For reasons that weren’t quite clear to me but seemed obvious to Mac, he was convinced that the theft had been accomplished or engineered by one of his seven patients in analysis. He claimed he couldn’t expand on his reasoning without violating his doctor-patient confidentiality.
“These patients are the only ones who have ever been in the back office where the computer is,” he said as Todd set the plate of baby back ribs in front of me. “Patients in analysis are always curious about each other,” he added as he set an envelope beside my drink. “That’s why I have two waiting rooms and a secluded exit from the back office.”
“Blackmail, you think?”
He paused, then said, “Lord knows I’ve been fooled before, but I am almost certain, my friend, that none of these patients are being blackmailed. Yet.”
“Almost?” I said, then stubbed out the cigarette, had a sip of my last martini, and a slug of water. I picked up a rib but left the envelope where it set. “How ‘almost’?”
Mac leaned closer as if we were under a cone of silence. And perhaps we were in our quiet island in the confusing froth of late-night bar conversations, a tangle of voices as opaque as the smoke floating above our heads. “My patients are your average band of unhappy neurotics whose lives would probably improve if they could just get out of their personal situations,” he said. “Look over there.” Mac pointed across the barroom toward the fake fireplace in the corner.
Our first baseman, Charlie Marshall, a lanky accountant with a narrow, long-suffering acne-scarred face, leaned on the couch next to his tiny wife, Ellen, who was talking to him as if she were lecturing a child. I knew she was seeing one of the other shrinks in town, a lady doctor known for her quick moves with a prescription pad, so Ellen lived on a half-dozen psychotropic drugs. Behind his glasses, Charlie’s eyes were deeply unfocused, and his grin was so painful his feet might have been on fire. Another couple—our third baseman, George Paul, and his bony wife, whose name I couldn’t remember—sat on the opposite couch. I didn’t know what George had to be unhappy about; he owned a successful Internet company that provided business advice, information, and accounting services to small hospitals and clinics all over the country. The catcher, Ken Forbes, an ex-college baseball player, now a business lawyer with a wife who never left the house, sat alone on the hearth.
“Charlie and George and Ken are patients?” I said. When Mac didn’t answer, I suggested, “Their wives?”
“Not a psychotic among the group, and they all have plenty of money,” he said, ignoring my questions. “Sometimes I think that the people around them are the fucking crazy ones,” he added. “If you’ll excuse my French.”
“I’ll excuse your French, my friend,” I said, “if you’ll excuse my reluctance to do this personal favor for you.”
Mac nodded slowly. We sat silently as I finished the ribs, then thanked the young woman with the cigarettes again. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said as I slipped the envelope into the inner pocket of the windbreaker, next to the scrap of cloth, then picked up my martini.
“It’s on me, buddy,” Mac said.
“No shit,” I said.
Mac settled the check while I finished a cigarette and half of my drink. Then I followed him out the back door and into the soft luxury of his new Range Rover, both of us still silent. We drove back to the motel without a word. Mac parked in his space beside the bridal suite, turned off the engine, then lit his cigar.
“You picked up the envelope, CW,” he said.
“I was drunk,” I said. “What the hell did I pick up?”
“A twenty-thousand-dollar retainer from Ron Musselwhite,” he said. “And the names and address of the seven patients. Some you’ll know, others you won’t. And for pity’s sake, don’t lose it. It’s the only copy. I’m on very shaky ground here, friend.”
“I suspect you’re not alone,” I said.
“Just follow them around randomly, now and again; watch them from a distance,” he said. “But not to or from my office, okay? You’ve got a blank check for expenses. Rent or buy whatever you need. But don’t hire any other PIs, and don’t listen to any private conversations. Whatever you overhear in public, that’s okay. You can report that, along with movements and impressions. But just to me. And nothing on paper or tape, audio or video. You can’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Not even Whit.”
“How long do you want me to work on this?”
“Until I know which one has the copies,” he said.
“How the hell are you going to know?”
“I just will,” he said.
“You know this job is even crazier than the last one?”
“I told you. I’ll double your hourly rates.”
“I’d have to be out of my mind to get involved in something like this, Mac,” I said. But I had to admit that the notion of being paid like a lawyer without bothering about law school had its attractions. “This is not my kind of job, man,” I said. “I find people who want to be lost—skip traces and bounty hunts, runaways and lost spouses—that’s what I do. I don’t do surveillance. It’s too fucking boring,” I added. I could hear the acceptance slipping into my voice.
“But you’ll do it, right?” he said, holding out his hand. “Thank you, Sughrue. I truly thank you.”
“You’re less than welcome,” I said.
We shook hands warmly, smiling ruefully at each other.
Making friends had always been hard for me after we moved to Vado, Texas, at the end of WWII when I was a kid. I was always the new kid in town, the one who wore feed-sack shirts and no shoes. The one with the crazy and often missing father. Nothing like being an outsider in a small Texas town to make an old boy cranky and adept with his fists. As far as I knew, the first group of men I’d really cared about were the guys in my squad in Vietnam. So in late middle age making friends was problematic at best.
Women usually make friends talking, by exchanging confidences, and men, traditionally, by working together. But the only work Mac and I had ever shared was the occasional firewood foray on nice fall weekend afternoons. Unless playing softball together was work.
Sports often revealed the cracks in a man’s character, the frayed edges of his personality. Maybe friendship between men was as inexplicable as love. Whatever, Mac and I were friends. Good friends, who depended on that friendship more than either of us admitted. We both dealt in the secrets of damaged lives, but we could never talk about them. Our bonds were silent but stronger, perhaps, for the silence.
“When we stop holding hands,” Mac said, “I’ve got a bottle of twenty-one-year-old Springbank single malt. Let’s have a nightcap?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. I had hoped he would ask me in for a drink when we came back from downtown.
I followed him into the inner entrance of the bridal suite, which opened into a short hall between a toilet and a closet, then into the sitting room. Except for the glow from the master bath, the bedroom was dark beyond the partially closed door, but Mac went to the wet bar without even looking in on Lorna. Once he had told me that she slept like a cat: deeply, quickly, often, and anywhere. He put ice cubes in a couple of glasses and drenched them with four fingers of peaty Scotch, then we settled with our drinks into armchairs across the coffee table from each other. Mac offered me a cigar, but I declined. I wanted another cigarette. So badly I couldn’t remember why I had quit. We sipped our Scotch and chatted aimlessly in low voices until we had almost finished our drinks.
“I thought I smelled your cigar, honey,” Lorna said from the darkened doorway, a depleted ice bag dangling from one hand, a tattered, barely recognizable stuffed elephant from the other. She held two condoms in green silver foil against the stuffed animal’s chest. Whitney had suggested that Lorna was so afraid of getting pregnant that she was on the pill, still used a diaphragm, and probably made Mac wear two rubbers. But until I saw them in her hand I thought Whitney had been joking.
“Oh hi, CW,” she added. She seemed
to have gone to bed wearing full makeup, but standing in the shadows her face was half dark. Unlike some women’s green eyes, Lorna’s never glittered metallically. They were always softly smudged, sleepy, dissipated like the smoke drifting from a green flare. Except for the blister on her thigh—fingerwide and perhaps four inches long—Lorna’s elegant legs were very white and very long beneath the short jade silk nightgown she wore. “You boys havin’ fun?” she said. Although she had never been any closer to the South than South Dakota, she had an almost unaffected Southern accent.
“We always have fun,” Mac said. “That’s why they call us boys.” Then he rose and walked over to his wife to kiss her on the corner of the mouth. Even barefoot, she stood a few inches taller than Mac. And she almost always wore heels. “Let me fill this up,” he said as he took the ice bag from her.
Lorna lifted a slim hand in a languid farewell, then floated into the darkness behind her. Mac stepped over to the bar, dumped the water, and began to load ice cubes into the bag. I excused myself and went into the toilet off the sitting room. I took the swimsuit top out and dropped it on the floor, only partially hidden behind the toilet.
As far as I knew, Lorna had never fooled around, but she had that air of availability about her, and she had always been a bit casual about exposing her body in ways that made me uncomfortable. One of her large and lovely breasts seemed always about to slip its mooring into public view. And she seemed unable to cross her legs without offering a glimpse of her dark red and neatly trimmed muff through transparent thongs.
Unfortunately, I knew what I was talking about. Once when the four of us were on a float trip down the Smith River, camped at Sunset Cliffs, after an evening of wine and whiskey, elk steaks, and mota shared with the guides, Whit and I had curled into our bags to sleep as calmly as rounded stones under the soft murmur of the river. But sometime during the middle of the night, I’d woken with an aching bladder. When I climbed out of our tent, but before I could trek up to the outdoor toilet, I noticed Lorna standing naked in the moonlight on the sandbar at the edge of the river.
We had camped at the mouth of the canyon where the cliff’s shadow covered the campsite like a widow’s shawl, but down by the river the moonlight glistened off Lorna’s body as if she were a pillar of rock salt. She stood so still, I walked down the slope to see if she was all right. When she heard me, she turned, a joint in one hand, a wine bottle in the other, and looked at me. She raised the bottle as if to offer me a drink but quickly lowered it to her side. The look in her eyes and the slight smile on her face signaled neither invitation nor anticipation but acceptance. Of what, though, I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it unnerved me. I retreated, pissed on a tree, then crawled back into my sleeping bag for a night of red-wine marijuana dreams.
The visible portion of the swimsuit-top micro-fabric sparkled vividly against the pale tiles of the floor beside the toilet. I’d done what I could. I flushed, then washed my hands and face. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, I was, as usual, shocked. I’d never regained the weight I’d lost after I’d been shot. The dark blond ponytail, which I couldn’t seem to give up, was shorter, but the beard had fallen by the wayside. The mustache fit into the decently earned wrinkles, and somewhere behind that blue-eyed dusky face, I hoped, a younger version of myself might still live, maybe an aging surfer or a retired dot-com millionaire. Then I laughed at my foolishness. Just another piece of footloose border trash staring back at me, a redneck with a corazón mejicano, a Mexican heart.
When I went back into the sitting room, I could hear the rattle of ice cubes as Mac rubbed the ice bag against Lorna’s blistered thigh. I finished my drink, whispered “Later” at the bedroom doorway, then let myself out.
I just made last call at the motel bar, grabbed a bottle of Rainier, bummed two Camel straights from the bartender, then went out to the empty poolside. The full moon had lodged at the zenith, smaller but still white-hot, as intense as a halogen flood. The night seemed full of scraps of party sound—pointless laughter, the bass-line thrum of overamped car stereos, and loud voices, hoarse with senseless anger. South of the Clark Fork River a siren whooped for a long moment, then stopped. I didn’t really want the beer, just the cigarettes, the ephemeral clarity of nicotine. I smoked slowly, even though I knew my throat and sinus cavities would hurt in the morning, a throbbing ache as if I’d spent the night snorting ground glass.
Beyond the pool I could see that the light in our room was still on. Whitney, I assumed, burning the midnight keystrokes on her notebook. Damn. Goddamn love. But I did owe her my life. When they got me to the hospital in El Paso after I’d been gutshot, the only number in my wallet was hers. When they’d called, she quit her job and flew down from Montana, although we’d only been out once. She sat by my bed until she persuaded me to live. She smuggled tacos and beer into my hospital room, and for reasons neither of us exactly understood, she married me. We’d never slept together, we’d had a single date, and there we were doing the vows in a hospital room. And she ran with me during the crazy times, hiding from the contrabandistas who had tried to kill me, hiding first in Utah, then later in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. I owed this woman my life and what little sanity I possessed.
When I finished the second cigarette, I left the rest of the beer, then went back to our room.
Whit was sprawled across the bed, asleep among a scattering of legal documents, her long, lean, lovely body stretched across the bed. When I leaned over to kiss her, her eyes opened slowly, eyes the clear blue of the desert sky reflected in a slickrock pool after a passing shower.
“You’ve been smoking,” she said quietly.
“Just a couple,” I said. “Four actually.”
“Well, just because I’m gone, don’t be smoking in my house,” she said, smiling widely. “I’ll be back.” I took that as a good sign. She rolled into my arms, whispering, “Get in the shower, cowboy. I’ll wash the stink right off you.”
Later, in the predawn half darkness of the room, she asked, “What did Mac want? Does he have another wild goose chase for you?” Then she kissed me on the shoulder.
“I caught the goose last time,” I said. Sometimes her mind startled me. “How the hell did you know?”
“He’s been making calf eyes at you all weekend,” she said. “Like a virgin in heat. What did he want?”
“Just an odd chore for a few weeks. He asked me not to tell you, hon,” I said without any hope that Whit would settle for my answer.
“His last odd chore took you out of law school, love,” she said. She was never going to let me forget that. Or forgive the way I lived my life.
“It paid off your loans,” I said. “And set up your office.”
“True,” she said cautiously. “Watch your ass,” she said. “Remember, he deals with crazy people.” Then she rolled away. She was asleep before I knew what to think. Maybe this case wouldn’t be as hard as it seemed.
The hard part was saying good-bye to Whitney as she climbed on the flight from Missoula to Minneapolis. Really hard. When I got home, I found myself sitting in my office glancing seriously through the classified ads looking for a dog I didn’t actually want.
As it turned out, moving to the white-shoe, latte-sipping heart of the frozen Midwest would have been easier all around.
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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © James Crumley 1993
Extract from The Right Madness © James Crumley 2014
James Crumley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
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