The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  That night while I had been in an interrogation room, Ellen Marshall had died of blood loss and shock.

  The next day, Mac placed Charlie in a rest facility outside of Whitefish, supplied me with enough tranquilizers and pain pills to keep me fairly normal, then he canceled his appointments for a week, and he and Lorna flew to Seattle so he could see his analyst at some length. We hadn’t exchanged more than ten words during our good-byes. And even those ten had worn us out.

  When I was able, I moved the girls out of my office and into the house. They hadn’t been there more than an hour before they owned the place. When the graduate students who house-sat for us came to take care of things for a while, Chloe and Charmaine decided that they owned them, too. Then I climbed on another crappy flight.

  This time instead of staying at her parents’ house, Whit and I spent the night at an airport hotel. We had dinner and drinks in the room, made love, then had another ragged conversation.

  “Are you going to keep working for Mac?” she asked.

  “If he wants me to when he gets back from Seattle,” I said.

  “How long?”

  “As long as he keeps paying,” I said. “I have to make a living, too, remember.”

  “Maybe you should take some time off,” she suggested.

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Can I ask you something, CW?”

  “What?”

  “How would you feel if I had an affair?” she said.

  “Are you going to sleep with a prosecutor to get a deal?”

  “Be serious,” she said. “What would you do?”

  “I’d kill somebody,” I said.

  “Me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “My lover?”

  “Only if he had a skinny mustache, slicked back hair, and never took off his black socks in bed.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Killing somebody,” I said. “That’s about as serious as I get.”

  “Yourself?

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d just drive up and down the street until I found an asshole I didn’t like, then I’d drop the hammer on him.”

  “That would be just like killing yourself, honey,” she said. “You’re smoking cigarettes again, and I know you’re smoking dope, too. Living on beer, sleeping pills, and coffee. That can’t be good with one kidney. I’m worried about you. And us. Are you going to be all right?”

  “If I’m not, you’ll be the first to know,” I said. “Don’t worry, okay? That just makes it harder.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “But it’ll be hard.”

  “Nothing else to do,” I said, slipping away from the conversation like a coward in the night. “What would you do if I had an affair?” I asked, a hollow laugh in my throat, the flickering image of Sheila Miller in the front of my mind.

  “You mean you’re not?” she said, good heart that she was, trying to laugh, too.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m married to a lawyer, and I’m afraid of her.”

  “You damn well better be,” she said, then snuggled next to me. “I hope Mac’s going to be all right,” she added. “I know how he feels it when one of his patients is in pain.”

  “Hell, he hates it when they have a hangnail,” I said. “But how the hell do you know how he feels?”

  “Just guessing,” she said, then closed my mouth with hers.

  Janeanne Reynolds was the anchor and news director for the local television news I didn’t watch. Which is why I didn’t know the name. She had been an anchor in Denver until she’d become the latest trophy wife of the local station owner, whose family owned a dozen small stations across the West. As far as I could gather from a couple of days’ work, all she wanted out of life, besides the mansion on the hill, was to continue her job covering the news in a small western Montana city, but her husband wanted to start a third family. Don’t marry the boss; it’s a bad idea if you want to keep working. I made a point of watching her work a few times. She was too good for our small market, but she seemed to honestly enjoy her work.

  Angie Cole was the daughter of Meriwether’s most successful real estate developer, Abe LoRusso, but she had married beneath her. She and her college-dropout husband had borrowed money from her father to open an upscale coffee-house and bistro in an already flooded market. They lost her father’s money bean over biscotti instead of producing grandchildren. The word was that she hadn’t left the house since the bankruptcy.

  Neither of the women were serial killers, having affairs, or indulging in a secret life as degenerate gamblers.

  Garfield Ritter, on the other hand, was doing one of them. As soon as he was mobile, he spent most of his time away from the college sitting on stools in front of keno and poker machines in every small town within thirty minutes of Meriwether, feeding the machines twenty-dollar bills as if he had printed them. He never won. Hell, he never even had a free drink.

  Charlie Marshall came back from his week of convalescence looking even unhappier than he had when he left. Since GG Paul never left the house these days, I tagged her husband a few times out of boredom—a waste of time since he probably had the computer skills to hack into Mac’s system and wouldn’t need to break into the office. He spent the occasional afternoon visiting with Charlie Marshall, and sometimes in the evening he visited The Phone Booth, sitting on the edge of the stage. Between the same two truckers, twice. Particularly when Sheila Miller was dancing. But as far as I could tell, he just looked.

  Sheila seemed so fragile and busy that I hated to follow her. I knew that she turned the occasional trick, but she was very circumspect about it. I did dig up a bit of her past. She’d been fifteen and in high school when her daughter had been born, and they had left Medford, Oregon, shortly afterward. In spite of her looks, Sheila turned so much money at The Phone Booth that she had avoided being shoved around the topless circuit. Her daughter, Marcy, was a stoner who hung with the local high school Goths, her classic beauty hidden beneath too much dark makeup. Unlike her mother, she had the face to go with the body, even if the body was a bit skinny, but the kid had never been in any real trouble. She went to school regularly in her little Miata, even met with a math tutor two afternoons a week, and then with Mac’s eating-disorders group afterward. She and her mother seemed close, except for the occasional shouting match, closer than most mothers and daughters might have been given their lives and backgrounds.

  It was all too normal. Hell, even Elwood Studer, denied his afternoon sessions with Mac, still left the house three times a week at the right time, and drove aimlessly around for a couple of hours, aimless but following exactly the same route, until the time he normally came home.

  Unlike Mac, who didn’t come home. He extended his Seattle visit indefinitely and asked me to come over to talk to him.

  Finally, I called Claudia to see if she’d let go of some of her inside-the-police-force information. For decency’s sake, we met late one night at The Bluestone, a roadhouse twenty miles south of town with a large dance floor and a small bar. And log cabins with fireplaces located conveniently behind the place along Bluestone Creek. I got there early and tried to hide in a dark corner, but she made an entrance like she always did. Tonight, instead of her usual tailored business suit—she liked to play the gangster’s daughter, but her father was a famous Butte tailor—she sported black jeans, a white cowboy shirt, red boots that matched her mouth, and an attitude as sharp and sparking as a straight razor. I gunned my drink before she could get to the table.

  She sat down, ordered for both of us, then brushed back the black-and-silver wings of her loose, thick hair.

  “Here to pump me, Sughrue?” she asked, then laughed huskily.

  “Give me a break, will you?”

  “Not until you give me one, cowboy.”

  “You want to dance?” I said with a sudden, twisted inspiration. Patsy Cline was singing “Crazy” on the jukebox. Blame it on Patsy.

  “What?”


  “Let’s dance,” I said as I grabbed her hand and led her onto the dance floor.

  Thirty minutes of dancing and a few drinks later, we sat down, winded and sweating. We had fit well together. I had grown up hanging around dance halls, and Claudia, who had been around country music herself, followed with an aggressive grace.

  “Thank you,” she said when we sat down. “I really enjoyed that. I feel young and properly depraved, and so grateful that I have to tell you that the DA’s office is slow-pitching discovery on the Biddle case.”

  “The trip hasn’t been totally wasted,” I said. “I enjoyed the dancing, too. Although I feel old and wasted, ready for a nap.”

  “Well, not totally wasted,” she said, her eyes sparkling like the moonlight on the creek behind the roadhouse. When I flinched, she laughed at me. “Stop being so damn sensitive,” she said. “When I really want you, CW, you won’t have a chance.”

  “I thought you said I was tougher than I looked,” I reminded her.

  “Lawyer talk,” she said. “I don’t like slow-pitch,” she added. “And the DA really wants to hang this kid out to dry, so I took things into my own hands.”

  “Butch in a dither?”

  “No more than usual,” she said bitterly. “But I came up with a copy of the crime scene inventory. That was all I could get, but it looks like enough.”

  “Interesting,” I said. I knew better than to ask how she had gotten it.

  “One thing really stuck out,” she said. “A red crotchless teddy. Carrie was a big girl, CW. It might have fit on one of her thighs. But nowhere else.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not quite,” she said. “Down in the basement, behind a loose brick, they found a small stash of two kinds of acid—liquid lysergic acid diethylamide and hydrochloric acid—one to rot your brain and one to weaken the mortar around the screws holding up the railing.”

  “Could’ve belonged to anybody in the building.”

  “The hydrochloric bottle had one perfect thumbprint on the bottom,” she said. “Arno Biddle’s.”

  “What made them look in the basement?”

  “Your usual ubiquitous anonymous call,” she said. “What’s your interest in all this?”

  “Justice,” I said without thinking about it, had the last of my drink, then set my empty glass down. “And protecting my client. I’ll tell you about it someday.”

  Claudia reached over, lightly scratched the back of my hand with her long, red nails and said, “How is it that we never got together in the old days?”

  “In the old days, sweetie, you wouldn’t date me because I was a struggling hippie PI instead of a rich lawyer,” I said. “Also, you were as mean and ambitious as a spitting cobra.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, then broke into a soft, sad smile that made her face young and lovely again. “You mean back before I threw my life away on a married man who was meaner and more ambitious than I was?” She didn’t want an answer to that question. “What now?” she asked.

  “I’ve got to go. An early flight to Seattle,” I said. Claudia knew what that meant. Either a drive to Missoula for a 6:30 a.m. loop through Salt Lake, or a small plane bouncing around the mountains. Another gift from the Reagan deregulation years. “To see a client,” I added.

  “How’s Mac holding up?” she said. “He’s certainly had a string of bad luck lately.”

  “He’s always taken his patients too seriously,” I said. “I don’t know how he ever held up.” Then I stood, saying, “Thanks, Claudia. You going to hang out?” I nodded at a trio of young guys leaning against the bar.

  “Wouldn’t be quite the same,” she said, then stood up, too.

  In the parking lot, we hugged each other, said good-bye like parting friends, then climbed into our rides.

  Thanks to a delayed flight and a canceled one, it was after four by the time I got to the Surry Park Hotel in Seattle, and I felt like I’d spent the day in hell instead of the Salt Lake airport. I must have looked like it, too. The snooty desk clerks wanted to know what I was doing in their hotel.

  “I’m Dr. MacKinderick’s assistant,” I said. “Igor.”

  They weren’t amused. I guess Lorna wasn’t, either. When the desk clerk called up to the room, she didn’t bother talking to me, just told them to tell me that the doctor was on his way down to meet me.

  When Mac stepped out of the elevator, limping, he said, “Leave your bag behind the desk, Igor, and walk this way.” His grin was as sketchy as a wave-washed gull track, but I did as he said, followed him out through the revolving door, limping into the afternoon sunlight. We were all the way down to the Market before he said, “You can stop limping, my friend. I got drunk and twisted my ankle coming out of the Bistro the other night.”

  “You got drunk?”

  “Same thing my analyst said.”

  “What was your answer?” I said.

  “You damn betcha.”

  “Can’t say I blame you,” I said.

  We walked through the Market as the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like an errant tide. Summer was nearly over, but the vendors wouldn’t be breaking down their stalls until much later on this long summer afternoon. The fruit and vegetables gleamed as brightly as postcard replicas, the flowers glowed, and the seafood glistened in their shaved ice beds.

  “How’s your head?” Mac asked when we stopped in front of the elevator down to the bay front. It wasn’t just the limp. Mac looked twenty years older than the night we’d won the Old Farts championship. “Still seeing double?”

  “I guess I had a little harder knock than I realized,” I admitted. “Never saw double, just didn’t see right. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I had a couple of acid flashbacks that night in the interrogation room.”

  “Thanks for holding out,” he said. “What were you doing outside Charlie’s house?”

  “Just doin’ my job, boss,” I said. “Either that, or I had an especially stupid idea.”

  “Speaking of ideas,” he said. “Any notion who copied the disks?”

  “No more now than I did when I started,” I said. “But I can guess who didn’t.”

  We crossed Alaskan, then turned north along the bay front, walking slowly until Mac stopped to lean against the rail to stare at the water, calm except for the passing wakes of freighters and ferries and rich folk’s follies. He stared at the scene so hard it looked as if he wanted to paint it. Gulls and crows scrabbled among the litter with dead seriousness, as if looking for something more important than a snack. It was a fine, brilliant afternoon, the only dark cloud hanging in my head.

  “Are you going to tell me?” he finally said. “Who didn’t do it?”

  “Sheila’s too frightened,” I began, “Janeanne’s too self-absorbed, Angie’s too timid, Garfield’s too selfish, Elwood’s too dominated by his mother, Charlie’s too sad … and poor Carrie is too fucking dead. That’s all I know. So, what’s so important on the disks?”

  “There’s a …” he said sharply as he turned to me, then sighed, turned back to the water, and apologized. “I’m sorry, CW. You know I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. You’ve done a great deal of work, haven’t you? God, and you’ve seen the deaths. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Bad habits, I guess.”

  “All habits are bad,” he said bitterly. “What’s the police angle on Ellen Marshall’s death?”

  “The police aren’t talking to me these days,” I said.

  “I thought Raymond was your new best friend.”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “So you haven’t heard what the note said?”

  “Note?”

  “I’ve always hated my hands on my body,” Mac said sadly. “If I can’t kill myself, I think I’ll trim them. That’s what she wrote.”

  “Charlie told you?”

  He nodded, then said, “This is the most awful part of my life. And here I am breaking a sacred trust. Shit.”

  “What are you going
to do?”

  “What do you think I should do?” he said.

  “Walk away from your practice, retire, leave Meriwether forever.”

  “Sounds like denial,” he said. “I’d never advise denial. Of course, my analyst says the same thing. Except with a sweet Swedish lilt to her voice. How the hell did I end up with an analyst who sounds like my mother?”

  “I don’t know, Doc,” I said. “You’re the shrink.”

  “Sometimes your friends know more about you than you do yourself,” he said.

  “And sometimes they don’t.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “How’s the separation going?”

  “We’re not calling it a separation, yet,” I said, “but it’s not going worth a shit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Thanks for saying that, but I fear some of it is,” he said without explanation. Then he paused, turned inward again. “I don’t know. I’m coming back to town, going back to work, and, even though I agree with your assessment of my clients, I want you to stay on them. And if you can stand it, I want you to work it even harder.”

  “Why?”

  “Ron’s got another twenty grand in an escrow account, plus another thirty that belongs to you, my friend, when we work this out.”

  “Fuck the money,” I said. “What’s the real reason?”

  “I just know something terrible is going to happen,” he said, “and these people need my help.”

  “I don’t know how much more terrible it can be,” I said.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know. And Mac …”

  “What?”

  “I’ve stopped remembering my dreams.”

  “And?”

  “I think I’m dreaming about the war again.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Trust me.”