The Highly Effective Detective Read online

  THE

  HIGHLY

  EFFECTIVE

  DETECTIVE

  ALSO BY RICHARD YANCEY

  Confessions of a Tax Collector

  A Burning in Homeland

  The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp

  THE

  HIGHLY

  EFFECTIVE

  DETECTIVE

  A Teddy Ruzak Novel

  RICHARD YANCEY

  Thomas Dunne Books

  St. Martin’s Minotaur

  New York

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  THE HIGHLY EFFECTIVE DETECTIVE. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Yancey. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yancey, Richard.

  The highly effective detective / Richard Yancey.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34752-9

  ISBN-10: 0-312-34752-9

  1. Private investigators—Tennessee—Knoxville—Fiction. 2. Knoxville (Tenn.)— Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3625.A675H54 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2006042521

  First Edition: July 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO SANDY

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee—and then my state,

  Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXIX

  Take note, take note, O World.

  To be direct and honest is not safe.

  —William Shakespeare, Othello

  THE

  HIGHLY

  EFFECTIVE

  DETECTIVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’D HAD THIS DOPEY IDEA TO BE A DETECTIVE EVER SINCE my mother gave me an illustrated Sherlock Holmes book for my tenth birthday. For months, I walked around the house with a bubble pipe and two baseball caps on my head, one turned backward so I would have that double-billed look. I outgrew the ball caps and the pipe, but never my dream of being a detective.

  Then when I was twelve, somebody gave me one of those Encyclopedia Brown books, about a boy detective who was smarter than his own father, the chief of police no less, and solved all the crimes for him. The answer to each mystery was in the back of the book for those people like me who wanted to play detective but could never figure out what the solution was. I liked that kid detective so much, I started calling myself “Dictionary Ruzak,” because “Encyclopedia” was already taken.

  After high school, I went to the Police Academy, but they kicked me out. I couldn’t run fast enough, and I never could pass the driving and the marksmanship tests. Then they put me in what they called “scenario training” and the bad guy always killed me. I must have died a hundred times, and would have died a hundred more, but the Academy concluded I wasn’t cut out for police work.

  After I flunked out of the Academy, I took a job as a guard with a company that provided security for a local bank. I wore a black uniform with a gold badge embroidered on the shoulder. I had the midnight shift, which I liked. It was quiet, I had a chance to read or listen to the radio, and nothing ever happened. I worked there for fourteen years. For ten of those years I lived with my parents, until Dad died of a heart attack and Mom told me if I didn’t move out, I never would, because with him gone, the temptation would be too great to live with and take care of her as an excuse not to strike out on my own. She kept on me to go to college. I worked nights, so my days were free, but somehow, like a lot of things people plan for, I never got around to it. I also could never figure out how I was going to work a full-time job, go to college, and sleep.

  So the day came when I was thirty-three years old and was still doing the same thing I’d been doing when I was nineteen. I was hunkered down. Flunking out of the Police Academy had taken something out of me, a pretty big chunk of my resolve or spirit or whatever you want to call it, and I was waiting for something. I couldn’t put my finger on what I was waiting for. Maybe it was some kind of mystical call to action, but I was never the type who believed we all have a destiny to fulfill, like a cosmic apple hanging from a tree that we wait till it’s ripe to pluck. My outlook on life tended toward the prosaic. I wasn’t much of a dreamer or go-getter, since the two usually go hand in hand. But sometimes, usually midway through my shift, about 3:00 A.M., when things were their most quiet and I was tired of reading and all the late-night radio talk shows had signed off, I would feel an aching somewhere in the vicinity of my heart, not in the heart itself, but about two or three inches below it, which I interpreted as some soft groaning of my unfulfilled soul, only I didn’t know what to do about it except wait for it to go away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THEN ONE NIGHT IN THE WINTER OF MY THIRTY-THIRD year, my mother called me to tell me she was calling from her deathbed. So I drove to her house in Fountain City. It was the fourth house she had lived in since I’d been born. Dad was a salesman and moved around a lot. He wasn’t a traveling salesman; he just wasn’t a very good salesman and he moved to follow what he called the “consumer trends.” I spent the first twelve years of my life in Brooklyn, where Dad sold furniture. Then we moved to St. Louis, where Dad sold cars. Then to Raleigh, where he sold life insurance. Finally, when I was sixteen, he moved us to Knoxville, where he sold more cars, more life insurance, and more furniture. The house in Fountain City was about fifty years old, renovated several times, big and drafty, with a pee smell in the hallways that Mom could never get out, so she burned a lot of candles, though Dad stomped around and said one day she was going to burn the whole place down.

  Mom had cancer. When it was diagnosed, I told her she should find a smaller place. She said she felt closer to Dad there. She had had cancer for three years, and this was about the sixth call from her deathbed, so I didn’t rush over. I even stopped first at the DQ drive-thru for a chocolate sundae. It was for her. Mom loved chocolate sundaes.

  “Mom, I brought you a chocolate sundae,” I said. She was lying propped up in the bed, with about a dozen pillows behind her back. She didn’t look good, and I felt guilty for not going straight over there.

  “I don’t want a chocolate sundae. You eat it.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and ate the sundae.

  “Tell me how I look,” she said.

  “You look great, Mom.”

  “No, I don’t. I look terrible. Don’t lie to me, Theodore.”

  “I never lie to you, Mom.”

  “You lied about breaking my kitchen window.”

  “Mom, that was twenty years ago. I was a kid.”

  Her eyes narrowed at me. I looked away.

  “How old are you now?”

  “I’m thirty-three, Mom. Mom, you know how old I am.”

  “You’ve gained weight.”

  “I’ve always been big, Mom.”

  “Now you’re bigger. You shouldn’t have eaten that sundae.”

  “You told me to.”

  I set the empty plastic cup on her nightstand.

  “Teddy,” she said. “I’m dying.”

  “Mom, you say that every time I come over.”

  “This time, I am.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “I doubt I’ll make it through the night.”

  “You want m
e to stay?”

  “No, I’m sure you have to work tonight.”

  “They’ll let me have the night off, if you’re dying.”

  “Really? How kind of them.” She coughed. She motioned to the box of Kleenex by her bed and I gave one to her. She pressed it against her mouth as she coughed, then examined it carefully for any sign of blood.

  “Teddy,” she said after she caught her breath. “I have a confession to make.”

  “Okay.”

  “When your father died, there was quite a bit of life insurance. I was working at the time, as you know, and we really didn’t need the money, so I set it aside—the life-insurance money, I mean.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was remembering all the times she’d complained about us not having any money.

  “I knew if we started to spend it, it would just be gone. Woosh! Right out the window. So I invested it. There’s quite a nest egg there, though the medical bills have taken their bite, and now that I’m dying and you’re thirty-three years old, with half your life gone already, I thought it was time to give it to you.”

  I thought about it. It was a lot to think about.

  “It’s quite a bit of money, Teddy,” she whispered. “And you shouldn’t spend it. Invest it. Like I did. You make a good living. You don’t really need it.”

  “How much is it, Mom?”

  “One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, give or take a few pennies.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I FELT BAD WHEN SHE DIED THE NEXT WEEK. BAD FOR NOT believing she was really dying and bad for being angry with her for hoarding that money, which we really could have used. Most of all, though, I felt bad because she was my mother and she was dead. She was the only family I had.

  I put the house up for sale and gave most of her things to charity. A couple of items, knickknacks she treasured or things I remembered from childhood, I kept, but I put them away in one of my closets.

  They gave me the night off the day of her funeral, so I decided to eat out, though having a steak that night made me feel a little guilty. I drove to the Old City Diner on the corner of Western and Summit Hill. Felicia was working that night. That made me feel a little less bad. She was my favorite waitress. I liked her nose. It was a small nose and crinkled in the middle when she laughed.

  “Teddy, how are ya?” she asked when she came to take my order.

  “Okay,” I said. “Except my mom died.”

  “Oh God! I’m sorry. Wasn’t she real sick, though?”

  “Cancer.”

  “My uncle died two years ago of throat cancer.”

  She took my order. I said, “She left me sixty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Get outta here!”

  “No, she did. Plus a little insurance money to boot, and I’ve sold the old homestead. She told me not to spend any of it. Didn’t make me promise, though.”

  “So what’re you going to do with it?”

  “Well, it’s always been my dream to have my own detective agency.”

  She put her hands on her hips and laughed. Her nose crinkled. Felicia had goldish blond hair that she pulled up into a bun for work. I only saw her at work, so I didn’t know how long her hair was or what it looked like when she took it down. She saw I was serious, and stopped laughing.

  I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket as she slid into the seat across from me.

  “See, I’m working on some names for it. So far, I’ve got Ruzak’s Detective Agency, Detection by Teddy, AAA Detectives—you know, that way, you get the first listing in the Yellow Pages—Just Like Sherlock Detective Agency, and Dick Ruzak Agency. See, dick is another word for detective.”

  “I don’t think you should call yourself ‘dick,’ Teddy,” Felicia said.

  “I’m not crazy about any of them.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  She left to put in my order. I studied my to-do list, things like renting an office and buying furniture and getting some phone and electrical service. Felicia came back with my steak.

  “You know what I would do with sixty-five thousand dollars?”

  “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d quit this stinkin’ job.”

  “I’m quitting mine tomorrow. It isn’t the greatest job in the world, either, but it’s the only job I’ve ever had, so it’s been like contemplating the void, working myself up to quitting.”

  She didn’t seem too interested in my contemplation of the void.

  “How about the Ultimate Detective Agency?” she asked.

  “Maybe something that’s an acronym,” I said. “You know, a title that spells something out, like CIA.”

  “CIA isn’t an acronym, Ruzak. An acronym is a pronounceable word, like NATO. TUDA.”

  “TUDA?”

  “For The Ultimate Detective Agency.”

  “That seems too close to tuna. If I’m going with an acronym, I should go with something that’s related, not something that’s going to make people think of fish.”

  “Related to what?”

  “The thing itself.”

  “The thing itself?”

  “Detection.”

  “How about Private Investigator & Gumshoe Ruzak?”

  I thought about this. “Doesn’t that spell out PIG Ruzak?”

  Her nose was crinkling at me.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I’ll think of something.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE NEXT WEEK, I RENTED SOME SPACE ON CHURCH Street, in the old Ely Building, about two blocks from the Tennessee Theater, where fading singing stars came for concerts and where old movies that hardly anybody came to see played on the weekends. My new office was one floor above the only dry cleaner’s downtown. It was in a drafty old building, and you had to walk up this narrow stairwell to get to my door. The ventilation wasn’t very good and I never could figure out a way to keep the stench from all those dry-cleaning chemicals from seeping up through the creaky boards. The other place I looked at was bigger, but it was above a Chinese take-out joint in Market Square and the rent was twice as much. I realized after a week that I should have taken the bigger place. I didn’t take it because I didn’t like Chinese food and the rent was higher, but smelling Chinese food all day would have been better than smelling chemicals.

  I finally settled on a name and hired a man to stencil it on the door. I bought a desk, a filing cabinet, an electric fan for the top of the cabinet, an executive office chair, a typewriter, and a telephone. Everything was secondhand except the telephone. There was a little space near the door that could be a secretary’s office, but I was trying to economize. I figured I would hire a secretary once I got my first client.

  But I didn’t get a client. I went to my office every day and sat by the phone, but the phone never rang. A couple of letters came addressed to “Current Occupant” and some bills, but no one called and no one came to the door.

  I put an ad in the paper and printed some handbills. I hired this little Latino boy to walk around the block and hand them out, but I didn’t monitor his work, so I don’t know how many he handed out or if he handed out any at all. I drank too much coffee and ate too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I thought about my mother. I thought about my old job. I missed my mother. I missed my old job. I started leaving the office earlier and earlier. I’d go to the diner in the Old City and sit in my booth and Felicia would ask me how it was going and I would say fine and she would laugh and wrinkle her nose at me.

  Then one day, there was a knock on my door. I thought it was another salesman, so I didn’t answer it at first. About twice a week, the salesmen dropped by. I bought some stationery from one, and when it came in, it had my name spelled wrong at the top: Theodore Rusak. This really ticked me off, because people were always spelling my name wrong or saying it wrong. It was Ruzak with a z and pronounced “Rue-zack,” not “Russ-ick” or “Ruh-zick.” I called the salesman, but he refused to give me a refund or redo the job unless I paid h
im full price again.

  The person kept knocking, so I got up and answered the door.

  “Theodore Ruzak?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I saw your ad in the paper. May I come in? I know I don’t have an appointment.. . .”

  “That makes it tough,” I said. “But I’ll squeeze you in.”

  He was a small guy, maybe five four, no more than five five, balding, with little white wisps of the remaining hair dancing in the air like the tops of dandelion heads. Dandelions reminded me of summer and my father’s irrational, visceral hatred of the weed, yanking me out of bed at six o’clock on Saturday mornings to pull them from the yard and flower beds, fussing at me for breaking them off at ground level, leaving the root intact to generate a new plant. Dandelions have very stubborn roots and are ingeniously designed to snap off at the top if you pull too hard. I’ve got one of those free association–type brains, where my thoughts bump around like pinballs, and I often come off stupid in conversations because I’ve bounced about ten thousand miles from the spot where I should be.

  He was wearing Levi’s, brown work boots, and a flannel shirt that was really too warm for the weather, like he was trying to come across as a farmer or a day laborer, but I wasn’t buying it. He was too old for day labor, for one, and the shirt was pressed; I mean, what sort of farmer irons his flannel? I waved him to a chair. He was a spry little guy; he reminded me of Fred Astaire in that movie musical about the Irish leprechauns. He had the same thin, sharply chiseled features and the rather triangular-shaped head. I figured he was in his late sixties and kept himself fit, maybe with tennis or golf, despite the fact he wore flannel and people who wear flannel generally don’t go in for the effete sports.

  I sat down behind my desk, pulled out my legal pad and my mechanical pencil, and wrote the date across the top.

  “My name is Parker Hudson,” the old guy said. He didn’t have an East Tennessee accent—definitely not a local, then—and his voice was strangely youthful, not cracked and quavering like you’d expect an old man to sound. He was no farmer all right. No self-respecting farm couple would name their son Parker. That was inviting trouble.