The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool

by Richard Yancey

  “Because you can’t take your car on the plane?”

  “No, I mean, why not just abandon the car at the airport?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want anyone to know she went to the airport,” she said.

  “Why would she want that?”

  “How the hell should I know? Are you a consultant or a cop?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “You’ve never been married.”

  “Oh. She’s scared. What is he, a wife-beater?”

  “I always thought he was pretty nice. Very charming. Smart. Handsome. Tons of money. Tons of it. Money so old, it has moss growing on it. He’s a professor or something in Knoxville.” A look came over her face: the lightbulb coming on. “You’re from Knoxville.”

  “Small world, huh?”

  “You are a cop, aren’t you?”

  “No.” I sighed. “Okay. Sorry. I’m a PI. Katrina Bates was my client. She’s disappeared. I’m trying to find her.”

  She stared at me for a couple of seconds. Then she said, “Is your name really Theodore Ruzak?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the dead aunt?”

  “There is no dead aunt.”

  “And you’re not an investment broker?”

  “I never technically said I was.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t know how close your connection was to Tom.”

  “My connection to Tom matters?”

  “It might.”

  “You think he did something to her.”

  “I have a working theory.”

  “Well, I don’t know him. Well, I do, in a casual way. They’ve had me over here for drinks. Took me out once on his boat.”

  Bing. “Tom has a boat? Where?”

  “Here. At the marina.”

  She downed the dregs of her wine and eyed the empty glass wistfully.

  “Come to think of it, he did kind of hit on me once. On the boat. Sort of playful pass, you know, nothing scary or very serious. He likes to flirt, knows women find him attractive. But I was married at the time. I believe in the sanctity of marriage, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “And life. That, too.”

  “I’ve never met a real PI before,” she said, and I thought, And you still haven’t. “Do you carry a gun?”

  “I left it in Knoxville.”

  “You don’t look like a PI. You look like … oh, I don’t know, you’re so tall and big, and those sad, soft, puppy-dog eyes.”

  “PIs have reputations of being a little seedy and cynical and smarmy and hard-edged,” I admitted. I thought of Dresden Falks. “Some of it deserved.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Not directly.”

  She squeezed her thighs together and tugged on the hem of her skirt. Then she hugged her knees, which forced her breasts forward, the cleft between them deepening as she leaned forward, her lips slightly parted.

  “Let me have a sip of that,” she said, echoing Felicia.

  “Of what?” I asked stupidly. The bottle was empty.

  “Your wine, dummy.”

  I held out my glass. As the only flesh-and-blood PI she probably would ever meet, I felt the obligation to set an example, to be an exemplar of PI-hood. In me, dear lady, chivalry lives on. Her finger-tips brushed mine as she took it, lingered there for a millisecond too long. Our eyes met.

  “Are you going to kiss me now, Ragman?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I said.

  SCENE NINE

  The Beach

  An Hour Later

  I removed my shoes and socks and walked right to the edge, to the end of it, where the rolling water kissed the continent and caressed my bare feet. Far to sea, a storm raged, too far away to hear the thunder, the lightning illuminating the horizon in brief, startling flashes. Onshore, the rain had departed. So had Melody Moy.

  Her lips had tasted slightly salty from the crackers, slightly syrupy from the wine, their texture reminding me of crayons, all that lipstick, and her tongue seemed large in my mouth as she dug her fingernails into my scalp, and I placed both hands on her breasts almost immediately and pressed hard, pulling at the buttons, sliding a finger into the little hole between them, pushing my left leg between her bare ones (no one wore panty hose anymore), forcing them apart, and her hands fell to my shoulders and she began to push, breaking the kiss and gasping, “What is this? What is this?” I didn’t say anything but was thinking, for some reason, Fire, fire, fire! I leaned against her and forced her backward, putting my mouth on hers again with my eyes tightly shut, the ache in my chest clamped just as tightly down. My first kiss was stolen behind some bleachers in junior high school, a girl named Carly, who parted her hair down the middle and who spoke with a slight lisp—“Teddy Ruthak,” she called me—and this was taken after several weeks of practicing on my own wrist, and the basic technique probably hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. I tried to remember Carly’s face, but all that came was her shoulder-length hair, straight, parted in the middle. I tried to remember if her nose crinkled when she smiled. Give me a sip of that. And this is what I want, damn it. Stop pushing. You’ve done your agenda. This is mine. And Melody Moy grabbed my wrists and pulled downward, but I was too strong.

  She let go and hit me as hard as she could on the right cheek. I fell away, pulling my hands into my lap, eyes still closed, saying, “I’m sorry, okay? Sorry. It’s not you. I didn’t mean you. Not you. Not you. Not you.” I didn’t move, didn’t even open my eyes, as she grabbed her purse and the basket—why did she take the basket?—and slammed out the door, and only then did I open my eyes and stare for a few minutes at the imprint of her lips on the empty glass sitting on the coffee table.

  SCENE TEN

  The Beach

  Moments Later

  I stripped off my clothes and strode naked into the sea.

  SCENE ELEVEN

  Lecture Hall

  Three Days Later

  After the cacophony of slamming books and buzzing, chirping, beeping, rap music– ringing cell phones faded and the last backpack-burdened undergrad had rushed from the room, but before Tom Bates could slide out the side door, I came in and walked down the steps to the front row, where I planted myself in a chair and looked at the dry-erase board and the hundreds of numbers and symbols that filled it, stretching ten feet from edge to edge, a single ineffable equation that, for all I knew, proved something of staggering proportions, on a par with the elegant E = mc2, the only famous mathematical formula I knew beyond and that might not qualify as a formula, but only as a symbol.

  Tom Bates stepped off the stage and stood beside me, and we stared at the board, like a couple of art aficionados at the Louvre.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “As a sunset,” I said. “What’s it mean?”

  “Your question is a bit nonsensical, Mr. Ruzak. It has no meaning beyond the intrinsic.”

  “Well,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Poetry of the mind. No. More perfect than poetry, for it is of us and yet so totally, beautifully, outside us.”

  “You like poetry, too?” I asked. I thought of the earthy odes tucked away in his sock drawer.

  “I write it. I’ve been published in the Poetry Review.”

  “I never got beyond the ‘Roses are red’ stage.”

  He nodded. I tensed, waiting for him to lay a line of his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry on me.

  He didn’t. He sat beside me and said, “You’ve found my wife.”

  “No. But I found a piece of her.”

  I pulled the paper sack from my briefcase and set it on the desktop in front of him. He didn’t open it.

  “Can’t be a large piece,” he said. “A finger or a toe?”

  “Her sunglasses. Chanel. She was wearing them the last time I saw her.”

  “Hmm. You found them at the beach house?”

  “On the boat. In this little space beside the co
mpartment with the life jackets.”

  “I believe she had more than one pair, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “ ‘Had’ is past tense.”

  He nodded. “Has more than one pair.”

  “Identical ones? I remember these glasses.”

  “She probably lost them and got a replacement.”

  “She would have to.”

  “ ‘Have to’?”

  “They’re prescription.”

  “Car abandoned at vacation house, plus prescription glasses, plus boat equals murder?”

  “You’re the math whiz; you tell me.”

  “I didn’t murder my wife, Mr. Ruzak.”

  “I have a theory,” I said. I nodded toward the board. “You like theories, right?”

  “Theorems,” he said. He fingered the edge of the fold on the bag.

  “Don’t touch,” I said. “They’ll want to dust them.”

  “You’ve gone to the police, then?”

  “We could both go,” I suggested.

  “You were going to share a theory.”

  “These things happen,” I said. “Everybody gets emotional, rationality gets tossed out on its ear, and we rarely recognize our own hypocrisy. If you thought she was having an affair and also thought she was stripping you of everything you had just because genius demands its own latitudes, in the heat of the moment, things could quickly spin out of control. Happens to everybody. Even geniuses have a hypothalamus.”

  “Animating spirit,” he said softly.

  “What’s that?”

  “The literal meaning of genius: ‘animating spirit.’ ”

  “Oh. You bet. So sometimes the spirit gets a little more animated than normal, a little too animated for its own good.”

  “You think I killed Katrina. You honestly think I killed my wife.”

  “You’re not interested in what I think, Mr. Bates.”

  “Mr. Ruzak, I’m astounded by it.”

  “Be interested in what I know. And here’s what I know: A few days after her marriage totally collapses, Katrina vanishes into thin air, on the very day she’s arranged for you to swing by and pick up your stuff. She called me from your house at twelve-thirty-six that day; you arrived there at twelve-forty-five, eight minutes later—”

  “Nine minutes, Mr. Ruzak,” he said, correcting me.

  “Nine minutes,” I said. Thanks, pi man. “She wasn’t there, you said, and she didn’t show for our meeting.”

  “Why was she meeting you?”

  “I’m not sure. She didn’t say.”

  “You told me she wasn’t your client anymore.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “So this was a social get-together.”

  “I’m not sure what she had in mind.”

  “Mr. Ruzak, were you and my wife seeing each other?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You were fucking my wife, weren’t you?”

  “I would never do that with a client,” I said. What was going on? How, in a matter of seconds, had I morphed from interrogator into suspect?

  “She wasn’t your client,” he said.

  “I was trying to give you the facts, Mr. Bates.”

  “That is a fact. She wasn’t your client. Beyond the fact of her ‘disappearance,’ it’s the most troubling fact of the whole affair. She fired you, then makes dates to see you. She flees town, and you pursue her to Tybee and trespass upon my private property, looking for evidence that I did something to her. These facts don’t indicate a man who ‘hardly knew’ someone.”

  I cleared my throat. “I didn’t trespass. I paid two thousand dollars for one night. And I was not personally involved with your wife. I don’t know how to prove a negative.”

  “Yet you’ve come here today demanding that I do. I can’t prove I had nothing to do with Kat’s disappearance.”

  “But you could help prove that was her decision. Have you called the bank? The cell-phone company? She wouldn’t get very far without money, and the odds are she wouldn’t travel without means of communication. You could do that.”

  “Why do you assume I haven’t?”

  “So you have?”

  “Whether I have or not is none of your business. Why are you doing this, Mr. Ruzak? This is a private matter between my wife and me, and who are you to bull your way into our lives like this? What is the meaning of it?”

  “That’s a good question, Mr. Bates. Maybe it has no meaning beyond the intrinsic.”

  A dark look passed over his face. Like a kid throwing a grown-up’s favorite maxim right back in his face, I had crossed a line. I had stepped on the toes of an ego the size of King Kong.

  “Alive or dead, I’m going to find her,” I said softly.

  “Your bravado is touching, Mr. Ruzak, but I sincerely doubt that you will.”

  “Because her body is at the bottom of the Atlantic?”

  “Because she’s smarter than you. In many ways, she smarter than both of us. You and I are incapable of proving a negative, but Katrina’s been doing it for over twenty years.”

  “You’re talking about your marriage?”

  “I’m talking about her marriage.”

  SCENE TWELVE

  Chesapeake’s Restaurant

  The Next Day

  Detective Meredith Black of the Knoxville PD ordered the grilled swordfish with fresh steamed vegetables. I ordered fried shrimp and hush puppies, with fried okra on the side.

  “In the still of the night,” she said smiling, “can you hear them hardening?” Her smile was broad, bright, and brisk, teeth disappearing as quickly as they appeared, like with Dustin Hoffman’s drag queen in that movie Tootsie. Though Meredith was a lot better-looking than Dustin. Dark hair, darker eyes, high cheekbones—I suspected Cherokee in her lineage.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your arteries.”

  “The cutoff is forty.”

  “Forty what?”

  “Years. On my fortieth birthday, I’m going strictly white meat, low starch, low cal, and I’m giving up all things fried.”

  “Think you can?”

  “Think I’ll try.”

  “Every once in awhile, I break down and gorge on those hot brownie sundaes from Buddy’s.”

  I sipped my sweet iced tea to distract my mind from the image of Meredith Black gorging.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  “It is a little odd,” she said.

  “But not enough for a search warrant.”

  “There’s no probable cause. No one’s even reported her missing.”

  “What about me?”

  “You haven’t filed a report.”

  “I could. I will.”

  “And then we send someone over there, Tom gives us the same spiel he gave you, and we still don’t have probable cause.”

  “What about the abandoned car?” I asked. “The empty house. The glasses on the boat?”

  “She dumped the car at the house, took a cab to the airport, boarded a plane to parts unknown.”

  “And the glasses?”

  “Lost on the boat, just like Tom said.”

  “Where they lay for two years, out in the elements, until I found them looking good as new.”

  “Suspicion isn’t evidence, Teddy.”

  Our food came. Meredith chewed vigorously, as if she had some underlying issues with swordfish.

  “There’s a tipping point,” I said. “When the last itty-bitty fact pushes things from odd coincidence to damning circumstance.”

  “Hey, I like that,” she said. “Except the ‘itty-bitty’ part. I haven’t heard that phrase since my grandmother died.”

  “Katrina kicks Tom out of the house. Vows to destroy him and all he holds dear. A few days later, she goes missing without a trace and her car turns up abandoned several hundred miles away.”

  “That would be a trace. The car.”

  “Plus the fact that around the same time, Tom received information that she might be having an affair herself. Or
he interpreted it that way. Plus the fact that he paid a lot of money for that information or maybe for information we don’t have yet, something he would be desperate to hide. Plus the fact that once he knew I was snooping around, he dispatched a lackey to offer me a way out of my professional difficulties with the state.”

  She was slowly shaking her head.

  “Maybe I’m not as good at math as you.”

  “And neither of us is better at it than Tom Bates. Can I ask you a professional question?”

  “No, but you can ask a question about my profession.”

  Bing: Out came the teeth. Bing: gone again.

  “What more would you guys need to open a case on this?”

  “Turn up a witness.” She pulled the last hunk of fish meat from the skewer with her fingers and popped the whole thing into her mouth. Then she licked her fingertips. “Or a body. A body would be good. A dead one or a living one, doesn’t matter. Bring me a body, Ruzak.”

  SCENE THIRTEEN

  The Office

  That Afternoon

  Felicia had left a message in the middle of my blotter, scrawled on my yellow legal pad, which made me wonder why she’d been sitting at my desk while I was out. What was wrong with her desk? After screwing my courage to the sticking place, I dialed the number.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Ruzak.”

  “If that’s your real name,” said Melody Moy. “Why’d you do this, Teddy?”

  “To say I’m sorry.”

  “Nobody’s sent me roses since ’05.”

  “I am, though,” I said. “Sorry. I guess I could blame it on the wine. I’m not a very accomplished drinker.”

  “You’re not very accomplished at a lot of things.”

  “I’m highly sensitive to karmic disturbances. There’s an answering vibration, like a psychic tuning fork.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This case, or noncase, or what ever the hell it is, created this kind of rupture, and unfortunately I tumbled into the chasm.”

  “This isn’t getting better,” she said. “You should have stuck with ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be honest with you: I left understanding completely why you’ve never been married.”