Chapter One

Whiteville, Tennessee, is located in Hardeman County, down

near the Mississippi state line. The town itself sits about 60

miles east of Memphis and 175 miles southwest of Nashville.

In the old days, back when people did things differently, the Louisville &

Nashville Railroad ran a passenger train between Nashville and Memphis

that stopped in Whiteville in the small hours of the morning. That train,

however, came off more than sixty years ago. Nowadays, the quickest way

to get to Whiteville from Nashville is to take Interstate 40 toward Jackson,

get off at Exit 87, follow Route 18 down to Route 100, and then turn right.

A four-hour trip end-to-end, about the same time as it used to take on the

train, and you don’t have to get there at four in the morning.

The town of Whiteville, whose motto, reasonably enough, is “The Gateway

to Hardeman County,” is home to around forty-six hundred souls, an

astonishing ninety-plus percent of whom are male. That is because the

two largest employers in the area are a pair of privately-operated, medium-

security penitentiaries, the Hardeman County Correctional Facility and

the Whiteville Correctional Facility. Together, the two prisons, which are

located a short distance apart on Union Springs Road, house some thirty-

four hundred male inmates. Perhaps for that reason, according to the website

maintained by the city, Whiteville is the fifth-safest municipality in the entire

state.

Today, the first Monday in June, I was in Whiteville to visit a convicted

triple murderer at the Hardeman County Facility. The inmate’s name

was Harvey Harris. Harvey was serving a life sentence for holding up a

1

GOODBYE IS FOREVER

convenience store ten years earlier in the Goodlettsville area of Nashville,

killing a customer and the store clerk, a pregnant woman, in the process.

Unfortunately for Harvey, at the exact same time he was high-tailing it

out of the parking lot, pedal-to-the-metal and balls-to-the-wall, another

customer was pulling in for a fill-up, a Mountain Dew and a couple of Slim

Jim beef sticks. Sensing something was amiss, since one of Harvey’s shots

had gone wildly off target and shattered the front window facing the pump

islands out front, the customer hunkered down in the front seat of his car

and waited until Harvey was well down the road before he went inside. He

took one look at the carnage and then called the cops, who tracked Harvey

down inside of forty-five minutes. Along with the two-hundred dollars and

change he had grabbed from the cash register, Harvey had in his possession

a .22 caliber autoloader, a stolen twelve-pack of PBR, a carton of smokes,

and a handful of scratchers for the next day’s Pick-Three drawing. Turned

out, none of them was a winner.

Ordinarily, conviction of a crime like the one Harvey committed carries a

death sentence. And indeed, he had been waiting on death row at Riverbend

Max in Nashville for most of the time since his conviction, waiting for his

appeals to peter out when a routine visit to the prison infirmary revealed

that he was suffering from end-stage pancreatic cancer and had only a short

time to live. At that point, the state decided that slogging its way through

any more appeals and protests from anti-death penalty advocates and other

assorted do-gooders wasn’t worth the trouble. And so, the governor was

persuaded to commute Harvey’s sentence to life without parole, and he was

transferred to Hardeman County to live out the rest of his few remaining

days in relatively less secure surroundings. Shortly after he arrived, he asked

his lawyer to get in touch with me.

As I soon found out, visiting an inmate in Tennessee is a fairly complicated

process. First, I had to complete a visitation form accompanied by a recent

photo, then mail it in and wait 30 days for approval. After that, Harvey was

permitted to contact me to request a meeting. When he telephoned me, he

was a little bit vague about what he wanted to discuss, and I almost decided

I had better things to do that waste my time driving down to Whiteville to

2

CHAPTER ONE

visit someone I assumed would be a hard case. But it was a warm, late spring

day, and my calendar was clear. And anyway, his lawyer assured me that his

firm, which was acting on Harvey’s behalf, would pay me for the day, plus

expenses, to make the trip.

From the highway, Hardeman County Correctional is nothing special to

look at. There are no high stone walls and no parapets to make it look like a

medieval castle. Instead, what you will see is a single-story structure that

includes a reception and administrative building, and a series of inmate

housing units, called “pods,” all surrounded by high chain link fences.

I identified myself to a corrections officer who checked my name on

a clipboard to verify that I had an appointment, then patted me down

for weapons. After that, I had to sign a form affirming that I had read

and understood the penalties for bringing anything on a very long list of

prohibited contraband, including telephones, drugs, and weapons, into the

prison. Then, satisfied that my business was on the up-and-up, he escorted

me to a secure room with a table and two chairs. Harvey Harris was already

seated at the table, waiting.

From across the room, Harvey looked more or less like any other sixty-

odd-year-old man you might encounter anywhere. But when I got a closer

look, I could see that his skin color was more bluish-gray than pink, and it

was hanging loosely on his arms and under his chin, making the jailhouse

tats on his forearms and neck sag misshapenly, so that they looked like

caricatures of Salvador Dali paintings. His eyes were yellowish, as if he were

also suffering from jaundice. His orange prison uniform fit him the way a

worn-out topcoat fits a scarecrow, suggesting that he had lost a great deal

of weight since the time it had been issued to him. I have had zero medical

training other than basic CPR when I was with the cops, but even at that, I

would have said Harvey Harris had no more than a couple of months before

his clock ran out.

When he saw me, he tried to stand up, to shake hands, I supposed. But the

effort was too much, and he sat back down heavily.

“Mister Gamble. Thank you for coming. I ‘preciate it. I know it’s a pain in

the ass making the appointment.”

3

GOODBYE IS FOREVER

“It wasn’t a problem for me,” I said. “Your attorney handled most of it. He

emailed me a couple of forms, I printed them out, signed them, and emailed

them back, and that was it, except for driving down here.”

He nodded slowly, as if even that small movement took a considerable

effort. “I suppose you’re wantin’ to know how come I asked to see you.”

“In a minute. First, I’d like to know where you got my name.”

“From a guy I met one time when I was at county back in Nashville. It

was quite a few years ago. I don’t remember his name no more. Tommy

something, I think. He said you used to be a cop.”

“I was,” I said. “I was a uni for a few years before I made detective. Then I

got loaned out to the district attorney’s office as an investigator.”

“And then what? You didn’t like the job?”

“I didn’t like the guy I was working for. Or rather, he didn’t like me, so

we agreed it was time for me to move on. I’ve been private for better than

twelve years, now.”

He nodded, as if what I had told him squared with what he already knew.

“This guy I talked to, this Tommy. He said you were on the level. He said I

could trust you. That you’d be straight with me.”

I was pretty sure the Tommy he was talking about was a guy named Tommy

Mack, a penny-ante thief and bottom-shelf grifter who had been in and out

of stir for the better part of his adult life, and who had acquired a reputation

as a repeated bail skip. The last time he legged it, about a year ago, he got

away clean, but not before gunning down and nearly killing an organized

crime boss named Red Cherry. There was bad blood between Red and

Tommy, the result of a burglary Tommy had staged at Red’s home. Red

eventually recovered from his multiple gunshot wounds, and Tommy, who

up to that point had never in his life been more than a hundred miles from

the place he was born, disappeared into the wind. Smart, since his next

encounter with Red would have certainly proved fatal.

“Okay,” I said to Harvey. “Trust me to do what?”

“I need you to find somebody.”

I waited. When he didn’t say anything more, I said, “Anybody in particular,

or are you under the impression I run some kind of a dating service?”

4

CHAPTER ONE

“It’s my daughter. I haven’t seen her in more than, let’s see, it must be close

to ten years. Which is to say, the whole time I’ve been inside.”

“Then what you’re saying, she didn’t come to visit you at all during all the

years you were whiling away the hours on death row at Riverbend Max?”

“No, she didn’t. She came to the arraignment, but then, when they read

the charges, she got up and walked out. That was the last time I seen her.” He

hesitated just for a moment. “I expect you know my situation. I haven’t got

much more time, and there are things I’d like to tell her before…you know.”

“You mean before you die.”

“Well, I expect that’s one way to put it.”

“Is there another way? Look, Mr. Harris, I drove down here today because

your attorney paid me in advance to do it, and because I didn’t have anything

else on my calendar. So, forgive me for being blunt. But the fact is, you killed

two people—three, if you count the baby that store clerk was carrying—for

damn near nothing. I’m having trouble trying to think of a single reason

why I should help you do anything.”

“I’m dying, Mr. Gamble. Hell, you didn’t need me to tell you that. You

can see just by looking at me. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, and I

know there ain’t anything I can say to you or anybody else to make up for

that. I for certain killed them people. I pleaded guilty, and that’s that. I’m

not asking you to get me a new trial, or hunt up some new evidence, or help

me file another appeal. I just want to see my little girl one last time before,

well, before it’s all over. And I have to believe you’ll help me, because I think

you’re a better man than I am.”

When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Is that a good enough reason for

you?”

5