The Next Right Thing (24 page)

I hit him without thinking. The fact of it didn’t surprise me—I’d been dreaming about it the whole way out—but I was surprised to be once again acting without my own consent. That’s the way people talk about taking a drink, as though it’s happening to someone else at some gauzy distance. Like your arm is lifting the glass, and your consciousness has nothing to do with it. While the cartilage in his nose crunched under my knuckles—not really a crunch, more like a pop—I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been surrounded by the South Coast Symphony.

But I wasn’t surrounded by the South Coast Symphony, I was surrounded by five teenagers in softball uniforms. One of them was my daughter.

They were standing under ten feet away. They must have run up during my tunnel vision. The look on Crash’s face told me that she’d missed nothing. I walked toward her as Sewell, hands on knees, bled into the parking lot.

That’s another dubious insight that sets recovering alcoholics apart from the general population: no matter how bad you think you feel, you can always feel worse. Losing MP was a chocolate milk shake with whipped cream and sprinkles compared to this.

It was not the first time in my life that I had scared my daughter, but it was the first time since I quit drinking, over half her lifetime ago.

“Honey …” Nothing in her eyes encouraged me to finish the sentence. I wanted to die.

Crash shrugged away my hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you fucking touch me.” She backed away and turned to run, and thank God, her friends ran after her.

THAT STYROFOAM ICE CHEST
behind the truck seat in my mind was squeaking like a motherfucker.

As I drove, I reviewed the facts: I had destroyed my relationship with my daughter. I had given my ex-wife the justification for a restraining order that would make my custody claim impossible. And I had dreamed up a criminal conspiracy somehow responsible for my friend’s death that even I didn’t believe anymore.

I went home because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

When I parked my truck in front of my house, I was greeted by two Laguna PD detectives getting out of their Ford Fusion. They introduced themselves and offered IDs. Cardenas was built like a fireplug and had a face like a Mayan totem. Clancy was tall and rangy and Bill Waltonesque. God bless America.

“Your son,” Cardenas said, “told us you’d be back soon. We figured we would wait.”

“He’s not my son,” I said.

They both looked at me, maybe expecting I’d feel some responsibility to explain myself further. But I’d left all that bullshit back on the softball field in Anaheim Hills.

“Your boyfriend?” Clancy finally said.

“Can we talk inside?” Cardenas pointed toward my house.

After I’d given myself and Cardenas a glass of water and poured Clancy a cup of coffee from a pot that Troy must have made, we all sat down at my black-walnut-burl dinette. I asked them what they wanted, but I was sure I knew. Judge Sewell must have been quicker on the cell phone than I imagined.

“Where were you last night between two and four in the morning?” Cardenas asked.

“Here. Sleeping. Why do—”

“Can your, ah, boyfriend corroborate that?” Clancy interrupted.

“He’s more like a ward,” I said. “Like Batman and Robin?”

“Can he corroborate that you were here?” Cardenas asked.

“He was sleeping in another room,” I said. “But I think he’d say I was here.”

“He’d
say
you were here?” Cardenas wrote something down in his notebook.

“He’ll corroborate that I was here,” I said.

Cardenas wrote some more in his notebook. Clancy, I noticed, hadn’t opened his notebook and never stopped looking at me.

“How would you characterize your relationship with Thomas Kelly?” Clancy asked.

“Who?”

“Mutt Kelly.”

Oh shit
, I thought.
Is this my day for restraining orders?
“I barely know the guy,” I said. “Why do you want to know?”

Cardenas looked at Clancy, and Clancy shrugged.

“And please,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, stop that.”

“Stop what?” Clancy asked with an exaggerated display of bewilderment.

“The meaningful fucking glances,” I said. “I’m not impressed. I’ve pulled the same tricks myself. I’m trying to be courteous, but if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to ask you to leave. It’s already been a long day for me.”

Cardenas did not look at Clancy when he said, “Mr. Thomas, aka ‘Mutt,’ Kelly was found beaten to death in a parking lot about fifty yards from your cabinet shop. We estimate the time of death between two
A.M.
and four
A.M.
He died of blunt force trauma to the head, probably the result of being beaten severely around the face, but it also could have been that he died from trauma to the back of the head when he fell on the concrete as a result of being beaten severely around the face. Either way, we’re calling it a homicide.”

The news made me nauseated. To distract myself, I looked around at my home, which was better designed and furnished than any dwelling I’d ever occupied. These last few years it had become like an extension of my body, an extension of my soul. I brought clients here, not because it was the best work I’d ever done but because it spoke for me in a way I couldn’t speak for myself. The space had an unexpected and serene coherence. More than anything else I’d done, my house stood as a triumph over that earlier, disordered, distinctly unserene life.

And now it all seemed like shit. It embarrassed me. No one deserved a house this nice. Why did I feel that way? Mutt Kelly was nothing to me. But he might have been with Terry that last night, and someone had killed him. Where the two things related? I had to find out.

“You think I killed him?” I asked.

“Did you?” Cardenas asked.

They stared at me, waiting for my answer.

“Sean told you about Thursday afternoon,” I said. “Is he jammed up about this?”

Sean Wakefield must have fessed up about my interrupted assault on Mutt Kelly. I wanted to be angry, but he was probably in trouble for not telling them sooner. What he had seen made me a very natural suspect.

“That’s not your concern,” Cardenas said.

“I made some bad choices on Thursday afternoon,” I said. “Sean intervened, and that was the end of it.”

“So you’re saying you’ve had no contact with Mr. Kelly after this, ah, intervention?” Cardenas said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“How do you explain the fact that Kelly was carrying your phone number in his pocket at the time of his death?” Clancy said.

I couldn’t speak. He had my phone number? There was no scenario I could imagine in which that made sense. But it also deepened my inexplicable sadness over this idiot’s death. After a pause that was way too long, I said, “I have no fucking idea.”

“How do you explain the condition of your hands?” Clancy said.

We all took a good luck at the scrapes and bruises I’d caused myself by building that crib in the middle of the night.

“Mutt Kelly didn’t have a lot of defensive wounds,” Cardenas said. “If he was fighting with someone, he was way overmatched.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know what I can tell you. I didn’t do it. This guy was a biker, wasn’t he? Isn’t it more likely that he got into some kind of beef with one of his associates?”

“We were thinking it was one of his associates, too,” Clancy said. “But maybe not a biker.”

Cardenas closed his notebook. “We’re going to tell you what we imagine. You had some business with Mutt Kelly. He agreed to meet you near your shop. There was a confrontation, and it didn’t go well for Kelly. We’re hoping you can fill in the details.”

“I can’t tell you what happened,” I said, “because I wasn’t there.”

“Please, Mr. Chalmers,” Cardenas continued. “You have a story for us? Your side of things? We want to hear it.”

“We figured,” Clancy said, “that you were probably asking him the same questions you’d tried to ask him on Thursday afternoon.”

“I was asking him questions about my friend Terry Elias. About how he died. I thought Kelly might have been with him that night. Kelly said he wasn’t. I was pretty upset, hence the poor choices.”

“We know about Terry Elias,” Clancy said.

“What does that mean?” I said. “You know about Terry Elias?”

“Just assume we know everything,” Cardenas said.

“What the fuck else do you think I’ve done?”

“What happened to you?” Clancy said. “You used to be a cop, and now you’re a drug dealer?”

“A drug dealer?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re talking about your friend Terry Elias and the fifty grand you gave him to bring more of this shit into our community.”

Clancy was getting pretty worked up, and Cardenas held out a hand to calm him. I wish someone had been there to calm me.

“What the hell are you talking about? Terry wasn’t a drug dealer.”

“We’ve found hydroponic pot farms underneath all the houses your friend Terry helped arrange to buy from Simon Busansky,” Cardenas continued. “When we cleaned up this mess the first time and let those houses be sold to an A.A. group, you can imagine the last thing we expected was for those pot farms to reappear. Try to feel our profound disappointment with our friend Simon. Unfortunately, we can’t find him to express it ourselves.”

“Terry couldn’t have been that stupid,” I said. “He wouldn’t have been involved in something like this. I don’t know Busansky. I’m sure he’s a scumbag. But there’s no fucking way my friend Terry was involved in dealing drugs.”

Even as I said it, I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Was it possible that they could have run a full-scale hydroponics operation under the sleeping heads of a few dozen A.A. newcomers? While Troy and Emma themselves were living in those houses? Did Terry know? Had Terry invested in it? Could he have invested in it with my money?

I did a quick inventory of my actions over the last few days. I found myself looking like a guy who’d lost an investment, shaking every tree he could think of to find out where it had gone.

“Oh, fuck me,” I said. “I can see what you’re seeing, but that’s not what happened.”

“Tell us a different story, then.” Cardenas spread his hands out across my unnecessarily beautiful walnut tabletop. “Help us understand.”

“You think I’ve been going around rousting these guys because of money?”

“You’re going to tell us”—Cardenas laughed—“you gave that shyster fifty grand because he was your friend?”

The way he said it, the confidence of his conviction that I was a sharp operator among other sharp operators, stunned me because the truth was so much the opposite. I stood up. “This has been fun. No one has ever accused me of being a criminal mastermind before. You want to charge me with murder, charge me. Otherwise, get out of my house.”

They stood up. Cardenas picked up his notebook.

“Before you leave,” I said, “tell me how you have Mutt Kelly involved. What’s he got to do with the pot business?”

They smiled at me.

“Okay, never mind,” I said. “I’ll see you when you get a warrant.”

Neither of them moved away from the table. In fact, Clancy leaned forward a bit. “I always wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt”—Clancy slowly pocketed his own notebook—“because I know how easy it is to call someone a racist.”

“The thing that gets me,” Cardenas chimed in, “is how well
you landed. A lot of guys, they get a settlement like yours, they blow it on a sailboat. Look at you—you built a business. Granted, it’s a drug business, but—”

“You think I got a settlement?” I said. “Man, I didn’t even get my pension.”

Cardenas dramatically gestured to the home around us, like
Are you fucking kidding me?

“I work,” I said. “This all comes from work.”

“We work, too,” Clancy said. “But we don’t have houses like this. Hell, we don’t even live in Laguna.”

“You guys want to turn this into some kind of class war?” I said. “That’s your tactic for getting me to confess? I was a cop, and then I couldn’t be a cop anymore. You want to learn how to build houses when you retire, I’ll fucking teach you.”

“Who knew,” Cardenas said, “that beating up beaners could be such an awesome career move?”

I can’t say what poor choices I was about to make next, because we were interrupted by my sister, Betsy, and I didn’t get the chance to find out. She didn’t knock. She walked right in. Talking on her phone, she stood at the edge of my living room, beside the couch. She was wearing lizard cowboy boots, black Wrangler jeans, and a green suede jacket over a T-shirt that all by itself cost more than anything in either of their wardrobes. The cops were trying not to stare.

“Yes, it does,” Betsy said. “It looks like everything’s quite cordial at the moment.” The last part was somehow addressed both to me and to whoever she was on the line with.

“Yes,” I replied. “Quite cordial.”

“What are their names?” she said into her phone. Then, to the detectives: “What are your names?”

When they hesitated, I answered, “Detectives Cardenas and Clancy.”

Betsy repeated their names into her phone. “Yes, sir. I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble with my brother’s civil rights, but I appreciate your concern. I don’t have to call you ‘sir’ anymore? What do you call a terrorism czar, anyway? Mr. Ambassador? No shit? Right. Right. Jeep sends her love, too. Next Friday.” Betsy switched off her phone, shrugged. “Former boss.”