Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

  “Ain’t good police practice to apprise your suspects of how the investigation is proceeding.”

  Her jaw hung open, long enough for her to blink a couple of times. “Suspect? Me?”

  “Playing stupid has been working pretty well for you, I bet,” Tequila said, rising from his chair and leaning toward her. “You put on a dull, surprised look and toss your hair around, and everybody trips over themselves to wipe the drool off your chin.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Cut the act, lady,” he said. “I’m way past the point of thinking it’s cute. Maybe the reverend fell for that shit. Maybe that’s why he got his guts dumped out all over the carpeting.”

  “That’s enough,” I told Tequila. “Sit down.” He was cracking, seeing Yael’s killers everywhere, and it was bad news. If he managed to smother his ability to reason under a blanket of paranoia, we wouldn’t have a functioning brain between us.

  “I know what she is,” he protested. “Black widow. Femme fatale. There’s always one like her in these stories.”

  I grabbed hold of the golf club and gave him a look that made him let go of it. He folded back into his chair. I needed him to help me think, and he’d decided instead to pretend he was Humphrey Bogart.

  “There’s been another killing,” I explained to Felicia. “Looks like the two are connected to each other and somehow connected to us. We’re a little jumpy.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said, fanning at her face with a hand that still had a wedding ring on it.

  I was not persuaded. “You’d better start spilling whatever you do know.”

  “I’ll tell you anything.”

  I crossed my arms. “Let’s start with life insurance.”

  “Yeah,” Tequila growled. “When the good pastor went on to his eternal reward, what was your upside?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Fifty thousand. I have to pay taxes on it. And we live, used to live, in a house the church owns. They told me I have two weeks to get out. I don’t have a job; I’ve been a full-time minister’s wife for three years. I don’t know what I am going to do now.”

  “The funeral you threw for him sure made you look like you were well-to-do.”

  “The policy provided money for burial expenses, but it was reimbursed based on receipts, so I couldn’t get it in cash,” she said. “The church also paid for a lot of it. A lot of people in the congregation were embarrassed by the murder, and the deacons felt that an expensive funeral would save face.”

  What she was saying sounded plausible, but that didn’t mean a word of it was true. Good-looking women were easy to trust, which was what made them such effective liars.

  I looked at Tequila. He was digging his fingers into the armrests of his chair.

  “Do you know T. Addleford Pratt?” I asked her.

  “He contacted me after Larry died. He said Larry owed him some money, and he threatened to get a lien on the life insurance payment. If I have to pay off Larry’s debts, I’ll have nothing left, and if I fight them, then legal fees will wipe me out anyway. What I’ve got isn’t much of a foundation to build a life on, and I don’t know what I’ll do if those men take it from me. I think the casino people must have been the ones who killed Larry, unless…”

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. I broke the silence. “What’s any of it got to do with me?”

  “Let me show you.” Felicia began to unzip her handbag, which I must have noticed her carrying when she walked in but had not thought to search.

  “Gun!” shouted Tequila, and he leaped forward out of his chair to snatch the purse from her hands. Felicia let out a little shriek and curled herself up in a fetal position on the side of the couch farthest from Tequila.

  He pawed through the bag.

  “Has she got a weapon in there?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then give it back to her, and sit down.”

  He stammered some kind of protest, but he did what I told him.

  She recomposed herself, but tears were now streaming down her face. She reached into the bag and pulled out a top-spiral reporter’s notebook, a lot like the one I carried around for my memories.

  She flipped about a third of the way through it, and when she found what she was looking for, she gave it to me. At the top of the page, the words Things I mustn’t forget about Baruch Schatz were written in small, neat cursive script.

  “With so many parishioners to keep track of, Larry had to take careful notes, to help him remember what was going on in everyone’s lives,” she said. “He had dozens of these pads in his desk. I shouldn’t be reading them. I’m sure I’m intruding on his confidences. But I lost him so suddenly, and they’re all I have left of him.”

  I looked at what Kind had written about me and handed the notebook back to her.

  “All our friends, everyone I knew, was connected to the church,” she said. “Now I can’t turn to them. My husband trusted you, and I’ve got nobody else. I need you to find out who killed him.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

  She crossed her long tan legs. “You were sort of right about me needing insurance money. If the murder was related to Larry’s job, I’m entitled to a payment of around two hundred thousand from the state workmen’s compensation fund. But until we know who killed him and why, I can’t make a claim.”

  I didn’t say anything. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs.

  “I’ll pay you a fair cut of the proceeds if you help me find out what happened to my husband. Please, Mr. Schatz, I need that money to get away from this city and the things that happened here. It’s my only chance to rebuild some kind of life for myself.”

  It sounded like what she was saying could be true. On the other hand, she’d been prowling around outside my house, and in the days since her husband’s murder, she’d had plenty of time to come up with a story that would sound plausible, or even compelling.

  While I was mulling it, the phone rang.

  “Probably my wife,” I said to Felicia as I picked up the receiver.

  It wasn’t.

  “Howdy, Buck-o,” said Randall Jennings. “I heard you made it home safely, so I thought I’d ring you up.” This was his way of telling me that he was indeed watching my house. “That’s a tight new whip you picked up along the way.”

  Tequila could evidently tell it wasn’t his grandmother by the expression on my face. He was making inquisitive gestures at me. I held up a hand to let him know he should quiet down.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I told Jennings.

  “Your car. Your new car.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. You’ve got an eye on me.”

  “Well, I just want to keep you safe.”

  “Good night, Randall.” I started to hang up the phone

  “Hold up a second, Buck.” He cleared his throat. “I called to tell you I hauled your pal Norris Feely downtown to sweat him on the Lawrence Kind thing.”

  That surprised me. Jennings had made it very clear that he liked Tequila as the killer, and now he was questioning Feely. Either this cop was all over the map or he had some kind of elaborate plan I couldn’t see the shape of.

  “Folks tell me you used to be a wizard in the interrogation room,” Jennings continued, maintaining a friendly tone. “Why don’t you come and take a few swings at this chubby little piñata we’ve got here, for old times’ sake.”

  I had no idea what he was up to. “Are you saying you need my help, Randall?”

  “Nah,” he said. “But I figured life would be easier on you if this guy confessed, and I know you’ll get all pissy if you feel like you didn’t get asked to the dance.”

  He was right about that, although I doubted he had my best interests at heart. I tried to guess what sort of trap he could be setting for me, but I couldn’t figure out his angle. That made me uncomfortable.

  Felicia Kind agreed to give me a lift downtown, so I left Tequila
at the house, with the gold. He was vocal about his distrust of Felicia, and he was angry about getting left out, but he knew we couldn’t leave three million dollars unsupervised, and he acquiesced.

  I also knew that letting him visit the police department could somehow look incriminating. Jennings’s trap might be for him, and his relationship to Yael made him vulnerable. If a prosecutor could establish the mere fact that two unmarried adults had engaged in consensual intercourse outside the bonds of sanctified marriage, that evidence would be enough to get a murder conviction from most Tennessee juries.

  The preacher’s widow, however, would be very difficult to convict unless the jury saw something as persuasive as video footage of her actually committing the act. At least, she would be difficult to convict unless somebody managed to prove she had been unfaithful to her husband. If a jury heard that, she’d get the death penalty whether she was involved in the murder or not.

  “Did you ever cheat on Larry?” I asked her as we cruised down Poplar in her little Toyota.

  Her response looked enough like genuine shock and outrage to convince me of her sincerity. She wanted to know how I could dare to suggest such a thing and whether I understood what it meant that she was a minister’s wife and an avowed Christian. She told me I was cruel and vicious to even imagine she might be capable of such things. And she said some other stuff about me as well. I didn’t take it personally.

  I cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and waited for her to calm down. When she quit screaming, I said:

  “As long as that’s true, you’re fine. But if you can be linked to anything that looks like infidelity, you shouldn’t get within five hundred feet of the police station unless you are with your lawyer.”

  “I loved my husband, Mr. Schatz, and I believe in his work,” Felicia said, her voice husky and low, still full of anger but without the undertone of fear I’d expect from somebody guilty.

  “As difficult as it’s going to be, you’re going to have to endure suspicion until the truth comes out. When police have a white, middle-class murder and it’s not a clear robbery, the spouse is usually the culprit. But if you didn’t kill him, we’ll get you your money.”

  “I’m sorry I shouted at you, Mr. Schatz, and I’m sorry I frightened you and your grandson. You’re innocent in all this.”

  But I shook my head. “Nobody’s innocent.”

  * * *

  Degenerate gambler Lawrence Kind’s notes about me:

  I like Buck Schatz a great deal, although he seems to dislike me. Buck pegged me as a sinner the moment we met, and because of that, he believes I am a charlatan, a fraud. He’s a man trained to rely upon his instincts about people as much as or more than I do, and I take him seriously. Thus, it falls upon me to consider whether his assessment is accurate.

  I think that it is not.

  Buck associates piety with his own ethos of personal discipline, a worldview that is deeply embedded in ancient Jewish tradition. Because the Jews do not believe in redemption through Christ, they aspire to worldly perfection by compliance with the Halacha, an exacting set of over 600 biblical laws governing every aspect of daily life.

  Buck is not an observant Jew, as far as I can tell, but the faith of his people instructs his values. He judges men by how they act and cares too little for what they believe. He expects a pious man to lead the life of a monk, the life of a rabbi.

  A holy man, to a Jew, must be a scholar, a thinker, a man of books. But that is not what I am, and not the path that is required of an Evangelical minister.

  I’m a man of faith, and a teacher of Christ’s word. But I am also a sinner, weak and vulnerable to temptation. I profess to be nothing else, and I preach to my flock on how Christ redeems me regardless of my transgressions, about how I am saved despite my shortcomings.

  The evangelist becomes a man of God not by learning or study, but by revelation. My credibility in preaching Christ’s word is not tarnished because I have wallowed in the depths of sin; His glory is proven by the fact that I’ve come out the other side, with His help.

  Mostly.

  I can’t say I don’t still struggle. I can’t say I don’t still slip. But that is His will also, and that is the journey I must undertake. Buck wants to judge me for this, but Christ is with me on the road I walk, and He forgives my failures.

  My struggle is God’s will, because when my congregants seek my counsel, they need advice not from a scholar, not from a rabbi, but from a man who knows sin and temptation and knows the burden of struggling against it to find a way to Grace.

  I preach often about the malefactor, the criminal, who was crucified with Jesus. His punishment was just and deserved, the “due reward of his deeds.” But he begged Christ for forgiveness. He said: “Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom.”

  And Christ promised him: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”

  Jesus knows our hearts, and He knows we have sinned and He knows we will sin again. We are born of sin, and carry it in our blood and our bones and our flesh. We cannot purge sins through acts; we can only be cleansed by the blood of Jesus. And if we ask for absolution, He will bestow it.

  I think Buck can teach us all about discipline and about honesty. He reminds us that we can and should be better than we are. But he has a lot to learn about faith and forgiveness.

  I am eternally grateful that, when I stumble, I have Jesus there to pick me up, but I fear that as Buck reaches his end, he will find himself facing the abyss alone.

  38

  Randall Jennings looked seriously pissed when he saw me stroll into the Criminal Justice Center with Felicia Kind.

  “What’s she doing here?” he demanded, pointing an angry finger at her.

  “I didn’t know it was improper for a victim’s wife to visit the detective in charge of the murder investigation,” she said.

  “Back in my day, we treated crime victims with a modicum of dignity and respect,” I added. “I assumed that was still the policy.”

  “That’s a bunch of shit and you know it,” Jennings said. “You came in with one of my suspects, just to fuck with me.”

  Felicia gasped and put on the same wide-eyed expression of shock she’d shown me at the house. It was an extremely persuasive facsimile of surprise, and I would have been fooled if I hadn’t known it was a lie. I wondered how much of what she’d told me was true. I didn’t think she was the killer; I enjoyed looking at her, but she certainly wasn’t my favorite suspect. I wasn’t about to trust her, though.

  “This nice church lady?” I asked Jennings, feigning confusion. “I had no idea you were thinking in that direction. Isn’t Norris Feely under arrest for the murder?”

  “Norris Feely is in custody because he is a person of interest,” Jennings said.

  I scratched my head. “Is that a different thing from a suspect?”

  His mustache seemed to bristle. “You know what you’re doing to me, you mean old bastard.”

  But I wasn’t doing anything to him as far as I knew. I certainly had no intention of messing up his murder investigation if it was leading to an outcome other than a frame job on me or Tequila. Maybe he thought bringing her to the station could jeopardize the admissibility of some future confession she might make. I didn’t see why it would, though. When I was working homicide, concerned spouses of victims routinely visited me at the police station to check in on my investigations. It had never caused any legal problems, even when I ended up having to arrest them. I said something that wasn’t quite apologetic and veered the conversation back toward Feely.

  “He hasn’t said anything helpful,” Jennings said. “But he seems to like you. Maybe he trusts you. And I’ve heard people say you used to be pretty impressive in the interrogation room.”

  I’d loosened a few tongues in my day, and I had a gift for coaxing admissions out of the weak-willed. But I couldn’t imagine Feely cracking easily, and my technique for softening recalcitrant subjects had involved liberal use of a rolled
-up phone book.

  “I’ll see him alone,” I said. I didn’t want to have to spar with Jennings while I was trying to figure out what was going on with Feely.

  The detective stayed outside with Felicia. The two of them had a lot to talk about. I stepped into the sweatbox.

  This, at least, was a kind of place that hadn’t changed much since I was working. Two steel chairs, bolted to a cement floor, on opposite sides of a steel table, and a door that opened only from the outside. On television, interrogation rooms usually had two-way mirrors so people could watch the questioning. They always had microphones and cameras to record any statements. And maybe interrogations looked like that in places like San Francisco. But Memphis still stuck to the old ways, and this facility was just four solid walls. The process of extracting a confession could be ugly, and nobody wanted witnesses to what happened in that room.

  If there was a video or audio recording of the interrogation, the scumbag’s defense lawyer was entitled to a copy. Then he could scrutinize the cops’ behavior throughout the process, looking for a reason to move that his client’s statement be excluded from the trial. So every cop worth his salt knows that the only record of what transpires in an interrogation room should be a signed confession.

  I leaned against the table and felt very much at home.

  Feely was sitting with his arms shackled behind him, and the handcuff chain threaded through the back of the chair. This pleased me; I didn’t want to shake hands with him again.

  The furniture had been arranged with a less generously proportioned occupant in mind, and Feely’s gut was smushed up against the edge of the table.

  “You look uncomfortable, Norris,” I said.

  “Buck…” He smiled, relieved to see me. “Thank God you’re here. I’m in a jam.”

  I lit a cigarette and dropped the pack on the table. “Damn right you are.”

  I offered him a smoke, but he just sat there looking indignant.

  I pulled my memory notebook out of my pocket and laid it next to the Luckys, open to a clean page. I took my .357 out of the shoulder holster and set it next to the notebook, where Feely could get a good look at it.