“Sounds like Carlo Cash is doing well for himself.”
“He was, until six months ago. Now he’s probably dead.”
“What happened?”
“The Buck happened.”
I leaned forward in my wheelchair. “Wait a second. My name is Buck. Why is Elijah called Buck?”
“He’s not called Buck. He’s the Buck. It’s a name for some kind of Jewish ghost, or something.”
“Dybbuk?” I asked.
“Yeah. The Buck.”
According to the Jewish mystical tradition, a dybbuk was a malevolent spirit. It destroyed things and possessed people. Since Jews don’t believe in Hell or the devil, a dybbuk was our equivalent of a demon. It seemed Elijah had decided to find himself a name more sinister than that of a hard-drinking, dick-inspecting ghost prophet.
“So I am assuming Dybbuk robbed a stash house and stole money from this Carlo Cash?”
“No,” Jacques said. “Dybbuk robbed four of Cash’s stashes.”
I couldn’t help laughing at the way it sounded when Jockstrap said “Cash’s stashes,” but he didn’t seem to think it was funny at all.
“Dude stole fifteen million dollars.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Six months ago, Cash had a meet with his cartel guy. He was supposed to buy fifteen keys for six million dollars.”
“Heroin?” I asked.
“If it was blow, he’d be getting seriously ripped off,” Jacques said. You could buy a truckload of cocaine for the same price as a brick of heroin. “The night before the deal, one of Carlo’s stash houses got robbed. Inside, the two guards was dead.”
“How’d Elijah kill them?” I asked. The thief I knew was ruthless and resourceful, but I couldn’t see any way an eighty-year-old man could mount a successful assault on a fortified position defended by armed thugs. Jacques tried to shrug, but he couldn’t really do it, because he was handcuffed to the bed.
“I don’t know. Nobody called no CSI. The bodies went into holes someplace, and Dybbuk got away with half the money for the buy. Carlo can’t raise three million dollars overnight, but his dope connection is a scary Mexican gangster, so Carlo ain’t going to miss the meeting. You don’t leave a man like that waiting around, and you damn sure don’t want him to have to come looking for you.
“And Carlo needs the product. He’s got guys on the street who depend on him. They got to get their stuff to sling, so they can get paid. If they can’t depend on Carlo to provide, they will find somebody else to depend on. And Carlo has other expenses as well. There are dudes in prison who need to get paid to keep they mouths shut. And there are cops that need to be bought off. Carlo’s business got overhead, you know what I’m saying?”
“So Carlo went to the meeting with only three million dollars?”
“Nothing else he could do. One of his top dudes told Clarence they were all scared shitless the Mexicans would kill everybody, but this cartel dude was, like, a suave business motherfucker. The cost of the junk is the cost of smuggling it. You know, there ain’t no rich poppy farmers in Afghanistan. And once the Mexicans got it to the meeting with Carlo, the product had already been smuggled. Carlo had always been good for the money in the past, so the big Mexican gives Carlo all of the goods for the three million, but the difference had to get paid back, and with interest. So the next time, Carlo was gonna have to pay twelve million dollars: the three million he owed, three million in interest, and six million for his new shipment.”
“At street prices, he’d probably get five times what he paid for that.”
“Yeah, but Carlo don’t get to keep most of that money. A lot of people got to get paid: dealers and lookouts and runners and muscle and middle-men. Those dudes give zero fucks that Carlo got robbed. If they don’t get paid, they don’t stay loyal. A lot of layers between Carlo Cash and the street, and everybody be wanting to wet they’s beak. Carlo’s business don’t work if people don’t stay loyal. So, Carlo spent the last six months selling off his legit assets, emptying his clean bank accounts, calling in every outstanding marker he got, and borrowing money from everyone who’s less scary to owe money to than a Mexican drug lord. In the end, he got the twelve million, and had it squirreled in three different stash houses.
“Dude was mad paranoid. He be treating this like it was some black ops, secret agent shit. Nobody who worked for him knew the location of more than one of the stashes. He kept trying to change up his schedule to make sure he wasn’t being followed and shit. But Dybbuk don’t give a fuck. Dybbuk went and robbed all three stashes in the same night.”
“How’d he do it?”
“No idea. If I knew how somebody could rob Carlo Cash’s stash house, I’d rob that shit myself. I could do with a couple million dollars. That money was guarded by six of the baddest green beret Iraq-veteran motherfuckers Carlo Cash’s money could buy. The old man killed all of them.”
Elijah hadn’t gotten stronger or less fragile in his seventies, so he hadn’t killed those men at close range. Probably hadn’t shot them, either. No way he could have got the better of all of them.
“Do you know how he killed them?” I asked.
“Like I said, I only know what Clarence told me.”
“But you must have some idea of how they died. Were they shot? Were they poisoned?”
“All I know is that they dead.”
So you’ve got two paramilitary guards armed with shotguns in an apartment full of money. The windows are boarded and barred. The door is reinforced and barred with multiple locks. It’s the only way in. How does an eighty-year-old man bust in there and kill the men inside?
The best way to do it would probably be to use the sealed-up nature of the place against them, by pumping toxic gas in through an air vent or a radiator. When they smelled the gas, they might flee through the front door, at which point, the robber could possibly take them by surprise and shoot them. But if a line existed that Elijah wouldn’t cross, it would probably be gassing people.
I said: “So Carlo has got to go meet with the Mexicans, and he doesn’t have their money.”
Jacques nodded. “Carlo is fucked. He’s got to find Dybbuk and get the money back, or the Mexicans will kill him. And word is out that Carlo’s in trouble, and that a lot of his guys are dead. He’s looking weak to anyone wanting to take him out, and there are people who’d like to take over distribution for the Mexicans. But Carlo ain’t stupid, and he finds out where Dybbuk is at.”
“How’d he find out?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacques said. “But the usual way you get information like that is to find somebody who knows, and either pay them off or fuck them up.”
That was how I figured it as well. Nobody had followed us to the cemetery, and nobody followed us out, except for Elijah’s lawyer. Lefkowitz must have called from his cell phone in his Escalade, and told Carlo exactly where to find us.
“So Carlo called Clarence, and Clarence called me, and we went out to get the guy who took down the stash. But I didn’t know nothing about him being in the back of no cop car.”
“Do you have any idea where they might have taken him?” I asked.
“They’d need to work him over, and get him to tell them where the money is.”
“I understand that. But where?”
“I don’t know that, man. Carlo got a lot of places to hide shit. Hiding shit is what Carlo does.”
I took a hard, careful look at the kid. Looked in his eyes; watched the corners of his mouth. Looked at his hands. I honestly couldn’t tell if I thought he was lying, or if I just wanted him to be.
“All right,” I said.
“Are you going to tell them you shot me by accident?”
“I said I would.”
I figured a big chunk of Jacquarius Madison’s story was bullshit, particularly the things he’d told me about himself. Carlo would never have brought somebody’s cousin along to take part in a kidnapping plot, no matter how many
men he’d lost. Drug dealers live in fear of snitches, so they don’t conspire to commit major felonies with people they don’t know.
But I didn’t care much about that; if I could bring my vintage bank robber in alive, then Rutledge, Narcotics, could deal with Jockstrap and Carlo and the rest of them on his own.
My play at this point was to take what Jacques had told me and use it to brace Lefkowitz. Hopefully, the lawyer would spill some useful information that would lead me to Elijah.
But I was running out of time.
27
2009
I didn’t have to go far to find Meyer Lefkowitz.
While fleeing the scene of Elijah’s kidnapping, the lawyer plowed his Cadillac into a utility pole, which brought the car from forty miles an hour to a dead stop in seven tenths of a second. Lefkowitz himself did not decelerate quite so rapidly, and as a result, he went sailing through the windshield.
The sixty-thousand-dollar Cadillac Escalade comes equipped with special safety glass that shatters into pebbled fragments instead of jagged shards, so you can fly through it face-first and not suffer any significant injury. Unfortunately, the cash-strapped city of Memphis has not seen fit to install safety sidewalks yet, so Lefkowitz got good and mangled when he hit the pavement.
He was admitted to the same trauma unit where Jockstrap was being treated. He was so close, I didn’t even get lost on the way to his room. I wheeled my chair through the door, and made sure it closed behind me.
Apparently, he’d got his arms in front of him before he hit the glass. One of them was immobilized in a full cast, and the other was wrapped in gauze bandages that he still seemed to be seeping blood into. Getting his arms up had protected his head, however, and while there was noticeable bruising and swelling, he seemed to have most of his face intact, except for a square bandage taped to his left cheek.
“Hello, Mr. Schatz. How are you doin’?” He smiled at me, and he still had his teeth. Must have had a real lucky landing. The worst people always have the best luck.
“I’ve had better days, to be honest,” I said as I positioned my wheelchair next to his broken right arm.
“I am doing surprisingly well,” he said, and then he laughed. Whatever he was loaded on must have been powerful stuff.
On the balance, being high on opiates tends to decrease one’s capacity for deviousness and dulls the intellect. This can be beneficial to an interrogator for reasons that should be obvious.
However, there are different ways to induce different suspects to share information. Even on drugs, Lefkowitz was probably too smart to be tricked into accidentally admitting that he’d betrayed his client to a drug dealer. He didn’t strike me as the type who might be susceptible to guilt, and he had too much at stake to be cajoled into admitting something damaging.
He was still giggling. I knew it was because of the drugs, but it pissed me off, regardless.
Once you pass a certain age, you rarely see anything new, and I had seen plenty of men like Meyer Lefkowitz; this was the kind of person who believed he was insulated from punishment; the sort who viewed society and the justice system as a safety net to preserve his status and its privileges rather than a mechanism for punishing his transgressions.
These lawyers and businessmen and politicians and gangsters and playboys believed they were beyond the reach of anyone who might want to stop them from beating and raping women and children and murdering anyone whose existence they found inconvenient.
And a lot of the time they were right. Too many things that ought to have been absolute in our society were tentative and corruptible. Judges found technical reasons for excluding a suspect’s confession. Key witnesses got something fishy in the mail, and suddenly recanted testimony. Evidence disappeared out of locked rooms in police stations. Jurors reached inexplicable verdicts.
Elijah lived his life in rebellion against the brutality of state action; he died in Auschwitz at the hands of a country gone mad, and was reborn as the Dybbuk the day his mother was shot in front of him.
He was never wrong about civilization as an institution; it’s severely broken in all its forms. There isn’t any set of rules that binds everybody. Social obligations are flexible, punishments are distributed unevenly, and the law is never more just than the men who administer it.
But even if the state isn’t gassing us, our rights don’t really protect us. Criminals don’t care about rights, any more than the Nazis did, and the law does a poor job of protecting us from them. I learned that the day my father’s bloated corpse turned up facedown in the stagnant water of a drainage ditch by the side of the highway.
I became a soldier and then a policeman, but I was never really interested in being the tool of state power that Elijah thought I was. Just like him, I was shaped by the forces that made victims of my parents.
He wanted to be an avenging ghost. I wanted to be a razor blade.
So that’s what was in my head when I wheeled myself into Meyer Lefkowitz’s hospital room. Also, I was thinking this: There are guys who respond to a soft touch, and then there are guys who need to be touched with a fist. Lefkowitz had a very strong interest in deceiving me, but he was also a coward, so he definitely belonged in the second category. Pain was the key to making him talk, so it was unfortunate that he was all hopped up on painkillers.
Unfortunate for him.
I was going to have to hurt him badly enough to cut through whatever it was he was on. And I was prepared to do exactly that, even though age had deprived me of many of the tools I had once relied upon. I wasn’t capable of slamming a guy against a wall anymore, or of crushing a man’s ribs with a blackjack. But at least, in certain circumstances, I was still capable of being dangerous.
When I taught my son to shave, I told him this: A sharp new razor blade can give you a close shave or make a clean cut, but an old, battered, nicked, and rusty one isn’t good for anything but making a goddamn mess.
I lit a cigarette.
“Hey, I don’t think you can smoke in here,” he said.
“Who’s going to stop me?” I asked. “Are you going to call someone up and tell them I’m smoking?”
“I think they’ve got explosive oxygen in here.”
“Maybe I like to live dangerously.” I flicked ash onto his hospital gown.
“I don’t know. Seems to me we’ve had enough danger lately.”
“You want me to put it out?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I took a last puff. “Happy to oblige.”
The hospital gown he was wearing was cut in a deep V-neck to accommodate the cords attaching the electrodes on his chest to the machines that monitored his vitals. I could see the shallow pit of his clavicle at the base of his neck, and that’s where I stubbed out my cigarette, pressing the burning ember hard against his delicate skin.
“You’re burning me, man,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Looks like.”
“Oh, you’re right. I smell it now,” I said. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m old and I’m clumsy. I guess my hand slipped.”
I brushed the cigarette butt off his chest. The burn was already blistering ugly yellow-gray, and turning red around the edges. He didn’t even seem to feel it.
I lit another cigarette. “Let’s hope my hand doesn’t slip again.”
Lefkowitz’s eyes slid out of focus for a minute, and then he sort of shook off the confusion and said: “Hey, you can’t smoke in here.”
“I can’t?”
“No. This is a hospital.” He paused. He noticed the burn mark on his chest. “Do you ever get, uh, déjà vu? Like we had this conversation already?”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m eighty-eight years old. My memory ain’t what it used to be.”
“We definitely had this conversation already. It’s really weirding me out.” He tried to touch the burn on his chest with his bandaged left arm, and then he winced in pain, as the motion pulled the stitches under his bandages. The gauze turned
bright red in several places. His arm must have been shredded.
Well deserved.
“Let’s have a different conversation, then,” I said.
“Yes. Let’s.” The pain was bringing him around a bit. He seemed a little more coherent.
“You called Carlo Cash from your cell phone, while you were following us to the police station. That’s how he knew where to ambush us.”
“No.”
I took a drag off the cigarette. “You work for Carlo Cash.”
“I don’t.”
“I know you do. You’re the only one who could have given them directions to find us while we were driving. Tell me where they took Elijah.”
“I didn’t call Carlo Cash.”
“This is your last chance to spill it, before I get unpleasant.”
“Mr. Schatz, I don’t know anything.”
“Have it your way,” I said, and I reached over with my left hand and pulled his eyelid open. With my right hand, I held my burning cigarette close enough to his naked eyeball that he could feel the heat coming off it. “I don’t have much time, Lefkowitz. I want that man back alive, and if you continue to bullshit me, I am going to burn your goddamn eye out.”
“Oh, please don’t. Please. Please.” At least this was getting him sober.
“You are mobbed up. You are a scumbag.”
He started to twist and writhe, moving his head to try to get his eye out from under the cigarette.
“Be careful,” I said. “I’m old. I get the shakes. My hand ain’t steady.”
“I settle car accidents. I don’t do any business for Carlo Cash. Oh God. I don’t work for them. I barely have a criminal defense practice at all, beyond fixing an occasional DUI.”
I started to feel less sure of myself, and pulled the cigarette back from his eye. “Why did you agree to represent Elijah?”
“Because he came into my office and handed me twenty thousand dollars in cash. I told him he needed to find someone better qualified, and he said he was in a hurry.”
Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 16