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

by Friedman, Daniel

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  The Negro response to the morning’s violence turned out to be more subdued than I’d feared it might be; the Kluge strike had become a focal point for the anxieties of whites working in downtown offices, but it had never really been much of a cause among black Memphians. It seemed most people had viewed the Kluge strike as a labor issue rather than a race issue.

  And after six uneventful weeks of protests in front of the Kluge offices, there were no journalists around when the strike finally turned violent.

  The national news media would be interested, now that our story had a body count, but without gruesome, sensationalistic images or film footage, the story wouldn’t get too much play on television. Since nobody had really been paying attention to the strike outside of Memphis, only the local news people were reporting the story in the hours after the massacre.

  They had to live in this town, so the Memphis journalists were treading carefully in their coverage, focusing on the labor angle rather than the racial issue. Nobody wanted to publish or broadcast the story that would set off a riot.

  The strike was too small to attract much attention from national civil rights organizations, and the freight workers tended not to be the churchgoing sort, so the black preachers in Memphis hadn’t been rallying their flocks behind that particular cause. The crowd had been relatively small when the violence broke out, and most of the firsthand witnesses were arrested at the scene. Until the department started turning the protesters loose, hours after the shootings, very few people knew exactly what had gone down.

  The mayor wanted the whole thing kept quiet more than he wanted somebody to blame for it, and the brass was operating under the assumption that they could sweep the whole nasty situation under the rug if they just ran a thorough and diligent investigation that reached the inevitable conclusion: The officers had conducted themselves in an exemplary manner, and that any beatings or shootings that may have been directed at the strikers were fully justified.

  By the time most people who might have responded violently learned of the shootings, the streets were full of cops. By nightfall, we’d doubled our previous department record for the most arrests made in a single day, and our holding cells were full of Negroes. There weren’t any riots in Memphis; at least not in 1965. The peace was kept.

  Except at the Cotton Planters Union Bank. When the vault opened itself, after the three-hour alarm lockdown ended, all the money inside was gone.

  30

  2009

  I was back on my adjustable hospital bed. The nurse had put an IV in my arm, and she’d told me they were monitoring my iron, because my bloodwork showed that I was anemic. This wasn’t surprising to me. I felt exactly like I’d been in a car accident.

  Rutledge, Narcotics, was sitting next to me in the hospital-issue version of a comfy chair; a cheap, flimsy-looking thing with plastic cushions. He was too tall for it, and he looked kind of uncomfortable. He was resting his right ankle on his left knee, and had his elbows splayed over the armrests. He was holding something that I had at first thought was a notepad, but which was, in fact, some kind of electronic device: either a very large Internet phone or a very small computer.

  My grandson was so excited, he couldn’t seem to sit down at all. He was pacing around by the foot of the bed, and I was getting annoyed just looking at him.

  “I don’t understand how we’re supposed to find this guy based on the cell phone,” Rutledge said. “We don’t have the e-mail address or the password he’s registered it to, so we can’t trace it online.”

  Tequila started bouncing up and down. The only thing he liked better than knowing the answer was knowing the answer when nobody else did, so he could feel like he was the smartest kid in the class. “Telephones can be tracked by GPS,” he said. “But their location can also be triangulated by the phone company, using its cell-network infrastructure. They keep records of which cell towers every phone talks to, and this data can be used to find out where a phone, and presumably the phone’s owner, were located at a particular time.”

  Rutledge looked annoyed. “I know that,” he said. “But in order to track a cell phone, you have to know the phone number. You can’t just tell me that some guy has a cell phone, and then ask me to find it. Everybody has a damn cell phone.”

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know Rutledge’s first name. I flipped backwards through my notebook to see if I’d written it down, but I had not, so he probably hadn’t told me.

  I wondered if his name was something really black, and he was embarrassed about it. Maybe Rutledge was his first name, and not his last name. But if that was the case, then I didn’t know his last name. Unless it was Narcotics. I thought about asking him, but he seemed like the sort who might get all touchy and indignant about that kind of question.

  “But the type of phone is distinct, and the cell network can also detect which kind of phone it is communicating with,” my grandson said. “He had an iPhone.”

  “So what? There are tens of thousands of iPhones in this city. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Everybody’s got a damn iPhone.”

  “Right, but the cell providers keep logs of their towers, as well as logs of the phones, so it can look up a particular tower to see which phones were in range of it, just like they can look up a phone number and see which towers it connected to. We know the phone we’re looking for was at the Jewish cemetery off South Parkway at three o’clock yesterday. That cemetery is next to a rail yard, an abandoned factory, and a big gravel pit. There’s a good chance that it was the only iPhone in the vicinity of the cemetery at that time, and the phone company should be able to check the logs of the towers that cover the cemetery and find that number.”

  “And once they can identify the phone, they can find out where it’s been since yesterday the regular way,” Rutledge said. He looked impressed. “How did you even know about that?”

  “I took a seminar last semester about emerging technologies and privacy issues,” Tequila said. “It’s a very fertile area for legal scholarship, because courts are trying to take rules created to govern analog surveillance and apply them to facts relating to new developments like cell phones and Internet activity. There are conflicting decisions among the federal circuit courts about the privacy expectations associated with some of this stuff, and eventually, the Supreme Court is going to have to weigh in and make some major decisions about whether the digital footprint is entitled to protection under the Fourth Amendment.”

  “I’m glad I ain’t got a digital footprint,” I said.

  “You ought to be glad your friend Elijah has one,” Tequila said.

  “I guess. Do we have to get a warrant to do this?”

  “No,” Rutledge said. “The phone companies pull their logs for us whenever we ask.”

  “That’s the constitutional issue; whether police should be able to obtain data like that without judicial supervision,” Tequila said. “Maybe I will write a law review article about it. I’m on the staff of the Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.”

  “Keep it in your pants,” I told him.

  Rutledge pressed his computer device to his ear, which I guess meant it was a cell phone.

  “You’re not supposed to use those things in the hospital,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Well, who’s gonna stop me?”

  31

  1965

  I was sitting at my desk in the offices of the Detectives’ bureau at the Central Police Station. I’d left my car in front of the bank and walked back; the streets were too jammed up to drive.

  The opportunity to participate in the department’s campaign to suppress Negro outrage struck me as singularly unappealing, so I’d spent the hours since Longfellow Molloy’s death trying to stay clear of the massacre investigation by halfheartedly following up leads in a week-old murder. I knew who had done it, but I wasn’t going to be able to make a charge stick, because the asshole had gone and intimidated my two key witne
sses while I was focused on the Elijah thing.

  I had half a mind to go find the guy and just beat the shit out of him, but I knew that the morning’s events were going to be a black eye for the department, and I was worried that the brass was about to start taking police violence more seriously. I also didn’t want to draw too much attention to an investigation that I’d botched through my negligence. I sort of had an explanation for what I’d spent the last week doing, but it wouldn’t hold up under intense scrutiny.

  I was going to have to let this one go for now. I’d get him the next time he killed somebody.

  I stuck my notes into a Redweld folder and was sliding it into my desk drawer when I heard on the radio that the Cotton Planters Union Bank had been robbed.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the bank’s switchboard. The operator put me through to Greenfield’s extension and he picked it up himself.

  “Where are you people?” he demanded. “It’s been twenty minutes since I reported the theft of a hundred seventy thousand dollars, and the police still have not arrived.”

  On a normal day, a bank robbery would be a big deal for the Memphis Police; something every detective would need to prioritize above his regular caseload of junkies and Negroes robbing and killing each other.

  But this wasn’t a normal day. Today, nobody cared about Greenfield or his stupid money.

  “I thought you only had a hundred fifty thousand dollars in your vault,” I said.

  “We’ve had another armored truck delivery since then.”

  “You took another twenty thousand dollars into your vault after I warned you that Elijah was looking to rob you?”

  “Yes. Christ, you sound like Cartwright.”

  “You’re an ass, Greenfield,” I said.

  “Last time we spoke, you said I was a prick.”

  “You’re a prick and an ass. Actually, you’re that oily, wrinkled strip of flesh between a nutsack and an asshole. They call it a taint, because it ain’t the one thing and it ain’t the other. That’s what you are.”

  “I appreciate your sentiment.”

  “I’m just telling you this for your edification.”

  “Are you going to continue insulting me, Detective Schatz, or are you going to do your job and capture the perpetrator of this crime?”

  I clearly wasn’t going to be capturing Elijah. Greenfield’s state-of-the-art security system had bought the robbers three hours to escape before the crime was even discovered. Elijah was already out of the state.

  And I didn’t even want to see him caught, because I didn’t want his Jewish conspiracy exposed. Now that he’d robbed the bank, the only way I could keep his scheme from blowing back on me was to make sure he got away clean. If this robbery ever got solved, it would happen despite my most diligent efforts.

  “I think I’m just going to keep insulting you, Greenfield.”

  “Fuck you, Buck Schatz.”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  Now I had a problem: Ari Plotkin told me that Elijah’s plan had been to rob the bank when the strike broke out in violence. Waiting outside the bank in case something happened had not seemed like a particularly effective use of my time, and I doubted that was what the robbers had been doing. Elijah must have planned his heist to coincide with the outbreak of violence at the Kluge protest, which meant he had known exactly when the violence was going to break out.

  The day I’d met him, he tried to recruit me to be his inside man in the police department. But what part of his scheme required a man in the police department? It wasn’t hard to make the intuitive leap: He’d paid somebody off to start a race riot in front of the Kluge building in order to distract everyone’s attention from the job he was pulling at the bank. So, the Jewish heist I wanted to cover up and the police massacre that was already the subject of an intense internal department investigation were actually the same case.

  I made some discreet inquiries about the bank robbery case, and learned it had fallen in the lap of the most ineffectual detective on the force, a thick, wheezy guy named Whit Pecker who was about five months away from retirement and getting a head start on being lazy and useless.

  This was a lucky break for me; Greenfield wouldn’t tell him about his meetings with me; the bank’s insurer might deny coverage if they learned the manager had been warned about the robbery. If I was lucky, neither Elijah’s name nor mine would ever even be connected with the file.

  However, the men investigating the massacre were more of a danger; the three highest-ranking detectives in Memphis had all been tasked with the job of figuring out what had happened. So far, the word around the station was that they weren’t having much luck. They had dozens of witnesses to take statements from, and they were getting conflicting and useless stories. The Negroes all insisted that a police officer had struck the first blow, while the cops insisted that the Negroes had begun swinging sticks and throwing bottles, and that the retaliation had been a by-the-book response.

  But I had a little bit of information that the investigators didn’t: I knew about Elijah’s plan to corrupt a Jewish cop. There were only four Jews on the Memphis police force, and I was one of them, so while the official investigation was sorting through fifty names and fifty stories, I had a pretty short list to work with. All I had to do was ask a few friendly acquaintances a couple of discreet questions to find out that only one Jewish policeman had been on protest duty that morning.

  His name was Officer Len Weisskopf. He was twenty-six years old, and now he was in trouble.

  32

  2009

  “At three o’clock yesterday, one iPhone was switched on in the vicinity of the cemetery,” Rutledge, Narcotics, said. “That phone number belongs to Charles Cameron.”

  “Also known as Carlo Cash?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Rutledge.

  “I thought drug dealers only made calls on burners,” said Tequila.

  “Burners?” I asked.

  I guessed this was drug slang by the way the detective curled his lip when he heard Tequila use the term.

  “Prepaid, disposable cell phones,” Rutledge said. “They do their drug business on those, but they still have regular phones, for regular stuff. Like regular people. You understand that they’re people, right?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Tequila said.

  “Just don’t be thinking you all hip because you listen to Jay-Z and you seen The Wire,” Rutledge said. “I’ve met dudes like you before.”

  Tequila’s nostrils sort of flared. “You had that coming,” I told him. I did not listen to Jay-Z, and I had not seen The Wire, and I would not have been surprised if Rutledge, Narcotics, had never met anyone like me before, but I decided not to say this.

  “Anyway, we traced the phone to a warehouse on Riverside Boulevard.”

  “There are warehouses on Riverside Boulevard?” Tequila asked. “I thought that was all parks and new Downtown housing.”

  “You’re thinking of Riverside Drive,” Rutledge told him. “Riverside Boulevard is a whole different thing.”

  Riverside Drive and Riverside Park were part of Memphis’s revitalized Downtown. The construction of a half-billion-dollar basketball arena had done a lot to improve an area of a few blocks around the Peabody Hotel.

  Developers had bulldozed out the aging heart of the city and built a bunch of expensive apartment buildings and some cute little shops, a movie theater, and a lot of fancy restaurants.

  A year ago, Rose and I took Tequila out for dinner down there, at a Brazilian steakhouse. I wasn’t wild about the Brazilian part, but I figured they probably couldn’t ruin a piece of meat too much.

  For nearly thirty years, I worked in that neighborhood, at the 128 Adams Ave. police station, but Tequila had to ask his cell phone for directions, because I didn’t recognize anything anymore. It cost me eight dollars to park the Buick.

  You don’t order a steak at a Brazilian steakhouse; you pay forty dollars for a plate, and then waiters come around carry
ing swords with different kinds of meat skewered on them, and you just take as much of it as you can cram down your gullet. For some reason, the waiters were called chiaroscuros.

  Tequila didn’t even talk to us during the meal, because he was too busy cutting and chewing and flagging down waiters to bring him more sword-meats. I watched that boy put away at least three pounds of flank steak and garlic-rubbed sirloin and Parmesan-crusted chicken drummies and bacon-wrapped filet mignon. I was almost impressed, in the same way I might almost be impressed by a freak show at a circus.

  The next day, my grandson called to let me know that he’d “dropped a deuce that filled the bowl above the waterline.”

  “This is amazing,” he said. “It’s like a brand-new tropical island with rich, volcanic soil. In my toilet.”

  “That’s great to hear,” I said.

  “Do you want me to text you a picture of it?”

  “No. And I haven’t got that kind of phone.”

  “I’m worried it’s too big for the pipe, and it’s going to clog up the works. Maybe I’d better break it apart with the toilet brush.”

  My works were also clogged up, which made the conversation especially annoying. I was on the third day of a course of oral laxatives, and the Brazilian meats had done nothing to get things moving; they’d only made me feel more bloated and backed up. If I didn’t manage to pass something solid by breakfast the next day, I was going to have to try a suppository. If that didn’t work, I’d need to see the gastroenterologist. That guy was, by a significant margin, my least-favorite doctor.

  I didn’t want to explain this to my grandson, so he never figured out why I was mad at him.

  Anyway, the point is that, once you got past the new development spurred by the stadium construction, Memphis’s postindustrial decline had largely continued unabated. A couple of miles down the riverfront from the cluster of bank skyscrapers and government buildings and Brazilian steakhouses, you ran into miles of pothole-riddled streets and disused warehouses and shipping yards.