“Me, too, but she’s married.”
“What happened to her?”
“Boob job.”
“No, I’m talking about the other one. The reject from the ugly factory.”
“Told you.” He made a slicing motion across his throat.
“And that really happened because you saw Felicia?”
“What do you think?”
“I’d rather think practically anything but that.”
“Relax. I was kidding. You want to know the truth, she had this kind of stalker personality, couldn’t peel her offa me. It got creepy; I got rid of her. Upgraded to Tammy out there. Seriously, if you’re in the market, the old one’s kind of your type. Big, dumb, and naïve as a tenth grader.”
“I’m sort of involved right now.”
“No kid?” He seemed incredulous. “Not foxy Felicia.”
“Lady named Melody, down Savannah way.”
“Ah, Ruzak, you oughtta shop closer to home. Those long-distance relationships—they never work.”
“It’s still in the nascent stages.”
“Still in the what stages?”
“I’ve this habit of reading the dictionary in the john.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Since childhood. She’s the one who pointed me to the boat.”
“Boat?”
“Tom’s boat. And you’re the one who pointed to the town where the boat is.”
He held up a manicured hand with a platinum pinkie ring.
“Okay now, Ted, you know we can’t do this. We’re both on the witness list.”
“If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found the car or the boat or the sunglasses on the boat. They would have been found eventually by somebody, I guess, but pointing me there got them found a lot sooner.”
He was still smiling—the smile hadn’t faded since he’d greeted me in the reception area—but the voice behind the smile was hard.
“I thought this was about the job,” he said.
“It is about the job.”
“But we’re not talking about the job.”
“Maybe we are talking about the job.”
“So it’s about the job?”
“The DA has a problem,” I said. “A hole in their theory. Tom dispatches Katrina, throws the body into the trunk, drives all afternoon to Savannah, loads her on the boat, and dumps her a hundred miles offshore. He gets back before his first class the next morning at ten—but how? How does he get back to Knoxville if he leaves the car on Tybee Island? He didn’t rent one there and he didn’t fly, so how did he get home?”
“Maybe he hitchhiked.”
“Right. Or maybe he’s applied his mathematical genius to inventing a teleportation machine. Or maybe, just maybe, he had an accomplice.”
“Who followed him down to Tybee and drove him back.”
“Nobody’s asked me how I knew to look for her in Savannah. Yet.”
“Somebody ought to talk to the girlfriend,” Dresden Falks said. “She’d be my bet.”
“Because you have an iron-clad alibi.”
“Jeez, Ted, I do something like that and I could lose my license. Can’t practice detection without one, you know. Oh, wait.”
“Only reason I’m here today, Dres. The well’s running dry.”
“Gotcha.”
“And I wouldn’t want to walk into a situation on a basis of distrust. Did you help him that day or did he tell you after the fact?”
“Neither.”
“So why did you say she was in Savannah?”
“Um. Lucky guess?”
“You think the DA will buy that?”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what the DA buys. Look, Ruzak, you called me, wanting to talk about a job, and so far you haven’t said word one.”
“Maybe I’m trying to demonstrate what a hard-case tough guy I am.”
“I’m underwhelmed. You want to know what my testimony will be? I’ll tell you what my fucking testimony will be. Tom Bates hired me to get that case file from you, which I did and which, in turn, I gave to him.”
“That can’t be it.”
“Why not?”
“Not all of it. Like I said, the DA hasn’t asked and I don’t know if he will, but you can bet your trophies over there that the defense will, and I’m not going to perjure myself, Dres. I’m not risking jail time for some obnoxious George Clooney clone with delusions he’s living in a Mickey Spillane novel.”
Oh, that smile. Maybe he put it on the mornings, between polishing his shoes and knotting his Armani tie.
“Tom Bates offered me half a million dollars to off his wife.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“How come?”
“Because you’d take it.”
“That wounds my feelings, Ted.”
“That presupposes you have them, Dres.”
“He had it all figured perfectly, like one of his goddamned theorems.”
“Proofs,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“Snatch her in the middle of the night, take her over to the island, and dump her in the Atlantic. Said the affair actually worked to his advantage, gave some cred to her just taking off, that, plus, there’s a pattern of her doing it. I told him no, laughed it off, sure he was just blowing hot air … until the bitch actually went missing. I figured the stupid fuck did it or found somebody else to do it, and most likely he stuck to his original plan.”
“He came to you with this after he got the case file?”
“Yep.”
“What was he looking for in that file?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Did he think she was having an affair?”
“I don’t think he cared.”
“Then why kill her?”
“Ask me, I’d say he just didn’t like her. You know what that sick fuck did? This was before you even came into the picture. He had me take some pictures of him with his little girlfriend and mail them to his wife.”
“I think I’ve seen those pictures.”
“Then enter Theodore Ruzak. Tom calls me up, says, ‘My wife’s hired this dorky detective; find out what he knows.’ I say, ‘What’s it worth what he knows?’ You know the rest. A couple days later, he comes back to me and says, ‘I want you to make my old lady disappear.’ ”
“There was a lie in the file,” I confessed. “He must have taken it to mean she was cheating on him.”
“A lie in the file?”
“The reasons seemed valid at the time.”
“Most reasons do. I guess the point here, Mr. Hard Case Tough Guy, is you really got no leverage. I got nothing to hide. I’m the DA’s fucking star witness.”
“There’s something else,” I said.
“Always is.”
“About the pictures.”
“What about the pictures?”
“Why did Katrina Bates hire me to prove something she already had proof of?”
“Maybe it’s like somebody with a fatal disease. You know, getting that second opinion.”
“Or she wanted him followed for a different reason, something having nothing to do with an affair.”
“Like what kind of reason?”
“The same reason he wanted the case file.”
“You know what I think, Ted? I think you’re worryin’ this thing like a dog with a bone. You’re making it way too complex. This is your basic domestic homicide, with a little pussy on the side.”
“Maybe he talked to someone else about killing her, and he was afraid I’d turn up that somebody else.”
“Except he didn’t talk to me about it till after he had the file and after she hired you.”
“Doesn’t mean she didn’t suspect something before.”
“Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. Look, we both know he did it, and here you are nibbling around the edges like it amounts to a hill of beans. The important thing is they got him.”
“No,” I said. “The important thing
is she’s dead.”
SCENE TWO
Market Square Diner
An Hour Later
Called your bluff,” Felicia said. For some reason, she had dyed her hair platinum blond and gotten a French manicure, like she was auditioning for the lead role in a Madonna biopic. She had changed her perfume, too, from something musky to more flowery.
“More a feint than a bluff,” I said. “I figured it would give me some cred, the seedy quid pro quo angle.”
“ ‘Cred’?”
“Dres used it. I’m susceptible to others’ verbal tics.”
“The feint or bluff, or what ever you want to call it, before this one may have gotten your client killed,” Felicia said. She was talking about “K.B. having illicit liaison with BF.” “Never play poker, Ruzak.”
“I always hated card games,” I said. “Every Saturday night, my parents forced me to play euchre, and it was torture.”
“Tommy loves Uno.”
“Played that, too. Hate it worse than euchre. It’s spiteful.”
She laughed, for some reason.
“See the paper yet?” She dropped the front section beside my plate of scrambled eggs. “Tom Bates made bail. Two point two million dollars.”
“He looks drawn.”
“Facing capital murder charges will do that to you.”
“Dres picked him up in Savannah,” I said. “He suggested it was Kinsey, but that just feels wrong.”
“Feelings. Ruzak, it was your feelings that landed you hip-deep in this mess in the first place.”
“Right, and those pesky feelings led to justice for Katrina.”
“Sounds like the perfect title for the based-on-a-true-story TV movie: Justice for Katrina. Maybe that should be your new career path. You could write and star in it as yourself.”
“She might fess up,” I said, meaning Kinsey. “If it was her, if they offer her immunity.”
“Maybe they have. They don’t include you in the strategy sessions, Ruzak.”
“Here’s the thing: If I have these niggling questions, won’t the jury? Here you have a guy from the best family, with superlative genes, everything to lose, very little to gain, who looks good and talks good and could charm the socks right off my spinster aunt Regina, who’s never been arrested for so much as jaywalking, who gives millions every year to St. Jude’s Hospital, for Christ’s sake, and they’re supposed to believe he murdered his wife over the very thing he was doing himself? Had been doing himself since day one of the marriage?”
“Men are hypocritical assholes,” she said, but she said it with a smile. “I bet you the prosecution packs the jury with women.”
“Could backfire,” I said. “This guy’s got a way with the ladies.”
She sipped her green tea. I sipped my black coffee. Sunlight glistened on the ends of her newly minted hair.
“Did you see the sign next door?” she asked. “Prime office space, Teddy. You’d be sandwiched between here and the noodle place. It’s perfect.”
“We’d need a new name.” I was being semiserious.
“Teddy Ruzak, Inc.”
“Nothing with my name on it. Too sniffable.”
“ ‘Sniffable’?”
“How about Carpet Land, and we put samples on the floor to make it seem legit.”
“What happens when people come to buy carpet?”
“We sell it to them.”
“Ruzak, you’d be a horrible salesman.”
“Didn’t stop my dad.”
“You’re too honest.”
“That’s the irony. When I chose not to be, somebody paid with their life.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“For sure all I know for sure is I don’t know anything for sure.”
“If that’s a quote, you owe me a dollar.”
“Paraphrase—not covered by the rules.”
SCENE THREE
Apartment
Fourteen Hours Later
Archie began barking before the banging even started—a good thirty seconds before—clawing at the door of his crate as I stumbled toward the door of mine. “Archie, stop!” Bang-bang. “Archie, stop!” Bang-bang. I put my eye to the peephole and through it saw the last person I expected to see. I threw back the bolt, opened the door, and he stumbled into the room, reeking of alcohol, wearing the same suit from the day before (I recognized it from the picture in the paper). He staggered toward the bar and said, “Ruzak, can I come in?”
“You are in,” I said. I closed the door, threw the bolt. Archie whined, his thin tail a blur, and scratched at the bars of his prison. I let him out. He made a beeline to Tom Bates and commenced licking his hand.
“But you shouldn’t be,” I said. “If anyone knows you came here, we’re both in deep do-do.”
“No one knows. No one.”
He heaved himself onto the chair at the bar and asked if I had anything to drink.
“Bud Light,” I said.
“Jesus Christ!”
“I’d take you for a Heineken man.”
“If it’s all you have.”
“Maybe you’ve had all you should have.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t worry about what I’ve had.”
“I’m not worried about you at all,” I said. I set a Bud Light in front of him and his Adam’s apple jumped as he threw back his head and drank. With his left hand, he absently scratched behind Archie’s ears.
“I like your dog,” he said.
“I’m looking for a good home,” I said. “But I don’t think they allow pets on death row.”
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“Doesn’t matter what I think, Mr. Bates.”
“Tom, please.”
“Tom, please … leave.”
“I don’t understand; I really don’t. How things … This is so … Everything … In a nanosecond, everything can … Do you have another?” He waved the empty can in my face.
“Moot point,” I said.
“She was a great fuck.”
“Excuse me?”
“Katrina. My wife. Reason I married her. She had money, but I had more. She was pretty, but I’d had prettier. She was smart, but there were smarter ones. The thing she had, the one fucking thing—ha!—she could fuck—fuck your brains out; fuck you like she invented fucking. She was the da Vinci of fornication, the Mozart of screwing, the … the … Mark Twain of carnality.”
“Mark Twain?”
“You know what I mean. You know. That’s your ploy, your gig, your shtick, Ruzak. I saw it from the first, the very first time we met. It’s all a fucking act with you, this air of befuddlement, like Hamlet with the players; you think I don’t see through it?”
“If she was so great in bed, why did you fool around on her?”
“Her fault.”
“Well, sure.”
“No, it’s the truth. It was like she set a fire and it raged until it ate up all the oxygen in the room. I’m monogamous by nature—why the hell do you think I stayed married for twenty fucking years?”
“I don’t know the answer to that.”
“I’ll tell you the fucking answer to that. I loved her! How about that? I married her for sex, stayed married for love.”
“Okay. So you didn’t kill her. Who did?”
“I want another beer.”
“Mine’s not the only bar in town.”
“May I have another beer, please?”
I handed him another beer.
“I don’t know who killed her,” he said. “I don’t know shit. I don’t know how her blood got in our kitchen or in the car. I don’t know how the car got to Tybee and I don’t know how the sunglasses got on the boat and I sure as fuck don’t know what happened to my poker. My poker!” He laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“It isn’t me you have to convince, Mr. Bates.”
“It’s a start. All the great religions, they started with convincing just one person. Go back further, Ruzak; go back to prehistory. S
ome caveman had to convince another caveman if you sharpen a stick and throw it at the fucking mammoth, you might just be able to take down the big hairy son of a bitch. Go back even further. Some slimy vertebrate had to convince another slimy vertebrate to come out of the water, that the beach was fine. You get it. You’re not dumb.”
“No. Just confused, which is often mistaken for dumbness in slimy vertebrates.”
“I was resigned to it, the divorce. Resigned, as in tired of the whole damn thing. All the hysterics, the theatrics, the melodramatics. Maybe you didn’t know her that well, but Kat knew how to play the part. Jesus shit, she loved the part, the wronged woman, the long-suffering wife to the wandering Lothario. She told everybody who’d listen. We’d be at a faculty party and she’d turn to someone we barely knew and say, ‘Tom screws around.’ Or something to that effect. ‘Tom can’t keep his dick in his pants.’ ”
“Twenty years of that could build up some real resentment.”
“Okay, I see where you’re going. It’s so offensive. Really, I mean, look at me, look what I’ve done with my life, look at my reputation. I came this close to a Nobel. Did you know that? This close. And I was forty-one years old, Ruzak. Forty-fuckingone!”
“That’s your defense?” I asked, unable to help myself. “You’re too smart to have done it?”
“Too smart not to cover it up a little bit better, for Chrissakes. Blood splatter on the kitchen cabinets, Ruzak? Tossing the poker instead of cleaning it and putting it back? Dumping the car in a place where someone was sure to find it? I ask you honestly! Is that the behavior of a man of my intellect?”
“The prosecution’s theory,” I said slowly, “as I understand it, is you blew up that afternoon, killed her in a jealous rage, and got sloppy in your haste to cover it up.”
“Okay, but I had weeks to make sure I’d dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.”
“You tossed the poker somewhere where it couldn’t be retrieved—say into the ocean with your wife’s body. The sunglasses fell off as you heaved her over the side; it was the dead of night; you missed them in the dark. You left the car there because where else would you leave it? Just a plausible she left it there and took off with a third party, easily explained, at least easier to explain than if some fisherman hooked it in Lake Loudon.”
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 15