The Next Right Thing (31 page)

Claire Monaco had finished packing her bags and was almost on her way to St. Louis to start a new life with her son. She explained this to me when I reached her on her cell phone at Target, buying a few last-minute items for the long car trip.

I had taken the computer from Emma and told her I’d see her later at the house. I had started the call as I drove away in my truck. “You forgot to say goodbye, Claire.”

“You think you can forgive me?” she said.

“For what?”

“For all that shit with Terry. For taking your money and doing nothing good with it.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Are you having a good time with Alexander?”

She hesitated before she quietly said, “Yes.”

“You’re pre-forgiven, Claire. I don’t have the strength left to judge you.”

“You in legal trouble because of all this shit with Terry?”

“Not because of that,” I said.

No one on earth was better equipped to understand. “Your wife is trying to take away your daughter.”

“It’s a little beyond trying. I never had custody to begin with, and now it’s even worse.”

“You sound like you’re on the other side of it, though. I mean, in a good place.”

“How do you figure?”

“You sound whipped.” Claire laughed. “Terry used to say that was the best place to be.”

“Terry said a lot of things.”

I heard Claire’s son, Alexander, ask her if he could have a cupcake. It sounded like they were near the checkout. I heard
her tell him, “Get some of those animal crackers. You like those.” I was oddly pleased to catch her in a moment of good mothering.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I said.

“About Terry? I don’t know what else to say about him, Randy.”

“Actually, I want to know about you and John Sewell.”

Claire sighed. She was about to enter her own purgatory, the geographic cure. Around A.A., it was common wisdom that moving somewhere else wasn’t going to solve your problems. Still, I kind of liked the idea that she was moving to St. Louis rather than, say, Las Vegas.

“What did you find out?” she said.

“I’ve got some videos of you and Judge Fogarty. On a computer that used to belong to John Sewell.”

“So,” she said, “why are you calling me? You can’t figure that out?”

“I want to hear you say it. To a prosecutor.”

“I have a bad history with prosecutors,” she said. “No prosecutors.”

“Because Sewell is funding this little trip out of town?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “But that’s it. Fogarty didn’t just retire. He was encouraged by a friend of ours to retire. I cooperated with that process. There. That’s my gift. Thanks for the money when I really needed it. I gotta go, Randy. My son needs something unhealthy to eat.”

She hung up. Viva St. Louis.

I called John Sewell and asked him to meet me that afternoon at a certain condo in South Laguna that I happened to know was
up for sale. I told him I’d found something on a computer that once belonged to him.

It was Terry’s old condo, the one where I worked most of the steps, the one where I paid Claire to leave Terry alone. It had gone on the market a week before, and the administrator of Terry’s estate had called me. It was a simple thing to get a key from the Realtor. Meeting Sewell at Terry’s old place was probably some kind of fucked-up nostalgia on my part. Also, privacy was important.

John Sewell was standing beside a carport underneath the condo, wearing a suit and a tie. After three weeks, his nose had healed, but it was leaning a little to one side. I opened the key box and let us into the apartment. The starkness of the place shocked me. There was nothing in it but some new wall-to-wall carpet that I didn’t recognize: an imitation sisal that I couldn’t imagine Terry ever liking. He was a plush kind of guy, took his shoes off the moment he walked in the door.

It had been a long time since I’d come over. How could I have forgotten there was a fireplace? A nice one, too: a big solid cinder-blocky thing, pushing its way out as if the room had been built for its pleasure. The broker must have started tarting the place up for a showing: there were framed pictures of couples and kids on that generous mantel. It looked like they’d been cobbled together from a few different families.

For lack of a better idea, Sewell stood beside the fireplace. There certainly wasn’t anywhere to sit. He radiated impatience, which was how I realized that I’d been mooning over an empty room from my past. I walked over to him, admiring my remodel of his face. “Did you need surgery?”

“I will.”

“What’d they give you for pain? Percocet?”

Sewell solemnly shook his head. “I keep busy.”

“If I were you,” I said, “I’d get the Percocet.”

“You said you’d found something on a computer,” Sewell said. “Can I see it?”

I held up the thumb drive that I’d brought in my pocket. “It’s a sex tape of Judge Fogarty and Claire Monaco. You don’t have to look at it, you just need to know I have the computer we found it on. I don’t know much about computers, but it seems that erasing something doesn’t actually erase it.”

“If you were smart,” Sewell said, “you’d put this all behind you.”

“Have I done anything that makes you think I’m smart? If it helps me get the video into the right hands, I’ll say I made it myself.”

“You don’t want to do this,” Sewell said. “It’s only going to cause you more trouble. You’re Alison’s father—she can’t stay away from you forever. If I can get Jean to back down …”

“And Jean’s going to share custody why, because you asked her to?”

Sewell looked at me with the seriousness of God on his face, like I was some poor fool about to be sentenced. “Jean will do what’s best for her family.”

I laughed. “You think you can control Jean, too? How about this? I’ll destroy this video immediately and forget everything I know if you stay the fuck away from my daughter and her mother.”

“Why does your life have to be so hard?” Sewell said. “That’s what I don’t understand. Why do you insist that everyone pay for their sins? The only person who’s paying for his sins is you.”

“Terry paid for his sins,” I said. “So did Simon Busansky. And Mutt Kelly. So is Colin Alvarez. And now you’re going to pay for yours.”

“Look at yourself,” Sewell said. “If you stay focused, in ten years you’ll be worth as much as I am. But you ran around trying to get some kind of vengeance for your friend, and all you ended up doing was hurting more people. In five years, you’ll be dead of a heart attack, and your daughter will be looking up to me. I’m trying to help you here.”

“You want to know why my life has to be so hard?” I said. “Because I want it to be. I want to feel the bite of every goddamn stupid thing I’ve ever done. Some days that’s all I have. The innovation is that now you’re going to feel the bite of every stupid thing you’ve done, too.” I figured that was a good time to walk out the door: dramatic, convincing. I even shook the memory stick at him for effect.

“You’ll destroy that video right now,” Sewell said, “if you want Cathy to get a single cent of insurance money.”

A guy like Sewell never spoke carelessly. “You think you’re going to take that money back?”

“I’m not taking it,” Sewell said. “But with all you’ve brought to light about Terry’s activities, his terribly guilty state of mind before he died, how hard will it be for the insurance company to claim suicide? He was ashamed that he’d become a criminal again, and he chose to kill himself. Am I wrong, or is that not basically the picture you helped draw for the police? That little boy can collect a million dollars when his father dies of a heroin overdose, but he can’t collect anything if his father kills himself with a heroin overdose. That policy would have cost more.”

“I thought she already got the money.”

“I lent her some to tide her over,” Sewell said. “The insurance check hasn’t been issued yet.”

“You motherfucker. You’re going to blackmail me?”

“Blackmail? Please, Randy. There’s a half-dozen attorneys looking for some way not to pay that million dollars. This was your mistake. But I can help you with the life insurance, too. I’m ready to put in a call for Cathy. I know some ways of doing business that you don’t. Let’s give it a good end. We both want Cathy to get the money. We both want Jean to calm down. Why can’t we work together? You and I were bystanders to this mess, but if we resolve our conflict, there’s no conflict left.”

“It’s not enough.”

“I know you’ve had issues with addiction,” Sewell continued, “but you’re not like Alvarez or those others. You’re not even like Terry. You have willpower; it’s just misapplied. There’s nothing wrong with wanting justice; you just can’t insist on it. I’m a judge now, and even I can’t insist on it. Wisdom is about knowing what you can ignore. It’s time for you to leave some of these old ideas behind.”

The thing about the devil, an old-timer named Billy once told me, is that he makes more sense than anyone else in the room. Whenever I thought Sewell was ordinary-smart, he proved himself to be smarter than anyone I knew. He was trying to divide me from the A.A. pack, and he was doing a pretty good job.

But that was something Sewell couldn’t understand: there was no me outside of the me that A.A. had made.

“I need you out of my daughter’s life for good,” I said. “Or
I’m going to take this to the district attorney and let him figure out exactly how you got Fogarty off the bench. Make up your mind. You have until I can drive back down to Santa Ana.”

I’d started to walk to the door when Sewell addressed me in a tone of voice I’d never heard. Maybe it was the voice he’d suppressed in order to perfect his will. It sounded so unlike him that I almost didn’t recognize the symptoms of rage.

“Two things will happen before the end of the day,” he said. “First, I will make a case to Alison for why she should never speak to you again. We’ve been taking walks a couple of times a week, just the two of us. I will explain to her the pattern of violence that she witnessed and how it stretches back to an incident when you were a police officer that I believe I’m right in saying she doesn’t fully appreciate. Then I will make certain that no matter what happens, Cathy Acuña is unable to secure a cent of that insurance money. I will prepare a brief toward that purpose that even a first-year law student could follow. These are not threats, Randy. These are promises.”

“Thanks for dropping the pretense,” I said.

“Someone has to stop you.”

Now that I’d reached Sewell on the deepest level, I had a fundamental insight. Was he a terrible criminal? No. Was he a bad man? Definitely.

He’d made a mistake, though, by getting angry. That was my neighborhood. I took out my old service weapon from the back of my jeans.

The gun had been stashed in a lock box at my shop—for years it had been stashed in a lock box at my shop—and taking it out today had been like reaching into another decade. I can’t even say why I thought it was necessary. I didn’t think about it
again until I was pushing the barrel up under Sewell’s chin. Which is what I did right after I pulled it out.

I quickly recognized that this was what I’d been moving toward for weeks. My whole life seemed to click into place. My heart got very, very calm.

Sewell looked scared, but not scared enough to stop talking. “Are you prepared to destroy your whole life?” Sewell said tightly.

“You tell me,” I said, “how we would fucking know the difference.”

I might have done it. I was that insane. I thought I’d found a way to make the world work. Maybe God didn’t care about John Sewell’s sins, but I did. John Sewell would die against the fireplace I couldn’t remember in the condominium where I’d worked the steps. I was having a temper tantrum, for sure, but isn’t that how most people get killed?

However, if insanity can be defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, it was insane to imagine I could complete anything, even an execution-style killing, without Troy Padilla having a say in how I accomplished it.

“Randy?” Until he bounded through the front door, I thought I was hearing voices.

When he saw me, Troy crossed his arms, as though that gesture of disapproval were enough to prevent my faux pas.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Seattle?” I said. I barely glanced at Troy. I kept my focus on the matter at hand.

“Emma sent up the bat signal after you ran out of your shop. I told her not to show you that video until I got back.”

“How the hell did you find me?”

“I called Yegua. He had heard you talking to the Realtor.”

“Since when do you talk to Yegua?”

“Since we both agreed,” Troy said, “that we should keep an eye on you.”

“Awesome,” I said. “Now go the fuck away.”

“This is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Troy said. “Give yourself a few more weeks. If you still want to kill him, I’ll help you.”

“What do you know about killing people?”

I did notice that Troy seemed remarkably comfortable with my holding a Glock about four feet from Sewell’s chest. I shook my head. “Go,” I said. “Now. You weren’t even here.”

“Listen, Randy—there’s something I left out of my fifth step, and I should tell you before you end up in jail and can’t be my sponsor anymore.”