Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (22 page)

“It was drug money. It didn’t really belong to anyone. Like, legitimately.”

“You’ve had two years of law school,” I said. “Robbing a drug dealer is still robbery. You know that.”

I was reminded of something somebody once told me about the legitimacy of property rights.

“Well, the point I was making is that, if it wasn’t his phone, the owner could have tracked it,” Tequila was saying. “The phone has a GPS receiver in it, just like the tracking bugs you’ve seen on television. There’s an app—a computer program—called Find My iPhone. You can open the program from your laptop, and the phone will transmit its exact location, within a couple of feet, over the Internet. These things get stolen a lot, and people activate the program, and then report the thieves’ addresses to law enforcement. If the phone belonged to Cash or one of his people, they might have been able to track its location that way.”

“If they could find out where Elijah was so easily, why didn’t they take him sooner?”

“The phone has to be connected to the network to transmit its location. You said that it was switched off, and then Andre turned it on. Activating it made it traceable. But why would Elijah be carrying around a stolen phone that the people who were hunting him could locate?”

“I know why,” I said. “I should have figured it out sooner. He’s done something like this before.”

29

1965

Two days after I beat up Elijah, at half past ten in the morning, I was sitting in my car outside the bank, watching the front entrance, and waiting for something to happen.

I was thinking about finding myself some cheap, greasy food when I heard shouting behind me, coming from the protest.

“What you doin’, man?”

“Get on the ground!”

“Hey, we got rights!”

“On the fucking ground! All of you!”

My car was parked in a parallel space, and the front door of the Kluge office building was only about two hundred yards away, so I climbed out and started running toward the noise.

I could see officers brandishing their nightsticks, wading into the crowd of strikers, and swinging indiscriminately. Some of the Negroes had been carrying protest signs mounted on wooden posts, and they’d torn away the cardboard to make the things into bludgeons.

The loud, clear voice of Longfellow Molloy rose above the noise of the melee: “Gentlemen, we are marching to preserve our dignity. Don’t let them make you act undignified.”

One of the officers got hold of a bullhorn and shouted him down: “You are all under arrest. Drop your weapons and lie flat on the ground, with your hands above your heads.”

Some of the protesters were trying to flee. I saw an officer chase a woman down the street and hit her in the head with a club. She fell to the ground, and he kept hitting her.

“They want to make us criminals,” Molloy was shouting. “They want to make us animals. The world will see what they are doing. The world will see.”

But nobody was listening to him. A tear gas canister exploded in the air over the protesters’ heads, and people started coughing and clawing at their eyes. I saw four burly colored boys drag an officer to the ground, tear off his helmet, and stomp on his face. The other police saw this, too. I saw several nearby officers unholster their weapons.

“Don’t shoot,” I shouted at them, waving my badge above my head. “They’ll riot all over the city!”

Somebody must have been in charge here, but I couldn’t spot any brass. Maybe they were running the show by radio, or maybe they’d fled when the violence started.

Not all the officers opened fire, thank God. If they had, they’d have killed all the protesters and a bunch of them probably would have shot each other in the confusion. But three cops emptied their service weapons into the crowd, firing what would later be reported as eighteen shots.

A half-dozen protesters fell to the ground, killed or wounded. The rest dropped any weapons they were carrying and tried to flee. The officers were chasing down the runners, beating them with nightsticks and putting them in handcuffs.

I saw Longfellow Molloy lying in a pool of blood with one of his eyes and part of his nose missing. I thought of something Abramsky had said about the burning of Sodom: If the angels could have found ten righteous men, the city might have been spared.

Behind me, I heard a noise that sounded like a fire engine’s siren. I turned around, looking for something on fire, and then realized I was hearing the alarm at the Cotton Planters Union Bank.

I hesitated. There was going to be an investigation of this debacle; somebody was at fault. If anyone ever hoped to figure out who started the violence here, we would need to immediately start taking statements from witnesses; if the protesters left, they’d be too scared to come forward to give statements, and we’d never find them again. And once the officers involved got their lies in order, there would be no hope of sorting out the truth.

But I wasn’t technically even supposed to be on the scene of the protest. I didn’t want my name in the reports about a racial massacre. I didn’t want my photographs in any history books next to this. So I ran back toward the bank.

By now, all the office workers were trying to flee the neighborhood. The streets were jammed with cars, and people were streaming out of the revolving doors of skyscrapers on foot. It was weird to see the sidewalks so crowded; nobody in Memphis walked anywhere. It took me eight minutes to elbow my way through the crowd of panicked office workers and get to the bank. Robberies don’t last eight minutes; by the time I got there, I knew Elijah and his gang were already gone.

The revolving door was locked into place, but one of the guards standing inside recognized me and let me in. The lobby was mostly empty. It seemed like Greenfield must have allowed most of his staff to go home. Only his assistant, Riley Cartwright, and five uniformed security guards were inside.

“How many were there?” I asked. “Can you describe them? Can you tell me which way they went?”

“Nothing happened,” Greenfield said. “I activated the security system in order to seal the vault. It seemed like a reasonable precaution, in case riots break out.”

“There was no robbery?”

He shook his head. “Everything here is fine. My security staff will stay on duty, in case any looters try to break in, but the vault is secure and inaccessible for the next three hours.”

Maybe I’d actually managed to scare Elijah out of town. “Well, I guess I can be of better use elsewhere, then,” I said. “Call the police if you see anything suspicious going on.”

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

The Negro response to the morning’s violence turned out to be more subdued than I’d feared it might be; the Kluge strike had become a focal point for the anxieties of whites working in downtown offices, but it had never really been much of a cause among black Memphians. It seemed most people had viewed the Kluge strike as a labor issue rather than a race issue.

And after six uneventful weeks of protests in front of the Kluge offices, there were no journalists around when the strike finally turned violent.

The national news media would be interested, now that our story had a body count, but without gruesome, sensationalistic images or film footage, the story wouldn’t get too much play on television. Since nobody had really been paying attention to the strike outside of Memphis, only the local news people were reporting the story in the hours after the massacre.

They had to live in this town, so the Memphis journalists were treading carefully in their coverage, focusing on the labor angle rather than the racial issue. Nobody wanted to publish or broadcast the story that would set off a riot.

The strike was too small to attract much attention from national civil rights organizations, and the freight workers tended not to be the churchgoing sort, so the black preachers in Memphis hadn’t been rallying their flocks behind that particular cause. The crowd had been relatively small when the violence broke out, and most of the firsthand witnesses were arrested at the scene. Until the department started turning the protesters loose, hours after the shootings, very few people knew exactly what had gone down.

The mayor wanted the whole thing kept quiet more than he wanted somebody to blame for it, and the brass was operating under the assumption that they could sweep the whole nasty situation under the rug if they just ran a thorough and diligent investigation that reached the inevitable conclusion: The officers had conducted themselves in an exemplary manner, and that any beatings or shootings that may have been directed at the strikers were fully justified.

By the time most people who might have responded violently learned of the shootings, the streets were full of cops. By nightfall, we’d doubled our previous department record for the most arrests made in a single day, and our holding cells were full of Negroes. There weren’t any riots in Memphis; at least not in 1965. The peace was kept.

Except at the Cotton Planters Union Bank. When the vault opened itself, after the three-hour alarm lockdown ended, all the money inside was gone.

30

2009

I was back on my adjustable hospital bed. The nurse had put an IV in my arm, and she’d told me they were monitoring my iron, because my bloodwork showed that I was anemic. This wasn’t surprising to me. I felt exactly like I’d been in a car accident.

Rutledge, Narcotics, was sitting next to me in the hospital-issue version of a comfy chair; a cheap, flimsy-looking thing with plastic cushions. He was too tall for it, and he looked kind of uncomfortable. He was resting his right ankle on his left knee, and had his elbows splayed over the armrests. He was holding something that I had at first thought was a notepad, but which was, in fact, some kind of electronic device: either a very large Internet phone or a very small computer.

My grandson was so excited, he couldn’t seem to sit down at all. He was pacing around by the foot of the bed, and I was getting annoyed just looking at him.

“I don’t understand how we’re supposed to find this guy based on the cell phone,” Rutledge said. “We don’t have the e-mail address or the password he’s registered it to, so we can’t trace it online.”

Tequila started bouncing up and down. The only thing he liked better than knowing the answer was knowing the answer when nobody else did, so he could feel like he was the smartest kid in the class. “Telephones can be tracked by GPS,” he said. “But their location can also be triangulated by the phone company, using its cell-network infrastructure. They keep records of which cell towers every phone talks to, and this data can be used to find out where a phone, and presumably the phone’s owner, were located at a particular time.”

Rutledge looked annoyed. “I know that,” he said. “But in order to track a cell phone, you have to know the phone number. You can’t just tell me that some guy has a cell phone, and then ask me to find it. Everybody has a damn cell phone.”

It occurred to me that I didn’t know Rutledge’s first name. I flipped backwards through my notebook to see if I’d written it down, but I had not, so he probably hadn’t told me.

I wondered if his name was something really black, and he was embarrassed about it. Maybe Rutledge was his first name, and not his last name. But if that was the case, then I didn’t know his last name. Unless it was Narcotics. I thought about asking him, but he seemed like the sort who might get all touchy and indignant about that kind of question.

“But the type of phone is distinct, and the cell network can also detect which kind of phone it is communicating with,” my grandson said. “He had an iPhone.”

“So what? There are tens of thousands of iPhones in this city. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Everybody’s got a damn iPhone.”

“Right, but the cell providers keep logs of their towers, as well as logs of the phones, so it can look up a particular tower to see which phones were in range of it, just like they can look up a phone number and see which towers it connected to. We know the phone we’re looking for was at the Jewish cemetery off South Parkway at three o’clock yesterday. That cemetery is next to a rail yard, an abandoned factory, and a big gravel pit. There’s a good chance that it was the only iPhone in the vicinity of the cemetery at that time, and the phone company should be able to check the logs of the towers that cover the cemetery and find that number.”

“And once they can identify the phone, they can find out where it’s been since yesterday the regular way,” Rutledge said. He looked impressed. “How did you even know about that?”

“I took a seminar last semester about emerging technologies and privacy issues,” Tequila said. “It’s a very fertile area for legal scholarship, because courts are trying to take rules created to govern analog surveillance and apply them to facts relating to new developments like cell phones and Internet activity. There are conflicting decisions among the federal circuit courts about the privacy expectations associated with some of this stuff, and eventually, the Supreme Court is going to have to weigh in and make some major decisions about whether the digital footprint is entitled to protection under the Fourth Amendment.”

“I’m glad I ain’t got a digital footprint,” I said.

“You ought to be glad your friend Elijah has one,” Tequila said.

“I guess. Do we have to get a warrant to do this?”

“No,” Rutledge said. “The phone companies pull their logs for us whenever we ask.”

“That’s the constitutional issue; whether police should be able to obtain data like that without judicial supervision,” Tequila said. “Maybe I will write a law review article about it. I’m on the staff of the
Journal of Legislation and Public Policy
.”

“Keep it in your pants,” I told him.

Rutledge pressed his computer device to his ear, which I guess meant it was a cell phone.

“You’re not supposed to use those things in the hospital,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said. “Well, who’s gonna stop me?”

31

1965

I was sitting at my desk in the offices of the Detectives’ bureau at the Central Police Station. I’d left my car in front of the bank and walked back; the streets were too jammed up to drive.