Thinking of Eunice brought on this panicky feeling in my gut, as if my own thoughts didn’t belong to me, and I tried to comfort myself with that old saw about fearing for your sanity confirms that you’re just fine, that crazy people never think they’re crazy. Going crazy wasn’t like coming down with a cold—but that was hardly comforting. I told myself I should be more myopic when it came to my understanding of reality. Most people are—painfully so. I suspected I was trying to keep too many balls in the metaphysical air. I couldn’t seem to discard even the most worthless bit of information, like the fact that Einstein’s brain weighed less than the average human’s. Or that the higher your IQ, the more zinc and copper are contained in your hair. Or that every day we fart out a pint of gas. There’s only so many neurons in the human brain (about a hundred billion), and I was loading them up with crap. What did it matter that blondes had more hair than brunettes or redheads? How was that going to help?
I had been sitting in that hallway for nearly an hour when the door opened and Meredith Black stepped out. I stood up.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He’s agreed to take a polygraph.”
“Why are you giving him a polygraph?”
“It’s SOP.”
“What about a sketch artist?”
“What about a sketch artist?”
“To get some composites of the guys who did this.”
She gave my forearm a reassuring pat. “One thing at a time, Mr. Ruzak. Look, this is going to take a while. Why don’t you let us give you a call when we’re done?”
I looked at my watch. “There is one thing I need to do,” I said. Something felt squirrelly about this, something about the set of this detective’s jaw, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Besides, if things got really hinky I was sure Reggie would demand to see a lawyer.
“Call me on my cell,” I told her.
“Of course,” she said. She flicked a smile at me as casually as a lifelong smoker flicks his Bic.
“Okay,” I said, not moving. “Okay, okay. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“It would be better,” she said, “if you waited for my call.”
THIRTY-ONE
The tetragrammaton,” I said to Dr. Heifitz, “is hardly common knowledge. You remember saying that?”
The harsh late-morning light of early December shone through the smudged window behind me, and the shadows of the bobble-headed icons were long on the credenza.
He gave a quick, impatient nod of his weathered pate.
“And what is your point, Mr. Ruzak?” he asked, shaking his dice; I could hear them clicking together inside his fist.
“I have a witness who says the killers were college-aged kids.”
“Killers? There was more than one?”
“Three young males.”
“And you suspect something along the lines of a Yahweh death cult?”
“Well, I wouldn’t rule out that possibility, though my witness says they behaved more like drunken rowdies than religious fanatics.”
“As I think I told you, Mr. Ruzak, I know of no sect or cult that specifically emphasizes ritual sacrifice in the name of Yahweh.”
“Right, and that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because there’s also a possibility that at least one of these young men, given the location of the crime and the ages of the perpetrators, was a college student.”
“Ah.” He leaned back in his chair, lacing his pale, thin fingers together in front of his chin. “Ah.”
“And not just your run-of-the-mill undergrad frat boy. Someone either with a background steeped in some pretty obscure religious esoterica or maybe—and that’s why I’m here—maybe someone who’s taken a few religion classes….”
“You’re asking me if I think one of my students could be involved.”
“You ever cover the tetragrammaton in class?”
He nodded slowly. “I have. It’s part of a graduate lecture series on Judaism offered every spring.”
He closed his eyes while I described the three guys Reggie saw, as if to better picture them in his mind. Then his eyes opened and he slowly shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ruzak. After thirty-five years of teaching, the faces begin to blend into a single amalgamation: Adam the undergrad, if you will.”
“So you don’t recollect any odd kind of kid maybe a little fixated on God?”
“Being fixated on God is not odd, Mr. Ruzak. Or if it is, most of us are odd, then. Ninety-six percent of Americans profess a faith in the deity.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that,” I said. “Though that’s one of those statistics that gives you hope and bums you out at the same time. If everybody is buying into the system, why is the system so troubled?”
“I,” he said, “am not troubled.”
“What do you think … how difficult would it be for me to get my hands on the class roster for last spring?”
“All our rosters contain personal information zealously guarded by the university, Mr. Ruzak.”
“You could black out the personal stuff,” I said. “I just need the names. Phone numbers would help, too.”
“I’ll have to get it from the registrar’s office. It might take a day or two.”
He showed me to the door. I turned at the threshold to confide, “I think I’m in that tiny percentage who can’t decide the question one way or the other.”
“I like to comfort myself in such times with the fact that it hardly matters.”
“How so?”
“If God exists, our belief or disbelief has no consequence.”
“I always heard it did, in terms of where we spend eternity. But that gives me some hope, Professor. You know, there’s this old lady who thinks I don’t exist, at least on the physical plane, that I’m a figment of her imagination.”
He showed me his large yellow teeth. “Perhaps I should pinch you.”
“I suffer, therefore I am? But it could be the pain is part of her creation, too.”
“It certainly is part of God’s,” he replied. “I thought all that was Adam’s fault.”
“Yet the creation is still God’s. If it isn’t, we’re in one helluva pickle, aren’t we, Mr. Ruzak?”
THIRTY-TWO
What do you think?” I asked Felicia. “When you’re eighty, will you be more or less anxious about eternity?”
“I think I’ll be damned tired. Where are you, Ruzak?”
“Stuck in traffic on the Pike.” Over two hours had passed since I left the police station and Detective Black still hadn’t called. Thinking maybe she had tried my home number, I retrieved my messages, but all I had was two hang-ups, which I was sure came from Unknown Caller, and a long sales pitch from a company in New Jersey, offering me a once-in-a-lifetime deal in stock futures. If I ever had real money, the first thing I’d do is dump it in the lap of a fancy-pants investment counselor with a single order to sink it so far out of my reach it would take a bulldozer to dig it out.
“Any idea when you might be by to get this animal? I don’t need a specific time, just an ETA before midnight.”
“Right after I pick up Reggie. They were setting up a polygraph when I left. It’s making me a little nervous.”
“How come?”
“They didn’t polygraph me.”
She laughed for some reason. I told her about my meeting with Dr. Heifitz. Then I told her about the hang-ups at home and Unknown Caller.
“You’re about to share a hypothetical,” she said.
“Here it is: three college kids on a drunk stumble across Jack and Reggie on Church Avenue. At least one of them attended the professor’s seminar on ancient Jewish apocrypha, and in a burst of regret or maybe just to toss in a red herring, cuts the tetragrammaton into the old guy’s forehead. But one of them, maybe the same one who cut God’s name, is having trouble dealing with what they’ve done, and one day sees my poster on campus. He calls my number, but then he can’t make himself say anything.”
“H
mmm,” she said, though “hmmm” isn’t technically a word. “Here’s an alternative hypo: Reggie got in a fight with Jack over your hat, killed him, and made up the whole story about the kids to cover his murderous ass.”
“I would hate to think my hat was the spark.”
“It’s in your hypo, too.”
“That part wasn’t hypothetical. Reggie said those guys wanted my hat.”
“It all boils down to your misplaced philanthropy.”
“But if you went through life avoiding unintended consequences, you’d never get a damn thing accomplished.” I lifted my foot off the brake pedal and inched forward about half a car length. Why did I come this way? If I had her number, I’d call Eunice Shriver and tell her to write me onto I-40. I wondered how people would behave if our theology contained a promise from God that he would answer just one prayer in their lifetime.
“Do you ever pray?” I asked Felicia.
“Every Saturday, right before they draw the lottery numbers.”
“I guess I do, just not formally. Sometimes, stuck in traffic like now, I go, ‘Please, oh please,’ and I guess that’s a kind of prayer.”
“Weird. I was having one of those this very moment. Please. Oh, please.”
“Okay,” I said. I promised I’d call as soon as I got Reggie back from the clutches of the curiously thorough Knoxville PD.
Forty-five minutes later, I was standing at the front desk signing in, when the double doors leading to the back swung open and the big-bellied Detective Kennard stuck his conical-shaped head through the opening.
“Ruzak!” he barked. He crooked his finger at me, but he didn’t step aside to let me pass.
“You may want to hang out here for a while,” he said. I smelled garlic on his breath. “He’s downstairs getting booked.”
Stupidly, I said, “Who’s getting booked?”
“Jumper. He says he wants to talk to you, but we gotta get him processed first.”
“Why did you arrest him?”
“He confessed.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Think so?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“You’re not listening, Ruzak. I just said after we process him.”
“I want to talk to Detective Black.”
“She’s at lunch.”
“It’s two-thirty in the afternoon.”
“Late lunch.”
He waited for me to say something else. I didn’t have something else to say. He left and I sat in the small waiting area and flipped through an old People magazine while I waited. Ten pages were devoted to Oscar Night’s fashion flubs.
What now? Dear God, what now? Had I read it all wrong? He did run when Jack died, but why would he come back if he was guilty? Did he figure if some thickheaded out-of-work PI could track him down, the Knoxville PD certainly could? Maybe they showed him the crime scene photos and he collapsed in a paroxysm of remorse. His relationship with his son wasn’t peachy, to say the least. He must have known if he showed up on his stoop fessing up to murder, Robert would probably turn him in, so he invented the drunk-frat-boys story as cover.
A uniformed officer escorted me to the visitors’ room. Reggie was waiting on the other side of the glass, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, the receiver already pressed to his ear.
I picked up the receiver on my side and said, “What happened?”
“They arrested me, Ruzak, what do you think happened?”
“Did you kill him, Reggie?”
He stared at me for ten agonized seconds, and then began to cry and laugh, both at once, and I noticed for the first time that Reggie Matthews was missing most of his teeth.
“Just don’t tell Bobby,” he cried. “Don’t tell my boy. It’ll break his heart, Ruzak. It’ll break his heart.”
And that’s all I got from Reggie Matthews, besides the mixture of laughter and tears, and I thought of those mammoth, gravity-defying roller coasters, the ones where your feet dangle in empty space as your body is whipped and spun around, and you worry about your wallet falling out of your back pocket, and the way we scream through that controlled fall, the one we normally endure, when you think about it, with someone we love by our side.
THIRTY-THREE
Detective Black closed the door to her office and, as she passed me on the way to her chair, I caught a whiff of her perfume, causing a swelling in my nasal cavities.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He confessed.”
“And you believe him?”
“Of course not, but I decided to arrest him anyway.”
“Detective Black—”
“Please, call me Meredith.”
“Okay, Meredith … nobody could ever accuse me of being the most logical person who ever came down the pike, but the ‘why’s’ don’t make any sense to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Either his confession is true or it isn’t. If it is true, why did he come down here today? If it isn’t true, why would he lie?”
She stared at me for a second before answering. “The only thing I know, Mr. Ruzak, is Reggie Matthews admitted to taking a piece of two-by-four to Jack Minor’s head.”
“He didn’t have to come,” I said. “I didn’t tie him up and drive him over here in my trunk. Why would he make a big show of cooperating and then confess to murder? But if he is innocent, what happened in that room after I left which would make him confess to a capital crime?”
“Boy,” she said. “You got me. We did show him the crime scene photos. After that, he broke down and told us the truth.”
“The truth.”
“The truth,” she repeated, nodding.
“He beat his best friend to death.”
“That’s right.”
“Over my hat,” I said.
“He didn’t say what started the argument.”
“Then Reggie took a broken piece of glass and carved God’s initials into Jack’s forehead.”
She shrugged. “We didn’t discuss that.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think it does.”
“Well, you’re not the lead detective on the case, are you?”
“Something’s wrong here,” I said.
“No, something has finally gone right here. Solving a crime is what we detectives call a good thing.”
“Unless the solution is based on a coerced confession.”
“I take great offense at that, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Well, I take great offense at this whole setup. I could see two buddies having a falling out. I could even see Reggie beating him—though it goes against my gut; Reggie doesn’t strike me as the violent type—but I can’t see him mutilating the body like that. For one thing, I don’t think Reggie Matthews knows Yah-weh from a hole in the ground.”
She didn’t say anything. The teeth were out, though.
I went on. “I haven’t been a detective very long, not even a year. Well, I was never really a detective beyond the most generic definition of the word, but don’t the elements of a crime have to fit into its solution?”
“Mr. Ruzak, there are some elements to every crime that remain mysteries.”
“You people pushed him. You wore him down. That’s why you got me out of that room.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you Mr. Matthew’s attorney? Are you related to the suspect in any way? You’re not a detective, you just told me that, so who are you, and what is your business in this case?”
“I just want Jack’s killer,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
“Me, too. And I think I got him. You may think otherwise, and on that we’ll just have to agree to disagree, Mr. Ruzak, and let a court of law decide who’s right. In the meantime, maybe you can use that twenty-five thousand dollars you saved today to hire an attorney for Mr. Matthews. Since you’re so convinced of his innocence.”
“I’m not convinced of anything,” I said, rising from my chair. “Exce
pt this: If Reggie Matthews is innocent and you guys are innocent, there’s only one reason he’d confess to a crime he didn’t commit.”
I made for the door, walking on the balls of my feet, like a sprinter cooling down from a dash, strangely lightheaded, with a tingling in my fingertips.
“What’s the reason?” she called after me.
“Fear,” I said.
THIRTY-FOUR
I called Felicia from the car. I got her voice mail. I left a message.
“Hey. It’s me. Ruzak. Teddy. You know … hey, Reggie confessed. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I’m pretty sure he pulled this for a little protective custody. Maybe he’s thinking he can recant at any point and they’ll have to let him go. Or maybe he is guilty and I’m just plucking at straws because I can’t let this go. Anyway, I thought if you were around I could pick up the dog. Thanks. Okay. I’ll be at my place. ’Bye.”
The cold front had followed me down from Johnson City; the temperature hovered around twenty and the radio warned of a hard freeze coming. Everything, from the traffic lights to the naked branches of the dogwoods, had that terrible stillness, that sharply etched quality of a photograph that made you feel like a voyeuristic interloper in a landscape at once familiar and alien, like a lonely man looking at a picture of a beautiful woman.
A small figure in a worn gray coat was huddled on the stoop of the Sterchi Building as I pulled into the lot. I wondered why she didn’t wait in her car; she could at least keep warm that way.
“Eunice,” I said, my six-foot-five frame towering over her small, gray, bent-backed lump. “Eunice, what are you doing?”
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 13