The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool

by Richard Yancey

  “Why?”

  “She never gave her reasons, at least not to me.”

  “The best way to punish him for cheating?”

  “Or to protect them.”

  “Who?”

  “The unborn children. Perhaps she was afraid she would have a daughter.”

  “And one day their daughter walks in on Tom with the nanny.”

  “Violin tutor.”

  “Either one.”

  “Yes.” He seemed pleased I understood. “You’re quite perceptive, Mr. Ruzak. For a Pole.”

  “Like I said,” I replied. “Blasting stereo types.”

  SCENE FIFTEEN

  La Guardia Airport

  Three Hours Later

  We were fifteen minutes from boarding when my cell phone rang.

  “Well?” Felicia asked.

  “He’s pals with Donald Trump.”

  “Wow. That should crack the case.”

  “He also doesn’t seem concerned in the least.”

  “For him, she’s been missing a very long time, Ruzak.”

  “He said Tom has an explosive temper. And he gave me a key.”

  “A key to what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t say?”

  “He doesn’t know, either. Katrina sent it to him a few months back.”

  “The plot thickens. She called this afternoon.”

  “Katrina?”

  “No, dummy, that detective woman.” Felicia rarely referred to Meredith Black by name. “They’ve had a sit-down with Tom. He doesn’t know nothing from nothing. Thinks she’s run off and she’ll be back. Doesn’t know how, why, or when the car got to Tybee and is clueless about the sunglasses you found on the boat. They asked to take a look around his house; he refused. Said they can search when they come back with a warrant.”

  “Did they?”

  “She said the judge won’t go for it, not without probable cause. He’s done it before, you know.”

  “Done what? Killed somebody?”

  “No, Ruzak. Reported her missing. A couple of times.”

  “But not this time.”

  “He told the detective woman this time he’s more relieved than worried. Those other times, he actually had hopes the marriage would work. So they’re stuck.”

  “Maybe this key is the key.”

  “A little insurance policy? But why send it to the old man? She can’t stand him.”

  “Something Tom knows. He’d never suspect she’d give it to Alistair for safekeeping.”

  “She also said they’ve checked with the airports and every rental-car place within a two-hundred-mile radius of Savannah.”

  “Let me guess,” I said.

  “Nada,” she said, not letting me guess. “No record of a Katrina Bates renting a car or boarding a flight.”

  “Bank records,” I said. “Cell-phone records.”

  “Can’t without a warrant.”

  “If you were innocent,” I said, “wouldn’t you tell the cops, ‘Sure, you bet, have a look around the place’? “Here’re her bank statements; here’re her cell bills. Here’s a list of names of everyone she’s met in the past three years. Here’s a list of her favorite vacation spots.’ ”

  “Most people would,” she said. “Tom Bates is not most people. She barely had time to flash her badge before he lawyered up. Oh, that reminds me, the reason she called. She needs you to go down and give a statement.”

  “A statement of what?”

  “History, Ruzak. How this played out from the day Katrina Bates hired you. What you know. An official statement.”

  The desk clerk announced we would be boarding shortly. I stood up and walked to the windows to eyeball the plane. For some reason, it helped my preflight jitters when my untrained eye detected no apparent defects in the plane, like a four-inch crack in the wing, and saw no mechanics fiddling around in the undercarriage.

  “How’s Archie?” I asked her.

  “Chewing contentedly on a bone.”

  “Okay if I pick him up tomorrow?”

  “I’ll just take him with me in the morning.”

  “Should we go to the office? Hinton might be watching.”

  “Why would Hinton be watching?”

  “He’s doggedly per sis tent.”

  “Like a certain researcher and analyst I know.”

  My focus shifted from the plane beyond the pane to my own wispy reflection in it. Ghostlike, insubstantial. A faded memory of myself.

  “I’m not going to find her,” I said to it.

  She thought I was talking to her. “You honestly thought you would?”

  “Not all the research is finished, but the analysis pretty much is. She’s dead, Felicia. She’s dead, and by now her bones have been picked clean by the scavengers that patrol the continental shelf.”

  “Don’t go all soft on me now, Ruzak.”

  “It’s over. Done.”

  “Right. Tomorrow you hand over the key to the detective, give your statement, and work on your résumé.”

  “It’s just there was … until right now … this sliver, this knot at the end of the rope I was hanging on to. That maybe this bad feeling was just a feeling and she was sipping cocktails on the beach in Rio.”

  “Still an outside chance of that. Maybe you ought to book a flight to Rio.”

  As if cued, the clerk made the general boarding call.

  “You have to go,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

  “Here’s the problem,” I said. “I want to find the truth, but I want the truth I find to be the truth I want to find. It is about me, this Galahad thing. She isn’t the only one with a savior complex. You know, we think of the truth as a light-giving source, but sometimes it just plunges the whole room into darkness. The answer we find isn’t the answer we’re hoping for, like the prayer that goes unanswered. The answer is in the box.”

  “What box?”

  “What ever box this little key opens. Maybe it’s her itinerary. Maybe she left behind a manifesto, and explanation of why she took off.”

  “Get on the plane, Ruzak.”

  “He’s lying. I should go back and lean on him. What kind of father doesn’t hear from his kid in eight years, gets a key in the mail with a cryptic note, and doesn’t pick up the phone and ask ‘So what is the deal with this friggin’ key and cryptic note?’ He’s in on it.”

  “He’s conspired with his son-in-law in the murder of his only child?”

  “Maybe not the murder. Maybe the cover-up.”

  “Oh, come on, Teddy. Cut it out and get on the plane.”

  “Or it could be a setup. Manufactured evidence. Tom put something in the box and sent Alistair the key, pretending it was from Katrina. But why would he do that? Why not just create a fake good-bye letter and send it to him?”

  “Or simply mail one to himself. Or forge a note and leave it on the fridge. Or send one to you, her new best friend. I’m hanging up. Board the plane, Ruzak. You’re coming home.”

  That’s it, I thought as I walked down the ramp. The astonishing thing was hardly astonishing at all when you looked at the facts: Katrina Bates was not going home. No kids, no siblings, a father who had abandoned her and a husband who had betrayed her—even if she wasn’t at the bottom of the Atlantic, she wasn’t going home, because there was no home for her to go to. I had cast myself as the knight riding to her rescue, but in either scenario it wasn’t Katrina Bates who needed rescuing. She was either beyond it or in no need of it. The casting was all wrong: I wasn’t the knight; I was the fool.

  SCENE SIXTEEN

  The Sterchi Building

  Four Hours Later

  I expected to see him, and there he was.

  “He’s not here, Whittaker,” I said.

  “I know.” He fell into step with me as I dragged myself toward the elevator. “Where is he?”

  “Gone.”

  “So you actually did it? You gave him to someone else?”

  “What
’s it matter, Whit? Maybe I took him out and shot him in a ditch. The dog is gone, I’m in compliance, and you can move on to the next crisis, like fixing my leaky faucet.”

  “You have a leaky faucet?”

  “No, just making a point.”

  “Did you take him to the pound? I’d like to know.”

  “Because?”

  “I’m not heartless, Ruzak. I’m not a monster. It’s not as if I wanted something bad to happen to that dog.”

  “You want him, don’t you?”

  “I was going to say that if you haven’t found a suitable home for him. …”

  “So you have been sneaking in my place and playing with him.”

  “How would you like it, being cooped up all day with no one to play with?”

  “Maybe the issue isn’t his lack of a playmate.”

  The doors opened. His eyes narrowed.

  “I don’t like you,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Neither did the dog.”

  SCENE SEVENTEEN

  On Kingston Pike

  The Next Morning

  I was sitting in my Sentra when the call came. I didn’t need to look at the LCD to know who it was.

  I hit the talk button and said, “I’m a fool.”

  “I’ll alert the media,” Felicia said. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night. I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up with the file and the note and the key, and one thing I couldn’t figure is why she wouldn’t tell him what the key was to. She’s squirreled something away and sends the key to her dad because Tom wouldn’t suspect that connection, just in case something happened to her, but she doesn’t tell him where to find the thing she’s hidden. Why would she do that? On the off chance the cops interview him when she goes missing and he says ‘Hey, wait a minute. I did get this weird key, but she didn’t tell me what it goes to. It might be useful’? Then I thought maybe he lied to me. Maybe he does know what it goes to but for some reason won’t tell me. But if that were true, why give me the thing in the first place? Why invite me up to New York just to give it to me? So I spread it all out on my bed—the file, my notes, the envelope, the note, the key—and about three A.M. it hits me.”

  “What hit you, Ruzak?” She sounded very tired.

  “She didn’t hand-deliver it to him. She mailed it. So that’s where I am.”

  “The post office?”

  “The Mailbox Etc. place on Kingston Pike. It’s right there in black and white. Well, she used a blue pen. The return address. Even the box number. It was staring me in the face the whole time. So that’s where I am.”

  “And?”

  “It’s here. All of it. Pictures of Tom with Kinsey doing … well, you can imagine what they’re doing. And a diary or kind of daybook, I guess, in Katrina’s handwriting, a brief history of her marriage, the affairs, the fights, the threats—the acid-in-her-face remark, things like that. I haven’t read the whole thing, just kind of skimmed it, but it ends with her saying if something happens to her, it’s gotta be Tom. ‘Look to Tom. Look to my husband.’ ”

  “Probable cause,” she said.

  “I’m heading over right now to turn it over to Meredith.”

  “And we pray the ol’ professor has gotten sloppy.”

  “When hope of rescue dies, we labor for justice.”

  “A quote?”

  “You bet. Freshly minted.”

  SCENE EIGHTEEN

  The Office

  Two Weeks Later

  Meredith Black leaned back in the visitor’s chair, crossed her legs, and smiled at me. I wasn’t sure, but thought I was supposed to give an appreciative, if furtive, glance at her legs. I complied, just in case.

  “This conversation never took place,” she said.

  “What conversation?” I asked.

  “Oh, Ruzak. Ever the scamp. Have you heard from the DA’s office yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “You will,” she said. “You’re a witness, so I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “No withdrawals from any of the bank accounts. No calls from the cell phone after she called you at the Tomato Head. Blood traces in the kitchen. Blood traces in the trunk of the Mercedes. Blood traces on the boat. Even microscopic amounts on the sunglasses. DNA testing will take awhile, but you and I know whose blood it is. Oh, and we found your case file, hidden inside the bedroom closet. You wanna know what’s underlined three times? ‘K.B. having illicit liaison with BF.’ ”

  I closed my eyes. The knot on the end of my rope slipped as my conscious mind looked the truth square in the face, a face with which my subconscious was intimately familiar.

  “Weapon?” I asked.

  “Hard to tell without a body. No residue on any of the kitchen knives—we think he did her in the kitchen—but guess what? The poker is missing.”

  “The poker?”

  “The poker by the fireplace in the living room. It’s gone.”

  “The body? You won’t need it?”

  She shrugged. “It might wash up onshore one day. It happens. But the DA thinks we have enough. We’re picking him up this afternoon.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Thanks, Meredith.”

  “No, Mr. Ruzak. Thank you. Without your dogged persistence, the bastard might have gotten away with it.”

  “ ‘Dogged persistence,’ ” I echoed. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  “Most of it. The rest is luck.”

  “Which he’s run out of.”

  “More like he ran into something: the brick wall called Teddy Ruzak.”

  “He’ll hire the best lawyers money can buy.”

  “Already has.”

  “And they’ll say it’s a purely circumstantial case. You don’t even have a body.”

  “Well, get off your ass and find us one.”

  I got off it and walked her to the door. Felicia saw us and pointedly turned her back to open an empty filing cabinet.

  “What’s going on?” Meredith asked. She pointed at the sign on our door: OUT OF BUSINESS.

  “A bureaucratic glitch with the state,” I replied. “We’re working it out.”

  “Doggedly?”

  “And persistently.”

  “Good,” Meredith Black said. “We need more dicks like you.”

  I closed the door behind her. Her heels clicked in the echoey stairwell. Behind me, Felicia said, “ ‘More dicks like you.’ ”

  “I’m not a dick,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You’re a fool.”

  ACT THREE

  The Crime

  SCENE ONE

  Offices of the Velman Group, LLC

  Three Weeks Later

  The Velman Group occupied the entire seventeenth floor of the First Tennessee Bank Building on Gay Street, the tallest building in Knoxville, a glittering edifice of reflective blue glass, designed maybe as an architectural reflection of the river to which the entire state owed so much, a rigid blue tribute not far from the shores of its inspiration, not so rigid and not nearly so blue.

  I stepped off the elevators into the reception area a little after 9:00 A.M., wearing a tailored suit that had cost a bundle of my dead mother’s money back in the early days of my agency, when my hopes (and my bank balance) were high. Most of that money (and hope) was gone, like my mother. Time to dispose of the one thing I had left: my pride.

  A receptionist, a bleached-out, big-haired blonde with large, expressive eyes and an obscenely augmented chest, sat behind a chest-high desk on the opposite wall, beneath the company name in large gold letters. I told her who I was. She asked whom I had come to see. I told her, and she asked me to sign the book, which I did, in very small letters, and I felt like a big man trying to hide behind a sapling. She gestured to the row of chairs pushed against the wall and invited me to have a seat. I flipped through a two-month-old issue of a magazine called Hot Rodder. It featu
red glossy photographs of tricked-out cars and scantily clad girls, most of the cladding being cutoff jeans and plaid halter tops that accentuated their surgically enhanced breasts. They reminded me of the receptionist sitting a dozen feet away. Maybe that was how Dres found her: saw her picture and contacted the magazine. I wondered if it was true that the last receptionist had been fired because she didn’t mea sure up to the Felicia standard. Talk about unintended consequences and the anonymous victims we leave in our wakes!

  I waited forty-five minutes, tossed the magazine on the coffee table, and went back to the receptionist and asked how much longer I would be forced to wait, because I was a busy man with pressing concerns and I couldn’t wait all day. She picked up the phone and whispered into the receiver, a hand cupped around the mouthpiece. Five more minutes, I was told. Would I like a cup of coffee or a bottle of Evian? I took the Evian.

  Fifteen minutes later, Dresden Falks burst through the doors leading into the inner sanctum of the Velman Group, his entire countenance lighted up, absolutely glowing with plea sure. He grabbed my hand and pumped hard, his left cupping my elbow.

  “Ruzak, you son of a bitch. Sorry about the wait. Hey, Tammy, babe, hold my calls, will ya?”

  I followed him through the doors, down a long hallway, past heavy unmarked doors, the thick carpeting absorbing the sound of our passing, and I was reminded of that creepy hotel in The Shining. We turned a couple of corners, traversed a couple more identical hallways with identical heavy unmarked doors, until we reached one that he threw open, revealing a small office with windows facing west toward World’s Fair Park and the university. Dresden Falks’s desk was as neat as mine was messy, the bookshelves behind it displaying a couple of baseball trophies (he went to college on a scholarship, he proudly told me) and pictures of him with prominent local politicians. He fell into the large leather executive chair that was too big for the desk, shot out his cuffs, and waved me to the visitor’s chair, which was too small. I placed my sweating bottle of water on the bare desktop. Sometimes the smallest of paybacks can bring the greatest satisfaction.

  “So I’m a little bothered by the receptionist,” I said.