“Him handing you all that currency didn’t make you suspicious?”
“Of course it made me suspicious. That’s why he gave me so much money. So I’d keep my suspicions to myself.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You can’t buy Rolexes and Cadillacs settling car accidents.”
“You can if you settle a whole bunch of them. I outsource most of the work to a company in India that writes my complaints and my briefs for twenty bucks an hour. I’m on the phone all day doing nothing but negotiating settlements with insurers.”
“I will find out if you’re lying.”
“Go check. Pull any court transcripts or judicial opinions from matters involving Carlo Cash or any of his crew. You’ll find the names of the lawyers of record at the top of the first page of any of those documents. It’s the same guys handling all those cases, and I handle none of them. I settle car accidents.”
I took the cigarette out of his face and stuck it between my lips.
“I believe you,” I said. He didn’t have the balls to try to bullshit me while I jammed a burning cigarette in his eye.
But if that was the case, how the hell did Carlo Cash know what car Elijah was riding in, or where to find it?
SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:
“So, this guy Buck Schatz is in the news again.”
I was watching a show where a tweedy rat-faced liberal host argued with a fat, sweaty conservative who always wore his neckties loose and his collars unbuttoned. This pair made any ideology seem unattractive.
“That’s his name? Buck Schatz?” said Fat-and-Sweaty. “Is that some kind of joke?”
“Apparently that’s the guy’s actual name,” said Rat Face. “This is the ninety-year-old man who keeps shooting people.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about him a few months ago. He shot that killer cop guy in a hospital. What’s he done now?”
“He shot two young black men. Killed one of them.” I could tell Rat Face was winding up a little weasel tirade. “You know, this gets me thinking about our gun policies in America. Do we really need armed ninety-year-olds staggering around and killing people?”
Fat-and-Sweaty put his fingers to his earpiece. “Now, these two guys he shot were participants of a brutal attack on a police officer who was badly injured. The man Schatz killed in the hospital a few months ago was responsible for four murders. And Schatz is a retired cop, so he knows how to handle and care for a weapon. I think a lot of people would point to this guy as a great example of the benefits of an armed citizenry.”
Rat Face did an exaggerated television gesture of flailing disbelief. “According to news reports out of Memphis, this man Schatz suffers from senile dementia. He can’t remember whether he’s got a houseguest or a home intruder, and he’s packing heat. This guy is armed to the teeth and he lives in a rest home! I wouldn’t want to be the nurse who has to risk getting shot every time this man needs his sheets changed or his bedpan emptied.”
Fat-and-Sweaty was getting indignant. “Now, a lot of people would be—a lot of people are—calling this guy a hero. I don’t think it’s fair to speculate about his health.”
“Well, those were black men he shot this time.”
“I don’t see any call to bring race into this discussion.”
“You don’t get to decide whether to bring race into a discussion. When an old white man is shooting young blacks, race is already part of the discussion. It’s incredibly problematic that you and your lunatic gun-fringe allies are hailing this demented gunman as a hero for killing one black man and crippling another.”
“The police officer Mr. Schatz rescued by shooting those men was also black.”
Rat Face sighed. “Your aversion to obvious facts is as shameful as it is unsurprising. This is a ninety-year-old retired Memphis cop. It’s not a praiseworthy thing to have been associated with an outfit like the Memphis police during the years this man was working. The question we should ask isn’t whether or not he’s racist, but rather: How racist is he?”
“Well, speaking of shameful and unsurprising, did you hear what the president said today?”
“And speaking of racist…”
28
2009
If it wasn’t Lefkowitz who gave Elijah up to Carlo Cash, then I had no idea who had done it. I’d watched Andre’s mirrors all the way to the cemetery to make sure nobody followed us, and Elijah certainly would have been able to shake a tail as well.
I needed a fresh set of eyes on the problem, someone smart and helpful who might be able to look at the facts as I understood them and discern new patterns in them. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anybody like that, so I had to ask my grandson.
“Electronic surveillance,” he said. “You can attach a GPS tracking device to a car, and it will transmit its location to you wherever it goes.”
“Like a radio transmitter?” I asked. “Wouldn’t we have spotted its antenna?”
“This thing would be tiny. They could hide it in the wheel well, or under a fender. You’d never find it unless you went looking for it.”
“I think I saw an episode of CSI where they used one of those,” I said. “Used to be, if you wanted to know what somebody was up to, you had to follow him around.”
“These days, if you want to know what somebody is up to, you just have to follow them on Twitter.”
“What, exactly, is the Twitter?” I asked. “They talk about it on Fox News a lot.”
Tequila laughed. “I think maybe we should stick to learning about the tracking devices today, and save Twitter for later.”
We were waiting in my hospital room for the doctor to show up. I was back on the adjustable bed, and Tequila was sitting in a chair next to it. His mother had gone to fetch Rose from Valhalla. I was hoping to be able to check out by the time they got back, but the doctor wanted to keep me under observation until they could put me back on my blood thinner, and I couldn’t have the blood thinner until the doctor was satisfied that I wasn’t going to bleed to death out of my nose.
“I think we need to discuss your condescending tone later as well,” I said. “But first, I guess we need to figure out how Carlo Cash planted a GED bug on either Lefkowitz’s Escalade or Andre’s Crown Vic.”
“GPS, not GED.”
“GFY. That’s what I said.”
Tequila flipped through the notebook I had been writing in the day before. “Why does there even need to be a bug? There’s an obvious conclusion to draw from these facts, Grandpa. Lefkowitz called Cash and told him where to ambush you.”
“That’s what I thought as well,” I said. “But I talked to Lefkowitz, and he persuaded me that he didn’t do it. He’s nothing but an ambulance chaser who settles car crashes.”
“Maybe he lied to you.”
“I don’t think so. I asked him pretty hard.”
“I don’t understand what that means, Grandpa.”
“I burned him with cigarettes.”
His eyes widened, and his cheeks went pale. “Jesus. Fuck.”
“Watch your goddamn language,” I said.
“You burned an innocent man with cigarettes, Grandpa.”
“I feel like I’ve told you this before, Prosecco: There ain’t nobody who’s innocent.”
He sat there for a couple of minutes, flipping through the pages of my notebook, but not really reading them. Finally, he said: “There was only a two-hour gap between the time Elijah first walked into Lefkowitz’s office and the time you met him at the cemetery. They’d have to have been tailing Elijah to know he’d retained Lefkowitz, but if they were already following Elijah, they didn’t need to bug his lawyer’s car to find him.”
The cigarette burns would not be discussed further. This new information would go in the vault we filled with our forbidden memories; the things we didn’t want to remember. There was a clock ticking on Elijah’s life, and I’d done what I believed was necessary under the circumstances. But I didn’t feel that great about it.
/>
Truth is, there are a lot of things I’ve done that I don’t feel that great about. But if you look back on whatever the wrath of God is burning down behind you, you turn into a pillar of salt.
So, you just write down the stuff you want to remember, leave out the rest of it, and keep pushing yourself forward, on a walker or in a wheelchair or with anything that can keep you moving.
“Maybe Cash had an informant of some kind in Lefkowitz’s office; a secretary or a security guard or somebody who might have spotted Elijah,” I said.
Tequila shook his head. “That makes no sense. Why would a heroin dealer need to cultivate a spy in the office of a lawyer who settles car accidents? And, anyway, how would a device planted on the lawyer’s Cadillac let them know they needed to attack Andre’s Crown Vic?”
“I don’t see how they could have bugged Andre’s police car. They’d have to know that Elijah met with me that morning, and we assume he’d take care to assure he wasn’t followed when he visited me at Valhalla. Then, I called Andre on the phone a few hours later. They’d have had to get a wiretap on my cell phone very soon after my first contact with Elijah to know Andre was even involved, and if they’d found some way to listen to my calls, they would still have had less than an hour to attach the device onto Andre’s police car, which was parked at a police station. I can’t see how they could have gotten to either of those vehicles.”
“Well, if they didn’t have trackers on the cars, and Lefkowitz didn’t give them your location, I don’t understand how they could have coordinated the ambush.” He scratched his chin, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth in his chair for a minute. “Maybe they somehow planted a tracker on Elijah himself. Maybe something he stole from them was bugged, and he was carrying it with him.”
“I don’t think so. Andre frisked him before he put him in the car. If Elijah had a transmitter, Andre would have found it.”
I took back the notebook from my grandson and flipped through the pages.
“Here’s a list of the things in Elijah’s pockets,” I said. “A wallet with no identification, a book of matches, a hotel key, and one of those phones with no buttons.”
Tequila perked up. “A phone with no buttons? Like, an iPhone?”
“iPhone, youPhone, whoPhone?” I said.
Tequila pulled a slab of black steel and glass out of his pocket. “Was it a phone like this?” He pressed one small button on the side of the device, and the screen lit up with a picture of a numeric keypad and the words: ENTER PASSCODE.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was just like that. Andre switched it on, and then he asked Elijah for the passcode, and Elijah wouldn’t give it to him.”
“Why would an eighty-year-old fugitive thief need an iPhone? Is he checking his e-mail while he’s on the lam?”
“I don’t know what he does with it,” I said. “I don’t know what anyone does with those things.”
“Does anyone at your nursing home have a phone like that?”
“It’s not a nursing home. It’s an assisted-lifestyle community for older adults.”
“Whatever. Does anyone your age have a phone like this?”
“Nobody I know.”
He pumped his fist, like he’d just had a brilliant idea. “What if it wasn’t his cell phone?”
“Then we’ll have to charge him with taking somebody’s phone, in addition to the eight murders and the theft of fifteen million dollars.”
“It was drug money. It didn’t really belong to anyone. Like, legitimately.”
“You’ve had two years of law school,” I said. “Robbing a drug dealer is still robbery. You know that.”
I was reminded of something somebody once told me about the legitimacy of property rights.
“Well, the point I was making is that, if it wasn’t his phone, the owner could have tracked it,” Tequila was saying. “The phone has a GPS receiver in it, just like the tracking bugs you’ve seen on television. There’s an app—a computer program—called Find My iPhone. You can open the program from your laptop, and the phone will transmit its exact location, within a couple of feet, over the Internet. These things get stolen a lot, and people activate the program, and then report the thieves’ addresses to law enforcement. If the phone belonged to Cash or one of his people, they might have been able to track its location that way.”
“If they could find out where Elijah was so easily, why didn’t they take him sooner?”
“The phone has to be connected to the network to transmit its location. You said that it was switched off, and then Andre turned it on. Activating it made it traceable. But why would Elijah be carrying around a stolen phone that the people who were hunting him could locate?”
“I know why,” I said. “I should have figured it out sooner. He’s done something like this before.”
29
1965
Two days after I beat up Elijah, at half past ten in the morning, I was sitting in my car outside the bank, watching the front entrance, and waiting for something to happen.
I was thinking about finding myself some cheap, greasy food when I heard shouting behind me, coming from the protest.
“What you doin’, man?”
“Get on the ground!”
“Hey, we got rights!”
“On the fucking ground! All of you!”
My car was parked in a parallel space, and the front door of the Kluge office building was only about two hundred yards away, so I climbed out and started running toward the noise.
I could see officers brandishing their nightsticks, wading into the crowd of strikers, and swinging indiscriminately. Some of the Negroes had been carrying protest signs mounted on wooden posts, and they’d torn away the cardboard to make the things into bludgeons.
The loud, clear voice of Longfellow Molloy rose above the noise of the melee: “Gentlemen, we are marching to preserve our dignity. Don’t let them make you act undignified.”
One of the officers got hold of a bullhorn and shouted him down: “You are all under arrest. Drop your weapons and lie flat on the ground, with your hands above your heads.”
Some of the protesters were trying to flee. I saw an officer chase a woman down the street and hit her in the head with a club. She fell to the ground, and he kept hitting her.
“They want to make us criminals,” Molloy was shouting. “They want to make us animals. The world will see what they are doing. The world will see.”
But nobody was listening to him. A tear gas canister exploded in the air over the protesters’ heads, and people started coughing and clawing at their eyes. I saw four burly colored boys drag an officer to the ground, tear off his helmet, and stomp on his face. The other police saw this, too. I saw several nearby officers unholster their weapons.
“Don’t shoot,” I shouted at them, waving my badge above my head. “They’ll riot all over the city!”
Somebody must have been in charge here, but I couldn’t spot any brass. Maybe they were running the show by radio, or maybe they’d fled when the violence started.
Not all the officers opened fire, thank God. If they had, they’d have killed all the protesters and a bunch of them probably would have shot each other in the confusion. But three cops emptied their service weapons into the crowd, firing what would later be reported as eighteen shots.
A half-dozen protesters fell to the ground, killed or wounded. The rest dropped any weapons they were carrying and tried to flee. The officers were chasing down the runners, beating them with nightsticks and putting them in handcuffs.
I saw Longfellow Molloy lying in a pool of blood with one of his eyes and part of his nose missing. I thought of something Abramsky had said about the burning of Sodom: If the angels could have found ten righteous men, the city might have been spared.
Behind me, I heard a noise that sounded like a fire engine’s siren. I turned around, looking for something on fire, and then realized I was hearing the alarm at the Cotton Planters Union Bank.
I h
esitated. There was going to be an investigation of this debacle; somebody was at fault. If anyone ever hoped to figure out who started the violence here, we would need to immediately start taking statements from witnesses; if the protesters left, they’d be too scared to come forward to give statements, and we’d never find them again. And once the officers involved got their lies in order, there would be no hope of sorting out the truth.
But I wasn’t technically even supposed to be on the scene of the protest. I didn’t want my name in the reports about a racial massacre. I didn’t want my photographs in any history books next to this. So I ran back toward the bank.
By now, all the office workers were trying to flee the neighborhood. The streets were jammed with cars, and people were streaming out of the revolving doors of skyscrapers on foot. It was weird to see the sidewalks so crowded; nobody in Memphis walked anywhere. It took me eight minutes to elbow my way through the crowd of panicked office workers and get to the bank. Robberies don’t last eight minutes; by the time I got there, I knew Elijah and his gang were already gone.
The revolving door was locked into place, but one of the guards standing inside recognized me and let me in. The lobby was mostly empty. It seemed like Greenfield must have allowed most of his staff to go home. Only his assistant, Riley Cartwright, and five uniformed security guards were inside.
“How many were there?” I asked. “Can you describe them? Can you tell me which way they went?”
“Nothing happened,” Greenfield said. “I activated the security system in order to seal the vault. It seemed like a reasonable precaution, in case riots break out.”
“There was no robbery?”
He shook his head. “Everything here is fine. My security staff will stay on duty, in case any looters try to break in, but the vault is secure and inaccessible for the next three hours.”
Maybe I’d actually managed to scare Elijah out of town. “Well, I guess I can be of better use elsewhere, then,” I said. “Call the police if you see anything suspicious going on.”
Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 17