Don't Ever Get Old (27 page)

The idea that the killer would proceed here immediately after killing Steinblatt made a lot of sense. Nothing scuttled a frame job on an innocent man like having the fellow mucking around trying to vindicate himself. Since Tequila vanished the same time Steinblatt got carved up, it would look to an observer like Tequila had done the job and then fled. The police would consider his disappearance an admission of guilt and would pursue no other leads.

Tequila could go into a shallow grave, and the investigation into the murders would stop until some jogger or somebody's dog found the body. By then it would be too late to piece together solid evidence against another suspect. I comforted myself with the idea that Tequila would probably stay alive, though, at least until the killer got hold of the treasure. Unless he already had it; there was no way I could check the attic.

I dialed Tequila's cell again and got no answer.

Rose didn't know about the girl in St. Louis and didn't know Tequila was now a murder suspect, so she imputed nothing sinister in his absence. I decided not to alarm her. But I sat up in the living room, watching Fox News and hoping he'd come back.

Sometime after midnight, I fell asleep on the sofa. I woke up around three, when a black Chevy Malibu pulled into my driveway.

 

43

Wiping sleep from my eyes, I padded into the darkened kitchen and leaned over the breakfast table so I could peer through the window.

The Chevy rolled to a stop in front of my garage. I could see the back of it, and it looked like it had a yellow license plate, which meant it was from Mississippi. I could not make out the number.

The door opened and the silhouette of a man climbed out of the driver's side. The only light was from a streetlamp at the end of the driveway, and my vision was kind of fuzzy, so I couldn't tell who the driver was, even squinting.

Despite the near darkness, though, I could see he was holding a gun in his left hand. I wished I had my .357.

The Chevy's trunk popped open, and the driver roughly hauled a second man out of it and dropped him hard on the ground. The man from the trunk was bound or shackled around the wrists and ankles.

The captive tried to struggle, but the driver cracked him over the head with the gun and dragged him around the front of the car toward the garage.

I figured the captive must have been Tequila. The driver was probably Pratt. The debt collector must have kidnapped Tequila out of the house, taken him someplace, and beat him until he admitted we had the gold. Now he was back to take it from us.

I picked up the phone and started to call Randall Jennings. But then I realized that if the police showed up, my grandson would be caught in the middle of a standoff between police and a cornered man. My faith in the competence of the cops was less than total, and I didn't know if they could safely defuse a hostage situation. It seemed foolish to think that I could do a better job myself; I was infirm, unarmed, and confused. Even negotiating a swap of my grandson for the gold seemed to be a task beyond my capacity. But escalating the situation by involving police would be extraordinarily dangerous.

I went out the front door, closing it as quietly as I could, and walked across the damp lawn in my slippers.

On close inspection, the Chevy in the driveway looked a little different from the one that had chased us in St. Louis. I distinctly remembered that Chevy having black windows, but the one in the driveway had ordinary transparent ones.

This car also had an Ole Miss souvenir license plate on its front bumper; the pursuer in St. Louis had not had a license holder on the front of the car. I tried to think of a reason why the killer might have replaced all his windows in the last couple of days and couldn't come up with one.

I walked around to the garage, where the driver had dragged his captive, and I saw T. Addleford Pratt. But he was the one lying on the floor, bound up with duct tape. Tequila was waving my gun in Pratt's face.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“I'm trying to get a confession out of this son of a bitch,” Tequila told me.

“I didn't do nothin' to nobody,” said T. Addleford Pratt. His rotten brown teeth were smashed, and his nose was bent sideways and kind of flattened. The white part of his left eye was full of blood. I was impressed, momentarily, before I realized how much trouble we were in.

“What have you done, Billy?” I reached my hand toward him, and he gave me back my gun.

“As soon as you called and told me Steinblatt was dead, I knew Pratt had to be the killer. We told this asshole that Steinblatt was connected to the treasure, but Norris Feely and Felicia Kind didn't know anything about any Israelis. So I called a cab and went out to Tunica to find the son of a bitch, and it turns out he's driving the same car that chased us around St. Louis.”

“I ain't never been to St. Louis,” Pratt howled.

“You picked him up in Tunica?”

“Yeah. I caught him leaving the casino.”

I did the math in my head, and it didn't seem to work. “Steinblatt was killed less than twenty minutes before I called you. If Pratt was in Tunica, that's a solid alibi. He can't be the killer.”

Tequila kicked Pratt hard in the stomach. “He did it, the son of a bitch. Tell him you did it.”

Pratt moaned.

“Did you murder Lawrence Kind?” I asked.

Pratt spat a mouthful of blood onto the concrete floor of the garage. “Fuck, no.”

“Felicia Kind said you tried to get her to pay you out of her life insurance.”

“Dammit, I try to get ever'body to pay out of ever'thing. That's muh fuckin' job, you asshole.”

Tequila raised a leg to stomp Pratt again, but I signaled him to hold off.

“There was no money to collect on before you killed Kind, and after he was dead, there was money to collect from the life insurance.”

“No, you got it wrong. The casino is a creditor of the dead man's estate. The wife is the beneficiary of the life insurance. Since the insurance money never passes through the estate, we can't get a piece of it.”

I looked at Tequila. “Does that sound true?”

“I don't fucking know,” he said. Way to go, NYU Law School.

“Look, I am an accountant. I handle delinquent accounts.” Pratt paused for a moment to let out a snuffling moan. It sounded like something inside him was filling with fluid. But when he started talking again, a lot of the redneck inflection seemed to have drained out of his voice. “First, I identify that the debtor is late on his payments and I put a stop on further gaming credit. Then I call the debtor and listen to excuses. I threaten legal action, I send out a couple of letters, and see if I can shake anything out of 'em. When they don't pay up, I send an e-mail to my boss, telling him that I think he should write off the debt, or that he should pursue legal action.”

“You told us you work in the muscle business,” I said.

“Yeah. I bet I said a lot of shit. I was trying to cow you into handing me payment, at least partial payment, on a debt that's legally unrecoverable. There are lots of stories among gamblers about broken legs and crushed fingers. About holes in the desert outside Las Vegas. It don't hurt, in my line of work, to keep people scared. Folks in this part of the country are the kind of sanctimonious Christians that don't think casino debts ought to get paid, so it's a lost cause, most times, trying to get what we're owed in court. If the losers stay scared, they won't try to draw credit they ain't good for, and they won't go deadbeat on what they owe us.”

“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.” Tequila's eyes were welling up. “People get killed over gambling debts all the time.”

“Not by us, they don't,” Pratt insisted. “The Silver Gulch Saloon and Casino is licensed and regulated by the state of Mississippi. If we looked for a single second like a criminal enterprise, the state would yank our right to operate without hesitation. We ain't gonna jeopardize the whole damn business by committing murder over the piddly-shit debt Lawrence Kind owed us. And I sure ain't gonna kill nobody, 'cause it ain't my ass on the line over the loss. I didn't approve any credit for Kind. I just shook down whoever I thought might be shakable when the deadbeat turned up gutted.”

“Grandpa, the man drives a black Chevy Malibu. He's got to be the killer.”

“F'chrissake,” said Pratt. “If I was some kind of nefarious homicidal fuckin' kingpin, would this little dicksucker here have been able to kick the shit out of me, and shove me in the trunk of my own damn car?”

What Pratt was saying sounded, to my ears, like the truth. “The world is full of Chevys,” I told my grandson.

What I was thinking was that Tequila could have killed Steinblatt and then gone straight to Tunica to pick up Pratt. But I tried to banish such thoughts from my mind. I knew my grandson. I knew, absolutely, that he hadn't killed those people.

Certainly, there were other plausible scenarios, Pratt or Feely or Felicia might have a personal alibi, but any of them might have some sort of accomplice; two of them could have been working together, or somebody might be using some kind of contract killer. Hired muscle didn't usually do jobs in a messy psycho killer style, but if the money was right, most things were negotiable.

But even if Tequila was innocent of the murders, he had committed a pretty wide assortment of crimes in his apprehension of Pratt: kidnapping, grand theft auto, and assault, at least. And he'd taken Pratt across state lines, which subjected him to federal charges. And he'd used a gun, which meant he could be hit with an additional federal weapons charge. He was looking at three or four decades of jail time.

And as long as the real killer was still loose, and as long as we had Heinrich Ziegler's treasure, the people I loved would be in danger. I had to make the safe play now. And I had to protect Tequila.

I sighed. “You remember when you asked me if I ever framed a man up to close a case in a way I liked?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I never exactly did that before. But it looks like I'm about to. Go haul the gold down from the attic.”

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

After I left the death camp at Chelmno, I found a dank little tavern in the basement of an old building in Lodz, and I settled onto a wobbly stool to drown my dark mood in sour, cloudy vodka.

There was only one other barfly in the place, a stoop-shouldered Pole who carried years of hard living in deep creases on his face. He looked at me for a while, his milky yellow eyes glowing like phosphorus in the lamplit room. I ignored him, but he came over to speak to me anyway.

“Amerikaner?”

I nodded without turning my head toward him.

“Good on you, then,” he said in English. “I hate the Germans. They are full of lies.”

“They're full of something,” I said.

“I am Krzysztof,” said the drunk.

“Buck.”

“Ah. Book. I like this. Is fine American name. Like cowboy.”

“Sure.”

“Germans don't have such names.”

“Reckon not.”

“Germans come with big promise. Work for us, Krzysztof. Be a police. And I go to work for them. Now, what am I? Peasant farmer again, like before they came, only now, much worse. Nothing will grow, not even potato. So many marching boots and tank treads, strip the good earth. You have word for this?”

“Topsoil?”

“Yes. Topsoil stripped away. Fields are fallow. I have little money, and I spend it to drink. Perhaps later, I will starve. Things are very bad.”

“Be thankful you ain't a Japanese,” I said.

“Yes, or a Jew,” said Krzysztof, and he laughed. “I was police, at the Jew camp nearby. Very fine, the Germans promise. Pay is good. Plenty to eat. When you want woman, you take. Then they decide to send the Jews to Treblinka, and all goes away.”

“You were a guard up at Chelmno?”

“Yes, until damn Germans took it from me. Now, things could not be worse.”

But things got worse for Krzysztof a half hour later, when I took him outside and beat him until his face was mush and his nose caved in and his mouth was a ragged, gasping hole.

I left him lying on the street, his blood running down through the gaps in the cobblestones, and I skipped town before the local authorities caught up to me. A few days later, I booked passage home. Became a police. And now, what am I?

 

44

Randall Jennings was sitting at my kitchen table, looking at two hundred pounds of Nazi gold. Tequila was standing by the doorway with his arms crossed.

He'd wanted to hold back at least a couple of bars, but I knew that we needed our story to be as close to the truth as possible, and as long as we had anything, the killer would be after us. So despite Tequila's objections, all eight bars were resting on the table.

T. Addleford Pratt was on the floor, curled in a ball, bleeding. His hands and feet were still wrapped in duct tape.

“If you want to know why Kind was murdered, this is it,” I told Jennings. I'd explained to him who Ziegler was and how he had escaped from Europe with the treasure. I told him why we were in St. Louis and gave him a version of the story about how we acquired the gold that didn't involve stealing from a bank.

“Jim Wallace knew about the treasure all his life, but he was ashamed of letting Ziegler escape, so he never told anyone. He started talking about it when he was on his deathbed. He told me, and Norris Feely and Lawrence Kind.”

Jennings peered at Pratt and then at the swastika stamps on the gold bars. He rubbed at his eyes. He looked tired; he'd been off duty, and I'd called him at home.

“How does this guy fit into the story?” he asked.

“This is the debt collector for the Silver Gulch Casino in Tunica. Lawrence Kind owed him money and promised him a cut of the treasure against gambling debts.”