Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (26 page)

“Seems like a pretty big hole in your impenetrable security system, if somebody can just walk right out the door after emptying your vault.”

“We are a bank, not a prison. We want to keep people from getting in, not prevent them from getting out. Our security system assures that an alarm will be triggered and the vault will be sealed before a thief ever gets near it. Preventing an escape should never become a concern. And, of course, anything that would prevent a thief from escaping would also impede an emergency evacuation.”

“The problem is that your security didn’t work, and we need to figure out why,” I said. “And it certainly wasn’t helpful that the thief was able to walk right out the door after he cleaned out your vault.”

“If he got out that way, I don’t understand why the alarm didn’t go off when he opened it.”

“What if the alarm was going off already?”

Cartwright shrugged.

I turned to the guards. “Were either of you men guarding this vault the morning of the robbery?”

One of them nodded. “I was, until Mr. Greenfield moved all security staff to the lobby, to keep the rioters from smashing the windows.”

“Were you standing here in front of the door when it sealed?”

He shook his head. “I was already up front. But I had only just gotten there. Mr. Greenfield called over the intercom and told us that we were to reinforce the street entrance, and then he activated the security system.”

“Just so I’ve got this right: He moved you up front, and then he triggered the alarm, which sealed the vault.”

“That’s right.”

“And the vault was open when you left it?”

“Yeah, but not for very long. Couple of minutes, at most. Nobody could have come in and robbed it before he set the alarm off.”

I looked at the vault again, and then I looked at the security gate blocking the hallway. Then I looked at the ceiling.

“Is there a janitor here?” I asked Cartwright.

“Yeah, of course. Somebody’s got to clean up.”

“Have him come down here, and tell him to bring his broom.”

Cartwright scurried off and fetched an elderly colored man in a faded blue jumpsuit.

“Were you here yesterday when the bank was robbed?” I asked the janitor.

“No, sir. I got sent home with the office staff. I was none too happy about it. You know, they all get salaries, but I get pay by the hour. If I ain’t workin’, I ain’t eatin’.”

I nodded. “Can I borrow your broom?” I asked.

“I’m gonna need it back,” he said, but he handed it to me.

I poked the ceiling with it.

Greenfield’s office was covered in luxurious hardwood, and the grand lobby was made of pink limestone, but the guts of the bank, the parts the clients didn’t see, were no-frills commercial office space. The walls were thin and felt like cardboard, the floors were cheap tile, and the ceilings were drop-in panels made of compressed sawdust and asbestos, held up by a grid of steel beams.

Using the broom, I lifted a panel out of place. There was an eighteen-inch gap between the panel and the concrete floor of the next story, and electrical wiring and heating ductwork filled most of that empty space. But I figured a man could fit up there, and the steel grid would support him, as long as he splayed himself out and spread his weight over several beams.

“Does the security cage stop at the panels, or does it go all the way up?” I asked.

“It’s bolted to the concrete, and wired for alarms, if somebody tries to tamper with it. There is a gap in it for electrical, but it’s far too small for a man to fit through.”

I pushed the ceiling panel back into place, and then I gave the broom back to the janitor.

“So how did they beat the security alarms?” Cartwright asked. “How did they crack the vault?”

“I’ve got no idea,” I said. Greenfield had clearly wanted to blame the security system so that the bank could collect on the guarantee. So, I said: “I guess the vault or the alarm must have malfunctioned.”

And that’s what it says in the official report, as attested by lead investigating officer, Det. Baruch Schatz: The vault was plundered during an episode of racial unrest, by perpetrators unknown, as a result of an as-yet-unidentified mechanical failure of the security system.

37

1965

The camp at Auschwitz was comprised of barracks where the prisoners slept and the parade ground where the roll calls were conducted. All of this was ringed by high walls and razor wire, and monitored from guard towers, to prevent any escapes. But Auschwitz was a work camp first, and imprisonment was only a secondary purpose. Every day, the prisoners marched through the gates to their various labor details, supervised only by a couple of armed guards.

Of course, those guards were vigilant, and there were no real restraints on their use of deadly force. If a prisoner ran, the guards would shoot him. If he somehow got past them, they’d hunt him with dogs.

Elijah got out of Auschwitz by bribing a guard to let him flee, and that guard taught Elijah his most important principle; the rule that guided his future endeavors and gave shape to whatever passed for his moral philosophy:

Every lock has a fatal weakness. No matter how complex or refined its mechanism; no matter how many pins and tumblers it has, no matter how many plates of steel you embed it in, every lock has a key. And that key is in the hands of a man.

A sophisticated lock can thwart the efforts of even the most talented safecracker, and a sturdy enough vault can withstand a power drill or a blowtorch or even dynamite.

But there’s no technology that can reinforce the man with the key, and there’s no way to increase the complexity of the urges that motivate him. So the best lock in the world can never be sturdier than some asshole’s integrity.

The vault at the Cotton Planters Union Bank was a steel box with walls two feet thick, sunk into a block of concrete, protected by two armed guards, and rigged to a complex security alarm that would seal it at the first sign of a threat.

Six floors above the vault, Charles Greenfield sat in his lavish office, brooding. His career with the bank had been successful, but now he had climbed as high as he was ever going to get. He was an affluent man, but he was a servant to the truly rich; the people who owned everything. He had raised himself high enough to see over their walls and into their kingdom, but he would never dwell there.

He would never be one of them. And probably, he knew why that was; probably, he knew that even if his Tennessee drawl was spot-on perfect; even if he wore what they wore, and ate their deep-fried foods and sipped on sour mash whiskey, he’d always just be a Jew to them. Useful and servile and socially inferior.

He was a cog in a machine; an important cog, perhaps, but a cog, nonetheless. And below him, a small, sputtering inefficiency in the works was causing tens of thousands of dollars to pile up in his vault each week.

At precisely 10:30 in the morning on a Tuesday in late November, the protest outside Kluge erupted into violence. Elijah knew this would happen, because he’d paid Officer Len Weisskopf thirty-five hundred dollars to start busting skulls open at that specific time, on that specific day.

In response to these events, Greenfield moved all his guards to the front of the bank to protect the street-facing entrance, and then he pressed the alarm to seal and secure the vault.

If you review Greenfield’s conduct during the riot and the robbery, as a police detective or an insurance investigator might, there is nothing clearly wrong about any of the decisions he made. Except that the result of those decisions was that the vault was open and unattended for about ninety seconds, after the guards redeployed to the front of the bank, but before the alarm triggered.

And that was when Elijah slithered out of the ceiling, where he’d been hiding, splayed out on the steel beams. Greenfield probably stashed Elijah up there early in the morning, before the regular staff came in, when the premises were patrolled by only a single night guard.

It must have hurt like hell to perch up there, with his weight resting on a smashed kneecap and a crushed hand. But Elijah could deal with it; he’d survived worse.

And the payoff was worth it. He walked into the open vault and scooped all the cash into a bag and was out before Greenfield triggered the alarm.

The security cage and the alleyway door were wired to the alarm, but since the alarm was already going off, that didn’t matter. Elijah just walked through the security cage and out of the bank, and then he disappeared into the crowd of white office workers fleeing the neighborhood. Meanwhile, since the vault was sealed by the alarm, nobody would even discover the theft for three hours.

I don’t know how Elijah got to Greenfield, but the bank manager must have been in on it. There’s no other way the scheme works.

But here’s the thing: If that’s the scheme, then what was Ari Plotkin’s role? After I inspected the vault, I pulled Plotkin out of the lockup, put him in an interrogation room, and raked him over the coals again, just to see if I could rattle anything loose. I think, by then, he’d worked out that Elijah had set him up. If he knew anything, he probably would have snitched just for spite. But he didn’t know anything other than what I’d already learned from his crew: They were supposed to walk in with guns and clean out the cages. He hadn’t been involved in any plot to take the vault.

I went up to my desk, leaned back in my chair, lit a cigarette, and tried to figure out how the facts fit together.

I thought about how the department had taken the bank investigation away from Whit Pecker and dropped it on me. I’d busted a gang planning to rob the same bank just a few days earlier, and it seemed likely that the foiled plot was related to the successful theft. It made perfect sense that the department would tap me to run the investigation; I’d even go so far as to say it was a predictable outcome.

I thought about the first time I’d met Elijah; that meeting in the basement barroom full of river-stink and his five huge thugs. Why had he been looking for me, specifically? Perhaps because I was Jewish. But I had no reputation for corruption, and he had no reason to think I would be amenable to his offer. Why would he tell me he was planning a heist in Memphis; that he was trying to recruit a Jewish cop into his scheme? Why would he take the risk of even letting me know that he was in town?

I thought about Paul Schulman. If he hadn’t run away when he saw me in front of the synagogue, I probably would have ignored him. But he ran, so I chased him.

And when I caught him, he’d given me two important clues: He told me that the plan was connected to the Kluge strike, and he told me that Plotkin was involved.

How had Schulman learned these things? He was a third-rate hustler, and Elijah was notoriously secretive. And why had Schulman run when he saw me? He wasn’t one of the great intellects of his generation, but he had to know that I’d give chase if he fled. If I had to think of it, that outcome was predictable, too. Elijah had used Schulman to feed me that information.

When I held off on pursuing Plotkin and decided to try to stake out the bank instead, Elijah had shown up to provoke me. And I had responded in the most predictable way possible, by arresting the man that Elijah wanted me to arrest. And, because I’d arrested Plotkin, I ended up in charge of investigating the vault robbery.

In the end, any detective—maybe not Whit Pecker, but any competent detective—would have worked out that the vault was likely robbed during the ninety seconds it was open and unattended, and there was no way that could happen without help from somebody working in the bank.

Elijah and Greenfield wanted to be investigated by the one detective who had no desire to unravel their scheme; the one detective who would be unwilling to show the world how Jews in positions of trust and authority had betrayed society to enrich themselves.

I’d done exactly what they wanted me to do; I ran Weisskopf out of town before he spoke to the men investigating the Kluge massacre, and I covered up the ninety-second gap that Greenfield created for Elijah.

I don’t know if what I did was the right thing, but I protected the Jews. I protected my family.

38

2009

“The weakness of every lock is the man with the key,” said Rutledge. “So, if you want to get out of a concentration camp, you get to the guard. If you want to get into a bank vault, you get to the bank manager.”

“And if you want to get into three different hidden caches of drug dealer money?” Clark asked.

“He had Carlo Cash’s iPhone. As soon as he switched it on, Carlo could track him with the Find My iPhone application. Elijah wanted Carlo to find him,” Rutledge said.

“But Elijah didn’t switch it on until he was in police custody,” I said. “He wanted to bring Cash directly into conflict with the police.”

“And we responded to the attack on Andre Price with massive retaliation. We swept the streets clean of Carlo Cash’s people. We’ve been doing somebody’s dirty work. But whose?”

I shrugged. “The competition? Some underling who decided it was time to sit in the big chair? Personally, I think it was the Mexican suppliers. But I don’t know these guys, and I don’t care that much. I’m after my bank robber. The drug dealers are your problem. But if I had your job, I’d start with the assumption that whoever wanted Carlo Cash out of the picture was the same person who gave Elijah the address of the first stash house, six months ago.”

Rutledge squatted down and looked at the bleached spot on the warehouse floor. It looked exactly like nothing at all.

“So, how does an eighty-year-old thief get past a bunch of armed thugs to rob Carlo Cash’s locked-up stash?”

“My guess is, he buys the thugs off. Jacquarius Madison told me that Carlo’s business only works for as long as his people stay loyal. Elijah sows disloyalty. It’s how he works.”

“But Jacques said that the guards were killed.”

“Yeah, but how does he know? I asked him how they were killed, and he couldn’t tell me. I asked him what happened to the bodies, and he didn’t know. Most likely, the stash house was empty, and the guards were gone. Carlo told everyone his men had been killed, because he couldn’t let anyone find out that his crew had betrayed and robbed him. But after that first robbery, Carlo’s top lieutenants had to go with him to meet the Mexicans. And Carlo didn’t have the money. Jacques told me those guys thought they were all going to be killed at that meeting. They had to be considering their long-term employment prospects—their long-term survival prospects—with Carlo Cash after that.”