“Saw they caught the bastards,” he said.
I nodded. “They did.”
He trailed behind me as I trudged up the walk toward the entrance.
“You oughta take a look at the alley.”
“Why?”
“They cleaned it up. Put up some little tables. Looks like the outside of a little French bistro back there now.”
“That’ll be nice when the weather warms up.”
He hovered beside me at the door. I wasn’t sure what he wanted.
“You don’t have to work on Christmas, do you?” I asked. He shook his head. “Naw. Gotta scramble tonight, though—still don’t have all my shopping done.”
“Me either.”
I went upstairs, past the dry cleaners, three flights up to my door, where someone had posted a sticky note on the frosted glass: Mr. Ruzak please call me. I need your help. I didn’t recognize the name. There was a small pile of mail on the floor below the slot. I scooped it up and dropped it on Felicia’s desk. It was cold inside; my breath fogged around my head as I went into my office. A fine patina of dust covered the desk, the globe in the corner, the bookcase with the full leather-bound set of the Tennessee Rules of Evidence that Felicia had mail-ordered to give my shelves some gravitas.
The blinds were drawn. Funny, I couldn’t remember doing that. I pulled the thin cord to open them and stared out the window to the alley three stories below. The glass fogged with the impression of my breath, evidence of my autonomy: take that, Eunice Shriver!
In an instant, scientists tell us (in theory born in the mind of a priest), the universe spontaneously burst into existence, spewing out the matter that would form you and me a few billion years later, after violent cataclysms, stars and proto-planets smashing into each other, after mass extinctions and millions of years of evolution, the arrival of Teddy Ruzak in this moment, slouching in his rumpled overcoat, scrubbing his three-day-old beard with the back of his hand, standing before a foggy window slightly pigeon-toed, with a crooked nose and a bent walk, a triumph of Nature’s inscrutable design, the current occupant in this empty space, at once obscure and of paramount import.
It was like I told Angela: I knew the who, the what, and the where. It was the why, the motive. Someone once said we were here because the universe needed a way to look at itself. We were Creation’s eyes.
I closed the blinds and turned from the window. I knew these rooms like the back of my hand, but that didn’t change the fact that I was still in the dark.
I had solved the case but not the mystery.
FORTY-EIGHT
I stopped at the Barnes & Noble, then doubled back to Middlebrook Pike. The home was maybe five miles from the bookstore, and it took me forty-five minutes to get there, the traffic was so bad.
The receptionist at the desk took my name and told me to have a seat, and another ten minutes crawled by. Here’s Ruzak again, putting in his time, filling his quota. Finally, an attendant wearing hospital-type gear, including the soft-soled shoes and scrublike top, escorted me to a room they called the Solarium. The lighting was weak and washed out, a feeble, whispery-thin light; maybe the room was more solariumish in the summers.
Eunice Shriver was sitting in a rocking chair by a door marked FOR HOSPICE PERSONNEL ONLY. All the window seats were taken. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’d always been meticulous about her makeup, and now I saw her for the first time without it. They had taken her wig away, too, and her natural hair was thin and wispy. I could see her irregularly shaped, bone-white scalp. She was wearing a purple terrycloth robe and matching slippers.
“Well,” she said as I pulled up a chair. “Look what the cat drug in.”
“Merry Christmas, Eunice,” I said. I pulled the Barnes & Noble bag out of my coat pocket.
“What’s that?”
“It’s for you. Sorry, I didn’t have it wrapped.”
She peeked into the bag, pursing her lips.
“It’s a journal,” I said. “And also a pen. See, the cap has an S on it.”
“Why an S?”
“S for your name.”
“My name is Eunice.”
“I know. The S is for Shriver. They didn’t have an E pen. I looked.”
“Well. Thank you, Theodore.” She laid the bag on her lap.
“I didn’t know if they allowed you to have your computer or typewriter or whatever it is you use to write, so I thought you could use this journal.”
“Yes, so you did.”
“What, you don’t want to write anymore?”
“Oh, I finished the book.”
“You did?”
“And I have several publishers interested in it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I most certainly am not kidding. I shall use a pen name, of course.”
“Why?”
“Did Poe use his real name? Did Conan Doyle?”
“Actually, I think they did.”
“I picked the name of a local author, though this person’s quite obscure, something just shy of a hack, so I’m certain they won’t mind.”
“What’s her name? So I know where to look in the bookstore.”
She told me. I said, “Eunice, that’s a man’s name.”
“Ever hear of George Eliot?”
“No.”
“Well, there you have it.”
“Did you change my name too?”
“Dear heavens, why would I do that?”
“So I wouldn’t sue you for libel.”
She laughed. Even her eyes seemed washed out in this room of dying light. Ah, Christ, Eunice! Ah, Christ, light! I was gripping the arms of my chair, hard. Something was definitely stuck in my craw. But every time I tried to trap it or tamp it down, it skittered away.
Across the room, beside the upright piano against the wall, a five-foot Christmas tree stood, wrapped in gold tinsel and festooned with red and silver balls. An angel sat on the top, listing to one side so she appeared to be cocking her head toward the ground while she strummed her harp, trying to keep time with an earthly rhythm section. It occurred to me that any attempt to straddle the divide was doomed to failure. The distance between faith and reason was widening, and the time had come to pick sides.
“Eunice,” I said. “Do you ever get scared?”
“Why should I be scared?”
“I mean, you must think about it. You know it can’t be much longer. Do you think once it’s done, it’s done and there’s nothing afterward? Like those crash tests when the car hits the wall. I guess that’s it. Is it a wall or is it an open door, or like a—like some kind of—I don’t know, like a porous membrane, opaque but—but through it we shall pass? Because here’s the problem as I see it: If it is a wall, then you’ll never know you were wrong.”
“I would prefer not to,” she said.
“But what I’m asking … what I’m trying to get at … Eunice, are you ever afraid? It won’t be long before you’ll either meet oblivion or its utter opposite. I’m sure you’ve thought about it.”
“I do not worry about what’s next, Theodore. I worry about what’s left.”
“So ‘What’s next?’ is a pointless question because it can’t be answered?”
“Well, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to answer it, has it?”
“That’s the rub, I guess. In my line of work, you gotta go where the evidence leads you. Take something along the lines of three drunk college kids murdering a mentally incompetent homeless man. What’s that evidence of? We all have a destiny, and Jack’s is to be beaten to death and dumped on a pile of garbage? Or Jack is being punished for some grand transgression, either in this life or another? Or God gave these boys free will so they could murder a harmless old man just for the hell of it, just because they could? Don’t all these possibilities point away from an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful Presence and toward that wall, and we’re the dummies behind the wheel?”
She stared at me for a long moment.
&n
bsp; “Oh, Theodore,” she said. “You’re so marvelously inept, so hopelessly lost. How I love you.”
She placed a withered hand over mine and gave it a squeeze.
“Here’s what it is,” she said, squeezing. “Here’s what it is,” squeezing, “and I am so happy, so very grateful that you are mine.” Squeezing.
The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs Page 20