The Last Goodbye (6 page)

“I know, baby. How's your fettuccine?”

“Yummy.”

“That's good.”

“Jack, don't you just love Romeo and Juliet?” Blu asked.

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?” She seemed offended by my indecision.

I shrugged. “These days Romeo and Juliet would just go to Vegas and get it over with. They'd tell their parents to go jump in a lake.” Blu looked crestfallen, and I started to feel bad I had popped her romantic balloon. “Your hair's beautiful tonight,” I said. “How do you get it to do that?”

She smiled and forgave me. “So why the opera?” she asked.

“A case,” I said. “We're here to learn about the main singer, the great Michele Sonnier.”

“The one you said is singing Romeo.”

I nodded. “Listen, Blu, you've got a lot of men asking you out, right?”

“Um hmm.”

“Let me ask you something. What would you think if you went into some guy's bedroom and discovered a bunch of pictures of you?”

Her expression clouded. “How many pictures?”

“Maybe, like, twenty.”

She grimaced. “I wouldn't like that.”

“But wouldn't a part of you be flattered?”

She shook her head. “Two or three, maybe. Not twenty.”

“How about those guys who have seen
Cats
four hundred times? They're harmless, right?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I wouldn't want to talk to somebody like that. There's got to be something wrong in the head.”

We talked through dinner, Blu sharing her insight into male obsession, which was probably a topic she knew something about, judging by the attention she was receiving at the restaurant. We finished up and I paid the bill. Then we made the short drive to the opera, which was at Atlanta's grand old theater, the Fox. There was a group of impeccably dressed people milling around outside, mostly smokers getting their fix before the three-hour show. I gave my $250 tickets to the usher, and he led us down the long aisle toward the front.

The Fox is an Atlanta landmark, a tribute to the whimsy of people who can afford to pay artists to adorn their world. Walking into the hall, you are transported to a Moroccan castle, and the stage is surrounded with turrets and stone walls as high as the ceiling. Above you stars twinkle, as though you had come upon the place in the midst of an Arabian night. In other words, describing the distance between the world inside that theater and what was happening on any given night in the worst parts of Atlanta was a problem for a theoretical physicist. I'm not saying it was wrong to spend so much on making a place like that beautiful. I'm just saying that if you grew up in the projects and somehow, lost in that desert sunset, you found yourself inside the Fox, you would have had your worst fears confirmed about what life was like on the other side.

Thinking about Doug at an event like that bothered me, in a way. I didn't mind my junkies hard and pissed off; you pled them down, they did some time, life went on. But opera was rich people's music, and I figured Doug would have been as enamored with that whole cultured life as he was with Sonnier. I pictured him at all those concerts, dressed up, in the one decent jacket he owned, walking through the lobby, taking his seat, feeling for a couple of hours like he didn't live in the Jefferson Arms. In my mind I could see him trying to engage somebody at intermission in one of those concerts, saying, “Isn't it thrilling?” It made me want to weep.

Blu and I sat down in red velvet seats and waited for the show to start. In view of how little I could afford the evening, I was hoping at best not to be bored out of my mind. But for two hundred and fifty bucks you get to sit so close to the stage you can almost feel the air vibrate from the singing. The orchestra played an overture, and suddenly there were a lot of people on stage in beautiful costumes. The set—a villa in Italy, represented by faux structures and enormous background paintings—was effective, too. I settled in for the performance.

It was a few minutes before Sonnier walked on stage, and when she did, she got a huge ovation. She didn't acknowledge it; she was locked into her character. This was my first chance to look her over, and at least for this role, she seemed very different from her pictures. For one thing, she was dressed like a man, with her hair combed back, wearing pants, and a vest to hide her breasts. To my surprise, she had it down; even the walk looked real. Most women, when they try to walk like a man, fall into some exaggerated John Wayne swagger. But Sonnier understood the nuance of it: acting like a man isn't sticking out your chest. It's subtler, and comes from below the waist. So I could almost buy it, until she opened her mouth. Then she just started making the most beautiful, most spectacularly female sound you can imagine. Bellini didn't even try to write low notes for the character to make her sound more masculine. So Sonnier just sang away, making love to Juliet, but sounding like the most beautiful woman in the world.

It was a long ways between that opera and where I grew up in Dothan, Alabama. I admit I have no idea what I was supposed to feel, sitting there watching actors in painted faces and Renaissance costumes sing to each other. At first, hearing Romeo sing like a woman was disorienting, but after a while, I started to think about him in a new way. That high voice made him sound like a kid, which is what he was in the real play. For some reason he's never played by sixteen-year-old boys. Usually there's some guy in his twenties or even thirties up on stage. That makes a big difference. Because listening to this high voice come out of Michele Sonnier's exquisitely fine, delicate face, I started thinking that Romeo was just a victim of the system, powerless and naïve. He wasn't any stronger than Juliet, really, because they were both just children. He was fighting forces a lot bigger than he was, and he didn't even know it. Every time he opened up his mouth you realized right away that he was doomed. They gave the part of Romeo's dad to a big man with a booming, low voice, which made it worse. When Romeo tried to argue with him about how stupid it was that the Capulets and the Montagues were always fighting, it was like watching a pebble bounce off a wall. There was no way in hell Romeo was going to get Juliet. It was the perfect story, as far as I was concerned. All that misery—they endured every bit of it just because they couldn't let things go. If they had stripped things down, probably something else would have come along. They would have hurt like hell for a while, but eventually married somebody else and got along fine. But they couldn't do it, so two people died.

Even though everybody knew the story, a lot of people broke down when Romeo drank the poison. Sonnier was more than just a singer; she was a brilliant actress. Her Romeo was so fragile and vulnerable that it was like watching a real person face his moment of death. There were no histrionics, no ham-fisted overacting. She was singing with deadly seriousness, her voice a candle flame in the hall. She was facing the sober realization that there are times when so much has gone wrong that life is no longer worth living. That's the real point of that story, in my opinion. Even when the cost of believing is everything, some people just can't help themselves.

Then it was over. Blu had completely broken down, so I gave her a couple of minutes to collect herself. Most of the crowd was moving back out into the lobby, except for the people like us with the expensive tickets. We were led out a private exit to the parking lot. I led Blu in the dark to the car, and we drove over to the Four Seasons for the reception. It was only fifteen blocks, so we got there in about five minutes. At that point, I did Blu a favor: we didn't valet park. I didn't want to shortchange her, because she looked fantastic. It would have dampened her entrance for everybody to see her climbing out of my dented LeSabre.

We followed the crowd up a big staircase, and I could feel Blu getting excited looking at all the rich guys. They were looking at her, too, I can tell you that. You never saw so many men casually looking over the tops of their drinks in your life. We moved off into the sea of tuxedos and evening gowns.

Everybody is very polite at these kinds of soirees. They're also cliquish, but not necessarily from bad intentions. It's more an inevitability. The people in that room were the financial backbone of Atlanta, so they had a lot in common. You could feel it when they greeted each other. A million golf games, cocktail parties, and bank loans were silently implied with every handshake. The wives—about ten years younger than their husbands, on average—didn't fit the trophy girl stereotype, either. They seemed gracious and accomplished. But I wish you could have seen the McClendon effect that night. It was magical, let me tell you. I never had so much small talk in my life.

Even though I had nothing against it, I wasn't there in order to present Blu to Atlanta society. What I really cared about was finding out everything I could about Michele Sonnier. It was surprisingly hard to get the conversation onto that topic, mostly because the women wanted to know about Blu's dress and the men were working out how to get it off her. All I could pick up was that Sonnier was big stuff in the opera world, groomed for success from her earliest beginnings. She had grown up in Manhattan, entered Juilliard as a prodigy, and left two years early to pursue her singing career. She had been a star from the second she set foot on a stage. There was one hell of a lot of conversation about something else, though, and that was Charles Ralston and Horizn. The men were talking strategy about how to get in on the Horizn IPO at the offering price, something only the true insiders could pull off. The consensus was that getting in early was going to be richly rewarded. They all had their brokers poised on quick-release triggers.

Eventually, I felt obligated to cut Blu loose. She couldn't really troll with me around, and she'd done everything I could have asked. So I patted her arm and she moved off, smiling like a fisherman who's just discovered a stocked bathtub.

The food table wasn't bad; there was a nice spinach pasta in pesto, stuffed mushrooms, and little shapes of things wrapped up in tortilla. I milled around for a few minutes, then grabbed another glass of champagne. After a while I spotted an impeccably dressed man circling Blu. He was plainly working up an approach to speak to her. I started counting down from ten. When I got to seven, the man slickly sidestepped a slow-moving waiter; on five, and I have to admit he did it beautifully, he picked up two glasses of champagne without breaking stride; on one, he touched her arm and handed her one of the glasses.
Touchdown.
Something about him looked familiar; I had the vague recollection I had read about him in the newspaper, and that he had been doing something unpleasant to someone, but I couldn't remember what. What wasn't in question were his intentions toward my secretary: he was a player, in every sense of the word. I could see it all over him as he stood chatting amiably with Blu. He was smart, and he was probably a hell of a businessman. But no matter what else was going on in his life, it was less important to him than getting laid.

I stood watching them for a while, fascinated. Even though I figured Blu could pick up on the guy as well as I could, context is everything. Here, at an opera party wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit, he came off like a slightly miniaturized James Bond. Millions of dollars have that effect. Without the money, he was just a guy in khakis with a five-year-old Corvette hitting on girls at an airport bar. I gave Blu a couple of minutes to be adored and walked up beside them. The man's smile transformed itself into plastic. “Jack Hammond,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Derek Stephens,” the man answered. He was about forty-five and smelled vaguely of cigars. “I was just talking with your—”

“Cousin,” I said. “Blu McClendon, my dear cousin from Arkansas.” Stephens narrowed his smile and moved incrementally closer to my secretary.

“Mr. Stephens here was just telling me he's an attorney, like you, Jack,” Blu said. “He works for Horizn Pharmaceuticals. They're sponsoring Ms. Sonnier's tour.”

“So this is a big night for you,” I said.

“It's a big night for the Atlanta Opera, Jack,” Stephens answered. I could feel him sizing me up. “So you're a lawyer as well.” The accent was New England, upper crust. “Which firm?”

There were only about four correct answers to that question for a guy like Stephens, and Jack Hammond and Associates wasn't one of them. “Solo practitioner,” I said. “Criminal law, mostly.”

At that moment, I could feel Stephens starting to work out how to get Blu away from me with the minimum of fuss. People can look right at you, acting like they're interested, but if you look deep into their eyes, you can see wheels turning while they work out some completely different problem. Even though he didn't give a damn what the answer was, he asked me, “Are you a fan of opera, Jack? Or of Michele in particular?”

“New to both,” I answered. I was actually sort of enjoying talking to the guy. He had so much fast track all over him he smelled like a race car. “How about you?”

“I serve on Atlanta Opera board,” Stephens said. “Which is amusing, since I know nothing about opera.”

“Apparently, you had other qualifications.”

Stephens reluctantly pulled his gaze off Blu and put it back onto me. “A redneck hillbilly could get on the board of an opera company, Jack, if he was willing to write a sufficiently large check.”

He looked over at Blu's glass, which was not quite half full.
Time's up
, I thought. “Ms. McClendon,” he said, “let me get you a refill.”

“I'll go with you,” Blu said, beaming. “I'm dying to try those little squares with cheese in them.” And like that, they were gone.

I felt protective over Blu, but I didn't, strictly speaking, know enough about Stephens to worry. And I had never discussed Blu's dating life with her, mostly because it was more pleasant to imagine she didn't have one. But I didn't get a chance to think about either, because at that moment, the atmosphere in the room was disturbed.