I stood up and took a step toward him. He got up and took a step back.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. He turned and trotted down the hall, nails clicking on the hardwood, turning the corner and disappearing into the family room. Only no family lived here. What did you call the family room of a single person? I hung in the bathroom doorway, chewing on my lower lip. Something was going on with this dog. Maybe that’s why his owner abandoned him. Who’d want a dog that stared at you all the time?
Felicia lived in a neighborhood just off Chapman Highway, on the southern edge of Knoxville, a few miles from the town of Seymour. It was only a twenty-minute drive from my apartment, but it seemed much longer with Archie sitting in the bucket seat beside me, staring at my profile. I was so distracted I almost rear-ended a Buick at the stoplight for the entrance to Baptist Hospital. My mom had died in Baptist Hospital, which sat on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River. During the deathwatch, I would sit in the chair beside the window and stare outside at the opaque water sliding under the Henley Street Bridge.
At the door, Tommy pushed against his mother’s legs, trying to get to Archie, hollering, “Puppy, puppy, puppy, I wanna see the puppy!” I set him down just inside the door and those two were all over each other, swapping slobber, Archie’s tail a blur of white and brown, until the kid fell laughing onto his back and the dog jumped on his chest, swabbing the decks with his tongue. Felicia gave me a look.
“What?” I asked.
“Now, what do you think is going to happen when Buster has to leave?”
“His name is Archie.”
“He looks more like a Buster.”
“I didn’t name him.”
“Curse of the foster parent.”
“He doesn’t wag his tail for me,” I said.
“He’s going to eat the legs off my coffee table, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do, to tell the truth,” I said, watching Tommy and Archie frolic at our feet. “All he’s done with me is stare. Here’s his stuff.”
“Just set it there by the door.”
“Bob around?”
“No. Why?”
“Just wondering. You think I’ll ever meet Bob?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“You’d think I would have by now.”
“Do you want to meet him?”
“It’s like we’re Superman and Clark Kent: never in the same room together.”
“Which one would you say is Superman?”
“That’s funny, Lois.”
“You sure about this trip, Ruzak?” she asked.
I nodded. “There’s a reason Jumper took off right around the time Jack got killed. I find Jumper, I find the reason. I find the reason, I maybe find the killer.”
“You sound like Charlie Chan.”
“I’m a human being, Felicia.”
“Wasn’t Charlie?”
“I mean, I’m not a fictional character.”
“Who said you were a fictional character?”
“Nobody, but somebody implied it pretty strongly around four-thirty this morning.”
“Oh, Ruzak, a guest at forty-thirty? Who was it, that Amanda person?”
“Eunice Shriver.”
She cocked her head to one side and her nose crinkled.
“It was on the phone, Felicia,” I said. “Okay, I better hit the road. Archie, come here, boy.”
Archie ignored me. He had a grip on Tommy’s wrist and was play-growling deep in his throat. Tommy was laughing so hard that tears streamed down his face.
“Archie,” I said. “Come say good-bye to Daddy.”
“Daddy?” Felicia asked.
“All right,” I said. “That’s okay. He’s made a friend.”
I turned on the stoop to say good-bye, but the door was already closing. I saw Tommy on the floor, Archie squirming in his pudgy arms and Felicia fussing at both of them. Then she threw the deadbolt.
TWENTY-TWO
Johnson City, named for the seventeenth president, was situated in the far northeast corner of Tennessee, about one hundred miles north and a thousand feet higher than Knoxville, in an area alternately called the Tri-Cities (the other two being Bristol and Kingsport) and the “state of Franklin.” During the Civil War, this portion of the state seceded from the Confederacy and petitioned the Union to be admitted as a state, following the model of West Virginia. Johnson City, like Knoxville, was a college town, home to East Tennessee State University.
It had snowed over the weekend, the snow followed by a cold front that plunged the temperature into the teens. The hills encircling the city glistened pure white, but the snow piled beside the road and in the parking lots was that dirty-orange color that reminded me of deli mustard.
Holiday banners festooned the lampposts along State of Franklin Road, and the cars of Christmas shoppers packed the mall parking lot. This would be my first Christmas without family. Dad had a couple of brothers living in upstate New York, but I wasn’t close to my uncles. Dad had trouble getting along with family, though he never met a stranger he didn’t like.
I was thinking about that as I pulled into a space near the food court entrance to the mall: The focus of the season is family, but the thrust of Christmas, the point of the whole damn thing, is the stranger and the outcast, the anonymous losers living among us. Mary and Joseph bunked with animals in a barn and Jesus, who was God on earth after all, spent his first night in a food trough. When I was a teenager and the absurdity of this first hit me, I made the mistake of telling my mother, who was offended down to her Baptist shoestrings. I was convinced that we were worshipping a deity crazy as a bedbug and, if he was, what did that make us? She rewarded me with a slap across my mouth. Atheists and their fellow travelers point to Islamic terrorism as a wake-up call that we’d better abandon God or the biblical disasters attributed to him will pale in comparison to what we’ll end up doing to ourselves. In other words, God may not be dead, but keeping him alive endangers the human race.
I wondered if Jack’s killer was getting at something along those lines with the tetragrammaton. Maybe he wasn’t a religious fanatic at all. Maybe he was a psychotic atheist, though more people have justified their crimes by citing their love of God. In our time, the devil is out as the scapegoat. They say the 9/11 hijackers screamed “God is great!” right before they murdered three thousand people.
According to the Knoxville PD, Robert Matthews lived only a few blocks from the mall, but I had decided on the drive up not to attempt contact till later in the day. Odds were he’d be at work and I might get only one shot at this, since he might be harboring a fugitive. Plus, it was now after one o’clock and I was starving.
I ate at the Ruby Tuesday in the mall, then returned to my car and located the apartment complex where Robert lived or might live. I parked a couple of buildings away from his unit and commenced my surveillance. Gas was pushing three dollars per gallon, so I cut the engine and buttoned my coat up to my neck. Within an hour, I fell asleep.
TWENTY-THREE
Dusk was creeping in from the east when I woke up a couple hours later. It was so cold my nose had gone completely numb. I stepped out of the car and stamped my feet on the frozen pavement, and the sound of it was very loud in the frigid air. I was feeling a little spongy; there was no other word for it.
Robert Matthews lived in apartment 213 in Building C, and I trudged up the stairs to the second floor, unbuttoning my coat as I ascended: I didn’t want to be mistaken for a pervert, which I associated with men in buttoned-up overcoats.
I rapped on the door. I blew hard into my cupped hands. My knuckles had turned bright red. What if I had died of hypothermia in the Sentra? How long before somebody found me? It was a persistent worry since I moved from my parents’ house, that I would die alone in my apartment, and days would pass before somebody noticed I was missing. Now I had a dog, and what would that animal do if his owner fell over from a massive coronary or aneurysm and couldn’t put out th
e Alpo for a week? The thought was too terrible to contemplate.
The door opened and a woman in her late thirties, maybe, eyed me standing on the welcome mat.
“I’m looking for Robert Matthews,” I said.
“He’s not here.”
“But this is his address?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Teddy Ruzak.”
“Who’s Teddy Ruzak?”
“Me. I’m Teddy Ruzak. I’m a PI out of Knoxville and I’m trying to find his father.”
“His father doesn’t live here.”
Behind her, I could see a toddler with half his fist in his mouth, naked but for a diaper, his knees the color of charcoal.
“When will Robert be home?” I asked.
“Who is it, Liz?” a man called from inside.
Liz rolled her eyes and called over shoulder, “Somebody looking for Reggie!” She gave me the once-over and said, “He just got home.”
“Who?” He appeared behind her, wearing a grease-stained pair of overalls with his name stitched on the right breast: ROBERT.
“Teddy Ruzak,” I said. “How’s it going?”
He ignored the question. “Are you a cop?”
“He’s a PI,” Liz said.
“Technically, I’m an investigative consultant.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Robert asked. He had a small, pinched face, reminding me of those mammals that emerged from their primordial holes after the dinosaurs bit the dust.
“Basically it’s a reflection of the age we live in,” I said. “I’m a specialist.”
“What do you want with Reggie?”
“I think he might be involved in a murder.”
“Murder! You got some kind of ID or something?”
I handed my business card to him through the half-open door.
“‘Highly Effective,’” he read. “That what you are, highly effective?”
“Well, there’s good days and there’s bad days.”
He stared at me for a long moment. His wife was staring at him, and the toddler was staring at her. I stared at nothing and tried to look trustworthy.
“All right,” he finally said.
“Robert,” Liz said.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, and I followed them into the small family room with a sofa that had seen better days, worn carpeting, and cheap plastic vertical blinds over the sliding glass doors leading to the patio, where Fisher Price and Mattel were staging a major invasion. The kid, whose name I never caught, stared at me, gnawing on his knuckles, a dab of something the color of peanut butter on his knobby elbow. Robert offered for Liz to fetch me a beer. I thanked him, but I was still feeling a little spongy and asked instead for a cup of coffee. Liz left to brew some.
“Now, what’s this about Reggie?” he asked.
I gave him one of my flyers.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Robert murmured. He studied the picture. “This isn’t Reggie,” he said.
“No. It’s a man named Jack Minor. He was found murdered in an alley last month. Actually, I found him murdered in an alley last month.”
“There ain’t no way Reggie murdered anybody,” Robert said.
“Reggie ever mentioned Jack Minor to you? He may have used the name Cadillac.”
“I haven’t spoken to my father in eight years.”
“Is there a reason for that?”
“Oh, no. No reason. Just been real busy. Jesus Christ! What do you know about Reggie Matthews, Ruzak?”
“I know he’s been in and out of treatment centers, been arrested more than a couple of times, and likes the view from tall buildings. Down in Knoxville he’s called Jumper, though that’s a misnomer since I don’t think he’s actually ever jumped. And the most significant thing I know is your dad vanished around the same time his friend Jack Minor was murdered.”
Liz came in the room with a cup of coffee for me and a Miller Lite for Robert. She planted herself on the settee by the television. The kid picked up a stuffed bear and waddled over to me, holding it out.
“He wants you to hold it,” Liz said. I thanked him and pulled the bear into my lap. It was missing an arm, and the white stuffing bulged from the tear. There was something disturbing about that.
“Reggie ran out on me and my mom when I was twelve. Very seldom I’d get a postcard or a phone call, then about eight years ago he completely disappeared. I just thought he drank himself to death.”
“You didn’t know he was in Knoxville?”
“I didn’t know where the hell he was and I didn’t care. He was nothing to me.”
The little boy, emboldened by the big man with the red nose accepting his gift, commenced to bringing me other toys he scooped up from the floor, until I had a lapful.
“Okay, buddy, enough of that,” Liz told him, but he ignored her.
“What about other relatives? Brothers, sisters, cousins?”
“Nobody,” Robert said. “Nobody at all.”
“Why did he leave Johnson City?”
“He was never in Johnson City, far as I know. Me and Liz moved up here last year.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “Last time they arrested your dad, he listed this apartment as his address.”
His eyes narrowed over the neck of his bottle, and Robert said, “So?”
“So if you haven’t seen or heard from him in eight years …”
The kid, having relocated all the toys in the room to my lap, hoofed it down the hallway and disappeared into another room. Liz didn’t notice; she was watching Robert.
“He probably just gave them my name as the next of kin and they looked it up,” he said with a shrug.
Their boy returned with a toy rifle longer than he was and, face split wide with giggles, offered it to me. Liz fussed at him but I said it was okay, and leaned the rifle against the arm of the sofa. The kid barked a laugh and raced back down the hall.
“Was your dad very religious?” I asked.
“Was he what?”
“There’s a theological component to the crime,” I said. “Whoever killed Jack had some kind of obsession with God.”
“The only thing that obsessed Reggie was Jack Daniels.”
“How about you?”
“You think I didn’t learn my lesson? I never touch hard liquor.” He tucked his empty bottle between his thighs. His knuckles were encrusted with grease. If I were Liz, I wouldn’t let him near the furniture until he had showered and changed out of the grungy overalls.
“No, I meant how do you feel about God?”
“What is this? Are you a PI or a Jehovah’s Witness, Ruzak?”
“Neither.”
“Then why the hell are you here?”
“Well, that’s a good question and something I’ve been wrestling with. I’m a big guy, but no matter how big you are, there are some questions that’ll always be bigger. My gut tells me Reggie didn’t kill Jack Minor, but he may know who did and that’s why he took off. He’s afraid he’s next. So my theory is—to answer your question—my theory is, given your classic fight-or-flight response, Reggie has ‘gone to ground,’ to a place where he feels safe.”
“He wouldn’t be safe here,” Robert said. “I hate that sonofabitch’s guts.”
At that moment, his son reappeared, head, eyes, nose and cheeks hidden under my next present, fat little arms outstretched, stumbling along a little bowlegged toward me, until he bumped into the sofa and fell back on his diapered butt. Liz rose from the settee and moved toward him as he yanked the floppy brown hat from his round head and waved it toward me.
“Sorry,” Liz said to me.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking my hat from the child squirming in her arms.
“Nice hat,” I said.
TWENTY-FOUR
I drove to the lot on behind Robert Matthews’s apartment and parked on the backside of Building C. There was a six-foot space with a walkway between the buildings, so I could see the base of the stairs leading down from U
nit 213. Night had fallen, and the temperature could not have been much over twenty degrees. A hard freeze was coming.
I called Felicia’s number and got her voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message. Ten minutes later, my phone rang.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Sitting in my car. Hey, listen. I’m gonna be a little later getting back than I expected.”
“How much later?”
“An hour. Or a day. It depends.”
“On what?”
I told her. She asked, “Are you sure it’s your hat?”
“There’s a stain on the brim,” I said. “Mustard from a hotdog I had at Sonic. It’s my hat.”
“Do they know they’re busted?”
“I didn’t confront them about it, though maybe my reaction to the mustard stain gave me away. I don’t know; I’m not much of an actor.”
“He did it. Jumper. There’s no other reason to hide him.”
“Unless they’re protecting him from the killer.”
“Nope.”
“Why nope?”
“Twenty-five thousand reasons why nope, Ruzak.”
“For all they know I’m the killer—that was my line of thinking.”
“And the reward is the bait to lure the witness from his hole?”
“Right.”
“Hmmm. Robby doesn’t sound that sophisticated.”
“He’s a mechanic.”
“So?”
“So mechanics intuitively understand the principle of interlocking, moving parts. Anyway, I figured they needed time alone to debate the pros and cons of coming clean with me.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“Wait awhile for the call. I figure it’ll be sooner rather than later. How’s Archie?”
“He’s watching TV with Tommy. They’ve exhausted each other.”
“Any unnatural staring?”
“No, just the natural kind. Why?”
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 10