“One thing I will never do is play you in Trivial Pursuit.”
“When I was in my twenties, I fantasized about getting on Jeopardy! and winning a truckload of money, then retiring to the Bahamas and living on a yacht.”
“You don’t strike me as a nautical kind of guy.”
“It was just a fantasy.”
A Camero that looked black but might have been a deep blue pulled up in front of the honky-tonk. Isabella took a quick drag of her smoke, tossed the burning butt into the grass, kissed the long-nosed girl on the cheek, and slid into the passenger seat. The back wheels spun out, an angry plume of white smoke roiled, and the Camero whipped down the lane, directly in front of my car. I saw a flash of long, dark hair, a bare arm, and a white muscle shirt. I started my car.
“I gotta go,” I told Felicia. “She just jumped into a car with a guy.”
“Our guy?”
The Camero had already left the lot and was racing up Outlet Drive toward Lovell Road and the interstate. I floored the gas and hoped my little Sentra had the gumption to keep up. Archie stuck his head out the window as if going on point: Yay! Adventure!
“I didn’t get a good look, but he’s not driving a white truck.”
“Ruzak, don’t do anything crazy. Things get bad, you call the cops.”
“I can’t drive and talk. I’ll call you later.”
I dropped the phone into my lap. Then I pulled the .44 from my jacket pocket. Back on the interstate now, heading east, clocking eighty-five miles per hour and climbing. Archie was nearly beside himself with glee. This is fun! The front of my car began to shake. I clung to the wheel with my left hand and held the gun in my right. Don’t do anything crazy.
THURSDAY
12:13 a.m.
Felicia picked up on the first ring.
“Are you dead?”
I answered as if the question were perfectly reasonable. “I’m okay.”
“Where are you?”
“At the apartment. I lost him on the interstate, so I went with my gut and came back here. It’s here. The car. And the light’s on up there. The apartment.”
“You gonna knock? Ruzak, you gotta knock.”
“It wasn’t exactly a kidnapping,” I said, as much to myself as to her. “I mean, she opened the door and hopped in.”
She thought about it. At least I attributed the silence that followed to her thinking about it. She could just as well have been making out with Bob or nibbling a bit of Laughing Cow cheese on a cracker. Who the hell takes wine and cheese to a stakeout?
“Call Farrell,” she said finally.
“If I call Farrell, he’ll know I screwed up.”
“How did you screw up? He didn’t ask you to tie her down or barricade her door. And anyway, if the point’s to protect her, why are you more concerned about being perceived as a screwup?”
I thought about it. “I’m going up there. Farrell said she had a new boyfriend. Maybe this is him.”
“You want to wait till we get over there? Bob could go with you.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “If it is him, he’d have to be completely crazy to try anything with me standing right outside the door.”
“Call me back, Ruzak.”
I gave Archie a reassuring pat on the head before getting out. I closed the door and he hopped into the driver’s seat and pressed his wet nose against the glass, his tail thumping against the stick shift. If I could somehow teach him to drive, he could be my getaway man.
8:32 a.m.
The first thing I asked Felicia after she bailed me out was about my dog. One of the arresting officers had been kind enough to take him back to my place.
“He’s okay,” she said. “I swung by and took him out to do his doodle.”
Doodle? The air outside the station was warm and moist. Rain was coming. We got in her car. There was a wadded-up Laughing Cow wrapper on the floorboards.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I knew it was only a matter of time,” she said. “All this going around half-cocked.”
“I honestly thought it was an emergency.”
“We’ve got to find you a lawyer.”
“A lawyer would be a good idea.”
Farrell was waiting for us at the office. I really wanted to get back to my apartment, take a long, hot shower, check on Archie, and have a nice long nap. Farrell looked about as bad as I felt.
“What the hell happened?” he asked.
“Breaking and entering,” Felicia said. “Criminal trespass. Threatening with a deadly weapon.”
“It’s all a big misunderstanding,” I said. “I knocked several times.”
“Maybe you could talk to her,” Felicia said to Farrell. “Persuade her to drop the charges.”
“I thought I heard someone scream,” I added.
“So he kicks down the door and charges in, gun drawn,” Felicia said.
“At which point, I did hear her scream, in the back of the apartment, so I did what anybody would do.”
“They were in the bathroom,” Felicia said.
“ ‘The bathroom’?” Farrell echoed.
“This is delicate,” I said.
“On the countertop,” she said.
“Part of it was due to the bathroom acoustics,” I said. “It sounded very loud.”
“So Ruzak barrels in and scares the living shit out of them. Boyfriend falls and hits his head against the wall.…”
“His pants were down around his ankles,” I said. “I never touched the guy.”
“And Isabella fell back and cracked her head on the mirror,” Felicia said.
“Everybody’s going to be okay,” I said. “The paramedics were just a precautionary measure.”
Farrell sank into one of the visitors’ chairs. He wiped a hand across his face.
“This is my fault,” he said. “I knew her boyfriend drove a Camero. I should have told you he might show up.”
“I should have called you first,” I said. I sat beside him in the matching chair. “It’s my fault.”
“It’s both your faults,” Felicia said. She sat in the executive chair behind the desk. “Neither one of you has stepped back and looked at the big picture.”
Farrell blinked several times and said, “Big picture.”
She nodded. “It’s unwinnable. You hired Ruzak to protect someone who doesn’t want protection. Who obviously feels she doesn’t need it, for whatever reason, whether she thinks he won’t hurt her or thinks he can’t. And even if she wanted it, you can’t provide it. Ultimately, if someone wants to hurt her, someone will, be it him or this new one or the next one, unless you intend to lock her up in a tower somewhere, but even Rapunzel figured a way out of that. There’s only one way to be absolutely sure he’ll never hurt her, and I don’t think either one of you is the type to take that step.”
“It ain’t like I never thought about it,” Farrell muttered.
“She understands, even if she can’t articulate it,” Felicia said, pressing him. “She has a right to a life, Farrell. By doing this, you’re enabling him to continue to victimize her.”
“I’m her father,” Farrell said. “I’ve got a duty.”
“You’ve already done your duty. She’s a grown woman and it’s up to her now.”
“What about him?” Farrell asked. “You get any leads on where he is?”
She nodded. “Atlanta.”
“More a rumor than a lead,” I said.
“Okay, let’s say we verify where he is,” she said with a hint of exasperation. “We pinpoint his exact location. What then? He’s not Osama bin Laden; we’re not planning to take him out with a cruise missile, are we? Wherever he is, Atlanta or Memphis or Timbuktu, he has a right to be there or anywhere he wants, including back here. He’s done his time; he’s paid his debt to society. She’s moved on, obviously, and for all you know, he has, too.”
“What I know,” Farrell said. “You wanna know what I know, lady? I know that son of a bitch put my
baby girl in the ICU for three days. I know he broke her nose and two of her ribs; I know he fractured both her cheekbones; and I know he damned near choked her to death. I know he did that, and after he did that, he drove straight to a bar and played some pool with his buddies. He played pool! And I know what the doctors told me—that if she had lost consciousness, she would have died; she would have drowned in her own blood. That’s what I know, lady.”
“Okay,” Felicia said. She took a deep breath. She turned to me. “That’s what he knows. Now you tell him what you know.”
I thought about that. “What do I know?”
“You can’t protect her. Nobody can.”
I didn’t say anything. Farrell didn’t say anything. Felicia didn’t say anything. Then Farrell stood up.
“So that’s it. You’re done.”
“We’ll find out where he is,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
“We won’t confront him. We won’t escalate. We’ll leave him where we find him.”
“And I’ll quit my job,” Farrell said. “So I can look after her.”
Felicia shrugged. She remained behind the desk while I walked with Farrell down the stairs and out into the muggy morning air.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You never had kids.”
“No,” I said. “Just a dog.”
“Find him, Ruzak.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“And I’ll talk to Isabella. Get her to drop the charges.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “That was my first overnight stay and I’m really hoping it was my last.”
“It’ll be all right,” he said with a vigorous nod. “It’s gonna be fine.”
I shadowed him to his car. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He seemed lost in thought.
“You know what I was reminded of back there?” I asked. “That opening scene from The Godfather, where the baker asks Don Corleone to kill the two guys who messed up his daughter.”
“Never saw it,” Farrell said. He had to be lying—who hasn’t seen The Godfather?
“You know what Brando says to him? ‘That is not justice; your daughter is still alive.’ ”
“What’s your point, Ruzak?”
“My point is … your daughter is still alive.”
“I’m not saying anything by this, but you ever hear of the one percent doctrine?”
I trudged back up the stairs, to find Felicia still sitting behind my desk. Her name was on the license hanging a few feet away. Was it my desk? I asked if she knew what the 1 percent doctrine was, and she said, “You’re a moron if you do it.”
“Tell him where Quinton is?”
“You know what I would do?”
“Lie?”
“Yep. Either give him a phony address or say you can’t find an address.”
“To protect him from his own worst instincts.”
“To protect both of them. All of them. Most importantly, to protect yourself. Ruzak, this was very close. What if your gun had gone off?”
“That reminds me,” I said. “A lawyer. In case Farrell strikes out.”
3:17 p.m.
“Hey,” I said to the lawyer. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”
His name was Wally Michelson. Balding. A sharp nose, a hint of stubble on his chin, tobacco-stained teeth. Rumpled suit, scuffed shoes. His office was three blocks from mine, just off Gay Street, with a view of the women’s basketball museum. There are museums for everything. As we talked, rain began to patter against the window behind him. The space was small and cluttered and smelled like damp paper.
“No problem,” he said. His accent was as thick as Tennessee river mud. “Rain’s gonna fall.”
My eye strayed to the gray glistening glass over his shoulder; I couldn’t help myself.
“There’s a strong possibility she’ll drop the charges,” I said.
“Strong?”
“Once she understands I’m out of the picture for good.”
“What picture would that be?”
“The one in which I’m not guarding her anymore.”
“Why were you guarding her?”
I told him. He made some notes. The rain was soft and lulling, and during pauses in our conversation you could hear the gentle kiss of water on the glass and the swish of traffic on the wet pavement.
“Who’d you say the boyfriend was?” he asked.
“Jason. Sorry, I never got the last name.”
“No, the boy who you were protecting her from.”
“Quinton. Quinton Stiles.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “Funny.”
“Funny how?”
“Quinton Stiles was my client.”
“No,” I said. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said. He laid down his pen. “This is quite irregular, Mr. Ruzak.”
“What, like a conflict of interest?”
“You didn’t know he was my client?”
“I had no idea.”
“What do you think the odds are that you would seek representation from the same lawyer who defended the boy you were chasing after?”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin to calculate them. But to be accurate, I wasn’t chasing after him, just trying to help out an old friend by watching his daughter.”
“You haven’t tried to talk to Quinton?”
“I don’t even know where Quinton is.”
He nodded. The pen was back in his pudgy hand. He tapped it on his notepad. The rain hissed. The pen tapped.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Why would I?” he replied.
“You were his lawyer. Maybe he keeps in touch.”
“Why would he keep in touch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s assume he has. Why would I tell you?”
“I’m hiring you to defend me.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Maybe knowing his whereabouts would be helpful in my defense.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I’m no lawyer.’ ”
“No, you’re a PI who happens to be hunting my former client.”
“I wouldn’t call it hunting per se.”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing, hunting, chasing … all that kind of implies the goal is capture, but they really misstate the case,” I said. “It’s more akin to bird-watching.”
“Bird-watching?”
“Observe and report.”
“So that is why you’re here. You don’t want me to represent you; you want me to tell you where he is.”
“I think what I asked was if his whereabouts might be helpful to my defense.”
He tapped his pen for a second.
“No.”
“No it wouldn’t be helpful?”
“No it wouldn’t and no I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“Nor do I want to.”
“How come?”
Tap, tap.
“What do you know about Quinton Stiles, Mr. Ruzak?”
“Not a heck of a lot, except he beat this poor girl within an inch of her life.”
He nodded. The set of his mouth was grim. He tossed the pen onto the desk and leaned back in his chair.
“I’ve been a defense attorney for twenty-four years,” he said. “Hundreds of cases, not a few of which were felonies, not a small amount violent felonies, and in all those years and all those cases, Mr. Ruzak, there has been only one client of whom I can honestly say I was afraid.”
I took a stab at it. “Quinton Stiles.”
“Quinton Stiles. That boy was like the Oakland California of felons: There was no ‘there’ there.”
“No ‘there’?”
He shook his head. “You look into that boy’s eyes and nothing looks back at you. Not a bit of remorse for what he did, not an ounce of understanding that it was wrong. I’m not saying he doesn’t know right from wrong; Quint
on knows. He just don’t care. Didn’t even seem to care he was caught, which was the unusual thing, the scary thing. When the judge handed down the sentence, you would’ve thought he was talking about the weather. I’ve stood by convicted killers and child molesters who showed more emotion at their sentencing.”
“I’ve heard a lot of these types blame the victim,” I said.
“A lot of these types are victims,” he said. “Quinton’s daddy was an alcoholic who beat his momma, beat his brothers and sisters, beat him. Growing up, violence was the air he breathed. Started drinking and smoking pot when he was eleven. Been in and out of institutions since he was fourteen. At seventeen, his momma kicked him out of the house after he smacked her upside the head with a rolling pin—she was baking Christmas cookies—but she refused to press charges. Dropped out of school the next year, joined the service but was discharged three weeks into basic training for ‘psychological reasons,’ according to the army. Quinton Stiles is going to kill somebody one day, Mr. Ruzak—you can take that to the bank—and I hope when that day comes, they lock him up for life. He’s not fit for the world because the world’s not fit for him.”
“That’s my concern,” I said. “The killing somebody someday part. What do you mean, ‘the world’s not fit for him’?”
He pursed his lips and then smiled, but there was no humor in his smile.
“He might look like one and sound like one and if you prick him, he might bleed like one, but he ain’t one. I’m not sure what he is, but he ain’t human, Mr. Ruzak. Quinton Stiles is something altogether different.”
6:49 p.m.
Standing in the grassy strip outside the Sterchi Building while I waited for Archie to do his doodle, I called Felicia.
“It feels like that awful pregnant moment right before a thunderstorm,” I said.
“Here’s my take,” she said. “If he was planning something, he would have done it by now, and the likelihood of his doing anything diminishes with each passing hour.”
“He could be lying low because he knows we’re looking for him.”
“Or he isn’t lying low at all because he doesn’t care we’re looking for him or he doesn’t know we’re looking for him. You’re reaching conclusions based on assumptions and paranoid conjecture, Ruzak.”
“I think I need to talk to Momma.”
The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line Page 4
