“A corroborating witness to what?”
“Reggie’s story.”
“Which one, the one he told you or the one he told us?”
“The first one.”
“The one about the three college kids who committed murder just for the heck of it?”
“Right. That one.” I filled her in on Unknown Caller. “I’m meeting her tomorrow night at World’s Fair Park.”
“Well, let me know how that goes.”
“You don’t want in on it?”
“I would definitely want in on it if there was anything to be in on.”
“Don’t you think that might make the being in on it difficult if you’re not there?”
“I appreciate the offer, Mr. Ruzak, but at this point we’re satisfied we’re in on the only story that matters.”
“How come?”
“Because nobody in Reggie’s position would confess to something he didn’t do, Mr. Ruzak.” It was taking some effort, I could tell, for her to remain civil.
“That’s exactly why he confessed,” I said.
“Why is exactly why?”
“His position. He doesn’t trust his son to keep him safe—it wasn’t hard for even someone like me to find him. And he didn’t trust me to keep him safe. So he confesses to you, knowing you’ll lock him up, which gives me time to find the real killers.”
“Wow. That’s a heck of a theory. A man risks life in prison because he’s afraid he might lose his life out of prison.”
She was right: It was a heck of a theory, but no theory is perfect. Look at all the holes in Darwin’s.
“He’s hunkered,” I said. “He figures he might as well hunker in jail where he’ll be safe while he waits for this to play out. He can recant at any time, and then what do you have? There’s nothing else tying him to the crime.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“Just because you’re a semisuicidal homeless alcoholic doesn’t mean you’re not smart.” I didn’t tell her I had sort of planted the seed of this idea. She might perceive it as bragging.
DECEMBER 8
THIRTY-NINE
World’s Fair Park, situated between the University of Tennessee campus and downtown Knoxville, was built in 1982. There’s a pavilion and an amphitheater set amid acres of rolling green park. The nearly three-hundred-foot-tall Sunsphere near the center of the original park dominates the landscape downtown, with its shiny gold dome sitting atop its Eiffel-Tower-like scaffolding. For years there was a restaurant at the top, but they closed it down; I’m not sure why.
At seven-forty, I was standing at the base of the sphere, wearing my mustard-stained floppy hat and my trench coat, both hands stuffed into the pockets. In the left was Professor Heifitz’s class roster. In the right, the .45-caliber gun I bought from Wal-Mart, back when I naïvely thought I had a fighting chance to become a real detective, before I flunked the PI exam, before the state shut me down for flunking, before I found Jack Minor’s mutilated corpse in the alley when all I wanted to accomplish that day was rescue some ferns.
I could hear the traffic along Cumberland Avenue, the main drag through campus, and see the flickering headlamps of the cars on the interstate. To the west, I guessed from the apartments across the street from the museum, a dog barked, a clipped, hard-edged sound in the frigid air.
At a quarter after eight, she still hadn’t shown. I decided to give her another ten minutes. It couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes later when the first blow landed between my shoulder blades. I stayed on my feet, stumbling forward a couple of steps. Behind me, I heard the scraping of shoes against concrete. The second blow landed in the lower back, a kidney punch that dropped me to my knees. My hands came out when I went down, to brace my fall. Kneeling, I fumbled in my pocket for the gun, and took the next blow at the base of the skull. I pitched forward, meeting the concrete with my nose. I heard a crunch and tasted blood rising from the back of my throat. Much warmer than the surrounding air, the blood steamed as it hit the pavement, pouring from my broken nose.
A hand grabbed my right wrist and yanked it up to the base of my neck. I howled. A knee pressed into the small of my back and I felt the warmth of someone’s breath in my ear.
“You want to be next?” a male voice hissed. “That what you want, motherfucker?”
The fingers of his free hand dug into my hair and yanked my head back. I swallowed a wad of blood and snot.
“Don’t fuck with us, Ruzak. We know where you live.”
He shoved my face straight down. I managed to twist my head just in time, so my left cheekbone hit first and not my smashed nose. All I accomplished with that maneuver, though, was a smashed cheekbone.
He released me. I pushed myself up. Then he kicked me in the ribs, and the toe of his shoe wasn’t soft, like a sneaker, but hard, like a reinforced work boot or steel-plated cowboy boot.
I flopped back down, gun completely forgotten, clutching my side. I suspected he’d broken a rib.
“Stay down, Ruzak,” he said softly.
I took a few deep breaths and pushed myself back up. He kicked me again, twice, taking care to hit me in the same spot, where he could cause the most pain.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Stay down.”
I started to get back up. He snorted with frustration, a kind of hiccupping laugh, and let me have it again, until I heard another crunching sound and felt a stabbing pain deep inside my chest. I wondered if a rib had punctured my lung. My vision was clouding, but I tried to get up.
“Moron,” he said, and commenced to kick again. My legs moved against the ground, propelling me forward, like a Marine in an obstacle course. He must have kept pace beside me, because he managed to land his kicks in the same spot each time.
“Give up, why doncha? Why doncha just give up?”
One last time I tried to rise. He wasn’t expecting it and missed the spot in my side, hitting instead my solar plexus. I collapsed, writhing and gasping for air, but hung onto consciousness long enough to hear his last words before darkness overwhelmed me.
“Nice hat,” he said.
FORTY
I had a very odd dream in which I was a dog. I’m assuming I was Archie, because I was sitting on my kitchen floor watching my human self peel a carrot. As I stared, the carrot began to squirm and wriggle, growing fatter and longer until it morphed into a rattlesnake as thick as my arm. I kept working as the snake whipped about, peeling off the skin, long glistening strands of it falling into the sink as its blood ran down my forearms. The snake’s mouth came open, revealing three-inch fangs. The human-me just kept peeling. The dog-me barked.
I woke up in a hospital bed, an IV line snaking from my arm. Someone stirred in the chair beside me, rose, and came to stand beside the bed. I smelled White Diamonds.
“Hi, Ruzak,” Felicia said. “How do you feel?”
“Floaty.”
“You have Demerol in your drip.”
“Oh. It’s pretty good stuff…. How bad is it?”
“Not too bad. A fractured rib, a broken nose, a few lacerations here and there. You’ll live.”
I eased my hand to my face and touched the bandages over my nose.
“I was bushwhacked,” I said.
Her eyes seemed very large in the subdued lighting of the hospital room. She had pulled her hair back, but I couldn’t tell if it was in a bun or a ponytail. As the year had grown old, Felicia’s hair had grown darker. She had begun the year a Dolly Parton blonde. Now the color was nearing a Penelope Cruz brown.
“You were lucky,” she said. “Lucky he didn’t kill you and lucky we got to you as soon as we did. You might have gone into hypothermia.”
“Got to me?”
“I figured you’d call me. So when I didn’t hear from you, I called you. When I couldn’t reach you, I called Bob—he’s on duty tonight and the station’s only about a half mile from the park.”
“Bob found me?”
She nodded, smiling, and
her nose crinkled in the middle.
“You said you wanted to meet him, remember?”
“He didn’t have to do anything like mouth-to-mouth, did he?”
She laughed and shook her head. “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”
“Would he?”
She laughed again. “Anyway, I didn’t want you to wake up by your lonesome.”
She laid her hand on my forearm, just below the IV. Her hand was cold.
“Did you get a good look at him?” she asked.
“No. He jumped me from behind.”
“Well, it’s a helluva price to pay, Ruzak, but at least now we know you were right about Reggie.”
At that moment, the door swung open and Detective Black strode into the room. Felicia removed her hand from my arm.
“Well, Mr. Ruzak,” Detective Black said. Her nose was bright red and the color was high in her cheeks.
“I was right about Reggie,” I told her.
She showed me her teeth in what I took for Meredith Black’s version of a noncommittal smile.
“Hello,” she said, turning to Felicia. “I’m Detective Meredith Black with the Knoxville PD.”
“This is Felicia, my secretary. Well, technically, my former secretary.”
“Girl Friday and dog-sitter,” Felicia corrected me.
“Oh,” Meredith said.“Nice.” She turned back to me. “Feel up to giving me a statement?”
“I better go,” Felicia said.
“Okay.” Meredith smiled in her general direction.
“Why don’t you stay?” I asked. I looked at Meredith. “I got an armful of Demerol and I have trouble organizing my thoughts in the best of circumstances.”
“I don’t understand,” Meredith said.
“I think Teddy wants me to stick around, as a kind of interpreter,” Felicia said.
“He seems lucid to me.”
“Appearances can be deceiving,” Felicia said. “I used to think he was pretty smart.”
“It really doesn’t matter to me,” Meredith said. She slipped into the chair Felicia had vacated and dug a tape recorder from her purse. It was a very large, tote-sized purse.
“Here’s the deal,” I began, and brought the Knoxville PD up to snuff. Felicia hung by the door, arms folded over her chest. If Bob was working, I wondered, where was Tommy? And what about my dog?
“So I guess this girl was a no-show,” Meredith said.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t there.”
“And she didn’t give you a name over the phone?”
“If she had given me a name over the phone, I wouldn’t have set up the meeting in the park.”
“Seems an awfully convoluted way to go about it,” Meredith observed. “And risky. Luring you to a public place like that. Why not jump you in the parking lot under the Sterchi?”
“Well, I really can’t answer that,” I answered. “I’m not in his head.”
“My point is, why would they arrange something so elaborate and risky just to send you a message to back off? All these calls basically an act to lure you over there tonight? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not much has since I found him,” I said, meaning Jack.
“I’m just wondering if there’s an element to this you’ve left out.”
“I don’t think so….”
“You’re asking me to believe that the three people involved in this crime, if there were three people, involved a fourth person in their conspiracy to commit an act that blows any chance they have of getting off scot-free.”
I thought about what she said. Then I asked, “Huh?”
“Reggie’s confession was reported in the newspaper. Odds are they know somebody’s taking the fall for them. Why would they do something which sends the message we got the wrong guy?”
“I don’t know. All I know is my nose is broken.”
“Maybe this has nothing to do with the death of Jack Minor,” Meredith Black said.
“How couldn’t it?”
“I think only you could answer that question, Mr. Ruzak.”
From across the room, Felicia exploded.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, I’m not believing this! He’s had the living shit beat out of him; he might have frozen to death out there tonight; and you’re sitting there accusing him of lying about the whole thing! Where do you people get off? Ruzak’s got a lot of problems, God knows, but one of them isn’t dishonesty. He’s the most honest person I’ve ever known.”
“It isn’t a matter of Mr. Ruzak’s honesty,” Meredith snapped back. “It’s a matter of consistency and logic.”
“Well,” I said. “Those two things do happen to be problems.”
“Shut up, Ruzak,” Felicia said. “Why are you giving in to this …” She started to call her a name, then backed off. “… person?” She turned back to Meredith. “It is consistent and it is logical. I don’t think it was a setup. Or it didn’t become a setup until after the last phone call. I think she’s a girlfriend of one of these guys. He told her about Jack, then one day she sees Ruzak’s poster on campus. She starts calling him, but she can’t bring herself to say anything until yesterday.”
“Why?” Meredith asked. Her tone was sharp, but she was smiling, ever the biter.
“Why the hell does why matter? Maybe she really loves the guy and doesn’t want to see him go to jail for the rest of his life. Maybe she’s scared—she told Ruzak he would kill her—maybe she’s both, in love and scared, and then she finds out an innocent man is going to pay for something her boyfriend did and that finally makes her talk.
“Look, this isn’t brain surgery. All you have to do now is take that list and go through the names. Because his name is on that list. His or one of the other’s or maybe all three. There’s no other reason he’d do this. You wanted to know why he risked it—that’s why.”
“It isn’t a long list,” I said. “Twenty-seven names, twenty of which are male.”
“Don’t make us do it,” Felicia said to Meredith.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t make me and Ruzak go down that list. Can you imagine what the Sentinel would do with that story, how the Knoxville PD sat on its ass while some boneheaded loser PI who isn’t even a PI caught the real killers?”
Meredith looked down at my broken face. I said, “She never wanted me involved in this.” The remark about the boneheaded loser PI stung, but I knew Felicia was just driving home a point.
DECEMBER 9
FORTY-ONE
My breakfast the next morning was surprisingly good for a hospital. Eggs, toast, two pancakes, and a glass of orange juice. I asked the lady who brought the food when I could go home, and she said as soon as the doctor cleared me. So I ate my breakfast and waited for the doctor. I studied the IV in my arm and worried about a staph infection; a hospital really is the worst place to be sick: The longer you stay, the higher your odds of getting seriously ill from something that had nothing to do with your being there.
Felicia called to check on me.
“I don’t know when I can leave,” I said to her, half complaining, half explaining.
“Can you get a ride home?” she asked, which I took to mean she couldn’t be that ride. Probably something to do with Tommy, or Bob, or both—or neither. There were whole areas of Felicia’s life that I knew nothing about.
“I’ll figure something out,” I said. “You probably saved my life last night, and I don’t think I thanked you.”
“Was that a thanks?”
“More of a lead-in. Thank you. And make sure you thank Bob for me.”
“It couldn’t have worked out better,” Felicia said. She sounded tired, and I wondered how much sleep she had gotten the night before. “Now that our pal Meredith has the list.”
“What if the list proves to be a dead end?”
“Ruzak, at some point you have to say enough.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t, though, as long as Reggie’s
behind bars.”
“You have more important things to do, like studying for your PI exam.”
“Right. Um.”
“Right um’?”
“Well, sometimes circumstances force you to look at things with a fresh eye.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning maybe detective work and I aren’t a good fit.”
“If you really mean that, why are you thinking about doing more with this case?”
“I’m not sure how much that has to do with me being a detective.”
“Oh, Christ. You’re so …”
“Boneheaded?”
“You’re sore about that.”
“Alittle.”
“I was trying to make a point, that’s all.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“It has its advantages, you know. Being a bonehead.”
“Name one.”
The silence that ensued weighed on us both. Finally, I said, “I’m worried about Archie.”
“Archie’s fine. I swung by your apartment on the way home and picked him up.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I took your keys.”
“So how will I get in?”
“Turn the knob. I didn’t lock it. Your keys are on the kitchen counter.”
“So Archie’s with you?”
“Until you come by and get him. And the sooner, the better, Ruzak.”
There weren’t too many names on my list of people I could count on to give me a ride. I called the Humane Society. “I’m in the hospital,” I told Amanda.
“What happened?”
“A bad guy jumped me.”
“Oh, my God! Are you okay?”
“Well, the doctor just came through and said I could go home.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“Not yet, but they have his name.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just said they had his name.”
“They have his name on a list.”
“Dear Jesus, how many people attacked you?”
“It’s kind of a long story. The reason I’m calling is I need a lift back to my apartment.”
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 16