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

by Friedman, Daniel

  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.

  Even a peaceable man would have had a hard time not punching Paul Schulman, and I’d never been a peaceable man. So it was a good thing that he was a scumbag and I was allowed to beat the shit out of him whenever I felt like it.

  He was small-time, mostly: he ran little scams, bilking widows out of pension checks and selling bogus investments to credulous Negroes. But occasionally he overcame his numerous defects and managed to worm his way into a crew working on an elaborate con, or planning some kind of heist.

  He wasn’t a thinker, and he wasn’t much good as muscle, but he had nimble fingers and a certain degree of facility when it came to opening doors or cheap safes without using keys. If you were looking to break into something, Schulman was the sort of guy you went to if you couldn’t get a first-rate safecracker. Fortunately for him, a lot of valuables were protected by third-rate locks.

  Paradoxically, his capacity to involve himself in these larger crimes was what had kept him from serving any long stretches in prison for his petty offenses. Detective work was kind of like fishing: it was sometimes a good idea to throw the little ones back, so that you might reel in some big ones later on. And Schulman was a strong candidate for catch-and-release because he could be counted on to spill whatever he knew, anytime I roughed him up a little. There are few things more valuable to a detective than a reliable snitch.

  But on that particular evening, at the synagogue, Schulman saw my car and he took off running.

  Like I explained, there’s a lot of luck involved with police work; and knowing how to capitalize on that luck solves more cases than a capacity to make obscure deductions or a good eye for tiny clues.

  A crime novelist gave a speech a couple of years ago at the Jewish Community Center, and he said coincidence is anathema in a mystery. He said that all crime stories are about how the universe is fundamentally an orderly place, and how disorder, in the form of crime and corruption, is systematically expunged. Therefore, the story must also have order; everything must follow logically. Everything must fit together neatly.

  I don’t know much about narrative structure or overarching themes of order and disorder, but I know a bit about crime and how it gets punished. I worked plenty of cases that got messy, and I’ve seen more than a few that broke on account of coincidence.

  If my son hadn’t been studying at the synagogue with the rabbi, I wouldn’t have been there to pick him up. If Schulman’s father hadn’t died that year, he wouldn’t have come to the evening Maariv service to say Kaddish. If he’d kept his cool, I probably would have ignored him; I wasn’t particularly interested in him that day. And if I hadn’t chased him down, I might never have found any kind of lead on Elijah.

  But I was there, and he was there, and he ran when he saw me. And if somebody thinks they have a reason to run away from me, I assume I must have a good reason to chase them. Thus, I pursued.

  When Schulman bolted, I was halfway into a parallel space on the street, so I cut the wheel and worked the shifter, and the Dodge lurched back into the
road. My son was shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear what it was over the sound of the engine. I popped the clutch and the car jumped forward. I caught Schulman at the end of the block and drove over the curb and onto the sidewalk to cut him off. He was running as fast as he could, leaning forward and off balance. I think he’d been planning to try to dash across the intersection through oncoming traffic and lose me that way, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  He put a hand on my car to steady himself and turned to try to run away in the other direction. But I had more experience catching bad guys than he did in fleeing from cops. Before he could pivot and dash off, I kicked my door open and caught him in the back of his legs with the corner of it. He pitched forward and staggered a couple of steps, which gave me enough time to jump out of the car and and smash him between the shoulder blades with my Discretion.

  The flesh and bone rippled under the weight of the lead, and the spring flexed, so the club bounced off his back with a satisfying, hollow sound. Hitting somebody with the blackjack felt like banging a bongo drum with a hard rubber mallet. The impact of the blow spiked Schulman straight to the ground. He didn’t even have a chance to get an arm underneath his face before it hit the pavement.

  “Seems like you have something you want to tell me, Paul,” I said.

  He spit a big wad of wet stuff onto the sidewalk, and I saw there was some blood in it. “I don’t. I swear.”

  “If you lie to me, I might get angry with you. And if I get angry, you’ll get hurt.”

  “Oh, God. Please don’t.”

  “If you have nothing to hide, why’d you run from me?”

  He paused just long enough to anticipate the consequences, before he said: “My current circumstances entirely justify that decision.” Then he braced a little, in case that caused me to hit him.

  “You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t mind being a little dumber, if I could also run a little faster,” he said.

  “It ain’t the weight of your brains slowing you down, Paul.” I pushed the toe of my boot into his soft belly, and he curled himself up into a fetal position.

  “It feels like something is grinding inside of me.”

  “Those are your ribs. I’ve gone and broken your damn ribs. And if you don’t start talking, I will break something else.”

  Schulman didn’t respond, but his gaze fixed on a point behind me. I glanced back and saw that my son had caught up with us.

  “What are you doing, Dad?”

  “Get in the car and shut the door,” I said.

  “Why did you hit Mr. Schulman?”

  “Get in the car and shut the door.”

  “It’s okay. Your pop and I are just having a little chat,” said Schulman.

  “Don’t talk to my kid,” I told him.

  Brian crossed his arms. “This is wrong.”

  “Give me something, Paul,” I said. “I don’t necessarily want to beat you in front of the boy, but I’ve got a real bad temper and I might just lose it.” I raised the club and he winced. Usually, it took very little persuasion to get a low-rent scumbag of this caliber to squeal. The list of people who could clam Paul Schulman up like this was short.

  I knelt next to him; got my face close to his. I looked in his eyes, and I could tell if he was deciding whether his fear of me outweighed his fear of whoever he was protecting. I made a quick calculation. “Tell me what you know about Elijah. Are you in on this job he’s lining up?”

  I tightened my grip on the club. He looked at me for about ten seconds, while I loomed enormous and occupied his entire field of vision, and he realized that I was all-knowing and all-seeing and terrible in my wrath.

  “I’m on the outside of this thing,” he said. “I know a little, but not much. Please, Buck, don’t hit me again.”

  “Give me what you have, and we’ll see how much mercy it buys you.”

  He shuddered, and then he cringed, because shuddering shifted his cracked ribs. Then he screamed a little, because cringing just made it hurt worse. “Ari Plotkin has a piece of it, but he says Elijah don’t trust me. I heard the job has got something to do with the colored boys striking down by the river. That’s all I know.”

  I stood silently over him for long enough to see if he had anything else he wanted to say. But it didn’t look like there was anything else for me to get out of him, except for tears and drool.

  “I ought to arrest you, Paul. I know damn well you’ve been up to something lately that should earn you six months upstate. But I’m off duty, and I’m feeling charitable,” I said. “When you think about what happened here tonight, think about how nice I was to you. Next time you make me chase you, I will be a lot less forgiving.”

  I rose to my feet, which brought me eye-to-eye with Abramsky, who was standing with one protective arm draped over Brian’s shoulder.

  “This is a place of prayer, Detective,” he said.

  I glanced down at Schulman, who was quivering on the sidewalk. “I guess Mr. Schulman should have prayed a little harder.”

  The rabbi pinched his features so hard, his lips turned white. “These are your own people. How can you do this to your own people?”

  “Pretty easily, it turns out,” I said. I pointed at Brian with the club. “Get in the car.”

  But my son just stood there and balled up his fists. “I want to hear a real answer to that question.” In some ways, he was a lot like his mother.

  I looked at the rabbi. “Isn’t there a commandment about how he’s got to do what I say?”

  Abramsky crossed his arms. “He’s almost a man, and a man can’t just look the other way when he sees something like this. I think you had better try to justify yourself.”

  I was surprised by this show of backbone from such a soft, childlike man. I said to Brian: “Paul Schulman is a scumbag. He is not our people. We are nothing like this man. That isn’t what we are.”

  “You may have a big stick, but you are still a Jew, and one day you will learn that,” Abramsky said. “I hope, for the boy’s sake, that lesson doesn’t come at too great a price.”

  “If you feel like doing a mitzvah, call an ambulance for this schmuck,” I said to the rabbi. Then I turned to Brian: “Get your ass in the car. We’re done here.”

  5

  2009

  I was lying flat on my back on a soft mat in a windowless interior room, staring up into the fluorescent lights. Getting myself down to the floor had been accomplished with great difficulty, and not without assistance. Getting up would be painful.

  “Let me see you do two more sets of leg lifts,” said Claudia, who was a physical therapist or a rehab specialist or something like that.

  “I think I’ve had enough for today,” I said.

  “If you can swing that axe, Buck, you can give me a couple more leg lifts.” She pronounced her name “Cloudy-ah.” Her people were from someplace in Central America, and if she ever went back there, she was well qualified to work as a torturer for an autocratic governing regime. I’d had hurt put on me by some of the best, and this girl could hang with any of them.

  “I’m all worn out from the axe. The axe was a hell of a workout. I think it earned me a day off.”

  “There are no days off. There are just days when you get better, and days when you get worse.”

  This was the ninety-second day I’d done rehab therapy. This was the ninety-second day I’d spent paying the price for going after an old enemy and tangling with bad guys.

  I’d already done fifteen minutes of slow pedaling on the stationary exercise bicycle, and three sets of an exercise that involved pulling on a rope, which was supposed to help my core muscles. My core muscles were a mess. It turns out that getting shot in the back is real bad for the core muscles.

  Rose arranged to move us to Valhalla Estates while I was still in the hospital. It was a decision I wouldn’t have approved, but there was no choice, really. The house wasn’t accessible to me anymore. We had no
grab bars or seats in the bathtub. We didn’t have a toilet I could slide onto from a wheelchair. The hallway leading back to the bedroom was now too narrow for the chair to maneuver, and even after all my therapy, I still needed somebody stronger than my wife to help me out of bed in the morning.

  Rose picked this place over a couple of less-expensive options, in part because it had an on-site rehab facility and a physical therapist on the staff. Using the same criteria, she could have just moved us to the prison at Guantánamo Bay; I hear they’ve got room there, since that Kenyan president turned all the terrorists loose.

  “You know, I’ve studied the biomechanics of walking,” Cloudy-ah said. “The human gait is a kind of negotiation with the gravitational pull of the Earth. The planet is always trying to pull you down toward its center, and your body has adapted itself to use that very force to propel you along the surface.”

  “Until one day, it doesn’t, and then you get buried,” I said.

  “That’s why we have to work to keep all those muscles in good condition. If just one of these complex systems goes out of whack, the whole machine breaks down.”

  My machine was a heap of junk; I was made of ground-down gears and worn-out belts, with load-bearing beams held together by spit and Spackle, and that was before I’d gone and got myself shot.

  For the elderly, healing is complicated. The doctors’ primary concern was something they called decompensation: essentially, I had become so fragile that the stress of a trauma could cause a cascade of organ failures that would most likely kill me.

  The way my doctor had explained it: “With patients in advanced old age, an incidence of a fall or a trauma signals that a subsequent fall or trauma within the next six months is highly probable, even if the injury sustained in the first fall appears minor or superficial. Where we have two injuries within a six-month period, we see a dramatic increase in the probability of death within the subsequent twelve months, relatively speaking.”