Running Out of Road

by Daniel Friedman

  Legal expenses and the settlement consumed the bulk of Mr. March’s fortune, and he returned to Memphis to try to borrow money from some of his cousins who were still engaged in the cotton business. He was destitute when my grandfather arrested him for the murder of Evelyn Duhrer in 1976, which is why he was represented by court-appointed counsel at his murder trial.

  WATKINS: What does this have to do with any of the subject matter of American Justice?

  W. SCHATZ: Why have you been trying to convince your listeners that this man might be innocent? Chester March is a serial killer. Women go missing whenever he is around. And you are giving him a national platform to tell lies about his victims and about the courageous detectives who caught him. My grandfather stopped Chester in 1976 and would have put him away twenty years earlier if it hadn’t been for the bigotry of the police brass and the local prosecutors. How can you look at this story and think Buck Schatz is the bad guy?

  WATKINS: The good guys don’t beat up on shackled prisoners. Good guys don’t torture confessions out of suspects.

  W. SCHATZ: I just don’t think your little crusade is really about Chester March or Baruch Schatz. I think it is about Marius Watkins.

  WATKINS: What do you know about Marius Watkins?

  W. SCHATZ: I know he’s your father, and I know he’s been a guest of the government at the Dannemora prison for the last twenty years and will probably remain there for the rest of his life. Like I told you, a lot of information is available in legal and public records databases.

  WATKINS: Well, shit, man, I guess you got me. You figured out that I am the son of an impoverished single mother and an incarcerated father. How can any of my listeners ever trust me, knowing that I grew up in a housing project and attended a crumbling Brooklyn public school, and then went to Dartmouth and got my master’s degree in journalism from Columbia?

  W. SCHATZ: I question your objectivity with regard to allegations of police misconduct, in light of your father’s claims that cops planted the evidence that led to his murder conviction. I think your journalism is agenda-driven, and I think you’re hostile to police and sympathetic to violent criminals.

  WATKINS (NARRATION): When I looked at William before, I didn’t see Buck in him, but I can spot the resemblance now. He’s looking at me, but he’s looking through me. His eyes are set, and his lip is curled downward, just like Buck’s. I’m a puzzle he’s solved, a problem he has dismantled and defused. He has figured out my deal, and now I am no longer a threat. To him, I am nothing.

  I haven’t spoken much about my life or my past on the air, because I have never considered it relevant to the stories I am telling here, but I don’t have any secrets. I’m not trying to hide anything.

  My father, Marius Watkins, is serving a life sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. He was convicted of killing a man and a woman during a street robbery in 1992. A witness identified my father fleeing the scene shortly after hearing the gunshots. Police searched his residence and recovered a handgun. Ballistics experts testified at trial that the gun was the one used in the murders, and a forensics expert testified that my father’s fingerprints were recovered from the gun. Marius has maintained for two decades that he is innocent and that the NYPD planted the weapon. In appeals, he has unsuccessfully petitioned to have new DNA testing performed on the gun, which he says he never touched or saw before police raided his apartment.

  I am close with my father, and since I was a child, I have visited him regularly at the prison. I believe Marius Watkins is innocent, I believe he will be exonerated one day, and I don’t deny that his circumstances are a reason for my professional interest in the workings of the criminal justice system. If you feel I have misled you in any way by not disclosing this earlier, then I apologize sincerely.

  That said, I—along with Marisol Rodriguez, my coproducer on American Justice, and the team of researchers and fact-checkers who support us—stand behind everything we’ve reported. We do not believe that having an incarcerated family member disqualifies a journalist from covering the criminal justice system. We believe the son of a convicted felon is as qualified to tell the story of Chester March as the grandson of a Memphis cop.

  W. SCHATZ: You are welcome to keep those documents, in case there’s any information in them that is useful to you.

  WATKINS: I don’t want to look at any of your documents. When can I talk to Buck?

  W. SCHATZ: You’re never going to talk to him. I will never let that happen.

  18

  According to the clock on the nightstand, it was 2:24 A.M. The numbers glowed green, three inches tall. The clock was hideous and I hated it, but although it was grotesque, it was also necessary. We needed a large display so we could see what time it was without putting on our glasses. I stared at the green numbers, fuzzy around the edges, hanging in the darkness. 2:25.

  Rose snored softly next to me. It would be eighteen months, maybe two years before the cancer did its job on her. That’s a long time at our age. Long enough that she could die of something else first. Long enough that she might still outlive me. But she probably wouldn’t. I was a survivor. Always had been, since long before I knew what that meant or what it would cost me.

  They say that, when you lock a guy up for a crime, if he’s guilty, he’ll sleep soundly. Once the trap has snapped closed on him, he knows he’s caught, so the worst is behind him. It’s almost a relief. It’s the innocent who fear what comes next, who are anxious about their trials and fret about how to clear their names. That’s not true, of course. I’ve seen plenty of guilty men who were all kinds of nervous, and the worst criminals always believe themselves to be innocent. As they see things, intervening circumstances relieve them of culpability. It’s all somebody else’s fault. Whatever they’ve done is trivial next to what’s been done to them.

  But there must have been a kernel of truth to that old superstition, because, with her decision made and her course set, Rose seemed unburdened. She was done fighting. Done negotiating. Done searching for a way out. And now, she could sleep soundly. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her look so peaceful, though, admittedly, there were a lot of things I couldn’t remember. I was the one lying awake, anxious and afraid.

  Rose said she used to worry about me chasing after scumbags and killers. But, if anything, I should have taken more risks. Started more gunfights. Maybe smoked more. It takes a lot of nails to pin a beast like me into a coffin, but I could have found my number. An extra half a pack a day, maybe, and I could have been dead thirty years ago.

  They should put warning labels on vegetables. The surgeon general should tell people not to get too much exercise. Somebody needs to get the word out: If you aren’t careful, you might live too long.

  After I got back from the war—after I had mostly recovered from my injuries—I went out on the municipal golf course at Overton Park. I had my clubs, the same clubs I’d had before I went to Europe. And I pulled the driver out of the bag, and it looked like it always had, and it felt like it always had, and it was a pretty day in April, and everything seemed all right. And for a second, it seemed like I could pick up where I’d left off before the world exploded. And then I teed up, and I squared my hips, and by the time I got to the top of my backswing, I knew it wasn’t the same after all, and it never would be. I could feel the pins in my shoulder. I could feel that the rotation of my body was off, in a way I couldn’t ever fix.

  That wasn’t the last time I played golf. I figured out a stiff way to swing the club that could get the ball down the fairway. I told myself I’d compensate for what I’d lost on the drive by working on my short game. Brilliant idea, there. I must have been the first one who ever came up with it. And I told myself that what I’d lost was balanced out by the wisdom I’d gained.

  But the truth was, I knew when I took that swing that the best round of golf I’d ever play was behind me. That was the first time I really understood what it means to move through this life, to
suffer wear and tear that you can’t fix.

  The peak comes real early, and when you’re there, you never realize it. By the time you figure out that you’re on the way down, your best day is already so far behind you that you can’t even figure out which one it was in retrospect, and then for the rest of your life, you’ll just get weaker and uglier.

  At some point, you stop marking time around celebrations and holidays, and start using funerals as your signposts. Remember so-and-so? How long has he been gone? It’s been longer than you realize. You mark time by what you’ve lost and who you’ve left behind. And you diminish more each day, until you can barely remember your unbowed, unscarred, perfect self, until you don’t even recognize what you see in the mirror.

  At some point, what are you sticking around for? Why did I want to keep going without Brian? What is there to keep me going without Rose? Maybe there will be something good on TV? There’s never anything good on TV.

  There’s food. You can enjoy a great meal. But even that starts to get away from you. I’ve forgotten so many things, but here’s something I remember: Little children’s entire mouths are lined with taste buds. Taste is important to babies; they can taste before they can see, and it’s how they first come to know their mothers. Later on, the exquisite sensitivity of a child’s sense of taste can warn them if something they’re trying to eat is poison, before they’ve learned what’s safe and what isn’t. That’s why babies are always putting things in their mouths; they can get a lot of information that way. But all those taste buds fall out with the baby teeth.

  That means that even if you go to the world’s finest restaurants, even if you order the six-hundred-dollar tasting menus at the extravagant New York joints my grandson visits with his lawyer friends, nothing you ever eat will taste as good as a nickel ice cream tastes to a four-year-old. And by the time you turn ten, you will have forgotten what it tasted like. You keep losing taste buds your whole life. Your mouth becomes a dead gray expanse. When I was seventy, I doused everything I ate in hot sauce, and by the time I turned eighty, I’d stopped bothering. Do you want to know why the food in retirement homes is so bad? It’s because nobody cares anymore.

  I know what my funeral would have been like if, as Rose feared, one of the murderers I went after had got the better of me. There would have been pallbearers in dress uniforms. A eulogy from the police chief, maybe the mayor. A twenty-one-gun salute.

  Hundreds would have attended. The entire police force. Folks I helped. People from the synagogue. People who knew my mother. People who knew my son.

  My colleagues never fully embraced me on account of my race and my faith, but they’d have shown respect, and they’d have given me a raucous Irish wake. If you die in the line, you get an Irish wake at a downtown bar, even if you’re not Irish—even though most Memphis cops aren’t Irish. It would have been something to see, all those shitkickers and good ol’ boys, toasting my memory into the wee hours of the morning and retelling the stories of the meanest Jew who ever walked these streets.

  They’re dead now. All those cops. My mother and everyone who knew her. My son.

  And as I’ve diminished these last forty years, so has the mark I’ve made on the world. I once believed a man’s deeds and the things he built became his legacy, but it turns out that those things aren’t terribly durable. I’ve outlived all of mine. The people I saved didn’t stay saved. Something got them, eventually: disease or car accidents or old age or whatever. And the killers I stopped were replaced by new ones. And the city I protected remains near the top of every list of the most dangerous places in America, and people tell me now that the way I fought crime was barbaric and racist. When I finally go, if I’m remembered at all, it won’t be well.

  Who will show up to bury me? Tequila and Fran, I guess. He’ll probably give a speech that makes the whole thing about himself. Perhaps a couple of folks from the Jewish Community Center, but not many. Maybe some of the aides from Valhalla will show up, but probably not. If this place gave the staff leave to attend residents’ funerals, there would never be anyone at work, and it’s a lot to ask for folks to show up on their time off. There are some local veterans who attend other veterans’ funerals. I don’t know them, and they don’t know me. They fought in other wars. But they’ll be there nonetheless. And the department will send somebody. But just as a formality. Then they’ll go get lunch.

  I like to tell people that I’ve buried all my enemies. I don’t like to talk about how I’ve buried all my friends. And I don’t even know how to think about burying Rose. Seventy years I’ve been with her, and I don’t know how to be without her. Is it something I’ll get used to? I don’t think so. I haven’t gotten used to my son being gone. I haven’t gotten used to riding in the backseat of my own car. I haven’t gotten used to living in this place instead of my house. I haven’t gotten used to the walker. I don’t quite understand how all this could possibly have happened. Just when I reached the point where I thought I had everything fixed, it all started falling irreversibly to pieces. Entropy gets you in the end.

  But somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, I can sometimes forget enough to still believe I am the man I was. In my mind, in those moments, I’m still Buck Schatz.

  PART 4

  1976: BUCK SCHATZ

  19

  It was clear from the smell that something was very wrong on Alton Avenue. After four days tolerating the stink coming out of Evelyn Duhrer’s house, John Clifton had called the police.

  The responding officers agreed the house stank and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. They used the two-way in their patrol car to radio the precinct for further instructions, and the precinct captain decided the situation merited the attention of a homicide detective. He called me.

  “Lots of houses stink,” I said. “Somebody’s septic tank is probably leaking. Why are you bothering me with this?”

  “It’s not a poop smell,” the captain told me. “It’s more of a chemical smell.”

  “What kind of a chemical smell?” I asked.

  I waited while he conferred with the officers on the radio.

  “Like when you pick your kid up from school the day they dissect the fetal pig,” he told me.

  “That’s not a good smell,” I said. “Tell the officers not to leave. Have them wait outside, and if anybody tries to go into the house, have the officers stop them, frisk them, and question them. I will be down there in a couple of hours, with a warrant. Tell your boys not to take their eyes off that house until I arrive.”

  Most officers know what a rotting body smells like; it’s a meaty, earthy smell, with a sort of sweet undertone to it, and sometimes a shit smell as well, on account of the guts rupturing during decomposition. That smell signifies an unattended death, but not necessarily a suspicious one. It happens whenever somebody who lives alone dies of a heart attack or a stroke or a household accident, or a suicide, unless somebody finds them quickly.

  That smell also signifies that the decedent is well past the point of requiring medical assistance, so we could handle an unattended death carefully, with the knowledge that there was no emergency. When we found a house like that, the department would send out a detective to supervise the collection of the body and to make sure the scene was preserved until the coroner determined that the cause of death was not criminal. You didn’t want to have your uniformed officers going through the house, touching things with their bare hands and leaving dirty footprints on the carpets, only to discover a few hours later that your accidental death was less accidental than it initially appeared.

  But days-old bodies discovered in houses where there were no obvious signs of breaking and entering almost never turned out to be murders, so attending and preserving these scenes was a boring and undesirable detail. By the 1970s, I didn’t have to do garbage tasks like that anymore.

  I’d never have been treated as having seniority if the police brass had stayed Klanned up like it was in the ’50s, but the most wonderful t
hing happened over the course of the ’60s: All those bigoted schmucks retired or died.

  Old Inspector Byrne took his pension in 1961, and he fell out of a bass boat and drowned in a still pond two years later. One might wonder why a man who couldn’t swim would go fishing alone in a small boat without wearing a life preserver, and one might also wonder why a man as large and fluffy as Byrne hadn’t been able to float in calm water until somebody could rescue him. But apparently he wasn’t as buoyant as he appeared, which led to speculation among his kompatriots as to whether he might have had some colored ancestry. Personally, I speculated as to whether there might be more to Byrne’s death than was readily apparent at first glance, but he died outside the city limits, which meant it wasn’t my problem, and I didn’t like him enough to make it my problem, so if the former chief of detectives fell victim to foul play, the crime went unnoticed and unsolved.

  Henry McCloskey had a successful and much-admired career in the district attorney’s office until 1962, when an anticorruption task force found evidence that he had taken a cash bribe in order to drop charges arising out of an incident in which a prominent and successful local drunk ran a red light and T-boned a Chevrolet, killing two people. Henry was suspended without pay pending the results of the investigation, and he decided to use his time off to undertake a little home improvement project, which involved putting a shotgun in his mouth and redecorating his garage.

  And the head of the anticorruption task force just might have been a certain Jew detective! We had a good time at that crime scene. The cause of death was pretty clearly nonsuspicious, so I brought over some beers for my team, and we watched the crew from the coroner’s office clean up the mess. The recoil from the shotgun blast knocked all of McCloskey’s rotten, shitty teeth out, and one of the coroner’s technicians had to crawl around on the floor with a pair of tweezers, looking for them. He told me that the teeth smelled a lot worse than the brains.