The Next Right Thing (3 page)

Troy’s face started to cloud. He reminded me of the tough guy in high school, which was to say not tough at all. I noticed, however, that I believed him.

“I figured Terry knew what he was doing.” Troy started to cry. “Didn’t Terry always look like he knew what he was doing?”

Troy’s jaw began to shake, and Pierced Navel went apeshit. She kneed Wade in the groin and pushed past him into the garage. She slapped my face—hard—but her assault didn’t seem to have any purpose other than to focus my attention. Which it did.

“Do I
know
you?” I said.

“You should. Because assholes like you have been stepping on my feet and ramming pencils up my nose since before I knew what feet and pencils were. You’ve got a big fucking truck where your soul should be, and you want to drive it over someone, but you can’t because it’s encased in flesh and you would die if you tried. Fuck you, fuck you both.”

She swung back to slap me again, but Wade had by then recovered from her knee, and he got himself around her pretty good. She couldn’t do much but thrash and spit.

Wanting to punch someone so badly that I thought my heart would seize if I didn’t, I got right into Troy’s face. “I think you were there,” I said. “I think you were there and you were too chickenshit to call the paramedics.”

“I think you feel guilty,” Troy whined. “And you’re taking it out on me.”

I don’t know if I would have hit him or not, because two things happened at once: a dark stain grew from Troy’s crotch,
and shame spread through his face. The smell of urine filled the garage. As I backed away, the rage settled down inside me. I pushed Wade through the door with a hand that was no longer a fist. Pierced Navel followed us to the front door, screaming. “I don’t care how many A.A. enemas they stick up your ass, you’re still just a cracker with a badge!” She looked familiar, like I’d seen her regularly in some other life. And by the time Wade closed the front door on her and she didn’t open it back up, she seemed almost as young as my daughter.

As my truck slammed down Temple Hills, I wanted to puke from the adrenalin. I felt like the first time I beat up someone in a bar with my nightstick. My training officer had stopped at the door and tipped his hat, and I got that this was my little hazing. As the guy came after me—a big crew cut with swollen eyes—I would have sworn that I didn’t need the nightstick, but apparently, the nightstick needed him. It wanted his knees and then his kidney.

My cell phone startled me. The world of wanting to smack some guy from New Jersey shouldn’t have cell phones. It was Jeep Mooney, my business partner.

“Wade and I are on our way to your place,” I said.

“You’ve been avoiding me for weeks,” she said.

“Two minutes.” I flipped the phone closed.

Although she now lived with my sister, Betsy—in the biblical sense—I’d met Jeep in A.A. She’d been agitating for my return to work since the day after the funeral.

When we showed up, she was standing on her driveway. “It’s Punch and Judy.”

Wade looked at me. “You’re Punch,” I said. “I’m Judy.” Someone from the seven
A.M.
meeting must have called Jeep about Wade’s earlier encounter, but there was no way she could know about Troy Padilla and me. Yet.

Jeep was wearing a slate-blue suit over a white blouse. About an inch taller than me, she was stick-thin and regal as a queen. A once-upon-a-time debutante, she’d been spared the upper reaches of Orange County society by her Roman nose and cartoonishly bulging eyes, which weren’t most people’s idea of beautiful. She wouldn’t say exactly how she got the name Jeep, but I bet it was a taunt she transcended.

As Wade headed for Betsy’s office—lots of new toys there—I walked with Jeep through the backyard.

“Have you darkened the door of an A.A. meeting since Terry’s funeral?” Jeep said.

“Did that guy drop off those pavers?” I squinted as though I were calculating material costs.

Jeep stopped walking. “Have
you
punched anyone yet?”

I told myself again there was no way she could know about Troy Padilla. “Who told you about Wade?” I asked.

“I’m everyone’s den mother this week,” she said. “Yours, too. You look like shit.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I
feel
worse.”

We stood near the edge of my sister’s carp pond. We had both argued strenuously against it. But without Betsy’s carp pond, we wouldn’t have bisected the yard with a tight little man-made stream, exactly four inches across, which fed the carp pond. That got us into
Dwell
magazine.

“Am I here to look at something? Or is this where you take people when you want to ram some recovery up their ass?”

“The answer to both questions is yes,” Jeep said. “You should get back to work. You’re going to need money for this custody thing.”

“Betsy said that Jean has to give me what I want.”

“She also said that any time you walk into a courtroom—”

“Besides”—I held up my hand—“I’ve got fifty thousand out there somewhere.”

About six months before, Terry had asked me for fifty thousand dollars, to be paid back within a year. I had it, so I gave it to him. Still, it was a lot. Terry was sometimes reckless with money, but he would have gotten it back to me eventually.

“Oh, Christ,” Jeep said. “The money you loaned Terry is gone. Come back to work, and we could make that on just one job.”

“Maybe I want to fly solo and I don’t have the balls to tell you.”

“Balls aren’t your problem,” Jeep said. “Your brain’s too big for the inside of your skull.
That’s
your problem. You need to build something, relieve the pressure.”

I laughed. “When did you start quoting Terry?”

“He had
your
number,” Jeep said. “I’ll give him that.”

“But?”

“No but.”

I looked at the back of the house. The balustrade was thick with jasmine. In another lifetime, Betsy’s home was a faux Tudor-ranch style, as ugly as pink concrete. Now it had a second floor and a fucking carp pond.

“Okay, then,” I said. “What does she want now?”

“An extended balcony.”

“An extended balcony?”

“You want me to define the term for you? Yes, an extended balcony.”

“Tell me what comes after the ‘but’ that you claim wasn’t there. Then I’ll dish about the extended balcony.”

Jeep set her hands on her hips. “You know he wasn’t always such a good role model. He cut corners.”

“He cheated on his taxes. The IRS slapped him around,” I said. “Big deal. You know many lawyers who aren’t a little crooked? For that matter, you know anyone in A.A. who’s not a criminal at heart?”

“Me,” Jeep said. “I’m not a criminal at heart.”

“Which costs us money every time we do a deal. Listen—why does Betsy’s brain always reach for the first cliché it can find? A patio would work. A lap pool that goes all the way into the trees would work. But an extended balcony? I’m still not sure we did the right thing adding a second floor. Let’s not push it. This won’t be a balcony; this will be an invitation to musical theater.”

“Oh …” Jeep shook her head fiercely. “You can be such a
schmuck
.”

She stomped across our high-tech stream toward the house. I followed her into the kitchen where Betsy and Wade were sipping from bright ceramic mugs. They stopped talking when I came in. Jeep pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the freezer. “He thinks it’s a stupid idea,” she said.

Wade lifted his mug. “Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, dude.”

“For him”—Betsy pointed at me—“we’ve got Folgers.”

My sister is the most beautiful lesbian in the history of Laguna Beach. Ask anyone. Long brown hair, olive skin, green eyes
that make you forget you’ve seen green eyes before. As she pushed back her reading glasses, her contempt for me seemed sharper than usual. I poured myself a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain just to spite her.

She didn’t meet my eyes, which was a bad sign. Then again, it didn’t take much to piss off Betsy lately. I noticed her iPhone was out on the table. News of my behavior was often where the journey to being pissed off began.

Betsy used to prosecute hate crimes for the U.S. attorney. Somewhere along her trajectory, she took the advice of her Stanford pals and invested in social networking sites. She was soon able to quit her “codependent relationship with the government” to become a woman of passionate interests: like improving her already much improved house, like the huge model railroad in her attic that only Jeep and Wade had seen, like her folksinging. Her new Shawn Colvin Signature Martin guitar was sitting in the chair that no one had offered to me.

Jeep turned toward us as she lit her cigarette. “Guess who hasn’t been to a meeting since the beginning of fucking time.”

“Didn’t I tell you that in confidence?” I asked Jeep.

“You didn’t tell me
shit
.” She blew smoke past me. “I knew it before you opened your mouth.”

Wade lifted his nose from the coffee. “We can go right now, dude. There’s a meeting at the club in, what, forty-five minutes?”

“Or don’t go,” Betsy said. “And we can take bets on how long he stays out of jail.”

Apparently, Betsy knew about me and Troy Padilla. Once again I found myself giving Wade a look that would have killed a more thoughtful man.

“She got a call,” Wade said, “while you were outside. This place is like the A.A. nerve center.”

“Doesn’t anyone in A.A. have a job?” I said. “Who the hell called her?”

“I’m disappointed in both of you.” Betsy got up from the table. “You preyed on this kid. How’s that different from a drunk working over his wife? Or a guard beating a prisoner?”

Wade pointed to the scrape above his eye.

“Don’t give me that crap.” Betsy poured more coffee. “I heard you were running around making him into the guy who killed Saint Terry. He
had
to hit you.”

Wade dove again into his bright mug. Betsy wasn’t really talking to him anyway.

“I’ve spent half my life on the list of people who are denied basic human rights,” Betsy continued. “When we got married, they held up signs saying we were animals. I can’t be around this shit anymore.”

The freezer chugged from coughing up the cigarettes. Wade and Jeep both looked down. Then I got it.

“You think I jacked him up because he’s Mexican?” I said. “I’m not even sure he
is
Mexican.”

Betsy stared. Jeep stared. Wade kept his eyes on the floor. By asking the question, I had somehow proved her point.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll kick that pigeon another time. But please, don’t tell me again how Terry’s death makes sense. That he was a junkie and that’s how junkies die. One day he was a poster boy for Southern California A.A., and the next day he was dead from a heroin overdose in a Santa Ana motel? I know something happened, and I’m going to find out what.”

Betsy shrugged, not unkindly.

“
Christ
, Betsy,” I said. “Who goes out for one night and hits the jackpot? After fifteen years? Hell, before he got sober, he’d survived ten years of overdoses worse than that one.”

I wasn’t shouting anything that I hadn’t shouted weeks ago, after the memorial. I wasn’t shouting anything that I hadn’t shouted at myself every day since then. What was he doing in Santa Ana? Who was he with? Why did he need to borrow fifty thousand dollars from me six months before he died?

Wade continued to avoid my eyes. Betsy watched her guitar. Jeep was the only one who would look at me.

“I thought all of us had a solution,” I said to her.
“One day at a time.”

“Maybe he didn’t want it anymore?” Jeep said.

A question people had asked, I was sure, but not yet to my face.

“You don’t drive to Santa Ana to kill yourself. That’s pretty easy to do right here. I’ll never believe that.”

Jeep held my eyes. She thought I should let it go. She thought I wasn’t a cop anymore, that I hadn’t been a good cop even then. But I was dying from the pretense that I was anyone but my old angry self. Three weeks was, it turned out, my limit for lying to myself without a Jack Daniel’s to chase the lie. I had to find out what happened in that motel room. If only to prove to Betsy that I didn’t assault Mexicans anymore—or whatever the hell Troy Padilla was—for no good reason.