The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“THIS IS UP
THERE WITH THE BEST!”
—People Magazine
“When Ifinally caught up with Abraham Traheame, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle jointjust outside o/Sonoma, California, drinking the heart out o/afine spring afternoon… “
That’s how Detective C. W Sughrue ended one search and began another-a search for a girl in a dog-eared photo, ten years lost and gone. Now Sughrue has finally hit the big time, hunting down
Betty Sue Flowers, the barmaid’s beautiful daughter-whose path takes him careening from
Frisco’s tenderloin to a Denver jail, from an Oregon commune to an unmarked grave to the middle of a pornographic nightmare… passing the time with a boozing poet and a willing woman or two.
Who, what, and where is Betty Sue Flowers?… Ask the men who knew her, but never well enough… ask the mobster who wants her dead … the friend who says she is…But don’t ask Sughrue -who’s putting his life on the line for87 bucks and a passionate obsession for a girl in a dog-eared photo.
“What Chandler did for Los Angeles in the Thirties, James Crumley does for the roadside West of today.”
— Harper‘s
The lines from “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” are reprinted from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. copyright © 1973 by Richard Hugo.
POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
Copyright © 1978 by James Crumley
Published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-90286
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Random House, Inc., 201 East
50th Street, N.Y. 10022
ISBN: 0-671-82813-4
First Pocket Books printing January, 1981
10 9 8 7 65 4321
POCKET and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.
Printed in the U.S.A.
for Dick Hugo,
grand old detective of the heart
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done …
—Richard Hugo, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
1••••
WHEN I FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH ABRAHAM TRAHEARNE, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big man, dressed in rumpled khakies, looked like an old soldier after a long campaign, sipping slow beers to wash the taste of death out of his mouth. The dog slumped on the stool beside him like a tired little buddy, only raising his head occasionally for a taste of beer from a dirty ashtray set on the bar.
Neither of them bothered to glance at me as I slipped onto a stool between the bulldog and the only other two customers in the place, two out-of-work shade-tree mechanics who were discussing their lost unemployment checks, their latest DWI conviction, and the probable location of a 1957 Chevy timing chain. Their knotty faces and nasal accents belonged to another time, another place. The dust bowl ‘30’s and a rattletrap, homemade Model T truck heading into the setting sun. As I sat down, they glanced at me with the narrow eyes of country people, looking me over carefully as if I were an abandoned wreck they planned to cannibalize
for spare parts. I nodded blithely to let them know that I might be a wreck but I hadn’t been totaled yet. They returned my silent greeting with blank eyes and thoughtful nods that seemed to suggest that accidents could be arranged.
Already whipped by too many miles on the wrong roads, I let them think whatever they might. As I ordered a beer from the middle-aged barmaid, she slipped out of her daydreams and into a sleepy grin. When she opened the bottle, the bulldog came out of his drunken nap, belched like a dragon, then heaved his narrow haunches upright and waddled across three rickety stools through the musty cloud of stale beer and bulldog breath to trade me a wet, stringy kiss for a hit off my beer. I didn’t offer him any, so he upped the ante by drooling all over my sunburnt elbow. Tra-hearne barked a sharp command and splashed a measure of beer into the ashtray. The bulldog gave me a mournful stare, sighed, then ambled back to a sure thing.
As I wiped the dogspit off my arm with a damp bar rag that had been used too lately and too often for the same chore, I asked the barmaid about a pay telephone. She pointed silently toward the gray dusty reaches beyond the pool table, where a black telephone hung from ashen shadows.
As I passed Trahearne, he had his heavy arm draped over the bulldog’s wrinkled shoulders and recited poetry into the stubby ear: “The bluff we face is cracking up … before this green Pacific wind .. . this … The whale’s brinystink … ah, christ … dogged we were, old friend, doggerel we became, and dogshit we too shall be … ” Then he chuckled aimlessly, like an old man searching for his spectacles.
I didn’t mind if he talked to himself. I had been talking to myself for a long time too.
That was what I had been doing the afternoon Trahearne’s ex-wife had called me—sitting in my little tin office in Meriwether, Montana, staring across the alley at the overflowing Dempster Dumpster behind the discount store, and telling myself that I didn’t mind if business was slow, that I liked it in fact. Then the telephone buzzed. Trahearne’s ex-wife was all business. In less than a minute, she had explained that her ex-husband’s health and drinking habits were both bad and that she wanted me to find him, to track him down on his running binge before he drank himself into an early grave. I suggested that we talk about the job face to face, but she wanted me on the road immediately, no time wasted driving the three hours up to Cauldron Springs. To save time, she had already hired an air-taxi out of Kalispell, which was at this very moment winging its way south toward Meriwether with a cashier’s check for a retainer, a list of Trahearne’s favorite bars around the West—particularly those bars about which he had written poems after other binges—and a dust-jacket photo off his last novel.
“What if I don’t want the job?” I asked.
“After you see the size of the retainer, you’ll want the job,” she answered coolly, then hung up.
When I picked up the large manila folder at the Meriwether Airport, I glanced at the check and decided to take the job even before I studied the photograph. Traheame looked like a big man, a retired longshoreman maybe, as he leaned against a pillar on the front porch of the Cauldron Springs Hotel, a drink shining in one hand, a cigar smoking in the other. His age showed, even through his boyish grin, but he clearly hadn’t gone to Cauldron Springs for the waters. Behind him, through the broad darkened doorway, two arthritic ghosts in matching plaid bathrobes shuffled toward the sunlight. Their ancient faces seemed to be smiling in anticipation of dipping their brittle bones into the hot mineral waters.
In the years that I had spent looking for lost husbands, wives, and children, I had learned not to think that I could stare into a one-dimensional face and see the person behind the photograph, but the big man looked like the sort who would cut a wide swath and leave an easy trail.
At first, it was too easy. Back at my office, I called five or six of the bars and caught the old man up in Ovando, Montana, at a great little bar called Trixi’s Antler Bar. Trahearne had left, though, by the time I drove the eighty miles, telling the bartender that he was off to Two Dot to check out the beer-can collection in one of Two Dot’s two bars. I chased him across Montana but when I reached Two Dot, Trahearne had gone on to the 666 in Miles City. From there, he headed south to Buffalo, Wyoming, to write an epic poem about the Johnson County War. Or so he told the barmaid. As it turned out, Trahearne never made a move without discussing it with everybody in the bar. Which made him easy to follow but impossible to catch.
We covered the West, touring the bars, seeing the sights. The Chugwater Hotel down in Wyoming, the Mayflower in Cheyenne, the Stockman’s in Rawlins, a barbed-wire collection in the Sacajawea Hotel Bar in Three Forks, Montana, rocks in Fossil, Oregon, drunken Mormons all over northern Utah and southern Idaho—ci rcling, wandering in an aimless drift. Twice I hired private planes to get ahead of the old man, and twice he failed to show up until after I had left. I liked his taste in bars but I was in and out of so many that they all began to seem like the same endless bar. By the middle of the second week, my expenses were beginning to embarrass even me, so I called the former Mrs. Trahearne to ask how much money she wanted to pour down the rolling rathole. “Whatever is necessary,” she answered, sounding irritated that I had bothered to ask.
So I settled back into the bucket seat of my fancy El Camino pickup for a long siege of moving on, following Trahearne from bar to bar, down whatever roads suited his fancy, covering the ground like an excited redbone pup just to keep from losing him, following him as he drifted on, his tail turned into some blizzard wind only he felt, his ear cocked to hear the strains of some distant song only he heard.
By the middle of the second week, I had that same high lonesome keen whistling in my chest, and if I hadn’t needed the money so badly, I might have said to hell with Abraham Trahearne, stuck some Willie Nelson into my tape deck, and tried to drown in a whiskey river of my own. Taking up moving on again. But I get paid for finding folks, not for losing myself, so I held on his trail like an old hound after his last coon.
And it made me even crazier than Trahearne. I found myself chasing ghosts across gray mountain passes, then down through green valleys riddled with the snows of late spring. I took to sleeping in the same motel beds he had, trying to dream him up, took to getting drunk in the same bars, hoping for a whiskey vision. They came all right, those bleak motel dreams, those whiskey visions, but they were out of my own drifting past. As for Trahearne, I didn’t have a clue.
Once I even humped the same sad young whore in a trailerhouse complex out on the Nevada desert. She was a frail, skinny little bit out of Cincinnati, and she had brought her gold mine out West, thinking perhaps it might assay better, but her shaft had collapsed, her veins petered out, and the tracks on her thin arms looked as if they had been dug with a rusty pick. After I had slaked too many nights of aimless barstool lust amid her bones, I asked her again about Trahearne. She didn’t say anything at first, she just lay on her crushed bed-sheets, hitting on a joint and gazing beyond the aluminum ceiling into the cold desert night.
“You reckon they actually went up there on the moon?” she asked seriously.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Me neither,” she whispered into the smoke.
I buttoned up my Levis and fled into the desert, into a landscape blasted by moonlight and shadow.
Then in Reno I lost the trail, had to circle the city in ever-widening loops, talking to bartenders and service-station attendants until I found a pump jockey in Truckee who remembered the big man in his Caddy convertible asking about the mud baths in Calistoga. The mud was still warm when I got there, but his trail was as cold as the eyes of the old folks dying around the hot baths.
When I called Trahearne’s ex-wife to admit failure, she told me that she had received a postcard from him, a picture of the Golden Gate and a cryptic couplet. Dogs, they say, are man’s best friend, but their pants have no pockets, their thirst no end. “Traheame has this odd affinity for bar dogs,” she told me, “particularly those who drink as well as do tricks. Once he spent three weeks in Frenchtown, Montana, drinking with a mutt who wore a tiny crushed officer’s cap, sunglasses, and a corncob pipe. Traheame said they discussed the Pacific campaign over shots of blackberry brandy.” I told her that it was her money and that if she wanted me to wander around the Bay Area looking for a drinking bar dog, I would surely comply. That’s what she wanted, so I hooked it up, headed for San Francisco, a fancy detective hot on the trail of a drinking bar dog, a fool on her errand.
I should have guessed that the city of lights would be rife with bar dogs—dancing dogs and singing dogs, even hallucinating hounds—so it wasn’t until three days later, drinking gimlets with a pink poodle in Sausalito, that I heard about the beer-drinking bulldog over by Sonoma.
The battered frame building was set fifty yards off the Petaluma road, and Trahearne’s red Cadillac convertible was parked in front. In the days when the old highway had been new, back before it had been rebuilt along more efficient lines, the beer joint had been a service station. The faded ghost of a flying red horse still haunted the weathered clapboard walls of the building. A small herd of abandoned cars, ranging from a russet Henry J to a fairly new but badly wrecked black Dodge Charger, stood hock deep in the dusty Johnson grass and weeds, the empty sockets of their headlights dreaming of Pegasus and asphalt flight. The place didn’t even have a name, just a faded sign wanly promising BEER as it swung from the canted portico. The old glass-tanked pumps were long gone—probably off to Sausalito to open an antique shop—but the rusted bolts of their bases still dangled upward from the concrete like finger bones from a shallow grave.
I parked beside Trahearne’s Caddy, got out to stretch the miles out of my legs, then walked out of the spring sunshine into the dusty shade of the joint, my boot heels rocking gently on the warped floorboards, my sigh relieved in the darkened air. This was the place, the place I would have come on my own wandering binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack, this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed, their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot, windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair, and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of orange groves and ax handles. This could just as easily have been my place, a home where a man could drink in boredom and repent in violence and be forgiven for the price of a beer.
After I had thought about it, I stuck my dime back in my pocket, walked back to the bar for another beer. I had found bits and pieces of Trahearne all along the way and I felt like an old friend. It seemed a shame not to enjoy him, not to have a few beers with him before I called his ex-wife and ended the party. Whenever I found anybody, I always suspected that I deserved more than money in payment. This was the saddest moment of the chase, the silent wait for the apologetic parents or the angry spouse or the laws. The process was fine, but the finished product was always ugly. In my business, you need a moral certitude that I no longer even claimed to possess, and every time when I came to the end of the chase, I wanted to walk away.
But not yet, not this time. I leaned against the bar and ordered another bottle of beer. When the barmaid sat it down, a large black tomcat drifted down the bar to nose the moisture on the long neck.
“The cat drink beer too?” I asked the barmaid.
“Not anymore,” she answered with a grin as she flicked the sodden bar rag at the cat’s butt. He gave her a dirty look, then wandered down the bar past the bulldog and Trahearne, his tail brushing across Trahearne’s stolid face. “Sumbitch usta.drink like a fish but he got to be too much trouble. He’s like ol’ Lester there,” she said, nodding toward the shade-tree mechanic with the most teeth. “He can’t handle i
The barmaid gave ol’ Lester a hard, knowing glance, then broke into a happy cackle. As he tried to grin, ol’ Lester showed me the rest of his teeth. They weren’t any prettier than the ones I had already seen. “One night that crazy black bastard started up a-humpin’ ever’thing in sight—pool-table legs, cues, folks’ legs, anything that didn’t move fast enough—and then he did somethin’ nasty on a lady’s slacks and somebody laughed and damned if we didn’t have the biggest fistfight I ever seen. Ever’body who wasn’t in the hospital ended up in jail, and they took my license for six weeks.” She laughed, then added, “So I had that scutter cut off. Right at the source. He ain’t wanted a drink since.”
“Is that Lester or the tomcat?” I asked.
The barmaid cackled merrily again, the other mechanic brayed, but ol’ Lester just sat there and looked like his teeth hurt.
“Naw,” she answered when she stopped laughing. “01’ Lester there, he don’t cause no trouble in here. He’s plumb terrified of my bulldog there.”
“Looks like a plain old bulldog to me,” I said, then leaned back and waited for the story.
“Plain,” Lester squealed. “Plain mean. And I mean mean. Hell, mister, one momin’ last summer I come in here peaceful as could be, just mindin’ my own business, and I made the mistake of steppin’ on that sumbitch’s foot when he had a hangover, and damn if he didn’t like to tore my leg plumb off.” Lester leaned over to lift his pants’ leg and exhibit a set of dog-bite scars that looked like chicken scratches. “Took fifty-seven stitches,” he claimed proudly. “01’ Oney here, he had to hit that sucker with a pool cue to get him off’n my leg.”