The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 6

  “Here’s something that might help your kid: Napoléon loved ice-skating.”

  “He’s already turned in his report, but I appreciate it.”

  “Anything I can do.”

  “Mr. Ruzak, I’m not trying to hurt or deny anyone their God-given right to make a living in this country.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And I have an obligation to the taxpayers of this state to pursue matters in the most judicious and financially prudent way possible.”

  “Oh.” I got it. “You’d rather I voluntarily shut my doors.”

  “Best for everyone all around.” He seemed pleasantly surprised I got it.

  “I’m curious. How did you know I had a client named Katrina Bates?”

  “She’s not your client,” he reminded me.

  “Okay. How did you know I had a nonclient named Katrina Bates?”

  “Let’s say I have my sources.”

  Those were finite. We weren’t even to the end of the block before I placed my bet.

  “Dresden Falks of the Velman Group.”

  He answered with a small conspiratorial smile.

  “I’m hurt,” I said. “I thought he was my new BFF.”

  “ ‘BFF’?”

  “Ask your tenth grader. Who else have you contacted?”

  “I’ve told you too much already, Mr. Ruzak. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “Unlike my business.”

  “Since you’re so dead set on it, perhaps you might think of obtaining your license in another state.”

  “Relocate.”

  “There must be at least one or two with standards a little less rigorous than the state of Tennessee’s.”

  We stopped at the corner. Across the street, a middle-aged couple sat at a small metal patio table in the fenced-in courtyard of the Hilton, sipping grandes from the Starbucks kiosk in the lobby. They were decked out in biker gear: black leather jackets, chrome chains, jackboots. The guy’s hair was streaked with gray and fell down the middle of his back in a ponytail. Hers was platinum blond, laced with purple, cut short, and spiked with gel. You don’t normally think of hard-core bikers whiling away a spring afternoon sipping lattes from Starbucks.

  “But I love Knoxville,” I said. “Knoxville is my home.”

  “So much of life comes down to that, though, doesn’t it? Choosing between two conflicting loves.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty deep. Who said that?”

  “I don’t know that anyone did.”

  I nodded. “I’m the same way.”

  He followed me through the intersection and fell about a half step behind as my stride lengthened—I had about fourteen inches on him—puffing in the slightly humid air as he broke into a semitrot to keep up. We walked past the main branch of the library, and I thought of intersections, the strange serendipity that sometimes arises between thought and symbol. It wasn’t a very productive line of thought—few of mine were—and a disinterested observer might come to the conclusion that I either read too much or not quite enough.

  “Happens all the time,” I said. “I think or say something that sounds like something someone really ought to write down, and I get all excited, because it’s tough after ten thousand years of human history to even have an original thought, only to find out later somebody else said pretty much the same thing two hundred years ago, and I don’t know if I’m parroting them or just had the same thought independently. Like the whole concept of truth, Mr. Hinton. You know what the most haunting question in the Bible is? When Pi late says to Jesus, ‘What is the truth?’ You know, is it empirical and objective, or is it all relative and subjective? Is my truth your truth? Or is truth something outside both of us, immutable as the atomic weight of lithium? When you think about it, all science, religion, philosophy, morals, everything, turns on Pilate’s question. What is the truth?”

  Now, standing on the corner of Church and Henley, waiting for the light to change, Hinton said, slightly out of breath, “All right, then. I’ll bite. What is the truth, Mr. Ruzak?”

  “Boy,” I said. “You got me.”

  The light changed. I strode, he trotted, and I wondered if he intended to keep this up until he collapsed in a winded heap at my feet.

  “It’s all I can do to keep my head above the existential water,” I confessed. “But I try to do the right thing. You won’t believe this, but that’s always been very important to me, from a very early age, doing the right thing. Get it from my mom. I’ll give you an example. One summer we drove up to Gatlinburg to spend a few days at the park, and Mom bought this kitschy souvenir from one of those touristy shops along the main drag. I don’t remember what it was, something like a paperweight with the mountains inside, or it might have been the trip when she finally broke down and bought me the dream catcher. I was going through my nightmare phase, at least two or three a week. Not that Mom believed it would actually work; that wasn’t the point; I thought it did. You know, magical thinking. Anyway, we’re back home and she looks at the receipt and discovers they undercharged her twelve cents. So you know what she did? She wrote a check for twelve cents and mailed it to the store. My dad, who wasn’t a stickler like her when it came to morality—he was a salesman, after all—pointed out the stamp cost more than the check, but that wasn’t Mom’s point. She even stuck a note in there kind of lecturing the owner that twelve cents might not seem like much, but if he undercharged every customer twelve cents on everything he sold, eventually he’d lose his business.”

  “What do you think your mother would say, Mr. Ruzak, about your current situation?”

  “I don’t think she’d be entirely pleased, but that’s a particular misery, constantly trying to live up to your parents’ ideals. You’re doomed to failure.”

  At the corner of Henley and Summit Hill, he said querulously, “How far away from your office do you normally park?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to my car.”

  “No? Then where are you going? Not the Sterchi Building.”

  “How do you know I live at the Sterchi Building?”

  He didn’t answer. I was thinking, Now this is a pretty thorough guy, for a bureaucrat. Javert to my Jean Valjean. Maybe if I reversed course and followed Henley to the bridge, he’d jump into the river.

  “I have an errand to run down on Broadway,” I said.

  “Broadway!” he practically whined. “You’re walking all the way to Broadway?” He was aghast. You would have thought I told him I was shuffling on my knees to St. Peter’s Square.

  “I need to work off some of the winter pounds.”

  He pulled the white handkerchief from his lapel pocket and mopped his brow. “I left my hat in the car.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I said. “A harder man might consider this a sort of benign harassment.”

  “I was hoping we could reach an understanding, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “I’ve always been one hundred percent for that, Mr. Hinton.”

  “Why put off the inevitable?”

  “Basic human nature?”

  “You’re not stupid; you must know it’s only a matter of time.”

  “But, see, I’m an optimist. I hope for the best in everything.”

  “That’s not optimism,” he protested, and, unable to help himself, gave my sleeve a little tug. “That’s wearing blinders.”

  I glanced down at his face and noticed the smudges on his spectacles, the strayed eyelash clinging to one lens, and for the first time I saw Walter Hinton as the scrawny four-eyed kid getting picked on by some sandbox tyrant twice his size, heard the taunts of little girls whose cruelty at that age had no boundaries, felt it slam down hard into the marrow of my empathetic bones: I’ll fix you one day; I’ll fix all of you. … One day, I’ll be in law enforcement! Pity usually worked on me as a call to action, but what could I do? The only thing he wanted from me was the termination of my career. Not even the poor guy by the side of the road asked that of the Good Samaritan. Hey, thanks for saving my l
ife, now, by the way, renounce your Samaritan citizenship. It also struck me, and not without a tinge of resentment, that the psychiatrists and evolutionary biologists had it tamped down tighter than your aunt Tilly’s brassiere: Our life’s course is determined at a very early age; between our genetics and our formation from one to about four, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of self-determination, sort of the scientific equivalent of Calvinism.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s what it comes down to, Walter. I do what I do, you do what you do, and we let the chips fall where they may.”

  His gray eyes malevolently danced behind his dirty lenses. Through thin lips he sneered, “I don’t like you, Theodore Ruzak.”

  SCENE ELEVEN

  The Light house Mission

  A Half Hour Later

  It was five o’clock and dinner ser vice had just begun. Families gravitated to the tables near the plate-glass windows fronting Broadway; the singles more toward the middle and rear, where the buffet line and the battered stainless-steel urns filled with instant coffee were located. I waited my turn in line with everyone else. The director of the mission, a burly ex-marine named Walter New-berry (another Walter, another case of serendipity), stood over the steam table, ladling out the ground steak and mash potatoes and green beans, the sleeves of his white T-shirt rolled up to reveal his massive biceps and the Semper Fi tattoo on his left shoulder, while sweat rolled from his forehead and beads of it quivered on his upper lip. He greeted everyone by name, asked how they were doing, how their families—if they had family—were doing. “Hey, George, you’re looking great! How’s the AA going? How’s your kid? He finish school finally?” He did a double take when my turn came.

  “Ruzak? How ya doin’, my brother?”

  He stretched his arm over the sneeze guard and gave me the fist bump.

  “Can’t complain,” I said. Of course, I could—there was plenty there—but being surrounded by homeless people gives you some perspective, a sense of proportion.

  “Haven’t seen you in awhile. What’s it been, coupla months?”

  “More like five.”

  “Business must be good.”

  “What there is.”

  “You look good. Like you lost a few pounds.”

  “It’s the warm weather,” I said. “So mostly what I lost were layers.”

  “Come down for a little work? Could use the extra hands.”

  “Can we talk first?”

  “Kind of busy right now. Have a seat; be over when I can.”

  I took a seat at the end of a table, beside an old gentleman whose broken fingernails were encrusted with dirt and who gave me a brief congenial nod before diving back into his collards. I never cared for that southern delicacy; it always felt like I was consuming weeds.

  I waited over an hour, sipping lukewarm Folgers from a Styrofoam cup, watching the shadow of the building stretch across Broadway as the sun set behind it. People came and went like the candy wrappers and remnants of plastic bags skittering along the empty street in the dying light. Most ate quickly and in silence, and then another pair of ragged shoes shuffled through the door and somebody else waited patiently at the end of the line for a hot meal and a moment or two of cool air. My table had turned over for the third time when Walter finally slid into the chair across from me, his face beet red and knuckles redder, looking like raw hamburger.

  “You weren’t hungry?” he asked. I shook my head. “Not pleasure, then. Business.”

  “Sort of,” I said. I pulled the bulging white envelope from my breast pocket and slid it across the table. He lifted one edge of the flap with a fingernail and squinted inside.

  “Sweet Jesus, Ruzak,” he whispered.

  “Twenty grand,” I whispered back.

  “What for?”

  “For you. The mission.”

  “Shit. Why?”

  “Let’s just say I need the tax deduction.”

  “Well, all I can say is, business must be really good.”

  The envelope disappeared. He laid his enormous forearms on the table and studied my face.

  “There’s a catch,” he said.

  “No. It’s yours. All yours. No strings, except maybe a higher grade of coffee.”

  “You don’t like the coffee?”

  “It sucks.”

  “I’ll get the Starbucks.”

  “I’m not too keen on Starbucks.” Not because of the taste so much as the creepy water goddess– like creature on all the cups. “You can get Dunkin’ Donuts at the grocery now, but my favorite is Krispy Kreme.”

  He laughed, for some reason. “What else?”

  “Nothing else. You do great work here. Important work. Work that matters.”

  “Meaning you ain’t sure yours does.”

  “Meaning there is a string, but I’m the one tied to the other end of it.”

  “Free meals for life?”

  “I’m serious; I don’t want anything.”

  “You say you don’t want anything, but you hand me twenty grand in cash and sit there and don’t move and talk about being tied to strings.”

  “I hate to donate and run.”

  “This some kind of blood money, Ruzak? And you want to sleep at night?”

  “No, really, nothing like that. I’m pretty sure I’m doing the right thing. The dog I had in this fight fired me, and I don’t even know the one I’m pulling a number on. It’s all with the best intentions.”

  “And you’re afraid you’re paving your own road.”

  “Or someone else’s. But if I didn’t pave it, something bad might happen to them.”

  “Okay. Got it. Or I’ll pretend I get it, because I consider you a friend, Ruzak. You got heart.”

  “It’s just I don’t … I don’t … I don’t … I don’t want to live my life cowering in the shadow of my own fear; that’s the thing. I want to walk in the light.”

  “I hear you, brother. Save the worries of tomorrow for tomorrow.”

  “But this is the second or third time I’ve paved this road,” I admitted. “You know, thinking you’re doing the right thing and then it blows up in your face.”

  “You gotta do that, Teddy. It comes with the territory. Just ’cause somebody can take a hatchet to it doesn’t mean you can’t stick your neck out.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “I can’t save everybody, but maybe I can save the ones who fall into my little orbit.”

  He turned his gaze from me and allowed it to wander around the crowded room.

  “Heard that, brother,” he said. “Heard that.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  SCENE TWELVE

  The Tomato Head Restaurant,

  Market Square

  The Next Day

  About six blocks from my apartment, a manageable walking distance in clement weather, was the Tomato Head restaurant in Market Square, serving a tasty variety of specialty pizzas and sandwiches (the roast beef with the blue cheese dressing was my favorite) and their trademark blue tortilla chips. There was patio seating on the square, but in the warmer months I preferred eating inside, where local artists displayed their paintings and collages (the cheapest one going for $150, but that included the matting and frame) and the steady thrum of conversation provided some distraction from the steady thrum of the monologue between my ears.

  Something happened while I sat there, a rarity that never failed to startle me, like someone sneaking up and tapping me hard on the shoulder: My cell phone rang.

  “I missed your call last night,” Katrina Bates said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  She laughed, for some reason.

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  “I just wanted to let you know the package has been delivered.”

  “Very good, Mr. Bond.”

  “And something else. Kinsey Brock is having an affair with Tom’s best friend.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tom’s girlfriend is cheating on him.”

  “An
d you know this for sure?”

  “I don’t know it at all. That’s the red herring I planted in the file. Of course, she really might be cheating with his best friend, though the odds of me hitting that nail on the head out of the blue are pretty long.”

  “Who is Tom’s best friend?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’m asking how you know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I know. I don’t have to know.”

  What I actually wrote in the file, under the ‘Miscellany’ tab, was this: “K.B. having illicit liaison with BF. Verified. Undet./unclear if target aware of same.”

  “Who is his best friend?” I asked.

  “Probably Trace Michelson.”

  I jotted the name on my napkin.

  “What made you decide to go with this?” she asked. “Well, number one, it’s not something that must have come from you. Number two, I didn’t think you’d mind creating a little friction between Tom and Kinsey. Number three, it’s not something that he can come back and sue either of us for slander about, and it’s not so far in left field that it comes across as a deliberate falsehood thrown in the file to justify the payment. That would be number four.”

  She sighed. It must have been a pretty loud sigh, too, for me to hear it through the phone and over the din of the lunchtime crowd.

  “I wish you had cleared this with me first, Teddy.”

  “I thought I had.”

  “I mean the red herring. Teddy, Trace Michelson is gay.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my face grow hot. “Openly?”

  “He’s lived with the same partner for fifteen years.”

  “Well,” I said. “This is not necessarily a bad thing.”

  “He’ll know immediately it’s a lie. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose and by definition make it a bad thing?”

  “But he won’t know it’s my lie. He might think it’s Kinsey’s lie.”

  “You talked to Kinsey?”

  “No. But he won’t know that, and he might not believe her denial.”

  “Why would Kinsey lie in the first place? Why would she tell a total stranger anything about her sex life? And why would she name a partner who is undeniably homosexual?”