Don't Ever Get Old (26 page)

The Jewish Federation president was slumped next to a door leading to one of the dressing rooms. It might have been the fluorescent light, but her skin seemed to have taken on a distinct greenish pallor. The doctor and I looked at each other and then looked at the door. I reached for the knob, paused for a moment, and pulled out a wad of Kleenex I had in the sleeve of my sweater so I could open the door without leaving any fingerprints.

The first thing I noticed in the room was the smell: a wet, coppery stink, like a summer breeze coming off an abattoir. Hanging from a metal hook on the wall that might normally have held the costumes for the Chanukah pageant was a carcass that was the right size and just about hairy enough to have recently been Yitzchak Steinblatt. But the body was so mangled, it would be difficult to identify him without getting a lot closer, and I wasn't going into the room, because the floor was slick with blood.

The killer had hung Steinblatt by his feet. The hook was mounted at a height a child could reach, so Steinblatt's head, shoulders, and arms were resting on the floor. That meant the killer wouldn't have had to lift Steinblatt's full weight, but getting him up there still would have required a pretty significant effort from a fit adult male.

Even more impressive, Steinblatt must have been alive when the killer hung him up, because there was arterial spray all over the walls, and arteries do not spray unless the heart is still pumping.

“Hung him upside down and slit his throat,” the doctor whispered.

“Apparently, this killer has a sense of humor,” I said.

The big Jew had been slaughtered kosher.

And just as with the other murders, the torso was cut open and the entrails were spilled out all over the linoleum.

“Can you fix him?” the director asked the doctor. “Can you perform CPR?”

“I don't,” the doctor stammered. “I can't.”

“CPR only works when the patient's lungs are still in his chest,” I said.

The doctor nodded. “Um, yes.”

“What should we do?” asked the Federation president.

“Has anyone been in there? Has anyone touched anything?”

She told me nobody had.

“Good,” I said, and I pulled the door shut. “Call the police and don't let anyone touch anything until they arrive.”

She waved a hand to indicate her assent. “What do we do in the meantime?”

“I schlepped out here tonight because I thought there would be some free cake.”

Her eyes were sort of glazed over. “Yes, we had planned for refreshments after the presentation.”

“Good,” I said. “How about you cut me a piece of that? And fetch me a Diet Coke as well. Do you want anything, Doc?”

The doctor gave a sort of half shrug. “I could eat.”

“Attaboy,” I said. “Get Doc some cake, too.”

“And a Sprite, if you've got one,” he said.

I lit a cigarette. The JCC was about the only place I generally followed the no-smoking rule, but these were extenuating circumstances.

I looked around as the director and the president beat a quick retreat from the murder room. The hallway we were standing in ended with a door marked
EXIT
. The killer had butchered Steinblatt and then walked right through that door and out to the parking lot. The body was still warm, and the perp was probably halfway across town.

I found Rose in the lobby among a crowd of Jews, gossiping about what might have happened to cause the cancellation of the speech.

She looked at me and then looked with disapproval at my cigarette. “Are you going to tell me what's going on?”

I glanced around to make sure nobody was listening, and then I leaned in close to whisper in her ear:

“Yid's Cock got clipped.”

 

41

The homicide forensic techs were doing whatever they do at a crime scene, under the supervision of the local Lubavitcher rabbi who had come to make sure that every bit of flesh and drop of blood was collected for burial in accordance with Jewish law.

Even the detectives had been shocked by the mess the killer had made, and the young rabbi was the only one who did not react visibly. He told me he'd performed this grim task at the scenes of terrorist bombings in Jerusalem when he was a yeshiva student.

Randall Jennings looked thoughtfully at the flayed corpse of Yitzchak Steinblatt.

“Norris Feely has a pretty ironclad alibi for this one,” he said.

“He's still in your jail?”

“Yeah, but he's about to get sprung.”

“He could have an accomplice.”

Jennings chuckled a little. “He could be the accomplice.”

I nodded. “You're thinking T. Addleford Pratt is behind these, then?”

“No, I'm not.”

The two of us stared at each other for a long minute. I knew what he meant.

“That ain't how it is, Randall.”

“I can't rely on your word, at this point. Your grandson was acquainted with all three victims. Nobody else who might be suspected of killing Lawrence Kind had any connection to this guy, or to the girl in the hotel. And I've got Buck Schatz and his grandson at the scene of every one of these. I've been making my life a lot harder than I ought to, giving you the benefit of the doubt. But if you look at this objectively, there's only one answer that makes sense.”

“My grandson didn't kill anyone.”

“Can you account for his whereabouts at the time of this murder?”

“He dropped me and my wife at the front door at around seven. Then he went home.”

“How do you know he went home?”

“I just know.”

“Put yourself in my shoes, Buck. How do you make the facts we know fit together?”

I didn't say anything.

“Lawrence Kind comes to your house in the middle of the night. This isn't an ordinary sort of social call, I don't expect. Maybe you quarrel. The next day, he's dead. Your grandson has no alibi.”

“Kind had a lot of enemies.”

“The girl in St. Louis was visiting from out of town. She didn't have any enemies; didn't even know anyone except your grandson. And she gets the same kind of knifework, same disembowelment.”

“The killer followed us, maybe.”

He frowned. “Why would a killer follow you to St. Louis to butcher your grandson's one-night stand in her hotel room?”

For the gold, I thought. For the goddamn gold.

But what I said was: “I don't know.”

“Exactly. And now we have this guy. And look at this scene. This victim was killed the way Jewish dietary rules dictate an animal must be slaughtered. Who would know about that, except for a Jewish killer?”

“Anyone,” I said. “It's common knowledge.”

“You think Lawrence Kind's Tunica loan sharks know the rules of Jewish ritual butchering? You think whatever dropout Orange Mound hit man Felicia Kind might have hired to kill her husband would know something like that? And why would they go to the trouble to kill Yitzchak Steinblatt?”

This seemed obvious. “To frame Tequila.”

“Why would anyone frame your grandson?”

I didn't say anything, so he continued.

“I look at this crime, I look at all these crimes, and I see this killer was smart. All Steinblatt's blood went out of him, onto the floor, onto the walls. But there's no blood in the hallway, and nobody saw anybody running around covered in blood. The perp probably wore a smock or a coverall, and brought a change of shoes, and put the bloody stuff in a plastic bag at the door, so he could walk out clean. That's the way a detective's genius lawyer grandson would commit a murder. And at the previous two killings, we saw the same thing. There were bloody, horrible messes at the scenes, but no bloody footprints or drippings leading away.”

“I know Tequila didn't do it. He was at my house when Steinblatt was killed.”

“How do you know?”

“I called him right after the director showed me the body, to tell him what had happened.”

“On your home line?”

I thought about it for a minute. “No, on his cell.”

Jennings frowned. “So he could have been anywhere.”

“Could have been. But he was at my house.”

“Even if he was, your house is less than a five-minute drive from here. He could have gotten back before anyone even found the scene.”

He was right. I grunted at him.

Jennings sighed. “Look, the kid lost his father, and that's a terrible thing for somebody to go through. And, you know, some people have a loss like that, and they never get right again.”

He was trying to goad me into an emotional response. “We don't need to talk about this.”

“Point is, a man goes through something like that, maybe he could snap. And from where I'm standing, that's the only story that makes sense, unless you know something you ain't told me.”

I could come clean about the gold, give it up to Jennings and throw some suspicion back onto the other people. But there had to be some way to get out of this mess without losing the treasure. I just couldn't think of one.

“Are you gonna charge him with it?” I asked.

“I damn sure want to talk to him. I'll wait until tomorrow, as a professional courtesy. I trust that you will not let the kid lam it. Bring him downtown by lunchtime, if you want to save him the embarrassment of a perp walk. Otherwise, we will be looking for him. There's a lot of evidence.”

I grunted. “It's all circumstantial.” But I had seen plenty of convictions on circumstantial evidence.

He patted me on the shoulder, but I brushed his hand away.

“You might want to use this time to lawyer up,” he said.

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

Tequila could have been at home the summer Brian was killed, but he stayed up at his college. Ostensibly, he was doing some internship for credit, but mostly he wanted to horse around with his friends at the fraternity house. He wanted to spend his afternoons at the swimming pool and his evenings making love to some young girl he was seeing at the time.

One night, Tequila called home; his father was outside talking with a neighbor and didn't come to the phone. It was no big deal, they'd talk the next time. Fifteen hours later, he was on his way home for the funeral. Jewish people are quick about covering up their dead.

I remember he sobbed all the way through the memorial service. Sobbed at the graveside. It was his task to drop the first shovelful of dirt on his father's casket. He did it, and then he ran off to throw up in the cemetery parking lot.

For the next week, shiva visitors came in and out of the house. Rose and Fran and I sat there to meet them, and Fran's parents were there, too. Tequila spent most of the week locked in his bedroom.

He left only to go to synagogue, twice a day, at seven
A.M.
and seven
P.M.
, to say Kaddish, the mourner's prayer.

For a parent or a child, a Jewish man must mourn a year, and it is a son's duty to go to minyan and exalt God's name. Tequila would rather have been raging against the heavens, and while he dutifully obeyed the commandments, he seemed to take profound personal offense at the traditions that had saddled him with such an obligation. To my knowledge, Tequila did not step foot in a synagogue ever again once he'd completed his mourning duties.

After the services, he would come back to his mother's house sullen and angry and press through the gauntlet of condolence visitors so he could shut himself back up in his room. The idea behind shiva is that friends come out to support the bereaved in their time of need, but Jewish people tend to gravitate to wherever there is free food, and the house inevitably fills with strangers. It becomes more of a burden than a consolation.

On the third day, somewhere between the door to the house and the door to his bedroom, he overheard somebody saying something he didn't like. Now, reverence for the dead has never been a strong suit among the Schatzes, but we usually have enough decency to make wisecracks only when the grieving are not within earshot. And maybe Tequila was looking for an excuse to take something out on somebody.

So Tequila punched the guy until he fell to the floor. Then he kicked the guy until he stopped trying to get up. And then he went into the kitchen and started looking for a knife. That's when some friends intervened and dragged Tequila off someplace to cool down while other people got the injured man out of the house.

Despite whatever conclusions Randall Jennings might have wanted to draw, I knew my grandson was a good kid. But if I had looked at the situation dispassionately, I'd have been forced to admit that the detective's position wasn't unreasonable.

 

42

I called Tequila to get him to come pick us up. His cell phone rang six times and went to voice mail. I tried the house phone and nobody answered.

We hitched a ride home with some friends. The front door was securely locked, the burglar alarm was engaged, the purple Volkswagen was still in the driveway, and Tequila was gone.

I carefully checked all the windows and could find no signs of forced entry. I was not strong enough to climb the stepladder to the attic to check on the gold, but it didn't look to me like anyone had been up there. I called Tequila's cellular again: no answer. I called his mother. She didn't know where he was. I checked every room in the house. No note or message from him. No sign of a struggle. My .357 was missing.

I sat on the couch. Possibly Jennings had lied to me and sent officers over to pick up Tequila while I was still at the crime scene. They would have found the gun on my nightstand and bagged it as evidence.

Maybe Tequila had seen the hammer coming down and had decided to flee. But I was sure he was innocent, and that didn't seem like something an innocent man would do.

It was also possible that the real killer had taken him. Although nothing had been disturbed in the house, none of the other victims had struggled. Making Tequila disappear would be the logical last step of a frame job on him.