The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  “They’re an odd couple to be behaving badly,” Whit said. “How’d you get the tape?”

  “I’ve got a suspicious mind,” I said, then stubbed out the butt and stood up to face her. She stood over me in jeans and a sweatshirt, a streak of dust across her cheek, holding the door half open or half shut, but still just as lovely as she’d been years ago when I was living in Lawyer Rainbolt’s basement, and she’d come down the stairs carrying messages from the boss of the firm. “Why didn’t you let me know when you were coming out?”

  “Why didn’t you call about Thanksgiving?” she asked. “And what happened to your nose?”

  “You don’t really care what happened to my nose,” I said. “If you did, this wouldn’t be happening. I fucked up badly, and Thanksgiving Day I was holed up with a woman down in New Mexico, trying to put myself back together—”

  “Her?” she asked, looking over my shoulder, then slipping back inside. “She looks like she could put you back together.”

  When I turned around, Larise Grubenko was stepping out of the backseat of the only limo in Meriwether, a restored 1975 Cadillac stretch limo, wearing her traveling clothes—an Irish green suit with a reasonably long skirt, black stockings, and matching pumps with only four-inch heels, her mane of yellow hair gathered into a fancy ponytail that poured like a golden stream from a round bun. My hand darted reflexively under my armpit. Larise saw the move, took off her sunglasses, spread her arms, then smiled as harmlessly as a child as she strode up the walk toward the porch. I met her halfway.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked. I suspect that I was flushed with shame more than anger. “How the hell did you find me?”

  “Mr. Sughrue, you are not the only private detective in the world,” she said. “My husband flew his little toy airplane into the side of the hangar—I think he wanted to destroy the money, but it was safe with me—but my citizenship is in question. I’m going to Canada, where it’s not so complex. Edmonton, where I have family, where I have a chance to invest in my brother’s business—”

  “A strip bar with hookers, I assume.”

  “You’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be a woman,” she said. “We make our lives how we can.”

  “I think I already knew that,” I said, “but thanks for the reminder. Once again, what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “My poor husband remembered something he didn’t tell you,” she said. “Shooting his airplane was very cruel. It confused him—”

  “Perhaps I should have shot you?”

  “Perhaps he would have thanked you,” she said, her smile growing wide across her capped teeth. “But he told me something I thought you might like to know.”

  “What?”

  “The woman who gave him the money had red hair under her wig,” she said, “dark red hair.” Then she reached out to shake my hand. I almost refused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Women are what men make them,” she added, “and if anybody comes asking about me, please lie. My brothers aren’t as nice as I am.” She gave me another wolfish smile, then went back to the limo, raising her hand in a small wave through the darkened window.

  Red hair. Lorna. But why? I didn’t want to think about it.

  I didn’t know what to feel. Still angry, sure, but confused, too. I went back into the office for another beer. The two moving guys were carrying the couch out the back door. As I sat on the porch steps with another beer and another cigarette, the storm door opened again. But didn’t shut.

  “It’s not even noon,” she said, “and you’re on your second beer.”

  “You have any cocaine?” I said.

  “Was that her?” she said. “She was a beautiful woman, but obviously feckless. Just your type.”

  “Just a guy I met on a case,” I said over my shoulder. “Sex change worked.”

  “So who’s that?” she asked as Claudia’s Jag stopped in front of the house. I heard the door close behind me.

  Chickens coming home to roost? No, I felt like roadkill, eagles feasting on my guts as I took forever to die. So I didn’t bother to meet her halfway. Just sat there waiting for the worst day of my life to end.

  “I just stopped to say good-bye,” Claudia said, “and I’m sorry. I’m off to Butte and another life.”

  “You got your car back,” I said. “That’s good. Somebody told me recently that women are what men make them, so you don’t have to say you’re sorry.” I stood up, gave her a hug, then added, “Please take care of yourself. You’re a fine woman.”

  Then she spotted the moving van in the alley. “You don’t deserve this,” she said.

  “Nobody deserves anything,” I said. “I told you: it’s always luck, and grandfather eats old gray rats and paints houses yellow.”

  She paused, stepped back, her hands still on my shoulders, then she kissed me like a brother, hard and fast, driving a spark of pain from my nose to my knees, and said, “What about love and courage and kindness?”

  “Requirements,” I suggested. “Benefits.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’ll figure something out,” I said. “Don’t worry. And good luck.” As I said that I realized that it extended to Larise, too.

  Claudia went back to her gleaming Jag, and I went back to the porch steps and my beer. Within moments I heard the door open, but once again not close. The girls slipped out and wandered off to frolic among the dead leaves that covered the front yard like a tattered rag rug.

  “That was her?” Whit said. “You slept with Claudia? Christ, it would be easier to forgive you for fucking the transsexual.”

  “Well, shit, I lied about that,” I said. “To salve your feelings. She’s a Ukrainian whore, but I couldn’t afford her. She gave me a freebie. I guess we’re kind of friends.”

  “And Claudia?”

  “That’s different,” I said. “None of this involves you. Except this.” I reached into my shirt pocket to extract one of the cats’ bits of trashy debris. The green silver-foil remains of two condom wrappers. Mac’s shamrock rubbers. “Look what the cats drug in,” I said. “You sleep with that bastard?”

  Whitney’s blushing face said it all.

  “Either come out or go back inside. But stop this halfway shit.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. Then she came all the way out the door and sat beside me. “I’m not going to say ‘I’m sorry,’” she murmured.

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” I said. “But I’ll break the mold; I’ll say it: I am sorry as hell, sorry enough for all of us. Someday I’ll tell you about it. If I live long enough.”

  “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “Didn’t expect it would, love,” I said.

  She went back in the house without another word. And it was over.

  Darkness came early, as it always did in late fall, but I sat on the porch steps until full dark, surviving on beer, deer sausage, rat cheese, and an almost animal silence, broken only by a brief farewell to my son. I may have grunted in pain when the moving van pulled out, followed by Whitney’s rental, but I wasn’t sure. I was fairly sure that when my cell phone rang in my pocket, that it wasn’t good news.

  SIXTEEN

  AT TEN THE next morning, by driving through my hangover like a crazy man—I’d spent the night sipping Scotch and rewiring my cell—I was waiting on the Melita Island dock on Flathead Lake. Just as George Paul had suggested, unarmed and docile. I didn’t know what sort of madness I was facing, but after everything I’d learned about my friend, MacKinderick, I wasn’t about to take any chances. A big guy was waiting on the dock. He looked oddly familiar.

  “Hey, didn’t I see you at The Phone Booth?” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  He’d been one of the guys with Georgie Paul at The Phone Booth when I was tracking Sheila Miller. I lose names sometimes but never faces. Sometimes it keeps you alive. He patted me down carelessly, almost taking my word that the rewired stun gun was a satellite cell phone as we climb
ed into a Boston Whaler and headed for Wild Horse Island in the middle of the huge lake. As soon as it became apparent which dock we were heading toward, I said to him, “Hey, you don’t believe it’s a cell phone, call your girl friend.”

  “Don’t have one right now.”

  “Call your mother.”

  “In Portland?”

  “It’s on me.”

  He dialed, pushed Send, then put the cell phone to his ear. The shock almost knocked him out of the boat. I nearly let him fall overboard, but I wasn’t completely sure that he was one of the guys who had done Lonnie Howell, so I slipped the .357 Smith & Wesson from under his Carhartt tin-cloth coat, and when I pulled in down shore from the dock, I left him barefoot, bound in the dock line, and his dirty sock in his mouth. I popped him with another charge just for fun. It took the better part of an hour to circle through the lodgepole pines, dead falls, and occasional stately ponderosa to come steeply downslope to the back door of the cabin. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at the crowd sitting around a poker table in the middle of the main room of the cabin: Georgie Paul, of course, and Charlie Marshall; Elwood Studer and Ken Forbes; but Angie Cole, she was a surprise. The other truck driver from The Phone Booth was walking down to the dock.

  “One of you idiot bastards move,” I said as I stepped through the back door, “I’ve got a round apiece for all six of you.” You could have stirred the silence with a stick. “Georgie, call that guy back from the dock.” He didn’t hesitate a second, just hurried to the door, and shouted, “Eddie!” Then sat back down as I moved beside the door. Eddie got the shock of his life right in the ear when he came inside. He went down like a wet paper towel.

  “Everybody,” I growled, now that I had two .357 revolvers to go with my bad temper, “empty your pockets and purses on the table, take your shoes off, and go sit on the couches in the corner. Sit on your hands and cross your feet. And be fucking quick about it. I’ve got a hangover that would kill a normal man; I’ve been lied to, fucked over, and damn near killed. I’ve lost my wife, my best friend, and any hope for the future existence of the human race. So be goddamned quick.” They must have believed me because they moved at the speed of the guilty. Of what, I didn’t know yet, but surely guilty of something. “So what’s going on?” I said.

  They all tried to answer at once. The only clear thing in the babble was that it had been my good buddy’s idea.

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “One at a time.” The thick silence again, broken only by Elwood’s weeping. I stirred through the mess on the table. Cell phones, keys, a couple of Swiss Army Knives, wallets, bills, and change. And a Polaroid shot of Whitney dropping off Lester, who wore a blazer and a tie, in front of a stolid brick building.

  “This is bad, boys and girls,” I said as I picked up the picture. “Really bad and perfectly stupid. If you’d threatened my family twenty years ago, I’d have gutted you fuckers without another word, filled your body cavities with rocks, wrapped you in duct tape, dropped you in the lake, and burned the cabin down. Thank your lucky stars that I’m now a semi-adult and able to hire out the wet work.” Then I grabbed a cell phone at random off the table, dialed a dead drop number that my ex-partner and I had used for years, and left a message. I rattled off their names—Georgie, Charlie, Ken, Elwood, and Angie—then added, “Those Tongalese tree trimmers we used to know down in Long Beach. They still around? Good. Anything happens to Whitney or Lester, anything at all, I want these fuckers fed feet first and alive into the chipper.” Elwood broke into a wail, and Angie started to weep silently. “Georgie, I want you to slap Elwood until he shuts the fuck up,” I said as I cut off the call. I knew Georgie would take pleasure in slapping the helpless fat boy. “Elwood,” I said quietly, “where’s your mother?”

  “She fell down,” he blubbered softly.

  “So we can add murder to the list of your sins,” I said, and nobody disagreed. “Charlie, you tell me what the fuck’s going on.”

  He blushed and stuttered but finally got it out. “Medicare fraud,” he said, almost ashamed.

  “Medicare fraud?” I said before I could stop myself, quite simply amazed. You could have knocked me over with an onionskin carbon copy of a doctor’s bill. “What the hell’s this about?”

  Nobody answered at first, then Ken, the lawyer who couldn’t stop himself, shifted before he said, “About two or three hundred million dollars.”

  “You fuckers are all rich and you’re stealing from the government,” I said. Only Charlie and Elwood managed to look ashamed.

  “It was such a perfect plan,” Georgie said proudly, “and your best buddy is the one who worked it out. We overbilled Medicare claims by nickels and dimes and the occasional dollar. It’s an invisible worm of a program.”

  “Three hundred twenty-six hospitals, nursing homes, and mental health clinics,” Ken said, also almost proudly. “The loose change funneled automatically into an offshore account. Elwood and Landry set up that part. But Mac came up with the lock.”

  “The lock?”

  “We can’t access the account without all eight keys,” Charlie said softly.

  “Keys?”

  “Fucking box scores of baseball games,” Angie said, then wiped her face. With her makeup gone she was no longer the poor little rich girl. Now she looked like her father when he’d bullied the city council into approving another of his shitty particle board developments. “Goddamned box scores, player’s names, and game numbers.”

  “Foolproof,” Elwood muttered. “The NSA couldn’t break into our system.”

  “Until that idiot Landry went off the deep end,” Georgie complained, “and fucked up. Then we were locked out.”

  “But Mac said he could get Landry’s key,” Ron said. “But he didn’t. Then the damned lawsuit screwed everything all up.”

  “My guess is that you all chipped in to pay off the lab guy,” I said, and they all nodded sadly. “And sent me after Lonnie Howell? Who the Doc knew from Vietnam?”

  “Top-of-the-line interrogators don’t come around every day,” Charlie said, as if it were very important information.

  “But he didn’t come up with the key, did he?” I said. “He got sick of the business when Landry killed the kid. Then he faked Landry’s suicide,” I said. “Well, boys and girls, I’ve got some bad news for you. He did get the key, and when he was safe, he was going to sell it to you. But you cheap bastards couldn’t wait. You killed him before he could tell you. Skinny little bastard with mismatched snowboots and a hole in his stocking was nine times as tough as your hired help.”

  They all nodded sadly, as if the money had been one of their favorite children, sent away to never come back. “So what the hell do you fucking idiots want with me now?” I asked.

  They all looked at each other until Georgie finally let it out. “Well, the FBI is asking questions we can’t afford to answer, so we wanted to hire you to find Mac.”

  “What makes you think he’s alive?”

  “Somebody’s been trying to get into the account,” Elwood said.

  “And what makes you think I might look for him?” I asked. “What could you offer that would interest me? I’ve got you by the short hairs now. I can retire to someplace warm and pleasant on your stupidity. I wouldn’t look for Mac for love or money. Revenge maybe, but that’s between me and my worthless conscience.”

  “He said you were in love with his wife,” Angie said, as if accusing me of murder.

  “She knew about the scam,” Charlie said quietly. “He said you’d never let her go to prison.”

  I had nothing to say about that. I just laughed. They blossomed with nervous grins, which faded as my laughter became more and more insane.

  “I’m in love with his wife?” I chuffed between laughs as I settled down. “I’d eat buzzard guts before I’d fuck Lorna,” I said.

  And speaking of buzzards, Mac could charm one off its roadkill, I guess, and we were all his victims in some way. For the first time, I really hoped he was
dead. For his sake. As Whit had said a long time ago: I had piss-poor judgment about people for a guy in my line of work, but I had never looked for anybody I didn’t find. It was a gift or a curse, I had never decided which.

  “Okay,” I said when the crazy laughter finally died like the last ember in a woodstove, said almost without thought, “you fucking jerk-offs. If he’s alive, I’ll find him. Before I start, I want a million dollars—five hundred grand up front in my offshore account, five hundred grand in escrow, and three corporate credit cards with no limit for expenses. And I want your box score keys.” They looked at each other again. I wrote down the three names, DOBs, and addresses of my three best fake identities. “I can tell that you rich, cheap bastards have to talk it over. Whose place is this?” Charlie nodded. “Get me a pillow case,” I said. He was up and back like a shot. I loaded it with shoes, cell phones, car keys, and revolvers. “I’ll leave this shit with your boy on the other side,” I said. “He’ll come around eventually, I hope, then you better hope he’s got the guts to come back over to get you. And tell your boys that if I ever see either one of them again, I’ll kill them on the spot without another word. Then I’ll start on you bastards. You’ll be amazed how far down the line I’ll get before they stop me.” As I headed toward the door, I paused, turned around, and added, “And don’t forget what it’s going to feel like sliding feet first and alive into a wood chipper.” Fucking white collar criminals with faces as white as death. They made me sorry to belong to the same species.

  So I went back to my perch on the porch in the afternoons in front of the empty house behind me. I worked out in the late mornings, sweating out yesterday’s slow beers. A front moved in from the east, a hard, cold snowless wind pushing over the divide, shifting Mother Nature’s debris into my neighbors’ yards. I got some hard looks, but nobody bothered me. They all knew I wasn’t exactly a good citizen, which was probably why my wife had left. At night the girls and I watched old movies on the satellite television until I fell asleep in the chair. I could tell they’d never endured a Montana winter outdoors because as the temperature fell they spent more time sleeping on me and less time hunting. At some point I rented a houseful of furniture so the house sitters wouldn’t have to sleep in an empty house. But I stayed outside most days.