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

by Friedman, Daniel

  This gave the Internet woman a chance to swallow, which disappointed me terribly. I was rooting for the dam to burst.

  She said: “I think, in times like this, the status quo becomes less persuasive. In the early 1970s, the country was at the end of more than a decade of civil rights strife, the war in Vietnam was in full swing, and the presidency was mired in scandal. The audience, at that time, was prepared to embrace Vito Corleone, who responded to an ossified and exclusionary power structure and widespread anti-immigrant bigotry by building an empire outside the boundaries of the law.

  “The same thing is happening again today. The status quo and the establishment seem less noble after eight years of the Bush administration and seven years of endless war and the Wall Street crash and the banking- and auto-industry bailouts, I think. We feel powerless against greater social forces, and so we’re prepared to root for a somebody like a put-upon science teacher who reinvents himself as a drug lord.”

  “And what happens to our more traditional heroes in the meantime?” the host asked.

  She sucked back the rolling wad of spit before it spilled over her bottom lip, and swallowed again. I cursed at the screen.

  “They become dirtier. James Bond is the perpetrator of secret government assassinations. Batman is a white millionaire who goes out at night in a rubber sex-suit to beat up the urban underclass. That Western sheriff, bringing the law to some border town, is just taming the place so the railroad tycoons or the mining barons can take it from the frontiersmen and prospectors who staked it out first, and that supercop is starting to look like the boot of the elites on everyone else’s neck.”

  I gave up on the program, and changed the channel. She wasn’t going to drool all over herself, and she wasn’t going to convince me to accept her moral equivalencies.

  The film critics and professors on television often say that every bad guy thinks he’s the good guy. That’s maybe the case in comic books and dime-store novels, but the truth is that a good two-thirds of your violent criminals are too stupid to think at all.

  They’re not really moral agents choosing to do wrong; they’re simply acting on impulses, motivated by their basest desires for drugs and sex. They’re unable to appreciate the consequences of their actions, either for themselves or for the people they hurt. They’re nothing but vicious animals. That’s not a racial thing, either; it’s true of the whites just as much as the colored.

  Most of the rest are what psychologists might call sociopaths; the ones who are smart enough to know better, but broken enough not to care.

  Really, it’s only a tiny minority among your criminal types who bother to try to rationalize or justify their behavior, or to ground their crimes in any sort of principle. You don’t meet many like Elijah over the course of a police career.

  But equivocations like Elijah’s are always too shabby to stand up to scrutiny, and men like him are not really much different from other thieves and murderers; when you strip away the bullshit, all they’re doing is hurting other people for selfish reasons.

  And I don’t know much about heroes and antiheroes, but if you haven’t been hurt by some thug or psycho or outlaw philosopher recently, it’s probably because somebody like me got to them before they got to you.

  23

  2009

  My mind slid into semiconsciousness from out of a whirling phantasmagoria of nightmares. The first thing I became aware of was rhythmic beeping, with incomprehensible static noise behind it. The beeping filled me with deep instinctive panic, and it took me more than a moment to recognize the sound as belonging to hospital machines; to a cardiac monitor.

  I tried to look around, but all I could see was darkness. I realized this was because my eyes were closed. I tried to open them, but could not summon the strength. I couldn’t move my arms, either, but I could feel the cool, oppressive weight of a bedsheet on my bare legs, so I figured my inability to move was a drug thing rather than a spinal thing.

  Now the noise behind the beeping was congealing into voices, and I slowly began to understand the words.

  “… sent her home to have a shower and some rest. She was here all night.”

  “Don’t know how she’s put up with him for so long.”

  “Can’t believe he was in another shoot-out. Does anyone know what it was about?”

  “The policeman he was riding with is worse off, I hear.”

  “You really didn’t need to fly in.”

  “Why isn’t he awake yet?” I recognized my son’s voice. I was glad he was there. It seemed like I hadn’t talked to him in a long time. Why was that?

  “They had him under sedation. They were worried about a brain bleed, but the MRI came back clean. Apparently, he was just in shock, and he broke his nose. They had to transfuse him, which knocked out his blood thinners, so they’re worried about clots. Otherwise, he should be okay.”

  I was sedated. That was why my limbs felt so heavy; why it felt like wading through dense mud just to force my brain to think.

  “Well, I wanted to be down here, regardless. I’m always expecting that phone call about him.”

  “But you’re missing work at your new job.”

  “I’m a summer associate at a New York law firm; they understand the concept of a family emergency, and I think they’ll be able to live without me for a day or two. The clients won’t even let them staff me on the real matters, so my assignments are mostly make-work, anyway. Today, I’m missing a three-hour lunch, a partner giving a group lecture about negotiation tactics, and an open-bar cocktail event.”

  “But what happens if they don’t offer you a full-time job?”

  “That’s a pretty fucking inappropriate question, Mom.”

  Okay, this wasn’t my son; it was my grandson, William, who was now wearing thousand-dollar suits to his office in a Manhattan skyscraper, but still let everybody call him Tequila Schatz. I wanted to tell him to watch his goddamn language, but I couldn’t quite force my jaw to move. My tongue felt dry and sticky and heavy in my mouth.

  “It just keeps me up at night thinking about you in that city, and the decisions you make,” my daughter-in-law said. “There always seems to be something important you’re not taking care of.”

  “Look, I don’t really want to have this conversation right now.”

  “You never want to have this conversation.”

  Where was Brian? Oh, God.

  When I’m awake, I can push my rage and fear and grief down into someplace where I don’t have to think about it, but when I dream, it comes back up on me like bad Mexican food.

  Every time I wake up, I briefly linger between there and here, and then I push through the curtain, and the weight of everything I’ve lost comes crashing down on me, and I shatter. I thought maybe I wouldn’t have dreamed under sedation, with my brain and my heart slowed down and pickled in chemicals. But I must have. Coming out of it, with my mind spinning in druggy half-speed, the whole awful process took longer, like slowly peeling a sticky bandage off a crusty wound.

  It’s no wonder so many folks stop remembering things as they get older, when memory serves no purpose except to make old pain fresh again. It’s no wonder people stop getting out of bed. What’s out there in the world, except for scrambled eggs and disappointment?

  On the other hand, I really wanted some scrambled eggs; I hadn’t eaten for quite some time. I also wanted a cigarette.

  I tried to figure out how long I’d been unconscious. There was an oxygen tube running to my nose, but I didn’t have a feeding tube down my throat, so I’d been out for hours, rather than days, which meant there might still be some slim hope of getting Elijah back before his kidnappers murdered him.

  If William had gotten a standby ticket on the first plane out of New York, he could have been in my hospital room six hours after the accident. But it had probably been longer. Rose might not have called my daughter-in-law, Fran, right away, and Fran might not have immediately called William. He might not have been able to g
et a direct flight.

  If they’d sent Rose home to shower and change, that probably meant she’d been here overnight, which probably meant that Elijah had been in the hands of his kidnappers for between sixteen and twenty hours. The fact that I was able to maintain this train of thought, at least, was a good sign. The drugs were wearing off.

  My daughter-in-law said: “I get so mad at him when I think about what he’s put her through. I sometimes worry about what will happen if she dies before he does.”

  “He’s at that place. Won’t they take care of him?”

  “Assisted living is for people who can mostly take care of themselves. I don’t think he can, anymore, and in a year or so, as the Alzheimer’s progresses, he’s just going to get worse.”

  “It’s not Alzheimer’s. He says he might have mild cognitive something-or-other.”

  “You’ve spent a fair amount of time with him recently. What do you think?”

  “I’ve noticed he’s starting to sort of go downhill. He seems angry for no reason sometimes. And a little confused, I guess.”

  “She seems tired.”

  “She’s been sitting up in the hospital all night.”

  “No. She seems tired all the time. She seems like she’s tired of everything.”

  I couldn’t do much more than twitch my hands, and my eyelids were still stuck together. But my arms and legs were starting to get that pins-and-needles feel, instead of just being numb.

  “Valhalla won’t be able to deal with his temper, without her to calm him down. Do you think they’ll make sure he eats and watch while he takes his pills, and all the things she does? He’ll need full-time nursing care, and I don’t think he’d be able to tolerate having those people around all the time.”

  “When you say ‘those people,’ do you mean—?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Water, goddamnit,” I said.

  “Oh, shit. He’s awake.”

  24

  2009

  I was propped up in my adjustable hospital bed, sucking on ice chips, and I was feeling very anxious, because Elijah was probably off being murdered someplace. Since I didn’t like Elijah, this shouldn’t have bothered me so much, but I felt personally offended by his murder because the man had been kidnapped despite my firm objection into Clarence’s face.

  I had a plaster splint stuck on my busted schnoz. It pinched a little, and made a whistling noise every time I inhaled, and there was an itch underneath it that was driving me nuts.

  My grandson was sitting in a chair next to my hospital bed looking at me like he was staring into a coffin, which wasn’t improving my mood much. He was dressed in a suit and tie, which meant he’d come here straight from the airport. He looked masculine, and almost intimidating dressed like that. It set me on edge. I still thought of him as a child.

  When he was little, I used to make William shake hands with me, and then I’d crush his little paw in mine, rolling the knuckles between my fingers. I couldn’t do that anymore. His forearms were like steel bands.

  He said he worked out five days a week, for seventy-five minutes at a time, and saw a trainer three times a month. I’d seen him exercise when he was home from school, and he did his routine at the Jewish Community Center gym. His workouts were not like my trips to see Cloudy-ah; he ran against resistance on the elliptical trainer for an hour at a time, and came off the machine so drenched in sweat, he looked like he’d just been baptized.

  Despite his efforts, there were still twenty or thirty pounds of excess chub hanging on his squat frame; when I hugged him, his chest felt solid, but I could have grabbed on to handfuls of him. The boy liked to eat.

  Sometimes he’d call up, just to tell his grandmother and me about some weird New York restaurant he was at. He’d go to a Japanese place and eat sushi. He liked a Vietnamese oxtail soup called “fug.” He’d try the beef bull-googly bippity-boppity at a Korean barbecue restaurant that made him cook his own meat, or he’d have chicken tickers Marsala with sag veneers and Narnia bread at an Indian place.

  Stranger still: He called once to tell us that he was eating at a restaurant where the food was “influenced by the flavors and textures of traditional Moroccan street cuisine.”

  “Do you need to get some kind of vaccination before you go eat at a joint like that?” I’d asked.

  “Very funny.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “No, it’s really quite reasonable. Small plates cost twelve to fourteen dollars. Entrées are mostly between twenty-six and thirty-four. Sangria is only thirty bucks a pitcher.”

  “The Moroccans must be doing really well these days.”

  After twenty hours unconscious, I wouldn’t have minded some Moroccan street cuisine, though, and I might have paid thirty bucks for sangria if they’d let me drink it straight from the pitcher. I hated goddamn ice chips. I figured the nurse was probably right that I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down if I swallowed it too quickly, but I was thirsty, and the ice wasn’t helping. I hate hospitals.

  “What’s happening with Elijah?” I asked. “Have they found him yet?”

  “I don’t know who Elijah is,” my grandson said. I could tell immediately that he didn’t believe there was any Elijah. “You were riding in a car with your friend Andre Price, the police detective. Do you remember Andre?”

  “Yes, I remember Andre,” I said. “How is he doing?”

  “Not well, but he’s alive. They’ve got him in a medically induced coma. He had a serious head injury, and there’s some swelling that they’re trying to bring down.”

  “We had a man called Elijah in the backseat of the car. He’s a bank robber responsible for crimes that have been unsolved for fifty years. He was turning himself in. The men who hit us kidnapped him when they fled the scene.”

  “Nobody has mentioned anything like that. The police told us they believe Price was the target of the attack, because of a drug murder he’s been investigating. I think you might be a little confused.”

  The police didn’t even know about Elijah. That was the problem with being an invisible ghost: When you went missing, nobody looked for you. Odds were that he was already dead. I told him, if he was killed, I would “rain vengeance” on his enemies. I didn’t want to have to go and do that.

  “I guess I need to talk to the police,” I said.

  He nodded. “They want to talk to you. We’ve been telling them that you need to rest.”

  “I think I’ve rested long enough.”

  My grandson left the room, and came in ninety seconds later with a tall black guy who had a detective’s shield clipped to his belt.

  “I’m Rutledge,” he said. “Narcotics.” He was maybe forty-five and his hair was turning gray at the temples. He had the demeanor of somebody important. “I’ve heard a lot about you, and based on what I saw today, I guess a lot of it is true.”

  He turned toward Tequila and crossed his arms in a way that said he wanted to speak to me in private. Tequila nodded to show he recognized the gesture, and then he sat down in the chair next to my bed, to show he didn’t give a shit. Apparently, he’d progressed to the point in his big-city lawyer education where he no longer felt intimidated by figures of authority. I was very proud of him. Everyone should be fortunate enough to live to see their grandchildren become stuck-up and entitled.

  When it was clear Tequila wasn’t going anywhere, Rutledge, Narcotics, scratched his chin for a minute, and then decided he could say what he wanted to say in front of my grandson. “I want to assure you that we are going to get these guys,” he said. “Things have been bad the past couple of years. The city is hard up, and we’ve had fewer bodies and less overtime to throw at some of these problems. I’m not going to pretend we haven’t lost ground. But this attack on a police detective in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, has really woken us up. Price was one of our best, and you’ve got a lot of fans in the department. I think the boys see you as kind of a mascot.”

&nb
sp; “You have no idea how gratifying it is for me to hear that,” I said. It wasn’t good that he was talking about Andre in the past tense. What had happened to him was kind of my fault.

  Rutledge continued: “People are angry about this, and fired up. The coffers are open, and, with the full backing of the City of Memphis and Shelby County, we are rolling everything we can behind the largest drug interdiction operation I’ve seen in twenty years on the force. Our federal friends are pitching in as well. The U.S. Attorney is pursuing charges against street pushers that he would never have bothered with before, and guys who would have kept their mouths shut and served state time are lining up to snitch when the FBI threatens them with federal mandatory minimum drug sentences. It’s shock and awe out there in the streets, Buck.”

  I nodded. All those men and unlimited overtime, and a spirit of cooperation with the federal government, and nobody was looking for Elijah.

  “Who were the kids I shot?” I asked.

  “Clarence O’Donnell, age twenty-two. According to the report, paramedics attempted resuscitation, but I doubt they tried very hard, considering his brains were splattered all over the street. Pronounced dead at the scene, obviously. He just got out of prison a couple of months ago; he was caught trafficking teenage prostitutes, and pled guilty to assault and false imprisonment. He did eighteen months for it, against a three-year sentence. I’ve got a daughter, Mr. Schatz, so I’ve got to say: If I were you, I wouldn’t feel too bad about shooting Mr. O’Donnell.”

  “I’ve never felt bad about shooting anyone,” I said.

  He laughed. “You wouldn’t, would you? The second one is Jacquarius Madison, age twenty. Couple of minor juvenile offenses. Served probation. Graduated high school. He was a student at Tennessee Tech until last fall. Guess he got mixed up with some of the wrong people.”

  “Has he said anything yet?” I asked.

  “Shortly after we arrested him, a slick-looking sharkskin lawyer showed up and said he was Madison’s counsel. Madison talked to him for five minutes, and then sent the guy away and asked for a court-appointed attorney.”