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

by Friedman, Daniel

  “Relative to what?” I’d asked him.

  “Well, mortality rates are already quite high within your age cohort,” he said.

  He always knew just what to say to make me feel better.

  After two weeks immobile in bed, the best someone my age could hope for was irreversible muscle deterioration, but more likely, my legs would just fill with blood clots, which would turn into embolisms and kill me. That particular serious mortal risk was compounded by the fact that my blood thinners had to be discontinued for a while to allow my wounds to start healing.

  So, they’d sent somebody in to start the rehab while the gunshot wound in my side was still seeping; just days after they set my broken leg in a cast. They had me raising and lowering my arms, lifting and bending my good leg.

  Several times a day, they hauled me out of bed just to make me sit in a chair, even though it hurt like hell to be upright. I was discharged from the hospital after two weeks, but I spent another month in a wheelchair while I waited for the bones to knit. The cast was too heavy to drag around, and crutches or a walker would pull open the stitches in my side.

  Despite the effort, when the cast came off, the leg still wouldn’t support my weight. I tried to use the walker, but Rose thought I was unsteady on it. So I went back into the wheelchair for another three weeks while Cloudy-ah made me do lifts and bends until I was stronger.

  “I’m ready to stop now,” I said.

  “Just give me eight more.”

  I looked up at her. She was big without being fat; healthy-looking without being especially pretty. She had broad, flat features, and shoulders and limbs that seemed too big to fit on a woman’s frame. Sometimes, when I stumbled, she caught me with one arm and propped me back up. If I had to describe her with one word, that word would be “sturdy.” That was what she was: sturdy. Like a piece of furniture.

  Thinking about furniture made me think about Connor’s rocking chair again, so I laughed. Hacking that damn thing up had hurt like hell and worn me out, but it was worth it.

  “What’s so funny, Buck?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Is it really nothing important, or did you already forget what you were laughing at?”

  Monitoring my mental state was part of my rehab regimen. I’d already exhibited several symptoms of mild cognitive impairment before I got hurt, and my mind was one of those systems that could potentially decompensate as a result of my injuries.

  “I didn’t forget anything. I just don’t feel like talking.”

  I lifted the leg again. The leg hurt. My side hurt. My core muscles hurt.

  Even after three months of work, I was still so tired some days that I went back into the wheelchair after my therapy sessions. The whole situation made me grumpy, even relative to my age cohort, among whom grumpiness rates were already quite high.

  This was actually something of a problem. When I got angry, I got sullen, and when I got sullen, I got uncommunicative, and being uncommunicative was supposed to hasten the progress of my dementia.

  My doctor gave me a lengthy lecture about this particular subject, and at the end of it, he wrote something on his pad for me. His handwriting looked indecipherable, so I took the paper to my pharmacist, who told me that my asshole doctor had prescribed a “positive outlook.”

  I cursed a few times about the waste of a trip to the Walgreens, but I bought two cartons of cigarettes while I was there, so it wasn’t a total loss.

  My previous doctor had been a little more helpful. After my son died, he’d sent me to a psychiatrist, who had written me a scrip for an antidepressant. I still had some of the pills in my cabinet, but I didn’t like taking them. I wasn’t myself when I was on antidepressants.

  “What are you thinking about, Buck?” Cloudy-ah asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Does it not matter, or did you already forget what you were thinking about?”

  “Have I ever told you that I don’t like you?”

  “Not since yesterday.”

  I remembered that. I did. Really.

  “While you do your leg lifts, repeat this list to me,” Cloudy-ah said. “Chair, bird, truck, bush, hat.”

  “That’s not a list,” I said. “It’s just some things that have nothing to do with each other.”

  “That’s the point. It’s just a test of your short-term memory. We’ve done this before. Do you remember doing this before?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then you know the drill. Repeat the list back to me.”

  “I don’t want to. I’ve got other things on my mind.” I was thinking about Elijah. Maybe I should have stopped him from leaving, although I didn’t know how I could have accomplished that. It wasn’t as if I was going to chase the man down on my walker.

  Was he really out finding a lawyer? Did he really plan to turn himself over to the police? There was a good chance he’d come to Valhalla looking for a kind of help I hadn’t been able to offer, and if that was the case, I’d never hear from him again. Maybe when he saw what I had become, he’d decided I wasn’t in any shape to provide whatever it was he needed from me.

  I was also aware of the possibility that the whole scenario might be a trap. Elijah and I had not parted on friendly terms. It’s never a happy occasion when old nemeses show up after fifty years. Only a few months earlier, I’d walked into a place not unlike Valhalla, looking for an enemy from my own distant past, and my intentions toward him had not been benevolent. It was not unthinkable that Elijah was on a similar trip.

  Except I had a lot more reason to hate him than he had to hate me; he’d got away from Memphis mostly intact and left a hell of a mess in his wake for me to clean up. You don’t come looking to settle up when you’re already in the black.

  In any case, he’d probably never call. And if he never called, I knew I’d be better off. I didn’t need trouble. But I liked trouble, and I wasn’t sure how many more opportunities I’d have to get into trouble.

  “The list, Buck.”

  “Chair, bird, truck, mat … goddamnit.”

  “Come on. I know you can do this.”

  “Chair, bird, truck…”

  Silence. Five things that had nothing to do with one another. Who could remember a list like that? Nobody. Rose came along sometimes to my sessions with Cloudy-ah, and she said she couldn’t remember the lists, either.

  “Okay, time for a smoke break,” Cloudy-ah said, so I wouldn’t have to humiliate myself by admitting what was obvious to both of us. “I forgot mine. Can I borrow one of yours?”

  I had never seen Cloudy-ah smoking with any of her other patients, but I liked that she knew not to bother me about my bad habits. My bad habits were just about all I had left.

  “I smoke the unfiltered kind,” I said.

  She laughed. It was not a girlish laugh. “I think I can handle it,” she said, as she cradled a thick arm beneath my back and lifted me to my feet.

  “I suppose you can.”

  I gripped the rubber handholds on the top of my walker, and Cloudy-ah slowed down to keep pace with me as we left the physical therapy room and walked down the fluorescent-lit, medical-smelling hallway where the nurses had their offices. She held open the side door while I made my way through it, and she held on to my arm as I navigated the two low concrete steps on the other side of it.

  I fished the pack of Lucky Strikes out of the pocket of the hooded sweatshirt my grandson had sent me from NYU, and she flicked the lighter for me. I inhaled, and held on to the smoke for as long as I could. I leaned on the walker and tried to enjoy the view of the employee parking lot. When this was done, I’d go back to my room and sit in front of Fox News until I fell asleep, and she’d go back to her office and fill out a form. And in three or four weeks, I’d have an appointment with a neurologist.

  Unless Elijah called, and then maybe something unpredictable would happen. I hoped to God Elijah would call.

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

>   “Take a look at this graph,” said the man in the suit, on my television screen. “This is a chart of the performance of the S&P 500 over the course of the last fifteen years.”

  “Right,” said the host, jabbing his finger at the chart. He was wearing shirtsleeves and a tie, but he looked kind of rumpled. Ever since I’d gotten one of those new flat televisions, all the people on cable news looked worse. All pores and sweat and Pan-Cake makeup.

  I didn’t have much room to criticize him, though; the last few years had not been kind to my looks. George Orwell said that, by the age of fifty, every man has the face he deserves. What he failed to mention is that, by the age of eighty, every man has a face that nobody deserves. I looked like a wax dummy of myself that somebody had melted partway with a blowtorch.

  “You can see the tech bust, right here,” said the man on the television. “You can see the 2001 recession.”

  I could see acne scars. I could see a patch of stubble along his jawline that he’d missed with his razor. I rubbed at my face and felt a couple of similar spots on my own cheeks. I’d been having trouble shaving lately. It was hard to see what I was doing, even with a magnified shaving mirror.

  As recently as a few years ago, I shaved every morning with a straight razor, which is the only way a man should shave. Clean and close, every time. But my hands had gotten a lot less steady. I hadn’t cut my face with it, but I had sliced the hell out of a couple of my fingers trying to change out a blade, which caused a real mess because of my blood thinners, and we wound up visiting the emergency room. That was enough for Rose to insist on me switching to an electric shaver.

  “And here at the end is this mess we’re in now,” said the guest.

  “Why are we looking at this?”

  “You see how this line looks jagged. Lots of ups and downs. Unpredictable, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong! That’s how a sucker sees the stock market.” He took a fat blue marker and drew a diagonal line through the middle of the chart. “In a college math class, we’d call this line a regression to the mean. That means the extreme nature of all these up-and-down data points is really just noise. And that noise obscures the essential story of this data, which is that America’s fundamentals are strong, and while things can be volatile in the very short term, a diverse portfolio of American stocks is always going to go up, over the medium and the long term.”

  “Okay, but here at the end, beginning in 2008, your regression line keeps going up, but the line showing market performance drops way down.”

  “That’s still noise. The effects of a market correction are always exaggerated by the panic selling of unsophisticated investors. In the long term, the market is going to move back to the regression line, and the regression line is going up! I don’t want to start talking about technical stuff like price-to-earnings ratios, but fundamentals are rock solid, and there are a lot of great buys out there right now. Don’t fall victim to panic! Don’t be a chump! Day-to-day, you can’t time the market and play all these ups and downs unless you’re an expert in the industries and the companies you’re investing in. Leave that stuff for the professionals. Just buy blue-chip companies for the long term, and hang in there.”

  “And of course, it’s always smart to diversify your portfolio by investing in precious metals.”

  “Well, that goes without saying.”

  I hit the clicker. I was, I realized, like the stock market. My day-to-day progress in rehab, and any healing I’d done since my injury; all of that was just noise. Nothing but temporary victories obscuring my regression line: a steady downward slope of permanent compromises. I’d given up driving at night, and then given up driving almost entirely. No more smoking in front of the television; no more smoking indoors at all. No more eating the foods I liked. No more walking up staircases.

  Everything I had was just something I could lose. My son. My house. My mobility. My mind.

  The door of the unit opened, and Rose came in. She’d joined a mah-jongg club that met in the main sitting area every afternoon, during the time I usually went to sleep for a while, after rehab. As far as I knew, she had never played mah-jongg before we moved to Valhalla, and she’d never shown any interest in games of that sort, so I suspected she was just using it as an excuse to get away from me for a while.

  She looked at the television: “Is there any good news?” she asked.

  “Is there ever?”

  6

  2009

  At two in the afternoon, the phone rang and woke me up. Nobody calls me at two in the afternoon. Courteous people show some goddamn respect for naptime, and anyway, not that many people call me to begin with. Mostly just my daughter-in-law, who calls once or twice during the week to check in, and my grandson, who calls every Sunday, just before dinner.

  I yelled at Rose to pick it up, but she wasn’t in the apartment, so I grabbed the cordless handset off the nightstand and pushed the talk button.

  “What is it?”

  Instead of a response, I heard a dial tone, and somewhere else in the room, a phone was still ringing. I was briefly confused, and then I realized that call was coming in on my cell.

  I never got calls on the cell; that phone was just for emergencies. Except, I’d given that number to Elijah. I didn’t want him to call on the regular phone, because Rose might pick that one up. I’d meant to put the cellular someplace I could get to it easily, but I was tired and angry after having such a poor session at rehab, and I forgot. I left the damn thing in the pocket of my pants, which were now draped over the recliner chair, all the way across the room.

  I’d never be able to pick it up in time, and I didn’t know how to call him back. The cell held on to the numbers of recent missed calls, but Elijah was likely to be calling from a pay phone or some other untraceable location. I didn’t have much of an understanding of how these machines worked, but I knew that he wasn’t the sort of man who could be reached by hitting the redial button.

  Ninety-two days, I’d been doing my rehab. Hurting myself and pushing my body to the point of total exhaustion. If I couldn’t get out of bed to pick up the phone, what was the point of any of it?

  It was only a few weeks previous that I’d managed, for the first time since my injury, to get out of bed without any help, and it seemed like a huge triumph after three months of having to call building staff into the unit every day to lift me upright. But the process still took me several minutes, including a couple of brief rests to catch my breath. The phone would ring for maybe twenty seconds.

  Rushing this was not a great idea. If I put too much weight on my legs all at once, they might give out, and then I’d fall and hit my head on the floor and die like an asshole. A needless risk to get a phone call that I shouldn’t even be taking.

  But sooner or later, I was probably going to die like an asshole anyway.

  I slid my left leg onto the floor and reached for the stability rail on the wall. With my other hand, I grabbed on to the walker, which I’d parked next to the bed.

  Thus secured, I slid my right leg to the floor, clenched my teeth, and attempted to sit up. The motion strained my weak core muscles and yanked at the tight scar on my lower back where I’d been sewn up. This simple task was the thing I’d been working so hard to be able to do, and I could still barely achieve it without help.

  My vision went white, and my side was all fire. I yelped in pain and let go of the wall. Now my weight was on my legs, which was exactly where my weight was never supposed to be. My thighs shook, and I felt my knees begin to give out, and my body started to pitch forward, but I managed to splay my arms across the top of the walker and regain my balance. Before I pulled myself fully upright, I took a couple of deep, ragged breaths.

  And then the phone stopped ringing.

  “Aw, shit,” I said to the empty room, because I was feeble and senile and miserable and broken.

  And then it rang again. He must have hung up and called back. I pushed the walker across the
room and fumbled the device out of my pants in time to answer.

  “Hello, Baruch.”

  “Elijah.”

  “I thought maybe you had decided not to help me.”

  “I ain’t helping you. You said you’d turn yourself in, and I said I’d be there.”

  “Very well. I have obtained the services of a criminal defense attorney, and I am prepared to surrender, if the authorities can protect me.”

  “Go to the Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar, and I’ll meet you there.”

  He laughed. It was still a chirpy sound, but now it had some gravel in it. “Didn’t I tell you that I am in danger? I did not come looking for Baruch Schatz so that I could walk through the front door of a building full of police and criminals. You know as well as I do that men who carry badges may serve many interests other than that of justice.”

  I hated a lot of things about Elijah, but I hated the way he talked most of all. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Well, since you are famously incorruptible, I would like you to make arrangements with a police contact you trust. I will surrender to that officer at a place of my choosing, and you and he will arrange for me to be taken to a secure location.”

  “You want some kind of witness protection program?”

  “I would like to not be murdered today.”

  “You have to tell me what you’ve got yourself into.”

  “I will tell the police. You are not the police. Not anymore. Your task is a simple one: You are to put me into contact with men to whom I can entrust my safety. Are you capable of this?”

  “I know a guy,” I said.

  “Very well. Get in touch with this man. I will assume you can reach him in the next hour. At that time, I will call again and tell you where we will meet.”

  “I don’t like this,” I said. But the line had already gone dead.

  7

  2009