The Next Right Thing (17 page)

Mutt Kelly’s address was in Canyon Acres. If there was a wrong side of the tracks in Laguna Beach—and no one in the rest of the United States would argue there was—Canyon Acres would be it. Somehow my righteous anger that had been brewing for Mutt Kelly got conflated with the anger I felt at bad architecture. I not only wanted to throttle the guy who’d been parked in front of my house, I wanted to burn down his neighborhood, too. I found exactly the shitty little bungalow I had imagined: a two-bedroom rental that was standing only because someone was too stupid or lazy to tear it down. It would have had vinyl siding, but the city of Laguna Beach confiscates that stuff at the border.

I knocked hard on the door. As he opened it, Mutt Kelly didn’t seem to recognize me. He almost looked like he wanted to know how he could help me, though he didn’t say it like that.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“I want to know why you’ve been jerking off in front of my house,” I said. Then I kicked the door open into his forearm. It made a popping noise as it dislodged the sawed-off baseball bat
he’d been hiding: the kind of half-assed weapon that a teenager stashes under the seat of his ten-year-old SUV.

Mutt’s arm wasn’t broken, but it must have hurt like hell. He backed up, holding it, until he tripped on a Formica coffee table. On the couch behind the table, I saw a leather jacket with the initials “
A.C.M.C.
” “
M.C.
” stood for “motorcycle club,” which often meant “gang,” which brought back plenty of bad memories from my tenure as a police officer in Santa Ana. Now I was really mad.

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t care why you’ve been jerking off in front of my house. I’m here to beat the shit out of you. When you wake up from your coma, we’ll talk. While you’re sleeping, I’m going to kill everyone you know.”

He kept backing up and I kept walking toward him, getting into the groove.

“I didn’t do anything to your asshole friend Terry,” Mutt shouted. “You can’t blame me for that.”

Had I said anything about my “asshole friend Terry”?

The next thing Mutt saw was his Formica coffee table—an American piece of furniture if ever there was one—as it slammed into his good arm and took a nice chunk out of the drywall behind him.

Once he’d bounced off the wall, Mutt rallied himself into some kind of half-assed boxer’s stance. I got into my own half-assed boxer’s stance and feinted a few punches, which he avoided pretty easily. He suddenly didn’t look so ridiculous. When he caught the side of my head with a left hook, I decided it was time to let my rage find its form. I threw my right shoulder into his chest and launched him into the wall. He was tougher than I had thought, but he wasn’t going to be tougher than me.

At some point, Officer Sean Wakefield entered the house. As I threw myself toward the job of pounding Mutt Kelly’s face into a pulp, Sean announced himself in that voice you learn your first month on patrol. He called my name like he was dragging me by the collar back out of a room. He was in uniform, too, which meant more to me than I would have imagined. Standing there, his hands on his hips, he might as well have been modeling a sweatshirt that said
IMPULSE CONTROL
across the front. If I had thought I was in charge of my own actions, Sean had arrived to tell me I was wrong. Throughout my assault on Mutt Kelly, I had been shouting. Which was news to me until Sean entered the house and I started to hear myself.

“Were you with him?” I continued to shout. “Did you get him the fucking dope?”

“Randy!” Sean commanded from behind me.

“I didn’t do anything,” Mutt yelled at Sean as much as me. “I hung out with him sometimes. And
that’s fucking it
.”

“Randy!”
Sean barked even louder this time. “I need you to back the fuck up and come outside with me.”

Mutt Kelly put his hands down as I backed away. He had been tougher than I thought, but he looked relieved that the fight was over. Then Sean actually grabbed me by the collar and backed me out of the house.

Terry and I used to talk about that sweet moment of repose after you’ve almost destroyed your life. That’s exactly how I felt when Sean returned to the cruiser where he’d parked my ass ten minutes earlier. Jackson Browne sang softly from the laptop mounted between us. While I’d been marinating in the car, Sean
had convinced Mutt that the episode would not repeat itself, and Mutt had agreed to forget about it. I was already incredibly calm, which was S.O.P. after I’d done something really stupid. When Sean had shown up, I had been about to do what I’d never done even as a bad cop: beat a confession out of a suspect. Sean knew it, which was probably why he had asked Jackson to wait with me.

“Does your supervisor know that you have an iPod hooked up to your computer?” I asked when Sean got back in the car. “Does your supervisor know that you listen to Jackson Browne?”

Sean shook his head, took a deep breath. “This morning”—he checked something on his laptop but made no move to turn down the music—“I kept thinking you were going to say something, but you didn’t. And now I can’t help wondering if I should go back to meetings.”

“You came here because you want to go to a meeting?” I said.

“No.” Sean smiled. “I came here because as soon as I hung up the phone, I had an awful feeling you were going to come over here to beat that guy up. But I’m thinking about going to a meeting, too.”

“He was just getting his boxing lesson.”

“Which is lucky for you, because if he had filed a complaint, I would have had to arrest you. Now that I’m also trying to get sober again, I would have had to tell someone about our conversation at Brook Street, too. Rigorous honesty, right?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you would have talked to me first.”

“And then I would have had to tell somebody. You can’t drive around beating the shit out of people.”

I watched Sean and realized something profound: he was a cop and I wasn’t. I sometimes thought of myself as a cop, but
that was me lying to myself again. Sean felt that he owed me something, though it had nothing to do with my being a cop.

“I didn’t beat him up,” I said. “Write that down somewhere.”

“This is the point,” Sean said. “I’m not writing
anything
down. Unless you give me no choice. Why didn’t you tell me you thought this guy was with Terry that night?”

“Did he tell you whether he was with Terry that last night?”

“He claims he wasn’t,” Sean said. “Who knows? I don’t think he’s the guy you want to blame, though. You’re trying to make sense of this, and I just don’t think it’s ever going to make sense.”

“Why was this Charlie Manson wannabe parked outside of my house? He’s in some outfit with the initials
A.C.M.C
. Who is that? The Ass Clowns?”

Sean gave me a look.

“You think I’m making this shit up?”

“I think you’re angry. Which is understandable, because Terry was your best friend. I think this Mutt Kelly has done a lot of stupid things in his life—his sheet includes car theft and drug dealing—and parking in front of your house so he can steal your computer or catch a peek at your girlfriend wouldn’t even make the middle of the list. And
A.C.M.C
. is a gang called the Aryan Comanches. Even their name is a joke. They’re too stupid to understand that it’s a contradiction in terms.”

“Why did this guy start talking about Terry the moment I walked in the door? I never said anything about Terry.”

“He says Terry was trying to help him pull his head out of his ass. Terry did that from time to time, you know. Maybe he had talked to him about you. How many meetings in the last few weeks would this guy have to attend before he heard about the
legendary Terry Elias, his tragic death, and his avenging ex-cop sponsee Randy Chalmers? Like, maybe, one?”

“I just don’t get it, Sean. I know Terry wasn’t perfect, but I don’t see him in Santa Ana with a guy like this in the middle of the night.”

“Then maybe the guy wasn’t there.”

Sean looked at me with, what? Pity?

“Look,” he said, “will you promise to stop assaulting people within the jurisdiction of Laguna Beach if I tell you what I found out?”

“Yes,” I said. “I promise.” I needed to wonder at some point what my promises were worth. At some point.

“You were right that Colin Alvarez not only bought his home from Simon Busansky, he also bought that other address you gave me, and three other homes, all of which are now recovery houses. This was just about the time when Busansky made a deal with us. We took a ton of cash from him, but we let him sell his houses.”

“Is that a fancy way of saying he became an informant?”

“More or less,” Sean said. “He became the go-to guy for understanding marijuana cultivation in the South County. He’s a real talker. The DEA guys who know him seem to like him. But there’s something else: Terry brokered that deal for Busansky, like he brokered the deal for Wade.”

“You’re saying this had become a regular business for Terry? Making deals between the growers and the DEA? How come I never heard about it?”

“Maybe he didn’t want you to judge him,” Sean said, “the way you’re judging him right now?”

“But if he was making all this money,” I said, “why did he need to borrow fifty grand from me?”

“You loaned Terry fifty grand?”

“Forget about that part,” I said. “Do you know where Busansky is? And before you say it, I’m not going to roust him.”

“Funny you should ask,” Sean said. “Busansky had been in pretty good touch with my DEA guys, schooling them regularly on the ways of shady characters like himself. About a month ago, he dropped off the radar, and they can’t find him anywhere. I think they miss him.”

“They think he’s dead?”

Sean reached into the backseat for his notes. “A history of drinking and drugs, a shitload of connection to marginal criminal activity, solo trips to Mexico every month or so. He’s been producing small-time porn forever. Hey, he started out writing for
Hustler
. That was the high point of his life besides his brief career as a hydroponic kingpin. He could be decomposing in a
barranca
. Another OD. More likely, he’s just living the same life somewhere else.”

So: now I knew why it had taken so long to get anything from Wade. If Terry was connected to whatever was going on in those recovery houses, if he was connected to this clown Simon Busansky and the girls “making movies,” it had been Wade’s hydroponic adventure that had connected him. Terry had helped Wade out with the pot bust, and in exchange, Wade had introduced him to a new income stream. And maybe set him on the path to something much worse.

WHEN WADE DIDN’T PICK UP
his phone, I drove by his apartment three times. I checked in to each of his favorite restaurants at least once. I even cruised the parking lot of the Coastal Club. No Wade.

I returned home to change my clothes. Just as I was taking off my federal-law-breaking Armani sport coat, I noticed most of MP’s wardrobe stacked and neatly folded along the edge of our bed. My girlfriend did this kind of thing all the time: some people get sober and become Oscar, and others become Felix. When I caught MP attacking the grout in our bathtub one afternoon with an electric toothbrush, I hired Yegua’s girlfriend to clean our house. Did I need to know that MP had a system for organizing in which brown sweaters were always closer to the top than navy sweaters? She was probably just reorganizing her closet.

The sight of my kitchen reminded me that I was extraordinarily hungry, and the clock on the microwave told me why: it was nearly seven o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten since … well, I just hadn’t eaten. Time flies when you’re obsessed with hydroponic pot farms and amateur pornography and why the fuck your dead friends are involved with either of these things. It was only when I opened a ginger ale that I noticed the juicer was gone. I could explain that, too: sometimes MP and her yoga friends had antioxidant parties.

I sat down in my Eames chair and watched the dusk settle into the canyons behind my house, and I had almost made myself forget about the neatly folded clothes when I heard a car cresting the driveway. I went outside to see MP in a Volvo station wagon with
ALL PEOPLE YOGA
painted on the side. It was the company car for the studio where MP worked. She switched it off and set the parking brake. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t not crying. I crouched beside her window and touched her shoulder. I didn’t have to ask whether she’d heard about last night and Colin Alvarez. I didn’t have to ask whether I had remembered to call her back.