The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs

by Richard Yancey

  She broke the kiss and I removed my hand from beneath her shirt. She glanced in the rearview mirror and then unsnapped her pants and commenced to wiggle out of them.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Tell me you’re a virgin. Please.” Her cheeks were flushed. The foggy window behind her shone with the ambient light of the single streetlamp about two cars away.

  She pushed me back against the seat and straddled me. Her panties were white. I was surprised.

  “Come on, Ruzak,” she whispered into my ear. “I haven’t been laid in months.”

  It had been much longer than that for me, but I didn’t tell her that. Her hips rotated slowly as her weight pressed down on my lap, with both hands on my shoulders, pushing.

  “Don’t you like me?” she asked. “I can tell you like me….”

  “I do like you,” I said. “I do.”

  “But? There’s a ‘but’ there.”

  I bit back an inappropriate laugh. “This is just a little … sudden.”

  “Spontaneous.” Again she smashed her lips against mine. There was nothing tender about it. Insistent and fierce, bordering on angry.

  When I could talk again, I said, “I can’t shake the feeling I’m taking advantage of you.”

  She pushed herself off me and sat behind the steering wheel again, taking it in both hands, like a little girl pretending to drive her daddy’s car.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been edgy ever since I found him.”

  “Who?”

  “The old guy in the alley.”

  “See? You are in love with death.”

  “I really don’t see it that way, Amanda.”

  “Then why won’t you fuck me?”

  I didn’t say anything. She swung her face in my direction. “I turn you on,” she said. “I felt it.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Huh?”

  I repeated the question. She said, “Oh great, one of those. This is just my shitty luck.” She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.

  “So that means you don’t?”

  “No, I don’t, if you must know.”

  “The evidence could be interpreted either way.”

  “Who cares, Ruzak? Who really cares anymore?”

  She grabbed her pants from the floorboard and yanked them over her slender hips. “I like you, Ruzak, I really do, but guess what? You haven’t been commissioned to save anybody. You may think you’re preserving my honor or whatever, but really, all you’re doing is leaving me frustrated and fucking angry and thinking I’m unattractive as hell….”

  I reached over to wipe off the tear rolling down her cheek. She slapped my hand away.

  “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  “Sorry. You’re not. It’s me. You know it’s me.”

  “I don’t want to get engaged or have a boyfriend and, even if I did, it wouldn’t be with someone like you,” she said. “I don’t need a man to complete me. And guess what, I don’t need God or Jesus or any of that other bullshit. It’s all bullshit, Ruzak. Even love is bullshit. You know what love is? Love is just a complex hormonal response to stimuli. It’s genetic memory mixed with the procreative drive. It’s the lie we tell our children because the truth is too horrible to say aloud. You’re thinking love saves but love does the opposite. Why are you looking at me like that? Who are you, Mahatma Fucking Gandhi?”

  “I was just thinking this has got to be the oddest first date I’ve ever had.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Amanda …”

  “Get out of my car and fuck you.”

  “Okay.”

  I stepped out but left the door open. I leaned in.

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  She started the car and slammed it into reverse before I could close the door. I stepped back in the nick of time. She floored the gas. She stopped long enough to reach over and shut the door, and then she was gone, screeching out of the parking lot. I suspected she was hyped on caffeine, which can be as dangerous as driving drunk.

  I sat in my car for a minute or two, and then dug my cell phone from my pocket. Felicia answered on the fifth ring.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Ruzak?”

  “Hope it’s not a bad time,” I said, checking my watch. I figured Tommy would be in bed.

  “What’s the matter?” Felicia asked. “I thought you were on a date.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Something bad happened, didn’t it?”

  “I’ve got to get out of this funk,” I said. “I was thinking finding who killed that old guy might get me out of it, but now I’m wondering if that’s just making it worse.”

  “Of course it’s making it worse.”

  “I took his mug shot to the soup kitchen,” I told her. “The one taken when he was busted for B and E. I showed it to everyone who came by my station. Nobody remembered him. Nobody knew he had even been there. They didn’t know the face. They didn’t recognize the name. He passed through life as anonymously as a boat in the fog. Do you think I have a complex?”

  “Oh, Ruzak, don’t get me started. You made some ham-handed pass at her, didn’t you, and got your face slapped.”

  “No, just my hand.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I thought the network had dropped my call.”

  “You want me to come over?” she asked.

  “I’m in my car.”

  “Well, I could wait till you get home, dummy.”

  “No,” I said. “No. You have Tommy.”

  “Bob can watch him.”

  “Bob won’t mind if you come over?”

  “We’re all grownups, Ruzak.”

  “That’s okay. I think I’d rather be alone. Sorry to call.”

  “Ruzak, drop this.”

  “I will. I mean, I should.”

  “And it’s a good idea for you to talk to somebody. You know, a professional. Something’s going on with you and I’m not qualified to deal with it.”

  NOVEMBER 30

  FOURTEEN

  I brought some lilies for my mother’s grave and a bottle of Old Grouse for Dad’s. Mom had buried him among the Baptists, though Dad had never set foot in a Baptist church, or any church for that matter, since his twenties. He had asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered over the Smoky Mountains. Mom claimed to have looked into it before telling him federal law prohibited dumping a person’s remains in a national park.

  “Well, Mom,” I told her. “I got to get to the printer’s, but I wanted to let you know I’m not a detective anymore. Actually, I guess I never was, but anyway, despite that or maybe because of that, now I’m looking into this case of a guy I found dead in the alley behind my office. Nobody asked me to and Felicia tells me not to; she says it’s dangerous to my mental health, but I can’t get it out of my head, him lying down there in the garbage, like he was looking up right at me, and I can’t get it out of my head that the last thing he saw was the person who killed him, and I’m wondering if he was still alive when they carved those letters into his forehead, though the coroner doesn’t think so because there wasn’t much blood and there’d be more if his heart was still beating. He had seventy-three broken bones, Mom. He was a mess. Face, ribs, arms, fingers, both cheeks. They beat the living shit out of him. Sorry.

  “Damn, it’s cold. I prefer February cold to November cold. November cold seeps right in and you can’t shake it, even in a warm room.

  “So anyway, I’m supposed to be studying for the PI exam so I can do this the right way instead of the Ruzak way, but you know, part of this I’m convinced must be genetic; Dad was a cornercutter, let’s be honest. Remember how he lost that job in Saint Louis, skimming commissions from his crew at the car dealership? Or how he used to park in the handicapped spaces at the grocery? Dad thought the fix was in on eve
rything, even elections and pro football games, so he never saw anything wrong in putting the fix in himself. I’m not being judgmental, Mom. It’s not judgmental to face the facts.

  “I know what you’d tell me. You’d tell me to pray about all this, and I’ve tried but I can’t get past ‘Dear God.’ I start and then my mind gets overwhelmed and my thoughts scatter and I feel this weight come down on my shoulders like it’s too much, and I feel like a kid poking a big anthill with a stick. That’s weird. Then I think most people in my position would choose to escape or anesthetize themselves, which is just another form of escape, I guess. Like the vast majority of homeless people are alcoholics and a big chunk are also mentally handicapped, and this Cadillac Jack was both, but I’ve checked with every mental institution, hospital, and drug rehab clinic in eastern Tennessee, and nobody has a record of ever treating a Jack Minor.

  “The ways to catch a killer are finite, Mom. Forensics, witnesses, victimology, profiling…. maybe one or two more, but that’s about it. I guess I keep looking at Jack because he was looking at me. Maybe to catch his killer I need to look away. Like with God, you’re not going to find him by looking for him.

  “So that’s why I got to stop by the printer’s on my way home.”

  I unscrewed the cap of the Grouse and slowly poured the whiskey over Dad’s grave, near the base of the stone, aiming for the spot directly over his mouth. Then I dropped the bottle back into the bag and slipped it into the outer pocket of my overcoat.

  “It’s the last day of November,” I said. “Thank God.”

  A man was standing on the handicap ramp leading to the side door of the church, watching me as I walked back to my car. He raised his hand and I waved back. I stood by the car for a second, and then decided, What the hell? I crossed the lot and stood on the pavement beneath him while he leaned his forearms on the rail, smiling benevolently down at me with large, perfectly even teeth.

  “How are you, Eddy?” he asked.

  “It’s Teddy, and I’m a little cold,” I told Pastor Morris. He was wearing a gray suit and a bright yellow tie with a silver cross tiepin. His goldish-blond hair was swept straight back from his finely sculpted forehead. Pastor Morris was at least six years younger than I was, a fact that made me vaguely uneasy for some reason.

  “Want to come inside for a minute?”

  “I’m late for an appointment,” I lied. “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Not bad,” I lied again.

  “Working through your weekends?”

  “As a matter of fact …” I said, but stopped there. Let the preacher fill in the blanks; that was sort of his job.

  “We surely miss your mother,” he said, nodding toward the cemetery. “She was a wonderful woman.”

  “You think it borders on the profane, my talking to her grave like that?” I had to assume he had seen me out there.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, you know, talking to the dead, like some sort of ancestor worship.”

  “Talking isn’t the same as praying, Eddy.”

  “Teddy.”

  “Just closing your eyes and feeling God’s presence—that can be praying, too.”

  “I caught this documentary on TV not long ago,” I said. “About that tsunami in Indonesia. This one Indian guy was with his family on a train, heading for a holiday on the coast, when it rolled in and he never found his son, this twelve-year-old kid. He was just wiped off the face of the earth.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “Well, he never talked about his religion, but I’m betting he said a prayer.”

  “The Almighty has his own purposes.”

  “That’s the rub, Pastor. Why did he give us a brain if he didn’t want us to figure out what those are?”

  “Are you asking me why we suffer?”

  “No. Because I know what your answer’s going to be. Original sin or free will or echoing Christ’s suffering or something along those lines. I just can’t shake this feeling that God was born on the day the first person died.”

  I sat for a few minutes in the car. The forecast was calling for the first snow of the season. The preacher disappeared into the church. He was barely three months on the job when he buried my mother, and he kept getting her name wrong at the service. Maybe it didn’t make much difference in the eternal scheme of things, but I was pretty upset at the time. The ancient Hebrews invested a lot of time and energy ferreting out the hidden name of God, and not just because God was important to them; names were important. I wouldn’t be the same person if my name had been Ralph or Anthony or Christopher—or even Eddy, which this preacher obviously thought it should be.

  By forgetting her name, he was forgetting her, and the point of the whole exercise was to remember.

  FIFTEEN

  Amanda laid down her paperback copy of Nietzsche’s Man and Superman when I walked through the glass doors.

  “This better be about Archie,” she said.

  “That’s half of it,” I said. “Well, a third.”

  “You don’t owe me an apology, Ruzak. What do you have behind your back? Those better not be flowers.”

  “If it is, am I in trouble?”

  “Oh, Christ. They’ll just die. I’m here till four and I don’t have anything to put them in. What are they?” I showed her.

  “Daisies?”

  “It was more of an impulse buy,” I said. “I was at the florist’s picking up some lilies for my mom’s grave.”

  She grabbed the flowers and laid them behind the counter.

  “The second thing,” I said, to move off the subject of flowers. “I was wondering if you’d mind putting this on the door.”

  I showed her one of the flyers I’d been putting up all over town.

  “Who’s Jack Minor?” she asked.

  “The old guy who died behind my building.”

  “Twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward? Who’s putting that up?” She looked at me.

  “I collected a pretty big payoff on my first case,” I explained.

  She stared at me for a few seconds more, then shrugged and dropped the flyer beside the daisies.

  “I’ll ask the boss.”

  “The third thing,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I’ve decided to adopt Archie.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Because I’m underqualified?”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “They put him down this morning, Ruzak.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did call you. I left a long message on your voice mail.”

  “I wasn’t home. I was visiting my mom.”

  “I thought your mom was dead.”

  “I was visiting my dead mom.”

  “Well, Archie joined the club at ten-forty-five this morning.”

  “Well, of course he did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Don’t do that. Three more came in last night. Let’s check them out.”

  “No,” I said. “No. I still have to cover Cumberland Avenue.”

  “Carpe diem, Ruzak!” she called after me as I walked to the door. “Carpe diem!”

  I sat in my Sentra and put my hands on the wheel. I wondered if she could see me. Bits of snow began to peck at the windshield, no bigger than pencil leads, not soft, fluffy-looking flakes, but flinty pellets, a vindictive snow. The prospect daunted me, trudging up that long slope on Cumberland Avenue in this weather, stapling my “Wanted” posters on the light poles along the section known as The Strip, the main drag through campus. In a day or two, Jack’s face would be buried under other announcements and advertisements more interesting to college students, local band dates and roommate-wanted flyers with the little removable strips with the contact information at the bottom.

  Covered over. Busted up. Jack was pulp inside, his gut filled with blood, both lungs crushed. The only significant exterior bleeding h
ad been from his forehead, and that was after his heart had stopped. Jack Minor bled into himself; they turned him into a sack of blood and shattered bone, then cut the name of God in a spot no more than an inch from the only part of his brain that had the capacity to conceive of a God.

  The cops had found a broken piece of two-by-four near the mouth of the alley, which Meredith Black thought was a good candidate for the murder weapon. The crime techs had found several human hairs that resembled Jack’s stuck in one splintered end, but they had no plans to run a comparison. What would be the point of that? Detective Black had six other homicide cases on her desk demanding her attention, cases with leads and tips and real evidence to work from. No witnesses had come forward, and nobody had walked through the front doors of the station to confess. She had a better case with the gang-banger from the East Side who took a bullet in the forehead. He didn’t have much of a future, either, but there were people who noticed his passing, for whom each day was different because he died.

  Behind a closed door, one person holds down the animal while another injects it with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. The animal is dead in thirty seconds. Then they place it in an oven and burn it. Three to four million times every year. And it’s okay; it’s the humane thing. Nobody wants this dog. The man holding the needle is performing a necessary service to society. We can’t allow these creatures to run wild on the streets. They’re a nuisance and a burden.

  SIXTEEN

  I arrived at my apartment a little after five, in a darkness that struck me as preternatural. There was no message from Amanda. Felicia had left a message to call her.

  “I haven’t heard from you in a couple days,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “No news is good news.”

  “Ruzak, you’re not having a nervous breakdown, are you?”

  “You know what I think it is? That Hinton guy from the state left the cosmic door open that day he shut us down and some seriously bad karma blew into the room. They killed Archie today.”