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

by Friedman, Daniel

  “A sledgehammer?”

  “A jackhammer, probably. There’s only one way, really, to tunnel through concrete, and that’s the noisy way. I’m sure we’d have noticed. I don’t think any Sherlock Holmes shenanigans are taking place in my bank.”

  “Greenfield, I’m not trying to insult you, but I think there is real and credible information suggesting that a sophisticated criminal plans to steal the cash in your vault. I am advising you to take precautions.”

  “And what I have explained to you, Detective, repeatedly and at length, is that I have already taken every precaution reasonable. We have multiple layers of security. We have planned for every contingency. And, having done so, we are free to dedicate our time to doing our jobs and conducting our business, business which you are currently distracting me from.”

  “I appreciate that you are confident in your security,” I said. “But this is an unusual threat that I believe requires an unusual response.”

  Greenfield did the thing where he squeezed his nose again. “You said you believe the men you arrested for plotting to rob my tellers were suckers Elijah was using as a distraction from his real plot, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Consider the possibility that they were being used not to distract you from a robbery on my vault, but a robbery on something else entirely unrelated to this bank.”

  “I’ve thought about that. But the bank is the most likely target I am aware of, and if he’s out to steal something else, I have no idea what it might be. I’ve been unable to identify any other targets related to the Kluge strike that are valuable enough to attract his attention.”

  “That isn’t my problem.”

  “Unless I’m right, and he’s after your vault.”

  “Well, then, you’ve informed me of the risk. I shall take your suggestions under advisement. So you’ve done everything you can. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must devote my attention to less fanciful matters.”

  “Prick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Thank you very much for your time.”

  I left because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I still didn’t intend to let Elijah rob the bank, but if he somehow pulled it off, I figured it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy than Charles Greenfield.

  22

  1965

  I left Greenfield’s office through its heavy wood double doors, passed the desks of his two busy secretaries, and then I was standing in front of the elevator bank; he had taken a whole wing of the office suite for himself, and then knocked most of the walls out to make one big sunny cathedral in which to worship himself. Must have been nice.

  I pushed the button to take me down to the bank’s grand lobby on the ground floor; a vast, shimmering cavern full of pink limestone columns running from the pink limestone floor to the arched, vaulted pink-limestone ceiling.

  As I exited the elevator, the brass tellers’ cages were to my left, and, to my right was a reception area for clients awaiting appointments with loan officers and other upstairs officials.

  And of course, that’s where Elijah was; sitting in a leather chair, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

  I glanced around the lobby; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A few people were conducting business with the tellers, but the place was mostly empty. As Greenfield had told me, the nearby strike had scared away most of the bank’s business.

  I didn’t hear any alarms, and I didn’t see any of Elijah’s beefy henchmen, and I didn’t see any Jewish criminals waving guns at the tellers. But that didn’t mean the robbery wasn’t happening right in front of me.

  I went and sat in the chair next to Elijah’s.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He showed me his Auschwitz smile. “Would you believe me if I told you I was applying for a small business loan?”

  The nerve of this guy.

  “You’re under arrest,” I said. “We’re gonna stand up, and we’re going to walk out of here. If you attempt to resist, I will subdue you with force.”

  He sucked his lips around the broken stubs of his teeth. “Not sure that’s a good idea,” he said. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you outside.”

  The only public entrance to the bank was a single set of revolving glass doors. I’d never seen Elijah without his oversized accomplices before, and it stood to reason that if they weren’t in here, they might be out there. There was a good chance I hadn’t just coincidentally run into Elijah in the lobby of the bank he was planning to rob. If he had set this encounter up, he doubtless had his exit planned, and he had the advantage.

  “I’d be walking face-first into a buzz saw,” I said.

  “I actually didn’t arrange for there to be a buzz saw, but you’d definitely be riddled with bullets on the sidewalk.” He was chirping now, and I didn’t appreciate it.

  This was a chess game, and my adversary had the next several moves planned out. What could I do?

  I considered the loading door. I could potentially bundle him out that way and sneak past his crew.

  “I derive a great deal of amusement from the way your face looks when you’re thinking really hard,” Elijah said. “Right now, you’re wondering whether you can take me out through the loading door.”

  To do that I’d have to walk him right past the vault. I’d have to open the security cage in the hallway beyond. Could that be done without disabling the alarm? I’d have to unbar the side door, and I didn’t know that the alley beyond was clear. If his crew were waiting there, that might be their way inside. With the security cage unlocked, they could walk right into the vault.

  There was clearly some reason he was here; clearly some reason he was stringing me along. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the plan for the robbery. I wasn’t willing to be their dupe.

  “I don’t think you’re going to try to take me out that way,” he said. “So there are two doors and you can’t take me out of either of them. And do you really, in your heart of hearts, want to arrest me, Baruch?”

  He folded his newspaper and took a sip from his coffee cup.

  I didn’t want to arrest him. I wanted to kill him, or run him out of town. I did not want him to sit down in an interrogation room and start talking. He stood by and watched while his mother was shot in the head. He stood by and waited, while his father was beaten to death. He set in motion the chain of events that caused a Nazi guard to shoot twenty Jews on his work detail. And he didn’t seem too torn up about any of it. Some people truck their baggage around, and others travel light. This man was ruthless and self-interested; the sort who could burn every bridge he’d ever crossed and never look back.

  How many jobs had he pulled? Ten? Fifteen? There could be a corrupt Jewish cop involved in every single one of those schemes. If he was willing to expose them all, some ambitious twerp in the U.S. Attorney’s office would probably give him immunity from prosecution for his crimes. Catching a bank robber was a modest professional accomplishment for a law enforcement official, but exposing a web of police corruption was the kind of thing that made people’s careers, as long as it wasn’t a web of Jewish corruption, and the people doing the exposing weren’t Jewish.

  “You’ve got no involvement in my schemes, and yet, if they were revealed—if I talked—you’d be destroyed. Inequitable, isn’t it, Baruch?”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “If your police department functioned the way it ought to, you could call for backup, and a dozen officers would arrive within minutes to overwhelm any support I might have waiting outside. But you can’t call anyone, because you’re afraid to let your friends know what I’m up to.”

  “I could kill you right here,” I said.

  He chirped again. “Can you? Your institutions have certainly tolerated your thuggish excesses in the past. But the violence they allow you to commit against addicts and deviants and the underclass tends to reinforce and support the prevailing social order. Shooting an unarmed
, well-dressed white man in a bank disrupts that order. It’s bad for business, Baruch, and they won’t let you be bad for business. When we met, I said you reminded me of a dog, and you are, indeed, a useful working animal. But all dogs meet the same fate when they take to biting people.”

  He was probably right

  “You are all alone, Baruch, and you can’t stop me. You are going to let me walk out of here.”

  But there was a hitch in his voice; the tiniest hint of uncertainty. It was enough to make me reevaluate the entire situation.

  I took a long, hard look at Elijah. I saw a weasely little crook, scared and small and hiding behind his fifty-cent words and his fake European charm. He thought everything belonged to him. He thought he could waltz into my city, help himself to $150,000, and leave me to clean up the mess.

  But he didn’t understand what he was dealing with. I wasn’t the dutiful servant of a corrupt agency, like my son thought I was. And Abramsky was right that I wasn’t the angel, looking for somebody to redeem. I certainly wasn’t the bumbling peon Greenfield seemed to believe I was.

  I was a towering column of smoke rising above the desert. I was molten brimstone raining on the wicked. I was darkness blotting the sun and I was blood in the water. I was frogs and locusts and savage beasts. I was a razor blade sewn into a hemline.

  I looked at the revolving door, and then I looked around the lobby, and I knew what I was going to do.

  Elijah was smiling at me, and I smiled right back at him.

  Everything that had seemed so complex was suddenly clear. He was a problem, and I was a solution. He was a nail, and I was a hammer. This was a man I could break six different ways, using only my hands.

  “I must have really messed things up for you, arresting Plotkin and those boys,” I said. “You weren’t even here looking for me, were you? If you were expecting to see me, you never would have come without your buddies to back you up. You wouldn’t set up a confrontation here, inside the bank you’re planning to rob. Somebody might remember your face, if they saw us arguing. I have caught you casing the bank, trying to put a new plan together.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Plotkin doesn’t matter.” But the quaver in his voice was now more pronounced. He was afraid of me, and he was right to be afraid.

  “I don’t think there’s anybody waiting outside. I think I could throw handcuffs on you and march you right out that door, and nobody would stop me.”

  “You won’t take that risk,” he said. “And you don’t want to arrest me.”

  He wasn’t smiling anymore. I still was.

  “You’re right, I don’t want to arrest you, so I am going to let you go, free and clear,” I said. “But first, you and I are going to go to the men’s room for a minute.”

  I stood up and punched him in the stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out of him. The door to the men’s toilet was on the same wall as the elevator, about six paces directly behind where Elijah was sitting. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him through it. He was too stunned to resist, and nobody seemed to notice.

  Even the bathrooms in Charles Greenfield’s bank were fancy. The walls and floor were paneled with slabs of pink limestone, like the lobby outside. The fixtures all looked new and clean, and the mirrors above the sink were framed in brass. The line of urinals inside was unoccupied, and the toilet stalls were all empty. This was expected, since I hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the men’s room the entire time I had been sitting in the lobby.

  I slammed Elijah against the stone wall, hard enough to bounce his forehead off it, which kept him dazed long enough for me to produce from underneath my jacket the wrath of God, wrapped in soft leather and mounted on a coil of stiff spring. I whacked his knee with the blackjack, hard enough that it made a noise like shattering ceramic. Before he collapsed, I grabbed him by the lapels of his tailored suit jacket and clapped a hand against his mouth to keep him from screaming.

  “Like I told you, I’ll let you walk out of here,” I said. “But you’re gonna walk real slow, and every step you take is going to hurt like a son of a bitch. You won’t be making any quick getaways on foot for a while, and you won’t be sneaking up on people, either.”

  I pressed his right hand against the wall of the bathroom, splayed out his long pianist’s fingers, and then bounced the lead weight off it so hard that the blow left a spiderweb pattern of hairline cracks in the stone panel underneath.

  “I hope you weren’t intending to break open any safes with that hand,” I said. “It won’t be much good for delicate tasks. At least, not anytime soon.”

  Then I clubbed him in the gut as hard as I could; the lead weight hit him right above the navel, and the follow-through carried the blow up to his sternum. He vomited all over the floor. When I let go of him, Elijah collapsed into the puddle of his own sick and started writhing around, so I flailed at his legs with the blackjack and hit his back and his chest a couple of times for good measure.

  Then I hung the club from my belt, stepped over the damp, stinking pile that had once been a proud, smug man, and washed my hands at the sink.

  “I told you not to pull any jobs in my town, and you didn’t listen, and now look at what has happened to you,” I said. “Was this part of your plan?”

  He sort of gurgled.

  “It seems I’ve finally found a way to get you to stop talking,” I said. “You probably feel like you’re about to die, but you’re not. A truncheon is considered one of the more humane ways to subdue a perpetrator. The damage it does is mostly to soft tissue. It hurts, but it heals. Except for the hand. If I were you, I’d have the hand looked at.”

  He grunted something unintelligible.

  “I can’t understand what you’re saying, but I assume you’re thanking me for my restraint,” I said. “I certainly could have hurt you a lot worse. I didn’t, because I want you fit to travel. So, when you manage to pick yourself up off the floor, do the prudent thing and put some distance between yourself and Memphis. You may think this was a beating I just gave you, but really, it was a warning. Take heed, because I don’t warn anyone twice. The next time I see you, I am going to kill you.”

  I shook my hands dry, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burning match on the floor next to Elijah. Then I stepped over him again and walked out of the bathroom and across the lobby. The echoes of my leather soles against the pink limestone floor sounded to me like cannon fire.

  “You can’t smoke in here, sir,” said a guard who hadn’t noticed me dragging a man into the toilet, but immediately spotted my cigarette.

  “Yes, I can,” I said. “Watch me.”

  And since I was on my way out the revolving front door anyway, that’s what he did.

  Outside, I saw no signs of the beefy henchmen. I pulled my handgun out of its shoulder holster and edged around the side of the building to check the alley by the loading door, but there was nobody there, either.

  I had to give Elijah credit; he’d almost bluffed me. But almost only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades.

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  I’d developed a habit of watching a talk program about movies before my nap on Wednesday afternoons. It was less shouty than Fox News, and if I turned on the animal shows, I’d sit and watch them until dinnertime without falling asleep. The show occasionally featured actors and directors, but most of the guests were critics and academics. I hadn’t seen most of the movies they talked about; I hadn’t been to a theater in a couple of decades. Since these people weren’t natural TV talkers, they spoke softly and looked weird, and I appreciated these characteristics.

  The host was my favorite person on television. He was an exceptionally florid man with a Silly Putty face, and he looked like he hadn’t bought any new clothes since he was thirty pounds lighter, so his head splooged up out of his too-tight shirt collar like toothpaste coming out of a tube. When he got excited, he wobbled back and forth, and I believed, if I watched the show long enough, I’d event
ually get to see him tip over.

  “So, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of gritty sorts of characters and antiheroes,” he said. “Why do you think that is?”

  The guest was a critic from the Internet; a mousy-haired pinheaded woman with squinty eyes and a broad wet mouth that seemed like it was much too big for her scrunched-up little face.

  “Antiheroes are nothing new. Many of the figures of the Classical and Norse mythological traditions had significant flaws that modern audiences would consider antiheroic. Milton published Paradise Lost, starring a sympathetic Satan, in 1667. And of course, Nabokov wrote Lolita from the perspective of the odious Humbert Humbert, and The Godfather cleaned up at the Academy Awards in 1972. These are all antecedents to the sort of characters you see on contemporary programs like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.”

  I liked watching her. When she was busy concentrating on whatever the hell it was she was saying, it seemed like she forgot to swallow, so as she talked at length, her mouth was slowly filling with saliva. This had potential to develop into something interesting.

  “The traditional heroic figure represents the establishment,” she continued. “He’s the new marshal bringing the law to an unincorporated Western town, or the superhero foiling some villain’s plot for world domination, or the tough cop stamping out crime in his city. He stands for the perpetuation of the status quo and the continuity of the existing power structure, often against antagonists who are not unambiguously evil, but rather, harbor contrary values to those of the prevailing society, or who envision a different kind of social hierarchy.”

  The host had grown progressively wobblier as she spoke, and he finally piped up to interject: “And you think heroes like that are out of fashion these days?”