“You’re right. His head must be really spinning right now.”
“Well, somebody’s head certainly is.”
“My point is, he won’t know if this is something she told me or something I observed or even something somebody else told me. It’s equally plausible he won’t interpret it as a lie, but as a mistake. That I just got it wrong. Misidentified Trace as the lover.” Except I threw in that one pivotal word: verified. I gulped my iced tea, hoping to cool off the burning sensation in my cheeks.
“Six years into our marriage, Tom became convinced I was having an affair,” she said. “I wasn’t, but that little fact was completely irrelevant. Like a lot of cheating husbands, he could rationalize his behavior, while holding his wife to the strictest standards of fidelity. He followed me. He monitored my phone calls. He hired an obnoxious detective to shadow my every move. He threatened to divorce me, throw me out into the street without a penny, even hinted he might hurt me.”
“Hurt you?” I asked. “Hurt you how?”
“Well, let’s see. He said if I ever left him, he would throw hydrochloric acid in my face.”
“Ouch. If that’s a hint, I’d hate to know what you’d call a threat. So you’re thinking … what? What are you thinking? That this might put Kinsey in a really bad spot?”
“ “I could care less what spot it puts that little slut in.”
“Oh, good,” I said, which struck me as an oddly inappropriate response. “Well, I thought I should let you know in case he says something about it. I don’t want you to be blindsided.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a good question,” I said.
“Followed by a lousy answer.”
“You did fire me,” I acknowledged. “But the Falks offer threw a monkey wrench into the works.” Again with the monkeys. Why did they keep popping up? “Plus, I’m probably a little too soft-hearted for my own good. Sometimes for anybody’s good.”
“I don’t need your pity, Mr. Ruzak.”
“It’s not pity per se,” I protested. “More like this general sense of obligation to anyone going through a rough time.”
“I’m going to be fine,” she said, and her voice broke when she said it. “It’s just I could deal with it a lot better if it was a meaningless fling like all the others. That’s what hurts.”
“How do you know it isn’t, though? Meaningless.”
“I found love poems in his sock drawer.”
“To Kinsey?”
“No, to Trace Michelson, the gay guy. Jesus! Very bad poetry, which surprised me; Tom’s a better writer than that. Extolling her virtues and singing praises to certain portions of her anatomy, and I’m not talking about her eyes and hair.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” I said. “If he was so much in love, why did he wait until my call to leave you for her?”
“How the hell should I know? He’s a fucking man. Maybe it’s called having your cake and eating it, too.”
“We’re not monogamous by nature,” I said, careful not to sound too defensive. “It’s sort of an artificial construct.”
“Weird. You don’t know how much you sounded like Tom just now.”
I felt strangely flattered. “Well,” I said. “I do happen to be an effing man.”
She laughed too long and too loud.
“Where are you right now?” she asked. “I hear people talking.”
“The Tomato Head in Market Square.”
“By yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Tom’s on his way over to pick up some of his things and I don’t want to be here when he does.” She hung up before I could say anything, not that I had anything in particular to say.
My food came. I was used to eating alone, but I didn’t think Katrina Bates was, so I decided to wait until she came so she wouldn’t have to. The waiter came by and refilled my iced tea. A couple of tables turned over. Twenty minutes went by and still no Katrina. My roast beef sandwich rested before me, at once beckoning and forlorn. Eat me, Ruzak, eat me. I nibbled on some tortilla chips. I started to dial her cell number, then stopped. Maybe she’d changed her mind. Maybe Tom had showed up and she’d gotten waylaid. I figured maybe I should eat my sandwich before my blue cheese dressing went bad and gave me botulism. It was one thing to risk serious gastrointestinal complications for a dear friend or for a loyal secretary and coconspirator in my illegal detection operation, like Felicia; it was quite another to risk it for someone I hardly knew and who had fired me besides, cutting off an important cash conduit to fund my illegal detection operation.
So, not knowing what to do after another ten minutes had passed, I called Felicia and explained my dilemma.
“I would eat my sandwich and go,” she said. “What do you owe Katrina Bates?”
“I just don’t want to heap yet another one on her.”
“Heap another what?”
“Rejection.”
“Oh, brother. Are you aspiring to sainthood, Ruzak?”
“I’m not Catholic,” I said. “Dad was, but Mom would rather have slit her Baptist wrists than see me receive the Sacrament. But I think I read somewhere you don’t have to be Catholic to get the nod. And that makes sense in the theological scheme of things. God doesn’t play favorites, you know, causing the rain to fall upon the just but not the just. But you could also argue that by God, God does. Look at Moses and David and all those other reluctant prophets and kings.”
“Why do you do that? Why do you take every question so seriously, like you’re being interviewed by Time magazine?”
“Maybe it’s practice. Because I’m hoping, deep down, at some point, I might be newsworthy enough to be interviewed by Time magazine.”
“That reminds me. Time magazine called. They want to interview you.”
“Okay. Some things we should keep to ourselves.” I looked at my watch. Thirty minutes now. The lunch crowd was thinning out. The waiter came by with my fourth refill. By this point, between the sugar and the caffeine, my head and stomach were feeling bloated and soggy.
“Call her,” Felicia said. “Explain it’s nothing personal, but you’ve got to get back to the office. You have important work to do for people who still happen to be your clients. Nothing personal. No offense.”
“Have you noticed that?” I asked. “When somebody is about to say something guaranteed to offend you, the person always prefaces it with ‘No offense, but …’?”
“No, I never noticed, but now I know and it’ll come in handy, knowing that. … Oh, Ruzak?”
“Yeah?”
“No offense, but maybe you’re not staying there out of the goodness of your heart, but out of the yearning of your loins.”
“I don’t find her attractive,” I protested. “She’s too …” I conjured up a mental picture of Katrina Bates. What was excessive? “Too coarse.”
“ ‘Coarse’?”
“She uses the F word. And she makes references to wick dipping.”
Felicia laughed, for some reason. “Has it ever occurred to you, Ruzak, that you might be just a tad too tender for detective work? Don’t answer that,” she added quickly. “Forget I asked.”
“And something else,” I said. “The lie.”
“Whose lie?”
“The file’s lie. ‘K.B. having illicit liaison with BF.’ It didn’t hit me until after I gave the file to Dresden Falks that ‘K.B.’ could be interpreted or misinterpreted as Katrina Bates. It didn’t occur to me; now it’s too late. He could think I meant his wife, not his girlfriend.”
“So?”
“So Katrina said he threatened her before when he thought she was having an affair.”
“Threatened her how?”
“With acid, and there’s this, not her so much as a principle I was talking about just yesterday. You can’t save everybody, but you can refrain from hurting people. You can add your light to the sum of light.”
“Jesus?”
“No. I think it was the guy who wrote War and Peace.”
“You’ve read War and Peace?”
“That would surprise you?”
“So you haven’t read War and Peace.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you had, you would have said ‘Yes, Felicia, as a matter of fact, I have read War and Peace.’ ”
“Maybe I reacted to the implication there that somehow not reading War and Peace diminishes me as a human being.”
“That was an inference,” she said. “You just didn’t strike me as a War and Peace kind of guy.”
“Well, I am.”
“So you did read it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You have it in you. You have the potentiality for it. If there’s anybody who hasn’t read it but who’s an excellent candidate to one day read it, it would be you.”
“Right,” I said. “Something along those lines.”
“I’m hanging up, Ruzak. Finish your sandwich and get back to the office. Screw Katrina Bates.”
Maybe it was hunger, maybe the combination of caffeine and sugar, or maybe the fact that I was talking to Felicia, but I echoed, “ ‘Screw Katrina Bates’?”
“I was going to say ‘Fuck her,’ but then you might think I’m coarse.”
ACT TWO
The Victim
SCENE ONE
Sequoia Hills
That Evening
The house was brick, three stories of ivy-draped crimson in the Federal style, constructed on a gentle rise of land at the end of a cul-de-sac, behind a half wall of mortared Tennessee river rock, probably trucked in at great expense from the Little Pigeon in the Smokies. The windows were high and narrow, the shutters painted either black or forest green; it was hard to tell by the single streetlight. The grounds were immaculate: mature dogwood, maple, and Bradford pear, azaleas and daylilies and rhododendrons (which always reminded me of my mom, since they bloomed around Mother’s Day), and, in the walk leading from the little metal gate in the stone wall to the front door, a fountain whose gurgle and splash I could hear inside my car, which was parked two hundred feet away.
“Nice,” I said to Archie, who sat in the passenger seat, following my gaze, smearing the window with his wet nose. The tip of his tan-and-white tail twitched, a nascent wag. Why? In general, dogs are much less inscrutable than cats. They’re as easy to read as a McDonald’s menu. But this dog possessed motives that remained unsolvable, and here I was calling myself a detective. The unnerving, incessant staring, for one—what was that about? Dominance? He was going to establish it over me, by God, or die in the attempt? In the beginning, I was convinced he stared because I reminded him of a former owner, someone cruel and unrelentingly abusive who beat him every day with a rolled-up newspaper. We’re products of our experience, even dogs; well, practically anything with a backbone. Maybe he felt the need to practice eternal vigilance or suffer another blow upside the head. The opposite could also have been true: I was the current in a long line of masters, each having abandoned him for any number of reasons, and this made it impossible for him to trust me, to bond with me, lest his canine heart be broken. It’s hard to think of many things more psychologically shattering than abandonment. Rejection is like death without the mercy of death’s finality. A little death, though the French called something else that.
So my idea was to spend more time with Arch, let him know I wasn’t going anywhere. As with any relationship, you at least ought to act on the presumption you’re in it for the long haul. The only things that stood in our way, in my mind, were the lease and that inexorable foe of all relationships, time.
“Well, the lights are on,” I said. “She must be home.”
I dialed the number. On the third ring, a man answered. I hung up. In less than a minute, my cell rang and her number popped up on the ID. I hit the talk button and almost said “Domino’s Pizza.” It was tempting.
“Someone just called from this number,” the man said. “That would be me.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Katrina.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Well, that’s why I called,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Who is this?”
I took a deep breath. “Theodore Ruzak, Mr. Bates. I’m sitting in my car with my dog outside your house.”
A shadow passed by a downstairs window.
“With your dog?”
“I’ve been trying to reach her all day. She won’t answer her cell, and I’m a little worried about her, to be honest with you.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“She called me this afternoon around twelve-thirty, said she was on her way to meet me for lunch. She never showed.”
A pause. Then: “Why was she meeting you for lunch?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It wasn’t clarified.”
“Her idea?”
“One hundred percent.”
“And the reason you’re sitting outside my house with your dog?”
“Like I said. Worry.”
Another pause.
“Why don’t you come in, Mr. Ruzak.”
“If it’s okay with you.”
“I extended the invitation.”
“It’s really none of my business,” I said.
“No, it isn’t. But come in anyway.”
A chill went down my spine. In his picture, he reminded me of a vampire. Was I really prepared to go undaunted before the undead?
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come.”
“Leave the dog.”
“He might bark,” I said. “He may have abandonment issues.”
“We have cats.”
“Oh. Well, we could always talk on the portico.”
“You don’t like cats?”
“I’m allergic. Mildly. My concern lies more with the dog, those issues I just mentioned.”
He acquiesced. “Then bring him. I’ll shut the cats up.”
He met us at the door, wearing a royal blue robe with matching slippers. If he had been holding a pipe, I would not have been surprised. He was taller than I expected, and lean, which made him appear even taller, with large hands, long, delicate fingers, dark eyes, and that aristocratic nose. Shoulder-length hair swept straight back from his alabaster forehead, streaked gray, slightly damp, as if I had caught him after his shower. He was stereotypically pale, like all vampires and most academics, with a look-right-through-you stare, a thinner, taller version of Bela Lugosi, able to dissect you right down to your spiritual marrow with a single, omniscient glance.
He creeped me out a little. Not Archie. He strained at his leash the moment Tom Bates opened the door; I had to yank him back to keep him from bowling him over. The tail went into overdrive, whipping back and forth into a tan-and-white blur. Tom Bates offered Archie his hand, palm down, and out came the tongue, kissing his fingertips.
“What’s his name?”
“Archie.”
“Friendly dog.”
“Never met a stranger,” I said, thinking, Except his owner. I extended my hand and he took it in his, fingers still wet with Archie’s spit.
“Teddy Ruzak.”
“I know.”
“I guess you’re Tom.”
“You guess?” he asked.
“It’s an expression.”
“Really? Never heard that one. What’s the context?”
“Usually when people meet for the first time.”
“Ah.”
“People also say, ‘You must be,’ like ‘You must be Sam,’ or ‘You must be Alice.’ ” I felt like I was teaching a class for immigrants.
“Yes. Odd when you think about it.”
“Most things are,” I said. “When you think about them.”
“Do you think that’s the reason? Why most people don’t?”
“I never thought about it.”
He invited us inside.
Inside was as impressive as outside. Gleaming hardwood floors, soaring twelve-foot ceilings, crown molding, antiques and original art in gilded frames, and I’m not talking about the kind you find at the Tomato Head. A house heavy with shadow, rich in echoes. The den I followed him into was decorated in a nautical theme. A ship’s wheel hung on the wall behind his desk; model ships crowded the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The hardwood planks in this room were three inches wide and distressed, stained a molasses brown, like those found on the quarterdeck of a square-rigger. I thought of his family history and the fleet of vessels crossing the Atlantic, holds stuffed with human cargo.
He offered me a seat, which I accepted, and a drink, which I did not. I’d like to say Archie curled contentedly at my feet. That’s what I’d like to say. He moved toward Tom as he took his position of command behind the desk, reached the end of his tether, and plopped down on his heinie, back toward me, nose lifted and working busily in Tom’s direction, tail gently brushing the boards as he stared at him, I had no doubt, adoringly.
“So you haven’t heard from her, either,” I said.
“Not since last night.”
“Have you notified the police?” I asked.
“Why would I notify the police?”
“She’s missing.”
He shook his head. “She’s gone, Mr. Ruzak. Doesn’t follow she’s missing.”
“ ‘Gone’?”
“Purse, makeup, toiletries, some clothing, and her car. She’s gone.”
“Awful lot to take along for a lunch date.”
He shrugged: C’est la vie.
“Maybe she changed her mind,” he said. “About your date.”
“She didn’t leave a note or anything?”
“Neither a note nor anything else.”
“And she won’t answer your calls, either?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I? Katrina is a grown-up, Mr. Ruzak, and you, of course, know we haven’t been having the best of times. We’ve separated.”
“You moved out.”
“I did.”
“But you’re here.”
“And you’d like to know why.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 7