The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

Genres: Romantic Suspense; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Randy Chalmers has to admit he'd be dead or in prison were it not for Terry Elias. Thanks to Terry's coaching and an endless stream of AA meetings, Randy's been off the booze for eight years, has a successful new career, and is thriving in a healthy relationship. All is well...until Terry is found dead of a heroin overdose. Convinced that something (or someone) must have pushed him, Randy is soon off on a dry-drunk quest for answers. When his suspicions ultimately connect Terry's death to the activities of a recently appointed Superior Court judge Randy has to ask himself: Is he really onto something or just suffering from grief and paranoia?

Release date: March 6, 2012

Publisher: The Dial Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

OFFICIALLY,  I  STARTED   DESTROYING   MY  LIFE  that Wednesday morning. But it had been on my mind for a while.
As I drove up  Pacific  Coast Highway past the Laguna Art Museum, I suddenly longed for still-sort-of-disreputable Santa Ana, where there would have been a neighborhood nearby that would better reflect  my  mood. There’s  nothing worse  than a beautiful town when you’ve got an ugly head. From every corner of  always-blooming Laguna Beach, bougainvillea  announced that unhappiness was not an option here.
It had been almost three weeks since Terry died, and I hadn’t done a damn thing but drink espresso and avoid the people who loved me.
It reminded me  of when I first got sober. I didn’t  want to drink, but  I held the idea  of drinking close,  like a suicide bomb inside my heart. Just bend my elbow and a world of possibilities would open up.  Bad possibilities, but  possibilities nevertheless. I’d never see my  daughter again, but  I’d make sure  that a few people paid for their sins.
I could hear Terry’s voice: Clamoring for justice again? Is that it, Randy?
I was waiting for the light beside the Cottage to change, staring into a pack  of well-dressed skateboarders pointed toward Heisler Park, when my cell phone rang. It was Wade’s number, so I didn’t answer. Sometimes you’re too lonely to talk to your friends.
Instead, I drove my F-350 up to Jean  Claude’s café in North Laguna. Like every  other morning these three weeks,  I would park  my  ass in  a molded plastic chair beside a molded plastic table and try to clear my mind with double espressos.
That morning the sidewalk and the shrubs were  still  dewy. Across  the parking lot,  surfers   were  jaywalking across   Coast Highway, shrugging into wet suits,  blowing their noses into the street. Above the beach access, a gray shelf of fog announced the Pacific Ocean.
At a table nearby, a couple of rich people waved at me tenta- tively. I  vaguely remembered being introduced to them  by someone who thought I might design their home. She was too old to be his daughter and too pretty to be his first wife. I’d prob- ably  been dodging their calls,  but  they wouldn’t approach me here. I had perfected my sullenness. It was another way that my old life clung to me: sometimes I scared people.
For three weeks,  I’d been pretending I was just a home de- signer and not that earlier, angrier version of myself. It wasn’t working. Every  day  it got harder to pretend I was  anyone but myself.
 

Jean Claude set down another double espresso on the flimsy table. He was hardworking Eurotrash—a contradiction I liked. Also, the only guy in Southern California who didn’t look  like he’d grown his goatee yesterday.
“Ça va?” he asked.
“Ça fucking va. How about you? Who are you humping these days?”
“An important man, works for Obama. He’s too good for me, though. I want somebody bad,  like you.”
One  good thing had come out  of the past three weeks: I’d fi- nally found a way  to describe the sound of my  diseased con- science. It was a Styrofoam ice chest wedged behind the seat of an  old  pickup. The  rougher the road, the louder it  squeaked, until the noise became unbearable.
My cell phone rang again as Jean  Claude was clearing away my  second double espresso. This  time I answered: “What the fuck do you want, Wade?”
“It’s not Wade. It’s Tom. Wade got into a fight. He wanted me to call you.”
“Tell him that I’m not coming.” I hung up.
They couldn’t be anywhere but  the Coastal Club, one  of the places  I was avoiding, a place  that I’d been avoiding even before Terry died. I poured my espresso into a sip cup  and sped  out  of the parking lot.  Something that had stuck with me  from that lost decade of  being a cop:  running out  of  coffee  shops and driving away too fast.

. . .


A simple white building in a glade of oak and eucalyptus just off
Laguna Canyon Road,  the Coastal Club  was  nicer than most A.A. clubs  because a rich gallery owner had endowed it thirty years ago. Then it took them almost half that thirty years to de- cide  on  a design. It was just down the road from the old  Bhag- wan   Ranjeesh  place—now a  nursery school—and you  could have mistaken it for a deal like that. The architectural equivalent of a freshly laundered linen nightgown. They’d done a good job.
I hated going there, but it was the place where my life began. Once I would have slept there if they had let me. I first met Terry in the gravel parking lot where I was now skidding my truck into a swirl of dust.
Wade stood at the front door beside Tom  and several other fools  from the seven A.M. meeting. It seemed like everyone but Wade wanted to tell  me  what had happened. But they were  a little scared to tell  me,  too. Since  Terry’s death, I’d become an authorized repository for community grief. One  reason I hadn’t attended a single meeting since the funeral was that I was sick of people looking at me as though I might break  down or explode. Wade’s pal Tom, an overweight photojournalist who’d taken the highway patrol on  a chase through two  counties last summer, gave  me  a jaunty and ridiculous salute. He and a guy  I didn’t know at all, with dark glasses and a bomber jacket, stood behind Wade like Secret Service agents: arms at their sides but ready.
When I rolled up beside the curb, Wade said, “Dude.” “In the truck,” I answered.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Tom said. “Troy Padilla came out  of no- where.”
“Out of nowhere,” the other guy underlined. “In the truck, please,” I said to Wade.
“His  dad’s  a mafioso or  something,” Tom  explained. “He knows how to do that shit.”
 

“In the fucking truck.”
When we  got back  to my  house above Bluebird Canyon, MP—only her  father calls  her  Mary  Pat—was back  from yoga training and drilling up something in the blender that I might drink if I were  dying of cancer. She  gave  Wade a hug. They’d gone to Catholic high school together in  Ranch Santa Marga- rita. Wade had grown up  surfing and perfecting his  substance abuse and brushing his blond hair out of his eyes. MP had grown up riding horses, wishing she weren’t flat-chested, and steering clear of boys like Wade.
“He won’t talk to me,” Wade said. “All the way over here, he wouldn’t speak.”
“You  guys  are  going to have to work  this out,” MP  said. “While I’m somewhere else.”
“He thinks I’m lying  to him. This dude came out  of nowhere to punch me, and he thinks I’m lying.”
I sat down on the Indian daybed that MP had found for me at a swap  meet. Not as comfortable as my Eames  chair, but  it pro- vided me a great  view of my home. I’d taken a midcentury hill- side  ranch-style and redone the interior as  contemporary cottage. Eclectic  furniture like this daybed contrasted with the white ceilings, white walls, and white plank flooring. I had used traditional materials and hadn’t  goobered them up  with too many  fixtures. Reclaimed oak  beams in  the ceiling were  the darkest element by far. Otherwise, it was a playground for the light from the hills.
I’ll always  be happy to see Wade—forever, for the rest of my life—but he’s the guy who finds  your kitchen first. The guy who wonders if you’ve made coffee.  The guy who pleads his case to your girlfriend. The guy who was now scanning my living room.
 

We’d been friends long enough that I could read  his  mind: Is that  a new Blu-ray player? The kind  that  records? How much  does something  like that cost? You’d think he was still a crack-addicted surf rat instead of a guy with a modest trust fund and an  after- noon job as a scuba instructor.
I’ll never not love him, though. Him and Terry. “Coffee?” Wade asked.
MP shook her  head and punched up the blender again. She was the only brunette with bangs I would ever love.
“Not until you drop the bullshit,” I said. “Bullshit?”
MP had her back to me, but I could feel her smiling.
“The  bullshit about how this guy  attacked you  for  no  rea- son.”
“His father’s in the Mafia,”  Wade said.  “He’s from New Jer- sey. He needs a reason?”
Even Wade knew better than to sit down in my Eames  chair, so he  passed it to stand in  front of the window watching the goats  across  the canyon. Wildfire control: they ate  everything on the hill until there was nothing left to burn.
“I think he’s the guy who was with Terry,”  Wade said. “That’s not why  he  hit you.  Once you’ve got Tom  and that
other bozo  defending you,  I know it’s a bigger story than that.” Wade smiled. My  friends can  get mighty full  of  shit, but
sometimes they’ll drop it if you  ask them. While Wade consid- ered how to tell me the truth, I watched Yegua, my Guatemalan laborer/assistant/better half, cross the backyard with a posthole digger.
“Well   .  .  .” Wade finally said. “I’ve been telling everyone he was the guy with Terry.”
 

“Do you know that for sure?”
“No,” Wade said. “But it makes sense.”
“How does it make sense, Wade? And if it made so much god- damn sense, why didn’t you tell me?”
Wade turned from the goats. “You were too busy  hiding out at  Jean  Claude’s. I thought I’d wait  until you  showed up  at  a meeting.”
“Fuck you,  Wade.”
Wade stared across the room at the nook where my electron- ics were stacked. I could feel that MP wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Okay,” I said after a while. “I’ll fix some coffee.”
Wade looked at me. “Rick Buford at the South Coast hospital meeting said  that this dude Troy  and Terry  had been driving around all day, checking out  Terry’s old drug  neighborhoods. A nostalgia trip. Sometime after  the funeral, Troy  told Rick how guilty he felt.”
“Feeling guilty doesn’t  mean he  was  with him when he died.”
Wade sat down on the couch. He leaned forward, his elbows on  his knees. “Rick said Troy told him that Terry fell like a tree, that he’d  never seen  anyone fall  like  that. He  saw  it  happen, Randy. Then he must have just bailed. Didn’t even call the fuck- ing paramedics.”
MP set down her protein drink and leaned against the coun- ter. For the first time in forever, I wished that she weren’t in my house.
My sponsor Terry was a big man, about six foot three, with silver  hair  and a pale  youthful face.  I’ve had moments when I thought he stood straighter than any  man I’d ever known. He’d been off booze and drugs for fifteen years  on  the night that he died. On the night he died from a heroin overdose in a shitty  motel room in Santa Ana.
My friend Terry would have fallen like a tree.
This  was what I’d been waiting for. My gift from God.  And not the loving God  people talked about at meetings but  a God, like me, who got pissed off when good men died. I’d been sitting on  my  ass for  three weeks  because I needed all  my  righteous strength and every bad impulse I’d been saving from eight years of sobriety to go kick the shit  out  of this little prick  from New Jersey.
MP walked down the hallway into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.
I said, “Let’s go find this asshole.”

. . .


The  first time I really  talked with Terry  was  over  breakfast at Corky’s.  He  was  already hanging with Wade then, although Wade still  had one  more drunk left.  They  had invited me  to breakfast after the seven A.M. meeting at the Coastal Club.
Sometimes people in A.A. will say, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” I don’t think it would have worked on me. At the time I wouldn’t  have trusted anyone—besides my  SAPD partner, Manny, and my sister—who pretended to love me.
With Terry and Wade, though, it was a totally different deal. Corky’s was a great  place  to have breakfast, and I fell right into the food. Terry and Wade talked about people in A.A. whom I didn’t yet know. Mostly I ignored them. I wouldn’t admit that I needed this thing. When they asked me questions, I answered. Terry  seemed like the kind of smugly successful attorney I had always hated. And Wade seemed like a tadpole who needed to be
 

slapped every  time he said the word “dude.” Still pretending to be one tough hombre, I let them know early and often that I was a cop.
About  halfway through my  bacon, cheddar, and avocado omelet, I could feel Terry staring at me. When I met his eyes, he said, “You know, Randy, we don’t hang out  with you because we like you.  We don’t like you.  Isn’t that right, Wade?”
Wade nodded slowly.
“We hang out with you,” Terry continued, “because it’s head cases like you who keep us sober.”
It was an important moment in my life. I stood up from the table, threw down twenty dollars, and walked out  of the restau- rant. I think I told them to fuck themselves. Wade said I did, and Terry said I just walked out.
By that night, I knew who my sponsor was going to be.

. . .


Halfway to our  destination, I realized that I hadn’t  even said goodbye to MP.
“It’s not on Temple Hills,” Wade said. “And it’s not on Arroyo
Hills.”
“I don’t care, Wade, where it’s not.”
Wade looked at me  like I was rushing some terribly impor- tant process—the composition of a symphony, maybe. His sun- glasses  were  hanging from his  neck   by  one   of  those Croakie doodads. I pulled them off and threw the doodad out the window. “You  don’t  get to wear  that anymore.” I tossed back  his
glasses. “It looks  too stupid.”
The asshole Troy Padilla lived  in a “recovery home”—words that should be  said  in  quotation  marks. People in  Alcoholics
 

Anonymous were always  thinking up new  scams, and lately the new  scam  was this: rent a big house and fill it with newcomers who couldn’t pull  together a security deposit if they owned a gold  mine. Put  two  of them in  each room, invent a bunch of bullshit rules  about curfew and house meetings, and you  can rake  in  at least twenty grand a month over  the actual rent. At best,  it was “stone soup”: the newcomer went to A.A. meetings and didn’t mind getting screwed by some old-timers. At worst, the people who “managed” the houses began to think they ac- tually knew something about recovering from alcoholism.
In Laguna, the scam  had been refined a bit,  which is often what happens to scams   when  they  reach Laguna. An  A.A. member named Colin Alvarez,  who’d made a lot of money as a mortgage broker, started a corporation  called Recovery Homes Incorporated to administer the houses. Sober just about as long as me,  Colin was the kind of guy who, unlike me,  didn’t make jokes  about A.A. He’d come back  from a meth addiction in his early twenties and, also unlike me, didn’t miss many meetings.
What did I know? Maybe the “recovery homes” were the best thing that ever happened to some of these people. Terry used to say that A.A. itself  was the biggest scam  of them all, but  it had failed  as a scam, and it had become something better.
“Wait,” Wade said. “It is Temple Hills.”
Eventually, Wade steered us to a little ranch house hanging its ass over the side of a hill.  This dwelling had absolutely noth- ing going for it but  the fact that it had landed in Laguna Beach. The  porcini-mushroom-and-sun-dried-tomato color scheme beneath the shake shingles was the only upscale element in the design. In Tustin or El Toro, it would have cost half of what it did here. I parked my truck pointing down the grade beside the house.
 

I thumped hard on  the front door, which was  suburban and hollow-core and made a nice  scary  sound. A near-teenager with a bare midriff and a pierced navel answered. In my limited experience, these recovery homes existed somewhere on a con- tinuum between a prison and a pajama party. I saw that contra- diction in the girl before me. She might have been near the bad end of Laguna Beach High, but something in her eyes was harder than that by a lot.  It reminded me that in spite of the affluence surrounding them, some of these kids  could be living on  the street before the year was out.
“Look  who’s here,” she  said.  “It’s the let’s-drink-too-much- coffee-but-not-smoke-enough-cigarettes-and-still-think-we’re- better-than-everyone-else brigade.”
I was wondering what meeting she knew us from when Wade shouted after  a dark-haired kid in his early  twenties peeking at us from the end of a long central hallway. The kid ran, and I ran after  him. Wade and Pierced Navel  followed. At the end of the hallway, in  what looked like  the kitchen, I  saw  three more twentysomethings—two boys  and another  girl—watching us but apparently staying put.
The kid slammed through a door into the garage, but the au- tomatic garage-door opener was  taking its  sweet time letting him out. I pushed the button to send the door down again and tossed him up  against an  old  Datsun pickup. Troy  Padilla fea- tured grungy black  hair, baggy  pants, and a faux  hip-hop uni- form that would have been current anywhere but  Laguna. He was about five-ten and all worked out, but  none of it was real muscle. “Fluffy” was what Terry  would have called him. I was probably old enough to be his father, but also very much not his father: my  still-hanging-in-there blond hair   and slow-to-tan skin came from an entirely different gene  pool. I was five inches taller and thirty unfluffy pounds heavier. My  nose had been broken enough times to prove that I hadn’t always  been smart about who I fought.
The  garage door finished closing. I could feel  Wade some- where behind me.
“Were you with him?” I asked.
“You’re talking about Terry now?” the kid said. “Who the fuck else would I be talking about?”
“I wasn’t  with him. Not at  the end. I was  with him early, when he was looking. We went to the racetrack and a few shop- ping centers in Santa Ana.  But he never found anything. Then he got pissed off and left me at a bar.”
I slowed down my breathing. I checked the garage for blunt instruments that numbnuts might grab  for.  There wasn’t any- thing in here but that old Datsun pickup.
“Which bar?”  I heard Wade ask behind me. He had his arms across the doorway to keep Pierced Navel out  of the garage.
“The TGIF off Orangethorpe.”
“That’s not a fucking bar,”  Wade said. “That’s—”
I looked back with steel in my eyes, but  Wade wouldn’t stop talking. “No,  I’m not going to shut up,  Randy. I’m sick of this guy.  Tell him how tough your father is, Troy.  I never heard of a mafioso with the name Padilla. You’re so full of shit.”
I stared at Wade again. This time he got the message. “Okay,” Wade said. “I’m done.”
I backed away  from Troy a little, but  I kept my  hands up  in case he  tried to bolt. “How  did  you  know my  friend Terry,  and how come I don’t know you?”
From behind us, Pierced Navel suddenly pushed Wade in the chest, but  he stood his ground. Then she got really  close to him and sniffed him repeatedly, which was, well, very weird.
Troy looked me straight in the eyes. “I loved Terry, the same as you guys.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my fucking life, Troy. So tell me why I should believe you.”
“Everyone knows you,  Randy. Just like everyone knew Terry. You guys were like A.A. royal—”
I pushed him back  against the Datsun, not enough to hurt him but enough to let him feel how much I wanted to hurt him. “And if you loved him so fucking much,” I said, “why didn’t you call somebody? Why didn’t you call one  of us?”
“I had ninety days  of sobriety. He  was  like  a god  to me.  I thought I was just going to snort a little smack. That’s different, right? I thought that was different. I was insane. If you guys don’t understand that, who the hell understands that?”
“What Troy’s not saying,” Pierced Navel  shouted from be- hind me, “is that you don’t know him because you haven’t fuck- ing been around. It’s hard to be Mr. A.A. when you  don’t go to any fucking A.A. meetings.”
“Crazy girl”—I  pointed at  her—“you shut the fuck  up.” I turned back to Troy. “Did he talk to anyone else while you were with him?”
“He called Claire.”
“Claire Monaco? Why did he call Claire  Monaco?”
“It was after  midnight,” Troy  Padilla sneered. “Why do you
think he called Claire  Monaco?” He made a move to get away.
This time I threw him against the truck hard. “What was this shit  about him falling like a tree? Isn’t that what you said? That Terry fell like a tree?”
 

“That’s the way I imagined it,” Troy said. “He was a big guy. You gonna beat  me up because I have an imagination?”
Troy’s face  started to cloud. He reminded me  of the tough guy in high school, which was to say not tough at all. I noticed, however, that I believed him.
“I figured Terry knew what he was doing.” Troy started to cry. “Didn’t Terry always  look like he knew what he was doing?”
Troy’s jaw began to shake, and Pierced Navel  went apeshit. She kneed Wade in the groin and pushed past him into the ga- rage.  She  slapped my  face—hard—but her  assault didn’t seem to have any  purpose other than to focus  my  attention. Which it did.
“Do I know you?” I said.
“You should. Because  assholes like you  have been stepping on my feet and ramming pencils up my nose since before I knew what feet and pencils were. You’ve got a big fucking truck where your soul should be, and you want to drive  it over someone, but you  can’t because it’s encased in flesh and you  would die if you tried. Fuck you,  fuck you both.”
She swung back  to slap me again, but  Wade had by then re- covered from her  knee, and he  got himself around her  pretty good. She couldn’t do much but thrash and spit.
Wanting to punch someone so  badly that I thought my heart would seize if I didn’t, I got right into Troy’s face. “I think you were there,” I said. “I think you were there and you were too chickenshit to call the paramedics.”
“I think you  feel guilty,” Troy whined. “And  you’re taking it out  on me.”
I don’t  know if I would have hit him or  not, because two things happened at once: a dark  stain grew from Troy’s crotch,and shame spread through his face. The smell of urine filled the garage. As I backed away,  the rage  settled down inside me.  I pushed Wade through the door with a hand that was no longer a fist. Pierced Navel  followed us to the front door, screaming. “I don’t care how many A.A. enemas they stick up your ass, you’re still just a cracker with a badge!” She looked familiar, like I’d seen her  regularly in  some other life. And  by the time Wade closed the front door on her and she didn’t open it back up, she seemed almost as young as my daughter.

. . .


As my truck slammed down Temple Hills, I wanted to puke from the adrenalin. I felt like the first time I beat  up someone in a bar with my nightstick. My training officer had stopped at the door and tipped his  hat, and I got that this was my  little hazing. As the guy  came after  me—a  big  crew  cut  with swollen eyes— I would have sworn that I didn’t need the nightstick, but  appar- ently, the nightstick needed him. It wanted his knees and then his kidney.
My cell phone startled me.  The  world of wanting to smack some guy  from New  Jersey  shouldn’t have cell  phones. It was Jeep Mooney, my business partner.
“Wade and I are on our way to your place,” I said. “You’ve been avoiding me for weeks,” she said. “Two minutes.” I flipped the phone closed.
Although she now lived with my sister, Betsy—in the biblical sense—I’d met Jeep in A.A. She’d been agitating for my return to work since  the day after the funeral.
When we showed up, she was standing on her driveway. “It’s Punch and Judy.”
 

Wade looked at me. “You’re Punch,” I said. “I’m Judy.” Some- one  from the seven A.M. meeting must have called Jeep about Wade’s  earlier encounter, but  there was no way she could know about Troy Padilla and me. Yet.
Jeep was wearing a slate-blue suit over a white blouse. About an inch taller than me,  she was stick-thin and regal as a queen. A once-upon-a-time debutante, she’d  been spared the upper reaches of Orange County society by her  Roman nose and car- toonishly bulging eyes,  which weren’t  most people’s idea  of beautiful. She wouldn’t say exactly how she got the name Jeep, but I bet it was a taunt she transcended.
As Wade headed for Betsy’s office—lots of new  toys there— I walked with Jeep through the backyard.
“Have you darkened the door of an A.A. meeting since Terry’s funeral?” Jeep said.
“Did that guy drop off those pavers?” I squinted as though I were calculating material costs.
Jeep stopped walking. “Have  you punched anyone yet?”
I told myself again there was no  way she  could know about
Troy Padilla. “Who told you about Wade?” I asked.
“I’m everyone’s den mother this week,” she said. “Yours, too. You look like shit.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I feel worse.”
We  stood near the edge  of my  sister’s  carp  pond. We  had both argued strenuously against it.  But  without Betsy