Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series)
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Authors: Daniel Friedman
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For Buddy and Marget Friedman, Sam and Goldie Burson, and Aunt Rose Burson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my agent, Victoria Skurnick, and foreign rights manager, Elizabeth Fisher, who is largely responsible for Buck Schatz’s wildly successful invasion of Europe. I’d also like to thank my editor, Marcia Markland, for championing these books, her former assistant Kat Brzozowski, publicity manager Hector DeJean, Laura Clark, Lauren Hesse, Quressa Robinson, Thomas Dunne, and Andrew Martin. I’d also like to use this space to remember St. Martin’s Press publisher Matthew Shear, who died in August 2013. His loss was deeply felt.
I’d also like to thank my mom, Elaine Friedman, my brother Jonathan Friedman, Grandma Margaret Friedman, and Bubbi Goldie Burson for all their love and support. Thanks as well to Rachel Friedman, Sheila and Steve Burkholz, Carole Burson, David Friedman, Skip and Susan Rossen, Stephen and Beth Rossen, David and Lindsey Rossen, Martin and Jenny Rossen, Scott Burkholz, Rachel Burkholz, Claire and Paul Putterman, Andrew Putterman, and Matthew Putterman.
Finally, a special recognition: In chapter 10 of this book I used an extraordinary story about a failed 1919 attempt to integrate the Memphis Police, to justify Buck’s hesitance to divulge information he knows about a Jewish criminal to the department that employs him.
I learned about this obscure event from an exhaustive history of the Memphis Police, commissioned by the department and written by Eddie M. Ashmore, with research from Joseph E. Walk. I attempted to find a second source for this story, and could not; I suspect Mr. Ashmore found this information by delving deep into primary sources.
I contacted Marcia, my editor, and asked her whether I needed to include a citation or a footnote in order to retell this story in my own words, since it was only documented in a single place. We decided that the anecdote did not require a citation, as a footnote would be aesthetically jarring for readers, and facts are not proprietary, and are routinely included in fictional works without sourcing.
However, I believe the work of Mr. Ashmore deserves some recognition here. Eddie Ashmore was an ordained minister, an academic and a historian of local police departments in Tennessee. He died in 2007. His careful work documenting the histories of local police departments is probably obscure, but not unappreciated.
CONTENTS
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (Early in my career…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (“Take a look at this graph…”)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (My mother was always a thin woman…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (On television, the man my grandson…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (A journalist with a lot of blackheads…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (I’d developed a habit of watching a talk program…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (By the way, this is why he called himself Elijah…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (“So, this guy Buck Schatz is in the news again.”…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (The Negro response to the morning’s violence…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (When Brian woke up…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (I remember, the day of Brian’s bar mitzvah…)
Something I Don’t Want to Forget (By the way, this is why I’m called Baruch
1
2009
In my misguided youth as a Memphis police detective, I wrecked a fair number of motor pool cars. I damaged more than my share of property. I violated a lot of people’s constitutional rights, often with a rolled-up phone book. So getting taken to the woodshed by somebody in an official capacity was not a new experience for me.
Used to be, I could just sit quietly and think about football while my superiors yelled and vented their anger. Then, I’d make some token gesture of contrition and head back out to resume whatever I had been doing before. Nobody ever stayed mad at me for long; I’d always bring a nasty criminal to a messy end and my various excesses would be forgiven.
But I wasn’t sure how I could placate Vivienne Wyatt, the director of resident relations for the Valhalla Estates Assisted Lifestyle Community for Older Adults. She looked really pissed.
I draped an arm over the back of the chair I was sitting in and threw a sort of raffish half grin her way. “What can I say? I’m a maverick. I play by my own rules.”
By my standards, that was pretty close to an apology.
Unimpressed, Viv scowled at me. This one, apparently, was immune to my charms. “Mr. Connor says you went after him with an axe.”
“I didn’t go after him.”
“But you had an axe, Mr. Schatz.”
“Call me Buck, sugar.”
“He thought you were going to kill him, Buck. And please call me Ms. Wyatt.”
I snorted. “When I decide to kill Connor, Ms. Wyatt, I promise I’ll be unambiguous about it. I just needed the axe to bust up that damn rocking chair of his.”
“That chair was very dear to Mr. Connor. It was one of the few remnants he was able to hang on to from his life before he joined our community. Think about how difficult the transition was for you, and try to understand why your actions are so hurtful.”
I hunched my shoulders and didn’t say anything. I’d come here in a wheelchair, recovering from bullet wounds and crushed bones. I’d needed help moving around, help getting out of bed in the morning, help getting in at night. Help in the bathroom.
I was despondent over the loss of my independence, and over the loss of the home I’d lived in for half a century. Most days, I woke up wishing more than a little bit that I’d let the man who hurt me so bad finish the job.
I knew that, if I’d taken the easy way out, I wouldn’t have had a chance to kill Randall Jennings, and I’d really enjoyed splattering that bastard’s brains all over the walls of my hospital room. But getting better was hard work; it took nine long weeks of physical therapy before I was strong enough to piss standing up. Even then, I still needed to hold on to the assistance rails that were bolted to the walls next to the toilet, which had made it difficult to aim my stream. And the first time I got down on the floor to wipe up the splatter, I couldn’t stand back up, and I had to use the remote control button to call for the staff to come help me.
I was better than I had been, but I was still weak. I couldn’t really even swing the axe properly. My shoulder wouldn’t rotate. My body wouldn’t twist right. My legs were weak. I’d managed to hack off one of the rockers and an armrest and gouge at the seat a little bit, but when I was done, I was glazed in sweat and breathing ragged, and the goddamn thing still looked like a chair.
Six months ago, I could have smashed it to kindling.
I considered the fact that Vivienne Wyatt knew all of this, and I undraped my arm from the chair and stuck my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker.
Regardless of the various indignities I’d endured, I couldn’t find common cause with Dwayne Connor. I hated everything about my one-legged redneck neighbor. The man’s skin had the same texture as a pair of boxer shorts left to dry and crust up in the sun after spending a hard three-day ride wedged in a cowboy’s ass crack. And his personality matched his looks.
“Why did you feel the need to destroy Mr. Connor’s rocking chair with an axe, Buck?”
“My friend Crazy Mack came to visit. Mack is—” I paused. “Mack is like you.”
Ms. Wyatt arched one eyebrow. “You mean he’s black?”
“Yes. And Connor has some problems with that.”
Connor had called Mack several different names; shouted the kinds of words that make my grandson flinch, even when there’s no colored people around to overhear. But when I explained this to Ms. Wyatt, all she said was: “You can’t go smashing people’s chairs up with axes. Why do you even have an axe?”
“For situations like this one,” I said. “When stuff needs smashing. Aren’t you people supposed to get more upset when folks like Connor say stuff like that?”
“We people aren’t supposed to do anything,” she said. “If I started worrying about what every ignorant old white man in this place was thinking or saying, I wouldn’t hardly have time in the day to do anything else. You alone would probably take up my whole morning, Buck.”
I didn’t particularly like that implication. “Well, I’m upset about it. He was rude to my guest. There’s no excuse for that.”
She picked up a folder off her desk. “Look,” she said. “I’m really not supposed to talk too much about specifics of our residents’ circumstances, but I want to give you an idea of what the last few months have been like for Mr. Connor. He came here because he can’t be on his own anymore. His son went looking for him when he didn’t answer the phone; found the old man lying on the floor of his house. He’d been there for days, in a pool of his own mess. The smell was terrible. When Mr. Connor got into the emergency room at Baptist Hospital, a doctor discovered that a large clot had cut off all the blood flow to his femoral artery. His leg was dead and the flesh was rotting off the bones. They had no choice but to amputate.”
“The mean old bastard had it coming,” I said. “You can’t talk like he did to my friend. Crazy Mack is kind of emotionally delicate, on account of his schizophrenia.”
Viv leaned forward, toward me. “Buck?”
“Yes, Ms. Wyatt?”
“Did you bring a schizophrenic black man up to your floor to antagonize your racist neighbor?”
“Of course not,” I said, grasping the arms of my walker to help me rise out of my chair a little bit, so my eyes were level with hers. “Mack came by to show me some photos of his grandchildren. He has been my friend for more than fifty years.”
A trace of a smile from her. “Where did you get yourself a schizophrenic black friend, Buck? I think I need to hear this one.”
“Back in the prehistoric days, when I was a young patrol officer, I responded to a noise complaint, and I found Mack up on the roof of a low-rise apartment house wearing nothing but tinfoil, waving a big knife and screaming. Circumstances like that can easily escalate into a tragedy, but I kept a cool head and I was able to defuse the situation.”