The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

  “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.

  Mutt Kelly’s address was in Canyon Acres. If there was a wrong side of the tracks in Laguna Beach—and no one in the rest of the United States would argue there was—Canyon Acres would be it. Somehow my righteous anger that had been brewing for Mutt Kelly got conflated wi
th the anger I felt at bad architecture. I not only wanted to throttle the guy who’d been parked in front of my house, I wanted to burn down his neighborhood, too. I found exactly the shitty little bungalow I had imagined: a two-bedroom rental that was standing only because someone was too stupid or lazy to tear it down. It would have had vinyl siding, but the city of Laguna Beach confiscates that stuff at the border.

  I knocked hard on the door. As he opened it, Mutt Kelly didn’t seem to recognize me. He almost looked like he wanted to know how he could help me, though he didn’t say it like that.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I want to know why you’ve been jerking off in front of my house,” I said. Then I kicked the door open into his forearm. It made a popping noise as it dislodged the sawed-off baseball bat he’d been hiding: the kind of half-assed weapon that a teenager stashes under the seat of his ten-year-old SUV.

  Mutt’s arm wasn’t broken, but it must have hurt like hell. He backed up, holding it, until he tripped on a Formica coffee table. On the couch behind the table, I saw a leather jacket with the initials “A.C.M.C.” “M.C.” stood for “motorcycle club,” which often meant “gang,” which brought back plenty of bad memories from my tenure as a police officer in Santa Ana. Now I was really mad.

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t care why you’ve been jerking off in front of my house. I’m here to beat the shit out of you. When you wake up from your coma, we’ll talk. While you’re sleeping, I’m going to kill everyone you know.”

  He kept backing up and I kept walking toward him, getting into the groove.

  “I didn’t do anything to your asshole friend Terry,” Mutt shouted. “You can’t blame me for that.”

  Had I said anything about my “asshole friend Terry”?

  The next thing Mutt saw was his Formica coffee table—an American piece of furniture if ever there was one—as it slammed into his good arm and took a nice chunk out of the drywall behind him.

  Once he’d bounced off the wall, Mutt rallied himself into some kind of half-assed boxer’s stance. I got into my own half-assed boxer’s stance and feinted a few punches, which he avoided pretty easily. He suddenly didn’t look so ridiculous. When he caught the side of my head with a left hook, I decided it was time to let my rage find its form. I threw my right shoulder into his chest and launched him into the wall. He was tougher than I had thought, but he wasn’t going to be tougher than me.

  At some point, Officer Sean Wakefield entered the house. As I threw myself toward the job of pounding Mutt Kelly’s face into a pulp, Sean announced himself in that voice you learn your first month on patrol. He called my name like he was dragging me by the collar back out of a room. He was in uniform, too, which meant more to me than I would have imagined. Standing there, his hands on his hips, he might as well have been modeling a sweatshirt that said IMPULSE CONTROL across the front. If I had thought I was in charge of my own actions, Sean had arrived to tell me I was wrong. Throughout my assault on Mutt Kelly, I had been shouting. Which was news to me until Sean entered the house and I started to hear myself.

  “Were you with him?” I continued to shout. “Did you get him the fucking dope?”

  “Randy!” Sean commanded from behind me.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Mutt yelled at Sean as much as me. “I hung out with him sometimes. And that’s fucking it.”

  “Randy!” Sean barked even louder this time. “I need you to back the fuck up and come outside with me.”

  Mutt Kelly put his hands down as I backed away. He had been tougher than I thought, but he looked relieved that the fight was over. Then Sean actually grabbed me by the collar and backed me out of the house.

  Terry and I used to talk about that sweet moment of repose after you’ve almost destroyed your life. That’s exactly how I felt when Sean returned to the cruiser where he’d parked my ass ten minutes earlier. Jackson Browne sang softly from the laptop mounted between us. While I’d been marinating in the car, Sean had convinced Mutt that the episode would not repeat itself, and Mutt had agreed to forget about it. I was already incredibly calm, which was S.O.P. after I’d done something really stupid. When Sean had shown up, I had been about to do what I’d never done even as a bad cop: beat a confession out of a suspect. Sean knew it, which was probably why he had asked Jackson to wait with me.

  “Does your supervisor know that you have an iPod hooked up to your computer?” I asked when Sean got back in the car. “Does your supervisor know that you listen to Jackson Browne?”

  Sean shook his head, took a deep breath. “This morning”—he checked something on his laptop but made no move to turn down the music—“I kept thinking you were going to say something, but you didn’t. And now I can’t help wondering if I should go back to meetings.”

  “You came here because you want to go to a meeting?” I said.

  “No.” Sean smiled. “I came here because as soon as I hung up the phone, I had an awful feeling you were going to come over here to beat that guy up. But I’m thinking about going to a meeting, too.”

  “He was just getting his boxing lesson.”

  “Which is lucky for you, because if he had filed a complaint, I would have had to arrest you. Now that I’m also trying to get sober again, I would have had to tell someone about our conversation at Brook Street, too. Rigorous honesty, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But you would have talked to me first.”

  “And then I would have had to tell somebody. You can’t drive around beating the shit out of people.”

  I watched Sean and realized something profound: he was a cop and I wasn’t. I sometimes thought of myself as a cop, but that was me lying to myself again. Sean felt that he owed me something, though it had nothing to do with my being a cop.

  “I didn’t beat him up,” I said. “Write that down somewhere.”

  “This is the point,” Sean said. “I’m not writing anything down. Unless you give me no choice. Why didn’t you tell me you thought this guy was with Terry that night?”

  “Did he tell you whether he was with Terry that last night?”

  “He claims he wasn’t,” Sean said. “Who knows? I don’t think he’s the guy you want to blame, though. You’re trying to make sense of this, and I just don’t think it’s ever going to make sense.”

  “Why was this Charlie Manson wannabe parked outside of my house? He’s in some outfit with the initials A.C.M.C. Who is that? The Ass Clowns?”

  Sean gave me a look.

  “You think I’m making this shit up?”

  “I think you’re angry. Which is understandable, because Terry was your best friend. I think this Mutt Kelly has done a lot of stupid things in his life—his sheet includes car theft and drug dealing—and parking in front of your house so he can steal your computer or catch a peek at your girlfriend wouldn’t even make the middle of the list. And A.C.M.C. is a gang called the Aryan Comanches. Even their name is a joke. They’re too stupid to understand that it’s a contradiction in terms.”

  “Why did this guy start talking about Terry the moment I walked in the door? I never said anything about Terry.”

  “He says Terry was trying to help him pull his head out of his ass. Terry did that from time to time, you know. Maybe he had talked to him about you. How many meetings in the last few weeks would this guy have to attend before he heard about the legendary Terry Elias, his tragic death, and his avenging ex-cop sponsee Randy Chalmers? Like, maybe, one?”

  “I just don’t get it, Sean. I know Terry wasn’t perfect, but I don’t see him in Santa Ana with a guy like this in the middle of the night.”

  “Then maybe the guy wasn’t there.”

  Sean looked at me with, what? Pity?

  “Look,” he said, “will you promise to stop assaulting people within the jurisdiction of Laguna Beach if I tell you what I found out?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I promise.” I needed to wonder at some point what my promises were worth. At some point.

&
nbsp; “You were right that Colin Alvarez not only bought his home from Simon Busansky, he also bought that other address you gave me, and three other homes, all of which are now recovery houses. This was just about the time when Busansky made a deal with us. We took a ton of cash from him, but we let him sell his houses.”

  “Is that a fancy way of saying he became an informant?”

  “More or less,” Sean said. “He became the go-to guy for understanding marijuana cultivation in the South County. He’s a real talker. The DEA guys who know him seem to like him. But there’s something else: Terry brokered that deal for Busansky, like he brokered the deal for Wade.”

  “You’re saying this had become a regular business for Terry? Making deals between the growers and the DEA? How come I never heard about it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want you to judge him,” Sean said, “the way you’re judging him right now?”

  “But if he was making all this money,” I said, “why did he need to borrow fifty grand from me?”

  “You loaned Terry fifty grand?”

  “Forget about that part,” I said. “Do you know where Busansky is? And before you say it, I’m not going to roust him.”

  “Funny you should ask,” Sean said. “Busansky had been in pretty good touch with my DEA guys, schooling them regularly on the ways of shady characters like himself. About a month ago, he dropped off the radar, and they can’t find him anywhere. I think they miss him.”

  “They think he’s dead?”

  Sean reached into the backseat for his notes. “A history of drinking and drugs, a shitload of connection to marginal criminal activity, solo trips to Mexico every month or so. He’s been producing small-time porn forever. Hey, he started out writing for Hustler. That was the high point of his life besides his brief career as a hydroponic kingpin. He could be decomposing in a barranca. Another OD. More likely, he’s just living the same life somewhere else.”

  So: now I knew why it had taken so long to get anything from Wade. If Terry was connected to whatever was going on in those recovery houses, if he was connected to this clown Simon Busansky and the girls “making movies,” it had been Wade’s hydroponic adventure that had connected him. Terry had helped Wade out with the pot bust, and in exchange, Wade had introduced him to a new income stream. And maybe set him on the path to something much worse.