The Highly Effective Detective

by Richard Yancey

  We stepped inside and she cried, “Dear God, what is that smell?”

  “The dry cleaner’s.”

  “We’re gonna have to do something about that.”

  I showed her the fan and said it wasn’t too bad with the fan on and the windows open.

  Felicia ate two doughnuts and I ate the rest.

  “You feelin’ okay?” she asked.

  “I feel pretty crummy.”

  “It’s this place. It’s a dump, Teddy.”

  I gave her the card of the furniture salesman and told her to go ahead and order a desk for herself and a chair and maybe a filing cabinet if she thought she needed one. Felicia was wearing a nice powder blue business-type suit and high heels. Her hair was down and reached just past her shoulders. It was the first time I ever saw her with her hair down and wearing heels, and I told her she looked nice.

  “You want to go to the movies with me sometime?” I asked.

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

  “You never asked me.”

  “Some detective,” I said. I went into the John and washed my hands. She was standing by my desk when I came out. She looked just like Lauren Bacall. I told her she looked just like Lauren Ba-call and she asked who the hell Lauren Bacall was.

  “Never mind.”

  The glaze from the doughnuts had given her red lips a luster, and for some reason I thought of a bowling alley, those lanes waxed and polished till they shone.

  “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  “Why do you want to know his name?” she asked.

  “Just curious.”

  “His name is Bob.”

  “Bob?”

  “Why, what’s wrong with Bob?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’ve been dating for three years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “He’s a fireman.”

  “That’s a very important job. I wanted to be a cop once.”

  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” Felicia asked.

  “I used to.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had just flunked out of the Police Academy. She told me she wanted somebody with a future.”

  Her name was Tiffany, like the lamp, but everybody called her “Tiffy.” We started dating my senior year. I made the football team that year, after four years of trying. I was big and hard to knock down, but I got confused in the huddle because studying the playbook gave me a headache, so I didn’t play much. But if we got ahead in the game, the coach put me in at left guard and I would hunker down and just let them hammer me. “You’ve got a soft head and a softer body, Ruzak,” he told me. “But we’re leading fifty-two to ten, so go hit some people.” Usually, the opposite happened. Tiffy played in the band, and one Friday night she noticed this guy standing out there like a big dumb post for two quarters, and something about this lummox standing in there play after play while he had the living crap beat out of him impressed her, so she asked the tuba player about me. The tuba player, who was actually bigger than I was, introduced us after the game and we dated the rest of my senior year. We were even talking about marriage once I graduated from the Academy, but of course I flunked out and she dumped me for a guy named Bill Hill, which is the kind of name you never forget, so I was stuck with always knowing the name of the guy my girl dumped me for.

  I picked up the phone.

  “What are you doing?” Felicia asked.

  “I’m using the phone.”

  “How long are you going to be using it?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I need it.”

  “What?”

  “The phone, Teddy.”

  “Why do you need the phone?”

  “I’m calling an interior decorator.”

  “Why are you calling an interior decorator?”

  “For the office, Teddy.”

  “But I just gave you a furniture guy’s card.”

  “This place doesn’t need a furniture guy, Ruzak. It’s gonna take a whole lot more than a couple secondhand chairs and tacky prints on the walls.”

  She disappeared around the corner. I wondered how much an interior decorator cost while I got the number for the Tennessee Private Investigation and Polygraph Commission.

  “You can’t be a PI unless you meet state requirements,” the lady at the commission told me after I was on hold for twenty minutes. She had the same sharp, impatient tone as most people who staff telephone lines.

  “What are the requirements?”

  “They’re on our Web site.”

  “I don’t have a computer. That isn’t one of the requirements, is it?”

  “Are you saying you don’t have access to the Web?”

  “I’m saying I don’t have a computer. That’s what I said.”

  “But that isn’t what I asked.”

  “But you can’t have one without the other. That’s like making a phone call without a phone.”

  “Do you want that address?”

  “I might want it, if I had a computer, but I don’t have a computer. Could you just tell me what the requirements are over the phone? I own a phone.”

  “Obviously you own a phone, sir.”

  “Well, what if I was calling from a pay phone?”

  “Are you calling from a pay phone?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t. I was posing a hypothetical. The bottom line is, I happen to own a phone but not a computer. Would it be possible—to save you some time and the state some money—to tell me what the requirements of becoming a PI are, right now, while we’re talking?”

  “Your local library should have Internet access. . ..”

  “What, so I have to apply online?”

  “Did I say you had to apply online? I said if you wanted to look up the requirements online, you could access the Web from your local library.”

  “Ma’am, in the time we’ve taken to exhaust the Internet-access option, you could have told me what the requirements are.”

  “That’s an assumption on your part, sir.”

  “That may be, but you assumed I was talking from a pay phone, like I didn’t have the wherewithal to own my own phone.”

  “Sir, you’re the one who brought up the pay phone.”

  “I really don’t want to quibble,” I said. “I feel like we’ve started off on the wrong foot, and I’d like to step back onto the path and reach my goal of knowing what the requirements of being a PI are.”

  “Hold on,” she said snippily, and music started to play in my ear. I was on hold for quite a while and began to wonder if she had cut me off or was taking a break, or if the list was so lengthy that it took this long just to assemble it.

  Then she came back on and said, “Okay. There’re eight.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. I waited with my mechanical pencil. “Now we’re cooking.”

  “First, you have to be at least twenty-one years of age.”

  “I’m thirty-three.” One down, seven to go.

  “Then you can check that one off, I guess. Are you a citizen of the United States or a resident alien?”

  “What’s a resident alien?”

  “I—I’m not sure. Do you think you might be an alien?”

  “No, I’m a citizen. I was born in New York, though. Are you a resident alien if you were born in another state?”

  “You can’t be a citizen and an alien, sir, resident or nonresident.”

  “How can a nonresident be an alien in the United States? I mean, if you’re not living here. . .”

  “Sir, I have six other people on hold. . ..”

  I told her I was sorry, but I reminded her we would be much further along if she hadn’t bogged us down with the Internet option. I gripped my pencil hard to try to keep my thoughts from pinballing.

  “Have you been declared mentally defective?”

&nbs
p; “Not for years. But you know kids can be pretty cruel.”

  “By a court of competent jurisdiction, sir.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”

  “Do you own your own company?”

  “Yeah. It’s my own company.”

  “Are you of good moral character?”

  That one brought me up short. I’d always thought of myself as having good moral character, but who was I to say? What did the state want as proof? What did that mean, “good moral character”? I hadn’t been to church since I was a teenager, so I’d be hard-pressed to find a preacher or other moral authority to vouch for me. It was one of those tricky questions where the answer flipped back and forth in your head. If I said yes, that I had good moral character, I might be lying, in which case, I didn’t. But if I said no, that I didn’t, that would be telling the truth when a lie would be better, and didn’t that prove I did?

  “Sure,” I said. “You bet.”

  “Do you suffer from habitual drunkenness or narcotics addiction or dependence?”

  “I have a beer every now and then.”

  Felicia appeared from around the corner and leaned against the jamb, crossing one ankle over the other and her arms over her chest.

  “Beer? Who are you talking to?” she asked.

  “Sir, you know that’s not what I’m asking.”

  “The state of Tennessee,” I said to Felicia.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing,” I said to the phone lady. “No, no drunkenness or narcotic, um, ness.”

  “You also must submit your fingerprints for processing. All PIs must have a clean criminal background.”

  That sounded funny to me, “a clean criminal background.” Did that mean I could have a criminal background, as long as it was clean?

  “Okay.”

  Felicia rolled her eyes and disappeared again.

  “And you have to pass the exam.”

  My heart gave a little roll. “There’s an exam?”

  “Tennessee also requires a minimum of six hours of continuing education per year, acceptable to the commission.”

  “What, like at a college or something? Do I need a college degree, by the way?”

  “No, you do not.”

  “That’s good, because I don’t have one.”

  “Really? Is there anything else I can help you with today, sir?”

  “Sure. How much does a license cost?”

  “There’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar application fee.”

  I whistled. Her voice warmed because she was enjoying this part.

  “And a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar licensing fee, renewable every two years.”

  I didn’t say anything, and she said, “Are you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like me to send you an application?”

  “Sure. Yeah. That would be great. These fees, are they tax-deductible?”

  “Sir, I’m not qualified to answer that question. Talk to your accountant.”

  “I don’t have an accountant.”

  “Maybe you should get one, sir. Seeing that you’re running a business.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Thanks.”

  I gave her my address so she could mail the application, then hung up. I was sweating hard and my fingers were shaking a little. Felicia came back into the room.

  “Can I use the phone now?”

  “Felicia, do you think I have good moral character?”

  “I hardly know you, Ruzak. You’re a good tipper.”

  She disappeared again. When Felicia was in the room, I felt bigger somehow. My mental weight expanded about twenty to twenty-five pounds. I wondered if I should call Parker Hudson and tell him it really wasn’t moral for me to work as a private investigator on his bird case when I didn’t even have a license, no matter that it didn’t bother him. If I had good moral character, I wouldn’t practice detecting without a license. But then I would give up the fifty bucks an hour, plus expenses, default on my lease, and fire Felicia. She would have to go back to waitressing, and she hated waitressing. I told myself not to worry so much about this PI exam. There must be study guides, and maybe it was even an open-book test. In general, people panic before they have all the facts.

  I yelled into the vestibule to ask Felicia if she knew any good accountants, but she was already on the phone to some interior designer, setting up an appointment to “appraise the space.” Maybe she would back off the interior designer thing if I hinted that only people with no taste hire interior designers. But then she might get sore at me. I’d have to balance the cost of her getting sore against the cost of hiring some fancy-pants interior designer. When I was younger, they were called interior decorators. Designer sounds more artsy, I guess, and somehow more technical, like an engineer, someone who designs rockets for NASA or something.

  Felicia came back into the room and said, “They’re coming this Thursday.”

  “To give an estimate, right?”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “I have to take an exam.”

  “You want me to help you study?”

  “You’d help me study?”

  “It’s purely selfish, Teddy. You don’t get that license and I go back to being a waitress.”

  “Why were you a waitress, Felicia?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, somebody as smart and pretty as you—”

  She sat down across from me and said, “Maybe we should get something straight right from the beginning, Ruzak. My personal life is off-limits. Our relationship is going to be strictly professional. I won’t stick my nose in your business and you won’t stick your nose in mine.”

  “Don’t get sore.”

  “I’m not. Look, I’ve got lots of single friends who’d love to—”

  “Oh, I’m not looking for a girlfriend.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “How come?”

  I shrugged and looked away.

  “Are you still carrying a torch for her?” she asked, meaning Tiffy.

  “She’s married, Felicia. A guy named Bill Hill. Anyway, I thought you just said we weren’t going to stick our noses in each other’s business.”

  “Now you’re sore,” she said. “Don’t get a crush on me, Ruzak.”

  I promised I wouldn’t, though it probably wasn’t worth the breath it took to say it. It goes back to moral character: You make a promise like that and there’s no way you can know at the time if you can keep it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, I WAS SITTING IN MY OFFICE, which didn’t even look like my office anymore. There were potted plants, some huge thing in the front that Felicia called a receptionist desk, a computer on that desk (with high-speed Internet access), colored prints on the walls, a throw rug, new towels and a fancy toilet paper holder in the John. My old secondhand desk was gone, replaced with a huge mahogany number and a leather executive chair. Two matching visitor’s chairs were in front of the desk. There was a big globe of the world on a stand in one corner.

  Felicia brought in the designer, and I guess they had a high old time. Felicia said I had to project a certain image or people wouldn’t trust me to be their detective. “You have to look successful to be successful,” she said. She was wearing a new designer outfit, though she said she’d gotten it on discount. She’d charged everything to the business account, even her outfit and the three others she had bought, also on discount. “It’s like an advance. I’ll pay you back, Teddy.” The total for everything, including the shiny gold pens and stationery with the right name on it, was $26,546.74. This could have bought a nice car, even a convertible. I already had a car, but I’d always wanted a convertible.

  Felicia had also bought me a tape recorder to make dictation on. All I had to do was tape my letters and reports and she would type them for me on the computer, to make everything very professional, she said. I was fooling with the taping machine when Felicia bu
zzed me on the new intercom system to tell me Parker Hudson was there to see me. She was sitting about ten feet away, so I heard her voice over the intercom and from across the room, as if there was an echo.

  He was wearing a white sweater over a polo shirt, Docker slacks, and Birkinstock sandals. Except for the sandals, again he was dressed too warmly for the weather, which was eighty-three and sunny. Maybe he had poor circulation, like my mother, who had been dead now over two months, and still I hadn’t been to her grave. That meant nobody had been to her grave, since I was the only somebody she had left. I clicked on my new tape recorder and said, “Flowers for her grave.”

  “Whose grave?” Parker Hudson asked. He sat down in one of the fat leather visiting chairs and looked appreciatively around the room.

  “You’ve redecorated,” he said.

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother redecorated?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I did.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “No, about the redecorating.”

  “Flowers would add a little color.”

  “No, the flowers are for her grave. I was just making a little reminder for myself, but I never remember to check the tape for reminders, so I’m wasting double the energy.”

  He nodded. He seemed confused. “I hope this isn’t an inopportune time.”

  “No, pretty much any time is opportune.” I pulled my pad in front of me and picked up my mechanical pencil, clicking out some fresh lead.

  “I was in the neighborhood, visiting an old colleague at the bank, so I thought I’d drop by and check on the status of my case.”

  He stared at me and waited for me to say something.

  “Is there a status on my case?”

  “I’m working on some theories.”

  “Theories?”

  “Scenarios. Hypotheticals. Possibilities.”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Ruzak? It’s been three weeks since you took my case and I haven’t heard a word from you. Do you have any leads?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Have you been to the lake?”

  “I’ve been meaning to get out there. . ..”

  “Canvassed the neighborhoods for any potential witnesses?”

  “That’s on my list.”