A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  “I have one more thing I need to bring up,” I said. “The reason, actually, that I went down to Miami. And the reason we’re talking here and not at the hotel.”

  “I thought it was the pork chops,” said Gordon.

  “Remember Tom Preston?” I said.

  “That piece of gnarl?” said Gordon.

  “Well, he’s back on his feet after his unfortunate accident, and he’s now working for Maambong. Worst of all, Maambong brought him in to make sure we get this done quickly and right.”

  “Crap,” said Kief.

  “Mr. Maambong doesn’t trust us?” said Riley.

  “Maybe he sensed your squirmy little qualms,” said Kief.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Apparently this is such an important job the Principal sent Tom Preston to cover her bets.”

  “I get my hands on that sumbitch,” said Gordon, “he won’t get up so easy.”

  “Hopefully you’ll get your chance,” I said. “But somehow he learned that Menendez is linked to us.”

  “How?” said Kief.

  “I don’t know, but we’re not holding meetings in the hotel rooms that Maambong rents for us anymore. And that thing on the wall with all the photos and yarn. I’m taking that down as soon as I get back. Here on out we don’t trust anyone.”

  “Except each other,” said Kief.

  “Yes, Kief, that’s right,” I said, giving him a stare like a power drill. “Except each other.”

  21. Diagnosis

  I didn’t like the way Caroline Brooks was looking at me as I sat on the couch of her green-walled office with the bonsai trees and the box of tissues. She was leaning solicitously forward in her chair, her face filled with sympathy, as if I was about to learn of the cancer that was riddling my brain.

  “I guess the news is bad,” I said.

  “Not bad, just interesting,” said Caroline. “How honest were you being when I asked you those questions?”

  “As honest as I could be.”

  “Even though you admit to being a liar.”

  “That’s the rub, yes, but I lie for a purpose. I don’t see any purpose in lying to you.”

  “Patients often give doctors the symptoms they believe will get them the treatment they seek. Some want drugs, some want sympathy, some just want affirmation that they are special. I already told you that the strongest indication that you are not a psychopath was that you came to me in the first place. When I add to that the consistency of your answers, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. If you were lying, then the truth probably wouldn’t fit the diagnosis, and if you were being truthful, the very truthfulness is a mitigation.”

  “So you think I’m not. Good. That’s a relief.”

  “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Isn’t that what anyone would want to hear? I mean, Caroline, who the hell wants to be a fucking psychopath?”

  “Your mother is in jail for killing someone. Is that why you’re here, Phil, so you don’t end up in jail like her?”

  “I don’t want to end up like her, certainly. She mucked up everything she ever touched, including me. But her presence in that jail is only a reminder of what I really fear: ending up like the man she shot in the head.”

  “Who was he, Phil?”

  “His name was Jesse Duchamp.”

  “And he’s the one who died in the motel room in New Orleans?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe you should tell me the story.”

  “Maybe we should just let it go.”

  “If you need a tissue while you tell it to me, there are plenty in the box.”

  You’ve heard it already, the whole sordid tale—I couldn’t wait to pathetically blab it to you at the first opportunity—but at that point I had never told it to anyone, not a friend, not a lover, not my erstwhile wife. I could have used it to garner some sympathy—Oh, you poor boy, it must have been such a trial—but I never wanted any damn sympathy. The story wasn’t about what had been done to me, it was about what I was and where I was headed; if any of them had glimpsed that truth I would have transformed in their eyes to something low and vile, something less than human. They would have seen me slithering about them like a snake. And they would have been right. So it had remained my secret touchstone, my secret chain.

  But Caroline Brooks had glimpsed the absence within me and hadn’t pulled away in horror. Instead she had leaned forward and smiled. I was curious to see how she would react when I bared to her the root of my affliction, and so I did. I told her the story of my mother and my father and the murderer Jesse Duchamp. It took a while to get it right, with all the hesitations, the detours, and restatements that happen in a first telling. By the time you got hold of it, the story had been sanded down and polished. In the first telling it was jagged, but it was out.

  The interesting thing was that as she listened to it all without judgment creasing her features, I began to listen to it the same way. It didn’t change the facts of the story, and it didn’t weaken the chain the story had wrapped around my fate, but it did, I must admit, lessen the dismay it caused in my gut, and maybe that was the start of something new.

  When it was over and the quiet at the end of any telling passed, I waited for some reaction from the one person who seemed to matter in that moment.

  “So that’s why you came,” she said finally.

  “Kind of sad, isn’t it?”

  “For Jesse.”

  “So let’s get down to it. What do you think? Am I him?”

  “No, you’re not Jesse Duchamp.”

  “Is this an official diagnosis?”

  “I’m not in a position to diagnose Jesse Duchamp, Phil.”

  “He was a killer, a thief, he destroyed my family without a second’s thought. He was a psychopath. Am I one, too?”

  “It’s not as simple as a yes or no. There is a spectrum to any disorder. Part of that spectrum would be considered totally normal. We all have moments where our empathy fails and our behavior becomes problematic. There is also a part of the scale that is abnormal, and another, smaller part, that is pathological.”

  “All very enlightening but beside the point. What am I?”

  “In light of the protocols, and your professed honesty, balanced with your reasons for seeing me and my sense of you from our discussions . . .”

  “You’re hesitating. That’s not good.”

  “I think you are what you think you are,” she said in a voice soft as a whisper.

  There it was. I winced slightly, I rubbed my neck as if to salve the dagger wound, I let my eyes go out of focus. I played it subtly, letting her see me struggle not to make a big moment out of it, but I played it. For her sake. She had been so reluctant to say it outright, I wanted her to have her payoff before I got to the meat of what I was there for.

  “So what do we do about it?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is there a pill?”

  “There’s no pill. Sometimes drugs are prescribed to mildly tranquilize or deal with outgrowths of the condition, such as depression, but there is no drug to treat the condition itself.”

  “An operation? A procedure? Is there a form of therapy that will snap me to normal? Electroshock?”

  “It has been tried, but it doesn’t work.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “It depends on what you want.”

  “What does anyone want when they’re diagnosed with a disease? I want to be cured.”

  “It’s not that simple, Phil. First, it is not considered a disease so much as a condition. And it’s not clear what causes it. There is a theory that it derives from a defect in parts of the brain called the amygdalae, possibly in the way they interact with the orbitofrontal cortex.”

  “So stick an electrode in my brain and fire it up.”

  “That’s not going to happen. Operations are sometimes used where psychopathy was acquired through a brain injury, but that is certainly not your case, and
I wouldn’t approve of it in any event. We don’t experiment with functioning human brains anymore. About eighty years ago there was a doctor who went around the country sticking an ice pick in the brains of some seriously ill patients.”

  “Do you have his number? Maybe I’ll give him a call.”

  “It wasn’t psychiatry, it was butchery, and it turned out very badly for all, including him. Since then we’ve been more prudent.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do.”

  “There is no physical solution that I would recommend.”

  “I guess that’s that,” I said, standing and slapping my thighs. “I’ve got a diagnosis without a cure. Thanks for everything. But at least I have an answer to my question.”

  “Which question, Phil?”

  “Whether someone can really change. Apparently not.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bleak,” she said. “There are therapies we can try. Intense behavioral therapy over many years has shown beneficial effects.”

  “Over many years.”

  “It would take a commitment.”

  “And what kind of effects are we talking about?”

  “Less destructive behavior, at the least. It is a demanding road, but there have been positive results if the patient really wants to do the work. You can be trained to treat people as individuals of worth instead of things to maneuver. You can be trained to help instead of exploit.”

  “So if I had the years to put into it, I could maybe learn to better fool everyone as to what I really am, but the core of me will always be me. You see that bonsai tree on the windowsill?” I walked over, picked up one of the trees, and contemplated it like it was Yorick’s skull. “When you look at it, Caroline, do you sense its hopes and its dreams? Can you feel what it feels?”

  “Is that what you want, Phil? I thought you just wanted to keep your job.”

  “I want everything. Anything anyone else can get, I want in spades. Money, sex, power, even love, if it’s not a myth.” I hefted the plant in my hand and felt a familiar anger begin to rise. “Do you think you could create a mutual and loving relationship with this beautiful specimen?”

  “Of course not.”

  “The way you feel about the tree is the way I feel about you and every other person in the world. In the end you’re each just a piece of wood, to be used while useful and tossed aside when the time is right. And sitting around talking about my feelings is not going to change that one whit.”

  “But I know what that plant needs, Phil. It needs sun, water, and food. It needs to be cared for in a certain way. To learn how to care for it, actually, I took a course. Think of our work as a course in caring for other human beings.”

  “But next week when you tire of your tragic earth-mother decor and decide to go modern and sleek like that really special office you see in Psychiatry Digest, you’ll toss that tree into the garbage right next to the sagging gray couch and that stupid drum.”

  “You are not Jesse Duchamp, Phil. There is more in you than you know. We can find it, together. You don’t have to be alone in this.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” I hefted the bonsai in my hand. My mouth filled with a thick green tang, metallic and electric. “In everything I’ve ever done, in everything I’ll ever do, you’ve just told me I’ll be nothing but alone.”

  And then I tossed it. Well, maybe I threw it. Maybe I hurled the son of a bitch like a speedball at the wall behind her, where the pot shattered, and the dirt flew every which way as if it were blood from my wound, and the tree landed like a splayed corpse on the floor.

  22. Behavioral Therapy

  You want to top off your drink?” said the outlaw. “I’m guessing you do. My mouth sure as hell got suddenly dry. And with what’s coming we’re both going to need another belt.”

  He pulled the top off the bottle, poured a splash of Scotch into the magazine writer’s glass and then into his own. When he replaced the top there was less than an eighth of a bottle’s worth of the precious liquor remaining. He lifted his glass, took a swallow, and winked at her. With just the one eye it looked like a grimace of pain.

  As she downed a lovely swallow and let the richness flow through her, she felt a sense of relief. She had carried into the desert a dark purpose and heavy doubts, but somehow these last moments of the story, ending with the throwing of the tree, had erased the doubts once and for all.

  She had made a decision.

  She liked her lazy Sunday brunches, nights out with friends, kissing shallow, good-looking men on the couch while watching Netflix. She liked all the smooth appurtenances of her life, including the work, writing fluff so she didn’t have to think about more ferocious things. But this kidney-stealing, bonsai-hurling, one-eyed psychopath was living proof that she couldn’t have her life and satisfy the purpose she’d come here for at the same time. Once you linked arms with someone like him, there was no way to turn back.

  All she had to do was look around at the wasteland of this bar to be certain it was not a future she wanted or could handle. So she would give up on her darker hopes; she wasn’t hard enough to see them through anyhow, she knew that now. Instead she would finish the interview and write the article. Already she was wondering if she could maybe jump a few journalistic levels and hawk it to the New York Times. What kind of new and wonderful job would that lead to? Then again there was already so much detail on the recorder, it wouldn’t take much to stretch it all out into three hundred pages of true-crime sensation, just the thing to land her on the nonfiction bestseller list. The press, the speeches, the glamour of the bookstore signings. She took another sip of Scotch and tasted the lush possibilities. She was looking beyond the outlaw, seeing her future unspool in brilliantly surprising ways, when the bar door squealed open and a blast of the afternoon sun spilled upon the floor.

  “Christ,” said the outlaw. “Another one of Ginsberg’s mutants has joined the party.”

  This time the shaft was dimmer because so much of it was blocked by the colossal silhouette in the door frame. When the door slammed shut, the magazine writer could see the hulking man clearly. As he entered, he ducked down so as not to bang the crown of his great bald head into the stuffed big horn set over the door. The behemoth wore a leather motorcycle vest with no shirt beneath and boots he had wrestled off the feet of Frankenstein’s monster. He stood for a moment with his legs spread, his massive fists opening and closing, glaring at the two of them with no good intent on his face. She would have thought he was one of the bounty hunters after the outlaw’s hide, yet the outlaw himself, after a quick glance, seemed not alarmed.

  “Look at that piece of gristle with hands like wrecking balls,” said the outlaw calmly. “There’s a tribe of them out here, a plague of leather-clad ogres roaming the desert, living in mobile homes, cooking meth and snorting tumbleweeds. They ride the range on Harleys the size of oxen and leave trails of broken beer bottles and fractured bones. And this one I know, this one’s a prime specimen, a prince of the wasteland, with all the bile and twice the size.”

  The giant stretched his neck to the left, to the right, cracking bones with each twist, and then spat a great glob onto the floor right next to the outlaw’s chair. He turned to the bar, taking a seat a stool away from the thin man with the three-fingered hands. On the back of the giant’s vest was a flat, grinning face with sharp teeth and the ears of a bat.

  “They make quite a pair, don’t they,” said the outlaw. “Maybe the exploding meth that Crab Hands was cooking he was cooking for this beast. Oh, and look, Ginsberg has entered the conversation. Next thing you know the meerkat will join in; he’d be the wit of the group, tossing snark as he snapped scorpions between his teeth. I swear, sometimes this joint is like the cantina in Star Wars, without the charm.

  “Look at the three losers in their little huddle, a dyspeptic barkeep moving with the alacrity of sludge, a bald giant with the visage of death on his vest, and a crab-handed freak with barely six fingers to his name. Oh, how I envy th
em. Their lives might be as dry and static as the landscape outside this desert shack, yet someday they could be inspired by a sunset, their spirits could be sent soaring by a piece of music or the lines of a sonnet, someday one of these sons of bitches could even fall in love. Imagine that; I can’t.

  “After receiving my diagnosis I went to a bar, anonymous and brown, and sucked down a row of shot glasses filled with a rye just as anonymous and just as brown. The liquor was so rough it scorched my throat with every gulp. I was trying to burn the taste of what I was out of my mouth; this was not a moment for a fine sipping whiskey, this was a moment for something harsh and painful. Something more painful, actually, than when Caroline Brooks had delivered her verdict.

  “‘I think you are what you think you are,’ she had said.

  “Despite my little playacting in the psychiatrist’s office, that little declaration didn’t come down like a hammer’s blow because I had known. From the earliest days I had known, with every tear I hadn’t shed and every rending of emotion I hadn’t felt, I had known. It was in the way the beauty of the world never called to me, in the way cheating on my wife was as easy as cheating on a crossword puzzle, and discarding her was as poignant as discarding the morning trash. It would have been worse, in its way, to not have been what she said I was. Then I would have had no explanation and my monstrousness might have been too much to bear.

  “So it wasn’t her diagnosis that had me pouring the rye down my gullet. It was that other thing, the gift she delivered like a shiv along with the diagnosis, when she had made it clear there was nothing to be done, no drug, no operation, no way out. It wasn’t just that I was this thing, it was that I would always be this thing.

  “But we were talking of evolution.

  “The whole time I was feeling sorry for myself in that brown little bar, something Caroline Brooks had said was chewing through my brain. ‘I know what that plant needs, Phil,’ she said. ‘It needs sun, water, and food. It needs to be cared for in a certain way.’ Evolution was my point in coming to Caroline Brooks in the first place, to be something that could not just find success but keep it, too, something more than the skittering water bug I had been my whole life. Could I transcend the limitations of my blighted soul? Could I be different even if my core didn’t change? Maybe there was a way. I took out my phone.