The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “I’d rather—”

  “I’m sure you would,” she interrupted. “But we’ll do it my way. We’re sort of a close-knit and protective group, the ex-wives of Dr. Will MacKinderick. Except for the first one. She’s a mystery.”

  “All right,” I said, then dug a card out of my billfold.

  “You want a beer?” she said suddenly. “Might make this all go down easier.”

  “Why not,” I said. “But I’d really like a cigarette.”

  She went around into the kitchen, then came back with two bottles of Bohemia in one hand, a business card in the other. I looked at the card before I put it in my pocket. Lindsey Porter, architect.

  “He told me you were a stockbroker,” I said as she handed me the beer.

  Her smile was very much amused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You are his friend, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then I’d advise you not to look too closely at him,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”

  We sipped our beers and watched the fog butting at the glass walls. Then I told her what had happened. Or at least as much as I knew. It took two beers. Her smile faded but never completely disappeared, flickering around the corners of her mouth like a curious butterfly.

  “Mr. Sughrue,” she said, “I can tell you a couple of things that might help. Will MacKinderick didn’t kill anybody, including himself.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “I was the last time I looked,” I ventured.

  “You don’t look married,” she said. “Listen, Will MacKinderick is a fucking coward. He arranged to get sent back from Vietnam because he couldn’t stand the pressure in the OR. He picked his ER jobs very carefully, then when he couldn’t stand it, he went back to become a shrink.” She paused, took a deep breath, then added, “And that’s all I’ve got to say about that, mister.” She paused to watch the wisps of fog filter through the evergreens, then roll back on themselves like playful puppies. “I should have kept painting,” she said as she stepped over to a work in progress propped on an easel, a view of the meadow much as it was but lashed with sunshine. Something about the painting bothered me, but I couln’t place it. “I enjoyed the painting,” she continued, “but Will always said I was no good. Maybe he was right. He was better than I was and never lost a chance to tell me about it. He could be a mean son of a bitch. But I loved him until he left me. And perhaps a little longer.”

  “You want me to call you when I find out what happened?” I asked.

  She came out of her foggy visions to say brightly, “You call; I’ll let you know if I want you to tell me.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said. We shook hands, firmly but briefly. “You’re quite a remarkable woman, Ms. Porter.”

  “It was a long time coming, mister,” she said, grinning, “but I certainly am.”

  We smiled our good-byes; then I walked out into the cool, wet air. As I put my hand on the door handle, I realized what had bothered me about the painting: she was painting sunshine onto a dark photograph.

  Back at the Surry Park Hotel, I decided that I needed a drink and a smoke, so I sat down under the awning and collared one of the hotel’s snotty waiters. Cunningham wasn’t around, and even though I had counted on it, I almost hoped he’d had the sense to stay away from Lorna. I had had plenty of experience listening to husbands and wives telling stories about their spouses as if they were people I’d never met. Lindsey’s story bothered me, but not too much. And lots of people don’t like to talk about the ex-spouses.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have much time to think about it before the riot broke out behind me. The famous studied elegance of the Surry Park Hotel lobby was suffering mightily from Lorna’s assault on the front desk. Naked under a hotel robe, she was screaming and pounding on the desk as Mr. Folger huddled behind it. She picked up the registration pad and bounced it off Folger’s sweating forehead. Then she went for the pen. Cunningham tried to grab her arm, but she screamed for him to keep his hands off her, then buried the pen deeply into his forearm. I hustled inside, grabbed her robe with one hand and slapped her with the other. Lorna went completely slack, as rubbery as a snake. She slid out of her robe and hit the floor naked and unconscious. Either she had never been slapped before, or perhaps I had let loose weeks of frustration and coldcocked her.

  “My god, man, you’ve killed her,” Folger squealed.

  “She’s fine,” I said as I checked her pulse and covered her with the robe. “She just needs a little rest. Call an ambulance. Now.” Then I turned to Cunningham, whose face was as white as if he’d been shot, and handed him my card key. “I’ll meet you in my room in a minute. Go now.” He had the sense not to argue and to keep his bloody arm hidden from the crowd gathering in the lobby.

  It took me two runs through the psychiatrist list in the yellow pages to find Mac’s shrink’s name. By pleading life or death, I got through during a session, explained the problem, and left it in her calm, capable hands. Dr. Cassilli had such a soft, lovely voice that I felt like a better person just for having listened to her.

  I told Folger what the shrink had said, then asked for a pair of pliers.

  “What?”

  “Man, don’t fuck around now,” I said. “I fixed your problem, now you get into the junk drawer behind the desk or the bell boy’s pants and get me a pair of pliers.” Folger hustled like a man worried about a bomb. But when I took the pliers and headed for the elevator, he suddenly panicked.

  “What if she wakes up,” he stammered.

  “Slap the shit out of her,” I said. “Or let those guys take her.” I motioned over my shoulder at the paramedics coming up the stairs from the street.

  I stopped by Lorna’s room for a second, cleaned up, and grabbed a few things. Cunningham was sitting on the couch in my room, holding his arm wrapped in a towel. “Jesus,” he moaned, “if Pammie finds out about this, she’ll insist on charging the woman. Assault on a federal officer. My God, the paperwork.”

  “No, shit,” I said. “What happened? Lorna want some blow, then another bang?”

  Cunningham looked as dazed and confused as a child. “I can’t pull it out,” he complained. “It’s stuck.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Like the very devil,” he said.

  “This is going to hurt worse,” I said.

  “What?” he said, glancing at the pliers in my hand.

  I tossed them on the couch beside him, then a big-eyed monkey with a stupid grin, a stuffed toy. “No,” I said, “this.”

  “What?”

  “Nanny-cam, asshole,” I said.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, suddenly an adult in a world of shit.

  “I guess you don’t want to see the tape?” I said. “Since you’ve been there, done that, and brought back the hickie.”

  At least he had the guts not to deny fucking her. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Well, lover boy, right now I’m going to fix your arm, then smuggle you back to wherever you live, so you can come back in a clean jacket,” I explained. “Now I’m going to cut that one off you.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  I’ll give him this: he didn’t faint when I jerked the pen out of his forearm, poured vodka into the wound, stuffed cotton balls into the hole, then, for the final touch, tied it down with a pair of Lorna’s thong panties. Then I got him a windbreaker out of my closet—his shoulders would have burst through one of my shirts—mailed the tape to myself at Musselwhite’s office, called his secretary, told her what to do, then took Cunningham down to the garage, bypassing the lobby, then up to the duplex on Swedish Hill, where he lived and where we were able to do a little better job binding his wound.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had a tetanus shot?”

  “A couple of years,” he said.

  “Got any antibiotics?”

  “Never bee
n sick,” he confessed.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got some in my Dopp kit,” I said, “and some Lortabs.”

  “I don’t want any pain pills.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I told him. “Your arm is going to be as sore as a boil for longer than you have any idea, and without pain pills you won’t have a full range of motion, and believe me Agent Morrow will know, and she’ll get it out of you—”

  “No,” he protested.

  “Buddy, she’ll open you like a rotten tomato.”

  “So what do you get out of this, Sughrue?” he asked, hanging his head in shame.

  “What happened to the ‘Mister’?”

  “Screw you. Don’t push it too hard,” he said, more sad than angry. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Even without a body, the Bureau is still carrying Dr. MacKinderick’s death as an unexplained death on an Indian reservation, right?” I said, and he nodded. “And we’ve got what? Interstate flight to avoid prosecution, right? I want copies of the evidence photos, forensic reports, case files, and then I want you to walk me through the crime scene. You people are still treating it as a crime scene, right?”

  He shook his head.

  “Closed it down already? Well, tonight you copy the files, and tomorrow you take a personal day. Are you clear about that?” I said.

  “Clear as a bell,” he said. “And I can see my return to the Kansas Highway Patrol as clear as a bell.” Then he turned his drooping face up to mine. “What kind of criminal are you, man?”

  “Criminal?” I said. “Man, think of me as Dr. Justice. I can get it done. And I’ve never been charged with anything that stuck. So just be as smart as you’re supposed to be, kid, and everything will work out,” I said. “Now let’s get back to the hotel, and act as if nothing happened.”

  “What about the tape?”

  “Finder’s keepers, kid,” I said. “It’ll be in my lawyer’s safe by this time tomorrow.”

  “You’re a smart old bastard, aren’t you?” he said.

  “And highly trained at government expense, just like you, bud,” I said. “But keep in mind that I’m a couple of years short of old and that I loved my parents, so the next time you call me a bastard, you’d best be smiling.”

  Cunningham looked mildly confused. He had thirty pounds and twenty years on me, but I had put the snake bite of doubt in his eyes.

  “We ain’t gonna be buddies, kid, but we’re gonna get along.”

  When we arrived in the hotel lobby, Agent Morrow was almost as close to a fit as Lorna had been, and Folger looked even more distraught. Of course, if I had slapped Pammie, I probably would have broken all my fingers and my wrist, then she would have jerked my arm out of the socket and gnawed it like a chicken bone.

  Luckily, her anger was directed at Cunningham. “Where have you been, Agent?”

  “Chasing down a lead,” he said smoothly. “Mr. Sughrue got a call from a CI who thought he had spotted Dr. MacKinderick.”

  “Mr. Sughrue doesn’t have any confidential informants,” Morrow said sharply. “In fact—”

  “Hey, good point, Agent Morrow,” I interrupted. “But the lawyer I work for has clients.”

  “In fact, he’s on the verge of an obstruction charge.”

  “Here, Agent,” I said, then handed her two card keys. “Dr. MacKinderick’s room. My room. Search to your heart’s content.” Then I turned to Folger. “Have I got a couple of faxes back there?” Folger dug them up quickly. “Legal waivers of our rights,” I said, as she scanned the documents. “But of course no questions for Mrs. MacKinderick until Ron Musslewhite is here.”

  Morrow looked up quickly, the muscles in her jaw working out. “Is he that asshole in the braids?”

  “I’ll pass on the compliment,” I said.

  “Why would I want to search your room, Sughrue?”

  “I just want you to be happy, Pammie,” I said.

  But she wasn’t too happy.

  Later that evening, I called Whitney to fill her in about the events of the last couple of days. She had always been good about helping me work out what I thought by talking to me, but she seemed distracted that night. Finally, I asked her directly what she thought.

  After a long pause, she said softly, “CW, for a man in your profession, you seem to have a bad habit of trusting the wrong people.”

  After a pause even longer than hers, I said, “Thanks for that little gem of wisdom, Whit. Believe me, I’ll keep it in the front of my head for the rest of my life.” Then I hung up, switched off both phones, dug one of Lorna’s battered bindles out of my billfold, and without thinking, chopped two fat lines. I did one slowly, then the other more quickly. Just like riding a bicycle, you never forget. Then I wanted a double handful of Scotch, some aimless conversation, bright lights, big city, strange women, all that shit.

  The next afternoon, later than I’d meant to be there, I stood in the cold wind off the sound on the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, hoping it might wash the wasted evening out of my head. I ignored the pile of messages on my cell, just as I refused to look at the case file and the photos that Cunningham had offered, but nothing seemed to help. So I rattled off the ferry and put my nose to the rain-wet highway, following my old buddy around the corner of the Olympic Peninsula toward the end of the world.

  On a wet and foggy weekday at the end of summer, the Cape Flattery Trail parking lot on the Makah Indian Reservation wasn’t too crowded. In fact, it was strangely empty. Except for Cunningham and a tribal police unit. I grabbed my Old Goat windbreaker out of the trunk and followed Cunningham the three quarters of a mile to the last lookout on the trail, the place where Mac’s clothes and shoes had been neatly piled next to his bare footprints at the edge of the cliff. In the distance, Tatoosh Island seemed to be sailing away into a gray darkness. The Pacific front had stirred huge rollers out of the cold ocean. Below me, I could see the vicious currents sweep up the coast to collide with the rollers, then scramble with the outrunning tide sweeping around the curl of Neah Bay and the long stretch of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Nobody ever swam out of that.

  “Fucking melodramatic bastard,” I whispered by way of memorial or admiration, and I almost believed that he had done it. But I wondered why Mac had stopped to have his head stitched halfway across Washington. Maybe he was afraid of losing too much blood to make his exit. Then I dug into my pocket for a cigarette. I had open packs stashed in all my jacket pockets now. I found an unfamiliar box of Swan matches, too. When I opened them, I found the bug. Short range, short battery life, but state of the art. I couldn’t recall the last time I had worn that particular windbreaker. And couldn’t think of a reason for anybody to bug me.

  Walking back down the trail, I didn’t bother looking for clues. I knew that the cleaning crews had already been out with everything in their power to wash away the blood. The whole world was frightened of blood these days. And the steady drizzle had done its work. There was nothing here for me. Back at the parking lot, Cunningham handed me a plastic envelope, then left without saying good-bye. He looked like a man who had lost his buddy. But he had lost something even more precious: his innocence. I feared that he’d keep losing it until he became just another bureaucrat with a gun.

  So I took the case files and photos back to Port Angeles; bought a jeweler’s loupe, a bottle of Lagavulin, and a six-pack of PBR; then checked into a motel and cleared off the desk.

  First, the paperwork. The FBI had never been my favorite public agency, but you had to admire their organization. They had done a month’s work in three days. There were no surprises in the Meriwether PD’s preliminary report. Sheila Miller’s daughter, Marcy, didn’t have much to tell the detectives. And my bare admission that I had been cooping in my ride while the murder took place was hard for me to look at. Blood types in the office were consistent with both victim and perp, Sheila and Mac, DNA pending. Everything that might contain any information—hard drives, floppies, minidisks, and the back-up Zip drives�
�were gone. The paper files were mostly intact but out of date. The interrogation of Moses Lake hospital personnel was consistent with the arrival of a single male with a large but superficial head wound. There was no evidence of concussion, he was a doctor, and he had checked himself out of the ER against doctor’s advice. Nothing much in the reservation police report. A BMW Z car abandoned overnight in the parking lot at the trail head. Gouts of blood discovered at daylight. Drops of blood along the trail, some on the log sections used as flagstones along the trail. Others on boardwalks and bridges across the wet areas. Bloody handprints on some railings, more on the railings of the lookout. Blood on the clothes and shoes.

  Then the pictures, where I found nothing out of the ordinary until the first shot of the interior of the little car. On the passenger-side floorboard, a single manila file folder, empty, the name Landry, Turner typed on the tab. Well, I couldn’t chase him into the grave again. There was also a typed, bloodstained note on the passenger seat. It took the jeweler’s loupe, but the words rose off the page clearly. Lorna, love, so sorry, so, so sorry—is this darkness all we can know of love? It all sounded crazy to me. After my last telephone conversation with my wife, I didn’t much care to think about love and darkness. In fact, I didn’t want to think about anything at all. I had a couple of beers and a room service burger, rented a couple of thrillers on the television, and popped a couple of sleeping pills. I didn’t have any trouble sleeping after that.

  Dr. Cassilli couldn’t see me during the day to talk about Lorna, but she managed to meet me for a drink at the Four Seasons for a few minutes before a dinner meeting she couldn’t miss. If the name and the softly accented voice suggested a Botticelli, the actuality was something completely different. Miriam Cassilli stood six four in heels, with a sculpted storm of gray hair swept back from her large striking face. She had a nose that made Claudia’s look like a sparrow’s and softly intelligent eyes that deepened with her voice. As they used to say, she looked like she could play horseshoes with horse collars.

  Her large hand cradled the glass of merlot, and she smiled sadly at me. “I don’t know what I can do for you, Mr. Sughrue. I can’t tell you anything that might help in your search, if that’s what it is, as long as Will MacKinderick isn’t declared dead, and I can’t force Mrs. MacKinderick to take her medication or stay away from alcohol and cocaine. She’ll be stabilized in a few days, then she’s your problem, not mine.”