Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

  “Nothing means anything,” I told him. “Bad guys sometimes return to the scene of the crime, and sometimes they put rubber to pavement and never look back. I’m not their psychologist. I just lock the bastards up.”

  He smirked. “You used to lock the bastards up.”

  “That’s what I said.” My elbow was starting to throb; sticking Tequila had been a bad idea. I was sure I had bruised it.

  “So, how come we’re not in St. Louis?” he asked. “I have to go back to New York pretty soon.”

  “A man’s murdered, and that may be related to our treasure hunt,” I told him. “Wherever the gold is, it’s been there a long time, and it can wait a little longer. We need to make sure we’re safe before we do anything.”

  Kind’s parents and brother sat in the front row. The father was crying. I avoided looking at them, but Tequila was staring in their direction.

  “Who’s the pretty girl sitting with the family?” he asked the lady in front of us.

  “That’s the pastor’s wife,” she said. “Poor Felicia. This must be so hard on her.”

  Felicia Kind was younger than her husband, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat, with a black veil on it, and a tight-fitting black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline that put piety’s earthly rewards on full exhibition.

  “Hard-on indeed,” Tequila said in his best, most sympathetic tone. “That’s a hell of a dress for a funeral.”

  The big woman clucked like a mournful hen. “She must have been so dazed with grief, she didn’t even realize.”

  I watched a tall man with carefully mowed hair lean in toward Felicia to whisper in her ear. She laughed at whatever he said.

  “She knows exactly what she’s doing,” Tequila said. He leaned back toward me. “What do you think, Grandpa?”

  “I can imagine a chain of events starting with that woman and ending with that box.”

  “You think she did it?”

  “Everyone’s a suspect,” I said. “But when I look at that shiny coffin, I’ve got to suspect the life of the departed reverend was heavily insured.”

  “So you think she killed him for money?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “You have to understand, a filly like that don’t want to be kept in the paddock. She wants to nibble at the sweet new grass and get some sweat on those shapely flanks.”

  “Does that mean you think she’s sleeping with somebody?”

  I shrugged. No way of knowing. “It’d be kind of a shame if she wasn’t,” I said.

  Gregory Cutter, Kind’s replacement, patted Felicia’s hand, hugged the weeping father, and then stepped up onto the stage in front of the coffin. The crowd fell silent as the preacher grasped his microphone.

  “Lawrence would be pleased to see you all here today, I’m sure,” he said. “He was a friend and a counselor and a listener and a guide, and he touched many lives throughout our community with his wisdom and his compassion.”

  Kind’s father sobbed.

  “The way I see it,” Tequila said, shifting in his seat, “if this has something to do with her, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  I turned that over in my mind as I half listened to Cutter orating on the stage.

  “We’ve all wondered over the last few days what sort of monster could have done this to someone like Larry. And the police are still hunting for the killer. But I know who was behind this crime. I know who wanted to destroy Lawrence Kind and who wants to destroy this church.”

  “That makes things a whole lot easier,” Tequila whispered to me.

  “Each of us has an Enemy,” Cutter shouted from the stage, pointing his finger into the audience. “Each of us has a foe, savage and cruel. And that Enemy is fearsome enough to lay low the best among us, even men as pure and strong as our pastor.”

  I’d followed General Eisenhower’s advice and hung on to my gun, and that had kept me alive for eighty-seven years. But poor Lawrence Kind was never the sort of man who could operate that way. I wondered whether I’d had a chance to save him when he showed up begging on my doorstep. I suspected that by then the trap was already sprung, but even if I could have helped him out, Kind had only himself to blame for his ending.

  “The Enemy clouds our judgment. The Enemy tempts us to ruin. The Enemy demoralizes us,” boomed Cutter.

  T. Addleford Pratt was looking at us, smirking.

  Tequila scowled back at him.

  “That guy is a fucking clown,” he whispered. “The wife seems more dangerous to me.”

  “But even when that Devil lays the best of us low, we have to stand strong in the face of torment, like Jesus did and like Larry did. And, in the end, we know we will each come face-to-face with that Enemy, when we are totally alone, in the dark, when we are weak and afraid,” Cutter shouted. “But I look at all our friends here today, and I say, we are unyielding in our faith, and we will prevail over evil, and all of us who are strong in our love will walk with Jesus and Pastor Kind in the promised land.”

  I rubbed gingerly at my bruised elbow. “Even a silly-ass sumbitch is capable of being dangerous.”

  “Capable or not, he doesn’t have the stones to get rough with a retired Memphis cop in Memphis,” Tequila said.

  “Wouldn’t have thought he’d get rough with a minister,” I told him. “But somebody put Larry in that coffin.”

  In the front row, Felicia Kind crossed and uncrossed her legs. I squinted at her. Her mascara wasn’t running. Her lipstick wasn’t smudged. She was a very poised young lady; unusually so, considering the circumstances. If I’d looked at the Kinds in 1965, when I was at the peak of my career, I’d have immediately suspected—hell, I’d have been near to certain—that the death of the lumpy, reptilian pastor was somehow related to his bombshell wife. Kind wasn’t rich, but maybe Felicia bumped him off to get out of marriage to a hopeless gambler or to free herself to run off with somebody else. That certainly seemed more plausible than the goofy spy stories Tequila and I had been telling each other. It was unlikely that Avram Silver was capable of deploying an assassin halfway around the world. But it seemed awful risky to turn my back on a man like Yitzchak Steinblatt.

  Onstage, Gregory Cutter was chopping emphatically at the air with his raised right hand.

  “Here in this church, I say we will not give the Devil his due. We will stand up to the evil that threatens us. And those of us who have worshipped here will not forget Dr. Lawrence Kind, our pastor, our shepherd, our friend.”

  The police didn’t just escort the funeral procession, they closed off the streets between the church and the cemetery. But a shiny box and a thousand mourners didn’t change the fact that Kind was buried forty feet from the fresh mound of dirt they’d piled onto Jim Wallace.

  17

  As the crowd around Kind’s grave dispersed, I tapped the Dikembe Mutombo of Orthodox Jews on the arm.

  “Shalom, Yid’s Cock,” I said to him.

  Tequila giggled into his shirtsleeve.

  “You haven’t met my grandson, Manischewitz,” I said to the Russian. “He’s a real mensch. So proud of this one. I got buttons bursting off my shirt, and nachas oozing out of every orifice.”

  Steinblatt’s bushy eyebrows knit together with confusion. “Manischewitz? Like the kosher wine?” he asked.

  “People call me Tequila,” said Tequila. “It’s a fraternity thing. My name is Will.”

  “Ah, I understand,” said Steinblatt. He couldn’t fully hide his disapproval; growing up in Soviet austerity and fighting for survival on a tiny strip of Middle Eastern turf were probably not experiences that instilled much appreciation for the American college fraternity lifestyle. But poor Yitzchak had to pretend to like Diaspora Jews as part of his job.

  Tequila stuck out his hand, and Steinblatt’s swallowed it.

  “So,” I said. “How did you know Dr. Kind?”

  “I didn’t know him. Not personally. But he was well-known to my agency. I am here mostly to be speaking
to Jews of American South, but also, I am involved in representing Israel among our other friends.”

  “Lawrence Kind was Israel’s friend?” Tequila asked.

  “Oh, very much. The Evangelical Christians have been unwavering allies to state of Israel. They believe our presence there hastens the return of their Christ. Many people here think the political influence of American Jews preserves the special relationship between Israel and the United States, but Evangelicals are at least as important. Christian tourism is also bright area in our economy.”

  Most of the mourners had left, so I loosened my necktie and unbuttoned my collar. “Then taking care of Kind fell under your job description?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” said Steinblatt. “I never met him myself, but he was quite close with several of my colleagues, and all are deeply saddened to learn of his passing. He led tourist groups from his church to Israel several times, and the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs helped him organize those. Since I am here in Memphis, I come to share regrets.”

  “Nice of you to do,” I said.

  Steinblatt tugged at his beard. “He was such a young and vibrant man, and he died such a horrible way. It saddens me greatly. I find that, although I can never get far away from such violence, I can never get used to it, either. Mr. Buckshot, you have also seen a great deal of suffering. How does a man become accustomed to such horror?”

  “Some men seem to learn to like it.”

  His big, fleshy lips turned downward. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Are you one of those who relishes this violence?”

  I shrugged. “There are worse feelings than putting a couple of holes into a man who’s got it coming to him. What about you? Do you like killing?”

  “I have seen too much of it, too many wars. Violence is a self-perpetuating monster, and it feeds on the blood of the guilty and innocent alike. I was in Afghanistan, you know, in the war there. Then, I leave Soviet Union for Israel, and we have this Palestinian intifada. The lust for violence among the Arabs is barbaric. I cannot fathom the mind of a man who would blow himself up to kill civilians, and yet these people celebrate such atrocities. One moment, children are sitting in café. Next, boom. In pieces.” He bowed his huge, woolly head. “Even here in America, where there is plenty for all, the violence is unceasing. Things like this happen to people like Dr. Kind. Did you know that the rate of violent death per capita here in Memphis exceeds that of Jerusalem at the height of Palestinian resistance?”

  “Probably better off here than in Gaza, though, isn’t it?” sniffed Tequila.

  “What we do there is self-defense,” Steinblatt insisted. “It is our right to raise our children in cities free from terrorism.”

  Tequila frowned at him. “God knows, bombing their homes to rubble will curb their militancy.”

  I hit my grandson in the ribs, hard, with my bruised elbow and winced a little at the pain that shot up my arm.

  Steinblatt turned to me. “Tell me, Mr. Buckshot, how did you know Dr. Kind?”

  “That’s actually a funny story,” I said. “I’m sleeping with his wife.”

  The big Jew was quiet for a moment, and then his bushy eyebrows arched. “You speak to me with contempt. Have I angered you?”

  “You said you were going to meet me at the Jewish Community Center, and then you didn’t show up. When a fellow gets older, he starts to feel like time is precious, so I don’t like people wasting mine.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was unavoidably detained. I hope someday I can make it up to you.”

  “It must take something mighty powerful to detain a fellow your size,” I said. “What was it, exactly, that kept you?”

  He frowned. “I’m afraid that is a matter I have no liberties to discuss.”

  “I was just wondering, because around the same time you were standing me up at the center, somebody was murdering Lawrence Kind.”

  His big hands clenched into fists. “Are you accusing me of this?”

  I lit a cigarette. “I’m just observing things.”

  “I do not appreciate the implication, sir.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Yid’s Cock, do you know a guy named Avram Silver?”

  “I do not,” he said, and his voice had turned hard. “Now, if you will excuse, I must get to another appointment.”

  “With who?” Tequila asked.

  Stony silence from Steinblatt.

  “Don’t let me hold you up. I know you have important things to do. Whoever you’re seeing, send them my best wishes. I do know everyone Jewish in Memphis.”

  The big Russian gave a curt nod and stalked away from us.

  “What a nice guy,” I said to Tequila. “I wonder if your grandmother would like to have him over to the house for supper sometime.”

  18

  Tequila was sitting in my spot on the sofa and getting damn smug about his Internet. He’d turned on his computer after the funeral, and by dinnertime he had uncovered information that would have required a proper detective to burn a lot of shoe leather and cigarettes, waste a lot of time in the records room and the newspaper morgue, and probably bust a few heads as well.

  I turned up the volume on the television to drown out the self-satisfied little purring noises he was making as he tapped on his keys. Some academic types were talking about old war movies on the History Channel. I liked old war movies, and I wanted to write what they were saying into my memory notebook.

  “I think the continuing significance of Nazis as mass culture villains is connected to the fact that this is an unambiguous evil that has been essentially defanged,” said a bearded, bespectacled man on the screen. It took me a second to recognize him as the same NYU film professor who had been popping up on every channel the last few weeks, talking about the end of the tough-guy era.

  “We can hate them,” the professor continued, “but we don’t need to fear them, because they are vanquished. They are buried. They are an anachronism.”

  “How are you getting on the Internet?” I asked Tequila. “I don’t have any Internet in here, and your computer isn’t even plugged in.”

  “I’m piggybacking on your neighbor’s WiFi network.”

  “Oh. That makes sense,” I said, even though it made no sense at all.

  “If they’re buried, though, then why do we persist in digging them up?” asked the red-faced, heavyset television host. “Why preserve, as you say, an anachronism as the most prominent incarnation of absolute evil in our symbolic vernacular?”

  Tequila glanced up from his screen to look at mine. “Why do you watch this?” he asked.

  “Why does anybody do anything?”

  For six bucks on his credit card, Tequila had obtained the St. Louis police file on Avram Silver, which included the address of the house Silver had been arrested breaking into. Heinrich Ziegler’s house. The report listed the home owner as being one Henry Winters, so we knew Ziegler’s alias. And a search of real estate transaction records, a few keystrokes on Tequila’s keyboard, told us he sold the house in 1996. He had listed a place called the Meadowcrest Manor as his forwarding address.

  “Meadowcrest Manor?” I asked Tequila. “Do you think he cashed in his gold bars and bought some kind of mansion?”

  “No,” said Tequila. “Look at this.”

  The computer screen explained that Meadowcrest Manor was a full-service community for active seniors. In other words, a rest home. I shuddered.

  “The Nazis are universally recognizable, even by audiences poorly acquainted with history,” said the bearded professor. “Jackboots and swastikas and German accents form an easy shorthand for wickedness. But we can hate the Nazis without fearing them, because they are alien to our experience. Because they are gone.”

  “I ran a LexisNexis search on the St. Louis papers for Henry Winters, and didn’t find any obituaries, so as best I can tell, he’s still there, at Meadowcrest,” Tequila said.

  Ziegler had been shut in the rest home for more than a decade. Served him right
to be locked up, but he was the most formidable enemy I ever confronted, the only one ever to push me to the precipice. How could he have decayed so much?

  “So, we can vilify them without finding reflections of ourselves in them because they are foreign and because they are relics of an era that has limited modern relevance,” said the television host.

  The computer also had a contact number for the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, and it had an office in New York. Tequila had called them with a new kind of cellular phone that was itself a tiny Internet. I couldn’t understand how he dialed the thing; it had no buttons.

  The Israeli agency confirmed that Yitzchak Steinblatt was its employee, that he was in Memphis, and that he matched the description of the man I’d spoken to. So his story checked out. But then again, a secret assassin would be able to manufacture a passable cover.

  Older sorts of networks supplied helpful information as well. While Tequila busied himself with the Googles, I’d spent an hour kibitzing with the resident gossips and all-purpose oracles ensconced in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center, and they confirmed for me that the big Russian hadn’t met with any rabbis or scheduled speeches at any synagogues or arranged to do much of anything else.

  “So does that mean he has nothing to do with anything?” Tequila asked.

  “Does he look like someone who has nothing to do with anything?”

  “He’s really big.”

  I scowled at him.

  “Well, if Steinblatt killed Kind, I don’t see how the wife could also have been involved,” Tequila said. “We’re suspicious of everyone, but they can’t all have done the murder.”

  “What I learned from being a cop is that nobody’s innocent,” I said. But he was right. We were long on paranoia and had no evidence of anything. My doctor had told me paranoia was an early symptom of dementia in the elderly.

  “Precisely,” said the bearded professor on the television as an ugly little smirk crawled across his face. “We don’t fear them the way we might fear modern foreign enemies, or illness, or the unhinged and dangerous people who might be living in our neighborhoods, who might have insinuated themselves into our communities, into our lives.”