“He wants to sell us his silence; I say we just take it.”
Before anybody could move, the Luger was out of his shoulder holster and the muzzle jammed into the middle of my forehead.
“Don’t be an idiot, Falks,” Lynch said. “Put that away.”
“This is a no-go,” I said. “No-go.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Falks shouted in my face. Sweat was pouring from his and his hand was shaking. “Why do you keep fucking saying ‘no-go, no-go’ like that?”
The door shook violently on its hinges and an instant later splintered down the middle with an attendant thunderclap. Men in black body armor flooded into the room as I dived off the bed, fumbling for my .45 as I went down. The men were shouting, “Police! Get down. Get on the ground. Drop your weapon and get down now.” I rolled onto my back, and there was Meredith Black, smiling, those long incisors bright light house beams on a dark night at sea.
“I said ‘no-go,’ ” I gasped.
“You were overruled,” she said. “Mr. Ruzak.” And she held out her hand.
SCENE TEN
The Office
Two Weeks Later
I mounted the stairs slowly, bearing the precious cargo: two large coffees balanced atop the box of Krispy Kremes. I stopped on the top step; a man stood on the landing, blocking my way. He was stenciling letters on the frosted glass of the door. WHITE KNIGHT ASS. He eyed the box.
“Let you in for one of those,” he said.
“I gotta set the coffees down first,” I said.
“How do I know you’ll come back?”
I nodded toward the gold letters, still glimmering wet. “That’s me.”
He smiled. “Which part?”
“First part. Duty-bound.”
Felicia was at her desk, talking to someone on the phone, and I did not envy the person on the other end. Felicia was not happy with their ser vice.
“It’s knight, k-n-i-g-h-t, as in King Arthur, the Round Table, Sir Galahad. Ever hear of them? Not n-i-g-h-t …”
I moved the coffees from the box to her desktop and went back to the stencil guy, who grabbed a doughnut from the box.
“Where’s my coffee?” he joked.
Behind me, Felicia was saying, “Does that make sense to you, huh? N-i-g-h-t? ‘White Night’? What kind of night is white? Alaska! What about Alaska? Are we in Alaska? Or are we in Knoxville freakin’ Tennessee? … Oh, so now it’s my fault I have three reams of stationery with the wrong name on it? Are you the boss? Where’s the owner? I want to talk to the owner. …”
I grabbed one of the cups and a couple of doughnuts and went into my office, easing the door closed with my heel. I sat behind the desk, took that first exquisite bite, and chased it down with two sips of coffee.
The man in the visitor’s chair said, “Mr. Ruzak, you’ve kept me waiting for over thirty minutes.”
“Sorry,” I said to Walter Hinton. “Wanna doughnut?”
“No, I do not want a doughnut.”
“I didn’t think so. You strike me as a Dunkin’ man.”
“This is all just a game to you, isn’t it? You think it’s funny.”
“Maybe a little, in a creepy kind of pathetic way, like clowns are.”
“Are you calling me a clown?”
“Be a little nuts if I did.”
“Who is more clownlike, Mr. Ruzak? The licensing agent or the man who keeps changing his company’s name, thinking that will fool the licensing agent? You can tell me the color of the sky is purple. That will not make it purple.”
“Sometimes it is. At sunset.”
“White knight,” he sneered. “Let me ask you something, Mr. Ruzak. Who is going to ride to your rescue when I have you arrested for perjury and contempt of court? Just because you get your face on television and your name in the paper …”
“It’s not my business,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“White Knight Associates. It’s not my business.”
As if we’d planned it, Felicia came into the room with a stack of papers and laid them on my blotter.
“Here’s the incorporation papers,” she said. “Sticky notes where you sign.”
“Whose business is it?” Walter asked.
“Hers. She’s the president; I’m the secretary slash treasurer.”
She flashed a smile at him and sashayed from the room, perfume swirling in her wake.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can prop up a figurehead, but it won’t change the basic fact that you are practicing detection without a license.”
Cue Felicia. She came back carrying a hammer and something in a frame.
“Excuse me,” she said, and commenced banging a nail into the wall next to my landscape of Cades Cove. She hung the frame, then stepped back.
“Does that look straight?” she asked.
“What is that?” Hinton demanded, but you could tell from his expression that he already knew.
“My license to practice private detection in the state of Tennessee,” she said. She waved at me. I stood up and stepped to one side, and she slipped into my chair, folded her hands on top of the papers, and crinkled her nose at Walter Hinton.
“How may I help you?”
Hinton didn’t answer. He stood up, got halfway to the door, came back, grabbed his briefcase, and then, back at the door, turned to us, opened his mouth like he was going to say something, closed it again, and then stomped out of the room.
Felicia said, “Exit Hinton huffily.”
“I feel kind of bad for him,” I said.
“For the love of God why?”
“All those hours wasted.”
“It’s his job, Ruzak.”
“Can I have my chair back?”
“It’s my chair now. If you’re nice, I’ll let you borrow it.”
The phone rang. Neither of us moved to answer it. “It’s the phone,” I said.
She nodded. “It’s ringing.”
“Are you going to …”
“I’m the president. Presidents don’t answer the phone.”
“I can’t shake the feeling there’s been this kind of coup.”
“More like a power-sharing arrangement. Nobody’s stopping you from taking the test again, Ruzak. Pass it and we’ll reorganize.”
“Meanwhile answer the damn phone?”
She laughed.
I answered the damn phone.
She didn’t move from my chair—was it still my chair?—during the call. After the call, she vacated it and followed me into her office—was it still her office?—where the stencil man was putting the final touches on my ASS.
“Tell me again why you feel the need to talk to her,” she said. “Falks cut a deal with Beecham.”
I nodded. “Not Lynch, though.”
“Lynch is a seventy-year-old man with connections. Connections that can fund his bond and keep the appeals going till he’s six feet under. Lynch isn’t going to cut a deal. He won’t serve a single minute in prison for this.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t. He was played, just like everybody else.”
“Ruzak, you don’t walk a mile in somebody’s shoes; you run a marathon.”
“I don’t like niggling questions.”
“I didn’t ask one.”
“I mean Katrina’s deal with Dres.”
“And that matters because …”
“That’s why I’m going to talk to her.”
“And she would tell you now because …”
“She has a lot to lose.”
“She’ll just lie.”
“For him?”
“For herself, Ruzak. She must be scared out of her mind.”
“Why? Dres is locked up for the next fifteen years.”
“Right. So what would be her reason to come clean with you?”
I thought about it.
“I guess it comes down to your basic outlook on humanity. That even Hitler might have been, if the circumstances had been different
, reachable.”
“Jesus,” said the stencil man. “You are a white knight, aren’t you?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “Because deep down I have this longing or hope that she’s still savable.”
“Oh, Ruzak,” Felicia said. I sensed a meta phorical throwing up of her hands. She closed one eye, squinted through her thumb and index finger, lining up my head in the space between them, and then pinched her fingers tightly shut. “Squish. Squish.”
SCENE ELEVEN
The Hamilton
A Few Minutes Later
It was one of the newer condo buildings on Gay Street, across the street from the Tennessee Theatre, where two-bedroom lofts were going for a couple hundred thousand a pop. Hers took up half the ninth floor. The ride up seemed to take a long time, and I used that time to emit some serious flop sweat and worry myself with two conflicting hopes, one that I was right, the other that I was wrong. I usually worried, like most people, about being the latter. You don’t normally hope you’re wrong while at the same time being certain you’re right. It would be like Jerry Falwell acknowledging the possibility of Vishnu in the cosmology.
“Hey,” I said when she answered the door. “Thanks for seeing me.”
The place was quintessentially lofty: sparkling new hardwood floors, windows every four feet or so with nice views of the city, open and echoey, with columns instead of walls for support. The furnishings were a little too modern for my taste, all sharp angles and shining chrome and bright Art Deco colors.
“I’m surprised,” the woman who had called herself Regina Giddens said. “I figured the cops, not you.”
“Are you asking if they know I’m here?”
“No.”
“Well, they don’t. Nobody knows. Well, my secretary and a guy we hired to put the new name on the door, but other than that, nobody.”
“Not Dres?” she asked.
“No.”
She sighed. I followed her into the main sitting area. The big-screen television in the corner was roughly the same square footage as my bedroom. She asked if I wanted a drink.
“Coffee would be nice. Black.” I was trying to feel masculine.
I sat on the uncomfortable sofa with its one-inch cushions, sipping my barely palatable coffee—okay, maybe masculinity is not one of those things you can strain at—and she sat in the chair to my left, a contraption of canvas and metal that looked like a set piece from Star Trek. Not the classic Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said again.
“You’re not wearing a wire, are you?”
“You could frisk me.”
“I’d rather not.”
“I’m not wired. Like I said, I’m here for me mostly, to dislodge some things that have been stuck in my craw.”
“And I’m like the toothpick?”
“I’m guilty of the same thing sometimes,” I said. “Stretching the meta phor until it snaps.”
She nodded, like we were on the same wavelength. It hardly seemed possible, but she nodded, and pressed her knees together. Her knees were large, like the rest of her, including her best asset: Her eyes were big and doelike, vulnerable, just a tinge of wistfulness.
“There’re some things I know and some things I don’t know,” I said. “That’s pretty common, a universal malady, I guess. There’re some things you don’t know that I know and there are some things you know that I don’t. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. So I can tell you what I know and you can tell me what you know and then we’ll both know what he knows.”
“Everything that who knows?”
“Dresden Falks.”
The big doe eyes cut away from my face.
“I don’t know what he knows.”
“But you know what you know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Maybe we can start with what I know.”
“Okay.” She said it so softly, I could hardly hear her.
“You and Dresden Falks were lovers.”
She drew a deep breath before answering.
“You don’t know that.”
“They do down at Velman.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t like what?”
“We dated a couple times, that’s all.”
“Not what they say at Velman. The boss told me it ventured into the two-hour-lunch territory. Dres told me the street ran one way, a stalking situation, and he got you fired. But you weren’t fired, Rachel. You quit. You quit two weeks before Katrina Bates went missing.”
“Okay … so?”
“So that’s the first thing I know. The second thing I know is that after you quit, you moved out of your apartment and into this six-figure condo. A nice step up for an unemployed former receptionist.”
“My personal finances are none of anybody’s business, Mr. Ruzak.”
She was putting up a tough front, but it really wasn’t in this girl. The eyes gave her away; the expression in them didn’t jibe with the severity of her tone.
“True. I guess you could have come into some money. A rich relative died or you won the lottery. It’s the timing that’s troublesome, Rachel. People around the office catch you and Dres huddling behind closed doors; you abruptly quit; you move into these posh digs. And then Katrina Bates vanishes off the face of the earth.”
“She didn’t vanish. She flew to Vancouver.”
“No, Regina Giddens flew to Vancouver.”
“Well, Regina Giddens was really Katrina Bates.”
“No,” I said as gently as I could, and that took something. I wasn’t feeling too gentle. I was feeling pretty damned indignant. “You were Regina Giddens.”
She stood up. Dres had been unfair about her: She wasn’t ugly. As with a lot of big girls, that old saying about being pretty in the face applied. Now that face was contorted with anger and maybe a little bit of fear.
“Get out of here,” she said.
“I will not.”
“I’ll call the cops.”
“Hear me out. And after we’re done, we’ll go see them together.”
“We are done.”
“You haven’t heard everything I know.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re guessing.”
“I know Regina Giddens boarded a flight to Vancouver from Savannah. I know that after that she disappeared without a trace. I know the cops still can’t find her and I know Dresden Falks is saying he doesn’t know where she is, and how could he not know where she is? I know Regina Giddens didn’t get on another plane and fly away and I know she didn’t rent a car and drive away. You did. From the Avis at the airport. That was the mistake, Rachel. You flew up as Regina, but you came back as Rachel.”
“Why would I do something like that?” she asked, eyes closed, as if steeling herself for my answer.
“You couldn’t very well rent the car under the name of the woman who supposedly fled to Canada. For it to work for every-body—from Lynch to the cops—Regina Giddens had to fly there and stay there.”
“This is … I don’t know what … what you are talking about, Mr. Ruzak.” Back to the wounded, confused, love-struck girl act, the words slamming into one another in a breathless rush. “She faked her death to frame her husband. You have that on tape. Dres confessed. I don’t understand why you’re here accusing me of these things. I didn’t rent a car in Vancouver. Maybe she rented one using my name. Did you think of that? That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that make sense, Mr. Ruzak? She switched identities again once she got there—”
“That’s something I actually did think of,” I said. “Once I got your name from the rental company. But it was a one-way rental, Rachel, Vancouver to Knoxville.”
“So maybe she’s back here in Knoxville.”
I nodded. “Well, part of her is.”
“Part—part of her?”
“They found her, Rachel. Most of her anyway. Two little boys hunting crabs on Tybee Island.
This morning, they confirmed it through her dental records. Katrina Bates is dead.”
She fell back into the Star Trek chair. She didn’t have a choice; her knees gave out on her.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “We’ll go down to the station together.”
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“No?”
“They dropped me off at the airport.”
“Katrina and Dres.”
She nodded. I pulled out my handkerchief and handed it to her. She didn’t wipe her eyes; she wadded the handkerchief, worried it in her lap.
“They were going down to the island to stage the stuff in the car first, put the sunglasses on the boat.”
“And then Katrina takes a later flight? But you were the one using the name Regina Giddens.”
“She had another one, a different one. Name. She had a different name. I saw it.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You said you saw it.”
“I did see it.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t remember! Dres showed it to me, passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, everything. One set for me with Regina Giddens, another one for her.”
“How did he sell it to Katrina?”
“He said I was the decoy.”
“And she bought that?”
She shrugged. That did it. I shot up from the sofa. She shrank back in the chair.
“I want the truth,” I said.
“I’m telling you the truth!”
“Katrina Bates was a lot of things,” I said. “But one thing she wasn’t was stupid. Why would she need a decoy? A decoy for what? Dres was her accomplice; why would she need somebody else to pull this off? She didn’t; she wouldn’t. But Dres did, didn’t he? He needed somebody named Regina Giddens to sell it to the mark—”
“ ‘Mark’?”
“The victim, the patsy, the fool, the mark of the con, Alistair Lynch. The cops had to believe Katrina was dead and Lynch had to believe she was alive. That was the only path, the only way to the money. And it’s also the only explanation, Rachel, so stop playing around with me. I’ve been played like a Lynch a lot lately and I’ve taken a vow never to be played for one again. There weren’t two phony names; there was just one. You know it. Katrina came up with the name, but Dres took it and you used it, like you knew before I even said it, just like you’ve always known it: Katrina Bates is dead. You were there. You saw it.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 19
