“What, like buying something that can’t be bought?”
“I’ve always looked at therapy that way. What does a shrink do that your favorite bartender can’t?”
“Dispense drugs.”
“Alcohol is a drug. And unless you’ve got a real problem, you can get out of a ‘session’ for a lot less than a hundred fifty an hour.”
She helped me carry Archie’s supplies up to my apartment. I set up his crate by the sofa and asked Amanda why I needed to cage this dog.
“A dog crate isn’t cruel, Ruzak,” she answered. “It gives them a sense of security at night and when you’re gone. Dogs can develop separation anxiety. Crates help with that.”
I offered her something to drink. I didn’t think she deserved a reward for lying to me, but probably deserved one for rescuing Archie and forcing me into the decision I’d been avoiding for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on. She accepted a beer and we sat on the sofa while Archie worked on his new squeaky toy, a lamb whose cries I guess excited the part of Archie’s brain that still held the ancient memory of the hunt, the death squeals of the kill.
“Everybody has a type,” she said. “People they’re more attracted to than others. Is that it? I’m not your type?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“What is that? Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s neither.”
“Look, Ruzak, I’m young but I’m not stupid. You’re not gay so I know you must look at women. What kind of women do you like to look at? You a leg man? Breasts? Ass? What?”
“Eyes.”
“Eyes?”
I nodded and took a long pull of my Bud Light.
“What color are my eyes, Ruzak?”
“Brown.”
“You guessed that because most people have brown eyes. They’re green.”
“I could have sworn they were brown.”
“I don’t have large tits. But my legs are okay.”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“It’s winter, Ruzak. But I hardly ever wear skirts. Is that it, I’m not feminine enough?”
“Oh no. You’re feminine.”
“No I’m not. Not like my sister. I was always a tomboy; she’s the girly-girl. Maybe you’d like my sister better.”
“You want to set me up with your sister?”
“I’m just trying to figure you out. I’m attracted to you. I’ve never been attracted to a big guy before. You’re really not my type. I like athletic guys; you know, guys with a nice build. But the biggest thing for me is intelligence.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought she had just called me fat and stupid.
“That’s a puzzle, then,” I said. “Why you would find me attractive.”
“I’ve had dreams about you.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s the size thing. You’re so big and I’m skinny and in my dreams you’re holding me down…. It’s almost like a rape.”
“Boy.”
“And I’ll wake up and, God, I’ll be so excited.” She set her empty bottle on my coffee table and scooted closer to me.
“So what do you think?”
“My dreams are usually more mundane,” I said. “Me in the kitchen trying to open a can of tuna fish. Things like that.”
She put her pale hand on my knee and said, “It’s just sex, Ruzak. I don’t even expect it to be good sex, if you’ve got any issues with performance anxiety. We don’t have to go steady or get engaged or anything like that. I’m on the pill.”
My immediate instinct was to tell her I had AIDS. Then I thought that might be a little over the top and herpes would be better. I could tell her I was in the middle of an outbreak. Her eyes were green, but a very dark, loamy green.
“There’s somebody else,” I blurted out.
She stared at me for a second. “Where?” she asked, and then looked around the room as if the other woman might leap out from a hiding place.
“We’ve been dating for almost a year,” I said.
She pulled away from me and said, “You might have told me before I admitted to having sex dreams about you. What’s your goal, Ruzak? Why is it, every time I see you, you humiliate me?”
She grabbed her coat from the back of the sofa and stood up. Archie rose when she did and followed her to the door. It had been a big day for Archie, and Amanda was the one constant.
“I don’t believe you, by the way,” she said at the door. “You don’t have a girlfriend. What’s the big deal, Ruzak? Why can’t you just tell me you find me gross?”
“I don’t find you gross.”
“Then what is it? You a monk or something? Are you on a mission from God, Ruzak?”
“This old guy has raised some questions in my mind. I guess they’ve been simmering on the back burner for some time now,” I said, “And there’s this principle I try to live by: When you’re tumbling down a slippery slope, you don’t grab onto anyone. You’ll just yank them down with you.”
“But what if grabbing onto someone is your only hope?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I thanked her again for saving Archie and she left. Archie pressed his nose against the jamb and whined, his tail waving slowly.
“She’s gone,” I told him. “And I doubt she’ll be back.”
A couple hours later, I realized I’d forgotten to give her a check for the adoption fee.
NINETEEN
That night the Discovery Channel ran a special about the ascent of man and the mysterious disappearance of the Neanderthal. Did disease or competition with us wipe them out, or did we murder them into extinction? In the nineteenth century, the Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God’s grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she’s not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we’re meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don’t give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare or put a man on the moon or were the first species to conceive of God. We might not have been the first, though. Maybe Neanderthals got to God first. If true, that raises all sorts of theological issues I didn’t feel qualified to deal with.
Two things disturbed my viewing pleasure. One was the dog. While I sprawled on the sofa, he lay on the floor by the television, head between his forepaws, staring at me. It started to get to me after a while. I asked him what he wanted. I offered him a Milk Bone, then a pig’s ear. During a commercial, I rushed him outside for a quick walk, during which there was much sniffing but little urinating and no defecation. I worried he might be saving up for a deposit on my hardwood, and I remembered I’d forgotten to pick up some poopie-cleaning product at the pet store.
Back upstairs, he resumed his position by the TV, so it was impossible for me to ignore his stare while I tried to watch Cro-Magnon make his great migration. Maybe this was part of the separation anxiety Amanda had talked about.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him. He answered with not so much as a twitch of his tail.
A little after ten the phone rang. Archie got up before I did. He followed me into the kitchen and stood there, staring up at me, still as a setter on point.
“Hello?” I said into the receiver. Silence. I glanced at the caller-ID display. It said, UNKNOWN CALLER.
“I’m on the do-not-call list,” I said, thinking I was queued up in a phone bank. Silence. “Hello?” I said again. The line went dead.
Ruzak back to the sofa. Archie back to the TV. A commercial was on, the one with the two cavemen pissed off at the big insurance company. The phone rang again. Again Archie followed me into the kitchen. I glanced at the caller ID. UNKNOWN CALLER.
“Hello?”
More silence, but this time I thought I could hear someone breathing.
“This is Teddy Ruzak,” I said. “Who’s this?” No answer.
“Amanda?” I asked. “Eunice?”
The line clicked, an
d then I heard the dial tone. I went to the bedroom; Archie’s nails clicked on the hardwood as he followed me. I grabbed the cordless phone from its cradle and was halfway back to the sofa when the phone rang again.
I hit the talk button and said, “Look, I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling, but I’m in the middle of something important right now and the FCC considers what you’re doing a serious crime. It’s called harassment, and blocking your number won’t stop them from finding out who you are.”
Silence. I stood by the sofa. Archie sat at my feet.
“I can hear you breathing,” I said. My mind raced down the list of the people who might call me. The list was short, and everyone on it wouldn’t hold on the line without saying anything. I figured, if this wasn’t some random weirdo, that I actually had a lead on the line. “Are you calling about the reward?”
They hung up. I waited for the phone to ring again. I was sure they would call back.
They didn’t. Not that night, at least.
DECEMBER 5
TWENTY
I woke fully clothed on the sofa to the ringing of the telephone. I rolled over and the cordless fell off my stomach onto the floor. Archie was sitting by the coffee table about three feet away, watching me.
“Hello?” I gasped.
“Theodore, you never called me back.”
“Eunice? What time is it?”
“Four-thirty.”
“In the morning?”
“Old people never sleep; didn’t you know that?”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, because something had to be for her to call me at four-thirty in the morning.
“We haven’t finished, and I do my best work in the morning.” “Really, Eunice, I’m not in good shape right now.”
“Why, Theodore?”
“It’s four-thirty in the morning!”
“I am beginning to sense a certain reluctance on your part to help me with the last worthwhile endeavor of my life.”
“Well, I hope it isn’t the last thing you do. That would be a helluva coda, Eunice. Did you call me last night, around ten-forty-five?”
“Now Theodore, wouldn’t we both know if I had?”
“Somebody called three or four times and just held the line.”
I heard a strange clicking through the earpiece.
“Did you hear that?” I asked. “Something just clicked on the line.”
“That may have been my teeth.”
“Your teeth?”
“My uppers slipped.”
“Eunice, you’re not taping me, are you?”
“Theodore, what a question!”
It could be a tap. But who would tap my phone? Archie had not budged since I woke up. Mouth slightly open, bright brown eyes locked on my face, he looked like he was grinning.
“I’m going to hang up now, Eunice,” I said. “My dog needs to go outside.”
“Dog? Theodore, you don’t own a dog.”
“I do now.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to think about the wisdom of using that device.”
“Device?”
“The device of using a dog to create sympathy for the character.”
“He’s not a device, Eunice; he’s a dog. And I’m not a character; I’m a human being.”
She didn’t say anything. I heard another click. I knew from my PI test material that taping someone without their knowledge was legal in Tennessee, but phone taps required a court order. Knowing that didn’t kill the little germ of paranoia beginning to replicate itself in my sleep-deprived brain. I told Eunice again that my dog had to go wee-wee and hung up. I didn’t get up from the sofa, though. Just sat there and looked at Archie looking at me and waited for her to call back.
“Do you need to go?” I asked him. He didn’t move a muscle. Not even a twitch of his tail. Why was this creature staring at me? I’ve heard dogs are especially sensitive to stimuli that flies under our human radar, things like earthquakes and low pressure systems. Maybe Archie was picking up on something wrong with me, an imminent heart attack or aneurysm.
I scooped him off the floor and put him into the crate behind the sofa. He stared at me through the bars.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “This is supposed to comfort you.”
I threw myself on the sofa and tried to go back to sleep. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was losing my grip on something very important, not my sanity, per se, but my grip upon the familiar, the comfortable world I held so casually until the day Mr. Hinton walked into my office and yanked it out of my hands. Or was it that morning when I looked out my window and saw the dead man looking back at me, God’s name emblazoned above his empty stare? I felt as if I had crossed a border into a new country, an immigrant who couldn’t speak the language, my vocabulary useless in the Land of the Enigmatic Stare, where Jack Minor and Archie were natives. The string theory had unnerved me, but now I could see the seductiveness of it. In another reality, Teddy Ruzak had his detective license, Archie a house in the suburbs with a big yard and kids to play with, and even Jack Minor a place of his own where the sun shone more than ten days in the winter.
I gave up on sleep. On my way to the kitchen, I glanced toward the cage, and that dog was still sitting there, watching me. I let him out.
“What’s the matter with us, Arch?” I asked. I made a mental note to call the vet as soon as the sun came up. There was something wrong with this dog. He couldn’t tell me, but maybe a vet could.
“Come on, I’ll fry us some bacon.”
TWENTY-ONE
When the phone rang a little after ten, I checked the caller ID before answering. It said CITY OF KNOXVILLE.
“Mr. Ruzak,” Detective Black said. “How are you?”
“Look,” I said. “About yesterday. I guess I overreacted a little.”
“Perfectly understandable. I hope I haven’t caught you at an inconvenient time.”
“Oh, no. All my time is convenient now.”
She gave a little laugh, and I thought of those large incisors.
“I made some inquiries after you left, and I think I have a name for you.”
Nincompoop would be a good one, I thought, but I said, “A name?”
“Jumper’s real name is Reginald Matthews. He’s been arrested three or four times on nuisance and reckless endangerment charges. They call him Jumper because he has a penchant for threatening to jump off various rooftops around town. He climbs up and waits for us to get there and talk him down.”
“He’s suicidal?”
“He may be, but usually when people really want to kill themselves they do.”
She told me they had an address for him in Johnson City. I wrote it down.
“He listed his next of kin as Robert Matthews, his son, same address.”
“Phone number?”
“Nope, and there’s no listing for either of them. I checked.”
“I guess you’re not taking a drive up to Johnson City.”
“Maybe I’m trying to save you twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Hey,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”
“Just doing my part to aid and abet an unlicensed PI.”
I called the Humane Society and learned Amanda wouldn’t be in till three. She probably had morning classes. I dialed Felicia’s number. She answered on the sixth ring with a voice thick with sleep.
“I woke you,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I was up late with Tommy,” she said. “He had a rough night.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“What’s the crisis du jour, Ruzak?”
“I’ve got to drive up to Johnson City and I wanted to know—”
“I can’t go with you.”
“I was actually needing a pet-sitter. Thought maybe Tommy would like to meet Archie.”
“You finally got a dog.”
“Or he got me; it’s complicated.”
“Why are you going to Johnson City?”
“I�
��ve got a lead.”
“You’ve got a—is this about the dead bum?”
“Jack. Jack Minor. Yeah. There may be a potential witness or possible suspect up there.”
“Tell the cops.”
“Actually, the cops told me.”
“Why would the cops tell you?”
“I guess I kind of shamed them into it. I wouldn’t bother you, but I hate the thought of locking him up all day, plus I don’t know how long this might take. I might have to stay overnight, depending on what I find. Do you mind watching Archie for me?”
“Is this animal housebroken?”
“Well, he hasn’t relieved himself in my apartment yet.”
“I’m worried about you, Ruzak. I can’t figure if this whole thing is you working on something or working through something.”
“Maybe a little of both.”
Ten minutes later, I stepped out of the shower to find Archie sitting in the bathroom doorway, watching. I quickly wrapped a towel around my middle; I wasn’t accustomed to another set of eyes seeing me naked. Archie had abandonment issues, I decided. That’s why he stared, because if he looked away I might be gone.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told his reflection in the mirror while I shaved. “Well, actually, I am going somewhere, but I won’t be long and you’ll be staying with a very nice lady who has a kid that’ll just eat you up.”
He didn’t react to the sound of my voice. I tried to remember if he’d wagged his tail since Amanda left.
“You ignored your breakfast,” I went on. “I gave you a forty-five-minute walk. You don’t want your squeaky lamb or a bone. What do you want, Archie? You keep watching me like you want something—what is it? What do you want?”
I turned away from the sink and squatted on the linoleum. I snapped my fingers. Archie stayed in the doorway, ducking his head a little, nose twitching, the tip of his pink tongue protruding between his brown lips.
“Come here, boy. Come on, Archie.” I whistled softly. Archie didn’t move. “Maybe you’ve been beaten,” I said. “Maybe I even look a little like the guy who beat you and you’re wondering why Amanda delivered you back into the hands of the enemy. I’ll ask her if there was any evidence of abuse when they brought you in. It’s okay, Arch, swear to God, you can trust me.”
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 9