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

by Friedman, Daniel

  He reached forward and grabbed the large duffel bag.

  “Hold it,” I said.

  He let go. “I apologize. The contents of the bag are completely harmless, but I can understand why you might want to see what’s inside before allowing me to handle it. You are perfectly welcome to examine it.”

  I paused. I couldn’t unzip the bag while still keeping the gun trained on him, and bending over to open the thing up would put me in a fairly precarious position if he decided to lunge at me, even if I leaned against the walker for support.

  “Unzip it, slowly. And don’t reach inside. You may think you’re fast, but all I have to do is squeeze this trigger to make you dead.”

  “I understand,” he said. “You don’t warn anyone twice.” He pulled at the zipper and slowly opened the bag. It was stuffed with straps of twenty-dollar bills.

  “What is that supposed to be?” I asked.

  “Are you blind as well as crippled, Baruch? That’s a million dollars.”

  “Yeah, but what’s it for?”

  “My plan was to give you a choice. You could either take the duffel bag full of cash, or we could have a pointless showdown. I guess, now that you’ve disarmed me, the proposition has changed slightly. You can either take the money and let me go, or you can kill me.”

  “Maybe I’ll just kill you and take the money anyway,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Your house is in a nice, quiet neighborhood. The way your hand shakes, I think you’ll need to fire several shots to kill me, and a 911 call about multiple gunshots fired here will result in a swift response. This bag weighs more than a hundred pounds, and from the moment you discharge a weapon, you’ll probably have no more than four minutes before the police arrive. You won’t be able to get away with the money in time.”

  “Maybe I’ll just call the police and turn you in. Maybe the satisfaction of seeing you get what you deserve is worth more to me than the money.”

  “You’ll have to kill me,” he said. “I’ve got no intention of allowing the state to take me into custody. If you attempt to call the police, I shall attack you, and you will either have to shoot me, or else I will beat you to death with my bare hands, an outcome I’d find entirely satisfactory.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like you, either. So, why do you want to give me a million dollars?”

  “I’m not giving it to you. I’m buying something. When you take that bag and let me leave, you’ll have given up something you treasure, and that’s what I want. I don’t care about the money.” He was grinding his dentures as he spoke. “I’ve stolen more than I can ever spend. More than I can ever launder. I don’t steal because I need to. I’ve buried shrink-wrapped bales of money in places I don’t even remember how to find. I want you to sell the piece of yourself you think is too precious to be tainted by my muck. It’s worth a million dollars to watch you stand there and do nothing as I walk out the door.”

  “You ass,” I said. “You perfect, complete ass. I’m almost ninety years old. How can you think I am uncompromising, when I lead such a compromised existence? If there was any part of me that made it through thirty years of police work untainted, it got pretty damn tainted three years ago, which was the first time I had to take a shit and couldn’t get to the toilet fast enough. Do you think I care about my dignity? I was cured of dignity a long time ago. During the last several months, I have performed every embarrassing bodily function in front of an audience of strangers.

  “I was on the right side against the Nazis. I hope that’s what people remember about me, if they remember me at all. And when I worked police, I went out of my way to get the bastards who liked hurting defenseless women and kids. But I know whose interests the police exist to protect, and I know who benefits most from the rule of law and social stability. I ain’t one to romanticize police work. If I cared about rules, I might have done a better job of following them. If I cared much about the legal notions of right and wrong, I would never have let Charles Greenfield get away with his part of your bank robbery.”

  “You kept quiet about Greenfield because you feared unjust repercussions; and you worked for the people doing the repercussing. I forced you to confront the hypocrisy of your own position; the grotesque bigotry of your own establishment.”

  “I acknowledged it. And then I went on working as a cop for another twelve years, anyway,” I said. “Nobody gets through life untainted. But my actions did not directly cause the deaths of three civil rights protesters. That is something that I would never want to carry on my conscience.”

  He grimaced. “I didn’t cause that; I just made it happen at a time I found convenient,” he said. “I didn’t add a single ingredient to this city’s acrid stew of hostility and bigotry, I just stirred the pot a little. The man I paid off didn’t even discharge his weapon. Your organization killed those protesters. And the shooters weren’t even punished.”

  “The investigators were never able to identify the officers responsible.”

  “How long did it take you to find the officer I bribed? Ten minutes? Did the investigators ever find him?”

  “I ran him out of town.”

  “They could have tracked him down, if they’d wanted to. And they could have found the shooters. They could have just taken all the service weapons from the officers on the scene and smelled them, to see which ones had been recently fired.”

  There were reasons why that wouldn’t have worked; I was sure of it. But I couldn’t remember what those reasons were, so I said: “Maybe.”

  “And anyway, what if the Kluge strike hadn’t broken down with police violence? Did you know that Kluge had replaced all the striking workers within three weeks? The few men protesting the work site were picketing a fully staffed facility. The strikers had already been fired. And the replacement workers were all blacks, working for the same wage the strikers were protesting. Eventually, the picketers would have had to give up. I rescued them from failure. I made them a symbol of something. Without my intervention, their cause was hopeless.”

  “I don’t think Longfellow Molloy wanted to be a symbol.”

  “Who?”

  “What about Andre Price?” I asked. “Do you remember who he was?”

  “If it makes any difference, my heist this time tore down a massive, violent drug empire.”

  “Which will just be replaced, most likely by the people who tipped you off to the location of the first stash house.”

  His eyebrows lifted a little. He hadn’t expected me to figure that part out. “You’re a better detective than you ever let on. But, yes. When you take down bad guys, new bad guys pop up.”

  I nodded. “And when you take all the money out of a bank vault, they just fill it back up with more money.”

  He adjusted his legs on the floor and winced with pain as he bent them. “Glass is half empty; glass is half full.”

  “I just want to know one thing,” I said. “Why me? Why did you drag me into this drug dealer nonsense?”

  “Why not?” Elijah said. “The only reason I do anything these days is to be doing something. If you stop, you know, you stop. Also, I was curious to see what you’d do when Cash’s crew showed up with their guns.”

  “I could have been killed.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t like you.”

  That made me laugh. “In some ways, you and I are weirdly similar,” I told him.

  “We’re both old men,” said Elijah. “You spent your life trying to be sturdy, and now you’re crumbling. I spent my life trying to be smoke, and now I am dissipating. You spent your life trying to impose order on a disordered world, and I spent my life trying to take vengeance on a cruel world. The world is still disordered, and the world is still cruel, and we keep doing the same thing, because what we do is all we are. This, I think, is the way of things. So, are you going to kill me, or are you going to let me go?”

  I couldn’t see any way to bring him in alive, and he was no good to me dead. I wanted
his story. I wanted the world to know what he’d done, and that I was the one who caught him. But maybe the world didn’t care. The world didn’t even know he existed. And in the end, his story wasn’t really worth a million bucks.

  “You were wrong about me, I think, when you told me that meanness doesn’t weaken with age. There was a time when I’d have blown your goddamn head off on principle,” I said.

  “Meanness doesn’t weaken,” he replied. “But principle isn’t quite so durable.”

  “Get the hell out of my house,” I said. “And leave the bag.”

  42

  2009

  I listened for the sound of the Honda’s little lawn mower engine, but when I didn’t hear it for several minutes, I remembered that I’d gone slightly deaf and missed noises on the higher registers, so I pushed my walker down the hall and peeked out the front door.

  The car was no longer in the driveway.

  I called the main police switchboard at 201 Poplar from my cheap plastic cell phone and asked them to put me through to Rutledge, Narcotics.

  “Rutledge, Narcotics,” he said when he picked up the line.

  “Did you lose something?”

  “Yeah, motherfucker. I’m missing my goddamn cell phone. Did you steal it? Why would you steal my phone?”

  The reason was pretty embarrassing. On the way back to Valhalla from the murder scene, I had been sitting in the passenger seat of Rutledge’s unmarked vehicle, and he had been explaining to me in great detail why Quintin Tarantula was a better film director than Sam Peckinpah. I didn’t give a shit what he thought about movies.

  The phone was stuck in one of the cup holders between us, and I think I picked it up because I was trying to figure out how the thing worked; how one might dial a phone with no buttons. How it got Internets without any wires. I guess I got confused or distracted, and I absentmindedly stuck it in my pocket instead of setting it back in the cup holder.

  Totally unintentional. Honest Injun.

  But I still had it with me when I got in the Buick to go check out the old house, and it got me thinking about how Elijah had used an Internet phone to trick Cash into coming after him, and about what Tequila had told me people could do with computer programs. So, when I saw Elijah’s getaway car parked in the driveway, exactly where I knew he couldn’t see it from any of the windows, I realized that I obviously had to stick Rutledge’s cell phone underneath the fender with duct tape, so Rutledge could track Elijah down if he slipped away from me.

  It was not a coincidence that I had a roll of duct tape in the Buick’s glove compartment. I’ve always kept a roll of duct tape in my glove compartment. Duct tape is great. You can use it for everything from patching a ruptured fuel line to restraining a suspect.

  What I said to Rutledge was: “Can you do that thing with the computer, where you trace it online?”

  “I think so. I’ve got an Android, not an iPhone, but I have a similar app.”

  “I have no idea what any of those words mean,” I said.

  “I can probably track it.”

  “Maybe you should do that now.”

  “I’m kind of busy, Buck. Some folks walking in Riverside Park spotted a corpse floating out in the river, and I have to go look at it to see if it’s Carlo Cash.”

  “Send somebody else, and go find your phone.”

  “Why?”

  If I told Rutledge I’d let Elijah go, he would ask a whole bunch of questions that I wasn’t sure how to answer without mentioning the million dollars.

  Of course, even if I didn’t tell Rutledge about the money, if the detective took the thief alive, chances were good that my payoff wouldn’t stay secret, but at least, in that circumstance, Elijah would be alive, in custody, and talking.

  I wasn’t even sure Rutledge would go after Elijah if he had all the information. He could pin Carlo Cash’s murder to one of any number of the drug dealer’s former associates, and it was simpler to treat this as a straightforward drug killing than to explain to a jury what Elijah was. Some cops enjoyed the weird, intricate cases, but most just liked to be home in time for dinner.

  “Trust me,” I said. “You should hunt down your phone before you do anything else.”

  “All right, Buck.”

  “Seriously, Rutledge. I’m not crazy, and I’m only partway senile. I’m telling you this for a good reason.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “Track that phone, right now. Make it a priority.”

  “I’ll get right on that. You take care, now.”

  And then he hung up.

  I didn’t know whether he was going to look for his phone or not, but I figured I’d done my part and earned my money.

  43

  2009

  There was a time when I could have just dragged a duffel bag full of money out of the house and heaved it into my car, but I probably haven’t been able to do anything like that for the last fifteen years.

  I unpacked all the money out of the duffel bag, onto the floor. Then I sat down on Elijah’s folding chair, and packed as much as I figured I could carry back into the bag. Then I carried the money out to my car, pushing the walker in front of me and leaning on it to help carry the weight. I unpacked the money in the trunk, and then went back in the house and repeated the process.

  It took seven trips, which meant that I managed to carry about fifteen pounds at a time. I had to stop twice to rest and to smoke. Once all the money was in the trunk, I packed it back into the duffel bag.

  There wasn’t much, anymore, that I could do with money. I didn’t need any fancy cars, and wasn’t looking to impress any glamorous women. I didn’t care for technological gadgets or fine clothes. I wasn’t going to travel the world; sitting in an airplane seat for a ten hour flight would probably give me blood clots, and I wasn’t steady enough, even with the walker, to safely go for a stroll on the beach, or to maintain my footing on the slippery deck of a cruise ship.

  Going back to the house didn’t seem to make much sense. I needed daily therapy, and Valhalla had Cloudy-ah on site. And we were settled there. And the house wasn’t really home, anymore.

  If Medicare cut off the funding for the physical therapy, I supposed that Elijah’s money might help pay Cloudy-ah. If I needed nursing care or hospice, I wouldn’t have to worry about the cost. Beyond that, a million dollars didn’t really change much for me.

  But, hell, it was still a million dollars.

  I had no choice but to leave it in the car overnight, since I had no idea how to lug it into Valhalla. It wasn’t easy sleeping with all that money sitting outside in the trunk of the Buick, and it didn’t help that Rose was refusing to talk to me. But the night passed without incident.

  The next morning, I took the keys and went to a nearby Wells Fargo branch, where I asked for the largest kind of safe-deposit box they had. I paid the fee and arranged for my grandson to be allowed access to the box upon presentation of my death certificate.

  A member of the bank staff hauled the heavy bag from my car into the private safe-deposit vault, and then he left me alone with the box. Nobody asked what was in the bag, because it was none of their business. When I was done, I closed the box and I called to the guy who was helping me. Then I carried the empty duffel bag out of the vault, and he locked up behind me.

  I felt good about this resolution. After all, there is no safer place to stash a large amount of money than inside a modern bank vault.

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  I remember, on the day of Brian’s bar mitzvah, I tied his necktie for him, because he didn’t know how to do it himself. This is the speech he gave. I didn’t help him write it, but I think maybe my wife did. Or else, the rabbi:

  Assembled friends, family, and congregants, Rabbi Abramsky, Mom and Dad:

  Today we celebrate my ascent into Jewish manhood, and I thank you all for being here to share this important moment with me. Today is a day of great joy, but it’s also a solemn day, as I take on
new obligations and responsibilities: to daven and to keep the mitzvoth.

  And as I shoulder the burdens of Jewish manhood, it is incumbent upon me to remember that this is not a joyous day for everyone. Three colored protesters who marched against their exploitative employer in hopes of winning a fairer wage and a better life are now lying in the hospital, shot full of holes and trying to cling to any kind of life at all. Three others are dead, at the hands of the police. Horrific punishments, inflicted upon these men for the crime of peaceable assembly. Here in America. Here in Memphis.

  The Torah portion we read today was parsha Vayera, which tells the story of how Abraham failed to dissuade God from burning down the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and killing everyone who lived there. So this is a good day to talk about justice, and what the idea of justice means to Jews.

  Later this year, some other chazzan will sing to you the Song of Moses, the last divine words the greatest Jewish prophet delivered unto the Israelites before he wandered off into the desert to die.

  In this last great speech, Moses explains God’s philosophy of justice: “Vengeance is mine,” God says. “And I will be satisfied. In due time, the feet of my enemies shall slip. Their day of calamity draws near, and what’s coming down on them is coming down fast.”

  Because there is no god but HaShem! He makes life and He makes death. He wounds and He heals. And there is no force in heaven or on earth who can deliver the judged from His hands.

  Today we’re here in celebration, but we mustn’t forget that our lives will not be comprised entirely—or even mostly—of simchas. The walls outside the sanctuary are covered with memorial plaques, each bearing the name and date of a family’s loss; a family’s tragedy. We celebrate today, because we know that soon we will suffer. Hopefully, our pain will never be as acute as that of our kinsmen in Europe who endured Nazi genocide, or that of the Negroes standing vigil over their wounded brethren today, but we will have pain nonetheless.