The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “Oh, my god,” she groaned. “She was such a lovely woman. What happened?”

  “It was an accident,” I said. “She leaned on a balcony rail behind the Pacific Northwest. It broke. She fell six stories.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “Why don’t you have a couple of drinks?” I said.

  “Thanks,” she whispered. “But I just had an endless dinner with a client. And I’ve got to start looking at schools for Les in the morning anyway.”

  “Good luck,” I said, but didn’t mean it. I couldn’t imagine Les in a private school. “I’ll see you shortly.” She did say that she loved me in a soft sad voice that hit me right in the gut, then hung up.

  As I sat silently on the couch, Charmaine came from behind the television console, the other half of the broken ceramic frog in her mouth. This one was tangled in a bundle of clear fishing leader. I got off the couch and wrestled the console out of the corner so I could see what was behind it. A hole in the plaster and lath for the television cables, lined with white cat hairs. I went into the kitchen to pick up a flashlight I’d seen when I was looking for a drink. When I shined the flashlight into the hole, I was looking directly into the basement, so I went back to the kitchen and down the stairs to see what I had missed on my first search.

  The tiled laundry room, a modern internal addition, was bright and clean, with a line of heat lamps above a clothesline, but the rest of the basement was full of the typical detritus of nearly a hundred years of occupants, as well as a fine layer of dust. Cat tracks led from near the bottom of the stud beside the hole behind the television to a canvas basket beneath a laundry chute. I’d missed that. The sheets and towels from the upstairs bedroom in the basket showed circular depressions where I suspected the girls had enjoyed secret naps. There were no bundles of leader, though. Just a few tiny metallic green ceramic chips. I went back up to the kitchen for a couple of Ziploc bags. I put the fishing leader into one bag, then went to the upstairs bathroom for a pair of tweezers. Down in the basement, I picked up as many chips as I could find without disturbing the laundry.

  Then I spent the rest of the night trying to find out where the girls stashed their trophies. With the occasional stop for a beer or a catnap. Both girls followed me faithfully, as if I were searching for a mouse snack for them. But they didn’t help. I finally found the two halves of the frog behind the last shelf of books I searched, along with a dozen mouse tails, a squirrel’s skull, and a mummified garter snake.

  “You girls are a wonder,” I said to them as I put the frog halves into another Ziploc bag, and they seemed to agree. I wasn’t sure why I was treating the ceramic pieces like evidence, but I thought I should.

  I found an unopened can of French pâté in the pantry and gave it to the intrepid hunters, then went home for a much deserved nap before my one o’clock meeting at the county jail.

  It took a long time to convince Butch and Mr. Biddle that I should be allowed to talk to Arno privately; then it took a call to Raymond to persuade the deputy who ran the jail to let me see the prisoner alone. In the middle of our call, he put me on hold because his call-waiting was beeping. Afterward, he sounded quite cheerful when he asked me to hand the telephone to the jailer.

  “So who the hell are you?” Arno asked me when I stepped into the interrogation room, shaking his thick, dirty hair at me. In the old days, the jailers would have shaved his head.

  “I’m the guy who just might save your ass,” I said. “Didn’t your father tell you that?”

  “Hey, dude, my old man said I was supposed to talk to you just like you were him,” Arno said, then paused. “Well, fuck you and the jackass you rode in on.”

  I sat down anyway and asked, “Why was Carrie seeing a shrink?”

  “Fuck you,” he repeated, glaring at me. “None of your goddamned business,” he said, then clammed up, so I gave him one of my cards and let him. Before I could stand up or even regret the waste of time, the jailer came through the door, motioned me out, then told Arno that he had been kicked loose.

  Out in the hallway, Biddle stopped me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is our deal still on?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You make bail?”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, ignoring my question. “Why is it that the baby of the family goes bad so often?”

  “Ask a shrink,” I said, then turned to Butch. “Musselwhite has the picture and the negative in his safe.”

  “I’ll still need a deposition,” he said. “My office at ten Monday morning?”

  “If I’m still alive,” I said, then asked him if he had made bail, but nobody answered me, so I tried to leave it at that. But I’d never learned how to mind my own business. I walked across the street to lean against my rented car and have a cigarette, hoping to see where they went after Arno got kicked loose.

  I should have known something was up when Pete Morgan showed up, the television news crews right behind him, with Raymond appearing a few moments later. When the Biddles and Butch came out the door, they were met by a clot of reporters there to witness Raymond’s arrest of Arno Biddle for capital murder. I stayed as far away from the circus as I could, but Arno spotted me and screamed, “That guy over there! He knows I didn’t do it!” But the officers kept cuffing him anyway, then locked him into the back of their unit to take him downtown to book him again.

  When it cleared out, I followed Johnny Raymond for a few blocks, then called his personal cell phone. “What the hell’s going on?” I said.

  “Who the hell is this?” he asked, chuckling like a broken-down farmer who had just plowed up a nest of baby rabbits, then he hung up on me.

  I drove home to wait for the airport shuttle to pick me up, but my cell phone rang as I pulled into the driveway. The last person I expected. Arno.

  “Mr. Sughrue,” he said, his voice trembling. “I don’t know who you are or what this has to do with anything, but I want to hire you.”

  “I’ve already got a client,” I said, “and you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Fuck that,” he said, ignoring me. “Carrie never said, but I knew she was seeing a shrink to get up the courage to dump me. She said I was too much like her fucking father—”

  “That speaks to motive, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Hell,” he whispered wetly, as if weeping. “I’m the one who should have been seeing a shrink. Man, I loved that woman. She could have left anytime she wanted to. I swear on my mother’s head. Anybody who knows … who knew us can tell you that.”

  “Maybe I’ll look into your case for a bit,” I said. I didn’t like the kid, but he sounded convincing.

  “And there’s this other thing, man,” he said quickly, almost wailing. “I don’t understand it. But that was my corner; that’s the only place she’d let me smoke a bowl,” he added quickly. I could understand that. “She never leaned on that part of the rail. Never. Said it stunk like a cowflop campfire. I don’t know. Hell, maybe somebody was trying to kill me. I just don’t fucking know.”

  “What was she doing home that time of day?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that, either,” he said softly. “She came home madder than a wet hen, found some lingerie under my pillow, and started shouting at me about some chick whose name I’d never heard before. Hell, man, I don’t know what’s going on.”

  I heard rustling in the background as the cops informed Arno that his time was up. “Help me, man,” he squealed just before the line went dead.

  He’d wasted his single telephone call on me. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I sat on my front steps waiting for my ride out of town.

  “What the hell was that race car bullshit about, Sughrue?” Mac asked breathlessly as we stood atop MacDonald Pass two days later, listening to the cooling engine click as if the little BMW were counting off the hard miles. Mac’s flat cap had blown away somewhere outside Ovando, and the high-altitude sun drew beads of sweat out of his pale scalp. His face looked windblown, dishe
veled, his eyes a bit too big and too bright, his burly eyebrows uncombed. After he had picked me up in Lorna’s little roadster at the Missoula airport, we had popped over to Highway 200, then pushed hard up the winding two-lane all the way to the top of the pass. He hadn’t said a word the whole way. Maybe he had been holding his breath. “I always knew you had a death wish,” he huffed, “but I didn’t know it included me.”

  “Believe me, old buddy,” I said as I grabbed a small beer cooler out of the trunk, “that didn’t have a fucking thing to do with a death wish. That was an affirmation of life, man. Think of it as fishing for fun!”

  “Forgive me if I missed the fun part,” he said. I offered him a beer, but he declined, saying, “You drink, my friend. I’m driving home.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “So are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “Quite frankly, I don’t know where to start,” I admitted.

  “Try the beginning,” he suggested softly.

  “Or how much to tell you.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “You can’t see the plains from here,” I said, pointing east. “But you can feel them. The Great Plains. The Great American Desert, actually. The Big Empty. You can’t see it but you can sure as hell feel it, right?”

  “Right,” Mac said. “Growing up out there was like growing up on a frozen ocean. I always wanted a house by the living one; that’s why I painted them, but what the hell—”

  “You’re missing the point,” I interrupted. “I can’t see a thing that makes any sense, but I know something’s there.”

  “You know how much I appreciate your taking on the job …”

  “I know something is wrong, Mac, but I don’t know what,” I said. “The clouds are different out there over the Big Empty.”

  “And?”

  “When’s Garfield Ritter getting out of the hospital?”

  “Not for a while. They did a bypass Friday.”

  “I don’t have anything but a dumb hunch, a bunch of unexplained junk, and a couple of worthless witnesses,” I said, “but I’m fairly sure that his wife didn’t kill herself.”

  “How sure?”

  “You couldn’t take it to the bank,” I said. “But you could buy a round of drinks with it.”

  “Who are these worthless witnesses?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said. “The other odd thing is that I’ve got a photo of Arno Biddle with his back turned, going in the door fifteen feet away from Carrie Fraizer as she was falling.”

  “And?”

  “Earlier today Raymond arrested him for capital murder,” I said. “I don’t have any idea what he’s got, but it must be fairly solid. He invited the press to the arrest. This guy really wants to succeed at his job.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Want to hear the craziest part?” I said. “Even before I searched the Ritter place, he was convinced that Mrs. Ritter’s death wasn’t a suicide. And he asked for my help.”

  “He asked for your help? Christ, he hates you.”

  “True enough,” I said.

  “Whatever reason could he have for thinking that the death wasn’t a suicide? I don’t understand,” Mac said.

  “Well, partner, if you don’t understand, who the hell does?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, then absently took a beer out of the cooler. As he drank it, wordlessly, his silence deepened as he drew further and further into himself.

  I walked over to look at the sign marking the pass, took a leak into two oceans, then pulled out my cell phone to try to call Whit, but I was either out of range, out of battery charge, or simply out of luck. I went back to the car, grabbed another beer, settled into the passenger seat, then waited for Mac to come back.

  “How was the visit with Whit?” he asked as he settled behind the wheel.

  “Don’t ask,” I said. I’d been to happier funerals.

  He didn’t speak until we were parked in the sunset shadows in front of my house.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, breaking his silence finally.

  “I’ve got a chore, I guess,” I said.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “Maybe there’s some kind of blackmail going on here that I don’t know anything about.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Keep eating my liver, I guess,” he said, his voice deep and soft as if he carried the burden and pain of all the poor mad people in the world. “I’ll just keep gnawing away at my liver until it’s all gone.”

  When he left, I drove over to take care of the Ritters’ cats, then came home to wander through the house until the emptiness got to me, so I went out to the office. I sliced some sausage and cheese, cracked a beer, then found a black-and-white movie I’d never seen before—some Gothic groaner with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price—then leaned back in my La-Z-Boy, and popped one of Mac’s little white sleeping pills.

  When I woke with daylight streaming into my window the next morning, it seemed that I had dreamed the same thing over and over all night. Whatever it was, I couldn’t remember it exactly. But I woke with the taste of blood and cordite in my mouth. I wasn’t happy about that.

  I started calling Johnny Raymond every hour on the hour, enduring his laughing hang ups. Until I got his voice mail. “Tildon’s Corners at three o’clock this afternoon,” I said. “I’m in a bad mood, so show up, you dumb son of a bitch, or my next call is to Pete Morgan at the paper. I need to talk to you someplace out of your jurisdiction, asshole.”

  The bar was dark and the parking lot empty when I got there, but the door was unlocked. Johnny Raymond sat at the bar in work clothes and scuffed boots. As I stepped inside, Freddy locked the door behind me. Raymond came off his stool in a rush, his large face burning. I knew he had been a good cop and suspected he’d been a good marine, but he wasn’t much of a bar fighter. When I got tired of his swinging and missing or slamming his large fists against my arms and shoulders, I hit him in the throat hard enough to kill an ordinary man. He hit the floor, gagging until he passed out.

  “Is he dead?” Freddy squeaked from the door.

  “I hope so,” I said. “What that in your hand? Your dick?”

  Freddy looked at the short bat in his hand as if he’d never seen it before. “I told him you didn’t look like the runnin’ type,” he said, then pitched the bat behind a bank of keno machines. “But I didn’t think you’d kill him,” he said.

  “He’s too fucking dumb to die,” I said. “What the hell was this about? Did he think I fucked his girlfriend? Or do you people fuck your cows and cousins?”

  “I don’t think he’s got a girlfriend,” he said, either ignoring or not understanding the insult. “His wife’s awfully churchy, you know, and she probably didn’t appreciate your language. He’s my first cousin and all, but he gets a little more batshit every year. It ain’t too widely known, but he beat a guy half to death when they were on vacation in Mexico. Took all his money to pay it off.”

  I went around the bar to fill a pitcher with ice water and got a couple of beers. I dumped the ice water over Raymond’s face. A couple of times between beers. Finally, he climbed to his feet and stumbled to the restroom. He came back a few minutes later to flop on the stool beside me.

  “You could have killed me,” he croaked like a man who’d smoked Camel Straights all his life. “That would have been wonderful.”

  “I’m not going to apologize,” I said. “I had to put you down, Johnny. You’re too big and strong to handle any other way. Hell, I’m going to have to lean over to brush my teeth tomorrow.”

  “Then I guess I don’t have to apologize, either,” he said.

  “Right. We wouldn’t want to presume too deeply on our friendship.”

  “What the hell do you want?” he growled.

  “I’m going to guess that when the pathologist took another look at Charity Ritter, he found enough Valium and alcoh
ol in her to stun an ox, plus some other shit—ketamine, maybe—a needle mark somewhere, in the hairline or the belly button or the rectum, and some very thin bruise lines in her armpits.”

  “How the hell did you know that?” he asked.

  “A couple of cats told me some shit.”

  “You’re just guessing.”

  “Enough of a guess to keep the case open?”

  “There’s no case right now,” he said. “The people I answer to don’t see it that way.”

  “And I thought you only answered to God himself,” I said. “You’re sure that Biddle is good for Carrie Fraizer?” I asked.

  “That’s not part of our deal.”

  “Well, partner,” I said, “you know what I know. Arno is clean. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said to my back as I walked away.

  I went by the Ritters’ to leave plenty of dry food out for the girls, then took off to see my family again. Maybe I hadn’t stayed away long enough, or I had picked the wrong time to visit, because I was back in Meriwether the next night, when I slept in the La-Z-Boy again, drugged but not dreamless.

  Late the next morning after a lazy breakfast and a stint of lackluster bill paying, I dug the pages out of the office safe, then went back to work. The name on the next page was Sheila Miller. Tuesday and Thursday mornings at seven. As far as I could find out on the computer, Ms. Miller lived in the Wagon Wheel Mobile Home Park, about ten miles west of town. She was the single mother of a seventeen-year-old high school senior named Marcy, and worked three jobs. A personal health care aide in the daytime, she also delivered the Avalanche-Express every morning. Then she spent three nights a week just down the road from her place as a dancer-cum-bartender at The Phone Booth, a truck-stop paradise for longhaul drivers and other bits of random lust, a place that sported overpriced drinks, overrated tits, and soundproof telephone booths. A cursory search through court-house records didn’t turn up a marriage or divorce, or a birth record for her daughter. I couldn’t picture myself hanging around a group home, a topless joint, or following a paper carrier through the predawn morning. So Sheila would have to wait for another day.