The store was ten degrees cooler than outside, and since it was only in the seventies outside, it was damn cold in that store. A salesman dressed like a banker swooped down on us immediately, like an ER triager who knew a critical case when he saw one. For the next hour and a half, I stripped, donned, paraded, and pirouetted for Felicia and the salesman, a guy named Simon, who handed me his card when it was all over, because now he was my man at American Clothiers, my wardrobe guy. I bought—or my company bought, since everything was paid off the business account—three suits, four sport coats, five pairs of slacks, six ties, seven pairs of socks, and two pairs of shoes. The total bill was $4,576.98. Everybody seemed very pleased with the outcome, with the exception of one key person. Simon called into the back room and a little Lithuanian guy emerged with a tape measure around his neck. I was just assuming he was Lithuanian because he was short, swarthy, and spoke with that harsh accent of Eastern Europeans, and Lithuania was the first country that popped into my head. Simon asked the Lithuanian when my clothes would be ready.
“Two weeks! Two weeks!” he shouted back unnecessarily, and disappeared.
When we were back in the car, I sat for a minute staring at the storefront, the smell of leather and wool still lingering in my nose. “People have a comfort zone,” I told Felicia. “You know, a boundary that if they cross over it, they start to panic.”
“What, are you panicking?”
“Next you’re gonna tell me I need a haircut and manicure and a full body waxing.”
“Well, you do need a haircut.”
“When I was on the football team in high school, the night before the biggest game of the year, all the guys got together and agreed to shave their heads.”
“How come?”
I thought about it. “It’s a guy thing. Anyway, I went home that night and shaved myself completely bald, and when I showed up at school the next morning, I was the only one. Nobody else shaved his head.”
She laughed.
“I looked like Kojack, another detective not known for his fashion sense.”
She laughed again.
“Seriously, what do you think about the body-waxing thing? I’ve got some back hair.”
“I could have lived without knowing that, Ruzak.”
I asked her where she wanted to eat, because now it was past one o’clock and I was starving. We stopped at Don Pablo’s, a Mexican chain that featured a flagstone floor and round tables beside potted palm trees and round, wide hacienda-type umbrellas. That way, you could pretend you were dining outside in Mexico while you ate inside in Tennessee. Felicia ordered a strawberry margarita and I had a Corona.
“Speaking of comfort zones, our killer must have one,” I said. “The thing is, how do you bring him out of it?”
She thought about it. “Pressure. You put the pressure on. Like with the newspaper article.”
I mentioned that I had called Paul Killibrew with my idea for a follow-up story.
“Call him again.”
“Why?”
“Tell him it might be connected to the disappearance of Lydia Marks.”
“How’s that help?”
“If all the person did was kill the geese, he might come forward, because he sure wouldn’t want to be connected to abducting somebody.”
“Susan said they wired the phones and staked out the mail, but nobody contacted them for ransom.”
“Not a good sign.”
“Not if it was a real kidnapping. I’m afraid Lydia Marks is dead.”
“Probably.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS ON MY MIND THE REST OF THAT DAY AND WAY INTO the night, so the next morning I ran the numbers, and they did not look good. Felicia was late again. I paced the office until she got there around 10:30, and I almost didn’t say anything because her mood was so bad. She slapped her lavender purse on her desk, kicked off her lavender heels, and flopped into the love seat ($3,125 plus tax from Drexel Heritage) across from her desk ($2,567 plus tax from Braden’s), rubbing the soles of her feet and grimacing like she’d stepped on a sharp object. In fact, I asked her if she had stepped on a sharp object.
“I’m just not used to heels,” she said, and I thought of those thick-soled white numbers she wore waitressing.
“Nice outfit,” I told her. And it was nice, a three-piece ensemble—lavender skirt, white blouse, lavender half jacket, the kind with the sleeves that are cut short, like the jacket worn by the kid on the Cracker Jack box, whose name probably is Jack. “New?”
“Yes, it’s new. Why?”
“I’ve been crunching some numbers and we’re in trouble.”
She rubbed her arches and said, “How much trouble?”
“Enough trouble that Parker Hudson’s fifty bucks an hour plus expenses is not going to help.”
“That’s impossible. There’s no way we could spend that much in two months.”
“Look at this.” I handed her my calculations. Her nose scrunched up and her tongue came out like when she was framing the newspaper article.
“Well,” she said finally. “Looks like you’re going to have to postpone that body waxing.”
“We need a cash infusion.”
“You’re meeting with two new clients today and one tomorrow,” she said. “Up your fee.”
“I canceled them.”
She stared up at me. She was still sitting and I was standing a couple feet back, and for a second I was afraid she was going to come out of that love seat and coldcock me. Her tongue disappeared and her lips thinned out.
“Why did you cancel them, Ruzak?”
“I don’t have a license, Felicia. I haven’t sent back the application. I haven’t taken the test.”
“That didn’t stop you from taking Hudson’s case.”
“I’m only comfortable pushing the envelope so far.”
“Oh, what horseshit! You’re kidding me, right?”
“And I took his case before I knew I needed a license. One of the requirements, Felicia, is you’ve got to have a good moral character. And anyway, the more clients I get, the greater the risk the state’s gonna catch me, and then I’ll never get my license.”
“I lost my driver’s license for six months and I didn’t stop driving.”
“You lost your license? What did you do?”
“That isn’t the point. Sometimes you gotta play the odds, Ruzak.”
“I’m in the accountability business, Felicia.”
“The what?”
“My job is holding people accountable for their actions. That’s what a detective does. It wouldn’t be right for me to make a buck out of that while I’m not.”
“While you’re not what?”
“Accountable.”
“Are you firing me?”
“Huh?”
“Is this where this is going? You’re gonna fire me?”
“Of course not.”
“Because I can save you the trouble, Ruzak.”
“Felicia, look—” We were like a married couple fighting about household finances. I knew what that was like; Mom and Dad used to fight about it all the time. The worst fights they had were over money, the main issue being that there wasn’t enough. There was never enough. Even rich people will tell you that: There’s never nearly enough.
“But you just need to keep in mind you wouldn’t still have your one client if it weren’t for me.”
“I’m not going to fire you, Felicia. I was going to say we need to cut back a little on the, um, I don’t know what to call them. The stuff like here, in the office. Is it too late to return any of it?”
“Of course it’s too late, Teddy. It’s used office furniture. It lost half its value the minute it came through the door.”
I whistled. “That’s like when you buy a new car and—”
“Oh please,” she said. “Spare me the Ruzakian riff on depreciation or relative resale values or whatever the hell you’re about to go off on. You’re like the neighborhood bar know-it-al
l without the drunken charm. Are you always so goddamned earnest? ” She heaved herself off the three-thousand-dollar love seat and began to pace around the little area in her stocking feet. I could see the red paint of her toenail polish through the nude mesh. After pacing awhile, she stopped and said, “You’re going to have to take those clients, Ruzak.”
“Felicia, I told you—”
“You’re going to take them and charge them a hundred bucks an hour to be their ‘investigative consultant.’ You want to play Mycroft, now you can. You’ll sit your wide ass in that chair in there and noodle their problems and give them possible avenues to explore, and every minute the tiniest thought crosses that complicated brain of yours—I don’t care if you’re sitting on the can—you’re charging them for it.”
I thought about it. “That seems dishonest.”
“Oh Christ!”
She flopped back down on the love seat and proceeded to jam the lavender shoes back on her feet. Again I could see the pink tip of her tongue, and all of a sudden I wanted to cry.
“Don’t leave, Felicia.”
“I’m not leaving, you bonehead! I’m putting on my shoes!”
“Good,” I said, meaning the “not leaving” part. She went to her desk. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m calling the people you canceled and I’m uncanceling them.”
“But what about—”
“Do you want to be a detective or not?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then leave it to me, Ruzak. Have I ever let you down?”
I went into my office and sat my wide ass down in my $850 leather chair. It groaned a bit. I mean the chair groaned, not my wide ass. Wide ass. Bonehead. Guys are willing to take a lot more from a pretty woman than they would from a homely one. A homely one would be on the street right now, looking for a new job. Thinking that and thinking about morphing in a nanosecond from detective to “investigative consultant” made me feel like I had betrayed something precious or violated some solemn vow I never knew I’d taken.
She spent the next hour on the phone, getting my ex-clients back and rescheduling their appointments. I listened to her explaining my fee—$150 for the initial consultation, $1,000 retainer, $100 per hour—and saying how if they checked around, they’d find my rates very reasonable. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I motioned to her that I was going out for a walk. She had slipped off her shoes again and had both feet on the desk as she talked. I noticed a tiny hole in her stocking, on the pad of her right foot, and for some reason the sight of that hole broke my heart and I wasn’t sore at her anymore.
When I got back, Felicia delivered the good and bad news that of the three prospective clients, two had balked at my rates, refusing to make an appointment. This was good news for the maintenance of my moral character and bad news for my business. The third wanted to think about it, so the end result was that for now, I still had only one client.
I called Susan Marks’s number and got the voice mail again. I hung up without leaving a message. Twenty seconds later, I called the number again, and this time I left a message, giving her my home number and telling her to call anytime.
I pulled out the envelope containing the PI application from the state, which had been sitting in my top desk drawer for over a week. The thing that concerned me the most was the fact that it would take three to four months for the state to process my application—three to four months after I passed the exam, assuming that I passed it.
I had to make a grocery run after work. The nearest store to my apartment was down on Broadway, almost five miles. That’s one of the problems with getting people to move into downtown Knoxville: There’re no grocery stores or gas stations or anything very convenient except the bus station and the mission houses for the vagrants. I checked my messages when I got home, but nobody had called. Maybe if I joined a gym or took some Krav Maja classes, I thought, I’d make some friends and people would call me.
I was putting away the last can of Campbell’s when the phone rang. I jumped a little, because I wasn’t used to the phone ringing. She sounded even younger on the phone, a little breathy, and I could picture her biting that fat lower lip as she talked.
“Mr. Ruzak?”
“Hi, Susan.”
“This is Susan Marks. I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner….”
“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
“You said in your message you had some information for me.”
“Yeah. That’s right. Look, I talked to my client and he doesn’t remember anything, um, specific about your stepmom . . . seeing her or anything.”
“Oh.”
“So I told him maybe we ought to consider some hypnotherapy. You know, sometimes that can bring out things.”
“Do you really think so?”
I kind of really didn’t, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Still, you want to be careful with giving someone hope. False hope is crueler than despair.
“You never know,” I said. “He wasn’t too hot on the idea. How’re things going?”
“About the same. I’m real busy. It’s exam week.”
“Well . . .” I was trying to think of something else to say. “That must be tough, exams in the middle of all this.”
“Yeah.” It was barely louder than a sigh. I didn’t know how to comfort her, though comforting her wasn’t really my job, beyond the normal moral obligation to give comfort when pain comes your way. I had no point of reference besides sharing her humanity. My mother was never abducted, except in the poetic sense, and I had never taken a college exam. When I thought about it, I had practically no life experience at all—never been to college, never been married, never had a kid. I was over ten years older than she was, but I might as well have been ten years younger.
“And a bad answer is better than no answer at all,” I said.
“It’s like your life just freezes, you know? You can’t grieve. You can’t hope.”
“Oh, you can always do that,” I said. “Hope, I mean.”
“Why?” She repeated the question, her voice cracking a little. She seemed intensely interested in the answer. “Why?”
“Because when you think about it, that’s what makes us human, besides speech. I watch a lot of the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and let me tell you, there’s not much that separates us from the animals.” She was very quiet as I talked. I couldn’t even hear her breathe. I was relieved. Maybe my topic was just right, since she was studying to be a vet. On the other hand, maybe she was smirking on the other end because here was high school graduate and Police Academy dropout Teddy Ruzak lecturing her on animals. “Take chimps. Now, biologically, they have ninety-nine-point-something percent of our DNA; we’re practically identical. Chimps don’t talk, but they communicate. They use tools like sticks to dig out termites from mounds. They play games like people, and there’s even that old saying about a hundred monkeys hitting typewriter keys for a hundred years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare….”
“Shakespeare?” she asked.
“Sure, William Shakespeare. All his plays. Maybe not the sonnets. I don’t know. I had a high school English teacher who read all of Macbeth out loud to us, and she played all the parts; I still remember the ghost of Banquo and the witches: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair!’”
Now I could hear her giggling a little. This only encouraged me. Sometimes “Ruzakian riffs” could serve a purpose.
“But anyway, they love and grieve and form tight social bonds and learn from their mistakes, but like those damn geese, they can’t hope. If a baby chimp gets sick, they don’t hope it gets better. If a drought hits, the chimps don’t sit around hoping for rain. They just suffer. When those goslings got killed, their parents grieved for maybe a day, no more than two, I would think, and then it was forgotten. I guess my point is that hoping is human, and when you give up hope, you give up that one or two hundredth of a percent that makes you human.”
“I guess so
.”
“It’s all, um, you know, precious.”
“What is?”
“Life. I mean, it’s too important to be trivial. Even a virus like Ebola. It’s kind of what you might call evil in that it really messes with you, but that’s exactly why it’s not trivial.” I told her the story of the kids throwing rocks at the geese. “That’s when it hit me that I was wrong to think of my case as silly or a waste of my time on earth. Life matters, and to give up hope for life is like— well, I’m not what you might call a religious person, but the only word for it is sin. ”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if I had trespassed by slapping down my soapbox smack in the middle of her heartache. Plus calling her a sinner, in effect, was probably not such a good idea.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m talking too much.”
“No, I like to hear you talk. I’ve never known anybody who talks like you. I’ve never known anybody like you period.”
“I’m nothing special,” I said, which was one of those self-serving things people who think they’re special say.
She didn’t say anything, and so I went on. “Would you like to have a cup of coffee with me sometime? Not anytime soon—I know you’re taking exams and stuff—but maybe in a couple of weeks I could call you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think I’d like that.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FELICIA CALLED IN SICK THE NEXT DAY. I WAS SURPRISED but not shocked. There really wasn’t that much to do. I decided she had a good idea when she suggested staking out the scene of the crime to see if the killer was a regular, so for the next couple of weeks, I got up at 5:00 A.M. and drove west into Farragut, parked my car in a spot closest to the road in the park’s parking lot, drank too much coffee, and ate too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but I never saw a black SUV with HRT on the plates, which made me think maybe Gary Paul was right and I’d gotten the letters wrong. I wrote down the letters of the alphabet and tried to see which ones resembled H, R, and T the most. I came up with so many different possibilities and combinations that I gave up. I started to doubt the whole thing had happened at all.
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