The Last Goodbye (29 page)

I felt like I was turning to stone inside. “What happened?”

“There was an accident. The baby was nearly drowned while Michele was partying with friends in another room.”

“I see.” Only I didn't see. I was more confused and broken every moment.

“She was bathing the little girl, and got distracted. By marijuana and alcohol, as it happens. The baby was saved by police who had gotten a tip on the party. A neighbor heard the noise and was concerned the child wasn't getting proper attention. The police busted the place, and found Michele and her friends in the living room. Stoned.” I couldn't speak. “The police searched the house, and they found Briah on her back in a bathtub. The water was inches from her mouth. If she had even turned her head, she would have drowned.” Stephens grimaced. “So yes, Jack. Social Services removed the child. Anything else would have been irresponsible. But they did it to save the little girl's life.”

“Where is she now?” I asked. “Where is Briah?”

“What makes you think I know that?”

“Because you seem to know everything else.”

Stephens watched me, considering. “Fair enough,” he said, after a moment. “I do know. But it isn't any of your concern. It's enough to say that Charles has seen to it that the child has everything she needs.” He sighed. “Every once in a while, Michele gets regret. She decides she has to find her daughter and explain everything. After all these years, she wants to be a mother. It's understandable, I suppose. But Briah is in a far better place, and nothing good can come from that meeting.”

I sat in silence awhile, trying to make sense of things. The world was upside down. The woman I had been falling in love with was turning out to be someone who had mercilessly used me, and my so-called enemy was trusting me with his deepest secrets. Suddenly, a thought flashed through my brain. “Listen,” I said, “Sammy isn't the smartest guy in the world. Have some mercy on him. He's just ... frustrated at who he isn't.”

“I'm not going to do anything to your friend,” Stephens said.

“He trashed your Ferrari,” I said. “Or he had it trashed.”

“I'm aware of that.”

“And you're going to do nothing.”

“That's right.”

“Blu said you were upset.”

“Wouldn't you be?”

“I'd be nuclear. So why aren't you going to do anything about it?”

“Because although your friend is a pathetic worm, he is chronologically extremely lucky. If I am going to get my name in the paper six days before Horizn goes public, it is not going to be over a lover's spat with a disgruntled court employee.”

“And after?”

“Horizn's stock price will be fragile a long time, Jack. It's going to run up fast, and that will make people nervous. Stability is everything. And frankly, when I go on MSNBC, I don't want the first question to be about some southern-fried, redneck argument about a car.”

I stared. Nothing—I mean nothing—about this conversation had gone the way I thought it would. “He gets away with it,” I said.

“He does.” He leaned back in his chair. “Which brings us to you.”

Suddenly, I understood what the hell Stephens was doing in my office, and why he was risking giving me so much unvarnished information about the secret life of Charles Ralston's wife.
Damn right, he's not wasting his expensive time. He's here to make a deal.
“I'm something of a loose end, aren't I?” I said.

Stephens shrugged. “If you like.”

“You want me to stop nosing around about Doug's death. You don't want any cages rattled.”

“A billion dollars are at stake, Jack. Every penny of it rests on the spotless reputation of Horizn.”

“Not really my problem.”

“No, but what if all your questions were answered? And you do have questions, Jack. Questions about your friend.”

“I'd like nothing better than answers.”

Stephens reached in his pocket and set a card down on my desk. “Tomorrow morning, at Horizn offices. Give that to the guard at the gate.”

I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “To do what?”

“You have an appointment with Charles Ralston.”

“Is that a fact?”

“You have your suspicions, and time with Robinson made them worse. But Robinson's latest tragedy is his own, and Horizn had nothing to do with it. In the interest of peace, Charles has agreed to meet with you personally and discuss these matters. In my opinion, he shouldn't give you the time of day. But of course, I wouldn't put up with his philandering wife, either. So he's a better man than I am about some things.” He rose. “In the meantime, I'm also going to assume that you'll be reasonable about Michele.”

“You mean keep away from her.”

“This is a sensitive time, and she's a volatile woman. When she falls apart, nobody wins.” He rose and began walking toward the door. Before he reached it, he paused and turned back around. “And I have a message for Tom Robinson. One inflammatory word from him that gets into the media, and there won't be anything left of him or Grayton Labs to bury. He has nothing to prove, and I take the libel laws in this country seriously. Understood?”

“I'll pass it along.”

“You do that.”

Stephens left, and I sat alone in my office. Alcohol, for so long my sweet blanket of anesthesia, beckoned like a lover. I was wearing my guilt and stupidity like a sunburn. After the heat, comes the pain. And after Derek Stephens, came the personal recriminations.

I had backed the wrong horse. I had got my ass kicked. I had—and this was the hardest to swallow—opened up to the beauty, elegance, and talent of a woman I supposed to be so far beyond me that even to be near her was like a dream. And I had just learned that for her it had been an illusion, another role.

Love, I was being reminded, can be a bitch. The mere possibility of it made people act like idiots, and everything that had happened since Doug Townsend died convinced me of it more. Doug was doomed by trying to do something for Michele. Without that fatal obsession, he would still be alive, off drugs, and turning his life around. Sammy had risked his own existence losing his mind over Blu.
And I've just had my hat handed to me by Derek Stephens. Who, it should be noted, is presently breaking the heart of my secretary.
I opened my bottom drawer, pulled out a bottle and a glass. I poured a drink and sat looking at it, watching the light flicker in its amber, liquid depths. I heard some soft talking in the outer office, and then the door closed, meaning Stephens had left. I looked at the glass of whiskey, thinking about Blu. I'd heard it said many times that being beautiful can be a pain in the ass. But I hadn't really understood it, not until now. But Blu's most persuasive assets were also her most dangerous trapdoors. On the one hand, a guy like Sammy—who, in spite of being a little deranged about her, was actually quite chivalrous in his lecherous heart—was always lurking around to make life complicated. Smile at him, and he's likely to show up with flowers and a bottle of champagne. On the other, a guy like Stephens—who held in his hands the power to grant her every wish—was only going to use and discard her. I downed the drink, refilled the glass, and stared at the second just like the first. I don't know how long I stared. I just know that at some point the door to my office opened, and Blu, walking a little unsteadily, came in. “How you doing?” I asked quietly. “You okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “You had some messages on your desk.” “Listen, Blu, if you want to talk about anything . . .” “No, that's fine.” She ran a hand through her TV commercial hair. “I'm fine, really.” She crossed the room to my desk and pushed a piece of paper across it. “I'm resigning,” she said. “I'm giving my notice.”

I stared at the paper, then back up at her. “What are you talking about? I don't accept.”

She blinked a few times, and I wondered if she had been crying. “It doesn't matter, Jack. I'm leaving either way. I'm just trying to be professional.”

“But why?”

“Just because.”

“Is this about Stephens? Dammit, Blu, if he's pressuring you . . .”

“No,” she blurted, her face reddening.

“Then what? You can't just leave without telling me what's going on.”

She turned, and suddenly, there wasn't any doubt about whether she was crying. She was leaking all over the office. “Don't make me spell it out, Jack. Just let me do it.”

I stood up, walked to her, and put a hand under her chin, tipping her face up to mine. “You can do what you want. But just tell me why.”

She stood in front of me, spectacular even in her pain, her perfect face scrunched into anguish, tears coming from her flawless, cerulean eyes. And then she said something so human, so generous, so completely noble that it went like an arrow through my heart. “I'm doing it for you, Jack,” she sobbed. “Because as long as I'm here, Sammy isn't going to call here anymore.”

I let go and sat back on my desk, stunned. She was right, of course. She had lived through enough idiotic, outsized declarations of love like Sammy's to know what came next. Sammy wasn't going to come within ten miles of her, although he was still going to love her so much it drove him a little insane. Once a man lays it out that hard and gets turned down—not that Sammy had expected anything else, he wasn't
that
insane—he can't just pick up the phone and make small talk. The male ego simply doesn't accommodate it. It would simply be impossible for him to dial my phone number knowing that her voice was going to be on the other end. But being right didn't mean I was going to just let her walk out the door. I was fully prepared to pretend I didn't know what she was talking about, in the hope that we could both just lie to each other a little bit and get on with things. “Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “Of course he's going to call.”

She wasn't buying it. “He's not going to call, Jack. God, men are so—”

“Look—”

“You can't stay afloat without Sammy,” she interrupted flatly. “And he's not going to call with me here. He's been humiliated, and he won't be able to face me. So it's simple. I have to go.”

“But listen—”

“And anyway, he's your best friend, Jack. I'm not going to ask you to give that up.”

“So Stephens didn't ask you to leave?”

“No.”

I thought about it a minute, then ripped her resignation paper into pieces. “Then there's no way I can accept this. You're staying.”

“You'll go broke.”

“But you want to work here.”

“Of course I want to work here. You're . . . yes, I want to work here.”

“Then you're going to keep working here.”

She looked at me awhile, her tears subsiding. Her breath was still coming in painfully alluring gasps of lucky oxygen. “Why?” she asked. “Why do that for me?”

“Because at this moment I'm embarrassed for the male segment of the human race, and I am going to make amends. I am going to do something unprecedented. I am going to do you a favor, and I am not going to use it to get in your pants.”

It took a couple of minutes, but she pulled herself together. She smoothed down her top, adjusted her skirt, and pushed her hair back off her face and behind her ears. Then she walked straight up to me and kissed me gently on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said, a tiny smile escaping her lips. “Thank you very much.”

“You're welcome.”

“You really will go broke.”

“Probably.”

“Well, then, if there's nothing else.” She wiped her tears again, turned, and walked out the door.

WEDNESDAY CAME TO ATLANTA
like a whisper, a faint, golden luminescence spreading upward in the east. I sat in my apartment and watched my small fragment of the city come to life, light by solitary light. Newspapers were getting thrown onto porches, while alarm clocks for the early risers—the ones with the brutal hour and a half commutes—were shocking people out of the last, most precious, hour of sleep. A lone car, headlights gleaming in the fading darkness, rolled under my third-story window. I had not slept. Instead, I had spent the last few hours alone in my apartment, my only company a bottle of scotch and a list of eight names.

There are people who, when drunk, float into the black emptiness of nearly comatose sleep. I am not one of them. I can drink all night, although it's invariably a lousy idea. It's lousy because with alcohol, I become eerily attuned to the misery of the world, which is a heavy enough load to carry sober. So my bottle of scotch and I spent the night in too-familiar territory, ruminating on priests who preyed on children and overpaid CEOs and Clinton getting blow jobs in the Oval Office—in other words, the collapse of decency in this once-proud country. Before me—grist for my angry mill—were seven names of the formerly living: Jonathan Mills. Chantelle Weiss. Brian Louden. Keisha Setter. Najeh Richardson. Lavaar Scott. Michele Lashonda Lyles. Doug Townsend. To which I could probably soon add Roberto Lacayo, clinging to life in the hospital.

As the sun rose, I stared at the list, holding each name in my mind. Of their number, only Doug was a complete person to me, full of the details that make life meaningful. But it wasn't hard to imagine the common ground of the other lamented lives. Somewhere they had all gone off the tracks, finding themselves infected with a dangerous disease and willing to take a chance to get help. If they died in the crossfire of a corporate battle, they were nothing but sacrificial pawns. And just because the whole world was falling apart didn't make that acceptable.

I sat there in silence for another half an hour, sipping whiskey. I don't know what I expected; maybe I thought God was going to appear in my crap apartment and explain how everything works. All I know is I finished the bottle at about six-thirty, which was the moment I got free. I put down the glass, realizing that I had wondered enough about things that have no answer. The reason for the way things were was: there was no reason. None at all. They just were.
L'amore non prevale sempre
, baby, and that was the truth of things. To survive, you got to strip things down and let them go. Only then can a man get free enough to find his way through this mess.
There is no God
, I thought,
and I am His prophet.
I got up feeling triumphantly atheistic and made myself some coffee. I looked at the empty bottle of scotch, and made a vow: I would no longer drown my so-called sorrows. I would stay in touch with my pain, letting it burn into my cells the importance of detachment. The world was too big a place for me to make right, and I wasn't exactly driven snow, myself. But if I could figure out what happened to the men and women who got murdered trying to rid themselves of hepatitis, I would do it. I would do it because that was the kind of man I was, and it didn't need any explaining. So at eight-thirty I took a shower, letting the warm water wash away a lifetime of mistakes. At nine I put on a sport coat, got in my car, and drove to Horizn Pharmaceuticals.