The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  I knew that Hareem, the bail bondsman I had worked for when I was hiding down here, would be in his office in downtown El Paso on a Sunday, bonding out the Saturday night bad guys. But I never expected his receptionist, Lila of the blue hair, harridan extraordinary, would be there, too.

  “Lila,” I said as Claudia and I came in the door, “you still stealing doobies from your kids?”

  “You mean the doctor, the lawyer, and the computer geek? Or the Holy Roller housewife?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And why would you want to know?”

  “It’s just the way I am,” I said.

  “CW, you idiot, how the hell you been?” she said, then scrambled out of her chair to hug me so hard my head ached. “What’s up? You back in the business?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Who’s this?” she said. “This is not your wife,” she said sharply. “I know your wife.”

  “She’s my lawyer,” I said.

  “Well, you were always the sort of saddle tramp that needed a lawyer in his bedroll,” she said. Then to Claudia, wearing a black lawyer suit, “Honey, I wouldn’t sit down anywhere in this shithole.” The calendars hadn’t been changed since Carter and the dust hadn’t been disturbed since the last drug dealer had had a fit over the price of his bail.

  “Thanks,” Claudia said.

  Then to me, “Hey, what do you want? That ain’t your social face, not with that ear and a streak of blood on your face.” Somehow we’d lost my hat the night before.

  “Claudia, would you please wait outside?” I said. She gave me an odd look but complied. “I need a piece,” I said to Lila. “A big son of a bitch. And a roll of quarters.”

  “Don’t cuss in my office, CW,” she said. “I’m the only one who can cuss in my office.”

  “Sorry,” I said, then dropped a dollar bill into the pickle jar on her desk. I suspected Lila sent her kids to school out of that pickle jar.

  “Did you try the newspaper?” she asked, as she pitched me a roll of quarters.

  “Too much of a trail,” I said. “I want something that can’t be tracked back to anybody.”

  “You want one of the clean pieces out of the safe, don’t you?” She was talking about guns whose history had disappeared shortly after they’d left the factory.

  “On the money, my dear.”

  “Well, you go get it,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “What about Hareem?”

  “The old fart’s asleep,” she said. “You could steal his pants.”

  I slipped into Hareem’s office. The old man snored as if a kazoo had been stuck into his shrunken mouth. His teeth rested in a flyspecked glass of warm vodka, and his small hands were tucked into his stretched waistband. I opened the unlocked safe and slipped out a piece—a Colt short-barreled .357, the numbers burned off—took out a handful of rounds, then left the old man to sleep. He had done me many good turns during the hard times. Lila and Claudia were standing in the dirty downtown street, as out of place as angels dancing on the backs of tarantulas.

  I kissed Lila good-bye, told her to tell Hareem thanks. And handed her a bundle of cash.

  “Keep your cash, Sonny, “she said. “I ain’t even gonna tell him you were here.” Then Claudia and I climbed into the rented Jeep.

  “I’ll bet she was a piece of work in the old days,” Claudia said.

  “Shit, she’s caught more bail jumpers than most people ever see,” I said. “Says it’s the grandmother thing, and the .44 Bulldog she carries in her girdle.”

  As we drove west on Mesa, I stopped to pick up a couple of roses from a street vendor, then a six-pack of beer.

  “You taking flowers to your girlfriend?”

  “To Lester’s mom’s grave.”

  “Whitney’s not his mom?”

  “No,” I said. “And I’m not his dad. I got his mom killed. I fucked up. I killed his dad, too, but that wasn’t a fuck-up. That was on purpose. So we adopted Les, and ran with him from the people who were trying to kill me.”

  “Drug smugglers?”

  “And some Hollywood types,” I said.

  “He looks so much like you two,” she said, then added, “but I suspect you don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I drove across the valley of the Rio Grande, up the old western banks to the place we called the eighth wonder, where I had thrown Winona’s ashes into a whirlwind of desert dust, then tossed the flowers off the cliff and drank the beer until it was warm backwash. I was never going to be whole, but some of the holes had been filled. As I’ve always said, anybody who doesn’t believe in revenge never lost anything worth having.

  “I’m sorry,” Claudia said softly. Then added, “I’m a little worried about what you’re planning.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “They’re the bad guys. They can’t call the police.”

  This time I did it right: showed up at the door before Robert Guilder took off, displayed only a fake badge at the peephole, and when Larise opened the door, I hit her with a short uppercut on the point of the chin so hard I knocked her right out of her silk robe and her fluffy mules. The roll of quarters burst, scattering across the fake calfskin rug. I was way beyond caring. I slipped a roll of duct tape out of my small backpack and whipped a couple of wraps around Larise’s wrists and ankles, then I met Guilder at the kitchen door, slapped the toupee right off his head, and tossed him into a captain’s chair by his flying coveralls.

  “Put your hands in your pockets and don’t say a word,” I whispered, then tapped him on the nose with the .357 just hard enough to raise a tiny bump and a small cut. “Sit down in your chair, and don’t move. If you move, I’ll strangle you with her guts.” Then I strapped him to the chair.

  I think he believed me, so I went back to check on Larise. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue, and her jaw wasn’t broken, just a few chipped teeth. I grabbed a couple of poppers out of the medicine cabinet.

  It took two bursts up her nose to bring Larise back to the world, but she was tough. She came back with a smile and an invitation, “You came back for more?” The accent was a little deeper, with a slight lisp.

  “Listen,” I said quietly into her ear. “You’ve got a good life here and as long as you keep your mouth shut, you can have that life. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to talk to your husband.”

  “You’ve already hurt me,” she said, smiling now. “You’re leaving and never coming back, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll think of you now and again,” I said, then closed her mouth with her thong panties and a piece of duct tape. “But not too fondly.”

  Her eyes still smiled as if she knew better.

  I took the piece and the pack into the kitchen. Then motioned Guilder toward the back door. The golf lady was placing her flags, and she waved brightly. Then I muscled Guilder into the hangar, right next to his plane, his baby, his beauty. I closed the doors and put a couple of wraps of duct tape around his body, pinning his arms to his side, his hands locked in his pockets. Then I took something odd out of the backpack. A plastic liter soda bottle stuffed with cotton puffs and steel wool. I stuffed the revolver barrel into the opening.

  “Asshole,” I said, “I’m going to ask you one time, and one time only …”

  “And you’re going to kill me,” he stammered. “Is this something Larise did? I didn’t have anything to do with it. This is all her fault.”

  Okay, I lost my patience and slapped him hard enough to knock him down, then had to help him up. “I don’t know where you got that woman, you nitwit, but she’s worth a dozen of you.”

  “Off the Internet,” he babbled. “I didn’t know the people she was involved with—”

  I slapped him again, gently this time, and said, “All I want to know is who paid you to lose the Landry blood work?”

  “What?” he screeched.

  I put a round through the left cowling of his aircraft engine. It was even quie
ter than I’d hoped, but the silencer disintegrated.

  “My god, man, you can’t shoot my airplane!” he screamed.

  “Wrong answer, asshole,” I said, then took another makeshift silencer out of the pack. “Oh, look, it happened again,” I said. Another hole about two inches to the left of the other, and a shower of debris.

  Guilder fell to his knees, babbling, “Some blond woman in big shades set it up. I’d never seen her before, never seen her again. Just that one time in the Caymans. Shit, she even told me how to wash the money. And what the hell difference did it make who killed who, who was fucked up, and who wasn’t, where the piece of stove wire came from, I mean who cares—”

  “Where’d you lose it?”

  “Steel locker, deepest part of Flathead Lake, just like she told me.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Look like?” he whined. “Christ, I don’t know. A woman, dark glasses, a scarf, a wig; hell, it could have been anybody.”

  I know it was mean, but I used the third silencer to put another round between the other two. Guilder fell to the hangar floor, a sodden mess now, covered with tears and engine oil, dotted with bits of white plastic, cotton balls, and gray scribbles of steel.

  “You better hope your wife loves you,” I said. “At least a little.”

  “She doesn’t love me,” he whined. “She beats me up all the time.”

  “Learn to love it, man,” I said, then walked back into the blinding desert sun, just as blind as I’d been when I came.

  The old lady waved, shouting, “You boys not going up today?”

  “Engine trouble,” I answered.

  I didn’t really have any hope that Larise would go out to take care of Guilder before he died like a snake left in the sun, so I cut her loose. She rubbed her jaw briefly, as if being hit wasn’t that unfamiliar for her. Then she scrambled into her mules. She liked the height advantage. She looked as if she might take a swing at me just for the hell of it.

  “I’ll knock all your teeth out this time, honey,” I said, and she relaxed. “As long as you keep your mouth shut, and make sure the worm stays quiet, your life will go along just like always. But if any of this comes back on me, you’ll pray to get back to that army whorehouse.”

  “I’ll make no problem for you,” she said, sweetly, “and the worm will not … roll over?”

  “Don’t let him die out in the hangar,” I said.

  “What did you do?” she asked, worried for the first time.

  “I put a couple or three rounds into his toy,” I said, “so you be nice to him for a little while, okay?”

  “Mama will be nice,” she said, but I didn’t like the look of her smile.

  I wasn’t sure how long Larise had to stay married for full citizenship, but I sure felt sorry for Guilder when it happened. I bet myself that she would make him pick up the spare change scattered around the room.

  On the drive back to Deming I wiped and dismantled the revolver and tossed the pieces in dry washes where the next rain or wind would cover them with sand. When I got back to my room, Claudia was waiting, thoughtfully. She looked into my crazed eyes and didn’t say anything for a long time. “What happened this time?” she asked.

  “I persuaded Mr. Guilder to talk to me.”

  “And his wife?”

  “She was enjoying a little beauty sleep.”

  “You know, this may be a little rougher road trip than I was planning,” she said. “It spite of my years with Butch, I sort of enjoy practicing law.”

  “I can put you on a plane this afternoon,” I said. “Just say the word.”

  “Maybe just tell me what’s happening,” she asked. “I am your lawyer.”

  “As much as I can,” I said. “I don’t know, exactly,” I admitted, “but somehow all this shit started way back with the Turner Landry case. I don’t know how or why. But I do seem to remember that the kid who died with him, one Doug Foley, was from somewhere down in southern Colorado. I thought perhaps I would talk to his folks.”

  “Talk?” she said. “Just that?”

  “Just that.”

  “No more Miss Ukraine?”

  “That never happened.”

  “You sure?” Claudia said, her smile back in place.

  “We came to a mutually agreeable agreement.”

  “Did you get her to sign it?”

  “In blood,” I said, and the smile slipped off Claudia’s face.

  “Yours or hers?”

  “Mine,” I said. “All mine, I’m afraid.” A decent human being would have blushed or cried or told the truth, but I didn’t have the guts to be decent. Or live in Minneapolis.

  After we dropped the rental off, we drove over to Las Cruces, then picked up I-25 and headed north, stopping only for a green chili cheeseburger at the Owl Bar in San Antonio. Then we went on to Albuquerque, where we stopped for four days at a Best Western Suites Hotel, which had plenty of telephone lines and a modem connection. We tried everything we knew to try to get a lead on the Foley family, but they proved surprisingly difficult to locate. None of my investigative search engines had more than the slightest information, and that was mostly bare-bones court records of lawsuits. The post office box in Colorado Springs that they had used while using the Landry estate was no longer in use. The express mail came back stamped not at this address. There was a rumor that they had taken their sealed settlement from the Landry estate in cash—two suitcases full of cash. A rumor from a bar: their lawyer told another lawyer who was sitting beside another lawyer who had gone to school with Ron Musselwhite. But there were no listings for Edgar or Della or Doug Foley in any telephone book in the West. We did find that Della Foley had had an earlier successful lawsuit against a gas station in Fort Collins—more than fifteen years ago—also sealed and settled out of court. But my hacker was still unavailable. He was either drunk and homesick in Boston, or his liver had finally given out. He didn’t respond to my e-mails, and I didn’t want to leave a telephone record. So I stopped in Colorado Springs, dumped Claudia by the pool, then went to work.

  The hard part about getting to Fort Collins was driving around Denver, battling traffic and signs that either lied or joked about the directions. But the trip to the library went perfectly. The Coloradoan was on disks, and the story popped up immediately. The writer must have been working on a novel because he wrote it like a mystery story: the air vent along the gas-filler tube had cracked with age or pressure from the load of tools behind the seat; the nozzle switch had bent so badly that when the tank filled, the gasoline poured down the air vent, puddling under the seat; investigators suspected that a spark from the old radio started the fire; Della screamed, the attendant jammed the emergency shutoff valve, but it was blocked by a bit of candy—an Almond Joy, to be exact—and she was only saved because an old farmer carried a chemical extinguisher. Della lost her legs, but they saved the baby, Doug Foley.

  I copied the story, got a receipt, then stopped by the cop shop. The one cop who had worked the case had had his head smashed in an alley in Denver. Mugging there. Accident at the gas station. All the cases old news.

  When I got back to the room, I cut the stitches out of my ear and scalp with Claudia’s nail scissors and made my head presentable. We went out for dinner instead of ordering room service and found a quiet Mexican place in a strip mall, a place recommended by the night clerk. I got a pack of smokes when I ordered the drinks.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Claudia said.

  “I don’t.”

  “I don’t either,” she said, then shook one out of the pack. As I lit it, she said, “You know, CW, you may have forgotten, but if you’ve still got the receipt, I am your lawyer. You can occasionally tell me what the hell is going on. As long as you’re not planning a criminal act.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What the hell do you want to know?”

  “Like what you got from the airplane geek?”

  “He said that a woman who looked a lot like anybody
gave him a bale of cash to lose the Landry blood work and all the other evidence, plus instructions on how to wash the money,” I said. “You ever been to the Islands?”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding,” I said. “I’ve got a good hunch who the woman was, but I can’t make it fit.”

  “What are we going to do about finding the Foley family?”

  “Time to be a real detective again,” I said. “Put away my laptop and return to artful lies and fancy footwork.”

  “Are you ever going to return your wife’s calls?” she asked casually.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe when this shit’s over. If it’s ever over.”

  She didn’t smile, but she didn’t have to. She still had her eye on me, but she hadn’t looked closely enough to see that I was damaged goods. We’d slept in separate rooms since that night in El Paso, careful not to touch each other even by accident.

  “But thanks for asking,” I added.

  “No problem,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “This cigarette tastes like mouse turds. Don’t ask how I know how mouse turds taste.”

  “Probably a lot like rabbit turds,” I said, and we laughed, easy with each other again.

  THIRTEEN

  SINCE THE LAST time I had driven through, Colorado Springs seemed to have exploded, spread into the foothills and across the high plains, metastasized like Denver, complete with cheaply built but expensive condos, minimansions, strip malls, smog, and recklessly snarled traffic. We extended our stay at the Sheraton—I hate a motel without a bar—just off the interstate, where we checked into two rooms again with one of my several fake but clean credit cards. I’d begun to feel that even by paying cash, I’d been leaving too many tracks. I thought of it as laying a false trail. Over the years I had gathered several sets of IDs that were as solid as gold, and another few that would do in a pinch. Since I’d been gutshot, I’d been ready to flee, to drop this life and assume another.

  Claudia had her legal career to consider, so except for some general advice I left her out of this part, the part where I went to a copy shop, faked a letterhead and a business card from the Landry estate’s legal firm, and gave myself a job. Then I was off to a novelty shop out by Fort Carson where I had a fake tabloid printed. I called the Foleys’ lawyer, William Minster, and made an appointment for late that afternoon.