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

by Friedman, Daniel

  “I waited in the woods until nightfall, when I heard someone calling from the road. I crept to the edge of the forest, keeping to the shadows, and I saw a young woman in a little cart pulled by an old mule. I went to her, and she hid me under a pile of old rags, and drove me back to her shabby farmhouse. She said she was the guard’s lover, and he had told her to spirit me away, so that they could get my treasure. I didn’t wait for him to return, however. I found a knife and stabbed her to death, and I stole everything of value from her house. I had to stick the knife into her fifteen times before she stopped struggling. My resolve never wavered.

  “I lived out the war on the run, and I survived by taking whatever I needed. I never called it stealing. I don’t believe stealing is a thing that exists. The Nuremberg Laws that nationalized my family’s assets also endowed me, from a very young age, with a deep skepticism toward the concept of property rights. It’s not as if the ostensibly rightful owners of this country’s wealth have come by it honestly, any more than the beneficiaries of the Nuremburg confiscations earned theirs. Men strip the hills of timber and then blast deep scars in the earth to find coal, with the state’s full blessing, and yet I am a criminal for occasionally helping myself to a few stacks of paper. Kluge builds himself a limestone mansion with the proceeds of Negro misery, and you’re camping out in your car to stop me from stealing the payroll he’s refusing to disperse to his workers. As far as I am concerned, people are entitled to keep what they have only for as long as they are able to stop me from taking it from them.”

  “Maybe I don’t see it that way,” I said. “Maybe I think actions need to have consequences.”

  “What will you do? Lock me up? Kill me? I have already been locked up. I have already been killed. These things happened and will happen again, not because I am a criminal, but because I am a Jew. So why should I not be a criminal as well? Why should I spare anyone’s property?”

  The smart thing to do would have been to humor him, and see if I could draw him out a little and get him to reveal something about his plans, but finesse had never been my specialty, and I was sick of listening to the asshole.

  “Because I am a feral dog,” I told him. “And I don’t like you shitting where I eat.”

  He chirped. “I feel sorry for you, Baruch. You are a grumpy sentinel crouching here, eating your cheap, greasy food and holding your futile, lonely vigil. But what is going to happen is going to happen, and you can’t do anything about it.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose we shall,” he said, and he slid noiselessly out of the car. I had an idea that I should make an exception to my general policy about fair play, and just shoot the son of a bitch in the back, so I kicked my door open and climbed to my feet, drawing my gun as I stood. But somehow, Elijah and his men had already vanished.

  I picked up the envelope he’d given me, still holding it by the edges, and opened it by slitting the side with my pocketknife. It contained a store-bought birthday card for a child ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY. Tucked inside the card, I found three one-hundred-dollar bills; he’d thrown away as much money as I was paid for two weeks of hard work, just to taunt me.

  Technically, I should have turned the card and the bills over to the department, as evidence. Maybe a specialist could have done a better job of checking it for fingerprints, and found something useful on it. Or maybe the serial numbers on the bills might have connected Elijah to some robbery.

  But I was already too deep into my one-man vigilante mission, or my cover-up operation, or whatever it was. I pocketed the bills. There was really nothing else I could do.

  Maybe Elijah was trying to push me down a slippery slope. Or maybe I was already sliding. Maybe I’d been sliding for a long time.

  18

  1965

  I never thought of myself as an emotional man, but I was furious at Elijah. He’d put my family and my livelihood at risk, and he was contemptuous toward my values; toward the life I’d built and the stuff I stood for.

  The thing that made me angriest was the fact that he was probably right. I was ensconced within and dependent upon a system I couldn’t trust. I worked side by side with men whom I didn’t like, and who didn’t like me, and I might be forced, on any given day, to rely on these men in a situation that involved mortal peril.

  But what the hell was I supposed to do? Join Elijah and his herd of Jewish buffalo? I had a family to take care of, and a synagogue membership and a mother. I wasn’t a rootless, vengeful ghost.

  Elijah knew I’d figured out that he was robbing the Cotton Planters bank, so getting Greenfield to move the money was now too dangerous a gamble to consider. But since Elijah knew that I knew, I felt like I wouldn’t be tipping too many cards by pursuing Ari Plotkin, the local hood Paul Schulman had told me was involved in the scheme.

  Plotkin was a world-class sanctimonious shitball. He had a picturesque little ranch-style house within walking distance of the synagogue. He davened three times a day, and his wife wore a wig and kept a strictly kosher kitchen, to the point where he’d bought her separate dishwashers for their meat and milk dishes. And he paid for his proper Jewish lifestyle with theft and fraud.

  Burglary had once been a specialty of his, though he seemed to be doing less of that as he got older. He was a go-to man for anyone looking to fence stolen goods. He had a small-time bookmaking operation mostly serving the betting needs of the Jewish community, and he’d been involved in selling fraudulent stocks to widows and pensioners.

  He wasn’t above sticking somebody up at gunpoint, if there was enough money in it, but he’d only been caught doing that once. He beat the rap by shaving off his beard, which made it difficult for an eyewitness to identify him. If he’d rated highly enough to attract Elijah’s attention, I suspected he was also into some dirty and lucrative business I didn’t know about. His house was nicer than mine.

  Plotkin figured his activities were okay by God, as long as he didn’t steal from Jews. But it wasn’t God who was going to be judging him on this particular night.

  It was a Friday, which was the Jewish Sabbath, so I knew Plotkin was likely to be at home. I found him sitting on his front porch, reading—seriously—the Talmud. When he saw me climb out of my car, he hurried into the house.

  I walked up to the door and pounded on it with my fist.

  “Let me in, Ari,” I said. “There are things I need to discuss with you.”

  “I know my rights,” he yelled through the door. “I don’t have to talk to you. No police can come into my house without a warrant.”

  “Have you ever seen one of those programs on television, where the policeman tells the criminal that there’s an easy way and a hard way to resolve a situation? Because this is one of those.”

  “I think we should resolve this the way that involves you talking to my lawyer.”

  “I think we’re going to resolve it the way that involves you talking to my foot,” I said, and I kicked the knob a couple of times, until the lock splintered out of the doorframe.

  As the door swung open, Plotkin rushed at me brandishing what looked like a silver candlestick, but I already had my .357 drawn. I shot him in the leg, and he fell to the floor at my feet.

  “For future reference, the easy way would have hurt less,” I said.

  I stepped over him and walked farther into the house, to make sure no other threats were lying in wait for me. The kitchen branched off the narrow entry parlor, and that was where I found Plotkin’s wife cowering behind the linoleum counter and clutching their daughter, who looked to be about five or six. Both the woman and the girl started screaming when they saw me with my gun.

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  “Go away!” Plotkin’s wife shouted. “I will call the police.”

  “I am the police,” I said, and I showed her my shield. “Get out of the house. Your kid doesn’t need to see this.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Do I look like a goddamn
travel agent? Just leave.”

  She fled through the broken front door, wailing and covering her eyes as she passed her bleeding husband.

  I checked the other rooms of the house, to verify the place was clear, and then I returned to the front entryway, where Plotkin was flopping around in a slowly expanding pool of blood.

  In my tour of the house, I had noticed that his heavy, hardwood dining room table was set for Shabbos dinner. I went and grabbed hold of the white linen tablecloth, and yanked it, sending china plates and crystal glasses smashing to the floor. The tablecloth looked like it might be some kind of heirloom. I tore it into ragged strips as I returned to the wounded scumbag by the front door.

  “No sense in letting you bleed to death before you tell me what you’re up to,” I said as I tied pieces of tablecloth around his injured leg in a makeshift tourniquet.

  “That belonged to my grandmother.”

  “I guess I could have used my shirt to bandage your wound,” I said. “But it cost me five dollars, and I didn’t want to get Plotkin all over it.”

  “You are detestable.”

  “They say you can get Plotkin out with some club soda and a little bit of salt, but I don’t want to ruin a five-dollar shirt finding out if that’s actually true.”

  “I hate you so, so much.”

  “I don’t like you, either, Ari, but if you talk quickly, I’ll try to get you to a hospital in time for the docs to save your leg,” I said.

  “I don’t have to talk to police, I know my rights.”

  “You’re a clever one, aren’t you? The Constitution grants you a right against self-incrimination. Go ahead and sit there and be silent. However, that tourniquet is cutting off blood flow to your leg. If you take the tourniquet off, your blood will just pour out. The exit hole in the back of your thigh is the size of an apple. You are all fucked up, my friend. If you don’t get treatment quickly, your leg will probably have to be amputated above the knee. And if you don’t get to a hospital in the next couple of hours, they won’t have to bother with an amputation, because you will bleed out, even with the tourniquet. So you can exercise your rights as an American for as long as you like, but if you don’t tell me what I need to know soon, you are going to die.”

  “Murder,” he said. “This is murder.”

  “I came here to question a known offender,” I said. “Sometimes unfortunate things happen when known offenders get belligerent. You tried to hit me with a damn candlestick. My son has this mystery-solving board game, and half the time, the murder in that game is done with a candlestick. If we’d been in a conservatory when you came at me with that thing, I might have shit in my pants. Shooting you was really the only reasonable course of action.”

  “You pig,” he said. “You jackbooted gestapo thug.”

  “You can spend as much time as you want insulting me,” I said. “I ain’t the one leaking all over the floor. But if you’d ever like to walk again, you should hurry up and tell me what Elijah is doing.”

  “You can’t torture me into confessing to you. I’d rather bleed to death out of spite.”

  I showed him my gun.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. Then I spun the cylinder, theatrically pulled back the hammer with my thumb, and pressed it against his forehead. “You’re either going to tell me a story, or I will find other ways to amuse myself. It’s not really a good idea to insult a jackbooted gestapo thug.”

  “How can you behave as you do, and still call yourself a Jew?” Fat tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  “I could ask you the same question, you self-righteous, thieving hypocrite.”

  “I don’t commit brutality against my own people.”

  “You ain’t my people, Plotkin. I am nothing like you.”

  “And for that, I thank HaShem.”

  With a fairly elegant and practiced maneuver, I managed to light a cigarette without holstering the .357. “You want one of these?” I asked.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my house. My child sleeps here. You are putting my child at risk.”

  “Well, I wish there wasn’t a Jewish bank robber organizing a Jewish gang in my city. If this scheme of yours goes pear-shaped, all of us are likely to be treated the way you and your friends deserve to be treated. Folks around here tend to discriminate indiscriminately. Seems to me, I ain’t the only one here who is bad for the Jews. Seems to me you’re the one putting my child at risk. So you might as well take this cigarette, because everything comes down to this, Ari: You might think you have God on your side, but you’ve got Smith and Wesson in your face. I am goddamn furious right now, and I will be perfectly happy to kill you over this. Do you believe me when I say I’ll kill you?”

  He looked up at me, and his eyes were brimming with tears. “I do believe it.”

  “Good for you. So, you understand the stakes: Either you’re fixin’ to talk, or you’re fixin’ to die.”

  He took the cigarette, and he talked.

  19

  1965

  “When the schvartzes start burning things down, that’s when we go into the bank,” Plotkin said.

  “Who are you working with?” I asked.

  He gave me three familiar names; young Jewish men getting started on the wrong path. Kids in those days all wanted to be Meyer Lansky.

  “How do you know the colored will riot?”

  He grimaced. “Because they’re schvartzes. Because it’s inevitable.”

  That was information the department didn’t have; we were still trying to forestall racial violence by meeting the Kluge demonstration with a show of force. I wondered if we were intimidating them or inciting them.

  “You’re going to break into the vault?” I asked.

  “We’re going to take everything.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going through the front door with guns.”

  “What about the alarm system?”

  “That’s the beauty of the plan. Nobody will answer the alarms; not for a while, anyway. The police response will be very slow. There will be robberies happening all over the city, and the streets will be mobbed with rioters. We’ll be gone before any help arrives, and we will wear masks on our faces. When it’s over, the schvartzes will take the blame.”

  Whoever had put Plotkin up to this had evidently not briefed him on any of the elaborate security measures Charles Greenfield had described to me. This was not the elegant plan I’d expected. “Elijah told you this?” I asked.

  “His man.” Plotkin described one of the slablike goons. “I’ve never seen Elijah.”

  “What’s his role in the scheme?”

  “Elijah’s guy told us about the bank, explained how we can use the riots for cover, and pretty much worked out the whole plan for us. After the job’s done, he’s helping us to get away clean. His cut is a third of the take.”

  “How much do you expect to get out of the bank?”

  “He said we could get ten thousand. Maybe as much as fifteen.” This was about five times as much as Greenfield said a robber could plausibly get from robbing the tellers’ cages at his bank.

  This Plotkin plot was half-assed. If these guys went through the front door, all they’d manage to do was set the alarm off, and then get themselves caught or maybe killed. There was no way this was the thing Elijah was planning. He must have been setting these kids up. But to what purpose? The alarm would lock down the vault, making it inaccessible to Elijah. Did he want the vault locked, for some reason?

  This would require some thought.

  In the meantime, there was work to do. I called in the paramedics to come save my perp’s leg, and then I called for some patrol units to back me up when I went to fetch the coconspirators Plotkin had named. They were all at home, on account of the Sabbath, and they all went downtown quietly.

  I stuck the three men in separate interrogation rooms and asked each of them a bunch of questions. At the end of the night, they all signed statements, confessing that they’d
planned to rob the bank, but omitting any mention of Elijah.

  I wasn’t thrilled to have a gang of Jews locked up in Memphis for conspiracy to commit robbery, but their thwarted attempt at two-bit thuggery would be forgotten much faster than a successful $150,000 heist committed by a famous Jewish thief with a gang of Jewish accomplices and the assistance of corrupt Jewish police.

  Just in case you think me hardhearted: I put in a phone call to the District Attorney for Ari and his crew, told him that those boys had cooperated fully, and suggested a lenient deal wouldn’t be unreasonable. Given that they hadn’t even got close to pulling off a robbery before they got caught, I figured it wouldn’t take a whole lot of prison time to convince them to dedicate their future efforts to noncriminal enterprises.

  The three accomplices each got four years of state time, and were eligible for parole after eighteen months. Plotkin was sentenced to seven years and served three, since he was the ringleader, and also, he assaulted me. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

  While he was doing his time, though, his frum little wife had to go and get herself a job. After that, she was never as pliant or servile around the house as she had been before. His kid had some problems as well, and wound up pregnant by a goyish boyfriend when she was fifteen.

  I think Plotkin may have blamed me for this misfortune, but if he’d gone in the front door of that bank, he’d have got himself twenty-five to life up at the federal farm, or else just got killed, and he wouldn’t have even been able to give his daughter away at her shotgun wedding.

  He made his choices, and they were his to live with. If you choose to be a scumbag, there are consequences. I feel like he should have been appreciative of my leniency. Asshole tried to hit me with a candlestick.

  20

  1965

  Brian came home from services the next morning and told me that the rabbi had asked to speak with me. I didn’t really have much to say to the rabbi, but after the Schulman incident, it seemed like I needed to extend the kid an olive branch, so, when the Sabbath ended at sunset, I drove to the shul to meet with the man.