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

by Friedman, Daniel

“Can I offer you a drink, Detective?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Scotch, rocks. The oldest one you’ve got.”

  He had the kind of office you get when you want everyone to know what a big macher you are. It occupied a corner of the building and had two walls of glass, with views of the river.

  He had the place done up like some sort of expensive cigar club. Leather chairs. Leather sofa. Heavy wood desk. Deep rug. And, of course, the fully stocked bar, which I was happy to take advantage of.

  He pursed his lips. “The offer was a formality; I assumed you’d decline.”

  “Why would I turn down free Scotch?”

  “I thought cops weren’t supposed to drink on the job.”

  “We’re not,” I said. “But we’re also not supposed to put a blue light on the dash to get out of traffic or beat people up for getting mouthy, and I do both of those things on a near-daily basis, so I figure there’s no reason to get all fastidious about a glass of whisky.”

  His face cycled through several subtle variations of an affected expression of disinterest as he tried to decide whether I was threatening him. He settled on a blank frown that wasn’t quite blank enough. Rather than looking bored, he looked like somebody trying to look bored, and that meant I’d shook him up a little bit.

  His assistant, standing next to him, didn’t look like he needed to be shaken much at all. He was ready to explode like a bottle of soda pop.

  Greenfield strode across the room to the bar and filled a glass with ice from a silver bucket. Somebody’s job was to keep this guy’s ice fresh all day. He poured the whisky himself, though, so as not to seem fussy.

  Greenfield had big hands and broad shoulders underneath the fine wool and chalk stripes of his suit. His family had connections that got him into the navy during the war, which had seemed a little softer gig than dodging mortars in the Argonne. But sailors had seen some ugliness in the Pacific, and Greenfield looked like he knew how to handle himself.

  “You’ll have to drink fast, because this is likely to be a short conversation,” he said, pushing the Scotch into my hand. “If you’re going to question me about the bank’s clients, we’ve really got nothing to talk about until you show me a subpoena.”

  “I’m not investigating your clients,” I said. “I’m trying to prevent a robbery. You know you’re less than two blocks away from a mob of agitated colored protesters.”

  He laughed at me. “Those protesters are surrounded by dozens of police already. I feel pretty secure here.”

  I eyeballed the assistant. “He doesn’t look secure.”

  “Nobody cares what he thinks,” Greenfield said. “That’s why he’s got his job, and I’ve got my job.”

  The assistant looked to be about ten years older than Greenfield; a smaller man with dishwater-blond hair turning gray around the temples, and thin wrists. He had a prominent nose, close-set beady eyes, a short upper lip, and a weak chin. This was the kind of man who had to learn to tolerate being passed over from below. He did not bother responding to Greenfield’s insult. Perhaps he was resigned to the fact that nobody would ever take his side.

  “Now, I appreciate your concerns, Buck, but I really don’t think there’s anything to this, and I’ve got business to attend to, so if you could finish your drink and find your way out, I’d be mighty appreciative.”

  “I’ll get out of your hair if you want me to, but I’ve got a very solid tip that there’s a robbery being cased nearby, so if you’ve got any reason to believe you’re the target, you had better tell me what you know, or I won’t be able to help you.”

  Greenfield settled behind the imperial expanse of his desk. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  The assistant started coughing.

  “You want to say something?” I asked him.

  “Charles, if you’re not going to tell him, I will,” said the little man.

  Greenfield shrugged. “It’s on you, then. I’m going to state my objection to this and hear you acknowledge it, though, because I will have to report this breach of confidentiality to Nashville, and I’ll be telling them you volunteered information to the police over my objection.”

  “I understand your objection, I’ve worked twenty years for this bank,” the assistant said. “I’m going to speak my conscience. I don’t think this is a violation of client confidentiality, anyway. It’s the bank’s money I’m concerned about, not any client’s.”

  I took a sip of my whisky, lit a cigarette with a wooden match, and draped my arm over the back of Greenfield’s sofa. “What’s your name, friend?”

  “I’m Riley Cartwright. I’m a senior loan officer and an assistant manager of this branch.”

  “Well, Mr. Cartwright, I’m here to help,” I said. “Tell me about your problem.”

  “We’ve got over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in our vault right now, and I am absolutely terrified of a robbery,” he said.

  “That’s because you’re old and you’re stupid and your worldview is obsolete,” Greenfield said. “There’s no place safer to put money than in a modern bank vault.”

  “Why have you got so much money on the premises?” I asked.

  “We get an armored truck down from Nashville with cash every week,” Cartwright said. “Usually, Kluge issues paychecks on Fridays and the boys come in and cash them. Negroes ain’t prone to keeping their money on deposit.”

  “Kluge doesn’t really pay them enough to save much, anyway,” I said.

  Greenfield showed his irritation by squeezing the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “You’re not one of those, are you?”

  “I’m not one of anything,” I said. There was a heavy crystal ashtray sitting on the substantial hardwood coffee table in front of me. I ignored it and flicked ash onto the rug.

  “I hope you aren’t,” Greenfield said. “Those Negroes are nothing but malingerers, marching around on the sidewalk and insisting the white man owes them something. If they want to get paid more, they should learn a skill, instead of acting all entitled.”

  I paused and did some math. The cash in the vault below us exceeded the lifetime take-home pay for a Memphis police detective over the course of a twenty-five-year career. The workers at Kluge would cripple themselves hauling freight long before they ever earned half that much.

  Bank robbery is a dumb crime. Almost nobody gets away with it; there is too much security and there are always too many witnesses. But I sort of understood why somebody might try.

  A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Just sitting there. Hard to even comprehend.

  “There are only a hundred and twenty strikers. Five weeks’ pay for the lot of them is less than fifty thousand,” I said. “Why have you got triple that?”

  Cartwright started counting on his fingers. “Kluge has workers who didn’t walk off the job, and they’ve brought on some scabs to try to keep their shipments moving. But none of those people want to cash checks in view of the strikers. They’re going out of their way to do their business at other branches, away from the picketers.”

  Greenfield got up and poured himself another drink. “Probably afraid of walking out of here with a pocket full of cash and getting robbed by the marchers. I can’t say I blame them.”

  Cartwright continued: “Our other business has fallen off as well; people are avoiding this whole area, either out of support for the strike or because they’re scared of the Negroes. But we’ve been getting a truck full of money every week, even though nobody is coming to withdraw. It’s just piling up in the vault.”

  “Which is, like I said, a perfect place for it,” Greenfield said. “This isn’t the 1930s. Robbers can’t just walk into a modern bank with a gun and take what’s in the vault.”

  “If you don’t need the cash, why does the truck bring more every week?” I asked.

  “There’s really no protocol for canceling our armored truck delivery,” Greenfield said. “Cartwright doesn’t understand that we have contractual obligations to the
armored truck company to pay them for the routes, and they have agreements with the unions representing their drivers and guards to give them the work. Anyway, at the end of the quarter, we will balance our books, and send any excess cash back to Nashville, as we do four times a year. Until then, it is perfectly safe in our vault. The circumstance requires no deviation from routine procedures. We can’t disrupt our business every time some Negroes get upset or some criminal comes sniffing around.”

  “I’ve been arguing that we should return the extra cash at once, instead of waiting for the end of the quarter,” Cartwright said.

  Greenfield leaned back imperiously in his deep leather chair. “But that’s not the procedure.”

  Cartwright slapped a hand to his forehead. “Getting robbed isn’t the procedure, either. That mess in the street out there may just seem like a small dispute between a company and its workers, but the whole city is a powder keg, and that might be the spark that ignites it. The police know it; that’s why they’re swarming over the strikers. The Negroes are looking for any excuse to riot, and when they do, Memphis will burn. And we are sitting at ground zero on top of a big pile of money.”

  “If the whole city burns, our vault will be sitting unscathed and gleaming in the ashes. And if somebody comes in here to rob the bank, all they can do is take the cash in the tellers’ cages; twelve hundred dollars, at most,” Greenfield said. “Our vault is brand-new and quite secure, and no facility like it has ever been successfully robbed. Each teller has an alarm button beneath his counter. Our loan officers also have buttons attached to their desks, and I have one here in my office. There’s no way to take over the entire bank in time to stop somebody from pushing one of those buttons, and once the button is pushed, this vault is basically impregnable.”

  “No vault is impregnable. That’s hubris, Charles.”

  “Have you heard of a thief called Elijah?” I asked. “Because I believe he’s in town.”

  “I’d be interested to hear exactly what you know, and how you know it, since Mr. Cartwright has been kind enough to inform you of confidential information about our bank,” Greenfield said.

  I flicked ash onto his rug again. “While the investigation is ongoing, I have to protect the identities of my active informants,” I said.

  “Glad to know we can expect reciprocity from the police department when we provide helpful information.” Greenfield gave Cartwright a look that reminded me of the way a semi-truck might look at a squirrel lying prone in the highway. “I have heard of Elijah. He’s very good at finding banks that have neglected their security measures. Expert thieves will always avoid a modern vault like ours. They go after softer targets.”

  “A softer target isn’t filled with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash,” I said.

  “Fort Knox is packed to the rafters with gold bricks worth millions, but Elijah hasn’t broken in there, has he? As soon as anyone in the bank presses an alarm button, the police are notified by telephone and the vault automatically closes and locks. When the vault is sealed by the alarm, it starts a three-hour timer, during which the door cannot be opened. My key won’t work. There is no combination. It’s just sealed for three hours. It’s made of tempered steel, and the door is eighteen inches thick. If you’re experienced with an industrial blowtorch, you could possibly get through it an hour before it unlocks, but by that time, the police will have the place surrounded.”

  “What if somebody cuts your telephone wires?” I asked.

  “Triggers the alarm automatically,” Greenfield said. “We live in an age of scientific marvels.”

  “Even so, why don’t you just return the money, like Mr. Cartwright suggests?”

  “Because the established procedure is to rebalance our cash reserve when we do our quarterly accounting.”

  “You’re like a robot, following your protocol,” Cartwright said.

  Greenfield sipped his drink. “Yes, I am.”

  I flicked my spent cigarette into the crystal ashtray and lit another one. “Why?”

  “If there is a robbery, my conduct will be subject to review, both by my superiors and our insurers. If I have deviated from protocol by ordering an unusual armored truck, and that truck gets robbed, I will lose my job and the insurer may deny coverage. It’s a lot easier to rob an armored truck than a bank vault, you know. Truck robberies are about twenty times more common than vault robberies.”

  “Tell me about how a bank receives an armored truck,” I said.

  “That’s not something we are willing to disclose,” Greenfield said.

  “They pull up to the loading dock in the alley behind the bank,” Cartwright said.

  “So the door in the alley leads straight to the vault?”

  “The loading door is constructed from reinforced steel and mounted in a reinforced doorframe which is affixed in a reinforced wall. It has a sturdy bar lock on the back of it. There’s a security cage in the hallway, leading from the loading door. Tampering with the cage triggers the alarm and locks everything down,” said Greenfield. He seemed to be considering whether it might be possible to lock Cartwright in the vault. “During business hours, we keep two armed guards stationed in front of the vault, so they’d hear anyone messing with the loading door, and they’d have plenty of time to hit an alarm before someone breached the security cage. No one is ever allowed to be alone with the vault while it’s open, not even me. If one of the guards needs to piss, somebody else has to come and stand in his place while he’s in the john. I know, in the movies, every security apparatus has some Achilles’ heel, but in reality, most bank vaults aren’t built with vulnerabilities. We’ve foreseen every contingency, and planned for all of them.”

  “But the truck is vulnerable?”

  Greenfield shook his head. “Not particularly. It’s an armored truck. They’re like tanks. They’re designed to withstand robbery attempts, and crewed by experienced and heavily armed guards. But a bank vault will always be a more secure place to put cash than any place that isn’t a bank vault.”

  I considered the fact that I knew Elijah was in town and planning something only because he’d made sure I knew it. If he’d wanted to find himself a corrupt cop to deal with, it seems like he’d have gone looking for somebody with a reputation for dirty dealings. He had to have known I’d probably turn down his invitation.

  It could be that Greenfield was right, and the vault was safe. Maybe Elijah was hoping I’d flush the cash out of the vault and into the open, so he could steal it in transit. But maybe he’d found some vulnerability in Greenfield’s security protocol. If I did nothing, he was essentially free to execute any plan he might have to take down the vault, but if I tried to move the cash, I was possibly helping him get the money into an armored truck that he could rob much more easily.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?” Greenfield asked.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Well, then, congratulations, again, on your simcha. Give your son my best wishes, and get the hell out of my office.”

  13

  2009

  “I want to make sure we all understand that my client is cooperating,” said the lawyer.

  His name was Meyer Lefkowitz, and as soon as I met him, I could tell he was a piece of shit. Actually, I knew he was a piece of shit before I met him, because I’d seen his television commercials. In one of them, a cartoon spaceship crash-landed in Memphis, and Lefkowitz helped the alien pilot get a settlement from its insurance company.

  My grandson had told me that an effective criminal defense lawyer is someone who can be trusted by the courts to negotiate on behalf of people who cannot, themselves, be trusted.

  That made sense; criminal lawyers don’t usually get their clients off, because their clients are almost always guilty. They don’t spend time going to lots of trials, like the lawyers on television. What they do is make deals. Even in my day, the penalty a criminal would get for a jury conviction was much heavier than a decent plea bargain,
and as the court dockets have gotten more crowded, the plea deals have gotten sweeter and the punishment for going to trial has become progressively more brutal.

  A good criminal defense lawyer, therefore, is somebody who maintains a close relationship with the prosecutor’s office, and can use that established relationship and a reputation for trustworthiness and reasonableness to get the best deals for his clients. In other words, you probably want a lawyer who looks like an accountant or a librarian.

  Lefkowitz was fortyish, with thinning hair that he had built up into a sort of Astroturf pompadour through the liberal application of some kind of greasy-looking industrial polymer. He wore a pinstripe suit with wide lapels; the fabric looked expensive, but it was badly tailored and poorly cared for. He had a heavy gold watch with diamonds on the bezel, and he wore rings on six of his fingers. He looked like a gangster from a James Cagney movie.

  All this meant that he was probably bad at his job. When a ninety-year-old man with a Members Only jacket thinks your style is dated, you need to pull your goddamn head out of your ass. Lefkowitz was so buffoonish and so thoroughly bedecked in signifiers of corruption that it was unimaginable that any opposing counsel might seriously negotiate with him.

  “His cooperation is duly noted,” said Andre Price. He had Elijah handcuffed and leaning against the back of his police car, and he was examining the contents of the thief’s pockets.

  “You will return my client’s effects to him, until they can be inventoried at booking and a receipt can be provided,” Lefkowitz said.

  “I ain’t trying to steal from this old man,” Andre said. “I just want to make sure he doesn’t have anything he can lockpick his handcuffs with, or use as a weapon. Detective Schatz says your client is real slippery.”

  “My client will make a statement when you can offer him immunity and protection,” said Lefkowitz.

  Andre smiled and shook his head. Elijah had been carrying a wallet, a matchbook, a key to a motel room, and one of those glass Internet phones. Andre opened the wallet.