The Last Goodbye (41 page)

Nightmare looked around, as though Robinson must have been talking to someone else.

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Every second of your life until this is over.” Nightmare smiled, possibly the first smile of his life not tinged with sarcasm and irony. Robinson turned to me. “You should go home,” he said. “Change clothes. Take a shower, for God's sake.”

“Are you going to live?”

“Apparently. The point is, you can't help here. What are you going to do, baby-sit for a day and half? And as far as Ralston's concerned, Doug's body is cremated and we're no threat to him. We're working free.”

I sighed, deep with fatigue. “Yeah, I'll go change, take a shower. I'll call you.”

Robinson shook his head. “Get some sleep, Jack. I'll call you when we get closer to any results.”

I motioned for Nightmare, and he followed me out into the hallway. “You did good, Michael,” I said. “How's it feel?”

Nightmare smiled. “Weird.”

“I have a reward.”

“What's that?”

“Do you have any money?”

“Guess you forgot how we met.”

“Yeah. But seriously, can you get any? From your parents, or anybody?”

He paused for a while, considering. “My parents,” he said. “They're stinking rich.”

I paused a second, then burst out laughing. “You little counterculture shit,” I said. “The only reason you turned into an anarchist is your parents could afford to pay your rent.”

“Don't make me laugh.”

“I'll laugh for both of us. Of all the hypocritical—”

“Hey, it's not easy growing up like that.”

“Yeah. But there is a trust fund, isn't there?”

Nightmare's pasty face turned red. “Yeah, whatever,” he said.

“Millions?”

“A few,” he said. “But not till I'm thirty-five. They don't trust me, the little—”

“Save it,” I said, interrupting him. “Beg them for a few thousand. Whatever you can get. Steal it from Radio Shack, I don't care. Imagine somebody is going to kill you if you don't get it. That's how serious I am. And tell Robinson to do the same thing.”

“What are you driving at, dude?”

“There's more than one kind of revenge, Michael. Wait and see.”

I dragged myself home, nearly asleep by the time I got there. Robinson was safe behind the guarded gates of Grayton, and I was hoping for a few hours sleep. I walked in the apartment, looking around suspiciously for signs of disturbance. But everything was in its place. I locked the door behind me, pulled off my pants, and fell onto the bed. I slept about four hours, which I badly needed. When I woke, it was nearly three in the afternoon. I took a shower and changed clothes, both of which gave me a burst of energy. My first impulse was to call Robinson. I knew he would only have just started his test, but I just wanted to hear his voice and make sure he wasn't turning to chaos inside himself. I walked back to the living room and stared at the answering machine, which was still blinking. Reluctantly, I pushed play. The messages spilled out into the dead air of my apartment. There were a couple from Blu, wondering where I was. The original message from Billy, asking me to call back. And then my world turned upside down again, because the last message on the machine was playing, and the voice was Michele's. She had called only a few hours ago.

Jack, it's me. Can we meet? We need to talk. Things have gotten...I'm sorry about the way things got. I told you not to show yourself at the speech, darling Can we meet tonight? I wish you were here. I need to see you. So much has happened, so much madness. About nine, tonight, at your office? Can you? I love you.

I sat back against my couch, listening to her voice. In the last seventy-two hours, I had been lectured by Derek Stephens, had my secretary resign, had my car run off the road, been kidnapped, wrapped with duct tape and thrown in a closet, escaped, gone through a pointless exercise at a funeral home, and watched Thomas Robinson risk his life trying to find some reason for his life's work. I had done these things because I wanted justice, and because I was in love with a woman who I believed was married to a murderer.

I was not immune to the fact that she had lied to me about her husband knowing the truth about her. Hearing her—disembodied for once, absent her intoxicating presence—I admitted that I didn't actually know how deep the lies went. What had she said?
Maybe you can tell me how that works, Jack. How a woman whose entire life is a lie finds the right moment to stop.

It wasn't that discovering she'd lied to me meant I couldn't love her. Trust is rigid—it snaps like a dry twig—but love is elastic. When a woman you care about is drowning, you don't give her a personality test, you throw her a rope. But there was still an open question about what happened afterward. Loving a woman like Michele was a high-stakes enterprise, and I had already paid one hell of a price. I was wondering how high it would go, and who would end up paying. But sitting there listening to her voice, I suddenly realized that there was a way—final, and indisputable—to bring trust and love together again or to separate them forever. The real story of Michele Sonnier was buried in the court records at the Fulton County Courthouse, and my best friend had the keys. If I hurried, I could catch Sammy before he left.

AT LEAST I COULD BEGIN
with good news. “You don't die, Sammy,” I said. “You live.”

I had managed to catch Sammy before he left, at about four-thirty. I pulled him into his small office, sat him down, and closed and locked the door. After I laid out for him what Stephens had told me about the car, Sammy looked up warily; it was obvious that the initial endorphin rush that had come with his declaration of independence had run out about forty-eight hours ago, and he was stoically expecting his beating. “But he's going to have my taxes audited or something, right?”

I shook my head. “Derek Stephens can't have you audited, Sammy.”

“Yeah, but you know. I mean, something bad.” “You walk, Sammy. It's the timing. You're lucky.” That last comment was an utterly new concept for Sammy, so it took some time to enter his list of realistic possibilities. “Lucky,” he repeated, as though speaking a foreign language. “Me.” “Yeah. He isn't doing anything about the car.”

Sammy looked up from his desk. “Because of the quiet period.”

“That's right. He can't afford any bad publicity right now. What you did to his car would be on Letterman by tomorrow.”

“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: