The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line

by Richard Yancey

  “Ruzak.”

  “I like Rusty better.”

  I bought her another daiquiri.

  “So how’s the Bunko?” I asked.

  “I was winning before you walked up.”

  “The night’s still young.”

  “He’s a college student. Premed.”

  She had cut her hair—a cute bob job that framed her face, making it seem less thin—dyed it towhead blond.

  “So you know I haven’t caught mine,” she said. “Did you catch yours?”

  “Still fishing,” I said.

  A band started to play a ballad. I asked her if she wanted to dance; I didn’t trust my moves on the fast songs. On the floor, she went up on the balls of her feet and wrapped her thin arms around my neck. I stepped on her toes and said I was sorry.

  The song ended. Our spot at the bar was still open. I bought her another drink. I nursed my Bud. There was a little smile on her face, like she had a secret she was dying to tell. She dropped a hand on my forearm and said, “So how long does it usually take you?”

  I turned to look her full in the face. She might have been worried about getting old—I wasn’t up on all the motives that drive women to seek younger men—but I thought her face had character.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  On the way to my car, Nancy slipped her hand through the crook of my arm to hop over the glimmering puddles. The top of her head came to my bicep. I opened the passenger door for her; she slipped inside.

  I got behind the wheel, and before I could start the engine, she pulled my face toward hers, and then she kissed me, very gently, brushing her lips sensually over mine. It was a long kiss. She pulled back about two inches and looked for a long moment into my eyes.

  I drove straight to the motel.

  “We’re getting a room here?” she asked.

  “I already have a room,” I said.

  “Well, aren’t you the cocky one.”

  She waited for me to open the door for her and for me to offer my hand to facilitate her exit. Inside, I put on the night latch and turned the dead bolt. The unit under the window rattled and spat. It couldn’t have been over sixty-five degrees. Nancy sat on the edge of the bed, facing the door, and pulled off her cowboy boots. She rolled onto her tummy and pointed at the metal box affixed to the wall.

  “What’s that?”

  “For the bed.”

  “Oh, it’s a Vibrabed!” She giggled. “Oh God, I haven’t seen one of these since I was a little girl. Every summer, Daddy drove us down to Destin and we always stayed in this crappy motel, and it had these same beds. A quarter for thirty minutes.”

  “Now it’s four bits for twenty.”

  She laughed. “Tempus fugit. Does it work?”

  “I don’t know; I didn’t try it.”

  “Got any change?”

  I did. She fed two quarters into the slot and laughed aloud when the mattress began to shake.

  “Oh Jesus, Rusty, you got to try this.”

  She lay with both arms out to her sides, straining the buttons on her blouse. I shrugged out of my jacket, sat on the bed beside her, reached over, and undid the top button. I could see her bra. It was pink.

  “Funny thing is, when I was growing up, I thought that dump was the coolest hotel in the world and my dad the coolest dad for taking us there.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. Her tongue tasted like rum and strawberries. Her fingers combed through my hair, the nails gently scratching my scalp. I worked on the buttons as we kissed.

  “One question,” she whispered. “Why here? Why not your place?”

  “It’s the vibe,” I answered. “And I’m not talking about the bed, Nancy.”

  I kissed her. Said her name again. Most women love the sound of their name. I had read that somewhere. Tugging down the zipper of her jeans—“Nancy”—helping her pull off the blouse—“Nancy”—kissing her breasts—“Nancy.”

  “Rusty,” she moaned, both hands now working my hair as my mouth traveled down her quivering stomach. “I have to tell you something.…”

  “My name isn’t Rusty,” I said.

  “Mine isn’t Nancy.”

  SATURDAY

  3:14 a.m.

  The woman who called herself Nancy shook me out of a deep, dreamless sleep and said she had to go. We stood on opposite sides of the bed, with our backs to each other as we dressed.

  We drove in silence back to the bar. Her head was turned; she was staring out the window. I parked next to her car, one of only five in the nearly empty lot. They had turned off the neon sign. There is something almost tragic about a closed-down bar.

  We got out. The storm had saturated the air with moisture.

  “Can I have your number?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “You’re right. Stupid.”

  “Who’s stupid?”

  “I meant my question.”

  “What would happen if you had my number? Would you call me?”

  “Why I asked.”

  “You wouldn’t. You won’t. Anyway, I never give out my number.”

  I opened her door. She slid behind the wheel, checked her new do in the mirror, dug into her purse for a brush.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Hey what?”

  “I like you.”

  “And I like you.”

  “What I mean is … I don’t look at it like…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s a one-night stand.”

  “That would bother you?”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you might have been born in the wrong century?”

  “All the time.”

  “Okay.” She laughed. She tapped her cheek with her index finger. “Gotta go. Kiss good night.” I pecked her on the cheek and she said, “You really are too old for me, you know.”

  I closed the door and waited until her taillights disappeared from view. Then I drove back to the motel, went inside, and fell back to sleep fully dressed on top of the covers of the bed in which we had not made love.

  8:14 a.m.

  I was working on the second pot of coffee when the knock came. About time. It seemed very late to me. I grabbed my robe from the back of the bar stool and shrugged it on over my pajamas. Ran my fingers through my hair. The living room windows faced east and I had opened the blinds to allow the morning sunlight inside; long ribbons of light alternated with shadow across the hardwood. When I was a kid, the light of Saturday mornings seemed brighter than weekday light, infused with golden promises. Still struck me that way.

  Meredith Black was standing in the hall with a couple uniforms in tow.

  “I guess I need to get some clothes on,” I said.

  They stepped inside and just stopped, so I had to duck around them to get back into the room. Before heading off to change, I told them the coffee was fresh and to help themselves. When I came back, they were still standing where I’d left them. I followed them out, down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the lobby, and nobody said anything. An unmarked car was parked in the loading zone in front of the Sterchi. One of the uniforms held the door for me and I slid into the backseat. Meredith sat down beside me; the uniforms rode up front. As we cruised down Gay Street toward the station, I turned to Meredith and said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She didn’t look at me. She was staring straight ahead at the back of the driver’s head.

  “It’s better if you don’t say anything,” she said.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “My idea was for you to.”

  “You might want to call your lawyer,” she said.

  “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “We can get you one.”

  “Do I need one?”

  She shrugged, looked out the window. We drove into the shadow of the Tennessee Theatre stretching across Gay. Ly
le Lovett was appearing August 10.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  They put me in an interview room and closed the door. I was alone. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Thirty. I sat at the table and picked at a thumbnail. Near the forty-five-minute mark, the door opened and Meredith came in with another detective, whose name was Kennard. He had a huge bald head, a bulging gut, and his pants were an inch too short, revealing his white athletic socks over his scuffed Rockport loafers. He introduced himself. I reminded him we had met about a year ago, and he gave me a look like I was trying to pull a fast one. There were only two chairs in the room. Meredith sat in the empty one and Kennard leaned his big self against the wall beside the door.

  “You’re not under arrest,” Meredith said. “You don’t have to talk to us. If you want to talk to us, you have the right to have an attorney present. Anything you tell us is on the record, Teddy, and can be used against you. Do you understand?”

  “Quinton Stiles is dead,” I said.

  “How do you know somebody’s dead?” Kennard demanded.

  “Well, somebody must be,” I replied, “or I wouldn’t be sitting here with two homicide detectives.”

  “So it’s okay?” Meredith asked. “You wanna talk?”

  I nodded. She turned and nodded to Kennard. He left. She turned back to me.

  “Good cop goes first,” I said.

  “Marcum’s on his way,” she said. “And he is one very pissed federale.”

  “Lost his star witness.”

  “Once in the life of a law-enforcement officer, if they have any ambition, there comes along a career-making case. This was his.”

  “What happened?”

  She crossed her arms, leaned back in the chair.

  “All the textbooks say I should ask you that question.”

  “I was out till about four A.M.,” I said. “With someone.”

  “With who someone?”

  “I don’t know her name.”

  Her eyebrow went up.

  “Her nom de plume is Nancy. Don’t have a last name. She hangs out at a bar off Lovell Road. Cotton Eye Joe’s. But only on Wednesdays and Fridays. I picked her up there around nine o’clock.”

  “Took her back to your place?”

  “No. We went to a motel.” I gave her the name. She didn’t write it down. She didn’t have anything to write with or on. There was a camera mounted in one corner of the small room. I resisted the urge to look up at it.

  “Why a motel?” she asked.

  “My place—too many ghosts.”

  “What time did you check in?”

  “Um. Around four in the afternoon, I think.”

  “So you picked her up at the bar at nine and you already had the room?”

  “You know me, Meredith. Ever the optimist.”

  Kennard came back in carrying a paper sack. He handed it to Meredith and left again without saying anything. Meredith reached into the bag and took out a plastic Baggie, the interior of which was smoky gray with fingerprint dust. Inside the Baggie was a handgun.

  “This look familiar?” she asked.

  “It looks like my gun,” I said.

  “We ran the serial number. It is your gun.”

  “I told you guys it was missing.”

  “What if I told you this gun was used in the commission of a crime?”

  “I would say it doesn’t surprise me, since it obviously was in the possession of a criminal.”

  “Did you take a shower this morning?”

  “I was going to.”

  “What happened?”

  “The cops showed up at my door to arrest me.”

  “You’re not under arrest.”

  “So I can go? Right now? I can walk right now?”

  I stood up. She didn’t move. The gun lay on the table between us.

  “You aren’t interested?” she asked. “You’ve been hunting this guy for two weeks and you aren’t the least bit curious?”

  “Why did you want to know if I showered?”

  “We’d like to check your hands for residue.”

  I sat back down. “That’s fine. I didn’t kill him.”

  “No one said you did.”

  “But you think it.”

  “I think Quinton was silenced because somebody blew his cover.”

  “That somebody being me.”

  “Somebody who would have knowledge he was undercover and who would be strongly motivated to blow that cover.”

  “I don’t even know where Quinton is. Or was. I never did. That’s the funny thing.”

  “You didn’t need to know. Douglas Powell was the one who needed to know, and he knew. He always knew.”

  “Who is Douglas Powell?”

  “Dayton.”

  “So why aren’t you talking to him?”

  “Because right now we’re talking to you.”

  “Talking to him would be a more productive line of inquiry, seems to me.”

  “When did you?”

  “When did I what?”

  “Talk to him?”

  “Well, that would be … I don’t know, let me think. Couple of weeks at least.”

  “That was the last time?”

  “That was the only time.”

  “So you didn’t have any contact with him or anyone from his organization subsequent to our meeting with Marcum?”

  “I don’t like the guy. I mean, he dresses well and he talks good and he’s very slick, not your typical ranting racist revolutionary, but he gave me the creeps.”

  “It just strikes me as very odd, Teddy. Three days after Felicia ID’s Quinton, his mother wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of a single gunshot.…”

  “His mother?”

  “Where he was bunking. His old room. Twelve-forty-two on the dot—she knows because she looked at the clock—bam! There he is in bed, with your gun in one hand and a suicide note in the other.”

  “He killed himself?”

  Meredith Black laughed out loud. “No sign of a struggle. No evidence of a break-in. Just one dead government informant and a typewritten suicide note. Typewritten!”

  “Why is that funny? Maybe it’s like the Roman soldier falling on his sword. Maybe his cover was blown and he figured he’d rather do it himself than wait for Dayton to do it for him.”

  “Ruzak, you know this guy. You know what he was. Sociopaths do not commit suicide.”

  “They do when there’s no alternative. Look at those Columbine kids.”

  “He talks about two things in his note. Guess what they are.”

  “If I guess and get it right, you’ll use it against me.”

  “Your dog and your girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “So the idea is, Quinton Stiles kills himself because he feels bad about a dead dog.”

  I thought about it. “Seems ludicrous.”

  “You know what’s even more ludicrous? The decision he had to die in the first place.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t seem like their style. People like them, you’d expect a more Jimmy Hoffa–like scenario. Drop him in the river with five-hundred-pound concrete galoshes.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it, Teddy. A suicide connected by a note to an unconnected third party. An explanation that says nothing about his involvement with WAN or the FBI but mentions the third party’s dog and his gal Friday. The use of the gun is particularly ingenious. There’re only two sets of prints on that weapon—his and yours.”

  “But it couldn’t have been me.”

  “That’s right. Because you were miles away, lying with a tart on a Vibrabed at twelve-forty-two A.M. So we have not quite enough to put it on them, not quite enough to put it on you. Ingenious.”

  The door opened and Kennard stepped back into the room.

  “He’s ready,” he said.

  Meredith looked at me. “We’d like you to take a polygraph.”

  “I don’t think so. The last time didn’t turn
out so well.”

  “Totally up to you,” she said with a shrug. She was being nonchalant, but the color was high in her cheeks and a vein bulged in her neck. “We know it wasn’t you who pulled the trigger, but we’d like to rule you out as a coconspirator.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Things are going to get worse, Ruzak, before they get better,” she said.

  There was a knock on the door. Kennard stepped to one side and Marcum burst in. He was wearing khakis and a short-sleeve buttoned-down Ralph Lauren Polo. He looked smashing. He ignored Kennard and Meredith. He pointed at my nose.

  “You realize what you’ve done, don’t you?” he shouted. “Over two million dollars, thousands of man-hours, a fucking year of my life, and for what? For what? We had someone on her; we told him somebody so much as goes within fifty fucking feet of her and the deal’s off; and what the fuck do you do? What the fuck do you do?”

  “So arrest me,” I said.

  “You’re goddamn right I’m going to arrest you!”

  “If I were you, I’d arrest me.”

  “You think you’re so fucking smart. You think we can’t crack these assholes? They’ll give you up quicker than spit once we offer them a deal. You think we won’t offer them a deal?”

  “I’m no crackerjack Fibbie, but don’t you need some kind of leverage for that? Some damning something that would hold up in court to hang over their heads?”

  “You don’t know what we have,” he snarled.

  “I know you don’t have enough, or I’d be under arrest right now.”

  “It really doesn’t matter to you, does it?” He seemed flabbergasted.

  “It does matter,” I said. “I’m glad he’s dead. I wish it had happened last week instead of last night, but you can’t have everything you want, because that’s part of being human. And that’s what I am, Agent Marcum. I’m human. I’m not immune to hatred. I’m not numb to … to temptation. I like to think of myself as decent and law-abiding and that when given the choice between the path of light and the path of darkness, I’d choose the light. Sometimes those paths are obscured, more dappled than bright, and you have to weigh the odds; you have to decide what you’re most comfortable with. Ten percent? Five? One? What can you stomach? What is acceptable? I’m not denying I didn’t have motive. I’m not saying the threat was intolerable. But I’m a moral person. I’m a decent human being. But that’s not to say that even the decent don’t have to choose sometimes. If tomorrow they found a tumor in my brain and the operation was as dangerous as the disease, I’d still pick the operation. I’d rather kill the cancer than risk letting it kill me.”