The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Read online

  “To be perfectly honest, you wouldn’t have been my first choice,” she said, turning her face away. Archie lifted his head off her lap to follow her gaze across the river. She scratched behind his floppy ears. It struck me a stranger might think he belonged to her. “I would have preferred that other agency.”

  “The Velman Group,” I said. An easy guess: The Velman Group was the only big detective outfit in town.

  She nodded, absently pulling on one of Archie’s ears. “But I couldn’t go there,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. And then I got it. “A conflict of interest?”

  She nodded again. “Tom hired them about six years ago.”

  “To follow you?”

  “He was certain I was having an affair. I wasn’t. But I was afraid if I went there, they might tell him.”

  “So you hired me.”

  “And you told him.” Her laughter was soft and bitter. “He’s very smart and very talented and he’s had every advantage in life. He has looks and money, brains, ability, and privilege, but none of that, none of it, is worth a tinker’s damn without luck. You have to be lucky, and he is. And you’re a perfect example of it, Teddy.”

  She stood. Archie stood with her, his tail swinging as he looked up at her face with what I swore was canine adoration.

  I couldn’t see her eyes behind the designer shades, just my reflection in them, a big guy with a slightly crooked nose and in need of a haircut. My focus shifted to her lips, the bottom one slightly plumper and redder than the top, stained from the Italian ice, I guessed. Her makeup was otherwise flawless, not overly applied; I wondered if she used that new mineral foundation that was all the rage, or that I assumed was all the rage, based solely on the commercials, which ran endlessly on late-night TV. My original assessment of her had been a little off the mark: She wasn’t a pretty woman; she was a beautiful woman. Beautiful—and very, very angry.

  “You’re fired,” she said.

  SCENE SIX

  The Office

  Two Days Later

  The man in the gray suit showed up while I was messing with my new camcorder, trying to figure out which button ejected the mini-DVD. Like a lot of guys, I refused to waste my time reading the instructions; I preferred to waste it fooling with the gadget. The same principle applied to my aversion to self-help books.

  Felicia showed him in, and I couldn’t help but notice the certain lightness in her step as she sashayed out of the room.

  He was impeccably groomed; his hair shone with product; and there was something George Clooneyish about his looks, especially around the eyes. He led with his prominent chin, thrusting it toward me as he leaned over the desk to shake my hand.

  “Teddy Ruzak! It’s a plea sure.”

  He pressed a business card into my hand and plopped himself down in the visitor’s chair, tugging on his jacket so it didn’t bunch up around his shoulders. Then he adjusted the crease in his slacks. I looked at the card. Dresden Falks/The Velman Group, LLC / Investigations & Security.

  “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d make a courtesy call,” Dresden Falks said. “Though the name on the door threw me a little. Thought you were the DIC.”

  “We changed the name,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “To avoid confusion.”

  “What kind of confusion?”

  “The legal kind.”

  “There’s always plenty of that to go around,” Falks said. He smiled forcefully at me, the same aggressive smile you find at fundamentalist churches and used-car lots. His teeth appeared to be veneered. “You know what we call that down at Velman? ‘Job security.’ ”

  He laughed like he had gotten off a good joke. The door opened and Felicia pranced back into the room with an Evian and a cocktail napkin. Where the hell had she gotten a cocktail napkin? She set the bottle down in front of him and asked him if she could get him anything else. He told her he was all set and then made a show of turning in his chair to watch the gluteal muscles bunch beneath her skirt upon her slower-than-usual exit. I thought of airplanes, for some reason, and the fact that he had an Evian and I did not.

  He turned back to me, dark Clooney eyes dancing.

  “Lucky,” he said, raising his bottle in a toast. “You should see our receptionist down at Velman. Like a reject from the ugly factory. You two, you know?”

  “She’s in a serious relationship with a firefighter.”

  “Well, that makes sense. For she surely is hot.”

  He managed to chuckle heartily while taking a long pull from the bottle, reminding me of that old ventriloquist trick.

  “This is terrific,” I said to change the subject. “Always nice to meet a fellow traveler.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of slop in the trough to go around,” he said. He adjusted his tie to make it lie equidistant between his lapels. I wasn’t wearing a tie and hadn’t worn one for over a year, since the day of my mom’s funeral. So I tugged at the right sleeve of my sport coat to make it even with the left sleeve. His analogy bothered me. I had compared my calling to the knightly quests of yore. Now I was the runt pig slurping the big hogs’ dregs.

  “How is business, Teddy? Can I call you Teddy?”

  “Anybody can,” I said.

  “Hey, my friends call me Dres.”

  “That’s terrific, Mr. Falks,” I said.

  He unloaded the full weight of his smile upon me. I smiled back. We sat there for a pregnant moment, smiling at each other.

  “You’ve been hired by Katrina Bates,” he said through his perfect teeth.

  “Says who?”

  “Says my client.”

  “Who is Tom Bates.”

  Smile.

  “Makes you wonder why Tom thinks that,” I said.

  “PI One oh one, Ted: If you’re gonna contact the target, block your number first.”

  “What if I said I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about?”

  “Then I’d ask how you knew Tom’s name just now. And I’d probably show you these.”

  He pulled a stack of four-by-six glossies from his pocket and slid it across the blotter toward me. There I was with Katrina, buying Italian ices from the Mexican. Then the two of us strolling by the river, my right arm fully extended at the back end of Archie’s leash. There we were on the bench, with the hospital a blurry monolith in the background. The next sequence included me sitting in my car in front of Kinsey Brock’s apartment on Seventeenth Street, loitering outside the Rock Gym on Kingston Pike, where she worked out, leaning on the brick wall of the Copper Cellar on the Strip while she ate lunch with a couple of girlfriends.

  “Looks like I’ve been outclassed,” I said.

  “Outgunned,” he said.

  “That, too,” I said.

  “We got a situation here, Ted.”

  “I can’t tell you why she hired me, Dres.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I already know why. You told my client and then you followed the girl.”

  “Is it his girl?”

  Smile.

  “Not that it matters now,” I said. “She fired me.”

  “The Hurricane?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. That’s what we call her down at the firm.”

  “Seems mean.”

  “Guess she hired you to be her FEMA.”

  “That would make sense if you called her New Orleans. But I’ve been fired, so really my snout’s out of that trough.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “How do you know?” I pictured him crouched behind a bush with one of those high-tech listening devices trained at our bench.

  “The Big Easy fessed up. ‘Big Easy,’ get it? Tom goes right to the source, asks her point-blank, ‘Who is this Ruzak and why is he raggin’ on me?’ So Easy tells him who and why, most of which he already knew from us, except the firing part, which she also told him. But you win some and you lose some, right, Ted?”

  “Right,” I said. “Usually more of one than
the other. Anyway, like I said, Dres, I don’t have a dog in this fight anymore. You’ve got the pictures and Katrina’s confession, so I’m kind of at a loss right now trying to understand why you’re here with the slightly menacing attitude.”

  “ ‘Menacing’? My attitude is menacing?”

  “Leaning toward the confrontational.”

  “Just establishing the context, Ted. Putting all the cards on the table.” He polished off his Evian and placed the sweating empty beside the cocktail napkin. Not on it, beside it. Then he drew a long white envelope from his breast pocket and dropped it on top of the pile of pictures.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Five thousand dollars. Cash.”

  “The Velman Group wants to hire a detective?”

  “No, we want to buy the file.”

  “What file?”

  “Or rent it. We’ll give it back.”

  “The Bates file.”

  He nodded. “That file.”

  I thought about that.

  “There is no Bates file,” I said.

  “No Bates file?”

  I shook my head. “I destroy my old files.”

  “Teddy, you must’ve forgotten who you’re talking to. No dick in his right mind destroys his files. Information is our lifeblood.”

  “Unless it’s useless information.”

  “No such thing, in my experience.”

  “Well, that’s probably more extensive than mine. But that’s my policy.”

  “What’s your policy?”

  “File destruction. When the case ends, so does the file.”

  “Maybe for another five you could ‘reconstruct’ it?”

  “What, like tape all the shredded strips back together?”

  “Hey, the means is all up to you, Ted. We’d just like to buy that file.”

  “Which raises a question, Dres.”

  “Our client is a very private man. The thought of personal information floating around out there is intolerable to him. Because who knows what could happen, right? Plus, he’s also a very successful man, and you don’t get to be where Tom Bates is without making a few enemies along the way, right? It’s an unacceptable risk to a man like our client, having some potentially very damaging and very embarrassing information in the hands of a total stranger who’s already demonstrated his disregard of the old saw that discretion is the better part of valor. So I can go to ten, but that’s the bottom line, Ted. That’s the final offer; take it or leave it.”

  “Take it or leave it, or … what?”

  “We’re both professionals, Ted. We understand how it works, right?”

  “To be totally honest with you, Dres, I’m not sure either proposition is entirely accurate.”

  I slid the bulging white envelope toward his side of the desk.

  “Even if I still had the file—which I don’t—it’s not for sale. I may be licenseless, but I’m not licentious.”

  Smile. His, not mine.

  SCENE SEVEN

  The Office

  Moments Later

  Felicia dropped the Bates file on top of the surveillance photos and slid into the chair vacated by Dresden Falks. She flipped her hair over her collar and I caught a whiff of Chanel. Chanel, on a secretary’s salary, but then, she did live with Bob, who might have given it to her for Christmas or maybe her birthday.

  “When is your birthday?” I asked her.

  “November nineteenth, why?”

  “I never knew.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I would have gotten you something.”

  “Little late now.”

  “Somebody’s nervous,” I said, tapping the folder before me.

  “Extremely.”

  “Ten grand,” I said, thinking that would buy a heck of a lot of perfume, but saying, “for what?”

  “Maybe he’s a sadistic serial killer and he’s afraid she’s told you what’s going on in the basement.”

  She caught me looking at the Evian bottle, picked it up, wiped the sweat ring from the mahogany with the unused napkin. The tension in my shoulders eased.

  I said, “He’s got boocoos of it; it means nothing to him; maybe to him ten grand is like offering me a buck fifty.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Maybe the amount seems like a lot for a little to us, while to him it’s a little for a lot.”

  “A lot of what?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “But that’s not the salient point.”

  “Seems pretty salient to me.”

  “She didn’t divulge any dark, dirty secrets, nothing that would get him into trouble, beyond the infidelity, which is trouble, but not serious trouble. Not ten thousand dollars’ worth.”

  “A fact he’s not aware of.”

  “Right. Hence the offer.”

  “I love it when you use words like hence and salient. It makes me feel like we’re involved in something important.”

  “And even the compulsive cheating is an open secret in their milieu.”

  “See, there you go again: ‘milieu.’ ”

  “Katrina would know.”

  “Ruzak, I’m going to point out a couple of things. First, you’re probably right and Tom thinks you probably do know, but she didn’t at the most likely time when she would. Second, there is no case. She fired you.”

  “I think that’s the point,” I said.

  “I know that’s the point.”

  “About Katrina. She knows something or he thinks she knows something or might know something, and that something is something nobody else is supposed to know, which has made him very, very nervous.”

  “She’s in danger?”

  “Could be.”

  “We’re back to the knight-in-shining-armor shtick, aren’t we?”

  “You shouldn’t demean it, Felicia. The world could use a few of those.”

  “Ruzak, do you have a crush on Katrina Bates?”

  “I’m a professional,” I said, echoing Dresden Falks.

  “It’s okay, you know,” she said. “Look at Lancelot and Guinevere.”

  “That would make Tom Bates King Arthur.”

  “Makes more sense than casting you as Lancelot.”

  “Why do you pick on me?” I asked. “What’s the payoff?”

  The phone rang. She didn’t move to answer it, which was sort of her job—okay, it was her job. I grabbed the receiver.

  “This is Ruzak,” I said.

  I hung up two minutes later. She still hadn’t moved. When I was a security guard working the night shift at the bank and she was a waitress at the Old City Diner, I would try in my own awkward way to get her to ignore her other tables and talk to me. But I spent more time watching the back of her head and those well-developed calves than any other part of her. Then I hired her away from that job to be my secretary without even knowing if she could type. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why. At the time, I didn’t know she had a boyfriend named Bob. I had never met Bob, but I knew he was a firefighter, and it was chiefly for that reason I pictured him with features similar to my old G.I. Joe dolls packed in a box sitting in my hall closet. Mom kept everything.

  “Dresden Falks,” I said. “They’re doubling the offer.”

  She gave a low whistle. “Twenty grand.”

  “That’s about five thousand dollars per page.”

  “You should take it.”

  “Why? Lancelot wouldn’t.”

  “There’s nothing damning in it, right? So who gets hurt except the cheating asshole who’s ponying up? Plus, you’ll have the satisfaction of cutting Mr. Genius down to size.”

  “Make him feel like a sap.”

  I tensed, waiting for it: “And he’s not used to feeling that way, unlike you,” or something along those lines.

  But she said, “And it’s about the only thing you can do to protect her. He gets the file and sees there’s nothing harmful in it.”

  “Unless he thinks I’ve redacted the harmful stuff.�
�

  “So put something harmful in there.”

  I thought about that. Then I said, “Huh?”

  “Make something up. Something outrageous, ridiculous. Stick it in the file. He’ll know it isn’t true, but he’ll assume you think it is. He’ll think if you left that in, you didn’t take anything else out.”

  “That’s so …” I searched for the word.

  “Diabolical?”

  “Byzantine. What about the ethical obligation to my client?”

  “You don’t have a client, Ruzak.”

  “Still, I should tell her about the offer. What I may or may not pass off might be bogus, but the offer isn’t. The desperation to know what’s in the file isn’t. Tom Bates has something to hide, and what ever that something is, it goes beyond a little extracurricular activity.”

  “Not your business, Ruzak.”

  “I guess not in the professional sense.”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The human kind.”

  SCENE EIGHT

  Old City Diner

  Two Days Later

  Twenty thousand dollars?” Katrina Bates asked. She removed her Chanel shades and rubbed her eyes. They were puffy, as if she had been crying or not sleeping well. “For what?”

  We were sitting in the booth farthest from the door, the same booth I had sat in while trying to make time with the woman who one day I would pay to answer phones, type letters, mail invoices, and mock me. It was the perfect location to keep an eye on the door, and I wanted to keep an eye on the door because I was certain Katrina Bates was being followed. You don’t get to be the largest private investigation company in three states by slacking off on the details. I arrived a few minutes before she did, and had drawn the blinds so no Velmanistas could snap off a few through the window while we talked.

  “That’s something I’d like to know,” I said.

  Our waitress, a corpulent specimen named Lila, swung by to warm up our coffee. She asked how Felicia was doing. They missed her. I said she was doing great, and she said she had heard the state was shutting me down again because I had flunked the PI test, again. I said that didn’t matter, the flunking part, because technically speaking, I wasn’t a detective; I was an analyst. Then she got snide and said that instead of calling myself one, maybe I should go see one. My first instinct was to blurt “Oh, yeah, fat ass?” But I didn’t. What would be the point?