The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  On the other hand, George and I had sort of been drinking buddies once. We’d grown up in small southwestern towns—Vado, Texas, for me; Hobbs, New Mexico, for him. So we usually had plenty to talk about. Until one drunken night when we had followed the bartender into the basement of the Low Rent and snorted half a dozen fat lines of cocaine and gunned half a dozen shots of Patrón tequila with it. Later George had gotten on a crying jag, complaining about his early childhood. His father had either died or run away—it wasn’t clear—when George had been in the third grade, and he was convinced that his classmates had always felt sorry for him. “Poor little Georgie Paul,” he had blubbered endlessly until I finally got him home, “pobrecito Jorge, he ain’t got no daddy.” George had a pugnacious forehead and a brutal jaw, but his face was softened by jug ears, a short gray beard, and close-cut curly, gray hair that fit his head like a knit cap. He almost looked benign. But I had seen a sneaky meanness on the ball field—stepping on the first baseman’s foot, catching the second baseman with a flying elbow, banging the catcher on the knee as he warmed up at the plate, or making a tag like a punch. Also, to George women were bitches, cunts, or dykes.

  An hour or so later, the stool next to George opened up, so I drifted over, sat down, and ordered a round of drinks from my favorite bartender, Steve, a former political science professor. “For the State Champion Old Farts,” I said as I raised my glass. Charlie and George didn’t look all that happy to drink with me, but they raised their bourbons on the rocks and nodded thanks.

  “Well, I guess it’s better to go out champions than on a stretcher,” George said.

  “Like those other poor bastards,” Charlie added shyly.

  “Sounds like you guys are giving it up,” I said. They both nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” I said, “when we were driving back last Sunday, I felt like I’d either fallen down the stairs or had the shit beaten out of me.”

  “It’s just not fun anymore,” Charlie said quietly, as if nothing were.

  “Hell, I spend more time in the hot tub than on the field,” George said. “And frankly I’m sick of that fucking MacKinderick acting like he’s the manager. It’s our team. I mean who the hell died and elected him Casey Stengel and Babe Ruth?”

  “Hey, we’ll miss you guys,” I lied. George’s comment about Mac sounded strange to me, since I thought I had noticed his name when I dropped Mac’s pages. Then I remembered that his wife’s name was Georgia. GG for short.

  “How about you, Sughrue? You gonna hang in there?”

  “Like a hair in a biscuit,” I said. “They’ll probably have to carry me off like one of those poor Christians—tote me straight to the graveyard across the street.”

  “They did sort of wander into the wrong arena, didn’t they?” George said, something cruel in his laugh.

  “What are you boys doing out tonight?” I said.

  “The wives are in Seattle,” Charlie said, a sick but hopeful grin twisting his features.

  “The ladies are competitive shopping,” George said bitterly, low-tar smoke drifting out of his mouth. Hell, his wife could afford to buy a floor at Nordstrom’s. “Or getting shitfaced in the Four Seasons,” he added, “offering free blow jobs to Asian software millionaires.”

  “A good woman would keep her blow jobs at home,” Charlie said, then giggled, his grin almost becoming a true smile. He was more than a bit tipsy.

  “That’s for shitsure,” George said, his grin full of large, crooked yellow teeth, his blue eyes glittering. I wondered why he didn’t spend some of his fortune on his teeth.

  We made inane small talk for a while until it became clear that they weren’t going to resume their former conversation, so I paid my tab, said good-night, and went out to wait for Charlie in my rent car. I didn’t have to wait very long. He came out thirty minutes later, followed by George, and they climbed into separate vehicles without saying good night. I followed them up Dottle, then down to the corner of Railroad and Vender, where the Low Rent Rendezvous occupied the ground floor of another old railroad hotel that had been converted into an office building. They parked in the back lot and walked into the bar together. I knew that Eric Ray was playing to a Friday night crowd, and I wouldn’t have a chance to listen to their conversation, so I backed the Taurus into a space in the overflow lot across Railroad Street, beside the tracks.

  From my position, I could see their rides, but I could also see the back of the Pacific Northwest Hotel, the tallest building between Vender and Dottle. The setting sun poured down Railroad Street, the old bricks of the hotel shining as if newly fired. The light on the balconies behind the hotel was as bright as noon. The gaily colored wind socks and cloth butterflies hung unmoved in the sundown air. Several of the balconies were filled with scruffy young people chattering through clouds of dope smoke, competing stereos blasting.

  I opened all the windows to let the soft evening air in and the new car smell of the Taurus out. I had a cooler full of beer, a Thermos of chicory coffee, two chicken salad sandwiches from the Frog Pond Deli, and a capped plastic bottle for piss. So I was ready. I switched on the radio. All Things Considered was over, and having grown up among displaced hillbillies, I didn’t care much for blue grass. The only other things I could find on the radio were hard-and soft-rock stations, creamed-corn country, mystical stock tips, and Ronald Reagan’s boy whining, so I cut it off, stuffed The Last Coyote into the tape deck, and settled back to wait. Recorded books had made surveillance jobs almost bearable.

  Down the street, up on the top-floor balcony, the screen door slammed open with a bang and the bamboo awning rolled up with a snap. Nosy by nature, I grabbed the Leica with the telephoto lens and quickly focused on the balcony. Arno and Carrie were standing on the balcony arguing in loud voices that I couldn’t quite make out and waving their arms at each other. Arno threw a green can of Heineken’s straight out into the sunset, where it twirled, spewing foam in loops until it landed on the roof of Peale’s secondhand store across the alley. Carrie lit a cigarette, shoved Arno out of the way, then stormed over to the north side of the balcony, where she propped her right elbow into her left hand and puffed furiously, staring into the sun as it set behind Sheba Peak in the northern Hardrocks. Arno disappeared into the house, then came back out with another Heineken’s, cracked it, then chugged beer for a long time. Carrie ignored him until he shouted at her. Watching his mouth, I guessed that he had screamed, “Fucking cunt!” but I could only guess. Arno raged back toward the screen door. Carrie threw her cigarette at his retreating back, then quickly lit another, sighed deeply, and leaned back against the rail.

  Even though they had been shouting, I couldn’t hear their words exactly, but I didn’t have any trouble hearing the screech as the balcony rail pulled away from the bricks; I heard that very distinctly. More out of reflex than purpose, I hit the shutter release. I heard Carrie’s gasp of horror, then the descending scream. But I was out of the car and running before the body hit the bricks of the alley, so I missed that sound. At least I hoped I had missed it.

  Carrie lay on her side, her right arm smashed into a maze of blood and white bone shards beneath her, the side of her face flattened in a spreading bright red pool against the alley bricks. She still had a faint thread of a pulse when I squatted to place two fingers on her carotid artery; then the beat paused. Another longer tremble slipped wetly beneath my fingertips, followed by a longer pause, then a single tick, followed by a soft moan that escaped her bleeding mouth from among the clatter and grind of her broken jaw and teeth. Then nothing. I looked up into Arno’s white face, a shocked, bloodless moon staring down at me. I shook my head sadly, but he didn’t acknowledge it.

  A siren whooped from the police department two blocks away, answered by another from the fire station only four blocks in the other direction. If any life remained in the crushed body, I wasn’t going to be able to draw it out. Professional saviors would be here in moments. I heard the pounding of running feet on wooden floorboards as they echoed
out of the hotel’s rear entrance. I pushed my sunglasses tighter to my nose, tugged the bill of my Broncos cap down around my face, then walked away.

  It was only about fifty feet down the alley to the Iron Butterfly, a crowded yuppie bar, but I kept my gorge down long enough to get past it, then across the street to Mickey’s. I gunned two shots of cheap tequila and half a can of beer, then went into the john to throw it up, came back to the bar, had a shot of peppermint schnapps and the rest of the can of beer. When it felt as if that might stay down, I had another, then left.

  I was on the sidewalk heading for my car when I heard my name shouted behind me. It was the bartender, Mike.

  “Hey, man,” he huffed when he caught up with me. “You okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Well, you’re white as a sheet, tears are pouring down your face,” he said, then cocked his grizzled head, “and you didn’t pay for your drinks.”

  “Oh, hell, sorry,” was all I could say. I handed him a twenty, then walked on toward the burning sunset. “Catch you around.”

  “Don’t you want your change?” he asked somewhere way behind me.

  It should have been dark, as black as winter midnight, but the sun was so bright it hurt my eyes.

  When Mac moved to Meriwether, he bought up an entire block that nestled against the base of Grasshopper Hill on the east end of the Northgate neighborhood and north of the abandoned railroad tracks; then he had all the small houses either demolished or moved. He built a spacious but not huge Craftsman house and filled it with a fairly good collection of local art, a variety of seascapes, and three great Winslow forgeries. The house nestled into the south face of the hill and a tall brick wall bordered by a line of poplars on the street side. A small stone-banked ditch carried irrigation water across the yard. The ground was sodded with thick grass and landscaped into small hills and dales. It was a perfect place. In town, but almost a country estate in its solitude. He could walk to his office just across the river in thirty minutes, or to the Scapegoat in fifteen. Cemetery Park, where we played ball, was six blocks to the west. My house was only another two blocks farther.

  Northgate was a nice neighborhood, a nice mix of all incomes and all classes, a neighborhood with no room to expand, no bars, and almost no businesses. Grasshopper Creek, spouting small irrigation ditches for large gardens, wound past the cemetery, through the park, then around the community. There had been a spurt of gentrification in the seventies, but it hadn’t lasted. It was an easy neighborhood where you could, if you tried, forget the present and dream of a kinder past, one of those brief periods of peace between wars.

  Lorna answered the door when I rang, blocking the doorway. She was dressed to the nines: a little black dress, patterned stockings, spike heels, and an emerald as big as a small cracker hanging on a gold chain around her neck. The stone was surrounded by tiny diamonds, as were her matching earrings and dinner ring.

  “CW,” she said. “We’re just on our way out. Dr. MacKinderick is getting dressed now. Can I do something for you?”

  “I need to talk to him,” I said. “Now, please.”

  “Just for a second, though, hon,” she said. “We’re already late now. You can wait in the den.”

  “It won’t take a second,” I promised. Lorna led me down the hallway toward the den and ushered me inside.

  “May I get you something?” she said, poised in the doorway, glowing in horizontal bands of red-gold light, her hair shining like fresh blood.

  “I know where everything is,” I said. “Don’t bother. By the way, you’re looking sharp tonight.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir,” she said, smiling. She flipped on the lights and the exhaust system that filtered Mac’s cigar smoke out of the room. “Mac says you’re smoking again,” she said, then spun on a delicate heel and headed back down the hallway, the tapping of her heels as light as the blows of a fairy’s wand.

  I had a smoking cigarette and a handful of sixteen-year-old Scotch before the sound of her heels disappeared. Then I leaned on the back of a huge black leather couch. Mac’s den was more like a library or an art museum than a den. No animal heads, gun racks, or pictures of bird dogs on the dark oak walls. One wall was nothing but books, floor to ceiling. The other walls displayed three Chatham winter landscapes, a subdued western scene, and three small seascapes Mac had painted and brought back from a long honeymoon with Lorna in the Hebrides. Two ceramic rat pots flanked the fireplace. And on the wall between the French doors that lead to the veranda, strips of faded barnwood climbed the oak like a rough ladder, gleaming landscapes and ranchwork scenes that reminded me of Japanese miniatures. I walked over to look at the work more closely. Perhaps I had been wrong about Arno paying for Carrie’s analysis. Perhaps she had paid in art. Mac probably wouldn’t tell me, but I knew how to find out.

  Mac stepped into the den as he finished the Windsor of his rich silk tie. As he slipped into his linen suit coat, he said, “Sughrue, what’s up?”

  “You guys are a little overdressed for this poor ol’ country town,” I said, trying to ease the mood and avoid the news.

  “Since when are you the fashion police?”

  “Actually, I’m no kind of police at all,” I said. “I’m really bad news. You better get a drink.”

  “Sunset champagne at the Mansion,” he said. “Life donors of the art museum.”

  “You get the alarm code from Ritter?” I said suddenly, finding a new way to avoid the bad news as hard and fast as I could.

  “It’s in your mailbox,” he said, “with the key, too. By the way, don’t bother breaking into his house. I told him that somebody would stop by to feed the cats and water the plants. There’s plenty of food in the pantry and a list of directions inside the door.”

  “Do I have to clean the cat box?” I asked.

  “Also sit down with the cats, watch a little television, too—nothing too violent, though—and pet Chloe and her sister, Charmaine.”

  “How am I supposed to know which one is which?” I asked.

  “Chloe’s got one blue eye,” Mac said calmly, “and a bad attitude.”

  “Jesus, you don’t ask much, do you?” I said.

  “CW,” he said, a boyish grin flittering around his face. “You’re one of those loyal romantics. You’d do anything for a friend. And probably have, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You have any samples of a sleeping pill that will put me to sleep without making me crazy?”

  “Sure,” he said, then rummaged in the top drawer of his desk, dug up a small box, and pitched it to me. “Ambien. It will put you down, but it won’t interfere with REM sleep. Safe as mother’s milk.”

  “What if I don’t want to dream?”

  “Oh, shit. What’s happened?” he asked, suddenly serious. “What are you so carefully not telling me, my friend?”

  I couldn’t evade it any longer. “About half an hour ago, Carrie Fraizer fell off the top-floor balcony behind her apartment at the Pacific Northwest.”

  “Dead?”

  “You’re talking to the lucky son of a bitch who felt the last tick of her blood,” I said.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He staggered back as if I’d just hit him in the face, his hand to his eyes. He grabbed the Lagavulin off the bar and had a quick shot from the bottle. Two deep breaths and he was professional again. “The bastard finally did it?”

  “She fell, man,” I said. “I saw it. Hell, I may even have a picture of it.”

  “It’s Friday,” Mac said, “her best night for tips. She worked a split shift. Always.” He couldn’t take it in, either. He was perplexed, his forehead wrinkled, his black eyebrows reaching for each other. “She should have been at work. Jesus, I’m so sorry. And you were there? Were you following her?”

  “Earlier in the day,” I admitted, sounding guilty even to myself. “But I was hooked up on Charlie, sitting in the overflow lot across from the Low Rent. I had a clear view of the balcony. They were shouti
ng. I wanted to look closer, so I picked up the Leica.”

  “My god, what am I going to do?”

  “Go get drunk with the bigwigs,” I said. “Act like nothing happened. Use a glass, and you’ll be all right.”

  Moving like the living dead, Mac picked up a champagne flute off the bar, poured four fingers of Scotch into it, then drank it like a man who wasn’t going to stop, even to breathe. The flute was almost empty when Lorna came to the door of the den.

  She leaned into the room, stomping her long narrow foot, saying, “What the livelong hell are you boys doin’ in here?” Then she noticed the dark Scotch in Mac’s hand. “Mac, honey, what are you doing? We’re runnin’ late already, dammit.”

  “I’ll just be a moment, darling,” Mac said softly as he poured more Scotch into the flute. “Just a moment. CW just gave me some bad news.”

  “Not too bad, I hope,” Lorna crooned and started in his direction.

  “I’ll meet you in the car,” he said, and she looked mildly hurt. I noticed, but he didn’t. “Just give me a second.”

  “Well, sir, if you’re gonna be a-drinkin’ like some ol’ fish, I guess we’d better take my car. Nobody’s gonna care if my hair’s blown all to hell and gone,” she prattled, then walked toward the rear of the house and the garage. “I’ll meet you in front, darlin’,” she added, casting a coy smile over her shoulder.

  Lorna’s thick red hair was as heavy as a helmet, and it looked as if it would take a war ax to muss it, but I didn’t tell her that. Mac stared into the flute as if it held the secret to everlasting life.

  “I must be losing my mind,” he said. “I’m drinking Scotch out of a champagne flute.”

  “Actually, that’s an improvement from sucking it straight from the bottle.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Surely there’s no connection between Carrie and the Ritters.”

  “Probably just a coincidence,” I said. “But any time I see two dead bodies in three days, it makes me nervous. So I’ll make damn sure there’s no connection.”