“That’s all I need to know.” She didn’t look sick, but women have problems men don’t see easily.
“Good, because that’s all you’re gonna know.”
After she left, I took out my mechanical pencil and began a todo list.
The door opened and a man’s voice called out.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
I went around my desk and saw a tall man standing by the love seat. He was easily halfway to thirteen feet tall, dressed in an expensive gray suit that might have been purchased from American Clothiers, and fairly sparkling with diamond jewelry: watch, two rings, and a stud in his left ear. His hair was fashionably long and swept back from his massive forehead, which jutted out like the brow of a warship over a very long, very straight nose and full, sensuous lips. It was the lips, particularly the lower one, which gave him away.
“I’m looking for a man named Theodore Ruzak,” the man said.
“I’m Teddy Ruzak. And you’re Kenneth Marks.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I see the family resemblance. Come on in. Sit down. Can I get you anything? The coffee isn’t fresh, and I keep meaning to get one of those watercoolers, but Felicia, my secretary, might have something stashed in the filing cabinet, not that she drinks on the job, but she did have a margarita once when we had lunch.”
“No thank you,” he said, slipping into one of my visitor’s chairs. “I haven’t much time.”
“No, I didn’t figure you would—not have a drink, I mean, but have much time. I gotta tell you how sorry I am about all this….”
“No sorrier than I, Mr. Ruzak. We are preparing to leave for Ireland in two days.”
“Ireland?”
“For my wife’s funeral.”
“You’re burying her in Ireland?”
“As per her wishes, yes.”
There went my surveillance of the funeral.
“I feel really bad about all this,” I said. “Like I said before. I didn’t know your wife, but I do know your daughter, which I guess you know I do, since she was here this morning and now you’re here.”
He didn’t say anything for a second. Then he said, “My daughter tells me you have promised to help us find my wife’s killer.”
“Something like that.”
“You’re aware the authorities are also investigating her death?”
“Well,” I said, “it certainly isn’t a competition. They’ve got me outgunned in terms of manpower and experience and the ability to make an arrest.”
“Then what do you suppose you can do?”
I shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Indeed.”
He put his elbows on the armrests and laced his perfectly manicured fingers together. Now, this guy radiated charisma and power. I’d never asked Susan what her father did for a living, but whatever it was, he was very good at it and he knew it. He was not somebody to be messed with on a financial plane, not that I had any intention of messing with him on any plane. Still, the spouse is the first person you look at, so I looked at him and wondered if he’d had anything to do with his wife’s murder. If this was a movie, I would have said Mr. Marks was suspect numero uno: rich, arrogant, smart. A guy you love to hate. He certainly wasn’t playing the part of grieving widower very well, but these business-genius types are pretty cold fish, pretty ruthless, like those takeover guys who move in and fire half a company in order to save it. I really didn’t have a head for finances. I was past my twenties and nearly midway through my thirties, and I still didn’t know what I did have a head for. I certainly hadn’t proved myself in the detective line. I couldn’t even solve the murder of a gaggle of geese.
“Perhaps you would be interested to hear what I’d like you to do?” he suggested.
“That would be great. But I see my role as an adjunct to the police. Sort of an advisory position, because, see, technically, I don’t have my license. I’ll be taking the test next month, but as of right now I’m not a PI.”
“If you’re not a PI, what are you?”
“I’m an ex–security guard who lucked into some money and didn’t have the brains or maturity to think things through before stenciling ‘THE DIC’ on my door.”
He laughed. It was a bled-white kind of laugh, a social formality he observed, like shaking hands in the West or kissing cheeks in the East or bowing in the Far East.
“How did you luck into money?” he asked. I must have touched on his favorite topic.
“My mother died.”
“You consider that luck?”
“I didn’t say it was good luck.”
“My daughter told me you are the most unusual man she has ever met. I begin to see what she meant.”
He had such a formal way of talking, I wondered if he was a foreigner, too, like his second wife. Maybe he was naturalized, but he didn’t have an accent, as far as I could tell. But I wasn’t very good at accents.
“She brought your name up several weeks ago, after she read an article in the paper about your case of the dead geese. I told her at the time I didn’t think talking to you would lead anywhere, but perhaps it has, or might, and that is why I’m here.”
Now was the moment to pull out the ol’ checkbook and write Teddy Ruzak a big number, one with lots and lots of zeros, but he didn’t. He just studied me over his folded hands, his very light blue eyes taking everything in. Maybe German or Swiss. He was a big-bodied, stolid kind of guy, which fit the German theory; plus, the name could be an Americanized Marx, like the guy who started communism and made Ronald Reagan’s second career possible. But he also was precise in the way he talked, clipping off the end of each word very neatly and organizing his thoughts, and even in the way he held himself erectly in the soft chair without so much as twitching an eyelash. There was a stoicism about him that might be Swiss, plus my belief, not based on anything really, that the Swiss were very good with money. Maybe it’s all the talk about Swiss bank accounts, and you never read about Swiss poverty or them running to the World Bank for some debt relief. You never hear much about the Swiss period.
“I want the person who murdered my wife,” he said. “Sure.”
“And toward that goal, I am offering half a million dollars for the arrest and conviction of her killer.”
I gave an appreciative whistle. “Gee, thanks for letting me know. I’ve been cautioned against pro bono.”
“That money is for anyone who comes forward with information that leads to an arrest and conviction.”
“You bet, I understand. We see eye to eye on that.”
“However, I am prepared to offer you twice that amount.”
His proposal didn’t make much sense, but I was sure the blame for that didn’t rest with him. I wasn’t getting it.
“There is another proviso to my offer to you, Mr. Ruzak, and that is if or when you discover his identity, you do not tell the police. You tell me.”
He hadn’t moved a muscle. I was moving a lot of them, mostly the internal ones.
“Mr. Marks,” I said. “Wouldn’t I have to tell the police to fulfill the arrest and conviction part of the deal?”
“Our deal does not end with arrest and conviction.”
“You know,” I said, “when my mother died, I was pretty torn up. She died of cancer, and my first reaction was, Somebody by God’s going to pay for this. Like, Look how long cancer has been around, and we still can’t lick it? I wanted to mow down the entire medical community and maybe the government, too, for dropping the ball on the whole cure issue. I mean, we can put a man on the moon and build bombs that can blow up half the planet, but we can’t cure cancer? Anger is pretty natural—I think it has its roots in our genetic history, something to do with the fight-or-flight response, and sometimes it’s pretty useful, but it’s always been my opinion that revenge is anger misdirected in an unproductive way.”
“Then you are declining my offer?”
“All I ever wanted to be was a detective,” I told him. “If I ta
ke you up on this and somehow I succeed, that makes me an accessory to a serious crime, and I don’t think the licensing bureau would look too kindly on my application. Of course, it would also stink morally, ethically, and, besides, could land us both in prison for a very long time.”
“You don’t believe I could protect you?”
“What could you do to protect me?”
“Safe passage to a country of your choosing. A new identity. Or, in the alternative, my word that if things do not turn out as planned, I will take full responsibility and never reveal how I came upon the information.”
“How’s that protect me from my own conscience, though? What about the moral and ethical part—you know, the evil?”
“Don’t presume to lecture me about the nature of evil, Mr. Ruzak. I am intimately acquainted with it.”
“Mr. Marks, I wouldn’t presume to lecture a dog, much less somebody like you. I understand you’re something of a world traveler and I can only imagine some of the things you’ve seen in your travels. There’s an awful lot of bad out there, which is fortunate for my business but unfortunate for the species at large. I was only saying, all things being equal, I’d prefer to be on the side of light—you know, a bulwark against the darkness.”
“One-point-five million.”
“Gee, that shows a lot of confidence in me. It’s flattering as hell, but I really don’t—”
“Two million, then. My final offer.”
“I’m glad of that, because this sort of reminds me of a parlor game me and my buddies used to play in high school. Well, I called it a parlor game, but it wasn’t played in a parlor. We usually played in my parents’ basement. You know, where you’d challenge each other to see how far you’d go for money, along the lines of the old saying that everybody has a price. Like, Would you eat a bowl of dog crap for five thousand dollars? I just grabbed that number out of the air, but usually the dog crap fetched a price closer to a million. I believe I said I’d do it for five hundred thousand. I was in high school, you understand, and when you’re that age, you’re pretty materialistic. I remember I was ready to give up a foot for two million. Some people never grow out of that stage; otherwise, we wouldn’t have so much insurance fraud, like those people who stage car wrecks.”
He blinked several times, like he had something in his eye, or it may have been just the sting of the dry-cleaning fumes.
“Mr. Ruzak, you are either the most facetious man I have ever met or the most facile.”
“You mean you can’t figure out if that was a yes or a no. One of my problems is that I’ve got a restless mind, probably a result of spending most of my adult life sitting by myself in the dead of night listening to too much late-night talk radio. They didn’t allow televisions, so that was really the only media outlet available to me.”
“I don’t think your problem is too much talk radio,” he said.
“Well, that’s a relief. That would be something you can’t undo.”
“So your answer is no?”
“See, that’s the thing.”
“What is? What is the thing, Mr. Ruzak?” he fairly barked at me.
“Am I hesitating because I don’t know who did this to your wife? In other words, is my moral character predicated on my lack of knowledge or on a truly righteous underpinning? See, it’s like that game I told you about. It’s all abstract because I don’t possess the key to the treasure chest. That said, I made a certain promise to your daughter that I’m going to do everything I can to help find Lydia’s killer, but I’d be happy to settle for the half million and forgo the jackpot.”
His hands came apart and spread wide in a vaguely European gesture of surrender.
As I walked him to the door, I said, “You know, I probably don’t have to tell you there’re maybe a couple dozen guys in Knoxville alone who would jump at your offer.”
“And what would you do, Mr. Ruzak, if some unfortunate accident befell this person who murdered my wife?”
He meant would I rat on him.
“I don’t know. I’d feel pretty lousy for everyone involved, but we all have choices to make, Mr. Marks. I don’t have to live with anybody but Theodore Ruzak. That’s tough enough.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
FELICIA CALLED IN SICK THE NEXT MORNING. I GOT OFF the phone with her, called the downtown fire station, and asked for Bob. When he came on the line, I hung up. Then I felt crummy for checking up on her like that. Most people are honest and all have problems. You can’t get cynical. Cynical people aren’t a happy lot and they have tight mouths.
I was so deep in thought, I didn’t hear the door open and didn’t notice I wasn’t alone until my guest was halfway to my desk. We needed a bell over the door or one of those buzzers like they have in retail outlets. When I saw who it was, I went around the desk and held the chair for her.
“Hello, Mrs. Shriver,” I said.
“Will you call me Eunice?”
“If you’ll call me Teddy.”
Her hair looked shorter and less blue, perhaps her summer do. She was wearing a pair of those orthopedic shoes with the thick heels over the knee-highs and was carrying the same big handbag. I sat behind my desk, smiled at her, and waited.
“I shall call you Teddy, but only on the condition that you call me Eunice.”
I told her we had a rock-solid deal. She asked, “How old are you, Teddy, if I may ask?”
“Thirty-three.”
“My youngest son is thirty-four.”
“Well, we’re practically contemporaries.”
“Samuel is thirty-four, Rachel is thirty-seven, Kirk is thirty-nine, and Vernon, my eldest, is forty-two.”
“Wow, you must have waited to have them.”
“On the contrary, I couldn’t wait to have them. I love children, though more abstractly when I was younger.”
“That’s probably pretty common.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“My parents decided one little Ruzak was plenty for them.”
“Are you close to your parents, Mr. Ruzak?”
“They’re both dead.”
“Oh, goodness. Ruzak, what sort of name is that?”
“Polish. I’m Polish on my father’s side, German, English, and maybe a little Dutch on my mother’s.”
“I am third-generation Knoxvillian,” she said proudly. “My great-grandfather Martin Sparks founded the first full-service laundry facility very close to here, in the Old City.”
“That’s something,” I said. “You know, I’ve got a dry cleaner’s right below me.”
“He was also a bootlegger, but the family doesn’t talk about that.”
“Every family has a few skeletons.”
“Tell me, Teddy, do you speak to your parents often?”
“Not anymore. They’re dead,” I told her again. “But I do visit them and talk to Mom, or at her grave anyway, though sometimes I throw a word or two at Dad. I wasn’t that close to him. He worked hard and I didn’t see him much growing up.”
“It’s never too late to mend fences,” she said.
“You think so? I guess I always assumed death put the kibosh on patching things up, but hearing that really helps, Eunice. It lifts my spirits. You know, my mom died recently, leaving me a little money, and now any success I have will owe a lot to the fact that she had to die for me to have it, and that’s been weighing on me.”
“Oh, I know all about that weight. The weight of death.”
Here it came. She paused, tears welling in her eyes. She seemed to be waiting for something. I dug in my desk drawer for my mechanical pencil and found my yellow legal pad under a pile of papers.
“I suppose you know why I’ve come,” she said.
“I think I have an idea.”
“Must I say it, then?”
“I guess you need to, Eunice.”
She nodded, running her palms along the straps of her purse. Both feet were planted firmly on the floor and her back was straight. She had pre
tty good posture for an old lady.
“I am a murderess, Teddy.”
“I thought so,” I said. “Did you kill Lydia Marks, Eunice?”
She burst into tears, but her back remained straight, her feet planted firmly on the floor.
“Eunice,” I said. “How could you?”
“I wish I could say it was an accident, a horrible accident, but that isn’t the truth. I killed her. I killed that poor woman and left her body in the mountains as carrion. Oh, Teddy, what shall become of me?”
“How did you kill her, Eunice?”
“Stabbed her with my sewing needle.”
“Really? The coroner said she was bludgeoned to death.”
“Oh, yes, yes.” She gave a little wave with her mottled hand. “That, too.”
“So you killed her and then dragged her up the mountain to leave her for the carrion?”
“Yes. Yes, oh God forgive me, yes.”
“Well, I gotta say that’s impressive. A woman of your age dragging a corpse nine hundred feet up a mountain.”
“I didn’t say I acted alone.”
“No?”
“You remember I mentioned my son, my eldest, Vernon.”
“Sure. Vernon.”
“He helped.”
“Why?”
“Because the last thing he wants to see is his eighty-six-year-old mother sitting in the electric chair!”
“That would be the last thing anyone would want to see,” I said. “What did the police say?”
“They told me to go away. They told me they didn’t want to see me anymore.”
“You see them a lot, Eunice?”
She didn’t answer. She was dabbing her eyes with her white handkerchief.
“If the police won’t arrest you,” I said, “what is it you want me to do?”
“Help me,” she whispered.
“This Vernon, he lives in Knoxville?”
She nodded. “He came over last Sunday and found that woman’s body in my basement, covered with an old blanket. He said, ‘Mother, why do you have a body in your basement?’ So I told him I had killed her and he said, ‘Mother, we must not leave this body here. It’s begun to stink.’ So we put it in the trunk and drove into the park and Vernon carried it over his back up the mountain. I stayed in the car, as a lookout.” She looked away. It was hard to tell, but she might have been pretty in her day. Not a stunner, but pretty, and despite her wackiness, there was a dignity about Eunice Shriver, like with a lot of very old people, the pride of having outlasted so much pain and heartache.
The Highly Effective Detective Page 11