The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  Minster hadn’t seemed to prosper since the Landry settlement. He shared a receptionist with a bail bondsman, a credit counselor, a sex therapist, and several empty offices in a small modular building just off Bradley Boulevard. The list of specialities on his door under his name included everything but blackmail and murder for hire. The man sitting behind the desk, though, looked as bland as a flat beer. Neat blond hair matched a thin mustache, and rimless glasses framed a pleasantly plump face split by a smile as innocent as the first martini. Something about his light blue eyes, though, made me think of gimlets. His suit was off the rack but a fairly decent one. Only the faint odor of cheap bourbon sullied the scene.

  “So what can I do for you, Mr. Grubenko?” he said. I had decided Larise’s name sounded properly thuggish enough to go with my dirty jeans and steel-toed boots. “Your message was quite vague.”

  I didn’t say anything; just laid out my fake papers: a business card identifying me as a licensed investigator from Denver, the letter of inquiry from a fake law firm, and a copy of the East Bay Guardian open to an article alluding to rumors about leaks from the sealed settlement with the Turner Landry estate.

  “What’s this got to do with me?” he said after he looked over the papers, pushing them back toward me. “Why didn’t they just call me? Instead of sending a hired thug.”

  Perhaps I’d dressed down too far. Thug? I thought, but still didn’t say anything.

  “If you’re looking for the Foleys,” he said, “you’re wasting your time talking to me.”

  “How much is your time worth?” I asked in my best thuggish voice.

  “More than you can afford, Mr. Gruber,” he said. “Why don’t you just find the Foleys yourself. You’re supposedly an investigator.”

  “That’s Grubenko,” I corrected him. “And I’m not an investigator. People pay me to go away. The question is, how much can you afford.”

  “What?”

  “My speciality isn’t finding people, buddy,” I said. “My speciality is earth moving. And lawyers.”

  “What?”

  “Dirt,” I said. “They turn me loose on you, buddy, and I’ll bury you. Nobody, not the cleanest, purest lawyer in the world can survive once I start. You’ll lose your practice, find yourself overwhelmed with malpractice suits, and be lucky not to do time.”

  “You must be out of your mind,” he squealed, but he grabbed his hair, like a man who had trouble thinking.

  “Law school has its benefits,” I said, then picked up my papers and started to leave.

  “Look, you,” he said suddenly, a man afraid, a man whose lost chances showed in the red splotches glowing on his face. “I don’t know where the Foleys are, I swear. They’re a couple of old hippie maniacs. Really. I mean what kind of people walk away with more than two million five in cardboard suitcases—”

  “People without bank accounts,” I said. “Drug dealers.”

  “No, as far as I can tell, they deal in chickens, eggs, and ham,” he said. “Fresh vegetables in the winter.”

  Now it was my turn to say, “What?”

  “Free-range chickens, naturally nested brown eggs, and the best smoked ham and bacon you can buy,” he said. “No kidding. I think they’ve got a place way the hell east of town, but I don’t have any idea where. And when I say they’re maniacs, man, I’m not exaggerating. Mr. Foley looks and acts like some old testament prophet, and the woman … Jesus, the woman looks like a crippled witch.”

  “Crippled?”

  “She’s got no legs, man, I mean nothing below midthigh.”

  “She lose them in the gas station accident?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “I always assumed so,” he said. “But they never said anything. Hell, they almost never said anything. The suit was a slam dunk once the one against the shrink was settled. We never even got as far as a court date.”

  “What happened to your piece of the money?” I asked.

  “What happened?” he said, then snorted. “Well, if you take a drive up almost to the Garden of the Gods, about halfway up on the right at the top of the ridge to the south, you’ll see an adobe hacienda where a fucking bottle-blond chicana bitch and a baron of tortillas live quite well on the remains of my piece.”

  “It might be worth a piece of change if I can find the Foleys,” I said.

  “I see their truck around town occasionally,” he said. “A black Ford panel truck with their name in small print on the door. And I’m pretty sure they’ve got an unmarked stake truck, older and more beat up. I’ve seen the old man driving it at night. Their shit brings a pretty good price in this town. Fucking rich people are crazy. Even my ex, Yolanda, uses free-range chicken when she makes her shitty enchiladas. As if you could tell the fucking difference.” Suddenly, he reached into his desk for a pint of Old Crow. “You want one?” he said hopelessly, holding up the half-empty bottle.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Sure,” he said, sighing as he lifted the bottle to toast my departure.

  Back at the motel just as the shadows of the Rockies stole across the lawn, I stopped at Claudia’s door. I could hear her talking but couldn’t make out the words. But when I knocked, I heard her hang up. She came to the door in black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black leather vest over a white cashmere sweater. Her black hair drifted in long curls to her shoulders, her face framed by the white wings. I was reminded once again of what a striking woman she was.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “He collapsed like a bad soufflé,” I said. “But he didn’t know much.”

  “Ron called on your cell,” she said. “Your wife called him. He didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know what to tell him. You’re going to have to deal with this, CW. You can’t just let it hang.”

  “I know,” I said. “I called Les when I was stuck in traffic. Even he said I needed to call his mom. But I don’t know what to say. I told her we’d talk when this was over.”

  “Perhaps you should try again,” Claudia said as she moved around me. “I’ll meet you in the bar.” Then she walked down the balcony.

  Whitney went into her kindness mode. She wanted to know how I was feeling, how the case was going, that sort of thing.

  “Look,” I said, “I told you that when this was over, I’d come to visit, and we would see if we can work something out. But something really strange is going on here.”

  “You need some help?”

  “No, I need some luck,” I admitted. “Mac has left me with a ball of string with no beginning or end.”

  “I’ve always told you that you trusted people too much,” she said. I could almost hear the soft smile in her voice. “Take a break. Come up for Thanksgiving. My folks are going to my sister’s house in Duluth, and Les has something going on out of town with his buddies. We’ll have tamales and posole and all the fine tequila we can drink.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Promise, love.”

  “All right, I promise,” I said, the promise like a blade in my throat.

  “And thanks for giving Les a break from the calls,” she said. “He’s almost home here now. I’ve found him another counselor. One almost as good as Mac.”

  I wanted to scream: you took my kid to see Mac! That lying son of a bitch. But I kept my mouth shut, saying only, “Adios.”

  Then I called Ron to see if he had had any luck with the money in escrow.

  “Not yet,” he admitted. “But it’ll happen. They’re on shaky ground. So I went by your place to pick up your mail from the house sitters. They say the cats are real pains in the ass. But I’ll have my secretary pay the bills.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “This shit’s getting expensive.”

  “Why don’t you make your partner pay some of the bills,” he said, chuckling. “As a learning experience. She’s got more money than she can spend in a lifetime. According to Butch, who is whining all over town. Your other pal, though, Johnny Raymond, has g
one fishing.”

  “What for?”

  “Probably your ass,” he said. “Word is that he’s not working out. And Lorna is running through nurses like snot rags and insisting that Mac is alive. She’s driving me nuts. Be glad you’re not in town. She thinks you’re looking for Mac.” Then he paused. “What exactly are you doing?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I admitted. “But every rock I turn over, I find something that stinks. The only lead I’ve got is the old Landry case.”

  “That’s old news, Dog. What does that have to do with anything?” he said. “You make any connections?”

  “Nothing I understand,” I said. “Somebody paid the lab guy a cool three million to lose the blood and tissue work,” I said and thought, and a bit of stove wire. “But why, I don’t have a notion. Thanks for dealing with things up there, buddy.” Then he said something I didn’t understand. “What?”

  “Kiowa for ‘if you have to eat dog in a hard winter, eat the old ones first,” he said, then laughed like a shaman, his face painted black as he danced madly around a campfire.

  “How did it go?” Claudia asked before I could order a drink.

  “Not well,” I said, “but thanks for asking. Again. The judge still has the escrow locked up, but Ron’s optimistic about getting it released. He suggested we share expenses, that you pay for this learning experience.”

  She paused, then smiled. “I’m not exactly sure what I’ve learned, but I’d be happy to help. If there was any hope.”

  “Hope springs like frogs hop,” I said. “He also suggested that we eat the old dogs first.”

  “What?”

  “Some kind of Kiowa mojo, I guess,” I said. “He’s paying the bills right now, so he can say anything he wants.”

  “What did the Foleys’ lawyer tell you?” she asked.

  “You can’t imagine it,” I said. “We might as well eat well, drink, and make merry tonight, love. I’ve done lies, tomorrow the footwork starts.”

  I never suspected how many upscale markets and restaurants dealt in fucking free-range chicken, but I did find out that the Foleys had no set delivery times or dates and insisted on cash on the barrelhead, and they made everybody nervous. I also discovered what the unmarked truck did at night. For fifty bucks, a Mexican dishwasher smoking a cigarette behind a chichi restaurant called Past Tense, a place that specialized in old-style American food with French prices, talked to me. He’d picked up enough English to supplement my playground Spanish to be able to tell me that the crazy old man illegally collected restaurant slops and grease for a third of the cost of the regular garbage company. Which explained why none of the feed stores in town had ever heard of the Foleys.

  “Un hombre malo, man,” the mojado said. “He carries a club hangin’ off his wrist, a club like something I’ve never seen. A little handle and a big head wrapped with barbed wire. And his boys say he ain’t afraid to use it.”

  “His boys?”

  “He’s got a bunch of cholitos who work for him,” he said, “wetbacks like me,” then added, “but young ones. Bad little fuckers, too.”

  When we switched from days to nights, Claudia complained that footwork had become buttwork, and I offered to send her home, again.

  “Be careful, Sughrue,” she snapped. “I just might take you up on the offer.” But she stopped complaining and settled back into the seat like a woman waiting for something important. The third night, just after three, we found the old man’s truck behind Past Tense using its power-lift tailgate to hoist sealed barrels of slops up so the old man and several young boys could wrestle them into the truck. We followed the truck out of town on a secondary road, Highway 94, staying way back with our lights out, all the way up onto the vast, deserted eastern Colorado plateau past a wide spot in the road called Punkin Center. Twenty miles farther up the high lonesome, a place where the cattle stood by the roadside just to watch the cars pass, the truck turned south through a locked gate that led down a dirt track bordering a slight creek. The sun had just risen like a fireball to top the deceptively flat horizon. I knew that the landscape concealed gullies and ridges that could hide a small army.

  I stopped, persuaded Claudia to drive back and forth until I made it back to the highway, then crept alongside the road, slipping through the salt brush and scrub until I found the right ridge, just above a catch pond that captured the slight runoff of Little Bijoux Creek. In the arroyo below, just beyond a field of row crops, an installation glowed, more like a small prison than a chicken farm: tin buildings—the largest with a satellite dish—greenhouses, and scrub brush were surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire; small brown children and chickens wandered everywhere; a large generator throbbed, a windmill squealed, hogs snorted from a pen in the near corner, and the faint shouts of small boys rose into the morning light as they surrounded the truck to unload it. Then they reloaded it with other barrels that looked the same, but were filled with black plastic bags. One cholito slipped a cola as thick as a mare’s tail into his tattered jeans.

  That was as close as I wanted to get, all I wanted to know, so I headed back for the road.

  “Claudia, my dear,” I said. “I think we better look at this in broad daylight. And perhaps heavily armed.”

  “Make that ‘you,’ CW,” she said, as I turned the car around. “Doesn’t sound like my kind of place. What the hell you think is going on?”

  “Nothing good,” I said. “But at least we know why the Foleys were so hard to find. And you’re right; I’ll go alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “This is what I do for a living.”

  “And all this time I thought you did it for fun,” she said, but her laughter was hollow.

  I drove all the way back to Denver to check the classifieds to find a shotgun, a Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge pump and three boxes of shells, one a double-ought buckshot. A young widow whose husband had died in a car wreck was only too glad to get it out of the house. I turned my cap around, and acted nervous. She was glad to take my cash and get me out of the house.

  I picked up a hacksaw, a portable vice, a pair of leather bootlaces, and a battery-powered drill on the way out of town. Back at the motel, I removed the plugs, chopped the stock, and cut the barrel at eighteen and a quarter inches, in the vain hope that I might skate a federal beef. It hung perfectly under my windbreaker.

  Claudia watched me carefully, then said, “How many laws have you broken this afternoon, Sughrue?”

  “Until I walk out that door,” I said, “probably not a one.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am about that,” she said. “What now?”

  “A good night’s sleep and an early morning’s start.”

  “You’re just going to drive up to the gate in broad daylight, are you?”

  “Actually, I’m going to leave the pickup at the ridge, then spend an hour or so looking things over with a spotting scope, then walk up to the gate.”

  “Jesus,” she said, “I’ll close my eyes and wait in the pickup.”

  “No,” I said.

  “At least let me buy you a drink,” she said.

  I couldn’t deny her that.

  This time I picked the lock, so I could drive to the place in the plain Jane with government plates I had stolen from long-term parking at the airport lot, then I stopped beyond the ridge, watching through the spotting scope. The young boys dumped another barrel of slops into a trough shared by hogs and chickens alike. It seemed that the second chore of the day was hog butchering. A dozen young brown-skinned boys turned on a gas ring under a large steel tub with a chain hoist on a tripod over it. But nothing could have prepared me for the size of Edgar Foley. He must have been six ten, perhaps three hundred pounds. His gray, matted beard looked as large as my chest, the cigar stuck in his black-rooted teeth looked like a Virginia Slim between his giant fingers, a fifth of Four Roses whiskey filled his back pocket. It made me wish I had loaded the Remington wit
h deer slugs instead of double-ought buckshot, and I reconsidered my approach. The club hanging off his wrist looked like a small tree. When he strode out of the largest tin building, the only one with air-conditioning units hanging like warts from the windows, the cholitos scattered like chickens, then fell in behind him. He paid them no mind, marching to the hog pen, where he opened the gate, kicked gelts out of the way until he found one he liked. Then he killed it with a single stroke to the back of the head. The pig’s feet splayed and it hit the ground dead, without even a quiver.

  I had been to hog killings in my country youth. Usually it was a 10-gauge shotgun to the head, then in later more modern days, a .22 long-rifle cartridge driving a flat disc into the hog’s forehead. Edgar Foley looked like a man who liked doing it himself and only stopped killing his hogs because of economic concerns. The gang of cholitos threw lines around the legs and snout of the gelt, sliced his throat with a stunningly sharp linoleum knife, then like a band of barbarians, the young boys dragged the dead gelt to the pit, gutting it along the way, trailing pig’s blood and guts, a trail subject to an immediate and frenzied attack by the chickens. I wished I had a video camera to capture the scene for all the free-range chicken-eating dot-com white-shoe yuppies in the world.

  Then it got crazier. Boys came out of one of the tin buildings scattering earthworms and crickets to the chickens. It wasn’t hard to believe that the chicken is the evolutionary spawn of dinosaurs.

  But the final act was yet to appear. Della Foley, with hair like a storm cloud, came around the corner of the largest tin building, riding on her hips in a custom-made pony cart pulled by a bedraggled donkey. She had an old-fashioned buggy whip in her hand with a long stiff handle, topped by a limber whip that ended in a metal-spiked popper. At least, I assumed it had steel bits in the popper because the first thing she did was pop the head off the nearest rooster, cutting him off in mid crow. Then she cut a piece of the shirt off the back of the nearest young boy, and screamed at him to pick and clean the carcass. He hopped to it. Back at the boiling pit, the boys had chained the hog to the endless chain hoist, and dipped the body into the boiling water.