The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 8

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “No, it is not. But she’d be touched by your concern. I’ll pass it along when we speak.”

  “Part of it’s my fault,” I said. “Really?” He seemed bemused. “Which part?”

  “The reason I’m checking up. I should clarify something. K.B. stands for Kinsey, not Katrina.”

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t want you to be confused.”

  “You’ve failed, then.”

  I tried again. “I didn’t want you to think K.B. stood for Katrina Bates. It doesn’t. It stands for Kinsey Brooks.”

  “Couldn’t it stand for both?”

  “Well, sure. I was talking about the file.”

  “What file?”

  “The file you—” I stopped. He was looking at me with an expression of mild curiosity, like a collector in a gallery who has stumbled across an interesting piece by an obscure artist. T. Ruzak, from his obfuscation period.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. We can’t talk about it. Well, just so you know.”

  “Just so I know … what?”

  “The K.B. thing.”

  “Mr. Ruzak, have you been drinking?”

  “I haven’t even eaten.”

  “I didn’t ask that.”

  “I never drink on an empty stomach.”

  “Then what is the explanation?”

  “I just don’t want anyone to go off half-cocked based on an erroneous interpretation.”

  “The assumption that simply because she’s gone she must be missing?”

  “Well, that, too.”

  “She’s done it before. One might say it’s been the leitmotiv of our marriage. Reach a rough spot, and Kat takes off to find a smoother one. One time, she left me and spent two weeks in Rome, hovering around the Vatican like a gypsy moth battering itself against a naked bulb. In the early years, she usually went to her parents’ in the Hamptons.”

  “But she stopped?”

  “One died and the other she doesn’t talk to. Hasn’t in nearly ten years.”

  “That’s too bad, because when they’re gone, they’re, you know, gone.”

  “She’ll come back. I give this latest juvenile ploy for attention a week, perhaps two. No more than three. She can’t stand it, you see.”

  “Can’t stand what?”

  “Being away from me.”

  No smile. No ironical gleam in his eye. No expression at all in those black shark eyes set in a pale death mask. He wasn’t joking. He was stating a fact: Katrina’s love for him was as immutable as gravity.

  “So, no, I haven’t tried calling her. That’s what she wants me to do. It’s the point of running away. Women are manipulative, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “Not just women,” I said.

  “But no one uses it with more naked relish.”

  “Maybe my perceptions are shaped by my experience,” I said.

  “Aren’t everyone’s?”

  “It just struck me as odd and a little disconcerting. She told me you were on your way here and she was on hers to the restaurant.”

  “When did she call?” he asked.

  “About twelve-thirty.”

  “That would be right. I got here around twelve-forty-five.”

  “And she wasn’t here.”

  “I wasn’t expecting her to be. Last night she called and we arranged for me to pick up a few things. I would have been surprised if she were here.”

  “And you’re not surprised she wasn’t there? At the restaurant.”

  “As I’ve said, she must have changed her mind.”

  “Like she was going to meet me on her way out of town and decided not to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that in her character? I mean, to say ‘I’ll meet you there,’ and then not without explaining why?”

  “Our characters change with our circumstance, Mr. Ruzak. You’re a PI and somewhat a student of human nature, yes?”

  I nodded. The latter was truer than the former, and on both grounds I was shaky, but I nodded.

  “Then you understand. Under normal circumstances, no, she wouldn’t have stood you up.”

  “It’s just that we spoke for some time and not once did she say anything about hitting the road.”

  “Why would she?”

  “Because who am I?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Nobody really. You couldn’t say friend and you could barely say acquaintance. She wasn’t even my client anymore. The fact is, I hardly know Katrina at all.”

  He slipped into the opening I gave him and held forth on Katrina in a dry, professorial tone for about thirty minutes. It was a very long thirty minutes. Her upbringing (privileged, like his: nannies, exclusive schools, shopping trips to New York, London, Paris, a pent house condo in Manhattan, homes in Connecticut and Southampton), her education (Dartmouth, then Harvard Law, where she graduated third in her class), her distant, eccentric father (who rarely addressed her by name, preferring to refer to her as “the girl,” as if her gender diminished her in his eyes, and who was a notorious womanizer—when she was twelve, she caught him in bed with her eighteen-year-old nanny), her frail mother (who ignored her husband’s infidelities at the expense of her physical and mental well-being, maintaining till her death the facade of the perfect aristocratic American family, even as the burden of her husband’s liaisons, open secrets in the circles in which they traveled, slowly bore her down). Tom Bates must have considered himself, like a PI, somewhat a student of human nature, because after the vitae came the analysis of her character.

  “She both hates and loves men, just as she both hated and loved her father, the first man in her life, the primal man, who was as distant with her as he was intimate with every other woman in his orbit, with the exception of Kat’s mother, whom, according to Kat, he treated with total disdain. She turned a blind eye to his affairs, which, of course, made her utterly contemptuous. To Kat, too, understandably. Her mother enabled his addiction, and, just like every other addict, he resented the enabling even as he took full advantage of it.”

  “And then, of all people, she married you.”

  “Seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable? Reform the ‘lost father’?” He was smiling. He didn’t seem offended.

  “She told me about your honeymoon. Feeling up the waitress.”

  “Totally innocent. I was brushing off some bread crumbs. But I understand your point, Mr. Ruzak. Our past is our destiny. It’s probably no accident Kat married a man very much like her father and, I’m sure, a bitter irony to her that she woke up one day, only to discover herself in the very role she’d sworn she’d never play: the tired cliché of the long-suffering spouse to an unfaithful cad. She woke one day and found in the mirror her mother reborn.”

  “No wonder she wants to destroy you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  My face got hot. I’d forgotten I’d taken that line out of the file before handing it over to Dresden Falks.

  “I mean, I kind of got that impression from what you said, about loving and hating. One minute she was like, ‘Get the bastard,’ and the next it was all Tom this and Tom that. Comparing you to a Kennedy, kind of a cross between JFK and Russell Crowe in that gladiator movie. I can’t remember the name of it. …”

  “Gladiator,” he said.

  “He’s this Roman general who gets set up by the emperor, sold into slavery, and then comes back as the greatest gladiator who ever lived.”

  “Gladiator,” he said again.

  “Right. A Roman gladiator. In ancient Rome.”

  “No, Mr. Ruzak, the name of the movie is Gladiator.”

  “Well,” I said. “That makes sense.”

  “Except, as I recall the plot, his character is a devoted family man.”

  “Right, even after they’re brutally murdered. That hot Roman royal throws herself at him a couple of times and he says no.”

  “One wonders why Kat would compare me to him.”

  “Well, s
he didn’t, not in so many words.”

  “Then why did you say she did?”

  “I was reaching for a meta phor.”

  “And it slipped through your fingers.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I would say that you are more like Russell Crowe in this scenario, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “You would?” I was weirdly flattered.

  “In the sense that your mission was to avenge the wrongs committed against an innocent.”

  “Except Katrina wasn’t tortured, raped, and strung up like a slaughtered hog.”

  For the first time since we’d met, Tom Bates laughed.

  “It’s funny you say that, though,” I went on. “I’ve been having this ongoing debate with my secretary about how I see my job. Not so much a gun for hire as a knight in shining armor.”

  “I like that, though you’re a bit rotund for Quixote, with the dog you could pass for King Pellinore. And I suppose that would make me the Questing Beast.”

  “I’ve been meaning to bone up on my Arthurian legend, but Pellinore never catches the Questing Beast, right?”

  “Precisely,” he replied.

  At that moment, something behind me caught his eye, and he waved his hand, crooking his index and middle fingers in an imperial gesture of command.

  “It’s fine; come on in,” he called.

  A luminous young woman stepped into the room, treading lightly on the weathered planks in her bare feet, as if she were afraid of getting a splinter. She was wrapped in a yellow towel, her hair wet as Venus’s when the goddess emerged from the frothy surf.

  “Kinsey, this is Mr. Theodore Ruzak.”

  “Hi,” she said brightly. Then she swiveled away as gracefully as a ballerina on point, and said to Tom, “I’m making tea. Want some?”

  “That would be lovely. Mr. Ruzak?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

  “Okay,” she said in the same cheerful, slightly girlish voice. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ruzzick.”

  She left. We watched her leave. The water dripping from her hair glistened on her exposed back. Tom Bates said, “A beautiful girl, like a beautiful poem, has the power to blow the top of your head off.”

  “Sometimes when my secretary comes into a room, I feel like I’m expanding, or maybe like the room’s shrinking. She’s really pretty, too,” I added, as if this was some kind of competition.

  “Have you fucked her?”

  “What?”

  “Have you fucked her, or do you just lust after her?”

  “Well,” I said. The entire situation, like the Russell Crowe metaphor, had slipped completely through my fingers. “Neither one, really.”

  He gave a droll little chuckle.

  “She has a live-in boyfriend,” I said.

  “And to fuck her would shatter the ideal of the chaste and honorable knight. Perhaps you’re more Lancelot than Pellinore.”

  “I like Galahad,” I said. “Going for the Grail.”

  “Do you like Kinsey?”

  Huh? Staying up with this guy was like keeping pace with an Olympic sprinter.

  “Um, sure. We just met, but I. … You bet.”

  “She’s a bit young and inexperienced, but very open, very much in tune with her sexuality. It wouldn’t take too much prodding.”

  What? What wouldn’t take too much prodding? I shifted in my chair, clammy with nervous perspiration. I tended to dampen up when under duress.

  “I really have to go,” I said.

  “So soon?”

  “I just wanted to be sure,” I said. “You know, she said she was coming and then she didn’t, and she won’t answer her phone, so I just wanted to be sure everything was okay.”

  “Everything is fine. If you like, I’ll have her call you when she gets back.”

  “Well, that would be okay, I guess. Sure. If she doesn’t mind.”

  “I think she’ll be flattered. She understands I don’t give a damn.”

  SCENE TWO

  Litton’s Diner

  The Next Day

  At Litton’s, you write your name and the number in your party on a chalkboard and wait to be called forward, like a kid to the front of the classroom, to be seated. I wasn’t sure how that tradition started, but I suspected it had something to do with eliminating the need for a hostess. I wrote Ruzak and 2 on the board, then sat next to Felicia on the little bench under the poster of Neyland Stadium. Like the stadium, Litton’s was a Knoxville landmark, sort of a mecca for burger lovers, in whose camp I happily resided.

  “What an asshole,” Felicia said. “How did she do it for twenty years? I couldn’t have gone more than twenty minutes.”

  “When I was in high school, there was always the pretty, popular girl who fell for the doper.”

  “Savior complex,” she said.

  “ ’I can never say how I love.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Let’s make a new rule, Ruzak. From now on, you’re not allowed to whip out a pithy quote unless you know who said it.”

  “What if I break it?” I had little confidence in my own self-control.

  “A one-dollar fine.”

  “It’s just that being original is so damn hard.”

  “A good PI talks less and listens more.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The waitress squinted at the board and called my name, or something roughly similar to it. I thought of Kinsey Brock and “Mr. Ruzzick.” What was so tough about Ruzak? I almost mentioned this to Felicia but then thought better of it. I didn’t want to hear “It’s one of the few things about you that is.”

  I ordered a burger platter and a Coke. Felicia ordered a house salad and water.

  “Are you a vegetarian?” I asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Every time we go out, you order a salad.”

  “Maybe I’m trying to set an example.”

  “You can’t eat at Litton’s and not order a burger. It’s like refusing to kiss the Pope’s ring.”

  “I am,” she said. “Besides the fact this perv wanted to pimp out his girlfriend, what’s bugging you about him?”

  “It’s very easy to lie by word,” I said. “A lot harder by deed.”

  “New rule, Ruzak: Who said that?”

  “Me.”

  “Okay. Just checking.”

  “What he said makes sense. What he’s doing doesn’t. He moves back into the house the very day Katrina takes off, even brings his girlfriend with him.”

  “What’s nonsensical about that?”

  “For all he knows, any minute Katrina’s going to walk through the front door and find them going hot and heavy on the hard-wood.”

  “A function of his arrogance. This is the guy who felt up the waitress on his honeymoon.”

  “What I mean is, it’s like he knows she won’t be coming home.”

  “Maybe he does and he doesn’t think it’s any of your damn business.”

  “That’s the thing, I guess. It isn’t.”

  “And not what we really need to talk about, Ruzak. You waste time on peripherals. What are we going to do about the Hinton problem?”

  “You want to know why I sucked at baseball when I was a kid?”

  She closed her eyes. A line appeared between her eyebrows. Maybe she had a headache.

  “I don’t know, Teddy. There are so many possibilities.”

  “I always closed my eyes right before I swung the bat.”

  “Okaaay,” she said.

  “We still have a little money in the bank. We could close up shop till I take the next exam.”

  “Let’s face it, Ruzak,” she said, eyes open again. “You’re just a tad better at doing it than you are being tested on it.”

  “Throw in the towel? But then what would you do?”

  “Why are you worried about me?”

  “I meant to say ‘we’ or ‘me
.’ It just came out as ‘you.’ ”

  She laughed. When Felicia laughed, a cute crinkle appeared on the bridge of her nose.

  “Don’t worry about me, Ruzak. I had a different shitty job before I took this one.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  Our food came. The burger was juicy, the fries were crisp and salty, and the plastic quart-size cup containing my soda was bottomless. Felicia dipped a quarter-size piece of lettuce into her dressing and sipped her water.

  “What would you do if you couldn’t be a detective anymore?” she asked.

  “I’m not one now.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe go back to school. Well, I never actually went, so you couldn’t characterize it as going back. Maybe something in anthropology or medicine.”

  “Dr. Ruzak?”

  “It’s a stretch,” I admitted. “For a guy who can’t pass something as simple as a PI exam.”

  “Maybe you could just hang around the med school and meet some nice brilliant grad.”

  “I can’t picture myself as a kept man.”

  “So you’ve taken it that far,” she said, smiling. “You’ve considered it.”

  “I’m not a moocher,” I said, which wasn’t precisely a denial. “My dad was in sales.”

  “Forget it, Ruzak. You’d make a terrible salesman. You’re too honest.”

  “Tell that to Walter Hinton.”

  “You’re honest where it counts.”

  “There’re places where it doesn’t?”

  “I say you climb to the top of the highest ivory tower you can find and every ten years or so descend to impart your wisdom to the masses.”

  “It’s better to be implacable than wise,” I said. And this time, it was something I said.

  SCENE THREE

  Krispy Kreme Doughnut Shop

  Eight Days Later

  Dresden Falks watched the ladies in their white smocks and hair nets work their magic behind the plate glass separating the dining room from the vats and conveyor belts, where the glistening doughnuts rode. Falks was wearing a light summer sport coat over a Ralph Lauren button-up shirt and chinos. I was wearing an old Cardinals T-shirt, jeans, and doughnut droppings.

  It was a little after 9:00 A.M., and the HOT sign was lighted.

  “See that one in the middle?” he asked, raising his Styrofoam cup and extending his index finger in her direction. “Dead ringer for my elementary school cafeteria lady. Somewhere in America there must be a factory that churns them out, the big barrel-chested cafeteria slash food-assembly-line hair netter.”