The Highly Effective Detective

by Richard Yancey

  “That’s a horrible story, Eunice,” I said.

  “I know it’s a horrible story. And what makes it more horrible is nobody but Vernon believes me.”

  “I believe you, Eunice.”

  She swung her eyes back in my direction. The hope in them was palpable and heartbreaking.

  “Do you? Do you, Teddy? That’s all I want. You asked what I wanted, and that is precisely it. I want somebody to believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?” I asked. “You haven’t lied to me yet.”

  “Then you’ll help me, Teddy?”

  “Sure I’ll help you, Eunice.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THROUGH SOME ACE DETECTIVE WORK, I DISCOVERED THE name of Susan’s brother: Matthew. Matthew Marks. It sounded like some kind of joke, a biblical play on words. I discovered his name by calling Susan and asking her for her brother’s name and phone number. He agreed to meet me on the Strip for lunch, a Mexican fast-food place called Moe’s. You ordered your food and then watched them create your meal in assembly-line fashion. Moe’s was famous for its huge burritos, which were long, stuffed to overflowing, and extremely bland. I didn’t like Moe’s—the food reminded me of myself.

  He was a big guy, like his dad, with roughly the same haircut, except the kid wore his combed forward instead of back, like a bloated version of an Abercrombie & Fitch model. His face was wide and pockmarked with acne scars and he had a sort of hooded look around the eyes that reminded me of a lizard, though I’m not sure lizards have eyelids.

  “I’m only talking to you as a favor to my sister,” he told me after we carried our trays to a table by the window. The sky was overcast and therefore the world was shadowless, which always made me feel a little disoriented.

  “Sure,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  I asked him about school. It didn’t seem right diving right into the gruesome circumstances of his stepmother’s death as we stuffed our mouths with beans, rice, and chunks of greasy ground beef. I also wanted a chance to size him up before getting down to brass tacks. He had a chip on his shoulder, I could tell, like a lot of rich kids who never want for anything. But I figured that chip might come from Lydia being murdered and left as a meal for wild animals.

  He said he was just a freshman and hadn’t decided on a major.

  “What about business?” I asked. “You’re the only son, right? Maybe your dad would—”

  “My dad,” he sneered. “Don’t start with my dad. I hardly know the guy. He was never home when I was growing up. I was raised by my mother.”

  “Yeah, your mother…”

  “Not Lydia. Lydia was never my mother.”

  “You and Lydia didn’t get along?”

  He shrugged. The shrug is a gesture we lose as we get older, reaching its peak usage when we’re around twenty-five. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe there’s less to shrug about, which is ironic, because you think you know it all at twenty. I have a theory the shrug was born with the advent of organized sports, because, no matter the sport, players always do it after a penalty’s called against them. The shoulders hunch, the arms come up, hands palm upward, like, What? What?

  “I didn’t know her very good,” Matt said. “You wanna know how all that happened? One day, Dad comes walking in the door and says, ‘Kids, here’s your new mother.’ ”

  “What happened to the old one?”

  “She died, man. When I was fifteen.”

  “That’s tough. My mother died just recently.”

  “Yeah, but you’re what, forty? I was fifteen.”

  “Actually, I’m thirty-three, but a lot of people think I’m older.”

  “You don’t have the baby face like a lot of fat guys.”

  I set down my burrito and sipped my diet Coke.

  “How’d your mom die?”

  “Car accident.”

  “Bummer.”

  “What did you say? Did you just say ‘bummer’? What is this, Ruzak? You trying to relate to me or something?”

  “No. I honestly thought it was a bummer. Bummer was my first reaction to the news your mother died in a car accident. I thought, Bummer. So that’s what I said. What happened?”

  “A truck ran her off the road. She hit a tree. She died.”

  “I’m tempted to say ‘That sucks.’”

  “What are you talking about? It does suck.”

  “How did your father and Lydia meet?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Was it in Ireland?”

  “No, it was in fucking Afghanistan. Of course it was in Ireland. She was Irish, for Christ sakes!”

  “So he travels a lot on business.”

  “I think I said that. You’re not much of a detective, are you? Yeah, he travels all the damn time. England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, you name it, wherever the almighty dollar leads him.”

  “How’s he make it? The almighty dollar?”

  “Didn’t Suze tell you? He’s a smuggler.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious, man. He smuggles. You name it—drugs, weapons, even people. Human contraband, Ruzak. You know, slavery. My dad is a slaver.” He laughed. I wondered if he was putting me on and decided he probably was. I was wasting my time, but I told myself I wasn’t always going to be dealing with a cooperative witness.

  “Why do you think Lydia’s dead?”

  “Because somebody killed her. What do you think?”

  “I mean, do you think somebody she knew—”

  “Man, Lydia didn’t know anybody over here. She refused to make any friends. She spent about two thousand dollars a month in phone charges to the Emerald Isle to talk to her family over there. I always wondered why the hell she married my father and moved here if she loved it over there so damned much.”

  “Susan said she loved your father. Adored him.”

  He shrugged again. “I guess it’s easy to love somebody who isn’t there.”

  I said, “Why didn’t she travel with him? What kept her in Knoxville while he jet-setted all over the world?”

  “What did my sister say?”

  “I haven’t asked her.”

  “If anybody would know, it’d be Suze. Really, I never hung around Lydia much.”

  “Well, that’s understandable. I mean, it’s hard to accept a stepparent in the best of circumstances.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that. That woman gave me the creeps.”

  “Why did she give you the creeps?”

  “She never talked much. Just stared at you all the time with this stupid smile on her face.” He gave his best imitation of the smile, but I didn’t think he was very good at imitating attractive Irish women. “You know? And when she did say something, it was always… oh, shit, I don’t know, always so calm and almost whispery, almost like she was putting on an act or was doped up or something.”

  “When your dad was around—were they real affectionate with each other?”

  “Man, why would I notice something like that? You think I’m some kind of pervert?”

  He finished his burrito in one awe-inspiring face-stuffing orgy of sauce and dripping hamburger juice.

  “So…,” I said, knowing this was a signal my interview was almost over, “Lydia wasn’t having an affair or anything of that nature…as far as you know?”

  “Ruzak, that woman was about as sexy as a telephone pole. No personality at all, you know? Kind of pretty, though she didn’t have any shape. I never got what my father saw in her, but to each his own. I never saw the mailman hanging around, if that’s what you’re asking. But like I said, I wasn’t around much. Maybe she was screwing the whole neighborhood.”

  He stood up. I kept sitting.

  “One more question,” I said. “Who do you think killed Lydia?”

  He leaned over the table, bringing his face so close that I could smell the spices on his breath.

  “The British secret service. She was IRA, Ruzak. Dad’s a sympathizer and the m
arriage was a sham to get her out of the country. But the Brits found out where she was hiding and took her out.”

  “You think so?”

  He just laughed and shrugged. “I gotta go back home and pack.”

  “Thanks for talking to me, Matt.”

  “Thanks for the burrito, dick. That’s what they call detectives, right? Dicks?”

  He sauntered out the door while I sat there watching his shoulders give a little roll—the same way his father walked. I didn’t feel as if I’d learned anything, and now I had a very bad case of indigestion. What bothered me about where Lydia Marks was found was that it would take a pretty big guy to haul a dead body up a mountain through dense woods. Matt was big enough. But then she might have been marched up that mountain at gunpoint, and practically anybody can point a gun, even me. I just can’t shoot one with any accuracy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE WHOLE MARKS FAMILY LEFT THE NEXT DAY TO BURY the remains of Lydia in the family plot in Dublin. Now, the first Mrs. Marks was buried right in Knoxville, which raised the vexing question (at least to me) of where Kenneth would spend eternity— beside his first wife in Tennessee or his second across the pond?

  “Say you were married,” I told Felicia.

  “Why say I was married?”

  “I’m posing a hypothetical.”

  “I love it when you talk like a college professor. How’re you able to do that, Ruzak, seeing you never went to college?”

  “I read the dictionary.”

  “Really? How often?”

  “Every day. Usually while I’m in the John.”

  “Did anybody ever point out to you the dictionary’s not the kind of book you read .”

  “It goes back to my Dictionary Ruzak days. When I was a kid living in St. Louis, this group of neighborhood boys invited me to join their club, which met over one of the kids’ garage, and I went to one meeting where they swapped these mysterious hand signals and spoke in code words that meant nothing to me but a great deal to them, and they laughed the whole time at inside jokes that nobody bothered to explain to me. They told me I had to pick a handle only the club members would know—it was sort of a benign gang—and I told them to call me ‘Dictionary,’ because I was going through my Encyclopedia Brown phase. That cracked them up. For the rest of the meeting, they asked me to spell words like xylophone and oxymoron. It was the first and last meeting I went to.”

  “You know what, Ruzak? You’re the kind of guy who gets asked what time it is and then tells the person how to build a watch.”

  “Can I finish my hypothetical?”

  “Sure, I can’t do anything anyway until my nails finish drying.” The polish was bloodred, to match her dress. She might have been sick the past few days, but she had managed to drag herself out of her sickbed to visit the salon. Her hair wasn’t quite so blond anymore and I detected a hint of auburn. Women in general are restless when it comes to their appearance. There may be a Darwinian component to this, but I never really took the time to think it through.

  “So you get married and something happens to your husband.”

  “He dies.”

  “Or runs off on you or—no, let’s just say he dies and at the time he dies, you love him.”

  “Okay. Husband. Dead. Love him. Go on.”

  “A few years go by and although you can’t imagine ever falling in love again, you do, and you get married a second time.”

  “For what?”

  “For a second time.”

  “No, I mean for what reason am I marrying a second time? Love? Money? Blackmail?”

  “Love. Deep, deep love.”

  “Okay. I could see that happening.”

  “So then he dies.”

  “He dies, too?”

  “Or you die—that really doesn’t matter.”

  “We both die?”

  “Not at the same time. Well, it could be at the same time for the purpose of the hypothetical.”

  “All this is going somewhere, right?”

  “Right. So here’s the hypothetical . . .”

  “You love saying that word, don’t you? You should see your lips when you say it, especially the ‘po’ part.” She pursed her lips at me. “Hypothetical.”

  “Can I finish?” I was just acting sore. Inside, I was glad she was in a better mood. “So, which one would you want to be buried next to—your first love or your second?”

  “This is important?”

  “It’s been vexing me.”

  “I don’t know, Ruzak. It sounds like one of those questions the Pharisees threw at Jesus. Probably the first husband.”

  “Why?”

  “He had dibs.”

  “So it’s a question of first come, first served? What if you loved the second guy more?”

  “You didn’t say that in your hypo. You just said I loved him, too, which implies I loved him equally. Of course I’d want to be next to the one I loved the most.”

  “What do you think the odds are, one wife getting killed in a freak auto accident and the other murdered by some psychopath?”

  “Pretty damn long.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You think that’s what the cops are thinking?”

  “But Marks was out of the country.”

  “People like him don’t get their hands dirty, Ruzak. He hired somebody to do it, the same way Parker Hudson hired you to find the goose killer.”

  I thought about telling her of his offer to give up the killer for two million dollars, then decided not to. One hypothetical was enough for one morning.

  “What’s his motive, though?” I asked. “Susan said he was nuts about her and her him, and besides, even though I’m sure there was life insurance, the guy’s already richer than God.”

  “Really? What did you say his phone number was?”

  “Money really does overcome everything,” I said. “This guy might have killed two wives and you’re jumping in line to be number three.”

  “Maybe he didn’t kill her to get money, but to save it.”

  “She was threatening divorce? But Susan said—”

  “Okay, then. Money and jealously aren’t the only motives for murder, Ruzak.”

  I thought about it. “Blackmail?”

  “Maybe the kid was right in a way. Maybe the marriage was a sham, like she made him marry her and get her to America because she had something on him, and the only way to remove the threat was by removing her.”

  “But what could that be?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me. “You’re the investigative consultant.”

  I went to my desk and called Deputy Paul’s number. The dispatcher told me he was on patrol and couldn’t be reached. I left my number. Then I called Parker Hudson to remind him of our appointment with the hypnotherapist.

  “You’re really going to make me go through with this,” he said.

  “Well, I guess the only thing that could make you is your conscience,” I replied.

  “You know what I like about you, Teddy? On the outside, you’re just a cuddly big ol’ bear, but on the inside, you’re a scrappy little bulldog.”

  “Makes for a lethal combination,” I said.

  I told Felicia I was going out for some legwork and she said it looked like I needed it. I walked out the door with downcast eyes, like a puppy scolded by its mistress. Verity comes at you that way: Parker Hudson described it; then Felicia encapsulated it.

  I walked one block west to the Lawson McGee Library and took the stairs two flights up to the periodicals room. Matthew Marks was a freshman in college and his mother died when he was fifteen, which meant the accident happened no more than four years ago. I told the lady at the desk what I needed and she disappeared down an aisle that was marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. She came back after a minute with four microfiche cartridges, sat me down in one of the little booths against the wall, and showed me how to use the reading machine. Not to propagate stereotypes, but she was in her mid-fifties, wore n
o makeup, and smelled of old paper.

  She left me alone. My eyes were pretty worn-out by the end of it, but I finally found the story two hours later in the September 17, 2000, issue of the Sentinel. I located the obituary that ran three days later and asked the periodicals lady to make copies. I paid her for the copies, fifteen cents per page, and made the remark that at fifteen cents per page, you wondered where all your tax money was going. She curtly asked if there was anything else she could help me with, and from that, I gathered she was trying to show that my tax money paid her salary. I told her yes, there was something else, and asked for a receipt.

  I walked back to the office. Deputy Gary Paul was standing at Felicia’s desk and they were both laughing, but they abruptly stopped laughing when I walked in. It was clear to me by that point that Felicia had a thing for guys in uniform—firemen and cops and probably military types—but drew the line at security guards.

  “Teddy!” Deputy Paul said, and we shook hands. He followed me into my office and sank into one of the visitor’s chairs. Like Barbara Eden sans the bare midriff, Felicia appeared at his elbow with a fresh cup of coffee. She left without offering me any.

  “So what’s up with the goose killer?”

  “Parker Hudson is getting hypnotized tomorrow. We’re gonna regress him to the day of the killing. It’s a long shot, but—” I shrugged. I had noticed I was shrugging more after my meeting with Matthew Marks. I am very impressionable where tics and mannerisms are concerned.

  “Kenneth Marks’s first wife was run off I-Forty five years ago, going about eighty miles per hour,” I told Deputy Paul. “Her car flew over an embankment and smashed head-on into a tree, killing her instantly. The other driver kept going and, as far as I can tell, was never caught.”

  “Okay.”

  “Witnesses described the other vehicle as a white delivery truck with no identifying markings.”