by Dan Barden
“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.
“I’m sorry, Randy,” he said. “But I’m going to have to cuff you and walk you back up to whatever you were doing under that house.”
“What I was doing under that house,” I said, “was puking. There’s somebody buried up there, Sean, and I think it might be Simon Busansky. I don’t know who killed Mutt, or why Terry is dead, but I think this is where the bad shit started.”
“You’re not a cop anymore, man. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not a cop.”
“Didn’t you guys check out this house when I gave you the address?”
“My DEA guys have been looking into these houses for weeks. They started getting antsy when Simon Busansky stopped coming by for his chats. If anything, your bullshit slowed us down. Once you came to me, we had to hold off the raids until we figured out how you were involved. What’s the deal, Randy? You beat the life out of Mutt Kelly off intel that I fucking gave you, and now I’m going to find out that he wasn’t the only guy you put in the ground?”
“What the fuck, Sean? You really think I killed Mutt Kelly?”
“The way you showed up at his house was wrong.”
“Of course it was wrong,” I said. “And you were there to stop it. I heard everything you said, and I never went back. You know who I am. I’m a fuckup, but I’m not that kind of fuckup.”
I noticed that Sean hadn’t lowered his gun. An unlowered gun is a hard thing to miss. “And if I’d known that there was a dead body under that house,” I continued, “why would I be anywhere near the fucking house?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But you’re going to have to explain yourself up the chain of command. Right now I need to redeem myself for letting you go the last time.”
“I caused you some trouble, didn’t I?”
Sean laughed. I lowered my hands a little and moved a bit closer to him. “Believe it or not,” he said, “that fuckup with you doesn’t even make the top five for the week. Your reappearance in my life seems to have precipitated a crisis.”
Now that I took a good look, his skin had the gray puffiness that comes after an epic bender. “You’re hitting it hard,” I said. “Good thing we have a solution for that. We’ll go to a meeting together.”
“First I’m going to arrest you. Assume the position, Randy.”
“You really think I’m involved with this mess?”
“I don’t know what to think. Assume the position, Randy.”
I outweighed Sean by thirty pounds, but that didn’t mean he was soft. Even a soft guy with a gun in his hand is problematic. I couldn’t figure any smooth moves besides following instructions. I knelt and clasped my hands behind my head. It was the first time in years that I had knelt for any reason. When I first came to A.A., someone suggested that I pray like this, on my knees, because it demonstrated the proper attitude. I never was much for that type of thing. Kneeling there, though, the rocks pressing into my skin, I did pray. It was an awful prayer, but earnest: Just let me fucking finish this. Please, God?
Hearing the gentle sound of Sean’s weapon sliding into its holster as he carefully made his way toward me, I opened my eyes to stare at a creosote bush about a yard from my face. Which reminded me of hacking around Cleveland National Forest with the Boy Scouts. I remembered Jimmy Crews, who made Eagle Scout only to die in Operation Desert Storm, explaining the best way to escape a grizzly: run downhill. According to Jimmy, “the grizz” was so top-heavy that he would “fall over his own ass” chasing you.
Somehow that anecdote became a plan for action: the moment the handcuff touched my wrist—maybe the moment before—I would slam my body backward into Sean, my skull connecting with his forehead and sending him down the hill with me tumbling close behind.
Sorry about that, Sean.
But then the handcuff didn’t touch my wrist. I waited, probably longer than I needed to, before I turned around to look.
There was nobody there. The goats jeered appreciatively at Sean’s mercy from across the canyon.
I CAME UP OUT OF THE CANYON a block or so downhill. It was good luck for me that a landscaper I knew named Jorge was putting down sod in front of a great big, achingly-overdesigned-with-way-too-much-glass split-level. I asked him for a ride to Jean Claude’s. I figured it was smart to bypass my truck and my house for the time being—no telling how long Sean’s goodwill would last, or how soon Cardenas and Clancy would stop being scared of my sister. Of course, I didn’t explain any of this to Jorge, who seemed to recognize that I was lying about my truck breaking down, but did me the favor anyway.
I called Yegua on Jean Claude’s phone; my own phone was back in the truck. Jean Claude wasn’t in that afternoon, which was fine with me: without even knowing what I was into, JC would have straightened his mouth and narrowed his eyes, and I didn’t think I could take his froggy disapproval. Ten minutes later, Yegua and his girlfriend showed up. I to
ld him that I needed a ride to Wade’s and asked him to retrieve my truck from Troy’s recovery house as discreetly as possible. I guess I could have called Wade, but I was a little embarrassed: I was on the run from the cops. I just wanted to get out of the wind for a while. If Wade wasn’t home, I could wait things out with Yegua.
“Bien,” he said. “Bien. Muy bien.” He smiled enthusiastically at his girlfriend as though she, too, needed to be part of his cheerful acceptance of my routinely insane behavior. Juana, a pleasantly overweight thirtysomething with heavily mascaraed eyes and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, smiled with less enthusiasm.
Yegua drove me to Wade’s apartment on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway, north of Taco Bell. It was a converted motel, and Wade had less than four hundred square feet, but there was a window on the ocean, and for him, that was the whole deal. Wade was home, thank God. Troy was there, too, but it was clear from his grimace that he didn’t intend to enjoy my company.
“Why is he here?” I asked Wade. “And why is he pissed off at me?”
“Because Emma’s been gone since last night,” Wade said, “and you’ve been MIA since this morning.”
“Isn’t this what she does?” I asked Troy. I wasn’t convincing myself, either.
“This is different,” Troy said. “She’s been watching you running around being the Lone Ranger, and now her self-delusion has gone into the red zone.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it. I swallowed the five Excedrins that Wade had brought me and told them what I’d unearthed under the house. Before we could get started on what it meant or what the fuck we did next, Wade’s cell phone started ringing. He handed it to me. “It’s Colin Alvarez,” he said.
I took Wade’s phone with a big sense that my life was about to change for the even worse.
“You really fucked me,” Colin said. “Do you have any idea how much you’ve fucked me? Every asset that I have in the world has been frozen since this morning. Every place that I could possibly go is being watched by the cops.”
