“I played football in high school,” I told her. “Left guard. I wasn’t very good, but I was big and could take a lot of hits. People just bounced off me like little moths off a naked lightbulb. I haven’t been very active since then, but I’m gonna get into this Krav Maga deal. Don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Krav Maga, but a lot of girls do it; it’s a great workout, plus you learn self-defense. You really find out how to beat the living crap out of someone. I’m thinking I can write off the entire cost of the class, since knowing martial arts would come in handy in my line of work.”
She asked how I got interested in my line of work, so I told her about reading Sherlock Holmes and the Dictionary Ruzak moniker. She laughed about me calling myself Dictionary Ruzak. She had very good teeth and didn’t show too much of them when she laughed, like a lot of thin-faced girls, which reinforced my notion that she had some breeding, that here was a girl who had wanted for nothing in her life, that her stepmom disappearing was the first real trouble she had had.
The check came and she insisted we go dutch, but I told her I needed the write-off, because technically I was entertaining a client.
“But I’m not a client,” she said.
“Well, it’s sort of like you are, though one client removed, like a second cousin.”
She laughed. “You say things that don’t make sense and make sense at the same time.”
I blushed, as if she had paid me a compliment. It was dark when we stepped outside, and I told her I was walking her to her car. Downtown Knoxville can be pretty rough at night, after the library closes and all the vagrants hit the streets. Knoxville is known as a good place to come if you’re homeless: The cops don’t hassle you too much and people are generous. The air was heavy with a storm coming in from the west. The leading winds of the front had died and there was that before-the-rain stillness in the air. We didn’t say much on the ten-minute walk to the Hilton, and I was feeling a little like we were television reenactors on one of those true-crime programs, tracing Felicia and Bob’s route from the Bistro to the Hilton, if they even went to either the Bistro or the Hilton.
Her car was parked on the third level, a brand-new cherry red Mitsubishi convertible. My car was a 1992 two-door Nissan Sentra. I stood a couple steps back while she opened the door. She thought of something, pulled a pen from her purse, and scribbled her number on an old bank receipt.
“Will you call me right away after you talk to your client?”
“You bet.”
“An English sheepdog or maybe even a Great Pyrenees.”
“Huh?”
“The kind of dog you should get.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks. I’ll look into that.”
A lopsided smile. A hand on my shoulder. A little bounce on the balls of her feet and a kiss on my right cheek. She got in her car and I waited until her top was up and she was pulling out to turn, then walked back to the stairs. The rain had started and I had left the umbrella at the office. I was going to get soaked to my Skivvies, and I’m not such a romantic that I like walking in the rain.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I CALLED PARKER HUDSON FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING. A lady answered the phone—his wife, I guessed—and told me he was playing golf. The rain that had moved in the night before was still hanging around, having turned misty overnight and now promising to stay all day. Sometimes the clouds swoop down upon us from the Cumberland Plateau and settle in the valley for days. I left a message for him to call. He must be a dedicated golfer to hit the links in this kind of weather, I thought, or else he is lying to his wife. Although Parker Hudson didn’t strike me as the lying type.
It was Felicia’s turn to show up late. She didn’t get in till almost ten o’clock. She was wearing black knee-high boots, a suede skirt, and a white peasant-looking blouse that showed a lot of cleavage. As always, when she first walked in the room, I felt myself expanding like that fat kid in the Willy Wonka movie.
“Don’t tell me I’m late,” she said.
“How come?”
“Because I already know I’m late.”
“Car trouble?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
I wondered what could be like car trouble but not car trouble.
“You’ll never guess what’s happened.”
“You’ve caught the killer.”
“No, but the plot’s thickened.” I told her about meeting Susan Marks and about her missing stepmother. For some reason, I left out the fact that I’d had dinner with Susan.
“That’s a weird coincidence,” Felicia said.
“It would explain why the driver didn’t slow down or stop.”
“Because he was in the midst of an abduction?”
I nodded.
“On the other hand, maybe she’s wrong and the stepmom took off on her old man.”
“She’s sure that didn’t happen.”
“Stepmom was a lot younger, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Dad’s out of the country a lot, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Stepmom’s a looker, right?”
“She’s kind of pretty, yeah.”
“A foreigner in a strange country, no friends, no family around except the stepkids off to college…”
“Maybe I should look into this deeper.”
“Why?”
She was leaning in the entryway, one ankle crossed over the other, and as she talked, her thigh muscles clenched and unclenched.
“Is Susan Marks your client?”
“Not exactly.”
“Is Susan Marks your client, Ruzak?”
“No. She’s not.”
“Is the Highly Effective—oh Christ, I can’t remember how it goes—is the DIC a for-profit business?”
“Okay, Felicia. But I did promise I’d call Parker and ask if he saw anything that morning.”
“Don’t you think he would have told you already if he had?”
I shrugged. “Memory’s funny.”
“No pro bono work, Ruzak,” she reminded me. The phone rang and I heard her say, “The Highly Effective Detection & Investigation Company. How may I direct your call?” even though there was only one place to direct it.
It was Deputy Paul.
“Teddy, I’ve got an answer on that partial tag for you.”
“Hey, that’s terrific,” I said, digging in my desk drawer for my mechanical pencil.
“Well, it’s probably not the answer you’re looking for. You sure you got the letters right?”
“Hernando Radio Tango,” I said, trying to sound very law enforcement.
“What?”
“HRT, that’s what I saw,” I said firmly.
“Well, there’s no match, at least not to a Ford Expedition.”
“Stolen tag?” I asked.
“I thought the same thing,” he said, and I felt myself go warm with pleasure that I was thinking like a cop. Maybe I couldn’t be one, but I could think like one. “But there’s no record in the database. You sure it was a Tennessee tag?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Okay. Huh. Well, sometimes not every number gets keyed in correctly. I could check the actual paper, but that takes time, Teddy.”
“Look, I can’t tell you how much this means to me…and to my client.”
“Don’t mention it, buddy.”
I took a breath and said, “Does the name Lydia Marks mean anything to you?”
“No, should it?”
“She went missing around the same time the goslings were killed.”
He didn’t say anything for a second.
“Okay,” he said. He was waiting for the punch line.
“Maybe it’s connected.”
“What?”
“Lydia Marks’s disappearance and the killing of the geese.”
“What was her name again?”
I spelled it for him. He said, “Who’s the detective assigned to the case?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been deal
ing with . . . an interested third party.”
“A confidential informant?” There was a smile in his voice.
“Yeah, confidential informant, something like that.”
“I’ll ask around.”
We expressed our mutual admiration and hung up. Felicia spun around the half wall as if on cue, as if this were a play and we had to keep the action moving.
“Three things,” she said. “I hate our company greeting. It’s too long and I refuse to say ‘You’ve reached THE DIC.’ We’ve got to change the name before it’s too late. Also, Parker Hudson is holding for you, and what are you doing for lunch?”
“You’re asking me to lunch?” I felt gut-punched.
“Relax, Ruzak, it’s not a date. It’s a working lunch.”
“I didn’t think it was a date,” I said, but my tone probably gave me away. “What are we working on?”
“You,” she said, and spun back around the wall. I was glad peasant blouses were making a comeback; I had always liked them.
I picked up the phone and asked Parker Hudson, “Have you ever been hypnotized?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know, where somebody puts you in this altered state….”
“Teddy, I know what hypnosis is. And the answer is no, unless you include the spell placed on me by my beautiful wife thirty-five years ago.” She must have been in the room with him; that’s something you’d say if your wife was standing nearby.
I pulled the flyer about Lydia Marks out of my pocket. “She’s thirty-seven, five six, a hundred and thirty pounds, auburn hair.”
“Who is?”
“The woman you may have seen the morning the goslings died, maybe on the trail, maybe in the SUV itself. Her name is Lydia Marks and she’s your neighbor, I guess.”
“I’ve never heard of her. Or seen anyone like that. What’s this got to do with hypnosis?”
“I figured you didn’t have a memory of her or you would have mentioned it when you hired me. What I’m thinking is that they have that regression-type hypnosis therapy where you can reach suppressed memories….”
“You want me hypnotized?”
“Totally voluntarily.”
He laughed.
“You never know what might turn up,” I went on. “Even if it isn’t Lydia, maybe you’ll remember the tag number, because my lead’s not really panning out, or something else that’ll crack the case.”
“Why do you want me to remember Lydia Marks?”
I told him. He waited so long to say something, I had to ask if he was still there.
“I’d really like to help, Teddy. But I don’t think I’d be comfortable undergoing hypnosis.”
“What about your wife?”
“You want my wife to undergo hypnosis?”
“No, what if it was your wife who was missing? What would you think of a potential witness who refused to be hypnotized?”
“Now you’re trying to manipulate me, Teddy.”
“I’m just in the field, turning over stones.”
He laughed. “Oh Teddy. You know what lives under stones. All sorts of nasty things.”
He promised he’d think about it and we ended the call before I remembered to ask him about his golf game. I looked out the window behind the desk. My office was in the back of the Ely, so my view was totally blocked by the building behind me. It was 11:30, but it looked like dusk out there in the alley with the light rain falling straight down, making whispering sounds against the glass. I turned on my dictation machine and recorded a reminder to research hypnotherapists in the area in case Parker Hudson changed his mind. It had occurred to me during our conversation that maybe a shot of sodium Pentothal might open up his mind a little, but I doubted he’d go for it, since he was so hesitant about hypnosis, which was a lot less intrusive than an armful of truth serum, so I didn’t bring it up. I also made a note to look into those psychic criminal investigators who the police bring in when they’re desperate. I’d seen a special about them on A&E and, although I went in a skeptic, some of the stuff they came up with was pretty impressive. Thinking of psychics reminded me of another show I saw once, maybe on Animal Planet, about a pet psychic who could telepathically talk to animals, sort of a New Age Dr. Doolittle; maybe I could dig up one of those to mind-meld with the geese, because, apart from Parker Hudson, they were the only witnesses to the crime. I wondered if I was being creative or just getting desperate.
I called the number Susan Marks had given me and left a message for her to return my call. Her voice was very calm on the recording, very smooth, as if she recorded voice-mail introductions for a living.
Felicia came into the room and asked, “Did you drive to work this morning?”
“It was raining.”
“So that means you did?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“Lunch, remember?”
I don’t think I’d ever been as physically close to Felicia as when she slipped into the bucket seat beside me in the Sentra. I caught a whiff of peaches and thought of summertime. I took Cumberland Avenue west into Sequoia Hills, with the mansions lining either side of the road and the big Greek Orthodox church where every spring they have their fund-raising Greek Festival with all the food and dancing in the back parking lot, all the little Greek kids in their traditional Greek getups, their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders, and I wondered as we drove past the church if line dancing in country music had its origins in Greek dancing. I wasn’t really hungry when we set out from downtown, but thinking of baklava got my appetite up.
“Is Bob a good cook?” I asked Felicia. “I hear firemen are great cooks because they’re cooped up in the firehouse all the time.”
“He’s not cooped up all the time,” she said, which really didn’t answer my question, but I didn’t press it. Something about Felicia tightened whenever I brought up Bob.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “And don’t say ‘lunch.’”
“American Clothiers.”
“Oh, no.”
“Think of it as an investment, Ruzak.”
“PIs aren’t known for their couture,” I said. “Look at Columbo and Tom Selleck in those tacky Hawaiian shirts.”
“What about Sonny Crocket?”
“Who’s Sonny Crocket?”
“Don Johnson, Miami Vice, come on, Ruzak!”
“Felicia, I don’t want to look like Don Johnson.”
“I don’t honestly think there’s a danger of that, Ruzak.”
“American Clothiers is very expensive.”
“How would you know, Kmart Man?”
“I happen to know because I rented my graduation tuxedo from American Clothiers and even the underwear was seventeen dollars a pair, and that was fifteen years ago.”
“You priced the underwear?”
“Anyway, detective work can be grungy, dirty business, Felicia. You sleep in your clothes sometimes and—”
“What times?”
“Like on a stakeout. And—”
“Why would you be sleeping on a stakeout? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“I was just using that as an example.”
“What kind of an example is it that makes no sense?”
“Sometimes what I say makes both,” I said.
“Makes both what?”
“Sense and no sense.”
She laughed. Some women have very unattractive knees, but Felicia’s were top-notch. Her brown skirt with the cowgirl-like ruffles on the hem had ridden up to mid thigh.
“Do you ever line-dance?” I asked.
“Do I what?”
“You know, that kind of country-music dancing.”
“Never. I hate country music.”
“I don’t like it, either.”
“So why were you asking?”
“I don’t know.”
We were on Kingston Pike and the traffic was bumper-to-bumper. I loo
ked at my watch. When I was a security guard, everything was very time-oriented: when your shift started and ended, when you made your rounds, even when you took your potty and other breaks. Now I was self-employed, it felt weird working without a strict schedule.
“That deputy with the sheriff’s department called this morning,” I said.
“I know. I answer the phone.”
“Yeah. Anyway, he can’t find that tag.”
“Maybe you got it wrong.”
“Maybe.”
“Or they’ve disposed of the car.”
“That could be.”
“Or maybe he just missed it.”
“Another possibility.”
“I don’t even know how you can see to drive, Ruzak,” she said. “How long has it been since you changed the wiper blades?”
“Now I suppose I don’t have the right kind of car.”
“You’re about to bring up Columbo again and that clunker he drove on the show, but you can’t use Columbo, Ruzak. Columbo was a police detective, not a PI.”
“So was Sonny Crocket.”
We were close to West Town Mall and the traffic inched painfully along. Kingston Pike was always bad this time of day and the rain only made it worse.
I said, “You ever notice how when you get a new car, all of sudden you notice the same make and model all over the road, when before you hardly did? Ever since I met Parker Hudson, I’ve been seeing black SUVs. Look, there’re three in the right lane up there and two in our lane…and another one behind us.”
American Clothiers was on the west side of the mall, in a strip center with a Korean restaurant, a print shop, and a store called the Candy Factory, where every year I used to pick up some hand-dipped chocolate strawberries for Mom for Valentine’s Day. American Clothiers reminded me of my mom, too; she’d taken me there to help pick out my tux.
“My only point is,” I said as we walked toward the door. “My only point is PIs are eclectic when it comes to wardrobe. I don’t want to walk out of this place looking like a banker.”
“You’re not fooling me. This isn’t about clothes. Sometimes change isn’t a bad thing, Teddy.”
The Highly Effective Detective Page 8