The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Read online

  THE HIGHLY

  EFFECTIVE DETECTIVE

  Plays the Fool

  ALSO BY RICHARD YANCEY

  ADULT FICTION

  The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs

  The Highly Effective Detective

  A Burning in Homeland

  MEMOIR

  Confessions of a Tax Collector

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  The Monstrumologist

  Alfred Kropp: The Thirteenth Skull

  Alfred Kropp: The Seal of Solomon

  The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp

  THE HIGHLY

  EFFECTIVE DETECTIVE

  Plays the Fool

  RICHARD YANCEY

  Minotaur Books

  A Thomas Dunne Book

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  THE HIGHLY EFFECTIVE DETECTIVE PLAYS THE FOOL. Copyright © 2010 by Richard Yancey. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yancey, Richard.

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

  p. cm.

  “A Thomas Dunne book.”

  ISBN 978-0-312-38309-1 1.

  I. Ruzak, Teddy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Knoxville (Tenn.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3625.A675H56 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2009041536

  First Edition: March 2010

  10 9 8 6 4 3 2 1

  To Sandy, mon chérie amour

  ACT ONE

  The Accused

  SCENE ONE

  The Office

  A Sunny Morning in May

  This is not about sex,” the woman said.

  With my trusty mechanical pencil, I wrote “not about sex” beneath her name, “Katrina Bates.”

  “He’s had many affairs, practically since day one of our marriage. On the second night of our honeymoon, he made a pass at our waitress.”

  I wrote, “Day one. Second night. Waitress.” I stared at the words. Wouldn’t that be day two?

  “I was returning from the rest room and there it was: his hand rubbing her bottom.”

  “That’s brazen,” I said.

  “He had an excuse,” Katrina Bates said. She didn’t elaborate. I wondered what plausible reason a groom could offer for placing his hand on a stranger’s ass. I wrote, “Hand on bottom.”

  “Are you going to do that for the entire interview?” she asked. “Write down everything I say?”

  “It helps to jog my memory.”

  “It was twenty years ago and has nothing to do with why I’m here, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “Well,” I said. “Now I’ve written it, and if I erase it, a month from now I might forget what I erased and why I erased it and if I erased something that might be vitally important, and then I’d have to bug you about what it might have been, which you probably won’t remember, either.”

  She blinked at me.

  “So?”

  “So now I’m stuck. I could draw a line through it,” I offered.

  “I don’t care what you do with it. I was just asking why you think my husband’s hand on that anonymous person’s bottom twenty years ago could have anything to do with the reason I’m hiring you.”

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “Why are you hiring me?”

  “I want you to find out if he’s cheating on me.”

  I could have told her without so much as lifting a single investigative pinkie that the odds were pretty good that he was. Any guy who feels up the waitress on his honeymoon doesn’t place fidelity high on his list. Still, I was a firm believer in the ability of people to change—even to change for the better.

  “He’s cheated on you before,” I said.

  “Many times,” she said.

  “This time you want proof.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because this time is different.”

  She nodded. Katrina Bates was an attractive woman. Middleaged, with shoulder-length, chemically enhanced blond hair, moderately tall, blessed with good genes: prominent cheekbones, large, expressive blue eyes, and a long, graceful neck. And nice legs. With most women, the legs are usually the last to go.

  “This time he denies it,” I said.

  “Vehemently.”

  “Hides it.”

  A nod. And a tear quivering in the corner of her right eye.

  “Because this time it isn’t meaningless,” I went on. “This time it’s love.”

  “You understand, Mr. Ruzak.”

  I wrote the word love on my legal yellow pad. She didn’t protest. I slid the box of Kleenex toward her side of my desk. In my line of work, tissues were indispensable tools of the trade.

  SCENE TWO

  The Office

  Two Weeks Later

  This isn’t personal,” the man said.

  “I never said that,” I said. “Never even thought it, Mr. Hinton.”

  “But the law is the law.”

  “Right. Because if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be.”

  “I have the injunction right here in my briefcase, but I don’t need to show it to you, do I?”

  “Oh, no need for that. You gave me a copy last time you were here. I have it tucked away somewhere, but you know organization was never my strong suit.”

  “No, that would be deceit and dishonesty.”

  “At least it’s not redundancy,” I said. Score one for Ruzak, but it was like a hitting a homer with empty bases, down by ten runs, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. I folded my hands on the desktop and sat very still, holding myself carefully, like someone with a terminal illness. Hinton sat across from me, a little guy in a gray suit and bow tie—no kidding—who reminded me of Harry Truman, with the square head and round spectacles, the chin, square, but not quite so square as his head, thrust defiantly in my direction, as if he were daring me to pop it.

  “I’m not a complete idiot, Mr. Ruzak,” Hinton said, which I took as an implication that I was. “I know full well what you’re up to.”

  “What?” I asked. “I complied with the court order. I shut the business down. We’re not the Highly Effective Detection & Investigation Company anymore. Didn’t you see the name on the door? The Research & Analysis Group, LLC.”

  “You can change the name on your door, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are practicing private detection without a license, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “Well, we could quibble over semantics. What’s your proof?”

  “I don’t have to prove anything. The burden is on you to prove otherwise.”

  “That seems downright un-American, Mr. Hinton. But wouldn’t you agree it’s awfully difficult to prove a negative? I can’t prove I’m not doing something.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. He had thin lips and they were drawn tight. Give ’em hell, Harry. “Your company”—sneered like a dirty word—“the Research & Analysis Group—what exactly does it do?”

  “Conducts research.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “The kind you analyze.”

  “Funny.”

  “People come to us with certain questions and we research them.”

 
“What questions?”

  “The kind that require research. I’m sorry, but I can’t get into specifics.”

  “And why is that, Mr. Ruzak?”

  “I can’t really say, Mr. Hinton.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t violate my clients’ confidentiality.”

  “That applies to doctors and lawyers, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “And bankers. You forgot bankers.”

  “Is that it? Are you a banker?”

  “No,” I said patiently. “I’m a freelance researcher and analyst.”

  “ ‘Analyst,’ ” he echoed. “What do you analyze?”

  “The research.”

  “You may think this is humorous, Mr. Ruzak, but I assure you the judge will not.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “You normally don’t think of mirth as being a judicial quality.”

  “Never mind the specifics,” he said. “In general, without divulging any names or par tic u lar circumstances, what is the nature of your research?”

  “Well, in general, if you want to know specifically what I research, I would have to say those questions or issues that plague society in general.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, say a client comes in wanting to know something about the past. I do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Research the past.”

  “By ‘the past,’ do you mean history? Are you a historian, Mr. Ruzak? Do you have clients who want to know a bit more about the Battle of Hastings?”

  “That hasn’t happened yet, but sure, if they wanted to know a bit more about the Battle of Hastings, I’d dig into it.”

  “My tenth grader has a report due next week on Napoléon. Perhaps you could help him.”

  “My rates are probably beyond the means of your average tenth grader, but I could give him a discount, based on our friendship,” I said.

  “Do you find it ironic, Mr. Ruzak, this frivolous mockery of justice even as you purport to pursue it?”

  “Who said I purport to pursue justice?”

  “You did when you said you solve problems that plague society in general.”

  “I didn’t say I solved them. Nobody has, to my knowledge. I just add my light to the sum of light.”

  “I asked for an example.”

  “And I gave you one. The Battle of Hastings.”

  “I gave that example, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter to me who gets the credit.”

  “Are you stupid, Mr. Ruzak?” “I’d hate to think so.”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I hardly know you.”

  “In order for you to practice private detection or research or analysis, or what ever the hell you want to call it, in the state of Tennessee, you must acquire a license from the Private Investigation and Polygraph Commission, of which I am a duly authorized representative. In order to acquire that license, you must meet certain criteria, including passing the official test, which you have failed to do three times, Mr. Ruzak. Now you can call yourself what ever you wish—researcher, analyst, consultant. … You can call yourself a hairstylist or hog butcher for all I care, but as long as you charge people to ‘research’ and ‘analyze’ their ‘questions,’ your activities fall under our jurisdiction and you are subject to substantial penalties and fines for doing so without obtaining a license to practice the same.”

  “I’m not a detective,” I said firmly.

  “I’ll get the proof, Mr. Ruzak,” he promised. He stood up. “And then I’ll be back with a warrant for your arrest.”

  “An arrest warrant? For what?”

  “For contempt of court, Mr. Ruzak.” He placed his round hat upon his square head—wasn’t Truman a haberdasher?—and strode from my office in his perfectly shined shoes with a slight squeak in the left heel.

  The outer door slammed and Felicia came in, slid into the chair Hinton had just vacated, and we regarded each other for a moment. I looked away first. I was her boss and technically the top dog in our little operation, but from the get-go Felicia had this way of making me feel too big for what ever space we happened to occupy, even outdoor spaces, and the smaller the space, the more intense the sensation. In the car with her, I felt as big as a Macy’s parade balloon. But to be a little more precise, it was more like the space around me shrank than I expanded to fill it. Pretty women usually had that effect on me. So did furniture salesmen, and that was hard to decipher.

  “I told you it was a bad idea,” I said, meaning scraping the old name off the door and slapping on a new one. “This Hinton guy is relentless.”

  “It wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if you had passed the exam,” she replied.

  “What do you think it was?” I asked. Then I answered my own question. “The Yellow Pages. We’re still listed under private investigators.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We have a couple options,” I began. “Close up shop and hope with the test that the fourth time is the charm, or keep the doors open and the dev il take the hindmost.”

  “The devil take the what?”

  “Maybe I could pay somebody to take the test for me. It’s coming up next month.”

  “How you’ve changed since you took up private law enforcement.”

  “Einstein flunked out of school.”

  “Is that something you know, something you think you remember, or something you’re making up out of whole cloth to justify your failures?”

  “He may have dropped out.”

  “Maybe that’s it: You went into the wrong field. Try physics next; you’ve so much in common with Einstein.”

  “ ‘Genius is close to madness,’ ” I said.

  “There is an element of that,” she said. “The second part.”

  “I took the wrong tack,” I said. “I should have come clean and begged for mercy. All self-respecting sadists and bureaucrats suck on that teat.”

  “ ‘Suck on that … teat’?”

  “Better to sin and ask for forgiveness later.”

  “That’s your fallback position, isn’t it, Ruzak? Quoting aphorisms, like it accomplishes something.”

  “The ironic thing is,” I called after her as she headed for the door, “I actually believe I’m helping people, and the state is going to arrest me for it.”

  Of course the truth was that the state was going to arrest me for an entirely different transgression, but since reading somewhere that we lived in a postironic age, I had taken on a personal mission to keep irony alive, at least within my minuscule sphere. Teddy Ruzak: researcher, analyst, master ironist.

  Felicia appeared in the doorway, Gucci knockoff over her shoulder, hand on hip, one leg crossed over the other, and, it being spring, there was a lot of bare leg to be crossed. Felicia had well-developed calves from her years as a waitress at the Old City Diner. She also possessed a pair of the finest knees I had ever seen, not that I spent a lot of time studying women’s knees, but there it was. She wore no panty hose. Nobody wore panty hose anymore. I only knew this because one day I asked her why she didn’t wear panty hose and she informed me that nobody wore them anymore.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “It’s only two o’clock.”

  “I have to pick up Tommy from preschool.”

  “Bringing him back here?” I liked the kid and everything, but he was a little wild and tended to crawl into my lap and play with my letter opener.

  “Can’t,” she said. “Gotta run some errands. Let me know if you get arrested. I’d hate to get up tomorrow for nothing.”

  She turned, and I would like to say my gaze did not fall upon her backside on her way out.

  I shut down her computer, turned off the reception room lights, filled up the mister in the john just off my office, and watered the row of ferns on the window ledge behind my desk. Then, because I couldn’t think of doing anything else that wasn’t an obvious waste of time or an embarrassingly obvious bit o
f procrastination (reminding me of a funny T-shirt I had seen recently that said PROCRASTINATOR’S TO-DO LIST: I …), I pulled the Bates file from B section of the cabinet—not hard to find, since it was the only file in the B section—and dialed the cell number Katrina Bates had provided.

  He picked up on the third ring.

  “This is Tom.”

  “Tom,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Katrina.”

  A beat, then: “Okay.…” He was waiting for the punch line.

  “She doesn’t know I’m calling,” I said. “And she probably wouldn’t be too happy with the fact that I am. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t and she never said I couldn’t.”

  Another beat. I dug his picture out of the file. Lean, with dark eyes and thin lips. A pale complexion set off nicely by a full flowing mane of hair slightly darker than his eyes, going gray at the temples, but a steel gray, a battleship gray, which gave his youthful face a bit of gravitas. There was something vampirish about him. The dark looks and what he was wearing, too: a tuxedo. He was clutching some kind of trophy or award. He wasn’t smiling. He stood ramrod-straight, head tilted back, chin up, looking down his long, aristocratic nose at the camera; he reminded me of a Victorian gentleman at the turn of the last century, when the sun never set on the empire, not merely sure but cocksure of his just deserts. That’s right; I’m the dude with the trophy, not you, and not this fat guy with the triple chin next to me. Me.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “A friend of Katrina,” I replied. “You don’t know me.”

  “I know all her friends.” Ergo, you cannot be someone I do not know. Tom Bates taught mathematics at the university. He had published twelve books and held about the same number of degrees, a couple being from Harvard, with a smattering of others from places like MIT and Boston University. In college, he played polo. Polo! He spoke seven languages. He sat on the boards of half a dozen foundations. He was a personal friend of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Now that’s balance; that’s covering all your bases. In his spare time, he liked to play chess or one of the five musical instruments he had mastered since the age of five. He also liked to paint; one of his paintings hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Fortunately for poor Tom, what he lacked in the brains and talent departments, he more than made up for in wealth. Tom Bates was rich. Not Bill Gates rich, more like Donald Trump rich, except his money was old, extremely old, going back to the founding of the republic. Katrina had lowered her voice as she confessed this one dark stain upon the Bates family name, the shadow cast from the distant past. The acorn seed of their affluence was fertilized by the blood of human chattel: Tom’s ancestors had made their dough in the slave trade. After that practice was outlawed, they took the money and invested it in other, less odious ventures—textiles, manufacturing, real estate. The Bates family, according to Katrina, owned half the state of Massachusetts. “All the Bates men were geniuses,” she told me. “Geniuses at making money. Except Tom. It’s the one thing he’s terrible at. He’s a financial retard. Maybe it was some kind of ge ne tic mutation, but his genius doesn’t touch money.” It gave me some sick satisfaction when she said that. Up to that point, I’d been feeling pretty bad about myself vis-à-vis Mr. Tom Bates and his good looks, his twelve books, his degrees, his painting hanging in MoMA, his virtuosity at the violin and cello. Not that I was any better at making a buck, but it proved that in at least one area we were equal or near-equal retards.