Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (23 page)

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 witnesses 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 carrying 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.

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.”