The Last Goodbye (22 page)

Michele ignored him. “I'm looking for someone,” she said. “I got fifty bucks for whoever tells me where she is.”

“All right, baby,” Darius said. “What's the name?”

Michele pointedly continued speaking to the group. “She's fourteen,” she said. “Her name's Briah. Briah Fields.”

“I don't know nobody like that,” one of the other boys said.

“Yeah, Briah,” Darius said slowly. “I know her.”

Michele turned her head toward the boy. “Does anybody else know her?” In the seconds she used to speak that sentence, the other boys copped to the plan.

“Hell, yeah,” they started shouting. “I know her. She over on Trenton Street. She in M building. I seen her couple days ago.”

Darius moved closer. “Come on baby, I told you I seen her. I'll take you right to her. Gimme the fifty.”

Michele didn't flinch. “When I see her, you get the money.”

Having discovered that Michele had enough self-respect to despise his presumptions, the boy's mood was deteriorating. I was standing there, trying to figure out if I was going to get us both killed by opening my mouth, when motion to my left caught my eye. I turned to look, and saw a police cruiser turning the corner onto our street. The car was about four long blocks away.

Instantly, the boys fell back a few feet, although Darius kept his eyes on Michele, sending silent threats. The police cruiser pulled slowly by; two officers—one white, the other black—peered out of the window as it passed, their eyes landing questioningly on me. Michele stiffened. The cruiser went up a few car lengths and parked. I looked back at Michele; before I could even speak, she had disappeared into one of the long apartment buildings. But there was no doubt she had been seen.

Shit, shit, shit.
The cops walked slowly up to the little crowd. One, a tall, burly sergeant, was definitely in charge. The other, a smaller, beat officer, tailed behind.

“What's up?” the first officer asked.

“Zup?” one of the kids said. Darius, previously the leader of the pack, had fallen back into the crowd. Nobody met the officers' eyes. There's an unwritten rule in the neighborhood, and it works like this: the police demand absolute respect, down to the tone of voice. If you treat them like gods—I'm not exaggerating, I mean gods—they will give you no trouble, and maybe even cut you a break. But if you give them the slightest bit of lip, they will make your life miserable. It is absolutely imperative for project residents to be respectful. Interactions between police and citizens are therefore mostly one-dimensional, short-answer affairs.

The tall officer walked up to me. “See some ID?”

“Sure, Sergeant,” I said, smiling. I pulled out my wallet. He looked at my license, then back at me.

“What brings you to paradise?” he asked, a shit-eating smile on his face.

“I'm a criminal defense lawyer,” I said. “I'm getting some information for a client.”

The other officer spoke up. “Yeah? Who on? Wonder if we busted him, Bobby?”

“It's a her, and I don't think so.”

The first officer sidled up to my car. The kids in the street backed off to let him through. He looked the car over, probably wondering why a lawyer would drive a piece of crap like that. “You wouldn't be here for pharmacological reasons would you, Counselor?”

“No, Officer, I wouldn't.”

He stuck his head inside my open window, sniffing. He pulled back out and said, “Got any objection to my looking around in there?”

“Yes, actually, I would object.”

“Why's that?” the smaller officer said. “You got somethin' to hide? I think he's hidin' somethin', Bobby.”

The kids around were boring holes in me, watching our little circus play out. I was white, and they wanted to see what happened. It was like a science experiment to them, watching a novel chemical reaction unfold before their eyes. I almost wanted to get messed with, just to show them that life wasn't always about race. But I couldn't do that, for the simple reason that I'm a lawyer, and I wasn't about to take the shit being peddled that day by the Atlanta Police. “If you're making a formal request to search my vehicle, I refuse,” I said. If it was possible for the oxygen to get sucked out of the air immediately surrounding us, it was. Every kid was staring at the officer, waiting for a withering response. Respect was on the line, and that, along with the Kevlar around his chest, were his most important protections. So I hoped the officer wouldn't force the issue. Predictably, however, he did.

“You're right,” he said to his partner. “I think he's down here buying dope.” He moved toward the car, sticking his head back inside.

Don't touch the door handle
, I thought.
Just puff out your chest a little, and let it go.

“I'm gonna ask you again,” the officer said, pulling out of the car. “Do you give me permission to search this car?”

“I do not.”

His hand reached toward the door. The second his fingers touched it, I said, “I'm going to reach inside my pocket now, Officer. I'm telling you this so that you don't misunderstand the action. I'm getting my phone.”

The officer stood up, ready to face down a threat. I locked my eyes on his, then moved my hand slowly to my front pants pocket. “Phone,” I repeated. I pulled it out and flipped it on. “Here's the deal,” I said. “You have two choices. If you think you have just cause, your partner and I can wait here by the car while you go downtown and try to convince a judge that me standing on a street corner gives you the right to a search warrant. Since they all know me by name, that could be a tough sell. But if you want to give it a shot, I've got nothing but time. Or, you can go ahead and open the car door, while I do the play-by-play for Detective Billy Little.”

The officer glared. He was pissed and embarrassed. “You know Detective Little?” he asked.

“I saved his life in Iraq,” I said, sarcastically. “And unlike you, he's sort of sticky about the Constitution. Like I said, it's up to you. The more I think about it, I don't really care which one you choose. But if you touch the door handle, I'm dialing.”

By then, a pretty good crowd of kids had coagulated around the scene, making things worse. You could feel them recording events in their minds, taking notes on how white people handled the police. I wanted to tell them it didn't have anything to do with race, that it was three years of law school, but they would never have believed it. To this day, I don't know who would have been right.

The tall officer backed away from the car, his face a scowl. But I could see he had made his choice. “I still say you were on a buy,” he said. “But that's fine. If you're going to fling that constitutional shit around, move your ass along.”

“Flinging constitutional shit around is something I never get tired of doing.”

“Then move. Or don't, and give me a reason to arrest you.”

“I need to find my client.”

“We got rules about being inside the Glen, Counselor. If you're not a resident, you have to be visiting one by invitation. Who's your client?”

He was right; McDaniel Glen was a restricted area. I looked across the dirty expanse that passed for grass between the street and the closest building. Somewhere, Michele was inside. She would be left with the crowd of boys to hunt her. “Look . . .”

“That's what I thought. Then move along. Now.”

“Officer . . .”

“One more word,” the cop said.

I cast a last look back at the building, then moved toward my car. There was nothing else to do. Getting arrested wouldn't help Michele. If she needed saving, I couldn't do it from jail. So I got in, started the car, and slowly drove off, heart in my mouth. About half the crowd dispersed, the rest watching the cops to see what they would do. The officers got in their car and pulled up behind me, trailing me all the way out of the Glen. It was the longest drive I ever took. If I had even stopped to look down a street, they would have busted me. Eventually, I pulled back through the iron gates, leaving Michele still inside. The police cruiser parked outside the Glen, and the officers stared through their windshield, making sure I kept moving. There was no way I could get back inside until the middle of the night, one hell of a prospect. The next shift change for the police wouldn't come until one o'clock in the morning, a time when driving into the Glen had the potential to be a life-and-death decision. I pulled out my cell phone, in the hope Michele was carrying hers. It rang two feet away, in her purse. I hung up and sat in the silence, wondering if I had the stones to go after her, and knowing that I would have to whether I did or not. The last time I had tried to save a woman, things had not gone well.
Damn. Professor Spence's magnetic principle is about to fry my ass.

I'VE HAD DAYS GO
by so fast they felt like burning slips of paper, each one turning to ash before my eyes. But sitting in my car two blocks away from the Glen, every minute was an eternity. I couldn't leave. I couldn't go in. I couldn't do shit.

My mind, however, wasn't under those restrictions. It ran at top speed, creating one hellish scenario after another about what was happening at that moment to Michele Sonnier. I shouldn't have been surprised at the way she handled herself before; after all, she had spent a year and a half of her adolescence there, learning to navigate those treacherous waterways.
I'm safer without you
, she had said, and maybe she was right. It was entirely possible my fears were unfounded. It was also possible I was underestimating them. The projects are not a world that easily yields to rational analysis. People live there without incident for a lifetime. Others endure lives of such chronic tragedy they can't imagine a thirtieth birthday. The Glen, I had learned, was a universe unto itself.

After ten or twelve unpleasant situations passed through my brain, I closed my eyes in frustration.
She can't show her face, because the cops know who belongs there down to the blades of grass. They'd bust her, and society reporters could have a field day imagining why the wife of Charles Ralston—in disguise, no less—had been picked up prowling the streets of Atlanta's worst project.
I had to assume that Michele would do anything before letting that happen.
So it's up to me, and even though it sucks, I am going to go back in.

One thing I've learned by watching my underachieving clients: sometimes, there is a genuine value to going psycho. If you're in a box, the predictable answers don't apply. You have to rattle the cage, or you're done. So after a couple of hours I did the craziest thing I could think of. I took out my billfold and emptied it of money, stuffing the bills in my glove box. I put on a ball cap, pressing it down on my head as far as it would go. I got out of my car and locked it up. I trotted in the fading sunlight toward the Glen, until I could see the entrance. The cops were still there, sitting on their asses. I trotted a couple of blocks down the street, then slipped down a side street. A few hundred yards down I stopped and took the biggest breath I ever took in my life. I looked right and left, and climbed up over the iron fence that divided McDaniel Glen from the rest of the world. Thirty seconds later, I had dropped off into the other side. The moment my feet touched the ground, I was the whitest man in Atlanta.

Point one:
your client gets killed.
Point two:
you find out he was in love with a high-class opera singer.
Point three:
you agree to help that woman find her lost baby.
Point four:
you are walking through the Glen in the growing dark, trying to find her.
Point five:
it is entirely possible that you are not attracting to yourself the shit of others, but rather, things are working in exactly the opposite way. You are the shit, my friend, and you are sticking to everybody you meet.

It was seven or eight blocks to the building where I left Michele, and I started off at a trot. Two blocks later, I no longer had reason to fear what Darius and his pals were doing to Michele. They were coming around a corner and practically ran over me. They turned in my direction and started loping along beside me, smiling. They looked like they could have run for days at that pace. “Hey, motherfucker,” Darius said, “what you doin'? You trainin' for the Olympics?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling affably. “I'm training for the Olympics.”

“You're pretty fuckin' slow,” another boy said. They were trolling, engines barely ticking over. Judging by my sudden need for oxygen, I had about another six blocks before I blew a tire. “I don't think you gonna win no motherfuckin' medals,” the boy said.

“I'm gonna get my face on the Wheaties box,” I said, looking around for Michele. “I'm gonna make a million bucks from endorsements.”

The second boy—not Darius—laughed. He was genuinely amused. “You a funny motherfucker,” he said. I noticed a tattoo on his right forearm; it was homemade, of a six-pointed star.
Not good.

“I try to be,” I said, not breaking stride.

Just then, one of the other boys ran up ahead of me, falling in place about two steps ahead. His right pants leg was rolled up, which, like the star, was a sign of Folks Nation, a national gang with strong membership in the Glen. It would be a point of principle for them to beat the hell out of me, not because I was white, but simply because I was on their turf without permission. Believe me, the Folks Nation were equal opportunity intimidators.
Mayday. Jesus, I am so screwed.
I looked up ahead; if I had my bearings right, I was getting close to where Michele had disappeared. Of course, she might be blocks from there by now. I kept running, all of us moving in close formation, like a fighter group.

“I like that hat,” another, shorter boy said.

It's funny how much hell can be contained in such an innocuous statement. “I like that hat.” Between two casual acquaintances, it's a compliment. In a bar, it's a pickup line. Under the present circumstances, it meant the following:
You are now fucked. If you give me the hat, you're fucked, because you're weak, and we'll make you pay. If you don't give me the hat, you're still fucked, because you disrespected.
I had now entered the full-on Judson Spence rainstorm, and the tide was coming in. I stopped running. Psycho had got me inside the Glen; maybe it would help me find Michele, and get us both out.