“I just want him to leave her alone.”
“He has so far.”
“We don’t know that.”
I looked at him. “You think she’s telling the truth about the breakup but not the aftermath?”
“If he was calling her, coming by, she wouldn’t tell me. She’d hide it.”
“Because she’s afraid.”
“If I thought she was telling the truth, I wouldn’t have asked you to help.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask.”
“She won’t tell you the truth, either,” he said.
“Not her. Quinton.”
“Because what’s he care if you know the truth?”
“Well, he might,” I admitted. “There is a restraining order.”
“Which is not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
“What’re your thoughts? Would it be in his best interest to get one?”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’m worried about you. You don’t look good, Farrell. When’s the last time you had a decent night’s sleep?”
“I work nights,” he reminded me.
“You know what I mean. Here’s the thing—”
“Don’t do that, Ruzak. Don’t tell me what ‘the thing’ is.”
“She’s all you got. I understand. And you feel you’re all she has. You’re all that’s standing between her and the forces of darkness. But this kind of darkness, it’s like … well, it’s like night: It falls whether you want it to or not. We want to keep the ones we love safe from every possible hazard, but you can’t do that. Nobody can. In life, horrible things happen and no amount of precaution can stop them. So we wear our safety belts and lock our doors and keep our eye on the forecast, but no matter how careful we are, the semi barrels on into us, the thief picks the lock, and the tornado touches down. To be worthwhile at all, life has to be lived with faith, even if you’re an atheist. The alternative is the fear of the groundhog, hunkered in the burrow, poking its little head out to see if the coast is clear.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid, Ruzak,” he said testily. “This is really offensive, you lecturing me like this. What makes you think I don’t get it? What’s making you act like a groundhog poking your little head out of the hole to look at me? You think I’m really going to do something to that kid? You think I want to spend twenty years in prison over a scumbag like Quinton Stiles?”
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason you asked her to drop the charges against me. You’re my friend.”
9:21 p.m.
I was back at my desk, eating a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of Ruffles, when the call came. Archie lay curled at my feet, working on a rawhide chewie, and farting. I had changed his diet four times in an effort to address the flatulence, all to no avail. I had even called the vet to see if there was any hazard in slipping some Beano into his kibble.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m looking for a motherfucking scumbag named Ruzak.”
I told him I would be that Ruzak. Why had I never hooked up one of those recording devices to my phone? It would come in handy at times like these. I pulled out my legal pad and clicked out some fresh lead in my mechanical pencil. I wrote, “*69 after.”
“You been talking to my mom.”
“I have,” I told Quinton Stiles.
“And she talked to the fucking army.”
“I figured she would.”
“So what the fuck do you want?”
“The same thing we all want, Quinton.” I figured using his first name might help to establish a rapport. “A little peace of mind.”
“Bullshit.”
I didn’t say anything at first. I pressed a fingertip into my free ear and strained to hear any ambient sounds that might indicate his location. I heard nothing but his labored breathing.
“I’ll be specific,” I said. “I was getting a little desperate and maybe didn’t think through the gambit as well as I should have. I underestimated your mother’s savvy—that she might actually check out my story.”
“She ain’t a fucking moron. Unlike you.”
“Right. But I figured you might call to get some answers, and I’m glad you did.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “I didn’t call for answers; I called to tell you to stop whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing.”
“Or?”
“Or I’ll twist off your fat head and shit down your neck. I am not fucking with you, Ruzak.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Too much of that goes on already.”
“What? Too much of what? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m going to be straight up with you, Quinton: I’m a private eye. I was hired to find you.”
He had said he didn’t care, but he jumped on it immediately. “Who hired you?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
The line went dead. I looked down at the notepad and dialed *69. He had blocked the number, which didn’t surprise me, but it had been worth a try. I hung up and made some notes about our conversation. “Angry. Maybe a little scared.” But scared of what? Me? The idea seemed absurd. “Shit down my neck.” What did he care who was looking for him or why? He said he didn’t, but if he didn’t, why make the threat? Was he creating an alibi—for example, “I was nowhere near Isabella when somebody twisted off her head and shat down her neck”? An awful alibi if he was. The best alibi involves collaborating witnesses, placing you miles away from the crime when it happened. Of course, simply because I didn’t know where he was didn’t mean he didn’t have those witnesses at the ready. I thought about it while I tapped my pencil on the pad and Archie farted at my feet. He hadn’t asked why someone hired a PI. His first question was who. Who was more important to him. Why put who over why?
I tapped my pencil. Archie farted. Excess gas can be a sign of colon cancer in humans. I didn’t know if the same could be true of dogs. Do dogs get cancer? I knew they could get diseases like diabetes. My mom had had a dog that suffered from it (the animal had been about 102 in dog years), and every day she’d given that poor pooch an insulin shot. And cats get leukemia. I looked under the desk, and when I bent down, Archie raised his head and gave me a soulful look.
“Maybe I should get you in for a colonoscopy,” I said. I thought about the fact that human beings fart on average seven times per day, and sighed. Why was my head so muddled with useless information? Why did I have so much trouble keeping my thoughts in check? Maybe the gap between my neurons was too large, or larger than those of most people. A kind of self-congratulatory thought that I filed away to discuss with Dr. Fredericks.
I tapped the pencil some more. Then I dialed Felicia’s number. A man picked up.
“Hi, um, is this Bob?” I asked. For some reason, hearing his voice made me more nervous than hearing the voice of Quinton Stiles.
“It is.”
“Hey, this is Teddy Ruzak, Felicia’s boss. Well, nominally her boss, since she literally holds the license.”
“Right. Hey, how are you? Felicia talks so much about you, I feel like I know you.”
“Same here,” I said.
“Yeah? What’s she say?”
I racked my brain for one revealing tidbit. Christ. How did I always manage to get myself into these situations? Nancy from the bar. Isabella on the bathroom countertop. Mrs. Stiles on the ratty sofa. Rushing in half-cocked, blundering through the thickets.
“You’re her world,” I managed to say.
“That’s nice, but not true. Tommy’s her world.”
Tommy was Felicia’s kid from a prior relationship. Small for his age, with a square head and stocky frame, a little loud and a lot clingy. I liked the kid and everything, but when she brought him to the office, he liked playing with staplers, staple removers, and my letter opener. She would be at her desk, typing a letter or talking on the phone, and I would be chasing him around the room, p
ulling deadly objects from his clammy grip. When he finally got tired, he liked to crawl into my lap and go to sleep, whereupon he would commence drooling on my freshly starched shirts.
“I keep telling her we all should get together,” Bob said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Yeah?”
Not really. I couldn’t remember ever having made the suggestion. I was just agreeing with everything he said, taking the path of least resistance.
“Maybe dinner sometime,” I said. “Or something.”
“Or drinks one day after work. I’m only about three blocks from you.” Bob was a firefighter stationed downtown.
“Terrific,” I said.
“We’ll do that,” he said, and then neither of us said anything for a few seconds.
Then he said, “Did you want to talk to her?”
He set down the phone without waiting for an answer. I heard him say “Ruzak,” and then Felicia was on the line.
“Guess who just called,” I said.
“Publishers Clearinghouse,” she said.
“They don’t call. They come in person.”
“Are you always so damned earnest, Ruzak? Did you really think I was serious?”
“Of course not.”
“Then it’s to kill the joke, to make the person feel stupid for saying it.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“And that’s so important to me, Ruzak—your estimation of my IQ. Can we get on with this?”
“Quinton Stiles.”
“And?”
“And I star-sixty-nined him—”
“And he blocked the number.”
“And so I still don’t know where he is, but I know he’s worried.”
“And royally pissed.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s the most common reaction to your antics.”
“But behind the rage, I sensed a nugget of fear.”
“Obviously he doesn’t know you very well.”
“Not of me per se,” I said as the color rose in my cheeks. At least I didn’t try to make others feel inadequate or annoying. “Just the fact that someone is trying to track him down.”
“Meaning he must have a reason for avoiding that.”
“I didn’t tell him why I was looking for him.”
“Good idea.”
“It wasn’t, though. An idea. He never asked.”
“Because he assumes he knows.”
“The obvious suspect.”
“Which now probably increases the danger to the suspect’s daughter, the one thing you were hired to negate.”
“Or the danger to my client, the one thing I’m obligated to obviate.”
“ ‘Obviate’? Really, Teddy.”
“I do that because I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Knowing obscure words doesn’t make you smart.”
“Okay. Another pillar of my self-worth knocked down.”
She laughed. “You’ve got to tell him now. The suspect.”
“Stiles?”
“Farrell, dummy. You’ve got to tell him you’ve put a wild hair up Quinton’s patooty and to be careful.”
“What about Isabella? I should tell her, too.”
“Tell her what? That Quinton is mad? I think she knows that.”
“She says she hasn’t communicated with him in three months.”
“Right, and you know what? I’ve got this great investment property up in New York you might be interested in. This practically brand-new bridge I need to unload.”
“Why would she lie about that?”
“To placate her dad.”
“What about the new boyfriend?”
“You know what your problem is, Ruzak?” It was an extremely open-ended question, so I didn’t even attempt to answer it. “You’re a Neanderthal when it comes to modern relationships. Sometimes old lovers do stay friends.”
“It could explain her reluctance when it came to my protecting her.”
“And her anger that anybody would make a big deal out of it.”
“That explains her attitude, but not the protective order.”
“Did it to get Farrell off her back.”
“Who’s either a Neanderthal like me or…”
“Or he knows something we don’t.”
“Or maybe he’s just slipped from normal parental caution into paranoia.”
“The unknowable unknown. Not what Quinton will do, but what he might do.”
“The one percent doctrine.”
“See? Now if I ask what you’re talking about, basically admitting I don’t know what the one percent doctrine is, I’m immediately in a position of intellectual inferiority to you. It’s very subtle, Teddy.”
“I think you might be reading too much into my free-associative brain.”
“It is kind of like overrelying on fortune cookies.”
“Okay, I’m not the only subtle one here.”
She laughed. When Felicia laughed, a cute little crinkle appeared on the bridge of her nose. I pictured that: the crinkle.
“The idea that even a one percent chance of a devastating event happening is unacceptable,” I said. “Unsustainable. Untenable.”
“Okaaaay,” she said. “But we live with those odds every day of our lives.”
“Some we just have to, I guess. Otherwise, not a damn thing would get done.”
“It’s a bunch of crap, if you ask me. You could take something like that and justify practically anything.”
“And people practically have,” I said.
“Even things like torture and murder.”
“Yes.” I doodled geometric shapes on my yellow pad—stars, squares, rectangles, kites. “Especially those.”
10:36 p.m.
The bank was only a ten-minute walk from my office. Farrell must have seen us approach; he met Archie and me at the door. Archie’s tail slapped against my calf as he tried to shove his nose under Farrell’s hand. Farrell ignored the overture.
“What’s the matter, Ruzak?” Farrell asked.
“Why do you think something is?” I asked.
“The look on your face.”
“The reason I don’t play poker,” I said. “Heart always on my sleeve.”
He pulled up a rolling chair beside the closed-circuit monitors, poured two Styrofoam cups of two-hour-old coffee. Archie curled up between our feet, tucked his nose beneath a foreleg, and closed his eyes. I had read somewhere that under the same circumstances in which humans experience boredom, dogs simply fall asleep. It seemed a healthier response. “I talked to Quinton Stiles tonight,” I said.
“And? Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You found a number for him?”
“He called me. I ran a line by his mom and he grabbed it.”
“What did he say?”
“He threatened me.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Really? It seemed odd to me. Why doesn’t it to you?”
“I’m telling you, Ruzak, that kid is a psychopath. Knew it from the day I met him. He’s gonna kill somebody one day, if he already hasn’t. And I don’t want that somebody to be my kid.”
“I still don’t get it,” I persisted. “Three years is an awful long time for someone to hang on to a grudge, Farrell.”
He looked at me. “You ever have one, Ruzak?”
“There was this sixth-grade teacher, but by high school I’d let go of it.”
“Okay.” He sighed. “Your dog. Why do you get it rabies shots? Because there’s a county ordinance? Or because you love it?”
“That’s kind of a false choice. Whether it’s the law or love, either way I’d do it. I have a responsibility.”
“Exactly.” He was nodding vigorously, as if he had proved a very important point.
“They can run both ways,” I said gingerly. “Grudges.”
“This isn’t about protecting Isabella. It’s about getting even. That what you
’re saying?”
“I have to know,” I said. “You understand that. I have to know in case I do find out where he is. I have to know for sure why you want to know. Because if something happens based on something I do, then we have a huge moral issue on our hands, Farrell.”
He squinted at me. “Maybe you do, Ruzak.” He leaned forward and poked a finger in my chest. I smelled alcohol. “Not me.”
It was weird being back in front of those monitors. I felt an echo of that old ache in my chest, like the phantom limb syndrome. For fifteen years, I’d sat where he was sitting, watching what he watched, those images of empty hallways and vacant offices, kind of a Bartleby-like existence, choked in soul-crushing angst. No wonder the daydreams of opening my own detective agency, hunting down bad guys, protecting the innocent, saving damsels in distress. Sipping bad coffee, listening to late-night talk radio, wandering empty, echoing corridors past twelve-inch-thick doors behind which fortunes were stashed, representing the hopes and dreams of anonymous depositors who entrusted me with those hopes and the product of their daylight toiling, the midnight keeper of their dreams. Christ, you can romanticize practically any damn thing, and most of us do.
“I’d just like to know that everything’s going to be okay,” I said.
“Everything’s going to be just fine,” he said.
SATURDAY
12:17 a.m.
I cruised through the lot of the apartment complex and didn’t see the car, so on a hunch or because I simply had nowhere else to check, I zipped down to the honky-tonk and drove slowly through its lot. No Ford Fusion. I looked at my watch, pulled out my cell phone, started to punch in her number, slipped the phone back into my pocket, cut the engine, got out of the car, got back in, watched the front of the building for a few minutes, absently rubbed Archie behind his ears while he sat looking out his window, tongue lolling out of his mouth. I cracked the windows and told him I wouldn’t be long. He gave the back of my hand a swipe of his tongue and I wiped the dog spit onto my pants leg as I walked to the door. Just a quick look around. Then I’d try calling. Just to be sure she was okay. Experts tell parents to trust their gut, and Farrell’s was calling all hands to deck. If Quinton hadn’t been plotting revenge, he might be now after talking to me. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who had motive to hire a PI to hunt him down.
The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line Page 6