“To immortalize you!” she fairly shouted. “Holmes had his Watson. Marple had her Christie. Nancy Drew had her Keene. Ruzak shall have his Shriver!”
“Oh, Eunice. Eunice, that’s flattering as all get-out; I’m touched, really, but—”
“There are gaps, of course. Some things that I do not know, details and conversations and other matters that only you could know. I have been focusing on our relationship for the most part, but they’ll want to know more about the actual case and your secretary, I suppose, and how precisely you managed to bag the killer.”
“They? Who’s ‘they’?”
“Why, your readers, naturally!”
“Eunice, I don’t have any readers.”
“You will!”
“I don’t want any readers.”
“Nonsense! What detective in his right mind doesn’t want readers?”
“I’m not a detective.”
“You were!”
“Then I’m not in my right mind.” I scooped up the manuscript and held it out for her. She didn’t take it. The loss in her eyes was profound, and I looked away.
“You think I’m ridiculous,” she said, voice quivering.
“No.”
“A silly old woman with delusions of literary grandeur.”
“Of course not.”
“I wrote poetry when I was younger.”
I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, but I told her that was terrific. I was impressed. And how in the world could I accuse her, of all people, of being delusional? I kept holding out the manuscript until my forearm began to ache.
“If you really feel it’s necessary,” I said, “I guess you could just make up the rest.”
“What rest?”
“The gaps.”
“But this isn’t fiction, Theodore.”
“It would probably work better that way,” I said. “Maybe you could put under the title: ‘Based on a True Story.’”
She snorted with disgust. I figured it was disgust, anyway. Is it possible to snort with something else? Is there another emotion that causes you to snort?
She leaned forward and snatched the papers from my cramping fingers.
“I shall finish with or without your help, Theodore. Do you know why?”
“No. Why?”
“Because at the ripe old age of eighty-six, I have finally stumbled upon my life’s calling. I shall be known to posterity as the chronicler of the great Teddy Ruzak’s exploits.”
She stuffed the manuscript back into the tote and pushed herself out of the chair. We argued all the way to the door. Then I gave up. What did I care if she wrote about me? You have to have purpose in your life. The fact that I had just lost mine made this painfully obvious. Loss makes a lot of things painfully obvious.
TWO
I hung around for another couple of hours, misting the ferns, changing the voice-mail message, composing a letter to my clients about “pressing circumstances,” and writing a note to stick on the front door. “Temporarily Unavailable.” Ever the optimist, I had no plans to close up shop for good. I had more than enough cash in the bank to last until the next go-around and now more than enough time to bone up for the test. I’m a firm believer in that old saw about try, try again. But I wondered how kindly the state of Tennessee would treat my application, seeing that it had to get a court order to shut down my illegal operation.
I shut down Felicia’s computer and cut the lights. The office fell into a kind of premature twilight. I bumped down the thermostat to sixty-five and checked to make sure the fax machine was unplugged. Then I hung in the doorway, one foot over the transom and one foot in the room, jingling the keys, knowing I’d be back but not knowing if I would ever really be back.
I swung the door closed and locked it. I tapped the etching after my name, INVESTIGATIVE CONSULTANT, with my index finger, and thumped down the wooden stairs, the naked bulb dangling above throwing my shadow against the wall, the silhouette of my trench coat flapping in my descent like Batman’s cape.
I passed the dry cleaner’s on the first floor. The walls hummed with the sound of the machines, and I could see Gustav, the German proprietor, laboring over a shirt-pressing machine. A couple months back, Gustav had offered to do all my suits at a 20 percent discount. I had thanked him but explained I was doing my cleaning with those in-your-dryer bags from Sam’s Club. He reacted as if I had just admitted to shooting house cats for sport.
On the stoop of the Ely, I inhaled deeply and then blew out my breath, watching the white plume roil in the cold air. Ever since I was a kid, the phenomenon fascinated me. The rain was as fine as the aerosol emitted from my mister, which sat upstairs on the window ledge beside the row of ferns. What about the ferns? I should load them into my car and take them home. But I’d have to climb those stairs and open that door, cross through two rooms, past my big desk and the squeaky leather chair. Maybe I’d come back tomorrow.
I walked a half block west to the Park Rite lot that backed up to the Ely. I was parking there because I got tired hoofing it downstairs every hour to feed the meter—or trying to remember to hoof it downstairs every hour. Sometimes I got wrapped up in something or my mind strayed, and I’d find a ticket beneath my wiper. The city was gleeful about writing tickets.
The temperature wouldn’t rise much above forty today, and the forecast called for freezing rain overnight. The sky was an unbroken sheet of gray. The red reflections of cars’ rear lights chased their bumpers on the shimmering pavement, and their tires hissed as they passed, the water remembering the tread for a moment before the fresh rain wiped the road clean.
An old man leaned against the lamppost at the corner of Walnut and Church. Blue jeans, a ratty tan jacket, tangled, gray-streaked hair down to his shoulders, a full beard, also laced with gray, that grew past his Adam’s apple, holding a scrap of cardboard where he had scrawled, “We all need a little help now and then. God Bless.” He was a regular. I’d seen him almost every day since September. One block west was the main library, where the vagrants congregated year-round, sitting in the magazine area, staying warm or cool, depending on the season. The library wasn’t far from the mission on Broadway, which didn’t open its doors until late afternoon. If I was a vagrant (something not too far outside the realm of possibilities), I’d hoof it farther south for the winter. I’d go south until there was no south left.
At the four-way stop where Walnut met Church Avenue, I looked over at Ratty Jacket and found him looking back at me. In that moment, I made a life-or-death decision that would change both our lives.
I rolled down the window and he trotted over, chin tucked as he ran, and I dropped the spare change from my cup holder into his calloused palm. He commanded God to bless me, and then I reached over, grabbed my floppy hat from the passenger seat, and passed it out the window to him. It was too big for his head. The rim bobbed just over his bushy eyebrows, which were shot through with gray like his hair and beard. His eyes were wide with astonishment at my generosity. He grinned, touching the brim with one gnarled finger as I pulled away. He looked seventy at least, but probably was in his sixties.
I glanced in the rearview mirror, and he was still standing in the middle of the street, head turned toward me, a distorted, tan-and-blue figure in the rain-smeared glass.
THREE
I took Kingston Pike west, through Sequoia Hills with its hundred-year-old mansions behind wrought-iron gates and the big Greek Orthodox church, not far from the synagogue and the fundamentalists’ private school, past the Fresh Market where old Eunice Shriver fingered the bag boy out to get her, through the Bearden Hill area, and on the back side of the slope I turned left into the parking lot for the Humane Society. It was the only Spanish-style building I’d ever seen in Knoxville. The Spanish never had a strong presence in eastern Tennessee to my knowledge, and I always suspected the building originally housed a Mexican restaurant.
The place stank of ammonia mixed with the air freshener used to mask the st
ench of the ammonia. Cages lined the walls in this outer room, and the cages were occupied by cats lolling on carpet-covered ledges a couple feet above the floors of the cages. A big tabby lifted its head and blinked sleepily as I passed. My right eye twitched in response: I’m mildly allergic to cats.
The clerk (or attendant or whatever her title was) stood up and came to the counter. Maybe nineteen or twenty, with short-cropped black hair and a silver ring through her left nostril, her name was Amanda. She was a student at UT, studying philosophy. That probably helped, working at this place, which always struck me as a way station between deliverance and oblivion. She was clad completely in black: black halter that terminated an inch above her pierced navel, tight, black, hip-hugging jeans, and black combat boots. It wasn’t hard for me to picture her administering the lethal dose to some unwanted animal. I didn’t pretend to know much about philosophy, but what I did know didn’t favor an optimistic mindset.
“Hey, Ruzak,” she said, placing the paperback she had been reading facedown on the counter, folded open to keep her place. She was reading The Bell Jar. “What’s up?”
“The state closed me down today,” I said.
“Really? How come?”
“I flunked a test.”
“We have an opening washing out the runs.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “Just wondering if you got in anything new this week.”
“Let’s check it out.”
She grabbed a set of keys from a hook, and I followed her through the big metal door into the back wing of the building where the dogs were caged. We were greeted by a cacophony of barks, howls, whines, yips, and snarls. Some of the dogs I recognized. Butch, the pit bull, who had arrived earlier in the month and was doomed; nobody wanted to adopt a pit bull. Sassy, a Border collie with one bad eye, half shut and weeping with some kind of abscess, yellow gunk congealing in the long hair beneath her eye. Geronimo, a handsome German shepherd mix with a nasty disposition, though that might have sprung from an intense hatred of his confinement. Some dogs poked their snouts against the wire mesh, spittle flying from their mouths, furious; others cowered in the back of their cage, heads lowered, tongues dangling, like winded sprinters. Amanda must have recently washed down the cages: the concrete floor was slick, and the steel drain covers glistened with moisture.
“Okay!” she shouted over the bedlam. We had reached the end of the row. “He’s new. That one just came in last night. And that one over there, she’s new. It’s a she, right? Yeah.”
I peered into the cages, one by one. The dogs watched me. Amanda watched them watch me, and then she watched me, thin, pale arms folded over her small chest.
“Can I ask you something, Ruzak?” she asked. “For six weeks you’ve been coming here, and I take you back here and you stare at these dogs and then you come back and stare some more, and you haven’t even asked to take one out. What are you looking for?”
“The right dog.”
“Why don’t we do this? You tell me what breeds you’re interested in and, when one comes in, I’ll give you a call.”
“Well, it’s not the breed exactly. I mean, I’m not partial to any particular breed. I’ve always believed in the saying that the perfect dog finds you.”
“I’ve never heard that saying.”
“It’s all a little academic anyway. My lease doesn’t allow pets.”
“Then why are you looking for one?”
I didn’t say anything. She was still watching me. The dogs were still watching me. I stood with my hands stuffed into my overcoat pockets.
“Maybe it isn’t the dog you’re looking for, per se,” Amanda said finally.
“I have a very rich life,” I told her. “An abundant existence.” I wasn’t about to let her existential malaise infect me. I looked into the cage immediately to my right. Some kind of low-slung beagle mix stared back. It wasn’t barking, just lifting its narrow head and panting, creating the illusion of a grin. I pointed at it.
“Can I see him?”
“Sure. Go straight through that door into the courtyard and I’ll bring him out. His name’s Archie.”
I sat on a concrete bench under the bare, outstretched arms of a dogwood, the branches black from the rain. The water gathered at the ends and formed droplets that hung, quivering, before gravity took them down. Amanda came out after a few minutes, cradling the beagle, which she lowered to the ground about ten feet from the bench. Archie looked up at her, his thin tail a white-and-tan blur, bouncing off her shins with his front paws. Amanda clapped her hands and pointed toward me, and Archie took off, leaping onto my lap and placing his tongue beneath my chin. I could smell his breath and suddenly I was twelve again, playing with my first and only dog. I’d never fully recovered from that dog’s death, but I always told myself that was because you never fully recover from death, even the ones that aren’t your own. Nearly a year had passed since my mom died, and I still woke up some mornings with a hard nugget of grief lodged in my gut. It had surprised me in the beginning; I always thought of grief as a hollow kind of feeling, but real grief isn’t a void; it’s hard and glittering and sharp as a diamond.
Now I had muddy paw prints all over my tan overcoat and this dog was nibbling the soft flesh under my chin.
“Okay, Archie, okay,” I told it. I lowered it to the ground and it immediately put its paws on my leg, begging to be back in my lap.
“He likes you,” Amanda said.
“He’s probably not picky.”
“He’s small, which is good for an apartment,” she said.
“It’s a moral dilemma,” I said. “I signed an agreement not to bring an animal into the building, but beyond that, if I get caught I’ll have to bring him back here.”
“So you buy him some time. You could look at it that way.”
I looked her way. She might be prettier if she went back to her natural color and ditched the hoop in her nose. She must have been freezing out here in this rain, bare-armed and bare-midriffed.
“How did you decide on philosophy as a major?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “It’s interesting.”
“What does somebody do with a degree in philosophy?”
“I’m prelaw.”
“Oh.” I thought about telling her the world probably needed more philosophers and less lawyers, but that might lead to a debate, and I didn’t have the stomach or the nerve to get into a philosophical debate with a philosophy major with the personality of a lawyer.
“What’s ol’ Archie’s story anyway?” I asked.
“Brought him in a couple days ago. No collar, no implant. Just a stray, Ruzak.”
“Implant?”
“You know, some vets put in those tracking chips. GPS.”
“I think I read something about that,” I said. “Made me think maybe we should do that with children.” She laughed for some reason.
“He’s getting cold,” she said. “I better get him inside.”
I followed her back into the kennel. Archie smiled at me from behind his bars. His short hair shone with moisture, and I thought of otters.
“How much time does he have?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“I gotta think about it.”
She shrugged. I followed her to the front room. Her shoulder blades poked out her back when she hugged her arms, she was so thin. Back among the cats, I sneezed.
“You got a business card?”
I did, but no business to go with it. I scrawled my home number on the back of the card and told her I wouldn’t be in the office for a while.
“But don’t hold him on my account,” I told her, meaning Archie. “If somebody else wants him.”
“Do you? You haven’t said.”
“I have to think about it. One thing, I’m not sure how wise or ethical it is getting a dependent on the same day I lose my sole source of income.”
I sat in my idling car in the parking lot for a few minutes, watching the drops hardly larger t
han pinheads kiss the glass and looking past the raindrops to the magenta façade of the building. My one-bedroom at the Sterchi would seem empty when I walked in the door. I thought I should spring for some deep-pile carpet. Hardwood floors encourage echoes.
I stopped at the Food City on the corner of Kingston Pike and Northshore, to pick up a flank steak and some black beans, and I stood in one aisle at least three minutes trying to remember if I had any rice in the pantry. If I was wrong and didn’t have any rice, I’d be forced to return to the store or opt for the beans without rice, which would make me feel cheated, like I was being denied something I rightfully deserved.
It turned out I did have one bag of Success Rice left in the pantry. I set up a TV tray at the end of my bed and watched a special on global warming on the Discovery Channel while I ate, just another thirty-something bachelor eating alone in his underwear, watching television. The tray was an old one, from a set I inherited from Mom. For as long as I could remember, we ate our family dinners set up in front of the old Magnavox in the family room, so Dad wouldn’t miss a minute of Walter Cronkite. Somebody had told him once he resembled Walter Cronkite, and I suspected that’s why Dad was so hooked on him. Dad lacked Walter’s gravitas, though. His cheeks were ruddier, too, and his nose bigger, his voice higher pitched. His voice really didn’t match his size. Maybe that’s why Dad wasn’t the greatest salesman in the world: you saw this big, barrel-chested Walter Cronkite look-alike coming at you, and when he opened his mouth he sounded like Squeaky the Clown.
Watching the Discovery Channel convinces you of three things: The world is a wonderful, wondrous place; it’s going to hell in a handbasket; and you’re partially to blame. I discovered that just using my toaster pumped about a hundred tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 2
