Don't Ever Get Old (22 page)

His eyes flicked off the road for a second to throw an accusing glare my way. “You did that? You lost exculpatory evidence on purpose to close a file you couldn't mop up the honest way?”

“Don't look at me like that,” I told him. “I did that job as clean as anyone's ever done it.”

He made some noise about how I was being evasive, and I ignored it.

“Anyway, there's probably at least one other way into the hotel, maybe a service entrance or a loading dock,” I told him. “We'd be damn lucky if the killer went in the front door, because we could identify him on the security tapes. More likely, though, whoever did it was smart enough not to walk in past the desk.”

Tequila grunted.

“And, of course, you could have gone out past the camera, through the front, but reentered the hotel through another door to kill Yael, so the video won't clear you anyway.”

“That sounds like a rationalization.”

“It's detective work. You piece together the facts you have into the most plausible story you can come up with, and then you try to convict on it. It isn't an exact science.”

He scowled at me, and I could tell that, to him, it all sounded like another way of framing a guy. And maybe he was right. But murder wasn't supposed to be a game that people could win by being smart enough and lucky enough to not leave evidence that justified a conviction. Sometimes the evidence needed a little help.

Tequila couldn't understand how frustrating it was to see a killer get off the hook by intimidating a witness into recanting testimony or to lose a conviction because we hadn't been able to dredge the murder weapon out of the river.

Maybe Tequila's moral compass dictated that he ought to let a murderer go free because the rules said he had to. But I could see his white knuckles on the steering wheel, and I could see that his jaw was clenched, and I knew what he would like to do if he could get his hands on whoever killed Yael.

Somewhere deep down, beneath his college-boy diction and his lawyer words, he understood that there were conflicts that couldn't be settled with discussion or process. He knew that a man had to solve certain problems with his hands. But neither of us wanted to discuss that, so I decided to try talking about a less awkward subject.

“Did you have sexual intercourse with that girl last night?”

His jaw dropped open. “What the fuck, Grandpa?”

“Answer the goddamn question,” I told him. “They are going to conduct a postmortem examination and autopsy, and they are going to search that crime scene. I need to know what they will find there. So, did you have intercourse with Yael?”

He blinked away tears. “Yeah. We, uh … Yeah.”

“Did you use a condom?”

His face flushed red. “Yes, always.”

“Good,” I said. “Your mother will be relieved.”

“Jesus Christ, Pop.” He wiped at his nose.

“Was the used rubber in the room when you left?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you leave it on the end table? Throw it in the trash can?”

“I think I flushed it down the toilet.”

“You think?”

“I flushed it down the toilet,” he said.

“Well, at least you didn't leave your DNA everywhere.”

“Does that help?”

“I don't know. We didn't have DNA evidence when I was a cop. But it probably looks awful incriminating to a jury when there was spunk splattered all over a corpse.”

He shuddered, either at the word
corpse
or the word
jury
. He sniffled a little.

“The St. Louis people must not even know about you yet, or they would have picked us up while we were driving around the city all day,” I told him. “Randall Jennings must not have shared whatever he thinks he knows.”

Tequila took a hand off the wheel and ran it distractedly through his hair. “Why wouldn't he?”

“He wants to pin the Lawrence Kind job on you or on me, and he wants to make the bust himself, without sharing the credit with the St. Louis bulls. So much for collaboration among agencies, I guess.”

Tequila bit his bottom lip. “Does that buy us time?”

“Not much,” I said. “But the good news is I don't expect we'll have to look too hard for the real killer.”

“Why's that?” Tequila asked.

“Because he'll come looking for us.”

 

36

Randall Jennings had no authority to look in the trunk of the car in St. Louis, but that fact wouldn't buy us much space to breathe.

To get into a suspect's residence, police must obtain a warrant from a judge that allows them to conduct a search. That's guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

It is legal for police to enter a dwelling without that warrant only if there is probable cause; in other words, they must show that a reasonable person would believe a crime was probably occurring on the premises at the time the cops went through the door.

When police search a house without cause or a warrant, the search is illegal, and any evidence, whether it's drugs, stolen property, or a dead body, is considered poisoned and can't be used against the suspect. That means the bad guy goes free.

A vehicle is different, though. The law says it's public in a way a home never is, so there's a greatly reduced right to privacy in a vehicle, even a car's locked trunk. Police get a lot more room to play their hunches with automobile searches.

Maybe the cop thought the driver looked nervous. Maybe the suspect appeared to be holding something that looked like a weapon. Maybe he reacted fearfully or anxiously when he saw the police cruiser. Maybe he changed lanes without signaling. Anything like that is good enough.

Some patrolmen are dumb enough to say out loud, in court, that they pulled a car over just because the driver was black, and when this happens, it forces the frustrated judge to throw out the ten pounds of uncut Afghan smack the cop found in the trunk of the car. That's how criminal defense lawyers get their names enshrined in rap song lyrics.

But as long as the officer is able, after the fact, to articulate a reasonable basis for suspicion, almost any vehicle search will stand up in court.

So we were subject to search at will by law enforcement as long as the gold was in the car. We'd be a little safer once we got the stuff into my house, since Jennings wouldn't be able to muster enough proof to get a search warrant. But we had a lot of highway to cover before we got there. We were vulnerable.

If the cops found the gold, they would confiscate it. Our method of getting into Ziegler's safe deposit box had been extremely illegal. If it didn't meet the technical definition of a bank robbery, it was certainly fraud against a federally insured bank. That was good enough to be a serious felony.

And even if we beat criminal charges, the discovery of the Nazi gold would mean that we wouldn't get to keep it. It would go to Holocaust survivors or charities, and all our effort would have been wasted.

I thought of Jennings giving me that conspiratorial little grin of his and telling me how if I were in his shoes, I'd be thinking the way he was thinking and doing what he was doing. And I knew what I'd do if I were in his place.

I would have an all-points bulletin out on the Buick in Memphis, for starters, and I'd have any friendly folks in nearby departments looking for the car as well. That would ensure that some cop, someplace, would spot us, pull us over, and search us.

I took a long look out the window and puffed on my cigarette. The logic moved inexorably in one direction, and it wasn't a direction I liked. Drastic measures would have to be taken.

“We need to get rid of this car,” I told Tequila. “We need some alternative transportation.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “You love this thing.”

“Indeed. But sooner or later, you lose what you love.”

He wiped at his eyes. “Yeah, reckon so.”

Silence between us for longer than a moment. Then he said, “How do we do this? Smash the window of a parked car and hot-wire it? Carjack somebody at gunpoint?”

“Yeah, because driving around in a stolen vehicle is going to help us avoid getting pulled over by cops,” I said.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, the same way his grandmother did when she was annoyed with me. “Okay. So what is your plan?”

The plan, to the extent it could be described as such, was to stash the Buick someplace out of the way and get a rental car.

That didn't seem like such a bright idea to Tequila. “But you have to provide a driver's license to rent a car, right? I think they usually make a photocopy of it. And can't they track the credit card we use to pay for the rental?”

“The police need a warrant to get that information,” I said. “Hopefully, we can get home and stash the gold before Jennings can get in front of a judge.”

We got off I-55 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It wasn't much of a city, but it had a regional airport. That meant we could rent a car and leave the Buick unattended for a while in the airport's long-term parking lot.

First, we stopped at a Wal-Mart store and got four backpacks to carry the gold in. The hundred-pound duffels were too heavy for Tequila to move around easily. Then, I waited with the treasure and the Buick at the airport while Tequila hiked over to the nearby Enterprise store. He came back driving a purple Volkswagen Jetta. He said it was the only four-door available, but I suspected he'd picked it on purpose, to piss me off.

We drove into Memphis without any blue lights flashing in the rearview. I told Tequila to pass my street and pull around the block.

“We've got to figure the police are watching the front of the house, and we don't want them to see us carrying those bags in. So you need to sneak them in the back, over the fence.”

“You want me to jump two fences with fifty pounds on my back?” he said.

“Are you that out of shape?”

He was quiet for a minute. “No, I guess I can do it.”

“Okay,” I said, handing him the key to the back door. “Don't forget to deactivate the burglar alarm. Stay low to the ground. Sit the bags inside the door, and we'll hide them in the attic after we pull around the front and let the cops see us go into the house empty-handed.”

“You're trying to run a lot of misdirection on these people, Grandpa. Are you sure any of this will work? Are you sure there is even anyone watching us?”

I was sure Kind and Yael were dead, and I was sure somebody had chased us after we left the bank.

“If we're in so much danger, why don't we stash the gold in another safe deposit box until the heat dies down?”

“We can't. Not with Jennings on our tail. If a cop sees us carrying those bags into the bank, that would be pretty interesting evidence to show a judge. Along with our circumstantial proximity to the murders, that's good enough to justify a warrant to search the box. If we got here without them seeing us, the gold will be safe in the house, at least from the police, but it's too risky to move it again.”

Tequila grumbled about it a little more, but he grabbed one of the backpacks from the trunk, heaved it over the fence, and hauled his ass up after it. The four trips took him ten tense minutes, and he climbed back in the car damp from exertion.

“I've got splinters in my hands from that stupid wooden fence,” he told me as he let the Volkswagen roll down my street.

“Exercise is good for you,” I told him. “You've been looking kind of doughy.”

As he pulled into the driveway, I pointed out a black car parked in front of my house. “Somebody is staking us out.” I squinted, but it was too dark to see who was sitting in the driver's seat.

He glanced in the rearview. “Is it that Chevy?”

“Nah,” I said. “Toyota.”

We flipped on the light over the garage and made sure whoever was watching could see we were only carrying our lightweight overnight bags into the house.

Once we were safe inside, Tequila pulled down the folding ladder that led to my attic and stashed the gold up there.

“Is that car still out front?” he asked when he finished.

I nodded. “I suppose we should show our visitor some southern hospitality,” I said.

We went out the front door together. I had my .357 drawn, and Tequila had found my old golf clubs in the closet and was holding up a seven iron like a baseball bat. It was dark out, and the car was parked in shadow. I rapped on the driver's-side window with my gun. The door cracked open, startling me enough that I stepped back into a firing position, planted my feet, raised my right arm to shoulder level, and braced the butt of the .357 with my left hand. I had my finger on the trigger.

A light went on inside the car when the door opened, and we could see that the driver was not armed. It looked like she'd fallen asleep waiting for us and had reflexively reached for the door handle when we'd frightened her awake.

“Good evening, Mr. Schatz,” she said as she stepped out of the car. “It's a pleasure to finally meet you.”

I lowered my gun. “Hello, Mrs. Kind.”

 

37

Felicia Kind was sitting in my spot on the couch. I was pacing around the room, and Tequila perched on one of my cushy chairs. He stared at her with eyes full of menace. His mouth was a thin, pressed line, and his hands tightly clutched my golf club.

She wasn't as put together as she had been at the funeral; she'd been waiting for us in her car for at least a few hours. But she was beautiful anyway. Looking at her brought to mind the sorts of florid adjectives people ordinarily used to describe violin concertos and Renaissance paintings. She was wearing a zip-front hooded sweatshirt like one of Tequila's, but not baggy; it clung to her body enough that I could tell she wasn't hiding a gun underneath it. Her hair was disheveled from being mashed against the seat cushion, which made her look like she'd just crawled out of bed. She wasn't wearing any makeup, but that suited her just fine because her skin was flawless. And she made me very nervous. Felicia was dangerous the same way water was wet; it wasn't a question of whether she meant to be or not, it was simply intrinsic to her nature.