“Genetics,” I said. “DNA.”
“I’m talkin’ about God.”
“Oh. Right.”
“You believe in God, Ruzak?”
“I was raised Southern Baptist,” I said. “My old man was a lapsed Catholic.”
“I’m a Methodist, but I haven’t been to church in fifteen years.”
“I can’t approach the whole thing like a child, you know, like Jesus said to somebody, I think in the Temple. It definitely wasn’t the Mount … anyway, I think too much, which tends to keep the profound things at arm’s length—sort of the opposite of what you’d expect.”
We heard the sirens approaching. Lonny lit another cigarette.
“If he was a goddamned banker, he’d be at Fort Sanders by now with a drip going,” he said.
The first responder was a truck from the Knoxville Fire Department. Two guys jumped out, neither of whom were named Bob. Lonny and I stood behind the gate and watched them check the old man’s vital signs. One EMT felt for a pulse while the other shone a light into his eyes.
“He’s gone,” the guy with the light announced. He sported a bushy mustache. You don’t see many men over thirty with facial hair these days, and those you do see usually practice one of those macho professions or have no profession at all, like the dead man in the alley with YHWH tattooed on his forehead. Maybe it was a tattoo and I just didn’t notice it the day before.
An ambulance pulled into the lot and, while they were unfolding the gurney, a cop car parked behind my back bumper. The cop’s name was Middleton. He took our statements while they carried the body through the gate (the gurney was too wide to fit through the opening). They had to turn the old guy sideways to get him out because he had gone stiff, and his arms remained outstretched as if he had fallen frozen in an attitude of flight.
I told Middleton about my encounter with the deceased the day before and how I discovered him in the alley. Lonny didn’t have much to add, except the fact that he had seen him off and on for over three months and once had to chase him out of the parking lot.
No, we didn’t know his name. No, we didn’t know where he came from or how long he had been working Church Avenue. No, we had never seen him with anyone else. No, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong when I gave him my hat.
“Why did you give him your hat?” Middleton asked.
“It was raining.”
They had loaded up the body into the ambulance by this point. They slammed the back doors, sauntered to the front, and the ambulance slowly and silently pulled out of the parking lot. It seemed odd and disquieting. No crowd had gathered, either, as you might expect. The sidewalk was deserted and it was nearing lunchtime. Middleton scribbled in his pad. We followed him into the alley. He touched the piece of cardboard with the toe of his shiny black shoe.
“That’s his,” I said. “He was holding that yesterday.”
Middleton threw a leg over the rusting filing cabinet and walked to the opposite corner of the Ely, head turning back and forth as he scanned the ground. I turned the opposite way, to poke about near the gate for my hat. What happened to my hat? Did he give it to somebody? Did he lay it down somewhere and forget about it? Except for the handmade sign, there was nothing else I could see as evidence of the old man dying here—or even having been alive here. No discarded liquor bottles, no cigarette butts, no bag of belongings. Hadn’t I seen a backpack resting against the stop sign on Walnut?
Middleton returned, broken glass crunching under his polished shoes. He was just a kid, no more than twenty-one or two, I guessed. At that age, I had already flunked out of the police academy and been denied readmittance.
“Got drunk, passed out, and froze to death,” Middleton said, echoing Lonny from a few minutes ago. He flipped his notebook closed. “But we’ll see what the coroner says.”
“You see the letters?”
“What letters?”
“The letters tattooed or etched on his forehead.”
He gave me a look. I had left that out in my statement, so I told him what I saw. He didn’t bother to write it down.
“Okay, one more thing. I’m gonna need your names and numbers, in case there’s anything hinky in the ME’s report.”
It turned out Lonny’s last name was Bradford, like the fruitless pear trees that grew so abundantly in East Tennessee. Middleton paused after writing down my name.
“Ruzak. The detective, right?”
“Not anymore. Well, actually, not ever.”
“He’s on sabbatical,” Lonny offered.
“I remember seeing your name in the paper,” Middleton said. He drove away and, after he drove away, Lonny lit another cigarette.
“You wanna grab some lunch?” he asked me.
I hadn’t even had breakfast, but I told him no. I wanted to get my ferns home. For some reason, I was feeling very protective toward them.
SIX
Felicia had left a message on my answering machine, so after I ate a pimento cheese sandwich, I called her back.
“He’s definitely dead,” I told her.
“What happened?”
“They think he passed out drunk and froze to death.”
“That’s sad.”
“I didn’t see a bottle, though. And my hat’s missing.”
“Foul play, Ruzak? Somebody killed him for your hat? I’ve seen that hat. It’s not that nice. Why did you give him your hat in the first place?”
“Because it was raining.”
“Maybe another bum stumbled over him and took your hat. And his bottle.”
“That could be. Are you busy later?”
“I’m going out of town.”
“You are? You didn’t tell me.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m taking Tommy to Kentucky for a couple of weeks to visit with his grandparents.”
“What about Bob?”
“What about him? Why are you always so worried about Bob’s whereabouts?”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you’re sure making inquiries all the time. Bob has to work, if you must know.”
“That should be a nice trip,” I said. “Watch for ice, though. Especially around Jellico Mountain.”
“That’s on my list, Ruzak.”
I told her about the letters on the bum’s forehead.
“What do you think that means?” I asked.
“What the letters mean or what it means that they were on his forehead?”
“Either one.”
She had no idea. Neither did I. We mulled over in silence for a few seconds our mutual lack of any idea.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Yes, but I gotta go. Tommy wants lunch.”
“I just had a pimento cheese sandwich.”
“O-kay. … Ruzak, are you trying to keep me on the phone for some reason?”
“I guess I could be a little spooked. I think I would be okay if he had died with his eyes closed. You know, I look down and there he is, staring at me.”
“He wasn’t really staring, you know.”
“Or if somebody else found him,” I went on. “I know this sounds egocentric and I have a problem with that, but it feels like, I don’t know, that he was meant for me.”
“What?”
“The day before the state shuts me down, and I didn’t tell you about the cop, but he reminded me of me, except he obviously graduated from the Academy, and then I gave him my hat—not the cop, the bum—and it feels like I’m coming to some sort of epiphany or reaching a kind of existential critical mass—one of those moments when you can hear the muffled strike of the hammer.”
“Hammer?”
“You know, the hammer of Fate with a capital H.”
“I think you’re reading too much into the whole thing. Some homeless man freezes to death and you happen to be the one who finds him.”
I could hear Tommy shouting in the background, an incoherent, desperate sound. Tommy was Felicia�
�s kid by a guy who ran out on her when she was pregnant, and there were problems with the kid. I could picture him, tugging on her clothes, his wide face twisted into a grimace.
“You have to go,” I said.
“I have to go. Don’t have a crisis on me, Ruzak. Maybe you should get out of town, too. Go someplace warm for a while.”
That’s it, I thought after I hung up. That’s what was getting to me, besides the letters on his forehead and the way he seemed to be staring at me. Why didn’t he get to some place warm? The mission would have been open, and I knew for a fact that the Catholic church on Northshore kept its doors unlocked 24/7. If he passed out drunk, why didn’t we find a bottle in the alley? Of course, he might have died of a heart attack or stroke or any number of other causes. Maybe he had pneumonia or cancer or some other, more exotic disease. There are so many things that can kill you; it’s amazing we live past forty.
I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because of those letters on his forehead or my own moribund mindset or the nature of my former business that convinced me—absolutely convinced me beyond all doubt—that that old man had been murdered and left in that alley as if he were just another bit of refuse, another bag of garbage.
NOVEMBER 15
SEVEN
I noticed a tall, pale-skinned, dark-haired woman standing on the steps of the Sterchi Building as I turned into the parking lot. She was wearing a calf-length gray overcoat with matching gray gloves. She reminded me of your classic femme fatale from those old Humphrey Bogart movies. Thin, seductive, soft-spoken … and deadly.
I pulled into my space and saw her walking toward me, and even her makeup made me think I’d stumbled into a Philip Marlowe story: her lips were the color of arterial blood.
“Teddy Ruzak?” she asked. Her heels were gray, too, and their clicking echoed in the confines of the underground garage.
I told her I was. She flashed a badge and said, “Detective Meredith Black, Mr. Ruzak. Knoxville Homicide.”
“It’s the old man in the alley,” I said. “Somebody killed him.””
I’m afraid so.”
“I knew it.”
“Do you have a few minutes? I’ve been trying to reach you by phone …”
“I was meeting with my biographer. Sure. You want me to come downtown?”
“This won’t take long. Can we talk upstairs?”
She meant my apartment. Immediately I thought about the dishes piled in the sink and the view through my open bedroom door: the dirty socks, the pile of newspapers, the collection of coffee mugs on my nightstand.
“Sure. That’s no problem.”
We took the elevator to the third floor, and she stood a couple steps behind me as I fumbled with the keys. I always got nervous around cops. Cops and pretty women. And big dogs. Closed spaces. Dark, unfamiliar locales. Bikers. Certain members of the clergy. Like a priest is much more intimidating to me than a Protestant minister.
“I’ve been meaning to tidy up,” I said over my shoulder as I stepped inside. The blinds were drawn and the place had all the light and charm of an Egyptian tomb. I flipped on a light and went immediately to the sink, glancing down the little hall to the bedroom. The door was not fully open, so maybe she wouldn’t notice.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Water, but it’s tap, sorry, or I could make a fresh pot of coffee….”
“No, thanks,” Meredith Black said. She was kind of hovering near the door as if she were waiting for something, and I guessed that something was for me to gather my thoughts and start acting like a normal, innocent human being.
“Let me take your coat,” I said.
“Thanks.” She shrugged the coat into my hands. Underneath she was wearing a gray jacket over a crisp white blouse. A diamond solitaire hung around her neck on a sterling silver chain. Without thinking, I checked out her left hand. No ring. I draped her overcoat carefully over the back of a bar chair and motioned her toward the sofa.
“So you knew it was murder?” Meredith Black said. She left the how? unspoken.
“Well, when I said I knew, I didn’t mean I knew.”
She smiled. She had good teeth. Very white and straight. You could tell a lot about people based on the condition of their teeth. Socioeconomic status. Their sense of self-worth. Their personality type. In life, there are biters and there are chewers. Meredith Black, I was guessing, was a biter.
“It just didn’t make much sense to me,” I said. “The idea that he just passed out and froze to death. Of course, I’m no doctor and even if I was, I didn’t examine him or anything. I didn’t even touch him. I figured it could have been a heart attack or a stroke, but I had this gut feeling, based on a couple of factors, that nothing natural killed him.”
“What factors?” She was leaning forward, chin thrust forward, elbows on her knees. Her knuckles were red, a little chafed, probably from the cold.
“I didn’t think he was new to the, um, lifestyle, which meant he knew where to go to survive the cold. I guess I should tell you right off I had an encounter with him the day before. It was raining and I gave him some change—and my hat. My hat was missing, and people like him don’t toss a perfectly good hat. But I may have thought that because the hat had been mine and we tend to inflate the value of our possessions…. sorry; I ramble when I’m nervous.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I kind of lost my job a couple weeks ago and, you know, that sort of thing can yank the rug right out from under you, and I don’t mean just in the financial sense.”
She nodded. “Sure. You were a PI, right?”
“Investigative consultant. Never quite reached the PI level, which is what led me to lose my job. The state didn’t grasp the nuance.”
She reviewed the statement I gave to Officer Middleton. How I found the body and if I had seen anything or anyone suspicious that morning or the day before when I handed the old guy my hat. How often I had seen him hanging on the corner panhandling. She wanted to know what we said to each other when he came to my car.
“I didn’t say anything. He said ‘God bless,’ or something like that. That’s it.”
“Where did you go next?”
“Where did I go? I went to the pound.”
“The pound?”
“The Humane Society down on Kingston Pike. I’m kind of in the market for a dog. It’s still in the planning stages because I’ve got a lease issue. There’s a philosophy student named Amanda who works there.” I realized she wanted to know my alibi. “Then I went home. No. First I stopped at Food City and picked up dinner. Flank steak and beans. Black beans. I came home and ate in my bedroom. Not that I normally eat in my bedroom, but the hardwood in here makes the kitchen area kind of echoey…. And the next morning, the morning I found him, the only reason I went downtown was to retrieve those ferns over there. I wasn’t planning on going into the office for the next couple of months, and I didn’t want them to die.” I told her about seeing his face, calling 911, and then calling Felicia before going downstairs.
“Felicia?”
“My secretary. She’s not here. I don’t mean here here. We aren’t … she doesn’t … we don’t … She’s in Kentucky visiting her parents.”
“Okay. So after you tell Felicia, you go downstairs and meet …” She consulted her notebook. “Lonny Bradford?”
“Right. Lonny. Only I didn’t know his last name till the dead guy turned up. I never asked. That happens a lot in the service sector. You know, everyone’s on a first-name basis.”
“What else do you know about Lonny?”
“Is he a suspect?”
She didn’t answer. She just smiled at me with those bright, even teeth. Biter.
“Well, not much,” I said. “He’s studying to be a long-haul trucker. Or going to study for it. The only other thing I’ve got is my impression of him, which is he’s a pretty nice guy. Oh, and he’s a Methodist.”
“A Methodist?” She wrote that down.
“What are y
ou, Mr. Ruzak?”
“What am I?” The question was so open-ended I didn’t even know where to start.
“Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal?”
“I guess you could call me a lapsed Baptist. My mother was keen on that, but it never quite took with me. My father was a nonpracticing Catholic. He dropped the whole thing when he married my mom, but it’s one of those things you can never really get away from. The minute he realized he was dying, he demanded to see a priest. Even then, though, I suspected he was hedging his bets. The sad fact is it’s more the terror of death than the joy of life that drives us to God.”
“That’s very interesting, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Can I ask why all this matters?”
“We think whoever killed him also wrote those letters on his forehead.”
“Y-h-w-h.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“That was the other factor that made me think this was a crime. What do they mean?”
“YHWH is the tetragrammaton, Mr. Ruzak. The four-letter, unpronounceable name of God.”
EIGHT
The old guy’s name was John Minor, Cadillac Jack, or sometimes just Cadillac to those who knew him on the street or at the mission on Broadway, where he ate most of his meals. He had a record. Vagrancy. Trespassing. One count of B&E: he had served two years of a suspended sentence in Bushy State Prison for jimmying the lock of a package store on Middlebrook Pike. No one Meredith Black had talked to could say exactly when John Minor showed up in Knoxville, why he came, or where he had come from. He was a loner and rarely talked about himself or his past. He claimed to have served some time in the military, but so far they hadn’t found any record of his service. He said he had no family. He’d been tested at Bushy Mountain, and diagnosed as mildly retarded. That was all anyone seemed to know about Cadillac Jack. “How did he die?” I asked.
“He was beaten to death, Mr. Ruzak.”
“And you think the killer might be some kind of religious fanatic or something?”
“Did you notice the letters when you gave him your hat?”
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 4