The Next Right Thing (2 page)

“His father’s in the Mafia,” Wade said. “He’s from New Jersey. He needs a reason?”

Even Wade knew better than to sit down in my Eames chair, so he passed it to stand in front of the window watching the goats across the canyon. Wildfire control: they ate everything on the hill until there was nothing left to burn.

“I think he’s the guy who was with Terry,” Wade said.

“That’s not why he hit you. Once you’ve got Tom and that other bozo defending you, I know it’s a bigger story than that.”

Wade smiled. My friends can get mighty full of shit, but sometimes they’ll drop it if you ask them. While Wade considered how to tell me the truth, I watched Yegua, my Guatemalan laborer/assistant/better half, cross the backyard with a posthole digger.

“Well …” Wade finally said. “I’ve been telling everyone he was the guy with Terry.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“No,” Wade said. “But it makes sense.”

“How does it make sense, Wade? And if it made so much goddamn sense, why didn’t you tell me?”

Wade turned from the goats. “You were too busy hiding out at Jean Claude’s. I thought I’d wait until you showed up at a meeting.”

“Fuck you, Wade.”

Wade stared across the room at the nook where my electronics were stacked. I could feel that MP wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Okay,” I said after a while. “I’ll fix some coffee.”

Wade looked at me. “Rick Buford at the South Coast hospital meeting said that this dude Troy and Terry had been driving around all day, checking out Terry’s old drug neighborhoods. A nostalgia trip. Sometime after the funeral, Troy told Rick how guilty he felt.”

“Feeling guilty doesn’t mean he was with him when he died.”

Wade sat down on the couch. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Rick said Troy told him that Terry fell like a tree, that he’d never seen anyone fall like that. He saw it happen, Randy. Then he must have just bailed. Didn’t even call the fucking paramedics.”

MP set down her protein drink and leaned against the counter. For the first time in forever, I wished that she weren’t in my house.

My sponsor Terry was a big man, about six foot three, with silver hair and a pale youthful face. I’ve had moments when I thought he stood straighter than any man I’d ever known. He’d been off booze and drugs for fifteen years on the night that he
died.
On the night he died from a heroin overdose in a shitty motel room in Santa Ana
.

My friend Terry would have fallen like a tree.

This was what I’d been waiting for. My gift from God. And not the loving God people talked about at meetings but a God, like me, who got pissed off when good men died. I’d been sitting on my ass for three weeks because I needed all my righteous strength and every bad impulse I’d been saving from eight years of sobriety to go kick the shit out of this little prick from New Jersey.

MP walked down the hallway into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

I said, “Let’s go find this asshole.”

The first time I really talked with Terry was over breakfast at Corky’s. He was already hanging with Wade then, although Wade still had one more drunk left. They had invited me to breakfast after the seven
A.M.
meeting at the Coastal Club.

Sometimes people in A.A. will say, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” I don’t think it would have worked on me. At the time I wouldn’t have trusted anyone—besides my SAPD partner, Manny, and my sister—who pretended to love me.

With Terry and Wade, though, it was a totally different deal.

Corky’s was a great place to have breakfast, and I fell right into the food. Terry and Wade talked about people in A.A. whom I didn’t yet know. Mostly I ignored them. I wouldn’t admit that I needed this thing. When they asked me questions, I answered. Terry seemed like the kind of smugly successful attorney I had always hated. And Wade seemed like a tadpole who needed to be
slapped every time he said the word “dude.” Still pretending to be one tough hombre, I let them know early and often that I was a cop.

About halfway through my bacon, cheddar, and avocado omelet, I could feel Terry staring at me. When I met his eyes, he said, “You know, Randy, we don’t hang out with you because we
like
you. We
don’t
like you. Isn’t that right, Wade?”

Wade nodded slowly.

“We hang out with you,” Terry continued, “because it’s head cases like you who keep us sober.”

It was an important moment in my life. I stood up from the table, threw down twenty dollars, and walked out of the restaurant. I think I told them to fuck themselves. Wade said I did, and Terry said I just walked out.

By that night, I knew who my sponsor was going to be.

Halfway to our destination, I realized that I hadn’t even said goodbye to MP.

“It’s not on Temple Hills,” Wade said. “And it’s not on Arroyo Hills.”

“I don’t care, Wade, where it’s
not
.”

Wade looked at me like I was rushing some terribly important process—the composition of a symphony, maybe. His sunglasses were hanging from his neck by one of those Croakie doodads. I pulled them off and threw the doodad out the window.

“You don’t get to wear that anymore.” I tossed back his glasses. “It looks too stupid.”

The asshole Troy Padilla lived in a “recovery home”—words that should be said in quotation marks. People in Alcoholics
Anonymous were always thinking up new scams, and lately the new scam was this: rent a big house and fill it with newcomers who couldn’t pull together a security deposit if they owned a gold mine. Put two of them in each room, invent a bunch of bullshit rules about curfew and house meetings, and you can rake in at least twenty grand a month over the actual rent. At best, it was “stone soup”: the newcomer went to A.A. meetings and didn’t mind getting screwed by some old-timers. At worst, the people who “managed” the houses began to think they actually knew something about recovering from alcoholism.

In Laguna, the scam had been refined a bit, which is often what happens to scams when they reach Laguna. An A.A. member named Colin Alvarez, who’d made a lot of money as a mortgage broker, started a corporation called Recovery Homes Incorporated to administer the houses. Sober just about as long as me, Colin was the kind of guy who, unlike me, didn’t make jokes about A.A. He’d come back from a meth addiction in his early twenties and, also unlike me, didn’t miss many meetings.

What did I know? Maybe the “recovery homes” were the best thing that ever happened to some of these people. Terry used to say that A.A. itself was the biggest scam of them all, but it had failed as a scam, and it had become something better.

“Wait,” Wade said. “It
is
Temple Hills.”

Eventually, Wade steered us to a little ranch house hanging its ass over the side of a hill. This dwelling had absolutely nothing going for it but the fact that it had landed in Laguna Beach. The porcini-mushroom-and-sun-dried-tomato color scheme beneath the shake shingles was the only upscale element in the design. In Tustin or El Toro, it would have cost half of what it did here. I parked my truck pointing down the grade beside the house.

I thumped hard on the front door, which was suburban and hollow-core and made a nice scary sound. A near-teenager with a bare midriff and a pierced navel answered. In my limited experience, these recovery homes existed somewhere on a continuum between a prison and a pajama party. I saw that contradiction in the girl before me. She might have been near the bad end of Laguna Beach High, but something in her eyes was harder than that by a lot. It reminded me that in spite of the affluence surrounding them, some of these kids could be living on the street before the year was out.

“Look who’s here,” she said. “It’s the let’s-drink-too-much-coffee-but-not-smoke-enough-cigarettes-and-still-think-we’re-better-than-everyone-else brigade.”

I was wondering what meeting she knew us from when Wade shouted after a dark-haired kid in his early twenties peeking at us from the end of a long central hallway. The kid ran, and I ran after him. Wade and Pierced Navel followed. At the end of the hallway, in what looked like the kitchen, I saw three more twentysomethings—two boys and another girl—watching us but apparently staying put.

The kid slammed through a door into the garage, but the automatic garage-door opener was taking its sweet time letting him out. I pushed the button to send the door down again and tossed him up against an old Datsun pickup. Troy Padilla featured grungy black hair, baggy pants, and a faux hip-hop uniform that would have been current anywhere but Laguna. He was about five-ten and all worked out, but none of it was real muscle. “Fluffy” was what Terry would have called him. I was probably old enough to be his father, but also very much
not
his father: my still-hanging-in-there blond hair and slow-to-tan
skin came from an entirely different gene pool. I was five inches taller and thirty unfluffy pounds heavier. My nose had been broken enough times to prove that I hadn’t always been smart about who I fought.

The garage door finished closing. I could feel Wade somewhere behind me.

“Were you with him?” I asked.

“You’re talking about Terry now?” the kid said.

“Who the fuck else would I be talking about?”

“I wasn’t with him. Not at the end. I was with him early, when he was looking. We went to the racetrack and a few shopping centers in Santa Ana. But he never found anything. Then he got pissed off and left me at a bar.”

I slowed down my breathing. I checked the garage for blunt instruments that numbnuts might grab for. There wasn’t anything in here but that old Datsun pickup.

“Which bar?” I heard Wade ask behind me. He had his arms across the doorway to keep Pierced Navel out of the garage.

“The TGIF off Orangethorpe.”

“That’s not a fucking bar,” Wade said. “That’s—”

I looked back with steel in my eyes, but Wade wouldn’t stop talking. “No, I’m not going to shut up, Randy. I’m sick of this guy. Tell him how tough your father is, Troy. I never heard of a mafioso with the name Padilla. You’re
so
full of shit.”

I stared at Wade again. This time he got the message.

“Okay,” Wade said. “I’m done.”

I backed away from Troy a little, but I kept my hands up in case he tried to bolt. “How did you know my friend Terry, and how come I don’t know you?”

From behind us, Pierced Navel suddenly pushed Wade in the
chest, but he stood his ground. Then she got really close to him and sniffed him repeatedly, which was, well, very weird.

Troy looked me straight in the eyes. “I loved Terry, the same as you guys.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my fucking life, Troy. So tell me why I should believe you.”

“Everyone knows you, Randy. Just like everyone knew Terry. You guys were like A.A. royal—”

I pushed him back against the Datsun, not enough to hurt him but enough to let him feel how much I wanted to hurt him. “And if you loved him so fucking much,” I said, “why didn’t you call somebody? Why didn’t you call one of us?”

“I had ninety days of sobriety. He was like a god to me. I thought I was just going to snort a little smack. That’s different, right? I thought that was different. I was
insane
. If you guys don’t understand that, who the hell understands that?”

“What Troy’s not saying,” Pierced Navel shouted from behind me, “is that you don’t know him because you haven’t fucking been around. It’s hard to be Mr. A.A. when you don’t go to any fucking A.A. meetings.”

“Crazy girl”—I pointed at her—“you shut the fuck up.” I turned back to Troy. “Did he talk to anyone else while you were with him?”

“He called Claire.”

“Claire Monaco? Why did he call Claire Monaco?”

“It was after midnight,” Troy Padilla sneered. “Why do
you
think he called Claire Monaco?” He made a move to get away.

This time I threw him against the truck hard. “What was this shit about him falling like a tree? Isn’t that what you said? That Terry fell like a tree?”

“That’s the way I imagined it,” Troy said. “He was a big guy. You gonna beat me up because I have an imagination?”