The Highly Effective Detective

by Richard Yancey

  Like he always did when he caught me standing still, Tommy came over and sat on my foot and held up his fat little hands.

  “Ride! Ride!” he shouted, lifting his wide face up at me.

  “So now I cancel all your appointments and take the phone off the hook?” Felicia asked.

  I grabbed Tommy’s hands and lifted my leg straight out, whooshing him about two feet off the floor. He screeched with delight. “Roo-ZACK! Roo-ZACK!”

  “I don’t know, what do you think?” I asked.

  “By the time he gets that court order, you’ll have taken the test.”

  “You’re assuming I’m going to pass.”

  “You don’t have a choice, Ruzak.”

  “Well, we could probably afford the fine,” I said. I lowered Tommy to the floor, pulled the envelope from my pocket, and showed her the check. She grabbed it out of my hand and stuffed it into her Louis Vuitton knockoff purse. At least I hoped it was a Louis Vuitton knockoff purse.

  “I need a raise, Ruzak,” she said.

  “Done,” I said. Meanwhile, Tommy was back on my shoe, shaking his fists at me. I gave him a couple more rides, then swung him by the wrists onto the love seat, where he curled up and hooted with joy.

  I looked at Felicia, and she was actually smiling at me. She pulled the hair back from her face and asked, “Did I ever thank you for saving my life?”

  “I’m sure you did,” I said.

  “Well, in case I didn’t, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I sat down at my desk and looked out the window. The sun was directly overhead and bright summer light filled the space between the buildings. Felicia left with Tommy; they were going to the Subway at Market Square and she asked if I wanted anything. I told her I’d brought my lunch. The phone kept ringing, but I let the machine pick up while I stared out the window at the brick wall. I heard the outer door open and close again, and I said, “Hello, Eunice.”

  “Goodness, how did you know it was me?”

  I swung around in my chair to face her. She was wearing a yellow summery-type frock and a bonnet over a poofy blond wig. She looked like what Dolly Parton might look like in another thirty years, depending on the extent of plastic surgery she might get. She was wearing the same orthopedic shoes, though. She sat in a visitor’s chair and plopped the ubiquitous purple purse in her wide lap. Purple purse, yellow dress. Mrs. Eunice Shriver clearly did not know how to accessorize.

  “I saw your reflection in the window,” I explained. I made a show of pulling out my yellow legal pad and clicking out fresh lead in my mechanical pencil.

  “I see you’re quite the celebrity now, Theodore,” she said.

  “I’m thinking of writing a book about my exploits,” I said. “The working title is The Gosling Affair. What do you think?”

  “It’s not the sort of book I would read,” she sniffed.

  “What’s your taste? I’m thinking Gone with the Wind or maybe those Harlequin romances. Or those true-crime paperbacks.”

  She let the question slide past her. Maybe it was too intimate a detail. “It’s a poor title, Theodore. People will think it’s about a love triangle among birds.”

  “You know,” I said, “you might have a point there. I can’t stand those books with the anthropomorphic animals, like Watership Down or that one they made us read as seniors, Animal Farm. It’s kind of a creepy literary device and it disturbs my sense of the cosmic order. I have a couple other working titles. Murder Most Fowl. The Wild-Goose Case. Fowl Play. But there was a movie a few years back with that name; I think it starred Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn. It was spelled differently, maybe, but I think there was a scene that involved birds—not geese, but chickens. I don’t remember much more about it, except that Mel Gibson showed his ass in that movie. I was also leaning toward Theodore Ruzak: The (Unlicensed) Master of Detection, which sounds a little self-serving, which is why I put the unlicensed part in.”

  “Theodore,” she said. “I really didn’t come all the way downtown to discuss literature with you.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “It smells like a child’s been in here.”

  I gave the air a sniff, but all I could smell were dry-cleaning fumes (they were worse the hotter it got) and her perfume or body powder, or whatever it was.

  “That would be my secretary’s,” I said. “She brings her son in occasionally.”

  “Oh. I thought perhaps you were diversifying into day care.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s generally a good idea not to throw all your eggs in one basket.”

  “Theodore,” she said, “I am a busy woman and a paying client, and I would appreciate it if you would stop changing the subject and going off on wild tangents like talking animals and books and movies in which Mel Gibson exposes himself.”

  “You’re right,” I said. My stomach growled. My pimento cheese sandwich was no more than five feet from her in the minifridge by the bathroom door.

  “Have you any leads in my case?”

  “Not many, but I’ve ruled out the mayor.”

  “I’m not sure that’s altogether prudent.”

  “I can’t find a motive,” I said. “Do you even know the mayor?”

  “Goodness, what a question!”

  “In fact,” I said, “I can’t really find a motive for anybody to kill you. Why would anyone want to kill you, Eunice?”

  “Do you doubt, Theodore, after all I’ve done, after the kind of life I’ve led, that I would come to the twilight of my life with no enemies at all?”

  “I don’t guess many people do, even the Pope. Maybe certain people do, like hermits or mentally disabled people. I’d guess it’d be hard to hold a grudge against the retarded. Although there’s always stuff in the paper about some state wanting to execute a retarded guy, and that’s like all of society being your enemy.”

  She puffed out a hard jet of breath and said, “I have the perfect title: Theodore Ruzak: The Long-Winded Detective. ”

  “I am profligate,” I admitted. “Particularly with breath. And thought. I waste a lot of thought. If my life had taken a different path, I’d be sitting in some ivory tower right now, working on a paper about the economy of thought. But that would make me like that televangelist who preached against the evils of prostitution while he cruised truck stops.”

  “That is a horrible indulgence, Theodore, though quite understandable. A man such as you must get quite lonely at times.”

  “Oh, no. I said I would be like that. I’ve never done anything like that—never even thought about it.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  “I’m not sure now, but it probably was related to something we were talking about.”

  “I am an old woman and my memory is certainly not what it used to be, but I’m fairly confident, Theodore, that our conversation had nothing to do with prostitutes.”

  “Well,” I said. “There you have it.”

  We smiled at each other for a moment. We were on the same wavelength, which was comforting and disturbing at the same time.

  “But I was going to say,” Eunice Shriver said, “there are certain people whom I have named in the list I gave you who would be more than happy to see me six feet under. Another reason I came today is to give you an additional name.”

  She reached into her purse and handed over a single sheet of typing paper. I wondered why she’d bothered. She could have just told me the name, but maybe she wanted everything in writing.

  I looked at the name and said, “Oh, come on, Eunice.”

  “Would you not say that revenge is a very strong motive for murder?”

  “Eunice, you had nothing to do with the death of Parker Hudson and you know it.”

  I had raised my voice a little, and it was probably that more than what I said that made her stiffen and pull back in the chair.

  “Also,” I said, “how would his poor widow know that you did?”

  “Because,” and
now her voice dropped to a whisper, “because Parker and I…”

  “Eunice.”

  “We were…”

  “Just stop, Eunice.”

  “Lovers!” She pulled the white hankie from her purse and dabbed her eyes. I was about to light into her, but that was something her kids did all the time and it sure hadn’t fixed anything.

  “This is pretty serious,” I said. “And Mrs. Hudson knew about it?”

  “Not during the time of our torrid affair, no. Later.”

  “Eunice, you didn’t call Mrs. Hudson, did you?”

  She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t looking at me, but over my shoulder toward the blank brick wall on the other side of the alley.

  “Jeez, Eunice, talk about salt in the wound. Why would you do something like that?”

  “Because the truth will out, Theodore. The truth will always out. We were taking our usual morning stroll around the lake, Parker and I, when we saw that awful man Gary Paul hit those goslings. Parker saw inside the car and shouted, ‘There goes Lydia!’ ”

  “ ‘There goes Lydia’?”

  “ ‘There goes Lydia!’ And I asked him who this Lydia was and he told me.”

  “He told you? He told you what? Oh. He was seeing her, too?”

  All she could do was nod. I said, “So you killed Lydia because you were jealous?”

  Another nod.

  “And you told all this to Mrs. Hudson?”

  “I couldn’t keep it in any longer,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, you seem to have a problem with that. Okay, look, this is what we’re going to do.” I wrote a name and phone number on the top sheet of my pad, tore it off, and handed it to her. “This lady is tops in her field, Eunice. She specializes in the treatment of serial criminals and adulteresses.”

  “ ‘Dr. Stephanie Fredericks,’” she read, frowning.

  “Call her and set up an appointment. Today, Eunice. I’m one hundred percent certain she’d love to meet you. You’re worth at least one, maybe two articles in The American Psychiatric Journal. ”

  “Do you really think so, Theodore?”

  “I’d bet half a million dollars on it.”

  She went limp with relief. That’s all she was really after: a plan of action, a road map to the way out. She even gave me a hug at the door.

  Felicia and Tommy came back about fifteen minutes later, while I was eating my pimento cheese sandwich at my desk. Tommy ran straight to me, crawled into my lap, and grabbed the Clausen pickle spear from the paper plate. Pickle juice ran down his forearm and dripped off his elbow onto my $75 pair of dress slacks. Then he wiped his sticky face on my $150 dress shirt, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

  Felicia came over to move him to the love seat, but I told her it was okay because with his head right under my nose, I could smell his lavender-smelling hair instead of the dry-cleaning fumes. She returned to her desk and I sat there with her kid in my lap, and I was thinking this was it. This was what I had been waiting for all those years on the night shift with the aching somewhere in the vicinity of my heart, not Tommy Kincaid snoozing in my lap, per se, though that was part of it, but the whole thing. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like Mr. Sad Sack Teddy Ruzak schlepping through the second half of his life like he’d schlepped through the first. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel so crummy. For the first time in a long time, I actually felt pretty damn good.