The Highly Effective Detective Read online

  “All right, that’s great,” I said, and wrote his name beneath the date.

  “Have you been a detective long, Mr. Ruzak?”

  “Only about a month. But my background’s in security.”

  “I tried going to the police,” Parker Hudson said. “First they thought I was a crank; then they practically laughed me out the door.”

  I wrote beneath his name the words crank and laughed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making notes.”

  “I don’t like the fact that you wrote ‘crank’ beneath my name.”

  “Sorry.”

  I erased the word. Now all I had was “laughed” beneath his name. I wondered how much sense that was going to make to me later, so I erased that word, too. Police made more sense. I wrote “police” while he watched me write “police.”

  “Do you have a license, Mr. Ruzak?”

  “A driver’s license?”

  “A PI license.”

  “Do I need one?”

  “You’re the one billing yourself as a private investigator. Don’t you know whether the state requires a license before you can privately investigate?”

  “You know what, Mr. Hudson, I bet they do. I mean, you can’t even fish in this state without a license, and PI work is at least as taxing.”

  I wrote “license (?)” beside the word police.

  “So the answer to my question is, you don’t have a license.”

  “Don’t turn me in,” I said. “I’ll get one. Meanwhile, Mr. Hudson, maybe you oughta check out another agency. If I’m gonna make a go of this, I might as well do it legally. I know what right and wrong are. That’s one of the reasons I became a detective, though maybe I shouldn’t say that, because technically I’m not one till I get a license.”

  All of a sudden, he laughed. I wasn’t sure why he laughed.

  “Will you give me a discount?”

  “Well,” I said. I didn’t really know what to say, since I hadn’t thought out my rates. I tapped the eraser end of my mechanical pencil on the notepad and gave him what I hoped was a calculating look, like I was figuring what discount he might be entitled to, first for hiring an unlicensed detective and second for not turning me in for being an unlicensed detective.

  “I’ll pay you fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. My mouth was dry. Fifty dollars an hour! My top pay at the security company had been twenty-two dollars an hour. Why had I waited this long to go into the detective business? That was the way my mind worked: On the heels of euphoria came depression, thinking about all the wasted years. “Expenses?”

  “Gas and supplies and the like.”

  “Yes, and the like. . .that.”

  “Good.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want you to find a murderer.”

  I stared at him for a second.

  “Did you say a murderer?”

  “And once you find him, I want you to bring justice to his miserable soul.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PARKER HUDSON PAID ME A RETAINER OF TWO HUNDRED dollars. I promised I’d be on the case the very next morning and we parted very up on each other. I honestly thought he thought he had found the right man for the job. I didn’t have the heart and felt it didn’t make good business sense to tell him I had no idea what to do next.

  I drove to the diner in the Old City to celebrate. Felicia came over right away to take my order. She was wearing bright red lipstick and matching red nail polish. Her hair was up, as usual, and she wore the same white uniform with the name tag, and it occurred to me I had never seen her wearing anything but that white polyester waitress uniform.

  “So, how’s it taste?” she asked.

  “How’s what taste?” She had totally thrown me, since I hadn’t even ordered yet.

  “The canary. You look like the cat who swallowed it.”

  “I’m celebrating.”

  “You got a client.”

  “I got a client. How much do you make, Felicia?”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s Freddy pay you to wait tables?”

  “Two-fifty an hour, plus tips. Why?”

  “I’ll pay you twelve bucks an hour, with a two-week paid vacation every year.”

  “Huh?”

  “I need a secretary,” I said. “I’m getting clients now and I need somebody to answer the phone and do the mail and get the door. . .you know, a secretary.”

  Her nose crinkled. “You want to hire me to be your secretary?”

  “Sure.”

  She thought about it. “Okay,” she said. She called over her shoulder, “Hey, Freddy! I quit!” She took off her apron and slid into the seat across from me.

  “Okay, tell me about him.”

  “Who?”

  “Your client, Ruzak.”

  “His name is Parker Hudson.”

  She took a sharp breath.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “No. I just thought that I was supposed to do stuff like that. You know, like in the movies. Like, ‘Oooh! Not the Parker Hudson!’”

  “He dresses like a farmer, but he’s a retired banker.”

  “He’s loaded.”

  “I don’t think he’s hurting for cash.”

  “Ka-ching,” she said. “But why would some big-shot retired banker with loads of cash hire someone like you?”

  “The police won’t help.” It kind of bothered me, the way she said that, “hire someone like you,” with the emphasis on the word you.

  “Why won’t the police help?”

  “Well, technically I guess it’s a crime, but it’s not the sort of crime they take seriously.”

  “What is it, jaywalking?”

  “Hit-and-run. Murder. Well, it was closer to manslaughter, but the ‘man’ part’s misleading.”

  Her nose crinkled. “What is this, Teddy, some kind of joke? What really happened, his wife lose an earring?”

  One of the other waitresses came over. Her name tag said LACEY. Lacey was an enormous woman with steel gray hair and very small hands for such a large woman. She told Felicia that Freddy was pissed that she had quit like that and doubly pissed because we weren’t ordering anything. Only paying customers got booths. I started to order something, but Felicia stopped me.

  “Let’s get out of here, Teddy.”

  “It’s my favorite place.”

  “We’ve been shut down three times by the Health Department.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “We’ll pick something up. The food here sucks.” She said this real loud. She wanted to make sure Freddy heard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FELICIA KNEW THIS CHINESE PLACE CALLED #1 CHINA Buffet down on the Strip, the main drag through the campus of the university. A light rain was falling, the kind of rain that’s between real rain and fog, kind of a foggy rain. It was never easy finding a parking place on the Strip; I had to park three blocks away, and we walked together in the rain. Felicia was wearing a green overcoat. I didn’t have an overcoat or an umbrella.

  “Since when do the cops not take murder seriously?” she asked.

  “I guess it’s got something to do with the victims.”

  “Victims? Like more than one?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  The rain made her face look softer somehow. Maybe it was all the moisture in the air.

  We picked up our food and sat on bar stools at the long counter against the window and watched the people go by on the street, students mostly, since the Strip ran right down the middle of campus. She was having a bowl of noodles and I had some pork. The pork was soggy and the pieces seemed to take too long to chew. I didn’t really care for Chinese food, which is how I ended up over a dry cleaner’s in the first place, but Felicia had been pretty excited about the food here. I should have chosen the noodles, I guess. I wondered why only Chinese and American foods were done buffet-style. You never saw
an Italian buffet or a Mexican buffet.

  “So who were the victims?” she asked around a mouthful of noodles.

  “Geese.”

  “Did you say geese?”

  “Parker Hudson was taking a walk one morning a few weeks ago, and there’s this nice big lake he walks around, and as he’s walking, he sees these two geese with their babies, six of them, crossing the road.”

  “Okay, okay. I see where this is going.”

  “And while he’s watching, all of sudden this big SUV comes roaring up behind him and—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Runs right over the baby geese. The goslings.” That’s what Parker Hudson had called them, goslings. I wasn’t completely sure what that meant, so after he left my office, I looked it up. My name didn’t used to be Dictionary Ruzak for nothing.

  “Didn’t slow down, didn’t try to swerve. Parker’s sure whoever was driving saw them. And if they didn’t see them, they sure as heck felt them. So I asked him why they were crossing the road. . ..”

  She laughed. “You didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Okay. Anyway, the two adults didn’t get hit—Dad was leading and Mom was taking up the rear—and they went berserk, flapping their wings and honking to beat the band, refusing to leave their dead babies even when other cars came up, so Parker’s running up and down the road trying to scare them back to the lake. . ..”

  “Oh God. That’s awful.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t get the guy’s tag number. Just says it’s a big SUV with white-rimmed tires, something like a Ford Expedition or maybe a GMC. Might even be a Jeep. He’s just not sure.”

  “So he wants you to find who killed the geese.”

  “Goslings.”

  “And when you find them?”

  “First I have to find them.”

  “Okay, say you find them. Then what?”

  I shrugged. “I guess Parker files charges, I don’t know, reckless driving or something like that.”

  “He’s a big animal lover, huh?”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think it was the dead baby birds that got to him so much as the person who hit them, like life was nothing to him.”

  “It was probably just an accident.”

  “That’s what I said,” I said. “And he said, ‘If it was an accident, why didn’t he stop to see if the birds needed help? He must have known he hit them, so why did he keep going?’”

  “He didn’t care.”

  I nodded. “That’s what got to him—Parker, I mean. That somebody killed something and just kept driving.”

  “The world’s full of assholes, Ruzak.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you don’t take them to account.”

  She pushed her empty bowl away. One of the dishes on the steam table had been Peking duck. There were Peking duck and General Tao chicken and sweet-and-sour pork and beef and vegetables. It wasn’t disrespectful to eat the animals in those dishes, though. The whole reason they were on the earth was to be killed and eaten by people. The geese murdered that morning were wild geese that nested by Parker’s lake every spring.

  “Okay, detective, how’re you going to solve this murder most foul? Sorry.”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Just Parker. It was pretty early in the morning.”

  “He lives around there?”

  “House right on the lake. There’re two or three subdivisions on the other side of the road, but he didn’t see which one the car came out of. It might not have come out of any of them. The road connects to Kingston Pike.”

  “Busiest road in Knoxville.”

  “Right.”

  “Could be anyone.”

  “Right.”

  “Any one of about five hundred thousand people.”

  “Right.”

  “In a black SUV, the most popular kind and color of car in East Tennessee.”

  “Right.”

  “Or it might be someone from out of town, out of state, even.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, this should be easy.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “How much is Mr. Hudson paying you to hunt down this bird killer?”

  “Fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.”

  I was looking out the rain-streaked window, but I could feel her eyes on the side of my face.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “He gave me a two-hundred-dollar retainer.”

  She whistled. “And I was making two-fifty, plus tips.”

  “Blood money,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “People like me. And cops. Even doctors, I guess. Somebody has to suffer so we can earn a living.”

  “Teddy, these are geese we’re talking about.”

  “Tell that to the goslings.”

  “I never knew you had a sensitive side.”

  “Money never could motivate me that much, Felicia. Why else would I stay a security guard for fourteen years?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I DROVE FELICIA BACK TO THE DINER TO PICK UP HER CAR. The foggy rain had turned to just fog.

  “I still don’t understand why he decided to hire a detective,” she said.

  “He told me for three weeks he’s been staking out that same spot and the car hasn’t been back. He drove through all the neighborhoods around there, but he didn’t see any car that looked familiar.”

  “So what does he think you can do that he can’t?”

  Again, she emphasized the word you.

  “Well, he did say that when he wants his house painted, he doesn’t do it himself. He calls in the experts. That reminds me. I gotta get a license.”

  “What kind of license?”

  “A detective’s license.”

  “Oh Ruzak. That bird killer’s as good as in the cage.”

  “You’re ribbing me. That’s okay.”

  I pulled into the empty space beside her car. Before she got out, she asked, “Where’s your office?”

  “How come you want to know?”

  “Don’t I have to show up for work tomorrow?”

  I waited until she was in her car and the doors were locked, so no crazed dope fiend or bum could get her. The Old City could be kind of rough. When she slid into the driver’s seat, her white skirt pulled up and I saw a lot of thigh. Her stockings were the same shade of white as her uniform and she was wearing those thick-soled white shoes waitresses and hospital workers wear because they’re on their feet all the time. A few strands of goldish blond hair had slipped from the back of her bun and hung down her neck, swaying as she got in the car. I watched her pull out and waved to her as she drove away, but she didn’t wave back. Maybe she didn’t see me.

  Nothing can make you feel lonelier than hanging out with a pretty girl. All at once, I felt like crying. I knew I was luckier than most people. I had fulfilled my childhood dream. And so what if this wasn’t the coolest or sexiest case any detective’d ever worked? At least now I was a detective and making more money than I ever had as a security guard. I guess if my mom hadn’t died and left me that money, I’d still be a security guard making twenty-two dollars an hour, but at least my mother would be alive.

  I drove back to my apartment, but I didn’t feel like going inside. I decided to take a walk.

  I walked up and down Gay Street, all the way to the Tennessee Bank Building and back. Not many people live in downtown Knoxville. Most of the people I knew by sight, though I didn’t know their names. I passed three dedicated joggers damning the rain and some couples arm in arm, and the people walking past seemed more real to me than I did to myself. I’d always heard that the reality is never the same as your dreams when they finally come true. That it doesn’t feel like you thought it would. Then I thought maybe it wasn’t my dreams coming true that was making me feel so empty and ghostlike. Maybe it was something else.

&nb
sp; By the time I got back to the apartment, I was hungry again, so I cooked some pasta, and right in the middle of washing my plate, I burst into tears and cried for about an hour. A lot of people say you feel better after a good cry, but I didn’t feel better. I felt pretty crummy for the rest of the night. I took a shower and tried to watch some TV, but there was nothing good on. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s never anything good on TV unless you have something else you have to do and can’t watch TV. I thought about walking to the video store and renting a good detective movie, but just thinking the word detective made me feel crummier. I told myself I was crying over my mom, but deep down I was wondering if I was crying because she died or because I felt bad I hadn’t cried enough over her dying. Maybe it wasn’t about her at all. Maybe I was crying because I didn’t want to be a detective but had become one after a lot of hassle, just to find out that after all the dreaming about it, the reality sucked.

  The next morning, I was still feeling lousy, so I stopped by the Krispy Kreme and picked up a dozen doughnuts and two large coffees. Felicia was waiting for me on the sidewalk outside the Ely Building. She followed me up the narrow stairs, pausing at the door.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  “What? Oh, it’s the name I picked for the company.”

  “ ‘The Highly Effective Detection & Investigation Company,’” she read.

  “You like it?”

  “What does that— Teddy, that spells out ‘THE DIC.’ ”

  “Yeah, that’s another name for a PI. Only I couldn’t think of a word that started with a K, so I left it off.”

  “What?”

  “The word I couldn’t think of that started with a K.”

  “So that’s where I work now? I work at a place called ‘THE DIC’?”

  “I figured it’d be a catchy way for people to remember. Don’t you think it’s catchy? The copy in my ad says, ‘Got a mystery? Come see THE DIC.’ What’s the matter? Too wordy?”

  “No, it’s just. . .well, it makes you wonder why it took you so long to get a client.”