“Well,” I said. “You don’t know me. Look, I’ll get right to it. She knows.”
“Knows …”
“She doesn’t have proof, not yet, but she’s pretty intent on getting some, and you probably don’t want her to see the kind of proof she wants to see.”
He’s so quiet at first, I thought we’d been cut off. I said hello. He said, “Yes.” That was it. Just “yes.”
“So I was thinking that maybe for the good of everybody involved, you should do the manly thing and fess up, break it off, and devote yourself to a—what’s the best way to put this?—a more monogamous lifestyle.”
He said, “Who the hell is this? Who are you?”
“A friend of Katrina,” I said for the third time.
The line went dead. I didn’t call back. He hadn’t given me the opportunity to tell him what kind of proof his wife wanted. It wasn’t the kind I was eager to obtain, hence the call to urge him to confess and relieve me of the obligation.
SCENE THREE
The Sterchi Building
A Few Hours Later
The man named Whittaker was lurking in the lobby. I stepped inside the vestibule and he slipped inside my personal space.
“Mr. Ruzak,” he said. “You know who I am.”
“You bet,” I said. “You’re the assistant manager.”
“Manager now.”
“Well. Congratulations on the promotion.”
He trailed me to the elevator.
“Mr. Ruzak, we’ve received more reports of you walking a dog on the grounds.”
“ ‘Reports’?”
“From residents.”
The elevator doors slid open. We stepped inside. I deduced he was coming with me, based on the fact that he now stood beside me in the elevator that was rising toward my floor.
“The Sterchi is now and has always been a pet-free facility,” Whittaker said.
“I know,” I said. “Every time I see you, you tell me that.”
The doors opened. I stepped into the hall. He followed. He was standing so close, I could smell his cologne.
“The lease is unequivocal on that point. I have a copy of it right here, if you’d like to review it.”
“I have my own copy,” I said. “Which I review every night. Thanks anyway.”
“Then you’re familiar with the provision under Paragraph F, Section Five.”
I gave it my best shot. “Right. No pets allowed.”
He trailed me a couple steps back as I made for my door.
“Actually, that provision guarantees management’s right of ingress.”
“ ‘Right of ingress’?”
“We may enter your apartment at any time for just cause.”
“You’ve gone in my apartment?”
We were now standing at the ingress point, my door. I felt my face growing hot in response to this violation—not mine, his.
“Keeping an animal in this building is grounds for nullification of your lease and, ultimately, eviction,” Whittaker said.
“Of me or the alleged pet?”
“Mr. Ruzak, we could parse words here, but you see what I’m getting at.”
“Well, I certainly can tell where you’ve been.”
He reached into his briefcase. I flinched. “You’re about to hand me a formal eviction notice,” I said.
He pulled out a single sheet of paper with the Sterchi Management Company’s letterhead.
“Thirty days’ notice, Mr. Ruzak. The dog … or you. Have a great evening.”
“He’s completely house broken,” I said, following him back to the elevator. “And he never barks. He’s never so much as whined. If he were human, he’d be one of those monks, the kind who takes the vow of silence.”
“Thirty days, Mr. Ruzak,” Whittaker repeated. He stepped into the car. I remained in the hall. The doors closed upon his triumphant smile.
Archie was sitting up in his crate, mouth open slightly; I could see the tip of his tongue. Ours wasn’t exactly a joyous reunion, but it never was. Archie stepped out, I stepped back, and we stared at each other across a space as vast as the universe. Archie was a beagle mix, with the classic beagle markings of white and brown and the thin tail that arched gracefully over his back. That tail never moved unless the door buzzer rang or he heard footsteps in the hall, and then it all but vanished in a frenzied blur as he rushed the door. Inevitably, the bell fell silent, the footfalls faded, and Archie would collapse against the door and lift those soulful eyes up to mine with an attitude of such disappointment and loss that it never failed to bring me to tears, and not entirely empathetic tears, either.
“This isn’t another way station like the pound,” I would tell him. “This is home.”
I don’t think he ever quite bought it, though. Sterchi Management certainly did not. Animals have a sixth sense about natural disasters; maybe that extended to personal ones, as well. A couple of years back, I watched a TV special about this dog who smelled the cancer growing inside his master’s lungs. I wondered if Archie had “heard” the bell tolling upon Whittaker’s or one of his lackeys’ trespass into his territory, had somehow seen the handwriting on the wall.
“It’s okay,” I told him as he sat staring at the front door, his back turned toward me. “If push comes to shove, I’ll move.”
He ignored me. I was used to it.
When you live alone, you rely on ritual. Walk the dog, check your messages, separate the mail (bills, junk, catalogs), change out of your work clothes, cook dinner, load the dishwasher, sprawl on the sofa and channel-surf for a couple of hours, surf the Net, watch a video of a drunk girl singing on YouTube, walk the dog again, check your messages again on the slim chance someone called while you were walking the dog, wash up for bed, lie in bed for an hour and chase sleep. The only variation that night was I didn’t have to sneak Archie down the stairs and out the back door, since Whittaker knew of his existence. My mother had a favorite saying: “There’s nothing done in the dark that doesn’t eventually come out in the light.” She used that one on me all the time, especially when I was a teenager. Her way of warning me against the evils of alcohol, drugs, and unprotected sex. Particularly the sex: I had a girlfriend my senior year, Tiffany, who dumped me after I flunked out of the Police Academy—for a guy named Bill Hill, a name I was doomed always to remember. As far as I knew, she still lived in Knoxville, but I never saw her after she dumped me and married Bill. In my fantasies, I’d run into her at the grocery store or gas station, and she’d say, “So what are you up to now, Teddy?” and I’d say, “Oh, I have my own detective agency now, with an office downtown,” or something like that, and somehow I’d be able to work in the fact that my secretary was a dead ringer for Lauren Bacall, from the long, shapely legs to the luxurious fall of blond hair, even possessing the same throaty quality when she talked. In my fantasy, Tiffany had four children, all under the age of six, had gained twenty-five pounds, and was living on food stamps because Bill Hill had a drinking problem or maybe was in prison or even had left her for a woman who was not twenty-five pounds overweight and did not have four children, all under the age of six. It was a difficult fantasy to resist, but I tried to; it bordered on cruelty toward a girl whom I’d honestly thought I loved.
My cell phone rang a little after ten, between the brushing of teeth and the slow march toward sleep. I didn’t recognized the number and debated whether to answer. I got a lot of wrong numbers, usually for a fellow named Jackson, whose number must have been one digit different from mine. I was irrationally jealous of Jackson: He got many more calls than I did.
“Mr. Ruzak,” the woman on the other end said, with an emphasis on the first word: “Mr. Ruzak.”
“That’s me,” I said. “Who’re you?”
“This is Katrina Bates.”
“Oh. Hey. I was gonna call you.”
“Is that what happened? You dialed the wrong number by mistake?”
“The odds favor that,” I said, deciding to fake it, sin
ce I had no idea what she was getting at. “I hardly ever dial one on purpose.”
“I didn’t hire you to confront him about infidelity; I hired you to confirm the infidelity.”
“He told you.”
“Mr. Ruzak, I don’t pretend to know your business. If I knew your business, I wouldn’t have hired you; I would have done it myself. But it seems to me the last thing you’d want to do is contact your target and let them know the jig is up.”
“That seems reasonable,” I said. “But, you know, detective work is a lot like plumbing. Sometimes you gotta attack the clog head-on.”
“But now he knows I know, he knows you know, and won’t that make catching him that much harder, if not impossible?”
“He may know I know, but he doesn’t know who I am or what I look like. Anyway, who I am or what I look like isn’t the point. The point is, these things are best solved by the parties directly involved.”
“So … what does that mean, Mr. Ruzak? I didn’t hire you to fix my marriage. If I wanted someone to fix my marriage, don’t you think I would have hired a marriage counselor?”
“My secretary keeps trying to get me to see someone,” I confessed. “She’s convinced I have issues.”
“What?”
“Abandonment issues. My dad was never around very much when I was growing up; then he died when I was pretty young, and then my mom died. After that. After I grew up. So now I have some problems with intimacy. The difficulty I have with that—with seeing someone, I mean—is I’ve always been a by-your-bootstraps sort of guy. You know, tying yourself to the mainmast and riding out the storm.”
There was a pause.
“Mr. Ruzak, are you drunk?”
“No.”
“So this is how you normally talk?”
“I know,” I said. “It’s always been a problem of mine, kind of exacerbated by years of working the graveyard shift. There’s a monologist flavor to it.”
“You don’t seem to understand why I called. I’m upset with you. I paid you a five-hundred-dollar retainer and you pick up the phone and tell my husband I know he’s having an affair!”
“What did he say?” I asked. “Did he confess?”
“Of course he didn’t confess!”
“Well, I thought it was worth a shot.”
“I don’t want a confession. I couldn’t care less whether he comes clean. And I don’t want to waste any more time or money trying to fix something that’s irretrievably broken.”
“Then I’m confused.”
“Obviously!”
“If you don’t love him, why do you care?”
“This isn’t about love, you idiot.” By this point, she had lost it. “Didn’t I say that when I hired you?”
“No. You said it isn’t about sex.” Good thing I had made a note about that.
“Well, it isn’t,” she sobbed. “It isn’t about either.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“Revenge.”
“Oh. Well, I’m not sure I want to be in the revenge business.”
“What? What does that mean? Are you dropping my case?”
“I’ll tell you why I called him, Mrs. Bates. I called him because honesty is better than deceit. That’s one of the core principles I subscribe to; otherwise, I’d be in a entirely different line of work, the kind you can get arrested for, though there’s a strong possibility I’m going to be arrested for my current line, which is what you might call irony. Call it hokey and naïve, but I see my job as showing the person to the door; it’s totally up to them whether they walk through it or not.”
“Door? What door? What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Ruzak?”
“The door that opens to the truth, the thing that sets you free, the passage from darkness into light. You know.”
“Your secretary’s right. You do need help.”
“You’re firing me,” I said, and not without a drop of desire.
“Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, watched too many TV shows about detectives.”
“Most people have. And not just about detectives.”
“Because this is not what I expected. This isn’t what I expected at all.”
“Did you tell him I was?”
“Was what?”
“A detective.”
“Of course not!”
“If you had, do you think he would have come clean?”
“I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make a point about my integrity. You think I should have told him who you were.”
“Like I said,” I said. “I’m not the point.”
“Well, that’s certainly not true now! You’ve made yourself the point, Mr. Ruzak; you picked up the phone and told him I know he’s having an affair!”
I finally got it. “He pulled a switcheroo.”
“Excuse me? ‘Switcheroo’?”
“He changes the issue from him to me. He denied the affair, taking that issue off the table, and made me the issue. ‘I know all her friends,’ he said to me, so he says to you, ‘Who is this guy calling me claiming to be one?’ He’s turned it from his secret to your secret. That’s pretty damn smart.”
“And you’re surprised?”
“Impressed.”
“Well, I’m not.” She didn’t say, but I suspected it wasn’t Tom she wasn’t impressed with. “He’s going to be very careful now. Much more careful than before, making your job all the more difficult. He might even break it off.”
“That would be a bad thing?”
She muttered something I couldn’t make out. It might have been “I did it” or the word idiot. Given the context, the latter made more sense.
“Mrs. Bates,” I said. “I’m getting a little confused.”
“Oh, really?”
“You hired me to uncover this affair you suspect him of having, but tell me it isn’t about sex and it isn’t about love. Why do you need proof? Why don’t you just divorce him?”
“I told you why.”
“When?”
“Just now!”
“Oh, right. Revenge. But what revenge? Don’t most spouses in your position exact revenge by … Well, I don’t know of a delicate way to put this. …”
“Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Don’t think I haven’t had rich fantasies of putting a bullet into his Ivy League brain.”
I was a little shocked by that. “I was thinking more along the lines of you dipping into the same well.”
“Cheating on him? I could never cheat on Tom. I love him. He’s the love of my life.”
I rubbed my temple. This was getting bad. Maybe my problem was one of acuity, or the lack thereof, and had nothing to do with fear of intimacy. Maybe I just didn’t get it. I wondered if that was why detective work had appealed to me from an early age. Maybe it wasn’t solving crimes I was after, but solving mysteries, as in the ineffable kind. Like women.
I said, nearing exhaustion, “I thought you said it wasn’t about love.”
“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t want to destroy him.”
“But I thought that whole deal was about forgiveness,” I said.
“What deal?”
“Love.”
She gave a bitter little laugh. “You obviously have never been in love.”
“Well, I’m not sure that’s true,” I said. “You really shouldn’t assume that, Mrs. Bates. But it is funny you brought it up, because I was thinking about this girl I was engaged to a few years back; just today I was thinking about her and kind of fantasizing how things might be with her now, and they weren’t what you might call pleasant. They were downright grim. So I do get your point.”
“What happened?” she asked. “Did she dump you?”
“For a guy named Bill Hill. I didn’t know him very well, but his prospects were better, at least at the time; he was making a pretty good living and I had just been kicked out of the Police Academy. I understood why she did it, but understanding the bitter pill rarely makes swallowin
g it easier. Also there was the fact that Bill’s living was sales. That was also my father’s living, when he was living, and that might have raised some Oedipal issues.”
“I just don’t want to hurt anymore,” she said. “I’ve been hurting for so long. I just want the hurt to go away.”
“And you think destroying your husband is going to do that?”
“I’ve tried practically everything else.”
Then Katrina Bates did a startling thing: She asked to meet me for a drink. I told her I was in my pajamas. She laughed, for some reason.
“It never dies, does it, Mr. Ruzak?”
“What?”
“Hope. Deep in my heart, I don’t really want to destroy him. Deep in my heart, I’m hoping when I confront him with the proof, he’ll come back to me. I suppose that’s pretty naïve.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 2
