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

by Friedman, Daniel

  The river had become much less important as a transportation artery, and freight that used to be hauled by hundreds of longshoremen was now moved much more quickly by a couple of cranes that were run by computers. Memphis was still a transportation city, but the shipping business was centered around the International Airport and the FedEx hub these days.

  It wouldn’t be hard for a drug dealer to find himself a quiet warehouse where nobody would hear him torturing people.

  “Do you think Elijah is still there?” Tequila asked.

  Rutledge frowned. “The last place the phone pinged the cell network was right in the middle of the river, at about two o’clock this morning.”

  “Like he was on a bridge?” Tequila asked.

  “Like he was on a boat,” I said.

  Rutledge nodded at me. “And the phone hasn’t transmitted since then. Most likely, it went into the water.”

  “With the body,” Tequila said.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Rutledge said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” I told him. “It wasn’t Elijah’s body.”

  “What makes you think that?” Rutledge asked.

  “Because it wasn’t Elijah’s phone,” I said.

  33

  1965

  About twelve hours after police officers shot Longfellow Molloy, the brass decided the riots weren’t going to happen, and word went out by radio that they were cutting off the overtime. I went and got a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and killed forty-five minutes. Then I went to Weisskopf’s house and I knocked on the door. His wife answered.

  “I know who you are. You’re Baruch Schatz,” she said. She clearly thought it was odd that I was knocking on her door just before midnight. She seemed to be trying to decide whether she should acknowledge this oddness, and also trying to figure out what I was doing there. She apparently could not, so she decided to just be polite: “I’m Devorah. Congratulations on your simcha!”

  She was referring to Brian’s upcoming bar mitzvah. I smiled at her, in the automatic way I smiled at people when they said something nice about my kid. “Thank you very much. I need to speak to Len.”

  “Do you want to come inside?”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry, so I think it would be best if I just spoke to him here, on the porch. I promise I’ll only need him for a minute.”

  “I’ll get him.” She closed the door and went inside. I unhooked my blackjack from my belt; gripped the handle with a white-knuckled fist.

  The door opened. Weisskopf had broad shoulders and was a few inches taller than me, but he didn’t give the impression of being a powerful man. He had a face that might have been called handsome, if it wasn’t just a little distorted. The nose was slightly too wide. The lips were just a bit too fleshy. The eyes were a little too small and a little too far apart. His jawline and his middle were just a little bit soft and slack from living a little bit too easy.

  He was standing in the doorway, smiling at me, but not really concealing his nervousness.

  “This is certainly unexpected,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve ever really met before, but my mother knows yours, I think.”

  I gestured at the door, with the truncheon. “Step out onto the porch and shut that behind you.”

  I stuck a cigarette between my lips and lit it with a wooden match. He shut the door. He was looking a little nervous now.

  “Is there something I can help you with tonight, Buck?”

  I took a long drag on my smoke. “You can tell me what I’m supposed to say to my son.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me.”

  “When I go home tonight, my son is going to be waiting for me, and he’s going to want to know how I can be a part of an organization that committed the atrocity that happened this morning. He’s going to ask me how I can live with myself. And I have no idea how I am going to answer that question. So, I am asking you what you think I should tell him.”

  “I’m not sure why you’re coming to me with this,” he said. “We don’t even know each other that well.”

  “Don’t you dare try to bullshit me,” I said. I brandished the blackjack. “I will play your goddamn ribs like a xylophone with this thing. I will break all the teeth out of your fucking jaw.”

  He put his hands up, palms out. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said. “My wife is pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

  I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and frisked him to make sure he didn’t have a weapon.

  “Three people are dead because of you.”

  “Negroes.”

  “Quit saying things that piss me off when I’m trying to talk myself into letting you live.”

  There was only one reason I didn’t beat him with the blackjack until there was nothing left of his head but a smudge on the porch, and it wasn’t his pregnant wife: I didn’t want to have to explain why I’d done it. I didn’t ever want the department to find out that Jews were responsible for the massacre. So, I was going to have to cover this up. I was going to have to put Len Weisskopf someplace where nobody would ever find him.

  “How much did Elijah pay you to murder those people?” I asked.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody. I just hit a man with my nightstick.”

  “But you started it. He paid you to start it. You were his distraction while he robbed the vault.”

  “Maybe I was, but nobody told me about a bank robbery, and I didn’t know them fellas was gonna open fire on the protesters, and I never even met Elijah. All I knew was that my job was to grab the nearest schvartze at exactly ten thirty in the morning and club him with my nightstick. I bet you’d have busted one of them nappy heads open if somebody offered you a bunch of money. How many people have you beat down so far this week, for free?”

  I wanted to beat down one more right there, but I swallowed the lump at the back of my throat and ignored the provocation. “Who paid you? Who was your contact?”

  “Ari Plotkin.”

  Goddamnit. Next time I needed to shoot Ari Plotkin, I’d have to remember to shoot him in the face.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty-five hundred.”

  “Eleven hundred and change for each murder on your conscience.”

  His brow furrowed. “And how many dead men have you got on your conscience, Buck? How many have you killed?”

  “I reckon I can carry one more,” I said. I raised the club, and he threw up his arms to protect his head, and took a step back.

  “Oh God!”

  “Where is it?” I shouted in his face, leaving flecks of spittle and cigarette ash on his cheeks.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The money, you ass.”

  “It’s in the house.”

  “Go get it.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because, if you don’t, I am going to take this here truncheon and I’m going to beat you to death with it.”

  He went back inside the house. Whatever he was doing in there took long enough for me to get concerned that he was entertaining a stupid idea, so I hung the blackjack on my belt and unholstered my .357. I stepped to the side of the door, and as soon as it opened, I reached through it, grabbed a handful of his shirt, and slammed him against the wall.

  I frisked him, and it turned out that he hadn’t been quite dumb enough to grab his gun. He’d done as I’d told him, and retrieved a big wad of bills from someplace in the house.

  “You don’t get to keep this,” I said. I took the money out of his hand.

  “Yeah, well, it don’t look like you’re bagging it up for evidentiary purposes.”

  “Ain’t none of your business what I’m going to do with it.”

  “So, this is a shakedown?” he asked.

  “Think of it as your lucky day, Len,” I said. “I’d like nothing more than to pound you until your insides are mush. You deserve to get hurt real bad, and you deserve to go to prison.”

  “That’s my money,” he
said. “That money is for my family. I earned it fair and square.”

  “Well, then, it’s unfortunate for you that I done been endowed with what you might call a deep skepticism for the concept of property rights,” I said, and I stuffed the wad of cash into my jacket pocket. “Tomorrow morning, you’re going to call your sergeant and tell him you can’t deal with what you saw today. You’re gonna tell him you’ve got to quit the force.”

  “What am I supposed to do without my job?”

  “You’re gonna pack your shit up, and you’re gonna leave town.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  I pressed the muzzle of the .357 against his forehead. “I’m sure you’ll find someplace to settle in the broad and welcoming expanse of I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck. But you can’t stay here.”

  “I’ve got a house.”

  “Hire somebody to sell it and have them wire you the proceeds. But you had better be out of my town before the sun sets tomorrow. If I ever see you here again, or if you even look back as you leave, I will burn you alive in the white-hot flames of God’s holy fire. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you,” he said.

  I put my gun away. “Good,” I said.

  “I’ve got to tell you, though, that you’re a goddamned hypocrite,” he said. “You act all righteous at the same time you’re stuffing my dirty money in your pockets. You ain’t better than me. You’re at least as crooked and a lot more violent. It makes me sick just to look at you.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you won’t ever have to see me again,” I said. “And if you do see me, I had better not see you, because the next time I see you, you are going to die.”

  “You’re a hypocrite.”

  “And you’ve got until sundown tomorrow to be gone from Memphis, or else your pregnant wife had best start making funeral arrangements. Have yourself a good night, you lousy piece of shit.”

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  When Brian woke up, I had breakfast almost ready. I’d used the real beans to make the coffee, not the instant stuff I usually made. I’d also fixed scrambled eggs, bagels, fresh orange juice, and crispy bacon.

  The fight over bacon was one of the few major arguments with Rose that I ever managed to win. Both of us were born into traditional families that kept kosher kitchens, but my mother had begun ignoring some of the more inconvenient restrictions after my father died, and by the time I was in high school, I thought nothing about eating a cheeseburger in a restaurant.

  During the war, our rations generally weren’t very good, and salted pork held up better than most other meats, so it was cherished when we could get hold of it. I developed a taste for the stuff.

  When I got back from Europe, after what I’d seen and what I’d endured and what I’d done, I no longer had the patience to keep separate flatware for meat and dairy. When I did the shopping, I brought treif into the house.

  Rose was offended at first, but she eventually came to understand that the rules had changed. The Jews had needed deliverance, and God hadn’t shown up. The U.S. Army had to do His job for Him. I took a damn bullet doing His job for Him. So now, He didn’t get to tell me what I could have for breakfast.

  My concession to her was that after I filled the house with the smell of sizzling pig fat, I always made sure to cover it up with the smell of cigarettes.

  My son came into the kitchen rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He was wearing flannel pajamas, and it didn’t seem like it had been so long since he was wearing the ones with the little footies.

  I set a plate in front of him.

  “You can’t buy me off this easily,” he said.

  “I’m not trying to buy anything,” I told him. “I just wanted to fix breakfast.”

  There was a market that was open late, and I’d made a trip there after my talk with Len Weisskopf, mostly just to make sure Brian would be asleep by the time I got home. I didn’t know what to say, and I wasn’t ready to try to explain it to him.

  I’d broken one of the hundred-dollar bills that Elijah had given me to pay for the groceries. Using the money felt dirty. I didn’t feel particularly proud of anything that had happened over the course of the last week.

  “Three men are dead, and you think you can buy my admiration back with coffee and eggs?”

  “And bacon,” I said.

  He nodded. “Okay. I’ll have some bacon.”

  He ate in silence. I cooked more eggs.

  Rose came into the kitchen a few minutes later. I set a plate of eggs and a toasted bagel in front of her.

  “You didn’t cook these in the same pan with that filth, did you?” she asked.

  On our fifteenth anniversary, I tried to surprise her by bringing home a couple of live lobsters for dinner. Shellfish is forbidden to Jews, and Rose was furious. She told me to go back to the fish market and get my money back, but the lobsters had been out of the tank for too long, and the store wouldn’t take them.

  I wanted to cook them, even if Rose didn’t want to eat any lobster meat, but she wouldn’t have such unholiness in the house, and she made me throw them away. Nine dollars, right out the window.

  I ended up sleeping on the couch that night, and I’d learned my lesson.

  “I used a different pan,” I said. “Your eggs never touched the pork.”

  “Good,” she said. “That stuff makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t give Dad any guff, Mom,” Brian said. “He has a busy day of shooting Negroes ahead of him.”

  “I didn’t shoot any Negroes,” I said.

  “But your department did, and today, you are going to work like everything is normal.”

  “I’m not making excuses about what happened yesterday,” I said. “Those officers probably should not have opened fire.”

  “Probably?” He pounded his fist on the table and nearly spilled his orange juice.

  “Tensions were very high. It was a complicated situation.”

  “Those workers were trying to expose the barbaric practices of a company that was exploiting them, and the police treated them like a bunch of criminals. Your department allowed themselves to be used as strikebreaking thugs by that sleazy Alvin Kluge.”

  “Look, I know you’ve been listening to Abramsky a lot.”

  “I think for myself. But the rabbi is right about a lot of things.”

  “Abramsky lost family in the Holocaust,” Rose said. “I can understand why he’s concerned about the reach of the state and the way the police use force.”

  “That’s an incredibly narrow viewpoint, and you know it, honey,” I said. “There are other kinds of violence people need to be concerned about: Pimps and drunks beating up women. Drug dealers intimidating whole neighborhoods. Robbers gunning people down in the street. If the police can’t deploy coercion and violence, we can’t protect people.”

  Brian stuffed a whole piece of bacon into his mouth. “Those dangers seem pretty remote,” he said. “Maybe the cure is worse than the disease. In order to stop a few thugs from hurting a few people, we empower a whole thug department to menace everybody.”

  “Have I ever told you about what happened to my father?” I asked.

  “Buck, he’s twelve years old,” Rose said.

  “So what? If he wants to be a man, he can know about these things. I was six when it happened.”

  For the first time all morning, Brian looked straight at me: “What happened to my grandfather?”

  “We’re not going to talk about this,” Rose said.

  I scraped the last of the eggs onto a plate for myself, and then I sat down at the table. Nobody spoke. I ate a piece of bacon and lit a cigarette.

  Finally, I said: “The police force is only as good as the men who wear the uniform. Some of those men aren’t so good. But if good people won’t do that job, then only bad people will do it. I have to go out there every day, and try to do the right thing. Like I said, I didn’t shoot those Negroes.”

&n
bsp; “But you did beat down Mr. Schulman. I saw you do that.”

  “Yes, I did. And I felt like I needed to, because of the way he took off running when he saw me. I didn’t know what he was up to. Maybe innocent people would have been hurt if I had ignored his suspicious behavior.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Schulman was going to hurt anybody.”

  “It’s good that you think the best about folks. But sometimes, people are more dangerous than they might seem.”

  “And sometimes violence is excessive.”

  “Yes, it is. Sometimes.”

  “Have you ever killed a man?” he asked.

  Rose stopped chewing and looked at me.

  I set my fork and knife on the plate and I looked him right in the eye. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg, every now and again.”

  A boy has to become a man sometime.

  He stuck out his jaw and pouted at me. “Dad, I believe it’s possible to prepare a full four-course country breakfast without causing a single human fatality.”

  I think, when he asked, he already knew. It was the sort of thing he probably was able to figure out on his own.

  “Well, then, from now on, how about if you do the cooking?” I said.

  34

  2009

  It took over an hour to get my doctor to let me leave the hospital. He insisted on putting a note in my chart that said I was checking myself out “against physician’s advice.” I told him to put whatever he needed to put wherever he needed to put it to get me out of there.

  Fran brought Rose up to my room just as Rutledge was helping me into a wheelchair to leave. So that was a little bit of a scene, but at least William stayed behind to calm his grandmother down while I went with the detective.

  There was nothing for her to be upset about. The criminals were long gone by the time Rutledge got me to the warehouse. The place was a ruin. Half the surrounding buildings looked like their roofs had caved in, and the ride got real bumpy near the end, because the asphalt was crumbling.