“No, but it was raining and the whole exchange lasted about thirty seconds. I could have missed it.”
“No one who knew him can remember seeing them before,” she said. “And nobody remembers him being particularly religious.”
“Down on Market Square there’s that homeless preacher guy, you know the one? He stands on the corner shouting Bible verses and promising eternal damnation to everybody who ignores him.”
She nodded. “I know who you’re talking about.”
“Maybe you oughta talk to him.”
She smiled. Perfect teeth always reminded me of my own drawbacks in the orthodontics department: I have a slight over-bite and those stubborn stains on the canines.
“We just might do that,” she said. She had put away her notebook. The interview was over. She shot up from the sofa—there’s no other way to describe it, she rose so fast—and extended her hand with those pink, raw-looking knuckles.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Oh, you can call me Teddy.”
“Thank you, Teddy. And I’m Meredith.”
“Meredith, that’s terrific,” I said.
“If you can think of anything else …” She handed me her card.
I dug in my wallet for one of mine.
“I don’t need that,” she said.
“No? No, I guess you wouldn’t.” I put it back in my wallet, my face flushed, like a guy rejected in a pickup bar. Her perfume was of the musky variety. She also seemed awfully young to have made detective; she looked like she was still in her twenties.
I gave her coat back and, on the way to the door, she said, “So you live alone, Mr. Ruzak?”
“One of the reasons I was at the pound that day,” I said. “Now that my doors are shut I’m spending a lot more time here and there’s only so much TV I can take.”
“I have two dogs, Wally and Beaver.”
“I loved that show when I was a kid,” I said. I started to tell her my favorite character wasn’t the Beav or Wally but Lumpy, the fat kid next door, but thought she might interpret that as my identifying with Lumpy because of his size. I didn’t want to draw attention to mine, and the fact was I had no idea why I liked Lumpy. Too much time had passed. “What breed?”
“Dobermans.”
Probably the only Dobermans on earth with the names Wally and Beaver. We shook hands again at the door.
“We’ll be in touch,” she promised, and was gone before I could ask the question that immediately leapt to mind.
Why?
Amanda called that afternoon. From work, according to my caller ID. I assumed she was calling about Archie. I was wrong. “The cops just called me,” she said.
“Detective Black,” I said.
“I don’t remember her name. Some transient was murdered in your alley?”
“Well, it’s not my alley, per se. She’s just being thorough, checking out my alibi.”
“So you knew this guy?”
“No, not really. I gave him my hat that day. I thought you might be calling about Archie.”
“No, I was calling to tell you the cops are checking you out.”
“I don’t take it personally. How is Archie?”
“He misses you. Every day he asks where you are.”
“I’m gonna talk to my landlord.”
“Think it’ll do any good?”
“No. But you’ve got to try.”
“Offer them money.”
“Like a bribe?”
“Oh, Ruzak. You offer to give them a deposit for any damage. That’s usually how it’s arranged.”
“It probably would be better not to come to the table empty-handed. Thanks.”
“I’m just looking out for Archie,” she said. I could detect a smile in her voice. “She asked if you were wearing a hat.”
“A hat?”
“I told her I couldn’t remember.”
“I’ve got one of those anonymous personas,” I said. “I blend in.”
“That must come in handy in your line of work.”
“Well, I can’t think of a single instance where it has.”
She laughed for some reason. Some girls laugh only from the neck up. Amanda’s laugh originated deep in her belly.
“Hey, you wanna hang with me sometime, Ruzak?”
“Now when you say hang? …”
“Maybe grab a cup of coffee. My treat. I know you’re unemployed right now.”
“Oh. Well.” She wasn’t my type, really, with that quasi-Goth look and the thinness. The dyed-black hair and that pin in her belly button.
“That’s okay,” she said without a hint of disappointment in her voice. “You probably have better things to do—like looking for your lost hat.”
“No,” I said. “Sounds terrific. I’d love to.”
“I like you, Ruzak,” she said. She still sounded amused. About my saying yes? About my desire for a dog? About my being nondescript? I wondered, given my intuitive understanding of the ineffableness of human beings, how I ever hoped to make a go at being a detective. It was like trying to use an electron microscope to look at a quark. Or maybe more like using one to measure the circumference of the sun.
NOVEMBER 20
NINE
On the corner of the theologian’s crowded credenza, next to the row of bobbleheads of Jesus, Moses, and Buddha, sat one of those four-cup brewers, and the professor offered me a cup from it after I sat down. The coffee slipped over the lip of the pot with the consistency of crude oil. He handed me the cup printed with a Far Side cartoon, the one with a big-headed kid in class raising his hand and saying, “May I be excused? My brain is full.”
“I think I saw something in the paper about this case,” Professor Heifitz said. He was a small man, pushing seventy, I guessed, with a bald, conical-shaped head, small, quick eyes, large ears, and an equally impressive nose. Our noses and ears never stop growing; I’ve never looked into what evolutionary purpose that serves, but I guess it has something to do with our fading senses. “But I don’t recall any mention of the tetragrammaton.”
“It might be one of those elements of the crime they hold back—in the event they identify a suspect.”
“Have they?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think they’d tell me if they did. I mean, it’s not as if we have any kind of working relationship and, more importantly, I think I might be on their list.”
“Ah. So that’s it. You want to take yourself off their list.”
“I’m sure that must be it. Self-preservation. I don’t really have an alibi. I was alone that night.”
“Rather like the victim himself.”
“He wasn’t alone. Somebody beat him to death.”
“As I said.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking simultaneously that I was being infected by the academic miasma about me and of Eunice Shriver’s book: Ah! ejaculated Ruzak. I understand now. “I guess there’d be nothing lonelier than that.”
“It’s an interesting bit of information,” Professor Heifitz said. “The tetragrammaton is not what I would consider common knowledge.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “Along with hoping that the ‘what’ might help with the ‘why,’ which might lead to the ‘who.’”
“Which led you to me.”
“I thought about dressing up like a bum—or dressing down like a bum, I guess—and hanging out at the railroad yards, but I’ve got that common fear of the homeless, plus the fact that I don’t speak the lingo. They’d make me in two seconds.”
He smiled without showing his teeth. Our teeth don’t continue to grow past adolescence, but often that illusion is created as our face shrinks. He scooped a couple of dice from his desktop and commenced to rolling them in his hand. He played with those damn dice for the rest of our meeting.
“So what’s the significance of the tetragrammaton?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea how it relates to this crime,” he answered. “Obviously it holds some sort of signific
ance to the killer, but I’m a theologian, not a psychologist, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll get with the Freudians later.”
Again with the grin. “Perhaps you should start with the Jungians. All right. The tetragrammaton, as you already know, consists of four letters, rendered most commonly as YHWH but also as JHVH, JHWH, and YHVH, representing four consonants of the Hebrew alphabet: yod, he, vav, and he. Your Detective Black was correct when she told you the word is unpronounceable. The word, when it is rendered orally, is Yahweh.”
“The name of God?”
He nodded. “The name God gave himself in the burning bush. The tetragrammaton has been called ‘the secret name of God’ and appears often in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient Hebrew literature. After the Exile in the sixth century B.c., the name fell out of favor, replaced more generally with the common noun, Elohim. Interestingly, Yahweh is only one of these so-called ‘secret names.’ There were others. During the eleventh century, mystics known as ba’al shem claimed to work wonders and gain hidden knowledge by evoking the tetragrammaton and the other, more esoteric names of the Divine. The practice closely resembles certain shamanistic beliefs … that by knowing something’s name one can master it or gain power over it.”
“Gain power over God?”
“Or channel the power, to borrow a phrase from parapsychology. That would be more precise. By evoking God’s hidden name, you gain a portion of his power.”
“A power trip.”
“Who has not, at some time or other, Mr. Ruzak, hungered for a taste of the Ultimate Ground of Being? To the ancient Hebrews, God is first and foremost the Creator, above and apart from his creation, inexpressible in language, and thus his name is rendered unpronounceable, a reflection of God’s unknowable nature.”
Not knowing what to say, I bought some time by raising the Far Side cup, allowing the lukewarm caffeinated sludge to touch my lips. My brain is full.
“Any of these—what’d you call them?—ba’al shems still running around ba’al shemming?”
“Not to my knowledge, no, but echoes of the practice remain in kabbalism and certain fundamentalist sects of the Christian church.”
“And is that part of the practice, the writing on the forehead?”
He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Does this seem plausible to you: You’ve got some disturbed individual with this fixation on at least two things, this tetragrammaton business or God in general and homeless people; and he feels he’s been chosen to ‘deliver’ these lost souls back to God, sort of like a Catcher in the Rye syndrome only with old transients and not kids, or those hospice workers you read about who are offing the terminal patients right and left.”
“Again, I’m not a forensic psychologist, Mr. Ruzak. But I will say mercy killings usually don’t take the form of a savage beating. It is hard to imagine a more brutal way of ‘saving’ someone.”
I thought of the stories of Job and the Crucifixion, but I didn’t bring it up. I had no desire to go toe-to-toe with a theologian.
He looked at his watch. It swung loosely on his withered wrist when he lifted his arm. “Is there anything else, Mr. Ruzak? I’m late for class.”
“Just one more thing,” I said. “I was wondering … do you find it tough, your line of work? I mean, in these times is faith more like clinging on the edge of a cliff by your fingernails than taking up arms against a sea of troubles?”
“Clarify your question, Mr. Ruzak. Are you asking if faith is harder now than it was in the past?”
“I’m asking if we’ve finally gone too far and killed off God.”
“Oh, I believe God is more resilient than that, Mr. Ruzak. He is more than happy to suffer us for a few more millennia.”
TEN
Walter Newberry was a big man, a former Marine, semi-pro boxer and recovering alcoholic who found God literally while lying in a gutter on Magnolia Avenue. He came to at three in the morning, face-down, and when he pushed back from the concrete he saw the warning sign that read NO DUMPING/EMPTIES DIRECTLY INTO RIVER, with its picture of a fish. At that moment he heard Jesus calling him to begin his rescue mission, which he financed entirely through private donations.
“Saw this show on Discovery last Easter,” I told him. “About how the early Christians traced a fish in the sand as a secret sign in Imperial Rome.”
We were sitting in the mess hall of the mission house on Broadway, about five blocks from the spot where he fell ten years ago, landing on his stomach, which saved him from choking to death on his own vomit. Lunch was finished and the kitchen was already prepping for dinner. The mission was entering the busy season.
His massive head gave a nod. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt, blue jeans, and brown work boots. His right bicep sported a SEMPER FI tattoo.
“And early celebrations of the Last Supper always included fish,” he said.
“That’s one thing that struck me as a fat kid going to church,” I said. “All the eating in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.”
“And drinking. Look at all the metaphors Jesus used involving wine and vineyards. And his first miracle took place at a feast. He often referred to the Kingdom as a place of feasting.”
“Way to a man’s heart?”
“And his soul. What can I do for you, Mr. Ruzak?”
“Tell me about Cadillac Jack.”
“Showed up about seven or eight months ago. Never said where he was from, but his accent was pure Yankee. Real quiet. Always came late for the meals, sat in the corner up there, near the door. I try to talk to all the folks who come in, but he was a tough nut to crack.”
“So you didn’t—crack him?”
He shrugged, staring over my shoulder at the plate-glass window facing Broadway.
“I will say this: Over sixty percent of the people who come through those doors have some kind of mental condition … borderline schizos, manic-depressives, you name it. Over ninety percent have a substance-abuse problem.”
“Including Jack?”
He nodded. “Including Jack. And he was what I’d call … slow. You could tell in five minutes that the elevator didn’t go all the way up, you understand what I mean?”
I told him I did. “Anything else? Anyone who had a beef with him?”
“Not that I know of. He always struck me as pretty harmless. Gentle. I remember one time, he came in with this stray cat … or kitten, I guess, that he found on the street somewhere. He was crazy about that cat, and I bent the rules a little for him. Let him bring it inside. Don’t know whatever happened to that cat. Probably took off on him.”
“Anybody around here he was especially close to, besides the cat?”
“Yeah. Guy named Jumper.”
“Jumper?”
“Yeah. That’s what they call him; never heard his real name. Haven’t seen Jumper in a while, though, but that isn’t unusual. He probably went south with the hummingbirds.”
I asked him to describe Jumper. I scribbled down his description. Newberry watched me scribble.
“I already gave all this to that lady cop,” he said.
“Well, it’s not a competition.”
“You gonna tell me your interest?”
“I was the one who found him.”
“So?”
“So, well … have you ever been in the position where you’ve got nothing better to do and not doing something is sort of like embracing death?”
“Brother, now you’re tugging at the knot.”
“You ever hear of the tetragrammaton?”
“The tetra what?”
“Grammaton. The four-letter secret name of God.”
“I always spell his name with three letters.”
“Let me ask you this. You get any … oh, I don’t know how else to put it, fanatics in here? Frothing-at-the-mouth religious types?”
“There’s very few atheists in foxholes, Ruzak. It’s all in your perspective. A fanatic to you might be
a good Christian to me.”
“No, I think this would be somebody a little more wild-eyed.”
“You’re welcome to come back at six. We get more preachers, proselytizers, and table pounders than you can shake a stick at.”
I wrote my home number on one of my cards and asked him to call if he thought of anything else or if Jumper reappeared.
“You should come back,” he said. “Work the serving line. Thanksgiving’s coming up. We could always use an extra hand.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do you know him, Ruzak?”
“Know who?”
“Jesus.”
“We’ve never met.”
“You’re wrong about that, you know.”
My face felt hot, the same reaction I had when Amanda asked me out.
“That’s my conundrum,” I confessed. “The knot I pull at. It’s been my experience it just gets tighter.”
NOVEMBER 27
ELEVEN
What’s the matter with you, Ruzak?” Felicia asked as she wiped Tommy’s mouth for the fifth time. “You look like crap.”
“Crap!” Tommy barked.
“Don’t say that word,” Felicia told him. “It’s not nice.”
“But you said it, Mommy,” Tommy said. The table jiggled as he swung his pudgy legs.
“I’ve been thinking seriously about picking up one of those light boxes,” I said. Nature goes niggardly with light in late November. Midmorning could just as well be midafternoon, to judge by the light eking through the cloud cover. I slurped my coffee. This was my first time at the Market Square Diner, which had opened a couple of months after the former occupant, The Soup Kitchen, had cleared out. Felicia and I had lunched at The Soup Kitchen before it closed. I had been sorry to see it go. So sorry I’d refused to try this new place, as if to do so betrayed an old friendship.
“Seriously,” she said. “What’s up with you, Ruzak?”
“Ruzak!” shouted Tommy.
“Don’t do that,” Felicia scolded him, as if Ruzak was on par with crap.
My eyes strayed from her face. Through the window on my right, I could see the southwest corner of the square and the Suntrust Bank building, where in warmer months the crazy preacher man waved his pamphlets and exhorted the lunchtime crowd to dump Mammon for Jesus.
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