The Next Right Thing (25 page)

The boys looked like they’d been smacked by a fistful of quarters. It was the kind of stunt that would have made Betsy such a great detective herself. Mr. Ambassador? Who knew if there was anyone on the other end of the line? But I wasn’t betting against it, and neither were Cardenas and Clancy.

“Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet my sister, former Assistant United States Attorney Elizabeth Chalmers.”

They walked out my front door as though they’d been dismissed.

After the cops left and I’d had a chance to explain myself, Betsy started throwing books across the room. Phaedon architecture books, the expensive kind. “Jesus Christ, Randy. How many ways can I say this? You’re going to lose access to your own daughter. They’re going to charge you with murder.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m not as—”

Hearing the bedroom door open, we turned to find Troy standing barefoot in the hallway, a pair of headphones hanging around his neck. “Can I come out now?”

“No,” I said. “Go back to your room.”

When Troy turned dramatically back to Crash’s bedroom, Betsy said, “That’s your alibi? A kid who asks your permission to leave a room? Could this be any more pathetic?”

“Why are you even here?” I said. “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

“I still have friends in government,” she said. “I got a call that this investigation was about to land on you.”

“They can’t prove any of it. I wasn’t involved.”

“Would you please pull your head out of your ass?” she said. “These people don’t have to convict you to destroy your life.”

“I’m innocent. And Terry couldn’t have been party to fucking drug dealing. I gotta believe that. Besides, I’ve got another problem.”

Betsy was already scrolling through the numbers on her phone. “These guys are going to arraign you. We needed pricey counsel about a month ago. What other problem?”

“On the softball field, in front of Crash, I broke John Sewell’s nose.”

It looked like Betsy was going to continue scrolling, but then she threw the phone against the kitchen wall. It didn’t do anything satisfying, like shatter. In fact, it bounced all the way back to her cowboy boots. She picked it up and tossed it on the breakfast bar.

“And I don’t want pricey counsel,” I said. “I want you.”

“What is this, a fucking Lifetime movie? I’m not an attorney anymore, and frankly, you disgust me. You hit a man who’s going to become Crash’s stepfather? A judge?” Betsy put her face in her hands and turned away.

I put one arm around her shoulders and gently turned her back toward me. “I’m not asking for me,” I said. “I’m asking for
Crash. Someone needs to look out for her, and maybe you’ll have to jettison me in order to do that. You’re the only person I trust, and you’re the only attorney I know who’s smart enough to untangle the mess I’ve created.”

Betsy looked at me sternly for a long time, and then her sternness melted. She picked up her phone from the counter and sat down cross-legged on the tiled kitchen floor. I sat down beside her, and neither of us spoke for a while. She held my hand while my heart pounded and the refrigerator hummed.

My sister often hated me, but she would always help me when I asked her. I needed that kind of person in my life, or I wouldn’t survive. Wade, Jeep, Manny—I still had a fortune in friends who would drop everything to help me. But what about me? Who would call me? After what had happened today, would Crash ever call me again? Why didn’t Terry call me when he could have? I would have sworn that he could call me, but he didn’t.

Mutt Kelly had been found dead with my phone number in his pocket.

AT A CERTAIN POINT,
Betsy had to embark on her efforts to prevent law enforcement from destroying my life. She made me promise that I wouldn’t leave the house until she returned. To get Troy out of my hair, I offered him the keys to MP’s Volkswagen and a couple hundred dollars to go fix up his computer.

“I don’t feel good about Emma being out there,” he said.

“What do you want me to do, Troy?”

“I want you to find her.”

“Give me a minute, Troy. Just give me a few minutes.”

Troy went back to the bedroom, and I sat down in my Eames chair and commenced to think about why Mutt Kelly might need my help. The longer I sat with it, the more certain I was that he’d wanted to talk to me. At some point, I’d have to deal
with the insanity of my assaulting him at his house, but that was later. Right now I needed to know what he’d had to say.

What did I know about Mutt Kelly? I knew that he’d worked for John Sewell. As much as I hated Sewell, I couldn’t connect him to this foolishness. Whatever his faults, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would think growing weed under recovery houses was a good idea.

Whoever was behind this stupidity—and my heart begged that it wasn’t Terry—would need an electrician, and that’s what Mutt was. There was nobody more important to the success of a grow-op. All those lamps needed a lot of juice, and it went a long way toward avoiding arrest if you could keep the juice off the grid. In other words, find a way to steal it. A good electrician could probably help you hide your operation from the inhabitants of the recovery houses, too. That was it, I thought—Mutt was the guy who stole the electricity.

I wanted to go somewhere with this information, but where? It wouldn’t change anyone’s opinion of me or my behavior. The cops thought I was living a lie. I couldn’t help imagining Terry, what it must have been like for him to be telling those kids upstairs how to stay sober while he was making money off the pot growing under the floorboards. Was that what happened? Was that the beginning of the road that ended in the motel room in Santa Ana?

I remembered how Troy had described Terry, parked outside the recovery home the night he died. Troy was right: Terry wasn’t a sit-in-the-car kind of guy. He was always moving forward. What had stopped him from moving forward that night? Maybe he was stuck between those competing truths—what was
going on above the floor and what was going on below it—and he couldn’t get to the next thing in his life. The next thing in his life was, of course, his son. The son whom he never saw. Terry told me once that any animal will get depressed if you can keep it from taking action. What kept him from taking action? I had to know.

Not for the first time in my life, I broke a promise to my sister, Betsy. I got in my truck and drove up the hill.

When I drove my truck past Troy’s recovery house, I couldn’t find any evidence that the cops were nearby. I could only assume they’d already been here. I slowed at the place on the street where Terry would have parked his car. This gave me a good view of the backside of the house, which was supported by concrete piers over the canyon. It was a good time to be visiting the house: most of its inhabitants would be at the very young and very popular South Coast Hospital Beginners’ Meeting.

I parked my truck well down the street and cut across the hillside between two houses a few hundred yards away. I scrambled up toward the back end of the recovery home. Before leaving the truck, I’d thought to grab a carpenter’s belt and some work gloves so I didn’t look too much like a criminal sneaking up on the house.

There was an access door underneath the concrete piers. It had been freshly painted, and I removed the overused screws that held it in place. Someone had gone to the trouble of building another floor below the house by digging into the hillside and framing a platform. That same someone had been very careful
about sealing it off: it took me five minutes to remove the access door.

Once I was inside, I saw that this was no dead-space storage. The subfloor was heavy-duty, much more than would have been necessary for old surfboards and Christmas lights. Just the thing, though, for several hundred five-gallon pots full of dirt and fertilizer. Nothing like that was there now. Maybe the cops took it. There was a lot of loose wire around. Growing marijuana without sunlight required a lot of wire.

It sure looked like a suburban pot farm to me. And it looked like someone had cleared up in a hurry. I tried to locate where the power main would have entered the house, and sure enough, close to the top of the slope, I saw the shiny two-inch galvanized conduit coming up from the ground. There was a large section of loose dirt below the vertical pipe, but the visible section of the conduit was unmarked. It was a felony all by itself to steal electricity, and whoever rigged this would have dug down at least four feet to make sure they could bury the evidence of tampering.

Whoever rigged this. I reminded myself that I knew who rigged this. I had to give it to Mutt Kelly: it took huge balls to tamper with the six hundred amps of unregulated power that was coming into that house. And there was no circuit breaker between the meter and the transformer that serviced the whole block. It was like a fire hose pouring into a straw, and even power-company cowboys with gloves and insulated tools wouldn’t do a live-wire bite unless they were in a fiberglass bucket on the end of a manlift. You could get killed even if you didn’t make a mistake.

So I approached that mound of dirt very carefully, and that was when things got weird.

Basements are stinky, right? You can’t expect to crawl up the ass of someone’s house and have it smell like flowers, but as I crouch-walked closer to the conduit, I started to puke before I even recognized why I was puking.

You never forget the smell of a dead body, even when it’s making its way up through four feet of dirt. Even as a cop, I never got used to it. This time my understanding was so complete and awful that I stood up and hit my head on the two-by-twelve above me. And then I puked a little more. And then I got out of that fucking basement.

It could have been a dead animal down there, but I knew it wasn’t—not with all the care that had been taken to seal the space. There was almost enough dirt to contain the smell, but not quite. I could have dug deeper and found out more, but there was no way I was going back into that basement and no way I was going to dig anywhere near that bite.

Marijuana farming is a victimless crime. Until it isn’t anymore.

A moment to breathe fresh air and pull myself together would have been nice, but once I got back outside I understood that the cops hadn’t been here yet—if they had they would have checked under the house, too, and they would have already found the body. Sure enough, as I picked myself up to head back to my truck, I heard a huge crash near the front of the house. I imagined what a battering ram would sound like, splintering that hollow-core door off its frame. Bingo. As I cautiously looked around the side of the house, I heard the screeching arrival of
about five cars up the driveway. Cops can be such drama queens: can’t they brake without shredding their tires?

With all the commotion, there was no way to saunter down the street toward my F-350, so I started to make my way across the canyon. Scrambling down barren hillside on a rocky path that I hoped would find a road, I came upon, of all things, a flock of goats, probably the same ones that had been my entertainment three mornings ago over at my place. Wondering at the denuded landscape that these guys had left behind, I took too long to recognize Sean Wakefield, wearing a Kevlar vest, emerging from the ravine below the goats. I waved hello while the sensibly wary goats spread across the hillside away from us. Sean spoke quietly into a walkie-talkie that he then replaced on his vest. Instinctively, I kept both my hands out where he could see them. Still, I couldn’t quite believe it when he drew his gun.