“There you go. I think all this unpleasantness can get explained without anyone having to mention any Nazi treasures. People kill each other over so much less, sometimes even nothing at all.”
I sighed. “Didn’t you say the only way to keep clean was to do things by the book?”
He laughed. “I said doing police work in this town was like wading balls-deep in a river of shit. There ain’t nothing clean in a river of shit, Buck. And I got bills to pay.”
“River of shit,” I repeated. I squinted in the darkness to get a better look at him, and my detective instinct, my unconscious danger alarm, started screaming inside my skull. My doctor told me paranoia was an early symptom of dementia in the elderly, but I didn’t think senility was the thing setting me on edge. “And Norris Feely?” I asked.
Jennings leaned forward in his chair. “It seems pretty clear he’s the one that shot you. We’ll say it was a dispute over Jim Wallace’s assets. He’ll shut up about the gold if I threaten to charge him for murdering Lawrence Kind.”
His pieces all fit. But the problem was, the pieces of this thing seemed to fit any way I stuck them together. Everyone had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.
On television, the killers always make mistakes and the innocent are always vindicated, but most real murder cases are circumstantial, and circumstance doesn’t always point in the right direction. Facts were of less importance to Jennings than hammering together a story that could stand up to reason. Truth was a malleable and relative thing.
“You’ll just pin most of the crimes on the dead guy, and Tequila and Feely will shut up and cop to the lesser charges when you threaten to hang a murder beef on them,” I said. “And when your story becomes the official truth, the gold just vanishes. It works out well, except it doesn’t explain who killed those people.”
Jennings scratched his head. “It was Pratt, wasn’t it?”
“You believe that?” I asked him.
“Why shouldn’t I? The story makes sense. It’s good enough.” He paused for a moment, pretending to be confused. “Didn’t you tell me Pratt did all the killings? You’re the legendary Buck Schatz. I trust you.”
Jennings had a point. I couldn’t very well play the hard-nosed truth seeker when I’d very recently been trying to frame the thing on the debt collector.
But greater sins were in play here than a few judicious lies, and Jennings was looking to palm the money off the table while moving the chips around.
What I was thinking was that it was a five-hour drive from Memphis to St. Louis, not including stops. Jennings said the St. Louis police had told him we were checked in at the same hotel where Yael was murdered. But there was just barely enough time for him to get from Memphis to St. Louis between noon, when the housekeeper found Yael, and five-thirty, when Jennings met Tequila in the lobby. The St. Louis cops would have had to contact Jennings immediately after they discovered the body, and Jennings would have had to drive the whole way with a blue light on top of his car and the pedal mashed to the floor.
Possible, maybe. But more likely, Jennings was in St. Louis ahead of the murder. And, damn him, I knew what a man with a fatal head injury looked like.
“We didn’t beat Pratt to death,” I said. “He wasn’t dying when we left him with you.”
“I don’t know why you keep coming back to this, Buck. The guy is dead, I promise you.”
I pictured Jennings sticking Pratt in the backseat of his Cavalier and then rolling off down the street. But when he got to the corner, maybe Jennings didn’t turn and head toward Poplar Avenue. Instead, he shifted the car into park, and he reached beneath his dash. Maybe he had a scoped hunting rifle hanging under there.
He’d have crouched on the wet grass, glancing around to make sure there were no witnesses. Then he would have braced the stock of the rifle against his shoulder, and his elbow against his knee, and squeezed off one shot.
I pictured him opening his trunk, throwing the rifle onto those four heavy backpacks, and reaching in to pull out a tire iron or maybe one of the gold bricks. I pictured Jennings caving Pratt’s skull in.
I sat up straight in the bed and tried not to grimace in pain, even though my side was screaming. “I ain’t arguing with the fact that Pratt’s dead. But it wasn’t us that killed him.”
Jennings was silent for a moment, and then a slow smile split his face, and that pretty much confirmed it for me.
“I am disappointed you didn’t figure it out sooner. You didn’t quite live up to the legend,” he said. “But then again, you are much harder to kill than I expected you to be.”
There was only one reason for him to stop trying to deny it.
“I reckon you’re here now to finish the job.”
“Reckon so, Buck.” He rubbed at his mustache again. “If you were in my shoes, you’d be doing the same thing.”
48
First rule of survival is situational awareness; always important to take stock of the surroundings.
I was sitting in a darkened room with a man who had killed at least four people and had come to kill me. I had a bullet hole in my side that was stitched up, but kind of oozy and hurting like a son of a bitch. I was on painkillers for that, and the drugs had dulled my reflexes, which weren’t all that sharp to begin with.
The memory notebook and a ballpoint pen were lying next to me on the end table, with all the pills I was supposed to take.
And I knew, somewhere, in that notebook, I’d written what Gregory Cutter had said over Lawrence Kind’s coffin:
“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.”
He’d been right about that.
“You can shout now, if you want,” said the Enemy. “I don’t mind. Nobody will hear.”
That sounded true. This was an intensive care ward, so I knew people were coming and going throughout the day and night, crying and screaming in the rooms and in the hallways, coding out against the protests of squealing monitors. I’d heard none of it; when that sliding glass door sealed itself, the room became a cocoon of silence.
“Used to be, they kept the patients separated by curtains so the doctors could hear all the machines beeping,” Jennings said. “They remodeled a few years back. Now it’s pretty close to soundproof, so you people don’t have to listen to each other dying. If you have an irregularity, your monitor will send a text message to the physicians’ iPhones. Pretty amazing.”
“I don’t need to scream,” I told him. Couldn’t have if I’d wanted to. My mouth had gone all cotton-ball dry.
My eyes flicked toward the button next to my pillow that would call a nurse. But Jennings saw it, too, and he wagged a finger at me.
“Buck, there’s an easy way and a hard way to do this thing. If there is an extra corpse in this room when I’m done here, I am going to add that murder to your grandson’s tab.”
With nobody around to say anything different, he could make it stick, too.
“I ain’t planning to call a nurse to come save me,” I said. My voice was barely a whisper, more of a rasp.
“Good,” Jennings said, nodding. “Wouldn’t do much for the Buck Schatz legend, would it?”
I glared at him. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe.
“You let me put this into your IV line, and that’s the easy way. What’s in here won’t show up on your toxicity screening. Won’t show up in your autopsy. You’ll drift to sleep and that will be the end of it; an old man dying of natural causes. There’s dignity in that, and peace. Best possible death I can imagine. But if you try to struggle, I’m going to get the knife out and make a mess. Ain’t no point in wrestling the needle into you when you’ll just bruise up like rotten fruit and everyone will know it’s murder anyway.”
“Is there any possible way to not die?”
He shook his head. “You and I both know that if you leave here alive, you’ll be coming for me. You
and I can’t cut any deal. I can’t stick anything to you that will shut you up, except this needle. As long as you’re alive, I’ll have to watch my back. Am I wrong, Buck?”
He wasn’t. Somewhere inside my skull, my primal detective instinct was bellowing a battle cry. But there was also a weary part of me that didn’t want to face months of painful recovery, didn’t want to face Valhalla Estates, didn’t want to face degenerative cognitive impairment.
Jennings put his hand on mine, touching the spot where the intravenous line was stuck in the vein. “So, how do you want to do this?”
“How long have I got to decide?” I asked, pulling my hand back.
“Take your time. I got nowhere to be.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, staring at each other. I coughed noisily.
“When did you find out?” I asked him. No negotiations. No deals. No tricks. Just two professionals, talking.
“What? About the gold?”
“Yeah.”
It couldn’t have been news to him when I handed it over. He’d already killed three people for it by then. He must have known about it almost as long as I had. I thought he was out of the loop; I hadn’t even suspected him.
“Norris Feely was tailing you the day you drove down to the CJC, the first day I met you. He came sniffing around after you left, trying to find out what you were up to. He spilled pretty much everything to me, right there.”
Goddamn Feely. I hadn’t even started watching my back until after my conversation with Avram Silver; hadn’t known there was a reason to.
“Then you lied to poor Norris about the treasure, right in his face, at his father in-law’s funeral.” Jennings sucked on his teeth, making a reproachful, clucking noise. “Cold, Buck. Real cold.”
Feely must have believed Kind and I were squeezing him out. So he’d gone back to Jennings for help finding the gold. They had been trying to get to it ahead of me.
“And all the while, you and the preacher were having your late night strategy sessions. It seems a little unfair of you to ambush poor Norris at that dinner party.”
The way I remembered, it was me who got ambushed by the dinner party. But the point seemed largely moot.
“So you killed Kind because you thought he was working with me to get the gold?”
“We figured you wouldn’t be able to chase it down on your own, so if we eliminated the reverend, you’d just go away.”
“Tequila,” I said.
“You have no idea how close he was to getting the treatment,” Jennings said, drawing a finger across his throat and then downward in a zigzag diagonal line over his belly. “But then we found out where the gold actually was, and decided we might need to keep y’all alive for a bit.”
“You found Avram Silver,” I said.
“I never heard of Avram Silver until you told me about him.”
That didn’t make sense. I asked him how he found out the Nazi was in St. Louis.
“We punched the name ‘Heinrich Ziegler’ into the police database,” he said. “The feds investigated him for war crimes years ago, and never ended up charging him with anything, but their files were in the computer and all the information came right up.”
The same information he’d refused to look for when I tried to get him to help me out.
“Have I mentioned that you’re an ass, and I don’t like you?” I asked.
“You have no idea how happy it makes me to know that is the last time I will have to hear you say that,” he said, smiling at me. “Anyway, I sent Feely out to the house in St. Louis that Ziegler owned before his stroke. The neighborhood has gone to shit since he left, and half the street was foreclosed, so the place was empty. Norris went in and broke up the walls and floors with a sledgehammer. He even rented a backhoe and dug up the lawn. He didn’t find a goddamn thing.”
“That’s why Norris wasn’t at the Kind funeral.”
“Probably,” Jennings said. “Who gives a shit?”
I grunted.
“So when the gold wasn’t hidden in the house, we guessed he’d either buried it someplace off his property or stashed it in a safe deposit box. And either way, we couldn’t get to the gold without getting to Ziegler, and we had no pretense to get into a room alone with him. So we decided to stand back and see if you could get any information from the guy. Seems you had a pretty easy time of it.” He wagged a finger at me. “Nobody ever suspects the elderly.”
“And you figured that between chasing us in your black car after we left the bank, and threatening to arrest us for the murder you committed, we’d tell the truth and hand you the gold.”
He nodded. “I expected you to spill it right there in the hotel parking lot. The kid started crying as soon as I told him about the girl. I didn’t think it would take much. But you didn’t budge an inch. And then you disappeared somewhere along the highway, and turned up in a different car. That was clever. I didn’t know what you’d done with the gold, so it was like I was right back where I started.”
“So you locked up Feely, your partner. Why?”
“I was never going to split the gold with him, and I needed him to take the fall for killing Kind. I was planning to bump him off and set you up for it.”
That was why he put us in that interrogation room together. Feely had imagined that Jennings was watching what was going on in that room, eavesdropping on our conversation. But the room was a sealed box. Nobody could see what happened in there, and that was the whole point. If I had showed up at the police station alone or with Tequila, I would have gone into the room, and Feely would have come out in a rubber bag. With no proof to the contrary, Jennings could have blamed the gun-toting, senile loose cannon for killing the suspect. I’d spoiled the frame by accident when I showed up with the reverend’s widow; she’d seen me leave Feely alive. And since that didn’t work, Jennings killed Yitzchak Steinblatt to frame Tequila for the murders.
“How could you do those things to innocent people?”
Jennings laughed. “Memphis will top a hundred and sixty murders this year. We’re probably going to edge out Detroit and Newark to be the most violent city in America. A couple more killings don’t make a difference on top of all that. Hell, maybe carving up somebody like Lawrence Kind will get people upset about crime, and the city will have to find some extra resources to throw at the police department. But either way, I’m through busting my ass trying to clean this town up. I’m cashing out.”
“Max Heller and I didn’t see eye to eye on many things, Randall, but he’d be just as disgusted with you as I am. You sold out your own ideals, and nothing is worth that. You’ll regret it, if you live long enough.”
“If I do, I’ll dry my tears with my big-ass piles of money, and then I’ll cheer myself up by pissing on your grave. Speaking of which, how do you want to do this?”
I sighed. “I guess I don’t want to make things any worse than they have to be for my family.”
I reached over to the tray next to the bed with my right hand, the one with the tubes coming out of it, and I picked up my memory notebook. I gripped it tightly and brought it in close to my chest.
“Will you do me just one favor, Randall?” I asked.
He frowned. “Depends on what it is.”
“This notebook, right here, is where I write down things I don’t want to forget. This is my life, sort of, and I’d like for my grandson to have it. I sure don’t want it to get thrown away or bagged up in some evidence locker after I’m gone.”
Jennings mulled that over for a second. “So you want me to give it to him?”
I nodded. “It would mean a hell of a lot to me.”
“No secret messages in here, are there?”
“That’s not my style,” I told him.
He frowned. “You’re going to have to excuse me, Buck, for not trusting you.”
“You can read it if you want to,” I said. “But keep it safe and see that he gets it.”
“That’s your life, there, in that lit
tle book?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The parts that matter, at least.”
“Shit, man. That’s pretty sad.”
I glared at him. “It is what it is.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it. But no promises.”
He stood up out of his chair and leaned over me. He reached out his hand.
“I sure hope I don’t ever get old like you,” he said as he grabbed the notebook.
I didn’t let go, though. I yanked my memories toward me as hard as I could, which wasn’t very hard. But he was off balance, and I’d managed to surprise him. He fell across me, catching himself on his right arm.
His face was barely six inches from mine, close enough that I could smell coffee on his breath, even with the oxygen tube in my nose.
I stared Death right in the eye.
And I smiled, because in my left hand I had an obscene, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, and it was pressed against his ribs.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” I told him.
From this range, I didn’t need to be able to hold my arm steady. From this range, I didn’t need to be able to control the recoil. From this range, I couldn’t miss. So I didn’t do anything except raise a wall of noise; sound a clarion call of protest; bellow with rage at the enveloping shadow. And even though my ears were ringing from the blast, I’m pretty sure I heard Randall Jennings’s guts splatter against the wall behind him.
Tequila had brought the rod up from the house along with my other things, along with cigarettes and my notebook. He knew I didn’t feel comfortable without it.
And I’d been sleeping with it under the pillow, for two reasons:
The first was that, goddamn it, I’m superstitious. I hate birthdays, and I really fucking hate hospitals. When folks get scared, they cling to what makes them feel secure, and I’m no different.
The second reason was General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
History remembered Eisenhower for crushing the Axis and for becoming the thirty-fourth president of the United States. But what I remembered about him was that he told a frightened young soldier what to hang on to when all else was lost.
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