“Unless she already has.”
“That’s her seed. Maybe he has, too.”
“Come again?”
“I’m out of money. I guess you know the state’s shut me down again. They took my files and warned off my clients and confiscated the entire contents of my office, down to the staples and my Starbucks coffee. I went looking for a job, but I brought the wrong dice to the table. I need bigger dice.”
She gave a little laugh. “Ruzak, sometimes I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
SCENE SEVEN
Hilton Hotel Parking Lot
Three Days Later
Felicia pulled into a spot with empty spaces on either side and cut the engine. I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. I unbuckled my safety belt, loosened my tie, pulled on my collar, checked my watch again, asked Felicia to roll down the windows—it was a muggy, breezeless night—pulled down the visor, examined my teeth in the mirror, and looked at my watch.
“You’re sweating,” she said.
“Where’s my gun?”
“I have no idea where your gun is.”
“Here it is; I’m sitting on it.”
“Basic firearm safety, Ruzak: Don’t sit on your gun.”
“I need to invest in a shoulder holster.”
“Why?”
I pulled the flask from my jacket pocket and, grimacing, forced myself to swallow. Three quick ones. Felicia looked away. I looked at my watch.
“There’s got to be an easier way to retire,” she said.
“Both birds stone-cold dead this way,” I said. “And if you’re gonna go through all the trouble of saving somebody, you might as well make some money at it. …”
“Teddy Ruzak: savior for hire.”
I ignored her. “How’s it sound?”
She was staring straight ahead at the blank concrete wall, both hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Sounds good.”
I looked at my watch.
“Stop looking at your watch.”
I sipped from the flask.
“Go easy on that,” she said.
“My last shot,” I said, not intending the pun. “Last one.”
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“And you smell bad.”
“Fetid,” I said. “Bottom of the well.”
“Barrel. Barrel is the expression. What about the cops?”
“That’s gonna be tough. They like what they have.”
“You don’t.”
“I don’t have anything. That’s the point.”
“No. You don’t like what they have.”
“I don’t have to like it.”
“As long as you take advantage of it.”
“Ever since I hung my shingle,” I said, “you’ve been making remarks, subtle and not so subtle, about how I need to toughen up, how I don’t fit the hard-case, seedy PI ideal. This puts me there. See? I’m disheveled, I’m drunk, and to night I walk through the final, dark doorway. To night, I’m thoroughly corrupt.”
“You may have the seedy shtick, but you’re still missing the license.”
“We could always take the act to another town. Another state even. How about California? It’s a big state; we could go all Chandler with it. It would take awhile for anyone to figure the score.”
“Did you just say ‘figure the score’?” She was smiling.
“You know, I’ve never told you this, but ever since I first saw you at the diner, I’ve loved the way your nose crinkles when you smile.”
“You’ve had too much. Give up the flask, Ruzak.”
“It’s my flask and you can’t have it.”
“You never talk this way.”
“You’ve never seen me drunk.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I’ll shoot you,” I said. “Try to take my flask and I will pull my gun out of my pants and shoot you.”
Smile … and crinkle. Maybe I should kiss her. Who knew what might happen up in that hotel room? I should kiss her. That’s what any self-respecting hard-case gumshoe would do: give his gal Friday a passionate kiss before striding Gary Cooper– like toward his High Noon.
“Seriously,” she said. “No more. You don’t want to walk in there totally witless.”
“I’m not worried about walking in. It’s the walking out I’m worried about.”
I looked at my watch: 9:48.
“I have to go,” I said. But didn’t.
“I guess it’s totally out of the question, my going with you.”
I looked over at her. She was still staring at the wall, hands on the wheel.
“Wouldn’t look right,” I said. “Hard to explain. They’ll understand me. Won’t understand you.”
“Who understands you?” she asked.
“They do. That’s why this will work.”
“You hope.”
“I have to go.”
“Okay. Tuck in your shirt.”
“No.”
“Don’t get shot.”
“Yes.”
I got out of the car. “Roll up the windows.”
“It’s hot,” she said.
“He might park in here. I don’t want him to see you.”
“Okay, but I’m leaving them down a crack.”
I leaned in the open door. She finally moved her eyes from the wall to my face.
“What?” she whispered.
“That nose thing. The truth is, I just noticed it, just to night.”
I closed the door and repositioned the gun; the muzzle was poking into my butt bone. I walked away without looking back, trudging up the incline of the covered walkway to the front doors. The contents of the flask sloshed in my jacket pocket. I looked at my watch.
The elevator walls were mirrored, even the doors; I couldn’t help but look at myself, unless I wanted to ride with my eyes closed, which would make the vertigo worse. She had been right: I looked terrible. I looked about as bad as Tom Bates looked the night he showed up on my doorstep and picked up where he’d left off, that insidious plot to steal my dog’s affections from me.
In the hall on the nineteenth floor, I took one last look at my watch before knocking on the door. A couple minutes early, but heck, I was anxious. A woman called from the other side, “Who is it?”
“Me,” I said. “Ruzak.”
She opened the door.
SCENE EIGHT
Room 1921
A Few Seconds Later
She was wearing a red silky kimonolike wrap over a blue one-piece bathing suit, blond hair pulled into a tight bun, and no makeup. He was looking fabulously fit in a yellow short-sleeve polo shirt and khakis. If either were taken aback by my appearance, neither showed it.
“So good to see you again,” Anna Lynch said.
“Welcome to Knoxville,” I said. “How was your flight?”
“Absolutely uneventful, but just in case, I heeded your advice and didn’t order coffee.”
“Well, I hear it’s always smoother in first class.”
“Mr. Ruzak,” Alistair Lynch said. We shook hands. He was wearing a pair of reading glasses and holding a copy of the Sentinel. BATES TRIAL BEGINS TOMORROW blared the front-page headline.
I wet my lips. “Hey. Thanks for seeing me.”
“You said it was urgent.”
“You bet.”
I cast a sideways glance at Anna, who was standing just outside my personal space with as prim an expression as you can muster in a low-cut bathing suit.
“We need to talk,” I said to Alistair.
“Let’s go down to the bar,” he said.
“No,” Anna and I said at the same time. Then she said, “I’m going for a swim.”
“You said you changed your mind about a swim,” he said.
“I changed it again,” she said.
She left. Lynch sat at the small table situated three feet from the minibar. I sat on the foot of the king-size bed. He removed his reading glasses and laid them on top
of the newspaper. He folded his hands in his lap and calmly watched me rub my hands nervous ly up and down my thighs.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said again.
“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Ruzak? You don’t look well.”
“I could use something to drink.”
He gave a patrician wave toward the minibar.
“Help yourself.”
I did—to the little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I poured it into a tumbler and knocked it back in a single swallow. My throat burned and my eyes watered.
“That’s better,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Lynch. I really appreciate it.” It came out appree-chate.
“You said you had something important to tell me. About my daughter.”
“Right, and I wouldn’t bother you about any of this, because, A, we’re both witnesses against Tom and we shouldn’t be talking and, B, it’s not so much about your daughter as it is about me and my current situation.”
“Your current situation.”
“Current situation, which is not good. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Lynch. It’s not good at all. Not good is too mild. Sucks is better. I kind of left you with a false impression last time we talked, being the fact that I’m a PI, which isn’t a fact at all, but the opposite of a fact, by which I mean a lie. I’m not a PI, I don’t have clients, I don’t have an office—I don’t have even have staples—and, more to the point, I don’t have a license. I never had a license. I didn’t have a license when I met you, I didn’t have a license when your daughter hired, then fired me, and I don’t have a license now. I don’t have much of anything now. Being a phony PI was my sole source of income.”
“I see.”
“And this is my bad timing: At the same time I lose my business, the economy goes sour, leaving not just me but this very nice girl who happened to take a chance on me and my cockamamie idea to be a detective up the creek without a paddle.”
“Mr. Ruzak, are you asking me for a loan?”
“God no. I’m not that creditworthy. Not that I’m a deadbeat. Plus, you don’t know me. We’re practically strangers. If I was going to borrow money from somebody, it wouldn’t be from somebody who couldn’t be sure I could pay it back.”
“I must confess, then, that I’m somewhat confused, Mr. Ruzak. How are your problems related to my daughter’s death?”
“I didn’t say they were. There’s no connection at all. The state’s been after me since the get-go about this license, or lack thereof, this crazy little Harry Truman look-alike who chases after me like a bull terrier nipping at my heels, with court orders and search warrants and whatnot, like I’m a mob kingpin or something, not just some shmuck trying his best to eke out a meager buck for helping people with their problems. Because that’s all it boils down to, Mr. Lynch. People, say, like you, enter into a contractual agreement with people, for example, like me, to perform a ser vice beneficial to both. I help people out of their difficulties. I’m a helper. I’m Theodore Ruzak, helper for hire. That’s how I saw myself anyway. Not somebody acting out a personal agenda or trying to take advantage of people. It wasn’t like I was taking people’s money and pocketing it without trying my utmost to help them solve their problems. I’m no con man or thief or vigilante, which I guess is Walter Hinton’s take on me, but let me tell you, this guy is off his nut; he’d slap a fine on Batman and throw Robin in juvie hall. My point is, in my short tenure as a detective I’ve done more good than harm, helped more than hurt, added more light than darkness.”
“You’re one of the good guys.”
“That’s my perception, but the personal ones can be the most deceiving. I get that. I understand that. I try to be a straight shooter. I never cared for people who played games or got through life manipulating and using others. Never wanted to be that kind of person. Lately, though, I’ve been pushed further and further in that direction and really through no fault of my own. Take my dog.”
“Take your dog?”
“I didn’t mean literally take my dog. I mean I adopted this dog from the pound, thinking I needed a little companionship, but mostly it was like the PI work, you know, a mutually beneficial trade, because they would have destroyed this animal if I hadn’t adopted him. It was down to the wire and I was his Hail Mary pass. So I take him in, but there’s a prohibition against pets in my lease, and for the past couple of months the super has been all over my ass to evict him or me, or both of us, going so far as to break into my apartment while I was out and go through my things and, to be honest, deliberately trying to come between me and my dog. Steal his affections.”
“Mr. Ruzak, are you drunk?”
“I am drunk. Yes, I am.”
“I thought so.”
“But I’m not rambling. This is important. I’m getting to it, but you need to understand the background, the context of my thinking. I have a point. I don’t know if you watch much television, but I’m guilty of it, and not too long ago there was this news special about people who adopt monkeys not so much as pets, because there isn’t much of a story there, but as surrogate children. Diaper them, take them to playgrounds, roll them around in baby strollers, plop ’em in the high chair for dinner. Refer to themselves as ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy.’ And inevitably it doesn’t work out, because basically you can take the monkey out of the jungle, but you can never take the jungle out of the monkey. These monkeys are leopards whose spots will never change.”
“The monkeys are leopards?”
“They’ll turn on you every time.”
“Good advice. Thank you. I shall steer clear of monkeys.”
“Here’s the point. The show’s point. My point. It’s all about connection. You know, when your daughter hired me, she said it wasn’t about sex. ‘This is not about sex’ were practically her first words to me. Now on the surface, it was all about sex, about Tom fooling around on her since day one of their marriage, about a little twelve-year-old girl walking in on her beloved father with his wick dipped in the violin tutor. Sorry. Now it’s one of your primal urges, right up there with eating, but there’s another drive we’re all prisoners to, another universal longing begging to be filled.”
“Connection,” he said.
“Right! The need to feel connected to someone, even if that someone is a fucking monkey—excuse me. We’re so desperate for it, we’ll turn to monkeys or, in my case, a dog who barely tolerates me. I think that’s what Katrina was getting at. It wasn’t—isn’t—about sex. It never was. And Tom … I see you’ve got the paper there and I guess you know they revoked his bail.”
He nodded slowly. I went on: “You know why he’s on suicide watch? I do. The man who had everything—money, prominence, looks, women—in his heart had nothing because he didn’t have a child. And he wasn’t about to adopt a monkey and call himself ‘Daddy.’ Connection. Then at the very moment that connection he longed for was within his grasp, it was yanked away from him.”
“You understand if I can’t share your pity for Tom Bates, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Well, I could pretend and say I hate the bastard, but I don’t hate him, Mr. Lynch. Any more than I hate Katrina.”
“Why would you hate Katrina?”
“Well, you gotta admit, it is a little beyond the pale.”
“Yes. My daughter is the victim.”
“That’s the tragedy. They both are. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making excuses for him. He took certain vows when he got married and he broke those vows, but it just seems to me the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”
“You don’t believe murder justifies the ultimate punishment?”
“Oh, that’s a whole other debate, Mr. Lynch. The Catholic side of me says you don’t step into the shoes of God, and the Baptist side says hang ’em high. I understand you’re filing a wrongful-death suit against him.”
“Pending the outcome of this trial, yes.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here.”
“You want me to share a portion of the proceeds with you?�
��
“How you finance it is completely up to you, Mr. Lynch. But hearing about it was sort of the final tip-off for me. It kind of set off this bell in my head, because I might not have the license, but I kind of flatter myself that I have the instincts. I guess the first little bell was the pictures.”
“The pictures?”
“In the box you held the key to. Pictures of Tom and his girlfriend doing—being unfaithful, on Tom’s end. Those pictures were taken and that key mailed to you before Katrina hired me. In other words, she hired me to prove something she already knew. Why would she want proof for—of—something she already had incontrovertible evidence for—of?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Mr. Ruzak. And Katrina, of course, isn’t around to provide one.”
“You could extrapolate, like the prosecution: You know, Katrina disappears without a trace; we find her car on an island and her sunglasses on Tom’s boat; there’s blood all over the kitchen and car and boat, and trouble in the marriage. And of course the case file of a certain unlicensed PI hired by the victim to dig up some dirt on the accused, a case file the accused paid twenty thousand dollars to have. That’s it in a nutshell, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots. You don’t need a body to prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt. A body would be nice, and there’ve been cases where later they do wash up, but that won’t happen in this case. You know it and I know it and one other witness for the prosecution knows it. The ironic thing is, the one person who doesn’t know it is the person who’s on trial for his life.”
“I certainly do not know that. How do you?”
“I didn’t, till yesterday. I don’t know where your daughter is, Mr. Lynch. I’m not saying I do. But I do know where she isn’t, or, more precisely, what she isn’t, and that’s dead.”
He pursed his lips, stared hard at me. Then he stood up and said, “I think you had better leave.”
“You haven’t heard my proposition.”
“I have no interest in hearing your proposition.”
“I know it isn’t all about money. I know it’s mostly connection. Or the lack thereof. Your only child. The violin tutor. Her long-suffering mother. Not the tutor’s, the child’s. Guilt. Making amends. Maybe you bought in, thinking it wouldn’t go this far, that there’d be no way they’d go for the death penalty in a circumstantial case. You might have gone in assuming the worst he could get was life. Or that the odds were, if it went to trial at all, he’d walk or there’d be a hung jury. Or maybe she played you for the fool, like she played me. And then, well, then there is the money, quite a lot of it if you win the case, and you need the money, Mr. Lynch.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 17
