The Last Good Kiss

by James Crumley

TWO AFTERNOONS LATER, I KNOCKED ON RANDALL Jackson’s office door. He worked out of a cubicle in the corner of a large warehouse filled with cartons of books and magazines. He hadn’t been hard to find. The clerk in the first porno bookstore I had hit on Colfax told me where to look. But I guess I arrived at a bad time. After my knock, the voices inside the office stopped suddenly. The cheap door opened quickly, nearly jerked off its hinges, and a very large, very ugly man with a dark face and a three-hundred-dollar suit stepped outside and asked me what I wanted. I should have known, I suppose. Where there’s money, there’s dirt, and when you work my side of the street, you have to expect to deal with those people. They’re everywhere. Not as well organized as they would like you to think, but organized well enough.

  “Can I help you?” he asked politely, a soft trace of a Mexican accent in his voice. His twenty-dollar haircut looked as if it belonged on somebody else’s face.

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Jackson,” I said, even more polite than he had been.

  “I’m sorry but he’s busy right now,” the big man said.

  “Who is it, Torres?” a voice from inside asked. “Nobody,” he answered, not meaning to insult me.

  “Tell him to wait,” the voice inside said.

  “It’s a nice day,” Torres said. “Why don’t you wait outside?”

  “I’ll be on the loading dock,” I said.

  He nodded, and we went our separate ways. I was just as glad. The hairy pie of pornography is a big business with a small capital investment and a great cash flow, and freedom of the press is a fine theory, but none of it is any of my business. I waited outside, watching two black dudes hand-truck cartons into the rear of an unmarked blue van. It wasn’t a nice day at all, but I didn’t complain. Denver had a dose of smog as thick as L.A.‘s, but I stared through the gray, dirty haze toward the Rocky Mountains as if I could see the peaks, standing like ruined cathedrals against a crystalline cobalt sky.

  Randall Jackson wasn’t the man with the voice inside the office. He had a wheedling whine, as unctuous as old bacon grease as he ushered the man with the voice into the back seat of a black Continental with blank silvered windows. The large dark gentleman drove it away. Then Jackson turned to me, his whine gone.

  “You wanted to see me, bud?” he said. Time hadn’t been kind to him. His gut had grown rounder, his hair thinner, and his legs more bowed. His wardrobe didn’t help, either—a maroon blazer with electric blue slacks that sported a bright chrome stitch in the weave. His fancy loafers had a new shine and dandy tassles, but they were run-over at the heels. His name might be on the business license, but he didn’t even flush the toilet without permission. “Well, what was it?” he demanded.

  “I’m looking for Betty Sue Flowers,” I said. I didn’t think he was going to tell me anything anyway, and I knew I didn’t want him to know my name, so I didn’t explain anything or show him my license.

  “Never heard of her,” he said quickly.

  “Maybe she was using another name,” I said. “I’ve got information that you were with this girl in Oregon several years ago.”

  “You got shit for information, bud, I ain’t never been to Oregon,” he said, his tiny black eyes glittering like zircons.

  “Must be the wrong Randall Jackson,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Jackson.” Then I climbed back into the El Camino and drove away.

  That was that. For now. I couldn’t muscle him with a warehouseful of help watching. But he had lied to me, probably out of habit, and I intended to find out why. It had to be the hard way, though. His telephone would be unlisted, his home address in the city directory faked, and he had seen my El Camino, so I couldn’t tail him in it. I had to have another car.

  One of the reasons that I spend so much time driving back and forth across the country, aside from the fact that airplanes scare me spitless, is that I can’t rent a car when I arrive in a strange city. I can’t rent a car because I don’t have any credit cards. I don’t have any credit cards because I can’t get one without stealing one. It’s easier to steal cars. I have more experience in that line of work.

  Nobody likes to talk about it because it’s such a shoddy business, but private detectives spend a lot of time repossessing cars. That’s how I got in the business, in fact. After my third hitch in the Army, a friend of mine got me a job on the sports desk of the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, which is what I did in the Army when I wasn’t playing football, and since I was short of money and bored, I started moonlighting for a finance company skip-tracing and repossessing cars and stereos and furniture and televisions. When I got fired from the paper for being a lousy reporter, I headed out to San Francisco, where I hustled runaways for a year, then up to Montana, where my father had died, and took up skip-tracing and repo’s as a full-time job. I had stolen lots of cars legally with court orders in my pocket, and without, and I thought I could at least borrow one in Denver without too much trouble.

  I drove out to Stapleton Airport and parked in the lot farthest from the terminal, then waited for the right car, something inconspicuous in a company car preferably, driven by a tired salesman with his flight luggage in his hand. I didn’t have to wait very long for the right one, and as soon as the salesman was out of sight, I lifted a brown LTD that belonged to the Hardy Industrial Towel Company. With the right tools, it only takes a minute. I was out of the lot before the salesman hiked to the terminal.

  I had a supply of blank titles and a set of Alabama plates in my toolbox, plus a batch of blank repossession papers, but I didn’t have time to fill any of them out, so when Jackson pulled his plum-colored Cougar into the afternoon rush-hour traffic on Santa Fe, I had to stay close but drive carefully. He made it easy, and I stayed behind him all the way back downtown to a topless place on East Colfax. Two hours later, when he stepped out of the bar into the dusk, his face inflamed with whiskey and visions of naked, dancing flesh, I stuck a revolver in his ribs, and he drove us to a cheap motel out in Aurora. We didn’t even have to get out of the car.

  “Okay,” he admitted, “I knew her, all right. We came down here together, and I was flat busted, so I put her on the street, and she took a soliciting fall the first night. I couldn’t make the fine, so she did thirty days down on the county farm.”

  “And then?” I said.

  Jackson lit a cigarette and glanced up at the motel rooms. “After that she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Can’t blame her, can you?” “Guess not,” he said.

  “Where’d she go after that?”

  “Up around Fort Collins, I heard,” he said. “There’s some rich lady who lives up in Poudre Canyon, and she does rehab work, you know, pulls girls out of the slam and takes them home. A real do-gooder, you know, and I heard that Betty Sue had stayed there for a while. Then I didn’t hear any more.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing at all,” he said.

  “How come you lied to me?” I asked.

  “I thought you might be some of her family,” he said, “the accent and ali, you know, come to get even or something.” “

  “Even for what?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said, “she was just a kid.” As if that explained everything.

  “You shouldn’t have lied,” I said.

  “I see that now,” he said as he glanced at the .38 in my hand. “What did you have in mind up in that motel room, man?”

  “Taking you apart,” I said.

  “That’s what I figured,” he said. “Hell, I thought you were going to blow me away on the street, man. You should’ve seen the look in your eyes. You were crazy, man.”

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “What the hell are you looking for Betty Sue for?”

  “I don’t even remember,” I said, then Jackson drove us back to his car. “No hard feelings,” I said as he got out.

  “None at all,” he said, then hitched his pants and walked away.

  As I drove back to the airport, it crossed
my mind that it had been too easy, and I thought about going back, but I had enough trouble as it was. I parked the salesman’s company car near the spot where I had taken it, then picked up my own and headed north toward Fort Collins up I-25. Halfway there, my hands began to shake so badly that I had to pull into the nearest exit and off the road. I didn’t think it was nerves, though. Mostly anger working its way to the surface. Jackson had been right. When I shoved the piece in his back on the street in front of the topless place, I had wanted to pull the trigger as badly as I had ever wanted anything, pull it and pull it until I had blown him all over the sidewalk. I thought about what Peggy Bain had said about me being willing to kill just to stand in line for Betty Sue. I thought about it, but the line just seemed too damned long. I crawled under the topper and locked my .38 in the toolbox, then drove on north, the mountains to the west, the vast empty stretch of the Great Plains to the east.

  One summer when I was a child, after my parents separated, I had lived with my father out on the plains east of Fort Collins, north and east of a little town called Ault, during that summer, stayed with him and a short widow woman and her three little kids. He was trying to dry-farm her wheat land, and we all lived in a basement out on the plains, a basement with no house over it, where we lived in the ground like moles, looking up through the skylight, waiting for the rain that never came.

  When I turned off the freeway at the Fort Collins exit, I thought about driving east to try to find the basement. I had found it once in the daylight when I was living in Boulder but I knew I would never find’ it in the dark. So I checked into another motel, went into another bar, had another goddamned drink.

  The next day I had some luck. First, a little good luck that turned bad, then a little bad luck that turned worse.

  The second probation officer I called told me where to find the right rich lady. The first one I talked to could have told me but she just didn’t want to.

  Selma Hinds lived in a large octagonal cabin of log and glass set on the spine of a ridge south of the Cache la Poudre River. As I drove up the canyon, I could see it sitting up there like a medieval fortress. I parked by her- mailbox at the base of the ridge and changed into hiking boots, throwing longing glances at the old mine cable hoist at the side of the road, but it was for groceries and firewood. I had to trudge up the steep, winding trail for three quarters of a mile, wondering if Selma Hinds had many casual visitors or door-to-door salesmen. She didn’t have a telephone, so I also wondered if she was home. If she wasn’t at home, I would just have to wait, unless I wanted to walk the trail twice in one day.

  Finally, sweating and sucking for air, I broke out of the scrub pine into a large clearing on the saddle of the ridge just as half a dozen dogs discovered my presence. They greeted me happily, though, especially a large three-legged black lab who stabbed me in the groin with her single front leg. The others, mostly medium-sized mutts, were content with a gale of barking.

  The octagonal cabin sat on the highest point of the saddle with a large garden in the swale between it and five smaller cabins and a bank of wire cages set in the edge of the trees on the other side of the clearing. Two young girls and a boy were working in the garden among the spring planting, which was protected by sawdust and plastic sheeting, and the dry, rocky soil of the ridge had been mixed with compost until it was as black as river-bottom land. In the wire cages, small animals and birds seemed to gaze at me with the dazed eyes of hospital patients. The young people looked up from the garden but then went about their work.

  A tali, smooth-faced, motherly woman with brown hair streaked with gray stood in the doorway of the large cabin holding a big yellow cat in her arms. Her hair was tucked neatly into a bun, and she wore a long, plain dress. Even from twenty yards away, her gray eyes stared at me with a calm kindness, the sort you might expect to see in the face of a pioneer woman standing outside a soddy on the plains, a woman who had seen all the cruelty the world had to offer, had seen it and found forgiveness beyond reason or measure.

  She was nothing like my mother, who was a short, pert Southern woman, bouncy and mildly desperate, somewhat giddy, slightly sad because rogue circumstance in the guise of my father had left her working below herself as an Avon lady in Moody County, Texas, but as I walked toward Selma Hinds, I felt light-headed and joyous, as if I were coming home after a long and arduous war. She smiled, and I broke into a childish grin, nearly ran to throw my arms around her, but as I stopped in front of her, something in her gaze, perhaps a slight lack of focus in her eyes, lessened the impression.

  We exchanged introductions, and she invited me into her home. Inside, among the plain wooden furniture in the open cabin, a number of cats lay sleeping or walking about, switching their tails as they kept a weather eye on the dogs standing with drooping tongues and wistful faces just outside the door. As soon as Selma Hinds sat down on the couch and waved me to the opposite chair, the dogs sat too, their dark eyes watching us calmly, their frantic barking stilled.

  “You have the look of a man searching for something,” she said quietly, “or someone.”

  “A girl,” I said. “Betty Sue Flowers.”

  “I see,” she said, “and as you can see, I take in strays—the halt, the lame, the sore of foot.” She paused to smooth the fur of the calico that had replaced the large yellow cat in her lap. “And the spiritually damaged too, I take them in, do what I can to restore them—rebuild the body, replenish the spirit. Those who have homes they want to return to, I provide for their trip, and those who don’t I help to find a place to go, and sometimes, those who aren’t able to leave, I keep by my side.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, thinking that she must be mad or way too good for this world.

  “Mostly it works out that the human animals go on, and the others stay …” She paused again, just long enough for me to think that Betty Sue might still be here. “These are trying times for the young, and I provide a place away from the world, the violence and the drugs, a haven with a sexual king’s-ex,” she said.

  “And Betty Sue came here?”

  “Yes, for a time.”

  “Then she left?” I asked, confused now.

  “She left her spirit among us, it walks among us even now,” she said, “and her ashes are mixed with the garden soil.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s dead, Mr. Sughrue,” she said. When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You seem shocked. We all must die many times.”

  “I don’t know if I can explain that to her mother,” I said.

  “Tell her then that while Betty Sue was among us, she regained her innocence, restored her youth,” she said. “She was happy here, she grew young again.”

  “I’ve heard it’s possible,” I said, still stunned, “but I’ve never seen it happen.”

  “That’s a pity, sir, since it is one of life’s delights to watch the young grow young again.”

  “What happened?” I asked, wanting to know how she died.

  “She blossomed like a flower here,” Selma said, misunderstanding, “she came to value herself again. If you have been searching for her for some time surely you know something about her life after she ran away from home. She came here from jail, beaten and whipped by life, fat and ugly, but once she fasted and cleansed her system of animal mucus, the compulsive eating stopped, and she grew lovely again, whole. She stayed longer than any of my charges, before or since, even though her stay was more difficult than most.”

  “Do you mind if I ask why?” I said.

  “This isn’t just a job to you, is it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You’re not a member of the family, are you?” “No, ma’am.”

  “I sensed both those things immediately,” she said, “which made it possible to talk to you. You understand that I do not judge or criticize my charges or their life before, but when they come here, they must follow my rules or leave. No meat, no drugs, no sex. What they do when they leave is their busines
s, and if they come back up the mountain in emotional rags, I take them in gladly, but while they are here, they must obey the rules or leave.”

  “And Betty Sue had trouble?”

  “The boys followed her like a bitch in heat,” she answered flatly, “as well they should. Betty Sue had a great capacity for love. She fended the boys off, but it was so hard for her. She seemed to need that sort of male affection—I suppose her father never gave her the sort of love she needed—but she fought it to a standstill.” Then Selma paused to laugh. “She also admitted to an intense longing for red meat, but she never gave in to that desire either.” The bit of light laughter seemed to bring back memories, and her gray eyes turned cloudy. “Then one afternoon in late summer,” she continued, whispering so softly that I had to lean forward to hear her, “just after she had decided to leave in the fall to return to school, she drove my pickup down into town for supplies, and as she drove back, a stray dog ran in front of the truck, and she swerved to miss it, off the pavement and into the river … ” She rose and walked to the window, the cat limp over her arm, and pointed down toward the sparkling flow. “It happened on that comer right down

  there.”

  I followed the finger’s direction down the ridge to a narrow bend, a sharp curve ending in a swift green pool.

  “She survived the crash but drowned,” Selma said. “I am so very sorry.”

  “You had no way to notify her mother?” I said.

  “Her mother? No. I did what I could, placed advertisements in the San Francisco papers, but Betty Sue never talked about her childhood,” she said. “Never. Not a word the whole time she was here. In that, too, she was different from others who have stayed with me for a time.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Why do you think she wouldn’t talk about her childhood?” Selma asked, her eyes damp and serious.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she felt like a princess stolen by peasants. I don’t know.”

  “Children feel that way too often,” she said, “it’s so

  sad.”