The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “Get out,” he said sharply.

  “Are we going to have a fistfight?” I asked, my hand on the door handle. “Or are you just planning to drop the hammer on me without ceremony?”

  “Just shut up and get out of the rig.”

  “Aren’t you going to say ‘please’?” I said. Some sort of massive struggle was going on behind his large, open face, so I added, “Okay.”

  We climbed out. Raymond looked relieved that I hadn’t forced the “please” out of him. But when we met at the front of the rig, he crossed his massive arms as if he were holding himself away from me, protecting himself from me. We were about the same height, but he outweighed me by thirty pounds, so if I had to put him down, I’d have to hurt him.

  “Sughrue,” he said softly, “you know I don’t approve of you.”

  “Actually the word on the street, Raymond, is that you despise me,” I said. “Simple disapproval seems somewhat of an improvement.”

  “This is hard enough for me without you running your smart mouth,” he said. “I hate your attitude, hate the way you only obey those laws that suit you, and hate the fact that you’re a dope-smoking bum. But you’ve got a wonderful wife, even if she is a defense lawyer, and you two are raising a great kid, so maybe you aren’t as bad as I think—”

  He had some more things to say, but I interrupted him, “When I give a shit what you think of me, Johnny-boy, you’ll be the first to know. So just ask me what the fuck you want to ask me—”

  “You’ve got a foul mouth, mister.”

  “They’re just words, man.”

  “But the attitude behind those words—don’t push it,” he said. “You cost me a good man.”

  “Fergie wasn’t your favorite officer, man.”

  “Not Fergie, the kid,” he said. “He’s still nutty as hell, and he put in his papers. He would have made a good cop.”

  “Are you nuts?” I said.

  He waited a moment, shook his head dubiously, suddenly confused, then answered seriously, “I don’t know. Maybe I am crazy, but I need your help on this one.” Then just as quickly he turned again, red faced and steaming. “Goddamn it, I need your help.”

  “You know I can’t work an open case, plus anything I know from the Doc is confidential.” I wouldn’t have been any more shocked if he’d asked me for a date.

  He started to say something angry and insane again, then paused. “Look, I know you’ll go to jail before you tell me what you were doing in front of Ritter’s place, but I need—”

  “You don’t have any room in jail.”

  “Believe me, I’d be happy to make some,” he said, then unwrapped his arms from his chest. He threw them in the air in disgust, slammed them on the hood of the Explorer, then turned his back on me.

  “Don’t hit this piece of shit too hard,” I said, “the tires will explode.”

  He turned back quickly, as if the insult to his ride had been the final straw, then grabbed a deep breath and said, “What the hell happened? You were a good soldier, mister, what happened?”

  “Drugs,” I said.

  “Drugs?” He was confused.

  “Hey, I’d already been involved in losing one senseless war,” I said. “You guys got the drug war all fucked up. I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad, man, the budget suckers from the real cops.”

  “That’s what laws are for,” he said.

  “In your dreams,” I said. “What the hell do you want, Raymond?”

  “I need your help, mister,” he said again.

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t have been more amazed if he had asked me for a blow job.

  “Listen, I’m the only person in the department who wanted me to have this job,” he said, an admission so difficult I had to believe it. “When I got promoted, they wanted to put me in charge of patrol, but I badgered them until I got this job. And the troops who work for me have made it clear that they think I’m either a dumb farmer or a little tin soldier, a marionette—”

  “That’s martinet,” I interrupted.

  “Whatever,” he said, waving me off. “Listen, I don’t know what you were doing at the Ritters’, CW, but after going over the scene, I have to believe that you had just walked into the house,” he said. “And there’s no way in the world that fat woman got that rope over that beam,” he added, “and no way she tied a perfectly knotted bowline around her neck and climbed up on that railing—”

  “Maybe she just wanted to hang out with her husband when he came home,” I joked, then regretted it.

  “To hell with that,” he said, then actually blushed. Curse words seemed to have that effect on him. His two tours in Vietnam must have been more kinds of torture than just the usual nightmares of guerrilla warfare.

  “What was it you wanted?” I said.

  He grabbed another breath, then said, “I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes in my life, mister, and even though the lab reports aren’t back, I know this one is going to be clean. Too clean.”

  “Crime scene?”

  “Listen to me,” he said, “it is.”

  “Well, hell, man, I believe you believe it, but I don’t have any way of knowing,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

  “An open and honest exchange of information,” he said, then added sternly, “within the limits of the law, of course. Our investigation, such as it is, will be over shortly. Case closed—suicide. I don’t have any idea what you were doing there, but I know you were on the job, so if you come up with anything that makes you think that it wasn’t a suicide …” He paused, the word sticking like a fork in his throat, “Please let me know. If only for Fergie.” The please came out in a croak, as if he had dislodged a piece of lung tissue just to get it out.

  “I’m going to have to think about this,” I said, without even knowing what to think, “and I have to consult with my client.”

  “That’s fair,” he said, digging a business card out of his jeans. “But don’t call me at the office, okay? That’s my personal cell phone number on the back.”

  “Hell, Raymond, I won’t even tell anybody that I talked to you,” I said. “My reputation would be just as screwed as yours.”

  “Thanks,” he said and seemed to mean it. “Listen, just because I respect the law doesn’t mean that I can’t have a hunch,” he said, embarrassed now.

  “I’ve got to go to work, okay?” I said, glancing at my watch. “You probably do, too.”

  “It’s my day off,” he said. “I’m taking my little brother fishing up at Dog Lake.” I must have raised an eyebrow. Raymond blushed, then said, “Little Brother-Big Brother program, you know.”

  Even though we weren’t at the handshaking part yet, I nodded in approval, then shook my head. Nothing is more tiresome than a good guy who really is a good guy.

  FOUR

  BY THE TIME I got back on the job, Carrie Fraizer was walking swiftly through the low hedges just out the back door of Mac’s office. She was a tall, buxom young woman bearing a tangle of earrings in both ears, dressed in what looked like rumpled secondhand clothes—a peasant blouse, a flowing skirt, and sandals full of dirty toes—only her hair looked clean and cared for, a sleek black bundle pulled back into a ponytail. Once again I wondered how she afforded Mac’s sessions. She climbed into an ancient but beautifully preserved VW van. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I pulled in behind her and followed her to the parking lot behind the Pacific Northwest Hotel. I stashed my rented ride down the alley where I had a clear view of the rear of the building and the parking lot.

  The old maze of wooden balconies and fire escapes that once had hung from the rear of the brick building had been replaced with steel painted to look like wood. The balconies were cluttered with potted plants, wind socks and chimes, cloth butterflies, music posters, and coarse, unfinished art work. Twenty minutes later Carrie Fraizer came out on a balcony on the top floor. She had changed into waitress gear—a white blouse, black skirt, black panty hose, and flats. She leaned aga
inst the rail on the south end of the balcony and smoked. She was talking to somebody I couldn’t see at the other end of the balcony, a hulking shadow behind a hanging screen of bamboo strips. After two cigarettes, she went into the apartment. A few minutes later she came out of the hotel’s rear door, climbed into the van, and took off.

  I followed her out to the Eastgate Mall, then through the mall into a faux Asian restaurant, the Ginger Snap Dragon, where it seemed she worked as a waitress. The restaurant was so modern it squeaked like a new shoe: bundles of exposed pipe and wiring snaked among raw chunks of abstract art. I pulled up at the bar and ordered coffee.

  “Too early for a drink, Sughrue?” the bartender said. When I didn’t respond, he added, “Dave Moore.”

  “Little Davy Moore,” I said as I shook his small, strong hand. “Long time no see, man. How the hell are you?”

  “Good,” he said. “Really good.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” I admitted. The scraggly beard, butt-length hair, and biker tattoos had disappeared as if they never had existed. I had met Davy years ago when he helped me snatch a runaway girl from the clutches of a motorcycle gang. “Not for a second.”

  “Did a little jolt over in Monroe,” he said. “State of Washington cleaned me up.” He handed me my coffee, then glanced at his arms, which except for a few faded blue dots were unmarked. “Decided the outlaw life wasn’t for me, man,” he said, “and it’s wonderful what lasers can do.” He leaned over the bar to add, “My mother’s aunt owns a piece of the place. I’m moving up to bar manager next month. White-collar job.”

  “You’ve already got a white collar on,” I said.

  He laughed, then walked away when Carrie Fraizer called him in a husky voice.

  I nursed a couple of cups of coffee and a bottle of Tsing Tsao before ordering lunch. I wanted a cigarette, but the only place you could smoke inside the Dragon was in the gaming room, a small cubicle stuffed with gambling machines, so I ate my addiction. Peace seemed more important now than nicotine. I didn’t know what to think about Raymond’s appeal for my help. Help with what? He might have a hunch, but all I had was nightmares waiting. I hadn’t had any yet. Of course, I hadn’t gone to sleep clean yet, either. But the bad dreams always were waiting in the shadows, flirting around the fringes of sleep. They didn’t mean anything, I knew, but that was sometimes hard to tell myself when they blundered like drunken bears into my unconscious.

  Over an odd lunch—mediocre sushi, decent pot stickers, and slices of Chinese barbecue that, even with hot mustard, had the taste and texture of roasted shoe tongues—I watched Carrie Fraizer work and pumped Little Davy a tad, just enough so I could learn something without him knowing it. He had an ex-con’s desire to please and accommodate, plus a native Montanan’s love of stories, so the lunch wasn’t wasted.

  Carrie was an excellent and hardworking waitress. She had grown up on a ranch in eastern Wyoming, then fled when her father tried to marry her to the neighbor’s son. Something about water rights on the Powder River, maybe. She’d run to the college in Meriwether, on her own, worked her way to a B.F.A. in art education, hopping tables during the school year and working the slime line in Alaskan canneries in the summers. She taught high school for two years in Alaska, then came back to Meriwether to paint and hop tables again. Carrie painted enamel miniature western scenes on pieces of weathered barn wood.

  Hell, no wonder she looked familiar. Whit owned a couple of her pieces that she had bought at a gallery opening she had made me attend, one of those cold-cheese, warm-wine affairs. That night Carrie had worn makeup; her hair had been loose, a black flood across her wide shoulders, and her tall, strong body had been draped in a red sheath. She was a striking woman. No wonder I hadn’t recognized her as either a starving artist or a waitress.

  I ordered another beer after the lunch rush had subsided and carried it into the gaming room, where I leaned in a corner and finally had a couple of cigarettes. The retired couples working the machines on a wasted afternoon looked at me as if I were either a crazy preacher or a cop because I hadn’t bellied up to lady luck’s bad little sister. Maybe they should have felt guilty. Maybe we all should. What sort of mistake had been made in their lives that led them to believe the only fun left was stuffing twenty-dollar bills into an empty hole controlled by a computer chip? Perhaps I only felt sorry for them because they had fallen prey to a vice I had managed to avoid. Sort of the same way I felt sorry for golfers.

  When I had had enough beeping and burping, sounds that sounded too much like the electronic chortle of the house’s edge, I went back to the bar to settle my bill. Davy stopped in front of me just as a tall, beefy young guy with muddy, clotted dreadlocks, dressed in a mixture of combat camouflage and Salvation Army chic, strode in from the mall, followed by his pals, two giggling bookends.

  “Oh, shit,” Davy said, something almost biblical in his voice. “The beast returneth.”

  The guy, who wasn’t nearly as young as I’d first thought, walked up behind Carrie, slapped her on the butt, then squeezed. She batted his arm away, but her heart wasn’t in it. Not as much as I would have liked, anyway. After a quick kiss, the tall, bulky guy led his merry pals to the far end of the bar. Perhaps because Whitney had complained so much, during these past few years I had only smoked dope in the dark alley behind my office or other shadowed lanes, and I’d forgotten how much fun it was to be stoned on a summer’s afternoon.

  “You want another beer, Sughrue?” Davy asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Then bring me the tab.” I wanted to watch this visit for a bit.

  Davy brought me a beer, then waited on the boys down the bar. They all had complex concoctions in shot glasses that I didn’t recognize. Expensive concoctions, I guessed from the amounts Davy rang up. He handed me my bill and started to walk away.

  “Awfully nice-looking lady to be hooked up with trash like that,” I said. “If this was my place, I wouldn’t let people dressed like that in the door.”

  He nodded with energetic agreement. Nothing like a reformed biker to drum up disapproval of the badly dressed.

  “Fucking trust-a-farians,” Davy said.

  “East Coast money?”

  “Lots of it,” Davy said. “Arno owns the Pacific Northwest Hotel. Or his dad does. Somebody paid for the remodel with cash. He and Carrie have the whole top floor.”

  “Arno?”

  “Arno Biddle,” Davy said. “He’s kind of a barfly, Sughrue. I’m surprised that you don’t know him.”

  “I guess I fly in different circles these days,” I said.

  “Don’t we all,” he offered. “I’m married and have two little girls now.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Not many people beat the odds, man.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  But I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t have to wonder now how Carrie could afford Mac’s professional hours, though I almost asked Davy why she worked. I assumed I already knew the answer: the work ethic of a ranch kid. And who knew? Maybe she loved the creep. Stranger things have happened. But then I wondered what sort of unhappiness had forced her into Mac’s office.

  I paid my bill, then went home for a nap. To hell with these people.

  When Charlie Marshall, the next name on the list, walked out of his accounting firm that afternoon about six, I was in the Taurus parked in the firm’s lot, a Broncos cap pulled down over my dark glasses. Summer sunset was hours away, full dark hours beyond that. So I needed a bit of camouflage.

  I’d known Charlie for years but still didn’t really know anything about him, except for a few random things. His wife, Ellen, was completely batshit. She had been hospitalized a dozen times, twice for suicide attempts, and they had been separated as much as they had lived together. Charlie looked unhappy, not just his long hangdog face, but also his infrequent smiles that looked more like grimaces of pain than grins, as if he were sitting on a toilet passing a small animal with sharp claws. His watery gray eyes
hovered on the edge of tears behind round glasses, and his shoulders slumped under an invisible but terrible burden. Even his lank gray-brown hair looked sad. And he couldn’t sit still. I’d seldom seen him sit down in a bar. He always stood up, his feet shifting constantly, as if he were trying to balance the dismal weight on his shoulders. Once in a dim study at a party in a mansion up Gold Creek, I’d seen Charlie rubbing an antique French inlaid escritoire with both hands, his fingers touching the intricate woodwork as if it were a woman. His eyes were closed and he was smiling sweetly. But when he realized that he had drawn an audience, he stood up quickly, grabbed his glass of bourbon, and hurried away as if ashamed.

  That afternoon I waited until Charlie climbed into a Lincoln Navigator, then headed downtown. Just where I’d expected. Friday night at the Scapegoat. Charlie stopped between George Paul and Ken Cole to lean on the long curved bar. Almost immediately they were engaged in a serious, animated conversation. I’d dumped my disguise in the car, found an empty stool at the other end of the bar, and settled down. The barroom was filled with end-of-the-week drinkers, people waiting for a table in the dining room upstairs on the main floor of the old bank, and a crowd of young women with loud, high voices. A bachelorette party, I assumed, since the table was covered with dildos, blown-up rubbers, and scraps of lingerie. In Montana, women were allowed, perhaps even encouraged—if not required—to go see the elephant, too, as if they were cowhands just off the trail. The crowd of young women would have shamed even a bunch of Texas cowboys. But they were having fun.

  Just after Ken left, George and Charlie noticed me, lifted a hand, but didn’t wave me over. Charlie had been standoffish since the night I’d seen him stroking the furniture. Perhaps because I’d made the mistake of mentioning it to him during a party at his house. I had drifted downstairs, looking for the smokers, but had found Charlie standing alone in a workshop worthy of a professional cabinetmaker. But I could tell that Charlie didn’t want to talk about wood or his shop.