Tequila crossed his arms. “Sorry, but we worry about you.”
“Mississippi area code?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
I stomped into the living room and pulled the cell phone out of the couch. It was still ringing. I answered it.
“What?”
“Uh, is this Buck Schatz?” said the voice on the other end. He sounded startled, but after sitting there punching his redial button for over an hour, I supposed he wasn’t expecting an answer.
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is T. Addleford Pratt,” said the voice, recovering a little bit of composure.
“Whatever you’re peddling, we don’t want any.”
“I am the director of collections for Silver Gulch Saloon and Casino, down here in Tunica County, and I am looking to recover on a li’l ol’ debt.”
The redneck shtick covered the menace in his voice about as much as a squirt of Pine-Sol covers the stink coming off a week-old corpse.
“I don’t go to Tunica,” I told him. “You’re talking to the wrong man.”
“Well, see, I don’t reckon I am. I’m owed money by a feller named Larry Kind. He told me he’s got a share of some kind of Nazi gold that’ll clear the books for him, and that you know about it.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn about what Kind owes. You’ll have to take that up with him.”
“You know as well as I do that ol’ Larry done got himself cut up.”
“Are you telling me you had something to do with that?”
“I ain’t sayin’ shit, old man. But what goes around gets around, and we got this problem of his outstanding debt.”
“We don’t have a problem,” I said. “You’ve got a problem.”
“It’s your problem now, Buck, because I’m your new partner in this little treasure-huntin’ enterprise.”
I sighed. “Let’s meet up face-to-face in your office tomorrow, and we can talk this over.”
I hung up the phone and went over to the coat closet by the front door. I pulled a shoebox off of a high shelf and carried it to the kitchen table. Inside: my old Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, wrapped in cheesecloth. I examined it. Several times each year for the last three decades, I had disassembled the weapon; cleaned and oiled every part. It was in perfect condition.
What Eisenhower told me was, when you have nothing else to hang on to, you hang on to your gun.
I held it at arm’s length and peered down the sights. My arm shook a little from the weight of it. I had no reason to believe the gun had gotten any heavier, so I figured my arm had gotten weaker since the last time I’d aimed it. That was the bad news. On the bright side, though, my eyesight had gotten much worse since the last time I’d had to shoot somebody.
15
The Armani-suited downtown Memphis business types from the Baker Donnelson law firm or the Morgan Keegan bank might have been toasting one another in the Diamond Lounge over at the Harrah’s, but they didn’t come around the Silver Gulch. Somebody like Lawrence Kind would have stayed away as well, unless he’d run out his credit everywhere else. But for the right kind of clientele, Silver Gulch was the best place in Mississippi to stuff a welfare check into a slot machine.
Conveniently located an hour’s drive from Memphis, the Gulch catered not only to the kinds of rednecks who would only throw a wrinkled flannel over their stained wife-beater undershirts for dressy occasions, but also to mean-looking colored guys from Orange Mound who wore oversize basketball jerseys and baggy pants and carried fat rolls of bills wrapped in rubber bands.
Walking in, Tequila gave me a nudge and pointed at a white whale who must have easily weighed five hundred pounds, sitting on two stools and playing three slot machines. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt big enough to cover a small car. His naked upper arms were each as big around as a woman’s torso.
“Leave him alone,” I said. “He’s just trying to get comped to the buffet, same as everyone else.”
Endless mountains of soggy fried chicken, overcooked pork ribs, and crusty macaroni and cheese. To a certain kind of person, Tunica probably looked like heaven.
We walked past rows of machines and the glassy-eyed gamblers yanking at the greasy levers and asked the pockmarked attendant at the players’ desk if Pratt was around. The kid whispered into a handheld radio for a moment and then led us through a door that he unlocked with a key card, down a yellow-painted hallway with a cement floor, to the dingy office of the DIRECTOR OF COLLECTIONS.
Pratt stood as we entered.
“Howdy,” he said. “I reckon you don’t mind if I call you Buck?”
I looked him over. Deep-set, piggy eyes; greasy hair. Brown teeth piled on top of each other. I’d have suspected methamphetamine use if he weren’t forty pounds overweight. I made him for a two-bit shakedown artist. With the heater strapped against my ribs, I felt like myself again, more than I had in years. If I went at Pratt hard, I could cow the son of a bitch.
“Sit your ass down,” I told him, and he did.
I leaned over his desk, narrowed my eyes, and curled my lip to show him my own teeth, which were nicotine stained but still looked much better than his.
“Thirty-five years ago, I’d have put a bullet through your head, told folks you had it coming, and nobody would have said any different,” I told him.
Pratt didn’t flinch. “This ain’t thirty-five years ago, partner,” he said. “Your friends up and died on you, and Tunica is my town.”
I glared at him, and he glared right back.
“So, how’s about you take a seat there, Buck, and stop breathin’ old-man stink on me.”
Used to be, I’d have had a quick retort for him, but when I started to cuss at him some more, it was like my throat was stuffed with cotton balls. Side effect, damn it, of all the pills I take.
I opened my mouth, and closed it, and opened my mouth again, like a fish flopping in the bottom of a boat, but the only words that sprang to mind were some things my doctor had said about signs of cognitive impairment among the elderly.
I reached, reflexively, for my memory notebook, but I felt, instead, the weight of the gat, snug against my side, underneath my jacket, and I had a sudden and powerful urge to let it do the talking for me; to just cave in Pratt’s whole damn face around those tangled teeth and those mean, beady eyes; to empty his skull onto the cinder-block wall. I knew, though, that wasn’t a good play. It would create more problems than it solved.
So I chose the path of restraint and just punched him in the nose. It wasn’t much of a punch. My shoulder didn’t seem to rotate like it was supposed to. My back didn’t twist right to put my weight behind the follow-through. The bicep couldn’t snap the arm out.
He took the punch like he was leaning into a warm spring breeze, and then he smirked at me. I stared, dumbstruck, at my fist. My fingers and knuckles were already blue black, and the whole back of my hand was turning purple.
“You got that out of your system now, Mr. Buck?” Pratt asked.
I didn’t have anything to say, but Tequila filled the silence.
“Pratt, you haven’t got a claim against us. We’ve made no agreement to assume Mr. Kind’s obligations, and Mr. Kind had no interest in any property we possess. Your only recourse as a creditor is against Mr. Kind’s estate, which is no concern of ours.”
Tequila always spoke with a kind of precise, uninflected diction. He didn’t sound like Memphis, but he didn’t sound like New York either. His speech sounded kind of haughty, like he thought he was too good to have come from any particular place. Directed at Pratt, though, Tequila’s manner lent him an air of authority, like he was a psychologist talking to a disturbed child.
Pratt broke eye contact with me and smirked at Tequila. “Now, is that a fact?”
“I can tell you, if you try to go into court, you won’t be able to obtain relief against us. We’re not responsible for anyone else’s gambling debt.”
“Oh.” Pratt nodded. “Well, let me
tell you something, Mister New York City. This ain’t got nothin’ to do with no court. You find yourself, at this moment, in Mississippi, and around these parts, whatever claim I say I have, folks take serious, and whatever responsibilities I say folks have, they find they are responsible. And if and when we do go to court, all the judges ‘round these parts know who butters their biscuits, and it sure as shit ain’t y’all. I am going to collect my money, and that’s just that.”
I sat and shushed Tequila just as he was starting to say something else. Talking law to this Mississippi swamp beast was like preaching the gospel to the back end of a horse, but my grandson had bought me the precious seconds I needed to shake off my senility and come up with a plan of some sort.
“Fine,” I said, holding my throbbing hand. “I’m too old to futz around with you. When they find the treasure, you can have whatever my share would have been.”
This surprised him. “When who finds it?”
“The Israelis.”
“What Israelis?”
“Didn’t you know? All those Nazi assets were stolen from Jews in the war, so they go back to Israel when they’re recovered. If you find it, the Israelis just pay you a small commission.”
His face slackened. “Huh?”
“Turns out they pay you the same if you just tip them off as they do for actually hauling in the damn gold, ain’t that right?”
“Uh, yeah. International Convention for the Recovery of Stolen Assets,” Tequila lied. “Codified in federal statute. Your lawyers can look it up.”
“So we just called up the Israeli embassy. They sent a man over to take care of it,” I told him. “An Israeli government agent by the name of Yitzchak Steinblatt. Can’t miss him, he’s real big, with a big beard. That’s who is hunting the treasure.”
“No,” said Pratt. “No, Kind said you were the one going after that.”
“You’ve never been lied to by someone who owed you money?” Tequila asked.
Pratt thought on that for a second.
“Shit.”
He didn’t have much else to say, so I maneuvered out the door as quickly as I could. I wanted to open up some distance between myself and Mississippi, but Tequila insisted on putting twenty bucks in a slot machine.
“As long as we’re down here, we might as well try our luck,” he said.
I crossed my arms. “I want to leave now.”
He stared at me with eyes full of contempt. “I’m your ride, and we’ll go when I say we go.”
So he spent fifteen minutes tugging a lever. The guy at the next machine was two hundred and seventy-five pounds of mean, wrapped in black leather and prison tattoos, and my grandson didn’t even seem to notice. I watched both our backs with my hand stuffed inside my jacket, clutching the butt of the .357.
Tequila kept a blank expression as he watched the reels spin. I wondered if his sheltered upbringing had retarded his ability to comprehend danger in this place, in this situation.
He pulled the lever again, and the game took his money. He punched it, annoyed.
The guy with the prison ink glanced away from his own machine to eyeball Tequila.
“Hope you have better luck,” Tequila told him.
As we walked out into the parking lot, I explained for my grandson’s benefit that Pratt had undoubtedly been watching us the whole time we’d been in there on the casino’s security feed.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Tequila growled at me. He stopped walking and crossed his arms. “How does it help us if he looks at that monitor and sees us bolting for the door like frightened rabbits?”
“It ain’t safe here. Under the circumstances, we’re better off getting far away from this place,” I told him, flicking my lighter. “You let me do the thinking for us. I have the experience.”
“I don’t trust your thinking, Grandpa,” he said, furrowing his eyebrows and leaning forward, forcing himself into my space. “Your thinking brought us out here, because your thinking was that you could tell this guy how things work in his own house. But your tough-guy bullshit was obsolete even when you could put some torque behind a punch.”
“Listen to me,” I began.
But he cut me off.
“I’m through listening to you. You’re not an educated man, and you’re not in control of this situation. Five minutes of lawyer talk over the phone would have convinced that guy we were a kind of trouble he didn’t want. Instead, we’ve shown him there’s blood in the water here. Maybe we’ve thrown him off the scent, for the moment, with the Steinblatt thing, but he’ll be damn hard to get rid of. And on top of that, you want to let him see us run away. What the hell kind of a plan is that?”
I recoiled a little from his outburst. “I may not know law books, but I know people,” I stammered. “You don’t understand the kind of man you’re dealing with.”
“I know what kind of man I’m dealing with. An ornery, senile, half-crazy old fuck.”
Neither of us said much after that. On the way back to Memphis, I looked out at the soybean fields surrounding the casinos and wondered how many folks were buried under them.
* * *
Something I don’t want to forget:
On the night Billy was born, Brian brought the baby, wrapped in a blue blanket, out of the delivery room for Rose and me to see.
The baby was small and very pink, with just a little tuft of light-colored fuzz on his head. When I leaned down to look at him, Billy peered back at me with big, bright eyes, green and wet.
“Hi, kid,” I said. “I’m your grandpa. I’m going to help look out for you.”
“I love him so much, Dad,” Brian told me, and his eyes were wet as well.
“If you ever felt before that your life lacked an animating purpose, I reckon you’re realizing right about now that you’ll never feel that way again,” I said, squeezing his shoulder. “This is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. This is why you try to force a cruel and arbitrary world to take on a shape that makes sense. This is what you are for: to protect this boy. To keep him safe and make sure he knows he’s never alone.”
“Yeah, Dad. I think that’s just about right.”
I found my whiskey flask in my jacket pocket. I took a long belt and handed it to my son. “Well, I know the feeling,” I said.
16
There was an ass in every one of the two thousand cushy movie-theater seats in the stucco-and-glass auditorium. The church had its sheriff’s deputies trying to untangle the jammed-up traffic in the parking lot. Judging from the attendance at his memorial service, it seemed that despite his unsettling appearance and his gambling problem, dead Larry had been a pretty solid hand at the pastor racket. A lot of people were crying.
I found a nice perch on the end of an aisle, at the back lip of the room, where I could see the crowd. Tequila slid into the seat next to me. We hadn’t talked about yesterday’s blowout in Tunica, and I suspected we wouldn’t. That wasn’t how things worked in our family.
He had showed up at the house earlier that morning with fresh bagels and coffee from Starbuck’s. A peace offering.
I accepted it and let him drive me to the funeral. So now we would pretend it had never happened, although the things he’d said had got under my skin.
I’d been to the church three times now in the span of a week. This was the life of an old person—going to the same places all the time, over and over, and attending a lot of funerals.
Somebody had already replaced the carpet on the stage where Kind had bled out. Somebody had repainted the splattered walls. Somebody had mopped up Kind’s various bits and scraped them into a heavy-looking oak casket with brass rails for the pallbearers to grab on to. The box was closed, of course, and it was so completely covered with cascading flowers that I could barely see how expensive it was.
“Maybe if the reverend had given that fancy coffin to those guys in Tunica, they wouldn’t have ripped his face off,” Tequila said.
A heavyset, middle-aged woman
in front of us turned around to give us an ugly look.
Tequila winced a bit and tried to look contrite. “We all have different ways of expressing our grief,” he told her.
“What makes you think the casino people did him?” I asked.
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “My theory is actually that you did it.”
I fiddled with the pack of cigarettes and considered lighting one. I decided against it. “Nobody says you’re innocent either,” I told Tequila.
“Well, if anyone starts snooping around and wants to know where I was that night, you can tell them you were with me, and if anyone asks about you, I’ll say the same.”
That was reassuring.
Lots of classy folks in the crowd. No Mexican day laborers would need to be conscripted to carry the late reverend; a judge, a councilman, and the mayor were on deck to help bear the departed to his resting place. I wondered idly if those three had alibis for the night of the murder.
The luminaries would be sharing the load with Kind’s former assistant and interim successor, a straight-backed, severe-looking fellow called Gregory Cutter. He’d got himself a promotion out of Kind’s death, and that was a motive. I added him to my mental list of suspects.
“Hey, there’s somebody we know,” Tequila said, gesturing toward T. Addleford Pratt, who was sitting nearby, dressed for the occasion in a red leather coat with a white fur collar.
“We got friends all kinds of places,” I said, jamming an elbow into Tequila’s ribs and jerking my head to the left and forward, toward Yitzchak Steinblatt, who was examining a Baptist hymnal with a sort of intense Hasidic zeal.
“Shit,” said Tequila. “That is, like, the Dikembe Mutombo of Orthodox Jews.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Detective Randall Jennings had shown up as well; he was sitting near the front, in the same seat he’d occupied the night of the murder.
“I don’t see Feely,” Tequila said. “Do you think that means he’s the killer?”
I looked around and didn’t see him either. What I suspected it meant was, when Norris Feely didn’t want to go someplace, his wife couldn’t force him to go anyway. I would have to find out how such a feat could be accomplished.
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