The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “Would you, please?” he said, then gunned the whiskey. “Guess I should let Lorna drive. ’Cept every time I do, she scares me sober.” Lorna drove her little BMW Z car too fast and too aimlessly for comfort. Faster than a speeding bullet with no more sense of direction than a ricochet. Mac set the flute in the sink. “Finish your drink, Sughrue. Take your time. Lock up and set the alarm, will you? And stop by tomorrow afternoon, okay?”

  “Not tomorrow,” I said. “Sunday. You pick me up about two at the Missoula airport, okay? In Lorna’s ride. I want to drive that little car, okay? And fast. I need to work it out, boss. Perks of the job.”

  Mac laughed for a second as if he had forgotten what had brought me here, then the sadness fell across his face. He turned, shook my hand with both of his. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m in your debt, my friend. Forever.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said as he trotted out of the den, wobbling a bit, on his way to sobriety courtesy of a windy adrenaline rush. I wished him luck.

  After pouring another stiff drink, I slipped a Kelly Willis disk into the CD player, adjusted the volume, then stepped through the French doors onto the wide veranda and sat down in a wonderfully comfortable wicker chair. I assumed that Sunday would be soon enough to pass along Johnny Raymond’s hunch. The sun had finally eased behind the Hardrocks, casting long shadows across the greensward. A brace of magpies strutted along the small ditch as if waiting for their daily carrion delivery. Three does—an old fat one, a yearling, and a late fawn with a few spots still left—clattered down the slope of Grasshopper Hill, leaped the five-foot fence as gracefully as if they were swimming in air, and settled down to their jobs, nibbling the short grass of the lawn peacefully, pausing occasionally for a quick flower snack or a brief munch of pale willow leaves. When I struck a match for another cigarette, they looked up with brown eyes as wise as children’s.

  What are you doing here? they seemed to say. This is our place.

  “I ate your grandmother and your grandfather, and half of your fuckin’ cousins!” I shouted. The deer didn’t seem all that interested in the seasons of mortality. The fawn hunched slightly, deer pellets raining like hail on the smooth surface of the lawn. “Well, fuck you,” I said. “I’ve got rows to hoe for Massa MacKinderick. Again.”

  FIVE

  THE MALPRACTICE SUIT had been the longest row I had hoed in my life. At least that time I didn’t have to deal with any dead bodies in person.

  A San Francisco brokerage partner, one Turner Landry, who had been forced out of his firm for cocaine abuse, drunkenness, and several counts of sexual harassment, had retreated to the languid climes of Meriwether, Montana, after a messy divorce and an unsuccessful trip into the spin dry. Unfortunately, shortly after he moved to town a few years back, he wandered into the Low Rent Rendezvous one summer evening and bumped into an off-shift lady bartender, a pretty woman except for her pockmarked face, who introduced him to the joys of crystal meth. For the first time in his life, Landry could drink to his heart’s content and command a blow job when the occasion arose. The sexual part of the affair only lasted a few months, but his love for crystal lasted into the next summer. It lasted through three car wrecks, several ugly incidents in local bars—one of which I witnessed, a fistfight with a wino about who was pitching when Kirk Gibson hit one out against the A’s in the ’88 series—and two arrests for shooting at his neighbor’s cows with a .44-magnum Ruger Redhawk.

  Only his money and his promise to stay in detox this time kept him out of jail. Much to everybody’s surprise, Landry was loosely paroled into the caring arms of Dr. MacKinderick. After six months of five sessions a week with the doc, Landry seemed dry and clean enough for a weekend pass to see his son in Denver.

  Coming back that Sunday, Landry picked up a fourteen-year-old runaway named Doug Foley in Casper, Wyoming. A spring blizzard trapped them in a cheap trailer-house motel outside Hardin, Montana. The next day in the gray, frozen morning their motel room was engulfed by fire, then the whole motel was leveled by an explosion. As far as the authorities could tell from the remains, the .44 magnum had been used to beat the kid to death, then Landry had turned the piece on himself and scattered bits of skull across the room.

  But when he pulled the trigger he didn’t know about the leak in the heating system or the large puddle of propane collected in the crawl space beneath the trailer. The explosion broke windows all over the west side of Hardin and killed two other guests, the owner, and his wife, who was filling in for the maid who had been too stoned to come to work that day. The trailer-house motel looked as if it had been hit by a firestorm, a tornado, or an Arkansas divorce. Not much was left but piles of charred fiberglass, smoldering particle board, and melted aluminum. And the remains of six bodies, of course. A mess but a fairly straightforward mess. Until the overworked and understaffed Montana crime lab, an outfit that usually did forensic work worthy of a much larger and well-endowed state, lost all the blood and tissue work. There was plenty of evidence of drug and drink paraphernalia in the room, but without the blood and tissue work, no evidence of actual abuse, or who had fired the pistol.

  Once word of the “misplacement” leaked to the press, Landry’s son from his first marriage, a thirty-year-old bum who had been disowned by his father after endless problems with drugs and other people’s checks, showed up in Meriwether with a copy of an e-mail that could be considered a suicide note, an ambitious Denver lawyer, and a five-million-dollar medical malpractice suit against Mac, claiming he should have anticipated Landry’s suicide.

  Mac, who had freely admitted to me that he cared too much for his patients, offered to settle for a million. But the lawyer wars had already escalated so quickly that no wiggle room was left. Ron Musselwhite was convinced that Landry had fallen off the wagon, back into crystal and drink again, the instrument of his own destruction. But with the loss of the blood and tissue work, he needed a witness.

  That’s where I entered the picture. I didn’t want the job, but because Mac had testified for Whit at the trial of the Benewah kid, I owed him a favor. Six months had passed, all the motel records had been destroyed in the explosion, and I had no place to start. No place but the bars of Hardin, a hard-drinking town just off the Crow Reservation, where I spent three weeks of suicidal drinking. All I learned during that cloudy and confused time was the name of the stoned maid who hadn’t come to work that day, Shirley Looks at the Ground. Her mother thought that she had moved to Sacramento. Maybe. Turned out it was Rancho Cordova, just outside Sacramento.

  For five hundred dollars, which she needed to bail her Sioux boyfriend out of jail, Shirley told me that the only person she remembered, aside from Landry and the kid, was a longhaired guy who drove an old white Ford pickup with one red front fender. Maybe it had a lawn mower or something in the back. Maybe he had been a marine, a Vietnam vet, she suggested, based on a glimpse of a blurred tattoo on his butt. But she refused to tell me how or why she’d seen his butt.

  Five months later, most of it spent on the road, after spending a ton of Mac’s money, with a little luck and thanks to an old friend of mine, a retired alternative newspaper owner living in Boston, I found the kid’s drunken uncle sitting in a recliner in a rundown clapboard house in the middle of an untended orchard outside Delta, Colorado. His guesses led me to Lonnie Howell as he cleared a driveway outside Denver, up in a fancy neighborhood above Evergreen, Colorado, one afternoon just after a heavy, wet October snowstorm.

  The woman of the house watched Lonnie as he ran his snowblower up and down the driveway. I might have watched Lonnie, too. He was a completely unreconstructed bush-vet hippie straight out of the seventies. Lonnie’s beard was gray and wispy, his jacket was the color of dried blood, except where it was black with grease or white with leaked feathers, his snow pacs came from two different pairs, and his knit cap had a large hole in the very top. Only his snowblower and pickup, which now also sported a blue rear fender, showed any signs of normal maintenance.

  The
woman had straight black hair streaked with gray, but lively amused dark eyes in a sharp face. She wore a mink hat that matched her coat, and she held a muzzled rottweiler bitch on a rolling leash. When I climbed out of my car onto the freshly blown sidewalk, the dog trotted toward me, unreeling the leash.

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said in a musical voice. “She’s a teddy bear. She wears a muzzle to keep her from eating rocks.” I must have looked confused. “Bitch eats rocks for fun. Last time it cost twelve hundred forty-three dollars and fifteen cents to have them cut out of her.”

  I took this as good news, since the dog had her muzzle buried in my crotch.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “I’ll bet he’s a-lookin’ for me,” Lonnie said over the roar of the snowblower. Then to me, he added, “I heard you were lookin’ for me, man. I’ll be done in a bit.”

  And he was. I followed his pickup down to south Denver, where he parked it and picked up his few belongings. When we stopped for meals or motel rooms, he was oddly silent, as if bearing some unnamed guilt, but I attributed it to the war, although he never said a word about it. His silence seemed very important to him.

  After that, the lawsuit was over. Lonnie hadn’t had a drug or a drink in years. The single blot on his record was that he had a general discharge rather than an honorable, which could mean anything from misbehavior to madness. He lived under the middle-class radar because he still hated the government that had squandered his youth and innocence in a useless war. He cleaned up nicely, and his deposition was intelligent and to the point. He had been in Landry’s motel several times during the blizzard, trying to help the kid kick drugs. In country, he had seen hundreds of kids hooked on CIA heroin. Lonnie knew the destructive horror of addiction. He had witnessed Landry and the kid slamming crystal, smoking dope, and guzzling everything from butterscotch schnapps to green Chartreuse.

  So they settled happily. Mac’s insurance company was happy, Mac was relieved, and Landry’s son had replaced a bit of his lost inheritance. Lonnie spent his days standing on the frozen bank of the Meriwether River and his nights drinking cokes at the motel bar. As soon as he was finished, he grabbed his piece of change and left town on the first plane, headed for a winter in Mexico. I went back to my family; Whit’s college debts, office expenses, and salary were paid for a year. Of course I had lost any interest in continuing law school. I was too close to the criminal mind to give a shit about the law.

  And the lawyers? Well, hell, they twirled their mustaches like Mexican bandits and went down to the Scapegoat for cocktails. Actually, Mac and I went with them, too. Mac expressed some disappointment that he never got to thank Lonnie Howell personally, but Musslewhite wouldn’t let him near the kid, and he didn’t ask me to find him again.

  But the lawsuits weren’t completely over. The family of Doug Foley, the runaway kid, planned to sue Landry’s estate, but that didn’t concern me.

  In spite of what I had said to the trio of cynical deer, I kept putting off my chores. I sat on Mac’s veranda sipping Scotch and not thinking about Carrie Fraizer until the deer wandered back up the hill. Then I locked up, drove over to my office, where I turned on the television, supposedly to watch the late news, cracked a beer, and watched the set as stupidly as if it were a powerful fire.

  Finally, I opened the blank envelope from my mailbox. I looked at Ritter’s alarm code, security company password, and front door key as if they were artifacts from a lost civilization. Or a modern one. Ritter’s key seemed to have electronic properties as well as physical, so just copying the key’s grooves and teeth wouldn’t be enough to open the lock. Smart key, wow. It seemed like a good idea to me. Except that I knew I would probably fuck it up and lock myself out of my house forever. Just like the time I told my new computer to kill itself, and it did.

  Enough of that, I said to myself and thought about tearing myself out of my office funk.

  Before I left, I called the paper to see if Pete Morgan, the reporter who covered the cop shop, was at his desk. He was. First, I asked him if he wanted to meet me for a drink, but he said he had to get a story out.

  “What story?”

  He told me all about it, then added that it looked as if Arno Biddle was going to be arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, small amounts of marijuana and cocaine, and wrestling with the cops.

  “And they’re thinking he’s good for pushing the girl off the balcony?” I said.

  “Those two have a history of loud, violent disagreements,” Morgan said, “but usually they limited their fisticuffs to bars. But I’m guessing more serious charges will be filed shortly. What’s your interest, Sughrue? Domestic disasters again?”

  “Only my own,” I lied, hung up the telephone, and finally left.

  But as I drove past the Scapegoat on the way to Ritter’s house, my weaker self took over, parked, went in, and started drinking handfuls of single malt. So I sat there shooting the shit with old shit-shooting friends until nearly two o’clock before I caught my breath. I thought about calling Whit, but it turned out that I was just drunk, not stupid. I gathered my wits and left a fairly coherent message on her office voice mail. She’d check her voice mail in the morning. She was a professional. As I perhaps wasn’t; I still had to go feed the cats. I settled my check and got a six-pack of Negra Modelo from the bartender, who insisted on calling me a cab.

  Whatever had been keeping me from going to the Ritter place seemed to have disappeared. Hell, when the cab stopped in front, I was so happy just to be there that I nearly asked the two college girls in the backseat in for a drink. We’d just picked them up in front of the Deuce and they were drunker than fat ticks on a wino’s ass. Alas, sanity prevailed. And they were afraid that my six beers wouldn’t go very far among the three of us. Reluctantly, I agreed with them. When I climbed out of the cab, they asked to bum a couple of beers; I looked at them as if they had asked to hunt over my best bird dog.

  “As my mother used to say,” I said, “If you don’t have time to stop in, don’t bother stopping by.” She used to tell that to prospective customers who stopped by our old shack to leave an order and wouldn’t come in for coffee or a highball; then she would close the door in their startled faces. She wasn’t a great Avon Lady, but she was a hell of a lot of fun as a mom.

  The young girls just looked blankly from the backseat. So I gave them the whole six pack and wandered toward the front door, waving good-bye over my shoulder. As the cab pulled away, I heard one of them squeal out the cab window, “We don’t have an opener.” But that was asking too much.

  In spite of the fancy key, the Ritters’ front door opened smoothly for me. I shut it and stepped toward the blinking alarm keypad, thinking I should punch in the code before I looked for the light switch. A drift of dusky moonshine from the skylight filled the ground floor of the house. Just as I reached for the keypad, two large white clouds came off a narrow table just inside the door. My heart stopped before they landed on my shoulders.

  When I screamed, the cats fled so quickly that they left rips in my windbreaker and my skin. I was surprised that I didn’t shit my jeans. But not surprised that I couldn’t dig the alarm code out of my head. After a moment the telephone on the narrow table rang.

  “Aristophanes,” I mumbled into the receiver, pronouncing it correctly, thereby and for the first time in my life justifying the government’s expense for sending me to graduate school under false pretenses.

  “Good night, professor,” a tired voice answered.

  As soon as my heart slowed a bit, I turned on every goddamned light on the ground floor, then began a serious search for something to drink. I was glad that the professional cleanup crew had been there before me because the place smelled of Pine-Sol rather than blood. The Ritters didn’t have a bar that I could find, but the kitchen pantry was liberally stocked.

  “Canadian Club and coffee,” I said to myself as I took an unopened liter off the shelf. And turned to face a two-foot typed list. “Rul
es for House Sitters,” it said. There was some admonition about staying out of the liquor cabinet, but I ignored that. I got the coffee started, then decided that I might as well deal with the goddamned cats. After what seemed a long time, I found the cat gear in its own private closet—better hidden than the booze—cleaned the litter pan, freshened it, then took a can of expensive cat food off the stocked shelf. When I cracked the lid, they were there, stropping my ankles and squeaking happily. They had forgiven me, but I was still withholding judgment.

  I spent the next three hours carefully searching the house without finding a single thing out of place. No illegal drugs, no pornographic material, no caches of cash. Just shelves and shelves of ceramic frogs. I paused occasionally to have whiskey-fortified coffee and a smoke on the back steps. I also ignored the rule about bringing my own food and found the remains of a decent pâté in the refrigerator. But otherwise my search was wasted. I even got a ladder out of the garage to climb up to the heavy crossbeam beneath the skylight. Nothing. The only even vaguely interesting thing was an open window beside the laundry chute in the master bedroom that led to a steel fire escape, obviously a modern addition. An open window in a house with central heat and air? I wondered about that. Perhaps Mrs. Ritter just wanted to catch a breath of summer air before she killed herself. Or the cleaners left it open to air out the house.

  Hell, I didn’t know. I poured the last of the coffee and a splash of whiskey into my mug, then went into the television nook to catch the early news. The Ritters didn’t have any ashtrays, so I used the empty pâté container, once Chloe and Charmaine had licked it clean. They were my buddies now. As I leaned back on the small couch, remote in hand, coffee and ashtray on the end table, Chloe of the one blue eye curled in my lap to have her head scratched with my free hand. Her sister stretched out along the top of my shoulders and proceeded to clean my neck, both of them purring happily, as if I were great cat furniture.