“Are you sore at me or something?”
“Why would I be sore at you?” she asked crossly. She went to her desk, out of sight, and now I was sure she hadn’t lunched at the Bistro; she’d been at the Hilton, or maybe not the Hilton, but some other private place for a quickie (though technically, two hours couldn’t be called a quickie), and her being sore had to do with guilt.
There were a few more calls in the afternoon. Felicia set up a couple of appointments for prospective clients and then around four o’clock, she said she had to take off early because she had a hair appointment. This made me wonder if she was a natural blonde. A lot of women in East Tennessee aren’t but want you to think they are. My mother had called it “the Dolly Parton effect.” After Felicia left, like some cosmic switch had been tripped, the phone stopped ringing. And I was out of ideas, since I’d used up my allotment for the day. I hung around till five o’clock, making notes, like “Check on minifridge” and “F/u on PI app.” Then I cleaned off my desk and trooped around the office, watering all the plants Felicia and the decorator had placed around because they were convinced the oxygen produced by all the foliage would help cleanse the air of dry-cleaner fumes. By the time I finished, I was a little sore at Felicia. Watering plants was definitely a secretary’s job, but then I realized the idea to call the newspaper with the story that might break the case was the detective’s job.
There was a young woman standing on the sidewalk outside the Ely Building when I left. She was a good-looking girl of about twenty, with shoulder-length dark hair and very large brown eyes. She didn’t have much shape, but she was tall and held herself well, like a girl who’s had some breeding. She was holding a section of the newspaper—the “Lifestyle” section of the Sunday Sentinel. I could see the top of my shaggy brown head above the fold. What a sheepdog! I decided right then to get a haircut first thing in the morning.
“Guess what? I’m Teddy Ruzak,” I told her.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I didn’t know if this was the right address. You saw me standing out here?”
“Actually, I was on my way home.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Ruzak, I need to talk to you….”
“Okay. It’s nice out. You want to walk?”
She hesitated, but only for a second, before nodding, and we set off east, toward Gay Street. The air had begun to cool and there was a springtime moistness to it that reminded me of flower gardens and the way wet grass feels beneath your bare feet. The gentle atmosphere played counterpoint to this girl’s agitation. She was definitely distracted and nervous about something. HRT, I thought. She’s going to tell me she’s HRT, the goose killer. I cautioned myself not to get my hopes up. She might be a chronic confessor, like Eunice Shriver.
“Where are you parked?” I asked. “Because if you didn’t feed the meter, they’ll still ticket you after five. They’re very aggressive about it downtown. It’s a cash cow for the city.” I thought I was being pretty clever. I wanted to see her car. If it was a black Ford Expedition with the partial tag HRT, I had her.
“I parked in the Hilton’s garage,” she said.
Well, there went that lever to pry the truth out of her. If she didn’t confess, I could tail her back to the garage to check out the car.
“Did you want to see me about the article?” I asked.
“Yes.” She dropped the newspaper into a trash can mounted on a light pole on the corner of Gay and Church. Her putting my picture in the garbage kind of hurt my feelings.
“My name is Susan Marks. I saw the article yesterday and …I don’t know what good it’s going to do, but …I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Go ahead. But call me Teddy.”
“Okay,” she said. “The article didn’t mention the name of your client.”
“I protect the identity of all my clients,” I told Susan Marks. Of course, I had only one client, but she didn’t know that. The trap of the human ego is the desire to impress other people, even total strangers. It’s led to more misery than half the wars in history. I wondered if I should tell Felicia that one so she could put it in The Wit and Wisdom of Theodore Ruzak, Master of Detection.
“I understand that, Mr. Ruzak, but I hope that after you hear my story, you’ll change your mind. You see, I’m a little desperate.”
We turned left on Gay Street and walked north. A guy passed us walking a big German shepherd that was wearing one of those thick black leather collars with the rows of glittering silver spikes. German shepherds are very smart but too aggressive and big for my little apartment. I wouldn’t want one of those little yippy-type dogs, though, the kind you dress in sweaters in winter, and the males especially annoy me, the way they daintily lift their hind leg to pee.
“Have you ever heard the name Lydia Marks?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’ve seen her picture before.”
She pulled a piece of paper from her purse, unfolded it, and handed it to me. It was a flyer with MISSING printed in bold black letters at the top. Beneath the word was a picture of a pretty woman with auburn hair, maybe around my age or a little older.
“They ran it in the newspaper a few days ago. She’s my stepmother and she’s been missing now for over four weeks.”
“You want me to find your stepmom for you?”
“I want anybody to find her. The police sure haven’t had much luck.” Susan Marks had a small, slightly upturned, freckly nose and a full bottom lip that was out of proportion to her top one, which gave her a kind of puckish look. She went light on the makeup and could have passed for a boy if her hair had been shorter or maybe hidden in a ball cap. She had the fine features of a pixie.
“What’s this have to do with my client, Susan?”
“When those baby geese were killed—that was around the time she disappeared. She always took a jog that time in the morning—always.”
“She lived near the lake?”
Susan nodded. “We aren’t sure she was abducted that morning. See, my dad travels a lot for business and my little brother and I live on campus. Dad flew to Brussels on Wednesday and didn’t get back home till late Saturday night.”
“You don’t call or go see her on a regular basis?”
“We aren’t that close. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Ruzak. I like Lydia, I really do, but she was Dad’s thing, you know? He met her in Ireland about four years after my mom died. I was a senior in high school. She was a lot younger than he was, but they were in love. And it was love. She wasn’t like some kind of gold digger or anything.”
We had doubled back toward Market Square. She sat on a bench beneath an oak tree and I sat beside her. I was still holding the poster and I looked at her stepmother’s picture as she talked.
“What have the cops found out?” I asked.
“Not a hell of a lot. There were no signs of a break-in. Nothing is missing in the house, the Mercedes is in the garage, and Lydia’s purse is on the kitchen counter with her driver’s license, all her cash and credit cards. The only thing we can’t find are the house keys.”
“And none of the neighbors saw anything suspicious?”
She shook her head. “Dad talked to her on Wednesday night. He tried calling again the next night, Thursday, but there was no answer. He wasn’t too worried, because Lydia often goes to the movies at night when he’s out of town.”
“By herself?”
“She was—she’s a very shy person. America was overwhelming to her. She hated America, I think, but Dad tried to help out the best he could. He even gave her a job managing some of his properties while he was away, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Please, call me Teddy.”
She nodded. “She didn’t know anybody in America when Dad moved her here after the wedding and she didn’t meet people easily. I don’t think she has any close friends here.”
“So what makes you think somebody abducted her? Maybe she hopped a cab and flew back to Ireland.”
“That’s the first thing the police t
hought, so they checked all the manifests. And anyway, you can’t get on any plane these days without a driver’s license.”
“Maybe she ran away.”
“She had nothing to run from.”
“I mean with somebody else.”
“Lydia’s crazy about my dad. If you ever saw them together, you’d know that’s impossible.”
“Okay. No friends. No lovers. Enemies?”
She shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“And your father was in Brussels.”
She gave me a cold stare.
“The police must have brought that up, too,” I added quickly. “Family members are the first people they look at in a case like this.”
“My father loves Lydia. He adores her. I’m talking to you because he can’t. Or won’t. He’s in some major denial right now. He can’t bring himself to deal with this, so I have to. We’re desperate, Mr. Ruzak. The police have no leads, no evidence, and no witnesses and I don’t know where to turn. Maybe it’s grasping at straws, but your client might have seen something. Even if he didn’t see what happened to her, at least if he did see her jogging on that trail that day, we could narrow down when she disappeared.”
I nodded. “Sure. That makes sense. I’ll ask him.”
She looked down at her hands. They were small and her fingers were very thin. I remembered a line from a poem I had read once, or maybe it was from a movie: “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
“Hey,” I said. “Are you hungry, Susan? I didn’t have breakfast this morning and all I had for lunch was a salad with low-fat dressing and a glass of ice water. You want to get something to eat?”
She looked up at me with a startled expression. The last thing she probably expected from me was a dinner invitation. I wasn’t sure why I had extended one. It probably goes back to my weakness for the bereft of this world, those holding the short end of the stick, from stray dogs to poor people with bad teeth. She was obviously pretty broken up by her stepmom’s disappearance and knew deep in her heart what all cops know: that the longer someone’s missing, the greater the likelihood they’ll never be found.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WE WERE A BLOCK FROM MARKET SQUARE AND THE TOMATO Head was still open, but I have this constitutional aversion to eating at the same place twice in one day. There’re not a lot of restaurants or any kind of place that stays open past 7:00 P.M. in downtown Knoxville, because there’re not a lot of people living downtown to patronize them. I thought about getting my car from the garage and driving somewhere, but we were about seven or eight blocks from my apartment and I was afraid if we walked all that way, it would give her too much time to change her mind. About the only other decent place was the Bistro on the corner of Jackson. It was attached to the Bijou Theater and frequented by the city’s theater crowd at night, actors and other artsy types who constituted Knoxville’s version of counterculture. The servers were all either actors or students studying to be actors and therefore could be counted on to be temperamental. I thought the place was overpriced for the quality, but it was kind of cool, with brick walls and wide-paneled wooden floors and a bar that ran the length of the room. A large painting of a naked fat lady hung over the bar; she was reclining on a bed with about fifty pillows and a small white dog, maybe a Pomeranian—I didn’t know, as I wasn’t up on the small breeds.
So we walked back to Gay Street and turned right onto Jackson. A breeze had picked up, the first real one in a couple of days, and some clouds were moving in. Susan Marks walked with her thin arms folded over her small chest. Maybe it’s just my impression, but androgyny seems to be more prevalent in the upper classes. Look at all those royals and superstar celebrities, especially the singers, only they don’t call them singers, but “recording artists.” I guess you couldn’t call people like Jack Kennedy or Paris Hilton androgynous, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It’s like money breeds the sex right out of you, though you hear that money is the ultimate aphrodisiac—or maybe it’s power, which in this world is the same thing. If I had a lot of money, I’d hook up with the most voluptuous woman I could find, just to safeguard against the asexual factor.
“Where do you go to school?” I asked. It was the first time I’d spoken since she said she’d have dinner with me. “The university?”
She nodded. She had this habit—probably born of self-consciousness, because her bottom lip was so much larger than her top—of sucking in her bottom lip and chewing on it with her teeth.
“What’s your major?”
“I’m studying to be a vet.”
“Hey, that’s terrific. I love animals. I’ve been thinking about getting a dog, although technically it’s not allowed. I haven’t had a dog since I was a kid and my collie died.”
“We always had a dog, usually two or three. And a cat. And a cockatiel, fish, turtles, a couple of hamsters—you name it.”
“Since you’re in the field, maybe you can tell me what the deal is with these ferrets that are so popular now and maybe what kind of dog I should get and your thoughts about somebody my age getting back into school….”
She stopped walking all of sudden.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. We were a block from the restaurant.
“This feels weird to me,” she said. “Having dinner with you.”
“Well,” I said. “Why are you?”
She shrugged. “Why did you ask me?” She had folded those thin arms over her chest again and her dark eyebrows had moved close together. She wasn’t exactly frowning at me, but she wasn’t smiling, either. I guess she was wondering if this was some kind of seedy quid pro quo, like I wouldn’t help her if she didn’t have dinner with me. It wasn’t that at all; she just seemed so lost and I felt bad for her. And, like a lot of guys, I equate eating with comfort—that’s really what it was all about, comfort. But would she believe me if I told her that? I wondered. One of the saddest developments of the modern age is the cynicism of the youth. There was another quote for Felicia’s book.
“I’m pretty hungry, to tell you the truth, and probably the last eighteen or nineteen meals I’ve eaten, I’ve eaten alone. It’s pretty crappy to eat alone. There’s nothing chic about it, and besides, it’s dangerous to your health. I read somewhere you tend to eat more when you eat alone, but I might have that wrong, because sometimes you read things and you remember them wrong because you’re justifying something—in my case, the fact that I need to lose about twenty pounds.”
She laughed and her eyebrows sprang apart.
“It may have said that you eat faster,” I said.
“You’re funny,” she said. “You’re not what I expected at all.”
We started walking again.
“What did you expect?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Probably someone like Philip Marlowe or Columbo. You don’t run into too many PIs in day-to-day life, so it’s one of those professions where stereotypes flourish. I never liked Columbo, chiefly because there’s something mean and snide about pretending to be stupid when you’re not.”
“Who’s Columbo?”
It was a dark night for the theater, so we didn’t have any trouble getting a table. Susan Marks folded her arms on the table and looked around the room; she had never been to the Bistro before, she told me. There was a tiny potted plastic flower arrangement on the table and an unlighted candle. I ordered a beer and Susan ordered a raspberry tea. I asked our waitress when her shift had begun and she told me four o’clock that afternoon, so she wouldn’t have known if Felicia and Bob had actually eaten there. I wondered why I was trying to catch Felicia in a lie, then decided it was because detective work is a vocation, not a job; you can’t leave it at the office at five o’clock.
I asked what she thought had happened to her stepmother.
“I think she was jogging and somebody took her. I don’t think she ran off with the yardman or joined a commune or is playing some sick game on my fath
er to get him to notice her or anything like that.”
“But we’re talking broad daylight on a well-traveled road with lots of moms around walking babies and retirees strolling the trail. Not exactly the ideal spot to be abducting someone.”
“There’s no other explanation.”
The waitress came back with our drinks. I ordered the filet mignon and Susan ordered the North Atlantic scrod, which was one of the specials on the chalkboard at the front of the restaurant. I thought about telling her you should never order fish on a Monday because restaurants serve the leftovers from the Friday deliveries, but we weren’t that intimate, and anyway, it was sort of a big brotherly or, worse, fatherly thing to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I guess the cops told you that’s one of the hardest cases to solve.”
She nodded. “Unless we can turn up a witness, there’s not much hope.”
Tears welled up in her eyes and I looked away. An older couple, maybe in their seventies, were eating at the next table, not saying anything to each other. You see that a lot when you eat out, old couples who’ve been married for a million years eating and not saying a word, but it never looks uncomfortable. After all that time together, they’ve probably said all that’s worth saying. The best way to take someone’s mind off their problems is to get them to talk about themselves, because most of us think our problems come from someone or something else, so I asked her about school—if she was going to specialize in any particular type of vet work, if she was going to work in the research field or be a practicing vet, if she was going to stay in the area when she graduated, and if vets had to do internships like people doctors. This kept the conversation going through the bread and salad and halfway into the entrée. When she relaxed, she had this habit of talking out of the right side of her mouth; she reminded me of those kids in that old movie Bugsy Malone trying to act like gangsters. She should let her hair grow some and wear more makeup, I thought, but vet work is kind of a butch science for a girl, a tomboy occupation. She had an athlete’s body, inclined more toward swimming or basketball than softball or soccer. To test my theory, I asked if she played any sports, and she told me she was on the tennis team. Well, tennis would fit, too.
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