Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

  “You have to help me,” he said. “Randall Jennings is trying to set me up for murdering Lawrence Kind.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “But maybe he fingered you because you’re the one who killed that poor guy.”

  His face slackened into what I didn’t think was an expression of genuine disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I can be, sometimes, I reckon.” I picked up the .357 and spun the cylinder. “My friend here, though, is serious all the time.”

  Feely smirked. “Come on, Buck, you’re not going to scare me. We’re friends. I had dinner at your house.”

  “Larry Kind also had dinner at my house,” I said. “I had dinner with that poor Israeli girl.”

  “What Israeli girl?”

  If a suspect is left to sweat long enough in an interrogation room, some police believe they can actually smell a lie on him. Feely was giving me a nose full of it. He knew something; I was pretty sure. I decided to press him.

  “We can place you in St. Louis at the time of the killing. We’ve got the records. Every place you go is recorded by the GHB.”

  “The what?” His greasy features arranged themselves in a way that suggested real confusion.

  I’d lost the name of the thing, got it wrong. I tried to look nonchalant as I flipped through the memory notebook.

  “The GED.”

  “Buck, I don’t know what that means,” Feely said.

  “The goddamn navigation computer.”

  “You mean a GPS? I haven’t got one of those in my car.”

  I eyeballed him hard, trying to gauge whether he was telling a lie. If he wasn’t, I supposed I’d bungled the bluff pretty well. It served me right for trying to bullshit about things I didn’t understand.

  “Don’t give me that,” I said. “I know you were in St. Louis.”

  Feely squirmed in his chair. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  That response surprised me. I had expected him to deny leaving Memphis.

  “What were you doing there, then?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Confirmation. He had been in St. Louis. I didn’t let surprise register on my face; if he realized he was giving me information I didn’t already know, he would clam up. So I sat there looking at him, drumming my fingers on the steel table.

  “Look, I’m not your enemy here,” Feely said. “If you get me out of here, we can help each other.”

  “Let’s say I was willing or able to do that. What can you do for me?”

  Feely didn’t have an answer. He looked down at the table and carefully avoided my gaze.

  “Norris,” I said after a long pause, “the best thing right now is to admit what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he insisted. “Jennings is trying to frame me.”

  I couldn’t totally dismiss the idea that Jennings might be up to something fishy. I had suspected him of trying to frame me and Tequila, and I still didn’t understand what he was trying to accomplish by putting me and Norris in a room together.

  “Why would Jennings frame you?”

  “I can’t explain here. He might be listening.”

  “Nobody’s listening to anything, Norris.”

  “Yes, he is. It’s a trap.”

  It made no sense to trust Feely over Jennings. Despite my misgivings and my personal animus for the detective, he hadn’t done anything that seemed wrong. I knew my grandson couldn’t be a killer, but Jennings’s suspicions about Tequila were objectively valid. And Feely had been on my short list of suspects even before he admitted he’d been in St. Louis when Yael was murdered. I wasn’t ready to let my guard down around the detective; couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d tie Tequila up into some bogus bust. But I couldn’t see any proof he was running the case dishonestly, and he seemed to be at least a couple of steps ahead of me on the killer’s trail.

  “I just wanted to do something for Jim, and to take care of Emily,” said Feely. “It isn’t fair.”

  I frowned at him. “If you want my help, you’re going to have to come clean about what you were up to in St. Louis.”

  “The same thing as you, I suppose.”

  “How did you know Ziegler was there?”

  He gave a full-body shudder when I spoke the Nazi’s name, and his gaze flitted toward an air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. The guy watched too many movies. “I’m not as dumb as you seem to think I am.”

  Maybe not. But I had three million dollars’ worth of gold in my attic, and he was handcuffed to a chair, so he couldn’t be all that smart, either.

  He bared his teeth; scrunched up his little ferret face. “You’ve got it, don’t you? I want my share.”

  I wrinkled my forehead in mock sympathy and slid the pack of cigarettes across the table.

  “Where you’re going, those are as good as currency,” I said.

  “Buck, all games aside, you know I got a raw deal here. Help me, please. I want to go home.”

  But I didn’t know how I could help him, even if I had wanted to. And what I wanted to do was let Randall Jennings do his job, at least insofar as he was doing it to Norris Feely.

  “I saw you threaten Kind, and you were in St. Louis when Yael was murdered. You’re as good a suspect as anybody, and if the detective said you did it, I don’t know any different.”

  “Don’t leave me in this place.” He was sobbing a little, realizing nobody was coming to rescue him. “Think of my wife. She just lost her father.”

  “I’ll look in on her for you.” I had a feeling Emily would be better off without him in the long run anyway. Of course, I might have thought the same thing about Felicia Kind, and she seemed to be having a rough time since her husband’s death. But I remembered Kind’s father, weeping at the funeral. I had no sympathy for Norris Feely.

  “You son of a bitch, you’ve been setting me up all along,” he shouted. “I swear to Christ, I’ll get you for this.”

  “Maybe you should speak to a neurologist,” I said. “My doctor tells me paranoia is an early symptom of dementia.”

  “You’re in cahoots, you bastards. I’m not your patsy.” His eyes turned upward, toward the vent. “Do you hear?” he shouted at it. “I’m not your fucking patsy.”

  I stood, scooped up the rest of my belongings, and banged on the door. Jennings opened it from the outside, and I left Norris to scream at the ceiling.

  “Did you learn anything?” the detective asked.

  “No,” I said, looking at Felicia. Her expression was hard to read. “Did you?”

  Jennings gave a diffident shrug. “Suppose not.”

  I sighed. “Guess I’ll just collect my pretty blond lady and take my leave, then.”

  39

  “Norris Fucking Feely.”

  Tequila had been growling about what he was going to do to Feely ever since I’d told him what I learned at the police station. I’d expected him to be angry, but I figured he’d cool down after he’d fumed a bit and gone off to bed; he stayed in my house and slept in his father’s old room.

  The next morning, though, he was still muttering darkly, and he spent the whole day stomping around the house and inflicting streams of colorful invective on anyone within earshot.

  I heard about how he wanted to pop Feely’s fat head like a zit and about how he wanted to punch Feely in the belly until the tubby little fucker puked blood. I heard about how he could beat Feely to death with a shovel and then use the shovel to bury the body in the woods. I heard about how he wanted to take things slow; put in some quality work with a fish scaler and a screwdriver on the motherfucker’s fingers and toes and then cut some things off the face before moving in toward the vital bits.

  Rose and Fran had been around to hear some of these things, and they’d found it all very upsetting, but Tequila wasn’t paying any attention.

  “That’s not the kind of stuff you should be saying when you are a suspected psycho killer,” I told him.

&nbs
p; He couldn’t take the hint. “Feely is the psycho killer. That’s why I am going to peel his fucking face off, shove a candle up his ass, and turn his skinless head into a macabre jack-o’-lantern.”

  “He’s not under arrest for the killings. He’s merely detained as a person of interest.”

  Tequila scratched his head. “What the fuck is a person of interest?”

  I sighed and dropped myself down on the sofa. “It means nobody is sure whether he did it or not. I don’t know what the hell is going on, Billy. We have three million dollars’ worth of gold in the attic, there’s a killer who may still be on the loose, and the only thing keeping Feely from telling the police about the treasure is the fact that he still thinks he can take it from us.”

  Tequila told me some things he’d like to do with meat hooks and acetylene torches. He told me what a razor blade could do to a human eyeball.

  I felt sorry for everyone who hadn’t been blessed with grandchildren.

  “Can you help me work this out?” I asked. “I thought you were supposed to be helping me, and I feel like I’m alone with it now.”

  “I’m so fucking pissed off about Yael.”

  I crossed my arms. “Well, instead of acting like an ass, why don’t you try to figure out who killed her?”

  “Because I don’t know how.”

  “You can start by telling me a story about how and why Feely might have done it. It’s a good first step, before you go peeling faces off of skulls.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Pretend it isn’t,” I said. “And start from the beginning.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Feely wants to kill the minister. He thinks Kind is muscling in on his piece of the treasure, right?”

  “It’s your story.”

  “Okay, Feely told you that he didn’t want Kind getting a cut. You told him there was no treasure. He was upset when Kind showed up at the dinner party; he made explicit threats.”

  I nodded.

  “Then he confronted Kind in the church and killed him.”

  This was a problem for me, and I told Tequila so. I was willing to believe a lot of things about Norris Feely, but the idea that the man was adept at hand-to-hand combat strained credulity. Lawrence Kind, pacifist Christian that he was, would still have been stronger and quicker than Feely. Yael would have been, also. Although Feely easily had eighty pounds on the girl, most of it was fat, and she was toned and hard and trained by the Israeli army.

  “Maybe Feely caught her by surprise, hit her over the head,” Tequila suggested.

  Sure; lots of maybes and no way to get concrete answers, since I didn’t have access to the coroner’s report. Jennings might let me see it; maybe he was sincere about wanting my help on the case. But I didn’t understand what he was up to, and he was not a friend. It seemed a bad idea to ask a favor of him if I didn’t understand the ramifications.

  The real nut of it was, Feely could have been responsible for both killings. He had no alibi for either, and his presence in St. Louis at the time of Yael’s murder moved him right to the top of my list of suspects. But I was still far from convinced of his guilt.

  In any case, even if Feely was innocent, his exoneration would refocus Jennings’s attention on Tequila, and Feely would probably start plotting to steal the treasure as soon as he got out of jail. I was happy to let the bastard cool his heels downtown while the system sorted things out.

  “If you don’t think it was Feely, who else could have done it?” Tequila asked. “I think Felicia might have been involved. She didn’t carve him up herself, but a woman that good-looking always knows a couple of guys who are willing to do things for her.”

  Tequila didn’t tell me a lot about the women he dated, but I could tell by his tone that he’d been worked over by someone beautiful he thought had loved him. To his eye, the widow was clearly a user and a manipulator. He brought his prejudices to bear on the question, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. I’d watched Felicia Kind lie to Randall Jennings, and she was utterly convincing. I would be a fool to trust a single thing she’d told me, no matter how honest it sounded.

  “What do you think about T. Addleford Pratt?”

  “Why would he kill Kind and then try to come after us for the treasure, when he could have just taken whatever Kind might have got from us?” Tequila asked.

  “Killing Kind meant he could try to get Felicia to pay him out of the life insurance recovery.”

  “Okay, but why would he kill Yael?”

  “Maybe to make it look like we killed Kind, or to threaten us, so we’d give him the gold.”

  “What is the point of doing that, if he doesn’t let us know it was him?”

  He was right. Killing Yael would not pressure us to pay Pratt off unless he came out and told us he’d done it. And we had no reason to believe he’d been in St. Louis anyway.

  “How are you feeling about the Israelis?” Tequila asked.

  That theory was looking a lot weaker. Yael’s death seemed to indicate that she had not been working with Yitzchak Steinblatt and Avram Silver, but there was no way to be sure. Maybe they got rid of her after she completed her role in the scheme: one less person who could expose them, and one less person to split the gold with. I suggested this to Tequila.

  “I don’t buy it,” Tequila said. “Silver seemed like a whiny loser when we spoke to him. I don’t think he’s some kind of a murderous puppet master. And our only basis for suspecting old Yid’s Cock is the fact that he is a large man.”

  “An extremely large man,” I said.

  “I’ll give you that. The motherfucker looks like some kind of pro wrestler from the shtetl. But a spy is supposed to be inconspicuous, and that guy is about as subtle as a goddamn bulldozer. I think Steinblatt is exactly what he says he is, and Avram Silver is a doofus, and this whole Israeli preoccupation of yours is bullshit.”

  I lit a cigarette and thought about that for a minute. Steinblatt showed up in Memphis soon after we spoke to Silver, on the same day Kind was murdered. He also had the considerable physical strength that Kind’s murder would have required. I was hunting a killer, and the big Russian looked the part. Maybe some ACLU types would call that profiling, but when there’s a guy who looks like a killer, he usually is one.

  The thing that made this unusual was that even though so many people seemed to have means and motives to do the crime, none of them seemed to intuitively fit as the killer. Murder, contrary to widespread belief, usually doesn’t make for much of a mystery. In the stories and on the television programs, cops are always trying to decipher opaque motives and people are never what they seem. But real murder is mean and dumb and unsubtle, and pretty much everyone a detective meets is exactly what they appear to be. If scumbags had the brains or the imagination to manage convincing deception, they wouldn’t have to be scumbags.

  “Mom told me that Steinblatt is going to be speaking about Israel down at the JCC tonight, to the Jewish Federation,” Tequila said. “It might be worth hearing what he says. Maybe we should go.”

  That would at least give me a chance to see if he looked at all like a genuine flack for the Israeli government.

  “I’ll take your grandmother,” I told him. “You’re not going. I don’t want you embarrassing me in front of people I know.”

  40

  Tequila gave us a lift to the Jewish Community Center, and despite his protests, he didn’t stay for the speech. I wanted him at the house to guard the treasure, and he’d already upset his grandmother enough with the things he’d been saying. I was getting worried about him; even if he’d had his head on straight, it looked like we were dealing with more trouble than we could easily handle. My detective’s instinct had been whispering to me all day, but I couldn’t understand what it was telling me. I felt sure something bad was about to happen, and I couldn’t figure out what it was or where it would be coming from.

  I needed my grandson’s help to stand any chance of getting ahead of this thing, bu
t I couldn’t trust his judgment anymore. Even when he wasn’t sobbing or fuming, I could hear emotion welling behind his voice. The kind of cool, flawless logic he’d used to dismantle the LSATs and the bank manager would have been a useful tool in our situation, but his thinking was obviously clouded. And, I was scared of putting him in harm’s way. The lousy little jerk was all I had left of my son.

  In the meantime, I hoped Steinblatt would be persuasive enough as a Diaspora liaison that I could write him off my list of suspects. I sure didn’t want to wake up to find him standing over me with those huge hands of his.

  The JCC was crowded. People who were elderly and Jewish found that Memphis offered very little to do on an average Saturday night, so most of them had come out for Steinblatt’s speech and for the free refreshments the Center always served at these events. A sizable crowd of people we knew were kibitzing in the lobby.

  Rose had insisted on getting rid of the wheelchair, even though it hurt her to stand up and sit down. She was walking with assistance from a steel cane with four rubber feet on it.

  “Everybody is looking at me with my cripple cane,” she said. “This sure isn’t something Fred Astaire would carry around.”

  I smiled at her. “If it’s any consolation, I feel just like Ginger Rogers right now.”

  “Oh, hush up, Buck.”

  But folks were looking; she was right about that. Health problems were big news among our contemporaries, since most of our social calendar revolved around burying one another.

  Esther Katz spotted us from across the lobby and shambled over to say hello. She used to play gin rummy with Rose, but then she started getting confused and had to be put away.

  “I heard you were in the hospital.” That Esther had heard it wasn’t surprising. That she remembered it, though, was nothing short of remarkable.

  Rose nodded.

  “Is it serious?” Esther’s face pursed with concern.

  “What business is it of yours?” I asked.

  “Well, I just wanted to know if I should ask my daughter-in-law to make her noodle kugel.”