele? I swear to God, if you hurt her, I’ll rip your head off.”

  Stephens ignored my question. “Pretty smart of you, hacking into our photo recognition software.” Please, God, tell me Nightmare didn’t sell us out again. “Trying to help Robinson was a bad idea,” Stephens said. “Everything was tidy. And now, more people have to die.” Stephens looked annoyed. “Let me ask you something, Jack. Why do you continue to believe in your failed values when they’re so clearly not working? Your idiotic insistence on justice is now going to cost you everything.”

  “You’ll lose. Don’t ask me how. But somehow, someday, you’ll lose.”

  Stephens shrugged. “I don’t like wasting such valuable commodities, but I can’t make your choices for you.”

  “You’ll probably get over it. Now tell me where Michele is.”

  “I’m a human being, Jack. I don’t like killing. Especially when people of quality are involved.”

  “There are eight people in McDaniel Glen who would like to talk to you about that, only they can’t, because they’re dead.”

  Stephens shook his head dismissively. “I’m not talking about them. I mean people like you.”

  “What do you mean, like me’?”

  “People with something to offer.”

  “White people, you mean.”

  Stephens shrugged. “Doug sealed his own fate by getting on the Lipitran program. Looking back on it, I should have anticipated that possibility. Nobody on earth knew more about how effective Lipitran was going to be. After all, he provided the information to us.”

  “So he took the initiative and put himself on the test.”

  Stephens nodded. “I didn’t tell Charles about it. Cleaning up messes like that is my job.”

  “Here’s an antiquated idea for you, Derek. You’re a bastard. Doug had no idea what you were going to do. If he had, he would never have helped you.”

  “I regretted having to kill him. I couldn’t care less about the others.”

  “I wonder how Ralston would take your particular brand of racism.”

  “He would agree completely.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. He hates his own people.”

  Stephens laughed derisively. “His people?” he jeered. “His people are vacations in St. Bart’s and courtside seats to the Hawks. It’s art openings and investment banking. Race has nothing to do with skin color, Jack. It hasn’t for at least a decade.”

  “Where does Michele fit in?” I asked.

  His expression darkened. “She’s too well known to disappear, but we can’t let her continue to blow up all the time. We’ve tried to manage her, but it’s become too dangerous. It was an almost intractable problem, to be honest. I was deeply concerned. And then, she was kind enough to solve it herself.”

  “Which means?”

  Stephen shrugged. “How do you kill a famous person? It’s almost impossible, unless she’s accommodating enough to go of her own volition to one of the most dangerous places in America.”

  I felt like ice. “She’s in the Glen.”

  “Of course she’s in the Glen. And I find this a great irony, Jack. She’s there to buy back her conscience.” He looked at me. “Sorry she couldn’t make her appointment with you. But Jamal Pope called to say he had her daughter waiting, and that in exchange for a great deal of money, she can have her. She was to call no one, and come alone. That is an invitation she found irresistible.”

  “You’re paying Pope to kill her.”

  “Apparently he’s very good at that kind of thing. Tomorrow’s papers will show that Michele Sonnier, driven by an unreported drug addiction, foolishly went into the bowels of McDaniel Glen in search for what she wanted. Unfortunately, she happened upon some members of a gang who had plans for her seventy-thousand-dollar car. There was an argument, and she lost.”

  “And that’s the end of her life? A frame-up about a drug deal gone bad?”

  Stephens looked unconcerned. “It’s the kind of mundane thing that actually happens, which makes it perfect.”

  “And me?”

  Stephens got his faraway look again, the one he used when he wanted to detach from certain details. “You, Sir Gawain? You finally get your wish. What you’ve wanted from the first is to die for a lady.”

  I stiffened. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I told you, Jack. I checked up on you. Didn’t that girl two years ago die because of your indiscretion? And haven’t you believed that your life was not really worth living from that moment on?” He smiled. “I’m giving you the opportunity to make amends for Violeta Ramirez, Jack. You get to go out in a blaze of chauvinistic glory. For God’s sake, I’m doing you a favor.”

  “You said her name.”

  “Who? Violeta Ramirez?”

  I lunged across the desk for him, determined to break his neck. I tackled him chest high, driving the chair back against the wall. He looked up in surprise and anger, and I hit him hard in the gut, forcing his breath out in a gasp. Stephens brought the gun down hard on the back of my neck, and I went down to a knee. Stephens stuck the barrel of the gun into my face. I ground to a halt, the pistol instantly clarifying my mind.
Dying without laying another finger on him wouldn’t wipe the self-satisfied smile off his face, and it wouldn’t do anything to keep Michele alive. The gun’s barrel shone in the dim light, shiny and lethal. I backed down, moving away a couple of feet. “Don’t misunderstand me, Jack,” Stephens said. “Just because I would prefer Pope to do this doesn’t mean I can’t do it myself. There’s too much at stake not to do whatever’s necessary.”

  I kept my eyes locked on the gun, which was a foot from my face. “So what happens now?”

  Stephens stood. “It’s time to go.” He pulled me up, pressing the gun barrel into my ribs. “Story time is over. Move.” We walked back through the office and out into the hall. Stephens kept the gun glued to my back as we went down the stairs to street level. Once outside, the street was deserted. He pressed the gun between my shoulder blades and said, “Over there. The gray Ford.”

  “A Taurus? Kind of low rent for a guy like you.”

  Stephens kept moving. “It’s nondescript.” He opened the driver’s door and shoved me in. He came in after me, pushing me across the bench seat. He shut his door and pushed the gun into my stomach. A strong bump in the road would probably discharge it. “Here’s the rules. If you so much as move, I’ll kill you. Then it’s just a matter of dropping off your body to Pope and letting him take it from there. You follow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now let’s go find your girlfriend.”

  He pulled the Ford out into the abandoned street, making his way toward McDaniel Glen at a steady, unobtrusive pace. We stopped at all the lights, Stephens driving conservatively. Halfway there I said, “You still have Robinson to think about.”

  Stephens kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. “The doctor is distraught after a second humiliation. He’s destroyed yet another employer’s fortunes. His life is no longer worth living.”

  “Think the cops will buy that?”

  “Robinson’s personal journal is kept on his computer at Grayton. It’s been thoughtfully rewritten, impeccably backdated in the computer code for the last month. Investigators will find his mood turns increasingly dour, his faith in himself shaken. He is friendless, ashamed to show his face. He becomes despondent. Eventually, he decides to put a stop to his life. It’s all there, line after painful line. The chronology will withstand any level of scrutiny.”