The Next Right Thing (16 page)

“Did Terry ever do any work for you?”

“He wrote a couple of contracts, checked out some deals for me. Me and a lot of other people in A.A., right? I bet you used him for your own stuff.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Let me ask you something else. Did you hear that Mutt was with Terry the night he died?”

I couldn’t see anything in Colin’s eyes except what you might expect: the attention that such a dramatic revelation deserved.

“Terry was with someone?” he asked.

“You didn’t hear that?”

“No,” Colin said. “What makes you think it was Mutt Kelly?”

“Claire Monaco talked to Terry a couple of times during the evening. He told her he was doing a twelfth-step call on Mutt.”

I didn’t say anything more, just watched his eyes. He smiled. “That seems like a good match, actually.”

“I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I know him enough to know that Terry would have been good for him.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so good for Terry,” I said.

“I’ve got nothing to hide, Randy. And I’d rather that you and I were friends.”

“What about the pornography?”

Colin’s eyes flashed angry, which I guess I understood. Or at least in the context of this conversation, I didn’t feel like holding it against him.

“I’m sorry if I sound like a cop,” I said. “I know how far you’re extending yourself in my direction, and I appreciate it. I gotta ask because I just heard about it. It’s another cluster in this clusterfuck, and I want to find out what it had to do with Terry. I heard that Simon Busansky used to make porn movies and that he might have made some in your houses. Did he ever mention that while you were bullshitting in the backyard?”

Colin looked off down Forest Avenue. He looked back at Joachin, who seemed to be chewing his teeth. When he met my eyes again, he was less angry. “I’m checking into that, too. I just heard about it myself. I’m embarrassed that it seems to have happened on my watch, but I don’t know anything else. Can I get back to you?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m sorry about your shoulder, by the way.”

“No, you’re not.” He smiled.

“How do you figure? You don’t think I’m capable of remorse?”

“It was my bad,” Colin said. “I came after you, and you were entitled to everything that happened after that. Enjoy the moment of guilt-free violence. I don’t think you’re going to get another one.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and it sort of sounded like a threat, but I figured he was entitled to that, too.

YOU’D THINK I’D BE ALL MR. SPIRITUAL
after making amends to Colin Alvarez and finding out my dead best friend had a son, but no, not really. Because the first thing I did once I got home was put on a blue Armani blazer that no cop with the possible exception of William Bratton would ever wear. I slipped my retirement badge and ID into the breast pocket and practiced a couple of times pulling it out while covering the word “retired” right there in the middle. If I were going for veracity, I would have strapped on my gun, too, but I was a little too proud of the fact that for eight years it hadn’t left the lock box at my shop. The buttoned sport coat, I told myself, should do the trick. I printed up a list of hospitals in the areas of both the 911 call and the motel where Terry had died. Impersonating an active police officer
was a federal crime, but I couldn’t ask Manny or Sean for help. This one was mine.

Twenty years ago, you could find out almost anything by flashing a badge. After Rodney King and O.J., even uniformed police officers weren’t as authoritative as they used to be.

Imagining who could be most easily bullied, I started with the hospital receptionists. But the receptionists had been apprised of California state law.

“Thought you’d save yourself some time?” said the redhead at Western Medical Center whose smock was covered with dancing Grateful Dead bears. “You know you need a subpoena for that information.”

It was maddening, as anyone at the right hospital with a computer could have told me: Had Terry been here? Who gave birth to his child? Where did she live?

It was way past lunchtime, and I was getting cranky with my lack of progress. After three hospitals and one compliment to my tailor, I was about to take off my sport coat when I found myself standing next to a smoker outside the revolving doors of St. Joseph’s. A skinny white guy in a green smock, he sucked so fiercely that his ash grew at a visible rate.

“You’re not a cop,” he said.

I smiled, kept my mouth shut. His real audience had been the attractive young African-American woman wearing a denim cowboy shirt. There were several more smokers near the revolving door. Everyone got a good look at me and my Armani jacket. I cranked up my smiling but malevolent stare. Only then I noticed what my police training had initially missed: the plastic wristband that identified him as a patient. My A.A. training, at least, kicked in: the furious smoking suggested inpatient detox.

I shoved into his face the picture of Terry from the memorial. The crowd of smokers drew away. “Have you seen this man? What’s
your
name?”

Between glances at my hard eyes, he checked the picture. The woman in the cowboy shirt shook her head, daintily placed her cigarette in the ashtray beside the revolving door, then went inside. Deprived of his muse, the cigarette addict’s nerves twisted tighter. Pulling out a notepad, I danced toward the not completely unlikely possibility that this guy and Terry had found each other at some point. He shook his head.

“I asked
you
what
your
name was,” I said.

Another voice spoke up behind me. “Can I help you?”

This man, too, was dressed in scrubs, but he was too healthy-looking for a detoxing addict. Maybe a nurse, probably a doctor. Clean teeth, bright skin—he looked me in the eye.

Cigarette Addict beat it back to the rehab, where people wouldn’t shove pictures in his face.

“Are you trying to hurt him or help him?” The guy pointed with an unlit cigarette toward Terry’s photo.

“He’s dead. I’m looking into what happened. May I ask your name?”

As he lit up, we stepped onto a grassy median between the parking lot and the emergency-vehicle lane, away from the other smokers.

“If you stop trying to intimidate me, I’ll try to help you, but I’m not going to tell you my name.” He smoked, but not desperately.

I nodded.

“You were a friend of his?”

I nodded again.

“Is that a yes?” he said. “You wouldn’t have taken that answer from the poor kid you were browbeating.”

“That was a yes.”

“What kind of cop are you? I don’t need your name, but I like to know who I’m talking to.”

“I’m not a cop. At least not in a long time.” I pulled out my retirement badge, pointed to the word “retired” on the ID. “He was my friend.”

After a long moment, the man said, “The mother had a hard labor, and he didn’t take it well. He started cussing out the nurses. He asked the attending where he’d learned how to butcher pregnant women. They got him to calm down for a little while, but then it got worse: he started punching his thighs, as hard as he could. I worried that he was delusional or detoxing, so I pulled him outside to chat.”

“To diagnose him, you mean?”

“No, I mean to chat. I asked if he was taking drugs. He laughed, said he was fifteen years clean. Talking about it, he started to chill out. I bought him a cup of coffee. Are you his business partner?”

“No. Did he talk about a business partner?”

“I guess that’s good. He said his business partner was a nightmare, and he hoped he hadn’t figured it out too late.”

“Did he say this man’s name?”

“Nope. At first he wouldn’t even talk about his girlfriend. Later, he told me that he loved her more than any woman he’d ever known.”

“When was this?” I asked. “What day?”

“It must have been, yeah, May ninth, a Sunday, around four
P.M.
, because I got off at six.”

“You sure about that date?”

“I’m good with dates.”

“You must have been a really good listener, too.”

That didn’t come out the way I had planned, and the doctor—or whoever he was—crouched down to grind his ash into the curb below us. He’d had enough of my shit. He didn’t toss the cigarette, though; he would put it in the ashtray beside the door like a good citizen.

“He needed to talk. That’s all I have for you.”

We stood back to let an EMS truck pass. It had become a bright afternoon. The sky was stark blue, and it gave the hospital above us a hard edge. I suddenly wished I weren’t such an asshole. It was a familiar wish.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but it sounds like you have some experience with guys like my friend.”

He looked at me and took time before he answered. “My boyfriend was addicted to Vicodin, but he’s been clean in Narcotics Anonymous for three years. My ex-wife was a cocaine addict. My dad was a vicious drunk. I have three brothers and one sister, and each of them explains to me—unsolicited, at least three times a year—why they
don’t
have a drinking problem.”

I asked my last questions into the grass. “How did it end? Was the baby okay? Was my friend okay once the baby was delivered?”

“My shift was over, and I went back home. At that point, mother and baby were fine. When I checked in the next day, I heard that the father had lost it again, and the attending had prescribed him some Valium. Wouldn’t have been my call. I found out later, though, that your friend refused the Valium. It’s weird, but I was proud of him.”

“You helped him,” I said.

He checked for sarcasm and didn’t find any. As I shook his hand, I asked him if he might see his way clear to helping me find the mother. He took a deep breath and sighed. “I can do that,” he said. “I believe your intentions are good.”

I laughed. “Best not to get into my intentions,” I said. “But they’re good as far as she’s concerned. I want to do what I can for her and the little boy.”

“Do you think it’s weird,” he asked, “that I can remember her name right now?”

“Why would I think that’s weird?”

“I don’t usually take this kind of interest,” he said, “but I had it in my mind to call your friend sometime, see how he was doing. What happened? How did he die?”

“Heroin overdose,” I said. “Less than two days after you talked to him.”

“Jesus.”

We looked at each other for a moment, long enough for me to see a weariness in his eyes that I might have missed. Maybe he was seeing the same weariness in mine. I shook his hand again and thanked him for reaching out to a stranger in trouble.

“Who are we talking about now?” he said. “You?”

CATALINA ACUÑA WAS THE MANAGER
of an apartment building on Flower Street that was currently for sale. The address was five blocks from where the 911 call had been made. It was a two-story stucco building with a row of carports under the second story. The carports were behind a security gate.

I’d made plans for a late lunch with MP, which I’d forgotten until the first time she called me, at two-fifteen. I let the call bounce to voice mail. I was going to text her back, but by two-thirty, I’d already let her second call bounce to voice mail. I spent that whole time staring at the building where I thought I might find Terry’s son.

Ms. Acuña’s apartment building was down the street from an elementary school. When the kids started walking past my truck at three, wearing gray slacks and white shirts, plaid skirts and
white blouses, I figured I had to do something. I got out and opened the toolbox behind my cab. When that felt stupid, I screwed up my courage to cross the street. That was when my phone rang again. It wasn’t MP this time. It was Sean calling with an address and a name: Thomas, aka “Mutt,” Kelly.

I’m a coward. I prefer physical pain to emotional pain. I returned to my truck and drove back toward Laguna. God forgive me, but confronting the guy who had been with Terry that last night was infinitely less terrifying than meeting the woman and child whom Terry had left behind.