I took it back from her. “Don’t see the point. Got along just fine for eighty years without any cell phone.”
She slapped her hand to her forehead. “That’s what you refuse to understand. Things aren’t the same as they used to be. We aren’t the same as we used to be. You need the phone to be charged up and switched on, because if you fall down, you can’t get off the floor without calling somebody for help.”
“I’m not too worried about that.”
“Well, you should be. We had to move into this place because you got yourself horribly injured. I had to give up my home because of your stupid Nazi-hunting adventure. I told you not to go after the Nazi, but you had to do it anyway. You never even asked me how I felt about losing the house. All I wanted was to be surrounded, during my last few years, by things that gave me comfort. Now those things are all in storage, because we have to live here, because of you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I gave you sixty-five good years, and now I am old and sick.”
“We’re not here because you are old and sick. We’re here because you got shot fighting with desperadoes over treasure. Who the hell does that?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I tussle with bad guys. You knew who I was when you married me.”
“I thought I knew who you were. But you’ve changed. You’ve retreated into yourself. You’ve become someone different since Brian died.”
“I’ve had a rough couple of days, Rose. Do we have to talk about Brian right now?”
“We’ve never talked about Brian. He’s been gone seven years, and you can’t even begin to deal with it. You want to know the difference between you and me?”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.”
“I’m stronger than you. You can’t deal with losing things. I’ve been preparing for it all my life. I spent the war worrying you were going to get yourself killed over there. A lot of girls had to worry about their men, so I couldn’t complain about that. But those boys came back and settled into ordinary lives. You came back to me with a lot of scars and, for some reason, a taste for blood and danger.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “You don’t understand, because I never wanted to burden you with it. All I ever wanted was to protect my family.”
“You didn’t want to burden me? I spent thirty years worrying that something was going to happen to you. Every morning, you walked out the door, and I didn’t know if you were going to come home or not. And when you worked late, you usually didn’t even call to tell me you were all right. I just had to wait. So when Brian died, I had to handle it alone, because I was the only one who was prepared to handle loss. Your whole life, your only plan to deal with tragedy was to die first, except you could never bring yourself to even do that.”
“My plan was to not ever need to endure tragedy. My plan was to take care of everyone. To keep you all safe.”
“Buck, that is a stupid plan, and I think you know it. And you had no contingency to fall back on when your stupid plan failed. When you got hurt, I gave everything up to bring you here. That was a choice I made. If you were too weak to get up in the morning, I didn’t have to move you someplace that could provide you with physical rehabilitation. I could have just left you in the bed and called in the hospice service.”
“I’d have done the same thing for you.”
“But you didn’t. Four months ago, I fell down and had to go in the hospital. And you left me. You ran away to St. Louis with Tequila to go on your silly treasure hunt. And of course, you ended up getting hurt, because you’re almost ninety years old, and you’re trying to do things you’re physically not capable of doing anymore. You insist on tussling with the bad guys, because you refuse to acknowledge the fact that you’re frail and brittle.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “This is all I’ve got. I’ve lost my health, and I’ve lost my career, and I’ve lost my son, and someday soon, I am going to lose my mind and my past. You say I can’t deal with loss, but this is how I deal with it. By being who I am, for as long as I can. When I’ve got nothing else, I’ve got my integrity, and I’ve got my principles. And I don’t leave things unfinished.”
“You’ve got me. Does that even matter to you? Do you think about how it affects me, when you run off to engage in some preposterous struggle with some ancient foe who nobody has cared about for fifty years?”
“Of course you matter to me. You matter more than anything. But you can’t ask me to be anything other than Buck Schatz. I’m much too old to change.”
“I know who I am, too,” she said, clenching her fists. “I am the one who has to get a phone call about how you’re in the hospital because you got into a gunfight with drug dealers. What if you’d died?”
“What if I had? I’m going to die someday. Maybe someday soon.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to go chasing after it.”
“Is it worse to get a phone call than to just wake up one morning and find me cold? Or worse, to watch me die of something slow, like the dementia?”
“I had to lose my home because of you. That was our place, and we had to sell it to some faceless company that wanted it for an investment property.”
This sounded familiar; sounded like something I might have written in a notebook at some point. But I’d forgotten about it.
“Wait. What company?” I asked.
“You know all about this. You were on the phone when William explained it.”
“I don’t remember that. Tell me who bought our house.”
“It’s a real estate trust that buys these properties as speculative investments.”
I pushed my walker over to the rolltop desk in one corner of the room and started going through the drawer where we kept our important papers.
“What are you doing?” Rose said. “You can’t just walk away from this conversation we’re having right now.”
I found the paper I was looking for: a record of the sale of our home to an entity called Fifth Cup Holdings. The fifth cup during the Passover seder was Elijah’s cup. He had bought it. He had taken my house; he’d spent a hundred thousand dollars just to taunt me. Or to tell me something. Could it really be that simple?
“I have got to go,” I said.
“What? You can’t leave.”
“I’ll be back soon. I promise.” I grabbed the keys to the Buick off the little peg on the wall where Rose hung them, because we hardly ever drove anymore.
“You can’t drive now. It’s nighttime. You don’t drive at night.”
“It’s no big deal. I’ll be back soon.” I reached into the closet to get my .357.
“It’s like you don’t hear what I am saying to you.”
“I hear you. I understand. But there are things a man needs to do.”
She’d get over it. She always did.
40
2009
I still had a set of keys to the front door of the house, but somebody had changed out the locks, so I pushed my own doorbell and held it down.
He was here. I’d known it as soon as I spotted the Honda Accord parked in the driveway. It was exactly the car he’d drive, because it was a car that nobody would ever notice. It wasn’t old enough to emit a memorable cloud of smoke, or to look remarkably boxy compared to the sleek edges of the latest models, but it wasn’t new enough to attract the curiosity of owners of older Accords who might take some vague interest in the trim or features of a new model.
The color was the same as the color of every other car you look at the back of for three minutes at a stoplight and never remember having seen. You could look right at this Honda Accord and never notice it. It was the next best thing to being invisible.
It was riding low on the rear shocks, too. Like a couple of fat guys were sitting in the backseat. But there were no fat guys in that car.
Here is something you learn in thirty-five years as a police detective: A twenty-dollar bill, or any paper denomination of U.S. currency, weighs approximately one gr
am. If you work the math out, five million dollars in twenties in the trunk will weigh a car down on its rear shocks the same amount as a couple of fat guys sitting in the backseat. Most people who aren’t drug dealers don’t think of cash as being heavy, but most people who aren’t drug dealers don’t take the time to consider the implications of large amounts in small bills.
I didn’t like that he’d parked the car in the driveway, though. He could easily have pulled it around the back of the house and parked in the garage, where it was out of sight. The driveway was the worst place to park it, because people on the street could see it and he couldn’t, since the only window that looked out on that side of the house was completely blocked by a privacy hedge.
He’d have been better off parking it on the street, where he could at least keep an eye on it. I wondered why he’d parked it where he’d parked it. It seemed like a sign of extreme carelessness, or maybe arrogance.
Or else it was a signal; weird that a man hiding out after stealing millions from a drug dealer would want to signal his presence. But who would recognize this thoroughly inconspicuous Honda Accord as a message?
I had, so I supposed I would. It was a signal for me. Just as I’d known he’d be here, he knew I’d be coming. And he was waiting for me.
Elijah still hadn’t answered, so I pushed the doorbell again.
Even though it was hot out, I was wearing the Members Only jacket that Brian had given me for my birthday in 1986. In the left-hand pocket, I was carrying a roll of silver duct tape. In the right pocket, I had my .357.
I thought of Longfellow Molloy lying on the pavement with his unblinking eye open and staring at me, and I thought of Andre Price lying in his hospital bed, hooked up to the ventilator. The check had come due, and it was time for Elijah to pay up.
I heard the lock click, but the door didn’t open. I counted to ten, slowly, and then I turned the knob.
Inside, all the lights were off, and there was no sign of Elijah. I pushed my walker through the front door and trudged down a short hallway. The dining room opened to my right. We used to keep my mother’s china in a glass-fronted cabinet in there. Now it was in a box in a storage locker someplace.
The wall to my left used to be covered with family photos. Of Rose and me when we were younger; of William as a baby; of Brian. Somebody had filled in the holes I’d nailed into the wall to hang the frames from, and then painted over the plaster.
The sturdy brick fireplace was the only remnant of my old den that hadn’t been ripped out during the renovation. The carpeting was gone, and someone had waxed and polished the wood floor underneath. This place didn’t look like home anymore. It didn’t smell like us.
My family was here for sixty years, and a construction crew had eliminated every sign our habitation in a matter of days. Standing there, in the dark, in the den that used to be my den but wasn’t anymore, I recognized the futility of all human endeavors. It didn’t matter whether you tiptoed through the world invisibly like Elijah, or you stomped around bellowing and beating people with clubs; in the end, the sum total of your life amounted to nothing that couldn’t be washed away or covered up with a dab of plaster and a coat of paint.
As years went by, you just got old, and then you vanished like a stone beneath the surface of a lake, and even as you gloated over the size of the splash you made, the waters stilled and everything went back to being exactly like it was before you appeared on the scene; exactly how it would have been if you’d never existed.
The kitchen where I used to eat breakfast with my family was to my right. The renovators had pulled up the cracked, dingy linoleum that Rose had been on my case for twenty years to do something about, and they’d laid down new tile. Stripped of its miniblinds, the window looked naked, but it was letting in a fair amount of light from the streetlamps outside, so I could see where I was going. I turned the other way and followed the hallway toward the bedrooms at the back of the house.
Along the way, I checked the guest room, where William used to sleep when his parents sent him here to get him out of their hair for a night or a weekend. The built-in bookshelves used to be lined with the thick, leather-bound photo albums that Rose had carefully maintained since before I married her. Now almost all of those albums were in the concrete self-storage locker we’d rented.
I checked the half bathroom in the hallway. I thought Elijah might be hiding in there, because it had no windows and was the darkest room in the house. I didn’t miss that bathroom; it was not a well-considered architectural feature. When somebody took a shit in there, the smell had no place to go.
Anyway, he wasn’t in there, which left two doors, across from each other at the end of the hallway. I put my hand on the door of the bedroom Rose and I had shared since Eisenhower was in office, and paused for a moment to think. Then I turned around, which was difficult to do with the walker in such a narrow space. I opened the other door and flipped the light switch.
Elijah was sitting in a metal folding chair in the middle of the room. Even the way he sat annoyed me: he crossed his legs with one knee on top of the other, like a woman. There was a large red duffel bag sitting on the floor next to him, and he had a black 9 mm pistol in his right hand.
“I’d halfway hoped you might fall down in the dark and die on the way in here,” he said. “But it’s good that we have a chance to talk.”
41
2009
“If you hadn’t wanted me to find you, you could have arranged to hide out pretty much anywhere else,” I said.
His face bore no expression; just an indifferent mask. He looked like a melted wax dummy of the man I’d beat up fifty years before. “Yes, I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?” he said.
“So, whatever you want to say to me, how about you say it?”
He looked up; his eyes met mine. “This was your son’s room, wasn’t it?”
I flinched. “Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”
He waved the gun at me. “The master bedroom is across the hall. There are only three bedrooms in the house. It makes sense that you would put the child in the closest room.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Impressive deduction.”
Then I hit him with my walker.
Even though it only weighed about five pounds, I couldn’t pick the thing up and swing it like I used to swing my truncheon. My legs weren’t strong enough to support my body when I twisted my torso. All I could do was lift the legs of the thing off the ground and sort of push it forward at him.
But that was all I needed; he was surprised by the move, and he reflexively put his arm in front of him to block the blow, so I tangled him up in the legs of the walker and knocked the gun out of his hand.
I took a wobbly step back and disengaged the walker from him before he could grab hold of it, and then I swept the front wheels at the gun and sent it sliding across the floor.
I set the walker back down and then sagged against it, winded from the effort. Elijah rose to his feet, knocking over his folding chair.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” he said. “I can’t imagine a more ridiculous or ineffectual thing for you to attempt. What else have you got planned? Are you going to spit your dentures at me?”
I smiled at him. “I’ve got all the original fixtures. You’re the one with the false teeth.”
“They’re implant-supported bridges. Very expensive, top-of-the-line orthodontic work, and they can’t be spit out.”
“Dentures is dentures,” I said. “How did you get all that dental work done, anyway? Ain’t you been living as a fugitive for fifty years?”
“I paid cash, like I do for all my medical care. And I paid extra to have the orthodontist destroy my dental records afterwards. Then I burned down his office, just to be safe.” He took a step back to get outside the reach of the walker. “Did you think you were going to beat me again, the way you beat me when you caught me in the bank? You aren’t strong anymore, Baruch. You’re a goddamn invalid.”
/> The demented part of my brain that still believed I was a detective was howling inside my skull; telling me I could break this man six different ways using only my hands. It was a lie. My hands weren’t much good for breaking anything anymore. I could still break wind, but that was all.
“I wasn’t trying to beat you,” I said. “I just wanted to get the gun away from you.”
“And then what? I can just walk over there and pick it up. You have to slowly, painfully shuffle across the room, and then you can’t bend down to lift the thing off the floor without toppling over and busting your head open. There’s no way you can get to it before I can. It appears you haven’t considered this very carefully.”
He took a step toward the gun.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I was you,” I said.
“Why not?”
I pulled the .357 out of my pocket and pointed it at him. “Because it appears my consideration is more careful than you realized, asshole. So, how about you sit down.”
He started to pick up his folding chair.
“Not on that,” I said. “On the floor.” I pointed with my gun toward the corner of the room farthest from where his 9 mm had come to rest. He was right that I couldn’t easily pick his gun up off the ground. But I was fine, as long as he couldn’t get to it, either.
“Come on, Baruch,” he said. “I have arthritic knees.”
“I don’t care. You can deal with the discomfort. Sit down.”
“Of course you would be armed,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected you to come after me, unless you were clutching your fetish object.”
“I think it will probably afford me a little bit of protection, in the event our conversation devolves into gunplay.”
“I don’t think that’s likely to happen,” Elijah said.
“Well, maybe you and I have different plans.”
“Do you think I would have hidden someplace you’d find me, if I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen?”
Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 22