Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (3 page)

“Then we shall be enemies.” He gave a nonchalant shrug as he pulled his jacket over his shoulders. “I shall be hunted by the feral dog. This outcome disappoints me, but I find it acceptable. Your pursuit will make my work here more interesting, and when I humiliate you, Baruch Schatz, it will burnish my legend.”

Something about the way he said that made the hairs on the backs of my hands stand on end. I wondered what sort of monster he kept hidden behind his own fragile veneer of civility. But the circumstances weren’t right for finding out; I was outnumbered and outgunned. So I turned my back on Elijah, to face the slab of muscle still blocking the exit.

“Get the fuck out of my way,” I said.

The big man looked over my shoulder at his boss, who must have gestured approval. He moved aside, and I pushed past him, out into the cold and the dark. The door slammed behind me. Startled by a shadow in my peripheral vision, I spun on my heel, drew my gun, and pointed it back toward the narrow entryway, in case somebody was coming out after me.

Nobody was.

3

2009

Morning wasn’t such a bad time at Valhalla Estates. The dining room had big plate glass picture windows overlooking the facility’s rear lawn, which was lush and sunny and big enough to play a game of touch football on, if anybody had the desire or capacity to do so.

I was not pleased that this specter from my past had arrived to spoil my breakfast. Breakfast was one of the better parts of my day. I wanted to enjoy it, because later, I’d have to do physical therapy. That was always unpleasant.

“You didn’t need to make a special trip out here to tell me you’re going to die,” I said. “You could have just sent a save-the-date for the funeral, or something.”

He cringed a little. There was a sagginess, a pouchiness to the various bulges of his face. Elijah might have been a legend, but he was made of flesh, and he was decaying like everything else.

“I thought you might want to do something about it,” he said.

“I don’t want to kill you anymore,” I said to Elijah. “I don’t care a whole lot what happens to you, one way or the other.”

“There are many words I’d use to describe Buck Schatz, but ‘indifferent’ would not be one of them.”

I stuck my fork into the eggs and stirred them around on the plate. I was hungry, and I was used to eating around this time, but I didn’t think I could choke down this slop with him watching me.

“I was a cop. Now I’m not anymore. I haven’t been a cop for a long time. I’ve been retired for more years than I spent working. I used to get paid to care about what people like you did, and what happened to you. Now somebody else has that job. If you need to talk to the police, I don’t suppose it’s too hard to find their number.”

“So, if you are no longer the police, what are you now?”

“The way I get through most days is by not asking myself that question,” I said.

He bared his teeth, and I saw they were straight and white like fresh-scrubbed kitchen tile. There was no natural way to make that out of what he’d had in his mouth the last time I saw him. The legendary thief was wearing a full set of dentures.

When he didn’t say anything for a minute, I asked him: “What is it you really want?”

“Help.” He clenched and unclenched those long pianist’s fingers. They were knottier than they’d once been, but the motion of them was still smooth and assured. “I need help.”

I shoveled some eggs into my mouth. I chewed for longer than eggs ought to require chewing—out of necessity, not for effect—and then I reached across the table to grab the plastic saltshaker. I shook it vigorously over my plate until the gelatinous yellow-white scrambled mass was coated with crystalline flakes. I took another bite, and this time, it was kind of crunchy. My doctor had warned me about my sodium intake, but salt was one of the only things I could still taste.

“And you came looking for me? To help you?” I asked.

He nodded a curt, European nod. “I asked for your help once before, and you refused. I thought, perhaps, this time might be different.”

“That line of reasoning runs into three problems that I can see. First, I’m eighty-eight years old. Second, I’m damn near crippled. And third, I don’t like you.”

“Baruch,” he said, lowering his voice to a near whisper. “Look at this place you’ve come to live in. Is this where you thought you’d end up? Is this what you wanted for Rose, your wife? The last time I saw you, you were violent and irrational and deeply misguided, but you were fierce and proud and full of dignity. There is no dignity in this place.”

I set the fork down. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I know you’re here because you need access to nursing care, due to your failing health. If you help me, I’ll pay you enough that you can hire a full-time nurse and buy a fine house outfitted with all the fixtures you need to ease your slide into decrepitude. I know about the fortune you lost, Baruch. If you make a friend of me, I can replace all of it.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be your friend. Why do people have such a hard time understanding that I ain’t friendly?”

“If you won’t help me, then kill me, damn you,” said Elijah. “At least deprive my pursuers that satisfaction.”

I hesitated, long enough to think about the kind of damage I could do with my fork. I considered the pale blue bulge of his jugular vein, throbbing beneath the loose flesh of his jaw. I wasn’t sure, though, whether I was fit enough to lunge across the table, and I didn’t want him bleeding all over my eggs. “What kind of help do you want from me?” I asked.

He stared straight into my eyes, without a trace of a smile, or I’d have thought he was putting me on. “I need you to keep me safe for as long as you’re able, and if I am killed, I want you to rain vengeance upon my enemies.”

“I don’t rain a lot of vengeance on people these days. Sometimes I dribble urine down the front of my pants, but that’s as close as I get.”

“I saw you on the news a few months ago. You blew a man’s head apart at close range with a pistol. You’re the meanest son of a bitch I ever met, Baruch. You’re mean in a way I never learned to be, no matter how bitter I became. You’re meaner than the soldier who shot my mother in the head. He looked pale and scared. You never looked scared. You never looked uncertain. Mean doesn’t weaken with age; it just curdles and gets more pungent. And, today, I need mean on my side.”

I always enjoyed hearing about my more attractive traits, but: “If you’re in danger, call the police.”

“I do not lightly subject myself to the coercive power of the State. I don’t know those people. They aren’t Jews.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You don’t want to call the police, because you are a criminal, and you need help with some kind of a crime.”

He leaned forward and bared his teeth again, as if he were shocked by the very suggestion. “I am reformed,” he told me. “I’ve become a philanthropist. I administer a charity that has helped hundreds of Jewish refugees immigrate to Israel.”

I would have thought he was lying, except that a charitable foundation was probably a great way to launder stolen money.

“Why don’t you ask Israel for help?” I said, liking the idea of Elijah going halfway around the world to a place where I wouldn’t have to deal with this.

“I’m not going to run, this time. I’m too old to run.”

“Philanthropists don’t usually get into the kind of trouble you say you’re in.”

“Not everyone wants Jews to get rescued.”

That sounded like a load. I ate some more of my salty eggs. They tasted like the sea, if the sea came from inside of a chicken. “And I’m too old to help you. I got nowhere to hide you, and no means to protect you. If you want to be safe, you have to go to the police.”

He sank into stylish, European reverie as he considered his options. I ignored him and focused on the eggs. I was thinking about going back through the chow line to get a bagel. The staff at Valhalla had an amazing way of cooking them, so they came out burned on the bottom but still frozen in the middle.

“If I go to the police, will you wield your influence to assure that I am protected? Will you make my safety your personal responsibility? Will you see to it that the danger I am facing is taken seriously, and that I am not subject to persecution?”

“You’ll have to admit to whatever you’re involved in. You’ll have to confess to everything you have ever done, and you’ll have to tell the officers about these people who are after you.”

He sat, contemplating his options, while I chewed. “That’s acceptable,” he said at last. “But I am not depending on the police. I am depending on you. I want you to assure my safety, and if I am killed, I want my vengeance to be a matter of honor for you.”

“Whatever you say,” I told him. “If you’re going to turn yourself in, I’ll broker your surrender. You ought to get a lawyer first.”

“I’ll look into that.”

“Well, you might want to hurry, since you’re going to be dead soon,” I said. “Or, don’t. If you wait long enough, the problem will most likely solve itself.”

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

Early in my career, I responded to a domestic disturbance call, involving a man in a leather coat who called himself Liminal Doug. He stood in the doorway of his shitty duplex and explained to me that, when a pimp truly loves a bitch, he sometimes needs to go upside her head.

I leaned sideways a little, so I could look over his shoulder and into the residence. I saw a woman lying on the floor, weeping and clutching at her face.

“So, I guess I must love you a whole bunch,” I said to Liminal Doug. Then I caved his goddamn skull in with my police baton.

The stick I carried around in those days was a blackjack truncheon; a ball of lead the size of a child’s fist wrapped in leather and mounted on a coil of stiff spring. A lot of officers were switching over to the side-handled nightsticks, persuaded by arguments that the new design was superior for defensive purposes. Since you had to swing the thing sideways, it kept your arm raised in a blocking position, and since the stick extended along the forearm past the grip, it provided some protection against a knife-wielding attacker. The nightstick was also supposed to be more difficult for an assailant to strip away during a struggle.

I wasn’t impressed by such practicalities, however, because I did not generally make a habit of trying to block knives with my arms. If somebody came at me with a knife, I did the sensible thing and shot him. And the sideways swing of a nightstick just felt counterintuitive to me. The blackjack felt like an extension of my fist, and I had a deep affection for the softness of the leather around the lead weight and the give in the spring. I liked the way the bludgeon would bounce off an offender’s head. I liked the sound it made.

I called the blackjack “Discretion,” and I exercised my Discretion liberally.

The district attorney refused to pursue assault charges against Liminal Doug, on account of what he deemed an excessive use of force on my part, but then somebody from the federal prosecutor’s office interviewed the girl at the hospital, and then charged Doug with a Mann Act violation: transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. That got him three years up at the federal farm.

And nobody ever called him Liminal Doug again after I busted his head open. People called him Doug Drool, on account of one of the more embarrassing side effects of his brain injury.

He also suffered from eye twitches and occasional seizures.

4

1965

People who learn most of what they know about police work from television programs and detective novels are always surprised by how much cops rely on dumb luck. We don’t solve crimes with brilliant deductions and minute observations. We don’t outsmart the bad guys most of the time. If we were smart, we wouldn’t be working jobs that involve getting shot at on a regular basis.

Actually, it’s hard to get away with crime. There are always witnesses. I saw a TV show where the cops found a body in the street, so they called in some white-coat scientist guys from the crime lab. The techs found some synthetic fibers near the corpse. Then they identified the killer by comparing the fibers to some kind of database that knew what kind of carpet everybody had.

That seemed fake to me. As far as I know, most carpeting is pretty much the same, and most people don’t have bits of their rugs sticking to them when they leave the house to go kill somebody. But if there’s a body in the street, and you send guys out to knock on every door in the neighborhood, a good percentage of the time, somebody will just tell you who the killer is.

The reason cops cruise around neighborhoods or walk the beat is that, more often than most people realize, you catch the bad guys by just being in the right place at the right time to observe suspicious activity.

I wasn’t looking, specifically, for Paul Schulman when I went to the synagogue. I wasn’t even at the synagogue on police business. My son had been going two afternoons a week for bar mitzvah lessons with Abramsky, the new assistant rabbi, and I was just there to pick him up. Brian and Schulman and the rabbi were coming out the front door when I turned onto the street.

Abramsky was supposed to be a “Modern Orthodox” rabbi, which, as I understood it, meant he shaved his beard but still kept his sidelocks. With his ridiculous haircut and his pudgy round face, he looked a lot like a giant toddler, and I disagreed with most of his ideas. Still, I liked him a little better than the senior rabbi, who believed cotton clothing was unkosher and wore black wool suits year-round. Even before there was allegedly global warming, Memphis, Tennessee, was not a good place to wear wool in the summertime, and between late April and mid-November, the old rabbi smelled like a pile of dirty gym socks.

Paul Schulman was the right age to have served in Korea, but he’d never joined up. You could get designated 4-F if you were deemed unacceptable for military duty on physical, mental, or moral grounds, and Schulman was disqualified all three ways.

He stood five feet and eleven inches and weighed 210 pounds, but with all that size, he still managed to seem like a small man. Part of that was because of his face; he was bucktoothed and jug-eared, and his jaw receded timidly into his neck. He also had a habit of tucking his elbows against his torso and folding his limp hands in front of his chest, which made him seem submissive and weak. And he had an ungainly, flat-footed way of walking.