Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (16 page)

“And what do you propose that I should do about this?” Greenfield asked. He had a kind of feral look in his eyes.

I’d seen a nature documentary about how solitary polar bears in the wild roam hundreds of miles looking for prey. When two of the males encountered each other, if they were attracted by the scent of a female in heat or a whale carcass rotting on the beach, they would fight viciously, sometimes leaving one of them seriously injured.

In this place, Charles Greenfield was the big bear, and his dominance went unquestioned. The men he kept around him, like his assistant, Riley Cartwright, were cringing, subservient types. Any outsiders who visited would likely be subdued by his size or his fine suit or his expensive furniture. This was a man who was used to being the master, and deeply resented people who tried to tell him what to do.

“I’m glad you asked, because I’m going to tell you what to do,” I said. I didn’t give a shit about his suit or his title or his office, and I wanted to make sure he knew it. The rotten whale-stink of this place was attracting new attention, and he was going to have to embrace that reality. In the last five days, I’d put two men into the hospital, which gave me a pretty good claim to being the biggest, meanest bear. “I think you should hire extra security, and station a guard inside the vault as well as on the doors. I think you should hire an engineer to check your foundation and the ceiling above, and make sure that no attempts have been made to breach the vault through any of those surfaces. I’d also urge you to reconsider moving the bulk of your excess cash someplace else, and to hire extra guards to escort the money to its destination.”

Greenfield laughed. “Mr. Schatz, this is a bank. Do you know what a bank is?”

“I’m familiar with the general concept,” I said.

“A bank is a place where people like me go to work every day next to a room filled with money. Do you know who would like to steal from a room filled with money?” He cocked his head curiously, but I just inhaled from my cigarette. This was clearly going to be the part where he got territorial and sprayed his polar bear piss all over everything. He let the silence start to feel uncomfortable, before he said: “Everyone, Detective. Everyone would steal from a bank if they thought they could. So, when you come in here and tell me that you think somebody wants to steal from me, you’re not telling me something I am not already aware of. The reason banks are able to function when everyone would like to steal from them is that we make it very difficult to steal a lot of money from a bank. Nobody is tunneling into my vault. My vault is constructed from eighteen-inch walls of tempered steel sunk into a concrete foundation, and booby-trapped with a lot of alarm triggers. Do you know what kind of a tool you need to break through a two-foot-thick wall of concrete?”

“A sledgehammer?”

“A jackhammer, probably. There’s only one way, really, to tunnel through concrete, and that’s the noisy way. I’m sure we’d have noticed. I don’t think any Sherlock Holmes shenanigans are taking place in my bank.”

“Greenfield, I’m not trying to insult you, but I think there is real and credible information suggesting that a sophisticated criminal plans to steal the cash in your vault. I am advising you to take precautions.”

“And what I have explained to you, Detective, repeatedly and at length, is that I have already taken every precaution reasonable. We have multiple layers of security. We have planned for every contingency. And, having done so, we are free to dedicate our time to doing our jobs and conducting our business, business which you are currently distracting me from.”

“I appreciate that you are confident in your security,” I said. “But this is an unusual threat that I believe requires an unusual response.”

Greenfield did the thing where he squeezed his nose again. “You said you believe the men you arrested for plotting to rob my tellers were suckers Elijah was using as a distraction from his real plot, right?”

“Yes.”

“Consider the possibility that they were being used not to distract you from a robbery on my vault, but a robbery on something else entirely unrelated to this bank.”

“I’ve thought about that. But the bank is the most likely target I am aware of, and if he’s out to steal something else, I have no idea what it might be. I’ve been unable to identify any other targets related to the Kluge strike that are valuable enough to attract his attention.”

“That isn’t my problem.”

“Unless I’m right, and he’s after your vault.”

“Well, then, you’ve informed me of the risk. I shall take your suggestions under advisement. So you’ve done everything you can. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must devote my attention to less fanciful matters.”

“Prick.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Thank you very much for your time.”

I left because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I still didn’t intend to let Elijah rob the bank, but if he somehow pulled it off, I figured it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy than Charles Greenfield.

22

1965

I left Greenfield’s office through its heavy wood double doors, passed the desks of his two busy secretaries, and then I was standing in front of the elevator bank; he had taken a whole wing of the office suite for himself, and then knocked most of the walls out to make one big sunny cathedral in which to worship himself. Must have been nice.

I pushed the button to take me down to the bank’s grand lobby on the ground floor; a vast, shimmering cavern full of pink limestone columns running from the pink limestone floor to the arched, vaulted pink-limestone ceiling.

As I exited the elevator, the brass tellers’ cages were to my left, and, to my right was a reception area for clients awaiting appointments with loan officers and other upstairs officials.

And of course, that’s where Elijah was; sitting in a leather chair, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

I glanced around the lobby; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A few people were conducting business with the tellers, but the place was mostly empty. As Greenfield had told me, the nearby strike had scared away most of the bank’s business.

I didn’t hear any alarms, and I didn’t see any of Elijah’s beefy henchmen, and I didn’t see any Jewish criminals waving guns at the tellers. But that didn’t mean the robbery wasn’t happening right in front of me.

I went and sat in the chair next to Elijah’s.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He showed me his Auschwitz smile. “Would you believe me if I told you I was applying for a small business loan?”

The nerve of this guy.

“You’re under arrest,” I said. “We’re gonna stand up, and we’re going to walk out of here. If you attempt to resist, I will subdue you with force.”

He sucked his lips around the broken stubs of his teeth. “Not sure that’s a good idea,” he said. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you outside.”

The only public entrance to the bank was a single set of revolving glass doors. I’d never seen Elijah without his oversized accomplices before, and it stood to reason that if they weren’t in here, they might be out there. There was a good chance I hadn’t just coincidentally run into Elijah in the lobby of the bank he was planning to rob. If he had set this encounter up, he doubtless had his exit planned, and he had the advantage.

“I’d be walking face-first into a buzz saw,” I said.

“I actually didn’t arrange for there to be a buzz saw, but you’d definitely be riddled with bullets on the sidewalk.” He was chirping now, and I didn’t appreciate it.

This was a chess game, and my adversary had the next several moves planned out. What could I do?

I considered the loading door. I could potentially bundle him out that way and sneak past his crew.

“I derive a great deal of amusement from the way your face looks when you’re thinking really hard,” Elijah said. “Right now, you’re wondering whether you can take me out through the loading door.”

To do that I’d have to walk him right past the vault. I’d have to open the security cage in the hallway beyond. Could that be done without disabling the alarm? I’d have to unbar the side door, and I didn’t know that the alley beyond was clear. If his crew were waiting there, that might be their way inside. With the security cage unlocked, they could walk right into the vault.

There was clearly some reason he was here; clearly some reason he was stringing me along. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the plan for the robbery. I wasn’t willing to be their dupe.

“I don’t think you’re going to try to take me out that way,” he said. “So there are two doors and you can’t take me out of either of them. And do you really, in your heart of hearts, want to arrest me, Baruch?”

He folded his newspaper and took a sip from his coffee cup.

I didn’t want to arrest him. I wanted to kill him, or run him out of town. I did not want him to sit down in an interrogation room and start talking. He stood by and watched while his mother was shot in the head. He stood by and waited, while his father was beaten to death. He set in motion the chain of events that caused a Nazi guard to shoot twenty Jews on his work detail. And he didn’t seem too torn up about any of it. Some people truck their baggage around, and others travel light. This man was ruthless and self-interested; the sort who could burn every bridge he’d ever crossed and never look back.

How many jobs had he pulled? Ten? Fifteen? There could be a corrupt Jewish cop involved in every single one of those schemes. If he was willing to expose them all, some ambitious twerp in the U.S. Attorney’s office would probably give him immunity from prosecution for his crimes. Catching a bank robber was a modest professional accomplishment for a law enforcement official, but exposing a web of police corruption was the kind of thing that made people’s careers, as long as it wasn’t a web of Jewish corruption, and the people doing the exposing weren’t Jewish.

“You’ve got no involvement in my schemes, and yet, if they were revealed—if I talked—you’d be destroyed. Inequitable, isn’t it, Baruch?”

“Goddamnit.”

“If your police department functioned the way it ought to, you could call for backup, and a dozen officers would arrive within minutes to overwhelm any support I might have waiting outside. But you can’t call anyone, because you’re afraid to let your friends know what I’m up to.”

“I could kill you right here,” I said.

He chirped again. “Can you? Your institutions have certainly tolerated your thuggish excesses in the past. But the violence they allow you to commit against addicts and deviants and the underclass tends to reinforce and support the prevailing social order. Shooting an unarmed, well-dressed white man in a bank disrupts that order. It’s bad for business, Baruch, and they won’t let you be bad for business. When we met, I said you reminded me of a dog, and you are, indeed, a useful working animal. But all dogs meet the same fate when they take to biting people.”

He was probably right

“You are all alone, Baruch, and you can’t stop me. You are going to let me walk out of here.”

But there was a hitch in his voice; the tiniest hint of uncertainty. It was enough to make me reevaluate the entire situation.

I took a long, hard look at Elijah. I saw a weasely little crook, scared and small and hiding behind his fifty-cent words and his fake European charm. He thought everything belonged to him. He thought he could waltz into my city, help himself to $150,000, and leave me to clean up the mess.

But he didn’t understand what he was dealing with. I wasn’t the dutiful servant of a corrupt agency, like my son thought I was. And Abramsky was right that I wasn’t the angel, looking for somebody to redeem. I certainly wasn’t the bumbling peon Greenfield seemed to believe I was.

I was a towering column of smoke rising above the desert. I was molten brimstone raining on the wicked. I was darkness blotting the sun and I was blood in the water. I was frogs and locusts and savage beasts. I was a razor blade sewn into a hemline.

I looked at the revolving door, and then I looked around the lobby, and I knew what I was going to do.

Elijah was smiling at me, and I smiled right back at him.

Everything that had seemed so complex was suddenly clear. He was a problem, and I was a solution. He was a nail, and I was a hammer. This was a man I could break six different ways, using only my hands.

“I must have really messed things up for you, arresting Plotkin and those boys,” I said. “You weren’t even here looking for me, were you? If you were expecting to see me, you never would have come without your buddies to back you up. You wouldn’t set up a confrontation here, inside the bank you’re planning to rob. Somebody might remember your face, if they saw us arguing. I have caught you casing the bank, trying to put a new plan together.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Plotkin doesn’t matter.” But the quaver in his voice was now more pronounced. He was afraid of me, and he was right to be afraid.

“I don’t think there’s anybody waiting outside. I think I could throw handcuffs on you and march you right out that door, and nobody would stop me.”

“You won’t take that risk,” he said. “And you don’t want to arrest me.”

He wasn’t smiling anymore. I still was.

“You’re right, I don’t want to arrest you, so I am going to let you go, free and clear,” I said. “But first, you and I are going to go to the men’s room for a minute.”

I stood up and punched him in the stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out of him. The door to the men’s toilet was on the same wall as the elevator, about six paces directly behind where Elijah was sitting. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him through it. He was too stunned to resist, and nobody seemed to notice.

Even the bathrooms in Charles Greenfield’s bank were fancy. The walls and floor were paneled with slabs of pink limestone, like the lobby outside. The fixtures all looked new and clean, and the mirrors above the sink were framed in brass. The line of urinals inside was unoccupied, and the toilet stalls were all empty. This was expected, since I hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the men’s room the entire time I had been sitting in the lobby.