The Last Goodbye (3 page)

“They probably weren't that close, Jack. The guy's a junkie.”

“Was a junkie, Sammy. Was.”

“Stop by the courthouse on the way over and pick up a key. And listen, Jack, take it easy over there. It's not exactly a great neighborhood.”

That was putting it mildly; Townsend had traveled the well-worn path, spiraling downward to pay for his habit, eventually landing in a crap apartment building called the Jefferson Arms. “I know, Sammy. I'll be in touch.”

A pointless, futile death for Doug Townsend was laced with irony, because ten years earlier, I had watched him do the bravest thing I had ever seen. We met in college—I was a freshman, he was a senior—through the intracampus tutorial service. Doug tutored me through calculus, about which I had little aptitude and less interest. But it was a hoop to jump through, so I had to buckle down. We were both busy during those days—I, grinding through the freshman flunk-out courses; Doug, who was three years older, with his computer science classes—and we usually met late at night, around ten.

Doug had confided to me that he had pledged every single fraternity on campus his freshman year, and been turned down by them all. He had the kind of overeager, wide-eyed social style that doomed him to loneliness. He was as well-rounded as a ruler and as awkward as a one-legged bird. But he could be brilliant in a narrow range of subjects. Chief among these was the application of computer technology. He loved computers, adored them, opened them up to expose their inner workings. They were, for him, friend, lover, and savior. It was just as well, because his human friends could be numbered on a single hand.

Late one night, Doug having finally explained to me the difference between tangent and secant lines, we were walking back across campus toward the dorms. I was staring down at the concrete, trying to work out what he was saying, when Doug sprinted out ahead of me. What Doug saw, and I did not, was a girl involuntarily vanish into the bushes beside the walkway. While I was still trying to figure out what was happening, all 130 pounds of Doug Townsend leaped into those bushes with a high-pitched, bloodcurdling wail. He was all arms and legs with no particular strategy, but it was impressive to see.

There were two frat boys in the bushes with the girl. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken them about ten seconds to waste Doug Townsend. Because they were drunk, it took about twelve. By the time I got there—and believe me, I was hauling—Doug had already taken a couple of significant clips to the body.

I dropped one of the frat boys with a decent right. I turned to see what was happening with Doug, and saw him take a smack to the side of the head. On the point of impact he had a strange, almost detached smile on his face, like a baby held in his mother's arms. There was the crunch of bone on bone, the peaceful, satisfied smile, and Doug crumpling into a little heap at his attacker's feet. Who then leaned over, vomited into the bushes, and passed out, saving me the trouble of finishing him off.

The girl was no more sober than the frat boys. She crawled back out onto the sidewalk in a drunken, four-legged, crablike move and fell to one knee. I tried to help her up, but she refused, eventually righting herself. She muttered something incoherent and careened down the sidewalk toward the dorms. Strictly speaking, I should have seen her home. But I didn't, because Doug Townsend, her forgotten, damaged hero, was groaning at my feet, and between the two of them, I knew who I was going to help.

No charges were filed. The girl let the bastards off, which wasn't a big surprise. But that night was a watershed for me. It was the moment adult concerns first entered my young mind, the time when my adolescence ended and I discovered that some things were truly important and worth fighting for. On that night I left Dothan and high school behind, and I decided that if there were frat boys and drunk girls and people as weak and brave as Doug Townsend in the world, there were going to be quite a few thorny inequities to be made right. In a fit of hubris that makes me wince to remember, I decided there and then to become a lawyer, and I've been trying to save people ever since.

We stayed friends through Doug's last year, but we lost track of each other when he graduated. I plowed through my prelaw classes, went to law school, and ended up in Atlanta. I had nearly forgotten about him, until from out of the blue, he called me. He sounded changed—agitated, like he had drunk too much coffee—but a lot of time had passed, and for all I knew, I sounded different, too. We agreed to meet for lunch. The man who walked into the restaurant that day was a shell, a thin capsule of skin barely capable of holding a human soul. Thanks to my new, inglorious line of work, it took me about ten seconds to recognize his problem: Doug Townsend had become a drug addict. From his amped-up, frazzled look, the problem was some kind of uppers.

The first question was how, and he refused to answer. He had more immediate needs: he had been arrested. Bail had been set at two thousand bucks, and scraping his ten percent together for a bondsman had tapped him out. He had nothing to pay an attorney, but I agreed to defend him. He was, after all, the reason I became a lawyer in the first place.

It was a first offense, and I pled him down, like most of my clients. There was time served, a stern lecture, a hand-slap. None of which served to slow down his wicked meth habit. He relapsed; he relapsed again, risking serious incarceration. But a few months later he had made a turnaround. He had reached the all-important bottom, and, having discovered himself doing and thinking and feeling things he would have previously considered unimaginable, he was determined to live. Weeks had gone by, his resolve taking root. The last few times I had seen him, he had seemed like his old self again; full of dreams and optimism. Now, inexplicably, he was dead.

All of this was on my mind as I drove across Atlanta toward Doug's apartment. I exited off I-75, making sure I didn't miss the Crane Street flyover. If you miss it, you and your formerly valuable car are dumped into one of the largest public housing developments in the Southeast: the McDaniel Glen projects. I took the flyover and looked down on the Glen—as it's referred to by its lamented residents—as I headed farther south. I had been there a few times with a uniform, looking for testimony on a drug case. But I never went there without a good reason.

Townsend's place was only two streets past the Glen, which gives you a good idea of where it stood on the desirability scale. It was called the Jefferson Arms, but it sure as hell wasn't Monticello. It was a sad, two-story brick affair, and the row of beat-up cars out front in the middle of the day told me welfare checks paid a lot of the rent. But even at the Arms there were better and worse units, and Townsend had told me how he had swung a second-story, corner two-bedroom: wiring up the manager with untraceable cable TV. A lot was possible in the black market economy if you had skills.

I pulled into the lot, parked, and looked around. Doug had drifted a long ways down from the college kid with dreams I remembered. He had started and failed at a couple of small-time computer businesses, but his bad habits undermined any chance of success. I pictured him fighting his demons, struggling against the compulsion, then giving in at last. I could picture him going out and making the buy, or worse, uncovering the secret stash he had kept around. I could see him talking it over with himself, going through the self-justification, the delusion. Then the whack, the horrible surprise, the struggle to breathe.

I stepped out of the car and walked up to Doug's door. I took a breath, turned the key, and walked into the very still, very quiet airspace of a dead man. I looked around cautiously. The first thing I noticed was the neatness of the place. The police usually left a place worse than they found it, but Doug's apartment was immaculate. There was something defiant about how everything was in its place, especially so close to the chaos of the Glen. I could picture Doug straightening the magazines on his table, just before he decided he couldn't live another second without meth.

The furniture was predictably worn: a sofa, a couple of chairs, a coffee table. I opened the miniblinds, standard apartment issue. The window unit air-conditioning snapped on, probably from the blast of warm air when I opened the front door. I'd have to get the electricity turned off, one of the little details nobody thinks about when a loner dies. Electricity, phone, cable, magazine subscriptions, all continuing on, oblivious, all assuming that the body of Doug Townsend was still warm, still filled with moving fluids, still dreaming up business plans for his little company.

I walked into the kitchen, looking at the three dishes and the silverware resting upright in the drying rack. I opened up a cabinet: Rice Krispies, Ramen noodles, couscous—which made sense, because Townsend, like a lot of computer geeks, had been slightly built, as thin as a blade of grass. I moved through the apartment, switching on lights. The first bedroom was fairly large, and doubled as his office. The bed sat simply on a frame, no headboard, but the covers were pulled taut. At the other end was a desk with a computer, a file cabinet, a couple of phone lines. It dawned on me that the phones were probably not in the database of Southeastern Bell; or if they were, they were being paid for by some company that had never heard of Townsend. We had talked a few times about hacking, and Townsend had played it down, but like I said, he had skills.

I opened the filing cabinet, flipping through the index tabs of projects. I knew Townsend had been busy; as a part of his defense we had discussed his business prospects at length. Townsend was pure geek, down to the cheap rayon shirts and the black-frame glasses: he once told me he could write programming code like some people hum melodies; almost improvisationally. As expected, there were a good number of folders, and I opened a few at random. Most were bids for programming work: small-time stuff, customizing databases or a networking job for a small business. Townsend could have done far better working for a company that could handle the business end, letting him be free to create. But he kept dreaming about a big score, coming up with something revolutionary enough to flip or turn into an IPO.

Junkies fall off wagons. It happens every day. But after two years of defending small-time drug offenders, I had acquired a nearly infallible sixth sense about that. Not just me; everybody who works in Odom's court gets it. We wonder:
Is this guy fucked? Or will he look back on this as his dark hour, secure and comfortable on the other side?
I can see it in a defendant's eyes, in his posture, in his damaged, unredeemable soul. Judge Odom could see it, that was certain. He was doing his best to hang on to a shred of humanity, a pretty considerable task for somebody who spends eight hours a day sending people to hell. But the fact was, for some defendants, he and everybody else knew he was merely delaying the inevitable. Maybe there's a value even in that.

Doug Townsend was as firmly on the side of life as anybody I'd seen. For one thing, he had something other than drugs that he was passionate about, a key survival ingredient. Watching him talk about computers was like watching Sammy Liston talk about Blu McClendon. I used to buy Doug coffee just to listen to him rattle on about what the future would look like. He saw a world where computers were in everything, even people, making sick people well, making old people young.

I cast off the memory and went back through the living room to the remaining room, the back bedroom. I opened the door and stopped cold. Most of the opposite wall was covered with pictures of a woman. I walked in, drawn forward by the photographs. The woman was black, late twenties, and strikingly beautiful.
What the hell is this?
The pictures were a mélange, some professional, others cut out of magazines and newspapers. At first I thought she must be an actress, because several of the photographs had been taken on stage, the woman dressed in a variety of ornate costumes. But one picture was a simple headshot, and there was writing beneath the photograph:
Michele Sonnier, mezzo soprano.
I stared at the photo, thinking.
Michele Sonnier. Sounds French, upper crust. Or maybe a stage name.

I tore myself away from the pictures to get a handle on the rest of the room. There was a twin bed, a small chest of drawers, and an old, wooden desk and chair. I pulled out the chair and sat down. There were some papers on the desk, business ideas, mostly, and some printouts of what looked like computer code. To my surprise, there was a framed snapshot of the woman—casual, with a lot of people in the background. She was smiling, although it wasn't clear if she was smiling at whoever took the photograph. I looked for an inscription, but there wasn't one. I tried to place the face, but I drew a blank.
If you had ever met this woman
, I thought,
you would definitely remember.
I set the photograph down and opened the main drawer of the desk. Inside were the usual paper clips, rubber bands, and pens. To the left was a row of three more drawers. The first had more nondescript papers; the second was nearly empty. I opened the third, the deepest one, and saw it was nearly full; on top was a stack of rectangular papers tightly bound by a rubber band. I picked up the packet and pulled off the bands.
Airplane tickets. A lot of them.

I fanned out the tickets on the desk before me.
Baltimore. New York. Miami. San Francisco.
I counted the tickets, then sat back, stunned. Townsend had made more then twenty trips in the last year, all paid for in cash. After defending him so many times, I was intimately aware of his finances; basically, there weren't any.
What is this? And how the hell did he pay for it?

I reached down into the drawer, pulling out the rest of the papers. On top were at least twenty more photographs of Sonnier, again, from a variety of sources. I looked through the remaining papers: more Sonnier, everywhere I looked. Beneath the photographs were press clippings and performance reviews, almost all of them glowing. Mixed in was a set of playbills, all apparently originals. I glanced back through the plane tickets, mentally calculating the cost.
Maybe the guy was stealing for
this,
not meth. Maybe she was his real drug.
Eventually, I was just seeing more of the same; not content with one photograph, Townsend had accumulated several copies of each. I stuffed the plane tickets and photographs in my valise and stood up.
This is beyond being a fan. This is definitely some kind of obsession.