“If I could narrow it down further, I wouldn’t need to turn to you, Theodore.”
It made me feel funny, old Mrs. Shriver calling me Theodore. Only my mother ever called me by my full name.
“Who are these people?”
“Neighbors, my children, of course, the ladies from my prayer circle, the postman, the mayor, among others.”
“Why would the mayor . . .”
“Now, that is a long story.”
I laid the paper on the desk, sighed, leaned back in my chair, and folded my hands behind my head.
“I’d love to hear it,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
IT WAS CLOSE TO SEVEN O’CLOCK WHEN I LEFT THE OFFICE. I was hungry, but I drove home. The nesting instinct was strong upon me, and as I drove, I wondered if I faked some kind of illness, my landlord might let me keep a dog, like if I could provide a note from a competent physician or maybe somebody like Dr. Fredericks, who could vouch my lack of companionship was slowly driving me mad. Of course, I could simply bring a dog in and hope one of my neighbors didn’t turn me in, but that reflected on the moral character issue I was trying to work on or work out.
I went straight to the refrigerator, but there was not so much as a slice of bologna, and all I had in the pantry was Campbell’s cream of tomato soup and a can of sardines. I was checking out the fridge again, sniffing various containers, when the floorboards creaked behind me. I closed the door and without turning around, because I knew who it had to be, said, “Hey, Gary.”
I turned around. He was sitting on the sofa in his full uniform, including the gun and the walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder, and for some reason I thought of my old job. We’d had walkie-talkies, too, but working the night shift, there was nobody to communicate with, so I didn’t even know how to use mine. Walkie-talkie is one of those archaic terms that’s funny when you think about it.
“Hello, Ted.”
“Guess I’ve blown a thousand bucks today.”
“Probably not all you’ve blown, Ted.”
“Maybe I’ll sit down.”
“Maybe you should. I’m waiting for a call and I thought it’d be best to wait for it here with you.”
“Sure, Gary,” I said. “You bet.”
I sat on one of the bar stools by the counter.
“You want anything?” I asked. “I’m fresh out of just about everything, but there’re a couple of Buds with good born-on dates.”
“No thanks.”
“Okay.” I sat there for a second and thought, Maybe I should take up smoking so I would have something to do with my hands in situations like this. But there was a downside to smoking, of course, and I had enough vices for two people. Plus, odds were this was the last situation like this I’d ever have.
“I knew the second that dumb-ass said Parker’s name that the thing was fucked,” Gary said.
“You give me too much credit, Gary,” I said. “I almost missed it, though the shadow of it was heavy upon me, like a splinter in my brain. It was like one of those Encyclopedia Brown moments— you know, like, ‘Encyclopedia realized Mike couldn’t have known Parker’s last name, since Ruzak never mentioned it!’”
Gary Paul laughed. “You skipped to the back of the book.”
“Is that where we are?”
He nodded. “Nearly.”
“Are you going to kill me, Gary?”
His small eyes widened. “Why would I kill you, Teddy?”
“That’s a good question. I don’t have any proof, nothing that could get anybody in any kind of serious trouble. If I did, I would have called the task force. But there are a couple tapes. Hope I’m not being premature telling you that.”
“Tapes?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a tape of Parker Hudson remembering your tag number under hypnosis and I’ve got a tape of Mike Carroll confessing to your setup at the Marks’s rental. That might be a little difficult to explain to the task force.”
“Oh,” he said. “You mean these tapes.” He then pulled them from his pants pocket and held them up.
“You broke into my office,” I said.
“Right after you left tonight.” He slipped them back into his pocket and adjusted the volume of his walkie-talkie. “You probably have a couple questions. Some loose ends. A couple extra splinters in your brain.”
“That story in the paper—about the geese—that bothered Ken Marks?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “I guess it did.”
“So he sent you to me, to find out what I knew and when I knew it. To throw me off or keep me close, or both, and when I got the tag number, you set up this deal with Mike to wrap my end up and keep me from nosing around and mucking things up worse than I already had. That’s why you pretended to talk to Detectives Listrom and Watson. I don’t know about Watson, but I know for sure you never talked to Harvey Listrom. Harvey doesn’t even know who you are.”
“Right on the money, Teddy.”
“Only Mike blew it, and this puts you in an extremely awkward position.”
“Bingo.”
“It was you on the road that morning, wasn’t it, Gary?”
“You really think I’m going to answer that question?”
“Oh, I only have one tape recorder, and that’s at the office. But you know that already.”
“I probably know just a little more right now than you do.”
“I have a working theory. You want to hear it?”
“You bet. We’ve got a few more minutes.”
I thought about asking him, A few more minutes till what? But I decided against it.
“Okay, here’s my working theory. It still has some rough edges, and maybe since you’re here, you can help me smooth them out. I think you’re the goose killer. I think you grabbed Lydia that morning, probably just as she was starting out on her jog. She knew you, though, somehow, or maybe you were wearing your uniform; at any rate, there was some measure of trust there, but she realized at some point something was up, and I think there was a struggle going on when you hit those geese. You weren’t watching the road and you couldn’t stop, obviously: You had a job to do for Kenneth Marks. I think he paid you to kill Lydia like he paid you or somebody like you to kill his first wife.”
He didn’t nod or shake his head or make any expression at all while I talked. He just stared at me.
“I don’t know why he wanted them dead,” I went on. “I guess maybe it’s the old money thing. As in it doesn’t matter how much you have, because what you have is never enough. I don’t know exactly what he does for a living, but my guess is that he lives pretty high on the hog and hiring someone to kill his wives was a way into some quick liquidity.”
“ ‘Liquidity’?” he asked, smiling.
“Liquidity. And I don’t know how he hooked up with a sheriff’s deputy willing to go to the chair for a few dollars, but somehow he did—right? See, these are some of the rough edges in my theory, but not even Darwinism fits together completely, you know?”
“Gosh, that’s one helluva theory, Ted. I don’t suppose you’ve gone to the task force with it yet. They already think you’re a–nut—I’ve made sure of that—and what do you have? Without the tapes, what do you really have?”
I was about to say, I have Parker Hudson, but at that moment, like a cosmic turning of the wheel or clicking of the karmic gears, his walkie-talkie squawked to life and he pulled it to his right ear to listen. I couldn’t make out what the dispatcher was saying, but it sounded pretty urgent. He stood up and said, “It’s time, Ted. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“You know where we’re going.”
“No, Gary, I honestly don’t.”
“Okay, you don’t know where, but you know what and why.”
“You’ve been hanging around me too long,” I told him, but because of that or in spite of it, I knew exactly what he meant.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I RODE SHOTGUN IN GARY PAUL’S CRUISER, AND IT occurred to me that it was m
y first time in a police car since my Academy days, racing around the track in a mock pursuit, orange cones and life-size cutouts of pedestrians flying everywhere, the instructor, a little redheaded Irishman named O’Roark, screaming in my ear, “Accelerate through the curve, through the curve, you big dumb Pollack!”
Gary jumped on the interstate, heading west, and I knew the minute we mounted the entrance ramp where we were going. I didn’t know precisely where, but I knew generally where. He turned on the siren and we roared west going ninety-five miles an hour till he reached the Lovell Road exit, which we took practically on two wheels.
“But here’s the roughest edge,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the screaming siren. “Why would Ken Marks offer me a boatload of money to find out who was responsible if he was the one responsible?”
“Gee,” Gary answered. “That is rough.”
“Maybe it’s like Jane Goodall and the chimps.”
“What is?”
“You know, she hung with those monkeys for so many years, she started to act like them, think like them, even look a little like them as she got older.”
“What you just said makes no sense to me, Ruzak. Sorry.”
“He had to come see me, and why else would he come see me? He had to have a reason to come, a reason that would make sense to me. He wanted to know what I knew without tipping his hand, so his only choice was to play the part, the only part, I would expect him to play.”
We pulled into the parking lot at Anchor Park. There were four other cruisers in the lot, which had been roped off with the yellow crime-scene tape, an ambulance, a fire truck, and a mobile crime-scene lab. Cars lined the other side of the street, parked illegally against the curb, and gawkers stood on the walking trail, moms in unflattering jogging shorts and baggy T-shirts and retirees in bright green shorts and sandals over white athletic socks. I followed Gary past the picnic tables and horseshoe court, down to the water’s edge. The first thing that caught my eye was not the men in black wet suits wading toward the shape floating in the middle of the lake, but the two geese swimming nonchalantly near the shore. The water was sparkling in the last rays of the setting sun.
“Who is it?” I asked Gary.
“Who do you think it is, Ms. Goodall?” he asked.
“It’s Parker Hudson,” I said, and as if on cue, one of the geese gave a loud bray and ducked its head under the surface of the lake.
I turned away, leaned against a tree, and my empty stomach heaved. Gary put a hand on my shoulder in an obscene parody of sympathy and condolence.
“I think you’re beginning to understand you’re in way over your head on this one, Ted. Your reach has exceeded your grasp.”
I nodded, head down, my arm wrapped around the tree, knees slightly bent. I wished I had eaten something; this dry retching really tore at your gut and burned your throat. This was the moment to pull free from Gary Paul’s grip and run to the water’s edge, shouting, “I’ve got him; I’ve got him right here! The killer’s standing right over there by that tree!” But I didn’t run anywhere or shout anything. Without the tapes and the only witness, what did I have? The guys in the black wet suits brought the body to the shore and laid it about fifty feet from us, and the people from the medical examiner’s office hovered over it, taking pictures and gingerly touching, prodding, and poking Parker Hudson’s body. He was dressed in shorts, sneakers, and a red polo shirt. I wondered what the hell was in that old man’s head that he’d cared about what happened to six insignificant baby geese. Hadn’t he realized the species would survive regardless? And why, if he’d cared so much, had he hired a hapless buffoon like Teddy Ruzak, who barely possessed the intellectual wherewithal to tie his own shoes?
“Let’s go sit in the car, Ted.”
He opened the back door for me and I slid into the seat behind the wire mesh. Gary got behind the wheel and slammed his door. His eyes were upon me in the rearview mirror.
“You agree, right? Way over your head?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Now we’ve got to come to an understanding here, Teddy. I hope you appreciate the fact that I’m doing everything possible to keep you in one piece here. I’d like to hate your fat guts, but I can’t, and believe me, I’ve tried. I took a big risk with that whole farce with Mike Carroll, and now I’m gonna have to ask you to think clearly for a second. What would be the easiest way to resolve this?”
“Kill me,” I whispered.
“Kill you. You bet. What’s the next easiest?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think, Ted. Come on. Think.”
I tried to think. “Oh, crap, I don’t know. Buy my silence?”
“That opens a can of worms, though, don’t you think? Marks offered you a ton of cash and you turned it down. Maybe you can’t be bought. Or I pay you off and down the road you change your mind or decide it wasn’t quite enough. It’s too open-ended. There’s no closure.”
I thought some more. I felt the answer floating in the ether but couldn’t pin it down. Since there were no plants around to water to distract myself, I chose my usual method of distraction.
“That’s something I’ve always been curious about, personally and professionally,” I said. “Does it get easier? My mother always said lies were that way, and I’ve wondered if the same applies to your mortal sins—say cold-blooded murder. I mean, was it easier to kill Lydia than his first wife? Or maybe his first wife wasn’t the first person you killed, I don’t know, but even if she wasn’t, was killing Parker Hudson easier than killing Lydia? Or is killing people one of those things that never gets easier, but something in which you find a comfort zone, like maybe flying an airplane, not easier or harder per se, just more relaxed?”
He smiled. “No, killing people isn’t like flying an airplane.”
“So you enjoy it?”
“Stop it, Ruzak. I know what you’re trying to do.”
“It is a little ridiculous,” I admitted. “Trying to expand your understanding of the world while somebody’s seriously considering putting a bullet in your head, unless you buy into the afterlife. How about that, Gary? I was never too religious myself, but you were born and raised in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Any qualms in that area?”
“You asking if I’m afraid I’ll go to hell?”
“Well… yeah.”
“I don’t think about it.”
I nodded. “I’ve got the opposite problem. I tend to think about everything, only I don’t have the requisite wattage upstairs to accomplish it with any thoroughness or to bring anything to a conclusion. Like walking in circles: I get the exercise but never arrive anywhere….”
He laughed, and as he was laughing, it hit me. In a way, the best alternative to killing me was worse than actually killing me. The answer was obvious, of course, and maybe it was slow coming to me because it was so obvious.
“Ah, come on, Gary, that’s like . . . well, it really is beyond the pale.”
“Then suggest a viable alternative.”
I didn’t say anything.
“There’s really no way to protect her, you know,” Gary said softly. “You try to hide her, I’ll find her eventually. Do you really think I won’t be able to find her? I’ll know if you so much as breathe in the direction of the task force, Ted. You do anything, anything, and she dies. I know you’re upset, and sometimes when people are upset, they miss subtle details, so my goal here is not to be subtle with you. I want the understanding between us to be crystal clear. Cross me and Felicia dies.”
Neither of us said another word. He drove me home, pulling to a stop in front of the Sterchi. I stepped out of the car onto the curb and closed the door. He rolled down the passenger window and leaned over to call out, “You okay?”
I nodded, he gave a little wave, the window rolled back up, and he drove away. I watched him turn up Summit Hill; then I climbed the three flights to my apartment. It looked the same but not the same. I’d had a similar feeling right afte
r Mom died, where everything familiar looked unfamiliar and strange. My insides felt hollow and my legs weak, and I realized I better eat something or I was going to have a major episode. Plus, I needed to think, and you should never try thinking, if it’s of the serious variety, on an empty stomach. So I ordered a pizza, and while I was waiting for it, I went into the bathroom and washed my face and hands. My reflection in the mirror made my stomach give a slow roll and I bowed over the toilet in an attitude of abject prayer, but nothing came up. When the feeling subsided, I paced around the two rooms, moving aimlessly, and for some reason, I remembered the time I’d slipped in the shower, cracking my head against the tile as I went down. You hear those stories of people who die alone in their apartments and nobody finds them for days. There was nobody who would check on me if I went missing, and maybe in a week or two, Felicia might come by and find me bloated and stinking—you read about such things. When I left the security company, I lost my company benefits, including the life insurance. Now I had no life insurance, and if something happened, there’d be no money for the expenses and they’d throw me into a pauper’s grave. But I had nobody to leave money to, so I wasn’t too concerned about it.
At one point, I stopped dead still in the middle of my mindless circuit around the apartment and said out loud, “He’s lying. He’s just buying time till he can kill me without causing a ruckus. He can’t afford the risk of me changing my mind or getting too big for my britches and running to the task force, thinking they’ll protect me.”
Then I thought, No, he really doesn’t need or want to kill me. With each death, the risk escalated, and like he’d implied, I was a pussy. I didn’t have the guts to do the moral thing, the thing that was right by Lydia, because doing the right thing conflicted with my self-interest. I had passed muster on every state qualification to get my license except that one, the one about moral character. It had thrown me for a loop because in thirty-three years, my moral character had never really been tested. It was a pretty scary thought, so I pushed it out of my head as quickly as I could. People in general spend a lot of their time worrying about wasting money or time, but the thing most squandered is thought. We waste a lot of it. The biggest successes in life are those people who are economical with their thinking. Losers like me are fooled into thinking that thought is cheap because it doesn’t cost anything. But real thought, true thought, costs dearly.
The Highly Effective Detective Page 17
