Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series)

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Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 6

by Friedman, Daniel


  “I didn’t really know what to expect.”

  “I’m glad you pulled me into this.”

  By the entrance to the graveyard, there was a plastic barrel full of gravel and a small water fountain. I picked up a couple of small stones. “So that is the legendary Elijah?” Andre asked, pointing at the trim, gray-haired figure at the other side of the cemetery.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He don’t look much like a thief.”

  “Good thieves never do.” I stopped on the path. “Hang on a second.”

  I took a left turn onto the grass, pushing the walker in front of me. Andre followed. Brian’s monument was big and new, made of black limestone. There were empty spaces next to it: for his wife on one side, and for Rose and me on the other. I knocked on the stone with my fist, and set a piece of gravel on top of it.

  “What are the little rocks for?” Andre asked.

  “It’s what Jews leave when we visit cemeteries, because we’re too cheap to pay for flowers,” I said. I didn’t know what significance the rocks had; somebody must have told me once, but I didn’t remember anymore.

  My mother was buried next to the plots where Rose and I were supposed to go. I left a rock on her gravestone as well.

  “Esther ‘Bird’ Schatz,” Andre said. “Your people do like their nicknames.”

  “I don’t talk about the kinds of names your people like,” I said.

  “Not where we can hear you, anyway,” Andre said. He squatted down, to read the inscription on the headstone. “She died in 1998? She must have been ancient.”

  “A hundred and four.”

  “I don’t see your dad here. Is he still alive or something?”

  “He’s in one of the older sections. He died in 1927. I was six.”

  “So, I guess not all the Schatzes live as long as you and your mom.”

  “My father was murdered,” I said.

  Andre waited for me to elaborate on that, and when I didn’t, he said: “I’m sorry.”

  My dad’s funeral was one of my earliest memories. Back then, the cemetery was mostly empty; only a couple of small sections filled with graves, and several more that were just empty, rolling lawns. Beyond that, the part of the property where my son would one day be buried hadn’t yet been developed; it was just trees and undergrowth.

  Not many people came to my father’s funeral, and I didn’t know most of them. I can’t recall their faces, but I remember how stricken Grandmother Schatz looked.

  “Your father believed in something that was inconvenient to some ruthless, powerful men,” my mother told me. “One day, you might believe in something. I hope you’ll remember that the things you believe in won’t keep you safe.”

  People were trying to talk to her, but she ignored them and led me off, away from the fresh earth we’d piled onto my father and down a row of graves.

  “You’ve learned something about the world today, Baruch,” she said.

  “I did?”

  “The world isn’t a nice place. The world isn’t a friendly place. The world isn’t a fair place. Your father is dead because he believed in a world governed by fairness and justice. He believed in a world that doesn’t exist.” She led me down to a corner of the cemetery where graves were smaller, to where there was only a space of a couple of feet between the headstones and the footstones.

  “Look at that,” she said, pointing at a monument no more than eighteen inches high, made of poured concrete in the shape of a lamb. There were several more just like it, farther down the row.

  “Do you understand what you are looking at?”

  “These are graves for little children,” I said.

  My mother nodded. “Believing the world is nice doesn’t make it true. Believing the world is nice doesn’t make you safe. People will hurt you for any number of stupid reasons. People will hurt you for no reason at all.”

  “No, they won’t,” I said. “I’ll hurt them first.”

  Eighty years later, in almost the same place, what I said to Andre Price was: “There’s nothing you can do about it.” I stuck my hands in my pockets. Elijah and his lawyer were now examining those tiny monuments in the old section. The years and the weather had worn the little lambs into unidentifiable lumps.

  “Let’s go arrest a bank robber.”

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  My mother was always a thin woman. Thin arms; slim waist; pale, pinched lips; narrow eyes, like a gunslinger’s. She wore her hair in a bun so tight that it pulled the skin of her face, which exaggerated the natural severity of her features. She might have been a pretty woman, if she’d allowed herself to be a little softer. But she had no use for softness or prettiness, and after my father got himself killed, she didn’t have much use for men, or the things men believed in.

  When I was eight years old, somebody grabbed her from behind and dragged her into an alleyway. I was in second grade, and when class let out, she wasn’t there to walk me home. I remember waiting almost two hours in the office of the Jewish day school before a police officer arrived to get me.

  He told me something bad had happened, and I climbed into his squad car—an old tin lizzie with police markings—and took a ride to the precinct house. My father’s death was still fresh in my mind; the funeral service in the hot, crowded little cemetery chapel and the smell of turned earth. I was terrified. The cop sat me on a hard wooden bench and told me not to move. I waited for a long time, watching as officers hauled in the bad guys for booking.

  Most of the crooks seemed resigned and docile, and allowed themselves to be led to the holding cell. One man struggled, and multiple officers ran to subdue him with clubs and fists. When they were finished, there was blood on the man’s head, and his body hung limp as two police dragged him away.

  Eventually, the cop who had picked me up from school came back, and he told me I could see my mother, but that I mustn’t be scared or cry.

  Then he took me into a small office, and she was sitting there, waiting for me. Her face was swollen and purple-black around her left eye. Her clothes were covered in blood; thick red-brown stains.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether to run into her arms or run away.

  She just smiled at me. A couple of her teeth were broken, and her mouth was all bloody.

  “You should see the other guy,” she said.

  She took me home, and cleaned herself up, and fixed my supper and put me to bed. She never told me what happened, and I knew better than to ask. But I was curious, and I was always a bit of a snoop. So, when I joined the police force, eighteen years later, I went to the records morgue to find the report on my mother’s attack.

  Here is the earliest thing I can remember about Bird Schatz: I was maybe four or five years old. She took me to a big department store downtown to buy clothes for Rosh Hashanah. We rode a bus together, and she told me that I must hold her hand all the time, or somebody might steal me away and chop me up into little pieces. She bought me an oxford shirt and a pair of slacks in the boys’ department, and then she sat me on a chair in the ladies’ section, and had the salesgirl watch me while she tried on clothes. She chose a plain white cotton blouse and an ankle-length skirt made of stiff blue fabric.

  Her new skirt fit fine off-the-rack, but as soon as she got home, she took out the sewing kit.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I’m hiding razor blades in my clothes,” she said. And then she showed me how she buried the sharp edge inside the reinforced fabric of the skirt’s waistband, and how she secured it with enough threads to hold it in place, but not so many that she couldn’t easily tear it loose if she needed it.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “In case somebody tries to rape me,” she said.

  If you’re wondering how my mother did her laundry, the answer is: by hand, and very carefully.

  It turned out she was still sewing razor blades into her clothes a few years later, when she had an occ
asion to use them.

  I’ve since seen lots of wounds inflicted by women on male assailants; usually scratches on forearms and bruises on faces from open-hand slaps. Since I was a homicide detective, the fact that I ever had a reason to pay attention to those wounds suggests things did not turn out well for these women. I also happen to know that in police-sponsored women’s self-defense classes, we advise striking or kicking at an assailant’s genitals. My mother didn’t scratch at her attacker’s face, and she didn’t kick him in the balls. She went at the bastard like a wildcat; she lunged for his vitals, and she burrowed into him.

  With her razor blades and her fingernails, she tore through an inch and a half of belly fat and a wall of abdominal muscle, and she unspooled his guts all over the pavement.

  “You should see the other guy,” is what she told me. She wasn’t kidding. They had to clean the son of a bitch up with a mop.

  After I read that file, I took a calculated risk to my personal safety and I asked her about it.

  “I remember his breath against my neck when he grabbed me. He said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’” Even years later, she flinched a little at the memory. “In the end, it was me who found something to show him, just before he died. I showed him his pancreas.”

  My mother kept sewing razors into her clothes until her sixty-fourth birthday, in 1956, when Rose bought her an electric washing machine, and I bought her a handgun to keep in her pocketbook.

  10

  1965

  People on television were talking about the strike downtown.

  “Ungrateful, is what they are,” said a man the station identified as Mr. Alvin Kluge, of Kluge Shipping and Freight. I squinted at the set and tried to guess how big his neck was. The television screen was a small convex bubble sticking out of a heavy wooden cabinet. The black-and-white image was fuzzy and ghostlike, but I figured the man’s collar size was eighteen inches, at least; a throat too big to get both hands around.

  If you were dealing with a customer who had that kind of bulk, and you wanted to choke him out, you had to get behind him and jam a police baton up under his chin, and then press a knee against his back, and pull the baton with both hands, hard enough to close the windpipe. You could bring down a man the size of a small bull that way in twenty seconds, usually without causing much lasting injury.

  If you didn’t care whether you injured him or not, there were lots of other ways to bring a man down, no matter how big he was.

  “Ungrateful? The lack of perspective is appalling!” Everything Brian said these days sounded like one of the new rabbi’s sermons. “They take and take and take, and then they expect gratitude from the people they exploit.”

  “You didn’t use to talk like that,” I said.

  “I didn’t use to be aware of the rampant injustice in the world, because I was a small child, and my parents are complacent.”

  “You hear that, Rose!” I shouted over the television. “We’re complacent.”

  “No, we aren’t!” she yelled back. “We’re Ashkenazi.”

  “We give them work. We give them a living. And this is how they thank us,” said Kluge on the TV. His jowls were either quivering with indignation, or else Brian needed to get up and futz with the rabbit ears again.

  “You pay them a third less than you’d pay a white man to do the same work,” Brian said.

  “How is it any business of yours what a Negro gets paid?” I asked.

  “Twenty years ago, when the Germans were marching the Jews into the ovens, the people of Europe were asking each other the same question. How is it any business of ours that Jews are getting shipped off to death camps?”

  “Oh, stop being so sanctimonious.”

  “Hey, Mom!” Brian yelled. “Dad says I am sanctimonious.”

  “No, you aren’t!” she yelled back. “You’re adorable.”

  The man on the screen was still talking: “… Shiftless, lazy, unreliable, disloyal. Have to watch them like hawks to make sure they don’t steal.”

  “He’s the victim now.” Brian balled up a section of my newspaper and threw it at the television. “This fat, rich vampire thinks he’s the victim.”

  “I just don’t see why it’s our problem. I have enough to worry about without opening a vein for the colored. You have to worry about your bar mitzvah.”

  “It’s our problem because, twenty years after Auschwitz, it’s happening again,” he said. “Or it’s been happening all along, and it’s still happening.”

  “And what are you and the rabbi going to do about it?”

  “We can stand up, goddamnit,” Brian said.

  “Watch your mouth,” I said.

  “Watch your mouth!” yelled Rose.

  On television, a black man, identified as labor organizer Longfellow Molloy: “Send us your prayers, ’cause we need God’s help. If you have anything to give, we don’t want to ask for any money except a fair wage for a day’s work, but we’ve got several churches running food drives to help the strikers, and canned goods are deeply appreciated. These men ain’t been paid in weeks, and their children are hungry. And anyone who wants to come down and march with us in front of Kluge Freight is surely welcome. Because they can’t treat people like this. It’s not right.”

  Brian continued: “We can stand in solidarity with the men striking for their human rights at Kluge Freight, and with the people who are sitting in at the lunch counters, and with the people who won’t go to the back of the bus.”

  “Nobody cares where you sit on a bus,” I said. “You don’t even ride the bus. Your mother drives you everywhere. If you were on a bus full of Negroes, you’d be scared out of your mind.”

  “I’m not scared of Negroes. I’m scared of a society that can mistreat a whole group of people based on arbitrary characteristics. The rabbi says there are seven times as many blacks in America as Jews. Anything that can be done to them can be done to us much more easily.”

  “He’s right about that,” I said. “We are vulnerable. And that’s why we should stay out of what’s not our business, lest our insertion of our big, Semitic noses into their feud reminds the goyim and the schvartzes that they all love Jesus, and they think we killed him.”

  “All that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”

  He might have been right. He seemed right enough that I felt bad about discouraging him. But I always liked doing nothing, when given the opportunity, and I thought doing nothing was generally a prudent course of action. Evil was probably going to flourish anyway.

  I did nothing, immediately, about my meeting with Elijah. Maybe I should have reported it to my superiors, but Brian was right: The Department had been doing wrong by the coloreds, and I wasn’t sure wrongs wouldn’t befall Jews if I let people know that a gang of Jewish robbers was trying to corrupt Jewish police officers, thereby forming a Jewish conspiracy. Neither the Memphis Police as an institution, nor the various people who comprised it could be trusted to handle information like that in a sane way.

  I’d overheard plenty of nasty comments around other cops: stuff about cheap Jews and Jews controlling government and Jewish bankers. None of them were especially ashamed to say these things when I was within earshot.

  Memphis law enforcement had what you might call a checkered history on race. In 1919, Mayor Frank Monteverde was elected with the support of the black community after promising to integrate the police department. So he hired three black detectives.

  These men were charged exclusively with arresting black criminals, because it would be unfair to subject white men to arrest by Negro officers. But when they raided a gambling den frequented by black patrons, the white crime boss who owned the operation took umbrage at having his place searched by Negroes, and sent a mob to lynch the detectives.

  The blacks escaped, but one of them discharged his weapon and injured a white man during the altercation. As a result, all the blacks were fired from the force and the Memphis Police remained entirely
white until 1948.

  During that period—from around the time I was born until just before the war—a man named Clifford Davis was Memphis’s Commissioner of Public Safety, and he was some kind of big to-do in the Ku Klux Klan; a wizard or a dragon or a fairy or something. During his tenure in office, the police force was about two-thirds Klansmen. By the mid-’60s, things had gotten more progressive, but only slightly. The reason Davis gave up running the police was that he got elected to the United States House of Representatives. And then, he got reelected another twelve times.

  There were still very few black officers on the force, and only four Jews, but an awful lot of the boys Davis hired were still around, and some of them were wearing fancy epaulets and answering to intimidating titles. A Jew was something less than white to these people, but it was close enough to get by, as long as they were focusing their bigotry on other preoccupations. So, I was loath to call attention to my heritage.

  It was entirely conceivable that, if they found out what Elijah was doing, they’d put the handful of Jewish cops on the Memphis police force on an open-ended unpaid leave, and then the department might carry out some kind of campaign of intimidation against the Jewish community.

  I didn’t take a bullet in France to get treated like my grandparents were treated in the old country or, worse, to get treated like a Negro, so I had to take care of this problem on my own, quietly. I’d run Elijah out of town, and if he wouldn’t run, I’d bury him someplace out of the way. No reason to give the redneck brass cause to go on a Jew hunt in the department.

  11

  1965

  “Let me tell you something about Memphis, Detective,” said Longfellow Molloy, the labor agitator. “Memphis don’t make nothin’. Memphis don’t grow nothin’. Memphis exists but for one purpose: Memphis moves things. The rail lines and the highway and the river all come together in this place. Memphis is one of the five biggest inland ports in the history of Western civilization. Fifteen million tons of cargo come through here, ship to shore, and shore to ship. Loaded and unloaded, from the bellies of barges into the trailers of trucks. Onto train cars. And do you know how fifteen million tons of cargo gets loaded and unloaded in this town every year?”

 

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