The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, please don’t get me wrong, ma’am,” I said. “I meant thanks for your help. It’s going to be easier to get her out of the hospital than the jailhouse.”

  “Mac thought very highly of you, Mr. Sughrue,” she said. “Often it seemed you were his only friend, and since you were, I think I can safely tell you in my professional and personal estimation that Will MacKinderick was capable neither of murder nor suicide.”

  “Well, Dr. Cassilli, you’re the second woman to tell me that in the past few days,” I said, “and, I suspect, the second ex-wife, too.” She didn’t deny it. “Computers are snakes and Whatcom County isn’t that far away. Just a few more miles to Canada, and I’d never have found it.”

  “I’ve tried to erase that part of my life,” she said grimly, then switched the conversation to me. Shrinks. “You have trouble trusting women, Mr. Sughrue?” she said with a tiny smile.

  “According to my wife, I’m too trusting, period,” I said. “I guess it always seemed easier to think that people were telling me the truth than to assume that they were lying. A lazy man’s response to a troubled world, maybe.”

  “A trusting heart is a precious thing, I think,” she said. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Maybe I’ll see if her parents won’t take her in for a while.”

  “Given what I know about her, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said seriously.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Excuse me.”

  “If she’ll agree, I’d suggest a month or two of convalescent care, and detox might be the best choice,” she said. “I can make some suggestions.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, then sighed so hard it seemed that the buttons might pop off the overstuffed lobby furniture.

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “Who the hell knows?” I admitted.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I guess I’m going to find out what happened,” I said. “That’s what I do. Nobody ever knows why, Doc, but I do ‘what’ really good.”

  “Good luck,” she said.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” she whispered, finished her wine, then left me at the table.

  I finished my drink, walked outside, then dialed Musslewhite’s private cell number, the one reserved for the most serious emergencies. “Chief,” I said when he answered, “I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, but you best tie up your braids and get your ass to Seattle.”

  “What’s up, Dog?”

  TEN

  THREE DAYS LATER, most of it spent lecturing me about fucking with the FBI, Ron had Lorna in a nice convalescent facility north of Seattle. I never found out what he said to her to get her to commit herself for sixty days, but whatever it was, it worked. When Agents Morrow and Cunningham showed up as the hotel people were packing Lorna’s room, I was standing in the middle of the downstairs room with the cocaine-loaded jewel case like a large piece of dogshit in my hands. I quickly stuffed it into the nearest bag, probably behaving in a guilty manner. Ron stepped in front of Morrow, his large hand extended, a huge grin on his face.

  “Hey, chubby,” he said, “I’m the asshole in the braids.”

  Cunningham and I left them to their conversation as we slunk into the hallway and down to the patio bar. It was one of those fall days that make people forget the rainy days. We sat down like old friends. He ordered coffee, but I told him to have a drink. “She’s going to be so mad, man, she couldn’t smell blood on your breath.”

  “Well, fuck it,” he said and ordered a vodka tonic. “How long are you going to keep me on the hook?”

  “Actually, kid, if you’ll find out one thing,” I said, “I’ll think about destroying everything.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why she’s got such a hard-on for MacKinderick?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “She used to be on a high-level task force investigating money laundering. And MacKinderick’s name came up once on a computer search of offshore transactions, then disappeared. Along with about ten thousand others. She knocked out all the computers on three floors and blew out the backup files. Five years of work. She blamed a short, bad wiring, a hacker—but somebody had to take one for the team, so she left the task force and came into my life.”

  “That’s the only name she remembered?”

  “It’s her mother’s maiden name,” he said. “She didn’t have a first name—Dr. MacKinderick’s name never appeared on any drug files—but when she saw it out here, she went batshit.”

  “So she’s just a loose cannon?”

  “You could say that,” he said. “Now what about me?”

  “Maybe you can tell me what this is?” I said as I showed him the bug I’d found.

  “Probably another federal offense,” he said, holding it, “but I’m sure that doesn’t bother you.”

  “You didn’t bug me, did you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “With our budget, man? This is some bootleg ultrahigh-tech shit. For about thirty-five hundred dollars you can pick up conversations within a quarter of a mile until the batteries go. The DEA might have some they picked up in a raid. And maybe the Israelis. I’ve never seen one except in a catalogue. I can only promise you that you’re committing a felony just holding it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a nice kid. I’ve got your number. Relax.”

  Then I dropped the device into his watery drink. I think he called me a dirty word as I walked away, but I wasn’t listening.

  When I told Ron about the exchange as I drove him to the airport—he was flying home first class; I was driving Lorna’s luggage back to Meriwether—he warned me, “You keep fucking with those people, Sughrue, they’ll get you.”

  “Bureaucrats with guns,” I said. “They’ve been trying to get me for years. Besides, I’m not the one who called her chubby.”

  “Slip of the tongue,” he said, laughing quietly.

  “At least now we know for damn certain that things aren’t as they seem,” I said. “He left me that one lead.”

  “The Turner Landry thing?” he asked as I pulled up to the departure curb. “How the hell does that connect?”

  “Well, old buddy, those bodies didn’t just drop out of the sky,” I said. “At least not all of them.”

  “Beautiful, Dog. There’s still all that money in the escrow account if you need it,” he said.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Good luck,” he said, stepping into a limo, while I pulled Mac’s Range Rover into the construction nightmare of downtown Seattle, heading for my home chores.

  The first morning back in Meriwether was spent unloading Lorna’s luggage, having an extra set of house and office keys made, and finding another young couple in graduate school to house-sit until Lorna was able to come home. Then I spent the early afternoon teaching the Garfield sisters to fetch a catnip ball and playing phone tag with my distant wife. It was hard to tell who won. Even our successes were strained.

  When Whitney finally caught me, I was sitting on the front porch lolling in the sunshine like a fat hog. And it went to hell, immediately.

  “Les won’t tell you, CW,” she said sternly, “but I will. He’d appreciate it if you didn’t call so often.”

  “What?”

  “He’s says it embarrasses him in front of his friends,” she said, then paused.

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “All right,” she said, “he’s having nightmares again about that time in the desert.”

  “What time?”

  “When you killed those men on the steps and around the trailer,” she said.

  I had the contrabandistas’ dope and money, and they had Whitney and Les. Years of paranoia and preparation had worked. Ollas of water, extra moccasins, knives, and pistols buried at five-mile intervals. It was meant to help
me escape, but it worked the other way. Twenty miles from the Rio Bravo to the trailer. I took my family very seriously. I ran twenty miles across the desert, gutted two men, cut one’s head off, then drove the Bowie all the way through the last one. Then washed in the horse trough before I opened the trailer door.

  “Honey, I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten all you went through during the bad times,” I said, “but please remember that I got you out and made them pay.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said. “Remember? They paid with their lives. My God, couldn’t you have found some other way?”

  “Like what?” I asked. “Like fucking what?”

  “You son of a bitch, we saw you through a crack in the blinds, saw you ass-deep in the freezing horse trough, washing at the blood—as if it could ever come off.” She paused. “You were smiling. And Lester saw you, too. His nightmares come back under any kind of stress, and Mac said it has something to do with you. I love you, but we can’t live that way ever again.”

  “Mac?” I said, sick with waiting for the answer. “He’s been seeing Mac?”

  “You’ve got to make a choice,” she said, ignoring my question, “and soon.”

  “There are a few things to clear up,” I said. “Then I can come out.”

  “Just a few things,” she said, sarcasm throbbing in her voice. “Right.”

  The girls, perhaps sensing my sadness, climbed into my lap and began to chew on various parts of my body. “You know where I fucking live,” I said, the anger slipping back into my voice. “You’re welcome anytime,” I said. “The blood has all washed away.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said quietly.

  With no answer for that, I hung up the phone. I hated to admit it, but those deaths were the end of my madness. Who knows why? After I got shot, I had a tickle in my heart, and I knew that tickle was fear. Maybe I was stupid, but I wasn’t used to living with fear. Once the drug smugglers were dead, I was no longer afraid to die. So to hell with it. I went back to work. Something I understood, carefully not thinking about Whitney or Mac.

  Then I called Claudia Lucchesi and badgered her into meeting me at the Bluerock Lodge, which wasn’t easy, but she finally agreed. That done, I drove out to the Wagon Wheel Mobile Home Park to call on Marcy Miller, Sheila Miller’s daughter.

  The young lady who answered the door had lost the Goth clothes and makeup, and removed the metal from her face. She had a power suit on, high heels, hose, and a new short haircut. She could have been a junior executive in training.

  “What can I do for you?” she said. Her voice was harder than her mother’s but softened by an overbite and a slight lisp. “I’ve got a job interview in thirty minutes.”

  “I thought you were in high school,” I said dumbly.

  “I graduated this summer,” she said. “What do you want?”

  I handed her my card, explained who I was, expressed my sorrow, and told her that I wanted to talk to her about Dr. MacKinderick.

  “Listen, mister, I’ve spoken to the police until I’m sick at heart,” she said, “and the only thing I’ve got to say to you is fuck off.” Then she tore my card in half, threw it at my feet, and slammed the aluminum door in my face, leaving me standing there feeling like an idiot, stupid, lost, and vaguely sad.

  Things didn’t go much better with Claudia. When she showed up straight from the office in her rat-killing clothes that night, she found me drooping over a watery Scotch at the half-empty bar. She stopped beside me, her hip cocked as if she were standing at the side bar.

  “Okay, where’re the candlelight, champagne, and room keys?” she said. “You look like a man trying to decide between sex or death.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I said.

  She threw a twenty on the bar, shouted to the bartender, “A double tequila shooter with a Corona back, and get my friend something festive.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she said, then gunned the tequila.

  “Don’t ask,” I said. “Please.”

  “Then what the hell do you want?”

  “I need the name of the guy who lost the Turner Landry blood and tissue work,” I said.

  “Turner Landry?” she said. “Old news. What’s in it for me, cowboy?”

  “Anything your hard little heart desires,” I said, more sadly than I meant. “Anything.”

  “Jesus,” she said, then sipped her beer, “you’re not kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Sughrue,” she said, “for reasons that don’t even make sense to me, I’ve always wanted to fuck you. But not like this. I want you whole. I’ll give you a call. Next time let’s meet someplace where the most expensive item on the menu isn’t an overcooked bacon double cheeseburger.”

  She was gone before I could say thank you or good-bye. The bartender came back with Claudia’s change, and shyly said, “Actually the bacon double cheeseburger is pretty good.” Then she smiled as if that might cheer me up. “And we’ll cook it however you want,” she added.

  “You’re a darlin’, darlin’, but I think I’ll have a double tequila shooter,” I said.

  “Worked for her,” she said. “You want another beer?”

  “I’ll just finish hers,” I said, which was a mistake. When I finished the shot and the lime, I nipped at the beer bottle, still sweet with Claudia’s lipstick. As if to prove my strength of will, I did another, then slipped into the john to finish the last tiny bit of Lorna’s bindle.

  Which in no way explains what I did next. The crime scene tape was off Mac’s office doors, and the cleaning crew had come and gone. When I flicked on the lights in the empty office, it was all there, just as real and intense as a combat flashback. I just waited it out, waited until it became an empty office again, full of nothing more threatening than the sharp odors of the cleaning solvents. The room was completely bare; everything had gone into police storage somewhere. The only thing out of place was the open door of the file closet. For no good reason, I walked over, stepped inside. Either the passage of the air or my weight caused the door to swing shut behind me. When the door latch clicked, the hair on the back of my neck rose straight up.

  When I turned, the ventilator panel, opaque from the outside, was completely clear from the inside, offering a perfect view of the space where Mac’s couch had rested. This time I had no control over the flashback. Images of Sheila Miller’s body, alive and dead, swept over me like a passing freight. Without remembering a single movement, I was suddenly outside in the middle of the dark street, sweating, trembling with the adrenaline rush. A rush that lasted all the way to the Goat, through a dozen Scotches, then all the way home, and through the night. I suspected that I was drunk because I broke into Whitney’s house even though I had a key. Maybe I felt like a thief in Whitney’s house because of the separation. I quickly gathered up the cats to take to the office to watch all-night television with me.

  Well, I’d had my mystical experience, so I paid for it with two solid weeks’ worth of stupefying legwork. I spoke to everybody in every house within a hundred yards of the Ritters’, spoke to them three or four times, then spoke to them again until one old lady called the cops on me. Then I moved on to the Marshalls’ neighborhood, which was a hole almost as black as that horrible night I’d watched Ellen Marshall slice her hands off on the band saw. I saved the Pacific Northwest Hotel for last because the residents there, even with the assurance of Arno’s father, weren’t likely to have light conversations with anybody resembling a cop. So I spent four days humping up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, usually with a twelve-pack under my arm and a fat doobie in my pocket.

  About six on the last afternoon, I found a police unit parked next to my ride. As I opened the door of the Outback, the cop hit his horn and motioned me over.

  “Chief Raymond wants to talk to you, Sughrue,” he said.

  Raymond’s office was as neat as a galley on a sailboat, a
nd I didn’t think he had cleaned up just for me. Only two things weren’t department issue: a framed picture of his wife and three little girls in their Sunday best and one of his SEAL team in cammies and face paint ranged in front of a hooch in the Delta like a badass, postapocalyptic street gang. Raymond looked straight and stern, his back to me, his uniformed figure dark against the afternoon sun. His desk was bare except for a pencil and a single legal form. I sat down without being asked.

  “I wanted to do this personally,” he said as he turned and shoved the legal form toward me with the pencil’s eraser. “Just so there was no confusion.”

  I glanced at the restraining order issued by a district court judge, then said, “Hey, buddy, this ain’t necessary. All you had to do was ask.”

  “This way I’m sure,” he said.

  “I thought we were friends,” I said.

  “Don’t push it,” he said. “Just keep your nose out of this case. You’ve got no client. An obstruction charge might take time to prove, but contempt of court doesn’t. I’ve got you by the gonads, you worthless piece of … I wouldn’t wipe you off my shoe.”

  “That’s unprofessional, Johnny, my boy,” I said as I stood up, “asking for my help was the smartest thing you ever did. This shit’s the dumbest. I don’t know the who or the why about these killings yet, but I know how it went down and, believe me, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’ve got a complete witness file on each death. I’ve got eleven people who saw housepainters at the Ritters’ house.”

  “Anybody recognize anybody?”

  “White hat, white pants, could’ve been ice-cream men,” I admitted, “and ten witnesses at the Great Northern who saw oversized Girl Scouts with cookies of an unusual brand.”

  “What had they been smoking?”