The Highly Effective Detective

by Richard Yancey

  When we got back in the car, I asked Felicia to forgive me.

  “Forgive you for what?”

  “Assuming you were, I don’t know, a goof-off or something. Why didn’t you tell me, Felicia?”

  “What would that accomplish? I don’t want pity, Ruzak, just a paycheck.”

  That made sense to me. Felicia was an awfully proud person, and awfully proud people never want special consideration. Unless they also happen to be rich—rich people usually want special consideration, based solely on the fact that they have more money than you. Like Kenneth Marks offering me the insider deal on finding his wife’s killer. Money can make you arrogant, but it isn’t the only thing that can. There’s a certain kind of arrogance born of ignorance. Sometimes I felt like Rip Van Winkle: fifteen years on the night shift, awake when the world slept, sleeping while the world went on. I froze at the age of nineteen, when I took that job, and completely missed those life experiences that would have matured me. So in my arrogant ignorance, I had assumed Felicia was missing work because she was a goof-off or had some kind of nymphomaniacal dysfunction.

  “It’s Marks,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “The killer.”

  “But he was in Brussels.”

  “He hired somebody, dummy.”

  “And that somebody followed me after reading the article, then killed Parker because he knew he was a witness?”

  “Right. See, you’re not such a bad detective, Ruzak.”

  “It fits the facts,” I said. “But you don’t need Marks in the picture for the facts to fit.”

  “What about the first wife?”

  “That still could be a coincidence. And what about the fact of him offering me money to find the killer?”

  “Done to throw you off. He knows you won’t find the killer, so what’s he got to lose?”

  “How does he know I won’t?”

  “He thinks you can’t. He thinks he’s too clever.”

  “Maybe he is.”

  “Apparently for you.”

  She was trying to goad me. Appeal to my manhood. It wasn’t going to work, but not for the reason she thought it wasn’t. She dropped me by the front door of the Ely Building.

  “Are you going back to the diner?” I asked.

  “What do you care?”

  “Well,” I said, “I do.”

  “Maybe I’ll take the exam and get my detective license. I don’t know. Or maybe…” Her nose crinkled. “Maybe I’ll marry Bob and he can support me.”

  “Has he asked?”

  She rolled up her window and drove away. I thought about going upstairs to the office, but what was I going to do up in that office?

  Instead, I drove to Wal-Mart and picked out a semiautomatic handgun. I filled out the application and was told I could pick up my gun after the waiting period. I told the clerk the clock was ticking but that on principle I believed in waiting lists and background checks and wondered if any exceptions were ever made based on dire circumstances. The clerk had never heard of any, and I didn’t doubt that he was a highly trained professional, but still he was a Wal-Mart clerk, so I decided to look into the matter more thoroughly. You couldn’t expect a Wal-Mart clerk to be an expert in all the ins and outs of federal law.

  Then I drove north on Broadway until it turned into Maynardville Highway, about four miles into the Halls area, and Sharp’s Ridge towered in the distance, its TV towers stretching like long fingers against the backdrop of the overcast sky. I hadn’t been to Halls since the week after I buried Mom; her insurance agent was out there, Harry Conrack, a burly ex-marine with a crew cut. I explained what I was after, and Harry looked me up in his actuarial tables and told me if I lost twenty to twenty-five pounds and got out of my risky line of work, I could reduce my premium by forty-five dollars a month. Then he performed some calculations—burial expenses, plus outstanding debts, plus my last four years’ income, plus the time remaining on my leases for the apartment and the office—and came up with a value on my life of $250,000. That struck me as strangely too much and not enough.

  “Who do you want as the beneficiary?” He had been a drill sergeant in the marines and tended to bark his questions at you, looking down his nose over his little half glasses like you were a raw recruit just off the bus.

  I gave him Felicia’s name. He scribbled it on the form.

  “Anybody else?”

  I didn’t answer at first.

  “Listen! You can do it two ways, Ruzak,” he shouted. “Co-beneficiary or contingent beneficiary, in case she’s dead, too.”

  “Contingent,” I said. “Thomas Kincaid.”

  He told me a nurse would be calling in the next couple days to arrange a physical. Then he sold me a rider that stated if I was ever hospitalized, I would receive a stipend of two thousand dollars a month. I thought that was a particularly sweet deal, since being healthy never brought in that much.

  Then he asked if I had renter’s insurance.

  “No.”

  “You’re buying some.”

  “I am?”

  “Damn straight you are, Ruzak!” They say the best salesmen fit their pitch to their personalities. Harry had all sorts of awards on his walls and pictures of himself with celebrities and politicians and other important-looking people whom I didn’t recognize. Harry’s pitch was perfectly meshed with his military background.

  So I left his office insured from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. He informed me I was an extremely lucky individual, since nothing horrible had happened since the hanging of my shingle, and gave me two coffee mugs, a calendar, some brochures on financing my next vehicle through him, and a prospectus on mutual funds. The burden of being a truly responsible adult felt new and strange to me, but at the same time I felt liberated from my childhood in a way my mother’s death could not deliver.

  I stopped for lunch on the way to the office, so it was after three o’clock when I finally walked through the door. The place was lonely without Felicia around. She had hardly ever been around even when she was around, but at least the potential for Felicia had been there. It was lonely and hot and smelled bad. I went through the mail, then checked my messages. There was just one, from Susan Marks.

  “Hey,” I said when she answered the phone. “I was going to call you. I probably should tell you I’m getting out of the detective business, too, but anyway, how are you?”

  “Oh, I’m okay.” She sighed into the phone, and for some reason, the cheese clinging to her bottom lip immediately leapt into my mind. “I’m starting my summer job, working for a vet full-time. Dad’s planning another trip overseas and Matt’s taking some summer classes because his grades were so horrible.”

  “You hear anything from the task force?”

  “They don’t talk to me. They talk to Dad.”

  “Does Dad talk to you?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean about what’s happening with the case.”

  “Oh. No. No, not much.”

  “When’s he leaving?”

  “In a couple days. Paris this time.”

  “Would you like to have a cup of coffee sometime?”

  “That would be great,” she said in a tone that told me it probably wouldn’t be.

  The call ended with both of us feeling a little relieved that no definite plans had been made. She was a nice girl, but our connection was based on death. It’s always hard to forge something tender out of that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THAT NIGHT I MADE THE MISTAKE OF FALLING ASLEEP TO the Discovery Health Channel, which late at night airs very graphic shows of operations. I dreamed I was in Mom’s hospital room when a Code Blue went off and the doctor decided there was no time to get her into the OR, so they cut Mom open right there and the doctor reached in and pulled out Lydia Marks’s head from Mom’s stomach, and the head began to talk in a lilting Irish brogue, only it was one of those dreams where you couldn’t make out the words, but it was cle
ar enough from the head’s attitude that I was a deep disappointment as a detective and an even deeper one as a human being. I woke with the word reword on my tongue. I stood in the shower a long time, wondering why I woke thinking of reword, until it occurred to me that maybe what I should have thought was reward and, to protect myself, my brain turned it into reword. Of course, in some private depths, I must have realized the day before what I had to do. It was really the only option left to me, and why I’d decided to buy a gun and life insurance at the same time I’d decided to quit. Timing was a problem: Marks was leaving the country in two days and the waiting period on the gun was six. I guessed I could have borrowed a gun from somebody, but the only person I knew who owned a gun for sure was Gary Paul. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what I would do with a gun. I’d failed marksmanship in the Academy, but just the thought of having one made me feel better, like keeping an emergency kit of batteries and fresh water and nonperishable canned goods tucked in a closet in case of a terrorist or nuclear attack.

  I looked up the address in the phone book, then got in my car and, instead of heading west, took Broadway to Central, to the cemetery where my mother lay.

  “Well,” I told her. “I guess I’ve solved my first case, but it looks like it also might be my last case, and the one thing I didn’t plan for or tell anyone was where I want to be buried, which, of course, would be right here next to you and Dad, but both places are taken up by other families, so I don’t know where they’re gonna lay me. I guess Felicia will decide that. If I had any foresight, I would have told her or written a note, but my problem is that I can’t think of everything. Of course, if I had any foresight, I wouldn’t have taken up this whole cockamamy detective thing in the first place, but it’s like you always said, Mom, you gotta play the cards that’re dealt you, even in solitaire. I never told you this, but I don’t much believe in heaven or an afterlife, but I like Whitman’s idea that we become part of the grass and all the green growing things, even those dead goslings, though there’re some schools of thought that hold animals have no soul. Then somebody close to you dies and you’ve got to justify your loss with the fact that you suspect it’s permanent in the cosmic sense. There’s also that whole question of suffering and why it happens if there’s a big Someone absolutely great and good looking after us, so I suspect the whole reason I’m not more spiritual is my shorts in the brains department. You know when I was little how I loved those seek-and-find word puzzles? I think that deal was me trying to convince myself I was smart, as if finding artichoke out of a jumble of letters proved anything. I love you, Mom, and I miss you, but I probably won’t be back.”

  The traffic was heavy and slow on the interstate heading west through the ubiquitous construction zones. For the past ten years, the interstate had been torn up at various places as Knoxville’s population expanded, though I suspected it had more to do with politics and the lining of the big construction company’s pockets as payback for campaign contributions. It was easy to believe, but most cynical things are. Cynicism is easy; optimism takes real effort.

  The house was in a development about a half mile from the park where the geese lived and Parker Hudson died. It was easily the most impressive abode in the most impressive neighborhood in Farragut. Three stories, huge columns in front, built to resemble a European castle but on a small lot, like the houses around it, with a half-circle cobblestone driveway and a life-size statue of a naked lady holding a bowl out of which water trickled into a pool. Water lilies floated on the surface, and underneath you could see the white and orange spots of the large koi, which sold for two or three hundred dollars a pop. I rang the bell and could hear it echoing inside as I waited for a guy called Jeeves to answer the door in white tie and tails. When I was in my twenties, like a lot of guys in their twenties, I imagined myself as fabulously rich, and my chief fantasy entailed a manservant who would shave me every day, because that was the essence of true wealth in my mind: It meant never having to shave myself, because, like most men, I hated to shave. I waited, but no one named Jeeves came to the door. Maybe it would be a sweet curly-haired thing of French ancestry in one of those frilly-skirted maid numbers. I rang the bell again and after about thirty seconds I heard the lock turn. The door opened, and Kenneth Marks was standing there, wearing a business suit and holding a cup of coffee.

  “Mr. Ruzak,” he said.

  “Mr. Marks,” I replied. “I was going to say I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop by, but actually I drove straight here from my apartment. Well, I stopped by my mother’s grave first.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m unarmed.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Urgently, I assume.”

  “Yeah. Pretty urgently.”

  He stepped back and I stepped forward and then he closed the door behind me. We were standing in a huge entryway that soared the entire three stories. The floor plan was more open than I’d expected; I’d thought the rooms would be small and I’d anticipated a lot of dark nooks and crannies, because when you think of evil, you picture a kind of spider’s lair of labyrinthine complexity. That was probably a comic-book approach to evil, but I’m a product of my generation, where most movies are just comic books that move.

  I followed him into the living room, or it might have been a very large formal sitting room, where one entire wall was comprised of two-story-length windows with a view of the lake and the high ridge on the opposite shore. There was a piano in one corner and a sixty-five- or seventy-inch big-screen television in the other. Above the sofa upon which I sat was a massive oil painting of the Marks family: Kenneth in the middle, with an auburn-haired woman seated beside him, and Susan and Matt standing behind their parents. Susan looked around fifteen or sixteen, so I assumed the woman I was looking at was not Lydia, but Kenneth Marks’s first wife. I wondered how Lydia felt looking at the picture of the Marks family, seeing the first wife sitting by her husband and Lydia standing on the outside of the picture, as it were, and for the first time I began to understand how terribly lonely Lydia Marks must have been.

  “Would you like anything, Mr. Ruzak?”

  “No thanks.”

  He sat across from me in a leather recliner that faced the TV, crossed his legs, and waited.

  “Nobody knows I’m here,” I said.

  “Is that important?”

  “I thought it might be. I’m also not wearing a wire.”

  “A… wire?”

  “You know, a listening or recording device. You can frisk me if you want.”

  “I have no desire to frisk you, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “That’s good. That’s terrific. You trust me. This isn’t going to work unless you trust me.”

  “What isn’t going to work, Mr. Ruzak?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but that didn’t steady me, so I commenced to cracking my knuckles, and the sound of the popping seemed very loud.

  “Mr. Ruzak,” he said. “I can think of only one reason for you to come here, so may we proceed? I’m rather busy getting ready for a business trip.”

  “That’s right, you’re going to Europe. Paris, right?”

  He nodded. “How did you know?”

  I swallowed. “I know pretty much everything by this point, Mr. Marks.”

  “Really?” He crossed his legs and pulled the cloth on the upper knee with his hands.

  “Well, some things I know with certainty and some things I know with just reasonable certainty, but others with less than certain, um, certainty. Maybe I will have something. Maybe a glass of water?”

  He got up at once, disappeared around a half wall, and came back with a glass of water with no ice. If I had Ken Marks’s money, I thought, I’d have a little silver bell to ring when I wanted a glass of water. I thanked him, took a sip, and put my glass on the glass-topped coffee table in front of me. There were no coasters, and I worried irrationally about leaving a ring.

  “You
know who killed Lydia?”

  I nodded. “You know I do.”

  He stared at me from across the room. I took another sip and saw it on the coffee table, the damned ring of sweated water.

  “Okay,” I said. “Enough beating around the bush.” I was talking to myself as much as to him. “Let’s strip it down to the bone. It occurred to me as I was working through this problem that the only way to go was to the top. It’s like when you can’t get satisfaction from the clerk, you go to the store manager. Or like my phone bill. My phone bill is always messed up. Month after month, there’s something wrong with it, and month after month I call the phone company on that toll-free number where they put you on hold for twenty minutes and at the end of it you’re talking to some barely literate, poorly trained customer service representative who usually has some kind of foreign accent. Like the last time I called. The rep sounded Indian—not American Indian but Indian Indian. You know, from India. Which he probably was, because of all the outsourcing. And after another twenty or thirty minutes, you’re transferred to someone higher up and have to go through the whole spiel again, until you finally reach somebody invested with some decision-making capabilities. My point is, if you want any kind of satisfaction, you’ve got to go to the string puller.”

  He nodded. “The string puller.”

  “The guy in charge. That’s why I’m here. Because this whole deal has really put me in an untenable position, Mr. Marks. I’ve closed my doors as requested, but I can’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually, the logic’s going to overwhelm you, and my ass—if you’ll excuse my language—my ass is grass.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Ruzak, but I’m having some trouble following what you’re saying.”

  “See, that’s been a problem of mine for some time. I think I told you I worked as a night-shift security guard for a lot of years, and night work tends to do things to your head. You don’t get the normal distractions and interactions of the waking, working world. You know, coworkers and lunch dates, things of that nature. You lose the grip on your own thoughts and you develop a tendency to ramble. You become susceptible to all sorts of verbal and physical ticks, like cracking your knuckles, for example, or mumbling to yourself. Mumbling is a particular hazard. You start to do it without realizing it, and the next thing you know, people are staring at you in elevators and enlarging their personal space. I’ve had a hard time adjusting.”