The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  And tried to work it all out again. Mac must have hired Lonnie Howell to interrogate Landry for his key to the system, but then the burned-out kid lost his nerve, panicked when Landry killed Doug Foley, then set up Landry’s phony suicide. I hadn’t been listening closely enough when Guilder told me what he’d dropped into the lake. Blood and tissue samples, and a bit of stove wire that probably had triggered the revolver as Lonnie drove away. And chances were that he had loosened the propane connection, too, but the explosion was larger than he had expected, which is how he lost the rear fender of his pickup truck. But Lonnie got greedy, which cost him his life. The scam seemed as solid as a lawyer, computer geek, and an accountant could make it, planning, I assumed, to use Angie Cole’s dad’s real estate business to give their dirty money a final rinse.

  I could see the twins breaking into Mac’s computer for his patient list, information to hurt his patients, sure, but I believed Elena’s denial that they hadn’t killed Sheila Miller, and they had no reason to steal Mac’s hard drives and backup disks. Mac was worried that the scam might be mentioned on one of the disks. Well, I couldn’t work out everything just thinking about it. In fact, every time I thought about it too long, my thoughts dissolved into a picture of a gutshot Mac in the middle of a long, painful humiliating death, crawling around as coyotes chewed on his intestinal loops. I tried to talk to Lorna, but she had disappeared, as had Marcy Miller. I called Lindsey Porter to suggest a gathering of Mac’s ex-wives, but she said they weren’t interested unless I could find out where his money had gone. She said she would talk to me, though, but she didn’t know any more now than she had a few weeks ago. She just wanted to talk.

  I kept sitting there as the weather changed, moving off the steps and up on the porch couch, bundled like a duck hunter in a blind, watching the weather as if the answers to all my questions were written on the light snow or the misty wind. I took the tape and splint off my nose as the bruises faded. Agents Morrow and Cunningham came by for another visit. Morrow was grumpy and frustrated at her failure to come up with anything more about Mac’s disappearance and my refusal to invite them inside out of the cold wind. She knew his patients were lying, she said, but they wouldn’t break their silence. Cunningham was as awkward and jumpy as a frog on ice cubes, but I stayed polite, avoiding their questions as nicely as I legally could until Pammie gave up, leaving with a promise to see me again.

  Georgie Paul showed up at dusk the day the first real snow fell, large drifting flakes. He wanted me to know that his group had come up with the first five hundred grand and had deposited it in my offshore account. He seemed proud of the fact that he recited my account number from memory, unaware that the five-hundred-grand figure automatically triggered a move into five other accounts set up by my ex-partner, who had retired to Belize some years ago. Then he handed me the credit cards and a list of baseball games.

  “Don’t you feel like a whore or something?” he said, shivering in the chill wind. “Taking money to look for your former friend?”

  “Be careful,” I said, watching a 7 Series black BMW pull up behind Paul’s Navigator. “You assholes make whores seem like respectable citizens.” Two blocky men in suits, overcoats, and fur hats stepped out of the car and stomped across three inches of wet snow in floppy galoshes, their hands in their pockets.

  “Who are those guys?” Georgie asked nervously.

  “Whatever happens,” I said, “don’t make any sudden movements.”

  One of the guys had a sloppy mustache, the other a unibrow. They didn’t waste any time on pleasantries as they stopped at the bottom of the steps. The one with the mustache growled, “Larise Grubenko, you have seen her?” I didn’t say anything. “She is our sister.” I still didn’t say anything.

  “We will pay you,” Mr. Unibrow said. “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Or break your knees,” Mr. Mustache said, pulling a Smith & Wesson hammerless .38 with a potato-sized silencer clamped to its short barrel, a silencer nearly as big as the revolver itself. He pulled it out of his pocket slowly for effect.

  “You guys don’t even look like brothers,” I said, “any more than the guys behind you.” They didn’t turn but paused long enough for me to pull out my piece. The short-barreled Walther PPK/S wasn’t known for its long-range accuracy, but I got lucky and popped Mr. Mustache in the eye and put the other six .22 rounds into Mr. Unibrow’s face. The war and the rest of life had taught me that the first punch usually wins the fight. The .22 rounds bounced around inside their skulls like marbles in a urinal, whipping their already minimal brain tissue into bloody jelly slopping over the edge of their brain pans. They fell like sides of beef; splashes of wet snow outlined the heap of their bodies.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Georgie said.

  “Shut up and give me a hand,” I hissed. The neighborhood hadn’t moved, the .22 rounds muffled by the heavy snow. The Christmas decorations blinked and glowed in the whirling flakes, but no doors opened, no curious faces appeared at the windows, no careless caroler roamed the streets. Holiday fireworks had been rattling around Meriwether for days. Georgie Paul shook like a dog shitting peach seeds, as my dad used to say, but I bullied him into helping me drag the bodies into the backseat of the Beemer. I took the pickup out of the garage, put the dead guys’ beautiful car into its place, then stuffed Georgie into the La-Z-Boy in my office and gave him a glass of Mac’s Scotch. And checked the front yard.

  There was almost no blood, and the drag marks were already filling with snow, but I scuffed them out anyway, searched the porch until I found all my brass, then went back into the office to get my camera and the fingerprint kit. The girls were avoiding Georgie as if he were a bad dog. They squatted in the far corners, growling under their purrs. I poured myself a glass of whiskey, too, and quickly replaced the barrel and reloaded the Walther as calmly as I could. I hadn’t killed anybody in a long time. I had thought I was through with that shit. But I pushed it to the back of my mind with the Scotch, and did my job. I snapped several head shots of the bodies and a set of prints for Agent Cunningham before I dumped the lumps into the trunk. Maybe he could keep their buddies from showing up at my house. Then I sat down at my desk to call El Paso.

  Disposal was going to be expensive: two guys and a flatbed wrecker all the way to Montana, then back down with the Beemer and its ugly cargo under a nylon shroud, headed south toward a terrible accident in the crusher. Somebody would melt the Walther’s barrel for me. I locked the garage door and taped the key inside a loose corner piece.

  “Can you use my computer to transfer twenty-five grand into another account?” I asked Paul as I went back inside to pick up my whiskey.

  “What?”

  “You can’t stand the heat on this any more than I can, buddy,” I told him. “Put that in the front of your mind. The best you can hope for is twenty-five to life.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he whined.

  “That’s the crime, jerk-off,” I said. “Can you move the money?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “But why do I have to pay for this shit?”

  “Because I don’t want to,” I said. “So fucking do it now,” I demanded, then gave him the account number. “Remember, you could be taking a ride, too. Three bodies are the same price as two.”

  “What’s my excuse?” he asked, resigned.

  “There’s no fucking excuse for you, Georgie,” I said, “but you’ll get some stock in a perfectly legal imported car dealership on the border, which will go bankrupt sometime in the near future, then you can claim a tax loss.”

  “I guess I’ve got no choice,” he grumped, then sat down at my desk. “Sughrue,” he added quietly, “I’d really appreciate it, though, if you wouldn’t call me Georgie.”

  “No choice, Georgie,” I said. “None at all.”

  He went to work at the keyboard without another word. Even with trembling fingers, it didn’t take him very long. Modern technology has made crime a gentler proposition. I tried to feel ba
d about the dead guys, but I didn’t feel much of anything. Fucking Mac had started this snowball rolling, and I was left standing in front of the avalanche of lies, more lies, and dead bodies. I let myself sink into the lounger, face-to-face with Mac’s painting. An expensively restored crofter’s cottage set above a shingled beach at the head of a hook-shaped bay. I had to admit that he wasn’t a bad painter. The bay looked dangerously dark and deep, the beach rough, the hills beyond smooth and ancient, crossed with tumbled-down rock fences, filled with soft bogs between the dangerous crags, the tiny cottage with its wisp of peat smoke a place of safety in a harsh, unforgiving world.

  Finished, Paul stood up, stretched sleepily as the adrenaline sifted out of his system. He even yawned as I asked, “Is your wife at home?”

  “What?” he said, yawning again.

  “Your wife,” I said. “Is she at home?”

  “Visiting her fucking mother in Indiana,” he muttered, barely able to keep himself awake.

  “Call her,” I said. “Tell her you’ve got business in Seattle for the next week or so,”

  “What kind of business?” he asked rubbing his eyes like a small child.

  “The business of staying alive. You fuck up, I’ll dump your ass off a ferry into the sound,” I said. “And we’ve got to give ourselves some semblance of an alibi in case something goes wrong.”

  “Alibi?” he repeated dumbly.

  “Go get in your rig, man,” I said, “and wait for me to pull up behind you. Then I’ll follow you home. You can grab a bag, then climb into my pickup, and I’ll drive you to Seattle.” Paul moved like a zombie, but he moved. I tore open a bag of dry food for the girls, left some cash for the house sitters, grabbed my traveling gear out of the Subaru, and tossed it in the pickup.

  At his house, Georgie packed like a broken robot, his limbs without strength or direction. I stacked him and his bag in the pickup cab, filled him with downers, which worked as well as handcuffs, and headed west. The storm slowed us, but by midnight we were crossing the pass into Idaho. At the bottom, the snow turned to rain. I took another dose of amphetamines, and pushed the truck harder. We hit Seattle at dawn. I called my house sitters, claimed that the storm had caught me on the coast, and arranged for them to stay a week.

  The only connecting rooms I could find at that time of day were in a suite at the Four Seasons. I put Paul in his bedroom, still drowsy from the road miles and the Mexican Valium, then I lost it. It all came to a terrible head inside, all the lies and greed and stupidity—some of it mine.

  I beat him senseless. One shot under the chin to get his attention, then I worked over his guts, ribs, and kidneys until he was weeping like a child, begging me to stop. But I seemed to be taking out weeks of frustration and lies on the helpless man. It’s a pure wonder that I didn’t kill him. When my arms finally wore out, I threw him on one of the beds, dumped an ice bucket of cold water over him, then another, and another until he came around.

  “I think you’ve broken something, man,” he whimpered.

  “You remember what that thug’s eyeball looked like when the round popped it, the way the fluid splashed out on his cheek, the way his face suddenly collapsed on that side,” I said. “Think about a knife blade in your eye, Georgie. If you leave this room while I’m gone, if you make a call to anyplace but room service, I can promise you that I will break you in half just before I cut your fucking eyes out.”

  “My God,” he said. “You’re insane.”

  “You better fucking believe it.”

  I hope he believed it. For his sake.

  I put the do not disturb sign on the suite’s door, informed the front desk that my partner had the flu and shouldn’t be bothered until we checked out. Then I took a cab down to First Street to work my way from dive to dive, slamming shots and beers with my people—winos, petty criminals, low-level drug dealers, Indian people drinking themselves into extinction, cheap whores, and clots of men whose failures reeked with anger and resentment. I couldn’t manage to get drunk, couldn’t even get high smoking crack with a half-breed Umitilla behind a bush down on the zigzags, couldn’t even find a fistfight. Hell, I couldn’t even get arrested. But sitting on a bench down on Alaskan Way, down where Mac and I had talked that afternoon shortly after Ellen Marshall had committed suicide in such a bloody, horrible fashion, her hands tumbling off the saw, I realized something. I should have thought about it at the time, but I was still wobbly, coming down from the quick shot of acid one of the twins had jabbed into the back of my neck a couple of nights before, and thanks to the massive dose Elena had given me, it came to me: a realization, a flashback, and bitter knowledge: I knew how to find Mac. All I had to do was sober up and call my favorite perverts, Cunningham and Morrow. The sobering-up part consumed the better part of two days. I took pity on Paul, let him into my stash of Vicodin for the pain. But I wouldn’t take him to the emergency room, not even when he begged. It was all I could do not to kill him. The Ukrainian Mafia guys had released something ugly inside me. Years ago I’d found some kind of sanity in the blood-drenched defence of my family. Now it was different; I wasn’t on the run this time. I was on a rampage, calm and stupidly mean, ready to kill the first person who crossed me, but somehow without anger, which confused me. I drugged myself into sleep. When I woke at dusk two days later, I ate a room-service steak like a starving man, drank two beers, checked on Georgie Paul, who hadn’t died but looked like a dead man, recently exhumed. Then I called Lindsey Porter to see if my truth matched hers.

  She looked even better than the last time when she opened the door before I could ring the bell, looked as if she might have dressed for my visit, her lush body boldly naked under a pale blue jumper and dark blue turtleneck that matched her eyes, her feet seductively bare with pink painted nails. I couldn’t see her makeup, but I could smell it.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” she said. “I know the ferry is a problem this time of night.”

  “Thanks for letting me come out on such short notice,” I said. “I didn’t know I was going to be in town.”

  She ushered me to the breakfast bar, saying, “You strike me as a man who prefers a bar stool more than a couch. And kitchens more than living rooms.”

  “Either is a good guess,” I said as I sat down on the stool. “Or a damned good perception. My mother hated couches and living rooms. We were always at the kitchen table when I was a kid. Hell, the television was in the kitchen.”

  “Mexican beer, shitty Oregon wine, or Lagavulin?” she asked as she moved toward the wet bar.

  “How about two fingers of Scotch and a beer back?”

  She smiled as if it had been a test, and I had passed with flying colors. “What did your mother do?”

  “She was an Avon Lady, among other things,” I said. “Waitress, carhop, grocery store checker, and the first female taxi driver in Corpus Christi, Texas.”

  “And your dad?” she asked as she set both Scotches and both Negra Modelos in front of us.

  “My dad?” I said. “Well, mostly he was just a sweet, funny crazy man who spent most of his life going away. He never did anything very long, but he did lots of things very well. Cowboy, bartender, roughneck, hayhand, welder, short-order cook. But what he did best was drift away.”

  “My parents were born, raised, and buried within shouting distance of the Sound,” she said. “I suspect that will be my fate, too.”

  “In the summers, I visited my old man in every state west of the Mississippi from Mexico to Canada,” I said. “Drifting around, too.”

  “And women loved him?”

  “It looked that way,” I said. “He made them laugh.”

  “And you?”

  “Wrong question,” I said. “Wrong time.”

  “Sorry,” she said, then we clicked glasses. “You said you had some questions.”

  “Honeymoons?” I said. “You’re in touch with most of Mac’s ex-wives. I need to know where you all went.”

  “The San Juans, St. Thom
as, Tahiti, the Canaries,” she said. “And, I guess, the Hebrides with this last wife.”

  “When we were on the bench that day,” I said to myself, “he wasn’t looking at the fucking water, he was looking at the islands.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “You’re thinking that he’s alive?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you’re going to look for him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know. But why don’t we just let it alone for now.”

  “Fine,” she said. “This is about you and me, Mr. Sughrue.”

  “You can call me CW,” I said.

  “And you can call me anytime.”

  So that’s how we spent the evening. Telling stories, rustling up snacks, and drinking too much, laughing and becoming friends. At some point she moved to the stool next to me, and when we laughed we leaned into each other. When it became apparent that I was too drunk to negotiate the rambling roads, fog, and drifting rain to the ferry landing, we suddenly stopped laughing in the midst of a silly story, the silence glowing between us.

  “You can stay the night, you know,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but if I do, I’d best sleep on the couch.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, your ex-husband, who used to be my sort-of best friend, fucked my soon-to-be ex-wife at a very bad time in our lives,” I said. “She couldn’t deal with the guilt, and I couldn’t deal with her anger. And I’m afraid that when I find him, I’ll kill him. I don’t want to sound like John Wayne, but I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t trying to kill me. But I’m afraid I might shoot Mac like a rabid dog, gutshoot him, and kick him to death before he bleeds out. That might complicate our relationship.”