The Next Right Thing (15 page)

Huh. That sounded weirdly useful. I was about to apologize
to Jean Claude for saying that I hated anything about him when my phone rang with a blocked number.

“Do you want to fuck me?” a young woman’s voice asked. It was Emma, Troy’s recon buddy.

“How’d you get my number?”

“I’m very smart,” she said. “Please answer the question.”

“No,” I said. “But trust me, that’s a good thing.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Tell me that you want to fuck me,” she said. “Then I won’t want you to.”

“I’m not going to say that, Emma.”

“Just say yes, then.”

“Yes?”

“There you go,” she said. “I asked you the question in my mind, and you answered affirmatively.”

“Can I ask you a question now?”

“No. I gotta go. But I’m watching you. Even when I’m not watching you.” She was gone before I could ask her about Simon Busansky. The very next time I had a weird exchange with her, I would have to remember to ask. As I put away my phone, I noticed, too, that I didn’t like the idea of her being out there, wherever the hell she was, alone.

When I got back to Bluebird Canyon, MP’s car was gone. It had been replaced by Jeep’s meticulously restored James Bondish Aston Martin. She had keys to my house, and she used them often.

She had already pulled two cigars from the humidor and
taken her spot on the deck in the Adirondack nearer to the side of the hill. I stood beside her and looked out over Laguna. The swells were getting choppy, and the surfers would be pissed off, but there was a nice breeze here in the hills. And Terry was dead and I still couldn’t explain it. Jeep tossed me one of my own Arturo Fuentes. “Give her some time,” she said.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Betsy, not MP. “Have you tried to broker a deal?”

“No brokering on this one. I have to stay out of it.”

“Are all dykes as chickenshit as you?”

“I’m sad she stopped talking to you,” Jeep said, “but I’ll be suicidal if she stops talking to me.”

“I’ve wrung my brain out like a rag. What the fuck did I do?”

“It doesn’t help when you have to explain why beating up a guy named Padilla
wasn’t
a racist act.”

“First of all, I’ve got to figure out if this guy
is
Mexican. I keep forgetting to ask.”

“I think you’re missing my point,” Jeep said.

I drew so deeply from the cigar that I almost inhaled. Unceremoniously, I changed the subject. “Do you think there’s such a thing as a normal person?” I said. “I mean, do you think there are people who walk around without all this baggage?”

Jeep didn’t answer for a minute, just smoked her cigar. Only one of the things I liked about my business partner was that she enjoyed a cigar or two before noon.

“Why do you want to know?” she finally said.

“This guy who it looks like Jean’s going to marry,” I said. “John Sewell? There’s a directness about him that confuses the shit out of me. It’s like he doesn’t feel any conflict about what he wants. And he doesn’t have to ask himself every morning
whether he’s good enough to meet the world. I have no idea what that would be like.”

“Again,” Jeep said, “why do you want to know?”

I looked at her. “Jean doesn’t have a high opinion of my parenting skills, and I’m not sure I disagree. This whole thing with Terry has made me wonder about things. On my best days, I’m kind of a mess. And I worry about Crash.”

Jeep pointed her cigar at me. “If you’re wondering whether this guy Sewell would make a better father than you, that’s bullshit. Maybe he’ll be a good friend to her, but that doesn’t mean a thing about who
you
are to her. There’s nobody on this planet capable of being a better father to that child. And if there is somebody, I’d like to meet him.”

I went inside to brew some coffee. Then I heard the churning engine of the FedEx truck. At my front door, I greeted Max, a big guy with jug ears who had been a champion kayaker in Uzbekistan. He smiled as I signed. The envelope was from Manny.

As soon as I felt it, I knew what it had to be: the recording of the 911 call.

Manny’s handwriting on the FedEx envelope reminded me that we’d been partners for eight years. I knew his handwriting as well as my own. I’d been partners with Jeep for five years; I knew her handwriting pretty well, too. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what Terry’s handwriting looked like.

I walked back out to the deck. “I think I’m ready to work again.”

“Just like that?” Jeep asked. “We don’t have to run an intervention or anything?”

“As much as that might be fun,” I said, “no. But tell me what you think about this: what if I used some of my pseudo-criminal
connections in A.A. to find properties around town that were kind of sketchy? Maybe they had a pot farm in the basement or they were running prostitutes out of the bedrooms, and they needed help cleaning things up. Maybe we’d even get a discount for this consideration. Oh yeah, and then we’d turn them into recovery houses.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re ready to go back to work yet,” Jeep said.

“I’m just talking,” I said. “Generating ideas.”

“You think that’s what Colin Alvarez did with those recovery houses he started?” Jeep said. “And is there even anything wrong with that?”

“Maybe. Do you think that’s doable?”

“And
why
were you thinking about this?”

I didn’t want to answer.

“Does it have something to do with Terry?” she said.

“I hope not,” I said. “Right now I’m just making shit up.”

I slapped the FedEx envelope against my thigh. My twenty-five-dollar cigar suddenly tasted like a dog turd, so I tossed it over the side of the deck.

After Jeep left, I pulled the CD from the FedEx envelope. It glowed in my hand for a full minute before I walked it out of my house toward my truck on the driveway.

I got in, closed the windows, turned on the engine, pushed in the disk, and went for a drive.

The caller hung up.

After listening to the tape five more times, I was certain I would recognize her voice if I ever heard it again. A high voice, a little girlie even. She was a woman, though, not a girl.

Everyone teased me about my Spanish, but I knew what
el padre de mi hijo
meant. And
el recién nacido
felt like a slap in the face. My throat got tight and dry with all I hadn’t known about the people I loved. Apparently, Terry’s biggest dream had come true a few days before he died. My best friend had a son, a newborn, who was now without a father.

As luck would have it, that was the next time I saw Colin Alvarez: right after I finished listening to the 911 recording for the fifth time. I was driving slowly through the oldest shopping district
in Laguna—although every neighborhood was a shopping district now—when I saw him getting into his BMW wagon across the street from the Swedish bakery.

When Colin saw me, I held up my hand, to keep him where he was while I parked in a metered space a few spots down. The baldy hipster was with him. I made a note to get his real name so that I could stop making things worse by thinking of him as “the baldy hipster.” That I got the last open space available in Laguna Beach that morning must have been part of God’s plan. I don’t know why I stopped. Repeated listening to the 911 tape seemed to be underscoring the idea that I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on around me, and this seemed like a good opportunity to apologize for what had been essentially an unprovoked assault. Did that mean that I was ready to call up Sean and tell him to leave off his search for connections between Colin Alvarez and former pot farms? I wasn’t yet that spiritual.

“I’m an asshole,” I called out as I approached them on foot.

“I’m not arguing.” Colin touched his shoulder, which probably hurt like hell.

“Why don’t you stay away from us?” Baldy Hipster said.

“It’s cool, Joachin.”

Joachin? How did I miss “My name is Joachin, and I’m an alcoholic”?

“The precise kind of asshole I am is this,” I said. “I was all freaked out about Terry’s OD, and I had a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, so I followed that guy over to your house and—”

“Got all up in my face,” Colin said. “I’m not good with that. Got a few anger issues myself. Probably could have handled my end of things better, too.”

Joachin looked ready to start in again, but Colin gave him a look, and he backed off, like
You’re the boss
. Despite my reputation as a tough guy, I can’t remember anyone ever quite backing down like that for me.

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“So you think this Mutt Kelly guy was following you around, huh?” Colin stepped up onto the curb and then immediately back off of it. I think he was trying not to be taller than me—which he was—and I had to credit him for this weird bit of thoughtfulness. The sidewalk was busy with skinny women carrying large bags. Both of us were looking down at the concrete as we talked. Colin looked up at me. “Do you know the guy?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. How do
you
know the guy?”

“I told you. He wants a place in one of the recovery homes. I’ve got no problem with scholarships when I can afford them, but I’m not sure how serious he is.”

I looked at Colin, really looked at him. He seemed to be looking at me, too.

“Go ahead,” Colin said. “Ask me anything you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“You came to my house to ask me some questions. I got that. And I’ll answer any questions I can.”

“What was your relationship with Simon Busansky?”

“He sold me my houses.”

“Did you know that Busansky was growing pot under most of those houses?”

Colin smiled. “I said that I would answer some questions. I’m not going to lay out my life story, though, and hope that you can make some trouble from it. I got to be friends with Simon, and I had a sense of how he made money. Was that a condition
of the sale? No. Was I participating in his business? No, I wasn’t. Simon never told me what he was doing, because he’s not stupid. Maybe I guessed, sitting around the backyard bullshitting with him.”

“Why was Simon still hanging out with you after you closed the deal?”

“I guess I thought I could help him,” Colin said. “After a while, it became clear that I couldn’t.”