Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (28 page)

I didn’t like that he’d parked the car in the driveway, though. He could easily have pulled it around the back of the house and parked in the garage, where it was out of sight. The driveway was the worst place to park it, because people on the street could see it and he couldn’t, since the only window that looked out on that side of the house was completely blocked by a privacy hedge.

He’d have been better off parking it on the street, where he could at least keep an eye on it. I wondered why he’d parked it where he’d parked it. It seemed like a sign of extreme carelessness, or maybe arrogance.

Or else it was a signal; weird that a man hiding out after stealing millions from a drug dealer would want to signal his presence. But who would recognize this thoroughly inconspicuous Honda Accord as a message?

I had, so I supposed I would. It was a signal for me. Just as I’d known he’d be here, he knew I’d be coming. And he was waiting for me.

Elijah still hadn’t answered, so I pushed the doorbell again.

Even though it was hot out, I was wearing the Members Only jacket that Brian had given me for my birthday in 1986. In the left-hand pocket, I was carrying a roll of silver duct tape. In the right pocket, I had my .357.

I thought of Longfellow Molloy lying on the pavement with his unblinking eye open and staring at me, and I thought of Andre Price lying in his hospital bed, hooked up to the ventilator. The check had come due, and it was time for Elijah to pay up.

I heard the lock click, but the door didn’t open. I counted to ten, slowly, and then I turned the knob.

Inside, all the lights were off, and there was no sign of Elijah. I pushed my walker through the front door and trudged down a short hallway. The dining room opened to my right. We used to keep my mother’s china in a glass-fronted cabinet in there. Now it was in a box in a storage locker someplace.

The wall to my left used to be covered with family photos. Of Rose and me when we were younger; of William as a baby; of Brian. Somebody had filled in the holes I’d nailed into the wall to hang the frames from, and then painted over the plaster.

The sturdy brick fireplace was the only remnant of my old den that hadn’t been ripped out during the renovation. The carpeting was gone, and someone had waxed and polished the wood floor underneath. This place didn’t look like home anymore. It didn’t smell like us.

My family was here for sixty years, and a construction crew had eliminated every sign our habitation in a matter of days. Standing there, in the dark, in the den that used to be my den but wasn’t anymore, I recognized the futility of all human endeavors. It didn’t matter whether you tiptoed through the world invisibly like Elijah, or you stomped around bellowing and beating people with clubs; in the end, the sum total of your life amounted to nothing that couldn’t be washed away or covered up with a dab of plaster and a coat of paint.

As years went by, you just got old, and then you vanished like a stone beneath the surface of a lake, and even as you gloated over the size of the splash you made, the waters stilled and everything went back to being exactly like it was before you appeared on the scene; exactly how it would have been if you’d never existed.

The kitchen where I used to eat breakfast with my family was to my right. The renovators had pulled up the cracked, dingy linoleum that Rose had been on my case for twenty years to do something about, and they’d laid down new tile. Stripped of its miniblinds, the window looked naked, but it was letting in a fair amount of light from the streetlamps outside, so I could see where I was going. I turned the other way and followed the hallway toward the bedrooms at the back of the house.

Along the way, I checked the guest room, where William used to sleep when his parents sent him here to get him out of their hair for a night or a weekend. The built-in bookshelves used to be lined with the thick, leather-bound photo albums that Rose had carefully maintained since before I married her. Now almost all of those albums were in the concrete self-storage locker we’d rented.

I checked the half bathroom in the hallway. I thought Elijah might be hiding in there, because it had no windows and was the darkest room in the house. I didn’t miss that bathroom; it was not a well-considered architectural feature. When somebody took a shit in there, the smell had no place to go.

Anyway, he wasn’t in there, which left two doors, across from each other at the end of the hallway. I put my hand on the door of the bedroom Rose and I had shared since Eisenhower was in office, and paused for a moment to think. Then I turned around, which was difficult to do with the walker in such a narrow space. I opened the other door and flipped the light switch.

Elijah was sitting in a metal folding chair in the middle of the room. Even the way he sat annoyed me: he crossed his legs with one knee on top of the other, like a woman. There was a large red duffel bag sitting on the floor next to him, and he had a black 9 mm pistol in his right hand.

“I’d halfway hoped you might fall down in the dark and die on the way in here,” he said. “But it’s good that we have a chance to talk.”

41

2009

“If you hadn’t wanted me to find you, you could have arranged to hide out pretty much anywhere else,” I said.

His face bore no expression; just an indifferent mask. He looked like a melted wax dummy of the man I’d beat up fifty years before. “Yes, I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?” he said.

“So, whatever you want to say to me, how about you say it?”

He looked up; his eyes met mine. “This was your son’s room, wasn’t it?”

I flinched. “Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”

He waved the gun at me. “The master bedroom is across the hall. There are only three bedrooms in the house. It makes sense that you would put the child in the closest room.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Impressive deduction.”

Then I hit him with my walker.

Even though it only weighed about five pounds, I couldn’t pick the thing up and swing it like I used to swing my truncheon. My legs weren’t strong enough to support my body when I twisted my torso. All I could do was lift the legs of the thing off the ground and sort of push it forward at him.

But that was all I needed; he was surprised by the move, and he reflexively put his arm in front of him to block the blow, so I tangled him up in the legs of the walker and knocked the gun out of his hand.

I took a wobbly step back and disengaged the walker from him before he could grab hold of it, and then I swept the front wheels at the gun and sent it sliding across the floor.

I set the walker back down and then sagged against it, winded from the effort. Elijah rose to his feet, knocking over his folding chair.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” he said. “I can’t imagine a more ridiculous or ineffectual thing for you to attempt. What else have you got planned? Are you going to spit your dentures at me?”

I smiled at him. “I’ve got all the original fixtures. You’re the one with the false teeth.”

“They’re implant-supported bridges. Very expensive, top-of-the-line orthodontic work, and they can’t be spit out.”

“Dentures is dentures,” I said. “How did you get all that dental work done, anyway? Ain’t you been living as a fugitive for fifty years?”

“I paid cash, like I do for all my medical care. And I paid extra to have the orthodontist destroy my dental records afterwards. Then I burned down his office, just to be safe.” He took a step back to get outside the reach of the walker. “Did you think you were going to beat me again, the way you beat me when you caught me in the bank? You aren’t strong anymore, Baruch. You’re a goddamn invalid.”

The demented part of my brain that still believed I was a detective was howling inside my skull; telling me I could break this man six different ways using only my hands. It was a lie. My hands weren’t much good for breaking anything anymore. I could still break wind, but that was all.

“I wasn’t trying to beat you,” I said. “I just wanted to get the gun away from you.”

“And then what? I can just walk over there and pick it up. You have to slowly, painfully shuffle across the room, and then you can’t bend down to lift the thing off the floor without toppling over and busting your head open. There’s no way you can get to it before I can. It appears you haven’t considered this very carefully.”

He took a step toward the gun.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I was you,” I said.

“Why not?”

I pulled the .357 out of my pocket and pointed it at him. “Because it appears my consideration is more careful than you realized, asshole. So, how about you sit down.”

He started to pick up his folding chair.

“Not on that,” I said. “On the floor.” I pointed with my gun toward the corner of the room farthest from where his 9 mm had come to rest. He was right that I couldn’t easily pick his gun up off the ground. But I was fine, as long as he couldn’t get to it, either.

“Come on, Baruch,” he said. “I have arthritic knees.”

“I don’t care. You can deal with the discomfort. Sit down.”

“Of course you would be armed,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected you to come after me, unless you were clutching your fetish object.”

“I think it will probably afford me a little bit of protection, in the event our conversation devolves into gunplay.”

“I don’t think that’s likely to happen,” Elijah said.

“Well, maybe you and I have different plans.”

“Do you think I would have hidden someplace you’d find me, if I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen?”

He reached forward and grabbed the large duffel bag.

“Hold it,” I said.

He let go. “I apologize. The contents of the bag are completely harmless, but I can understand why you might want to see what’s inside before allowing me to handle it. You are perfectly welcome to examine it.”

I paused. I couldn’t unzip the bag while still keeping the gun trained on him, and bending over to open the thing up would put me in a fairly precarious position if he decided to lunge at me, even if I leaned against the walker for support.

“Unzip it, slowly. And don’t reach inside. You may think you’re fast, but all I have to do is squeeze this trigger to make you dead.”

“I understand,” he said. “You don’t warn anyone twice.” He pulled at the zipper and slowly opened the bag. It was stuffed with straps of twenty-dollar bills.

“What is that supposed to be?” I asked.

“Are you blind as well as crippled, Baruch? That’s a million dollars.”

“Yeah, but what’s it for?”

“My plan was to give you a choice. You could either take the duffel bag full of cash, or we could have a pointless showdown. I guess, now that you’ve disarmed me, the proposition has changed slightly. You can either take the money and let me go, or you can kill me.”

“Maybe I’ll just kill you and take the money anyway,” I said.

He shook his head. “Your house is in a nice, quiet neighborhood. The way your hand shakes, I think you’ll need to fire several shots to kill me, and a 911 call about multiple gunshots fired here will result in a swift response. This bag weighs more than a hundred pounds, and from the moment you discharge a weapon, you’ll probably have no more than four minutes before the police arrive. You won’t be able to get away with the money in time.”

“Maybe I’ll just call the police and turn you in. Maybe the satisfaction of seeing you get what you deserve is worth more to me than the money.”

“You’ll have to kill me,” he said. “I’ve got no intention of allowing the state to take me into custody. If you attempt to call the police, I shall attack you, and you will either have to shoot me, or else I will beat you to death with my bare hands, an outcome I’d find entirely satisfactory.”

“Yeah, I don’t like you, either. So, why do you want to give me a million dollars?”

“I’m not giving it to you. I’m buying something. When you take that bag and let me leave, you’ll have given up something you treasure, and that’s what I want. I don’t care about the money.” He was grinding his dentures as he spoke. “I’ve stolen more than I can ever spend. More than I can ever launder. I don’t steal because I need to. I’ve buried shrink-wrapped bales of money in places I don’t even remember how to find. I want you to sell the piece of yourself you think is too precious to be tainted by my muck. It’s worth a million dollars to watch you stand there and do nothing as I walk out the door.”

“You ass,” I said. “You perfect, complete ass. I’m almost ninety years old. How can you think I am uncompromising, when I lead such a compromised existence? If there was any part of me that made it through thirty years of police work untainted, it got pretty damn tainted three years ago, which was the first time I had to take a shit and couldn’t get to the toilet fast enough. Do you think I care about my dignity? I was cured of dignity a long time ago. During the last several months, I have performed every embarrassing bodily function in front of an audience of strangers.

“I was on the right side against the Nazis. I hope that’s what people remember about me, if they remember me at all. And when I worked police, I went out of my way to get the bastards who liked hurting defenseless women and kids. But I know whose interests the police exist to protect, and I know who benefits most from the rule of law and social stability. I ain’t one to romanticize police work. If I cared about rules, I might have done a better job of following them. If I cared much about the legal notions of right and wrong, I would never have let Charles Greenfield get away with his part of your bank robbery.”

“You kept quiet about Greenfield because you feared unjust repercussions; and you worked for the people doing the repercussing. I forced you to confront the hypocrisy of your own position; the grotesque bigotry of your own establishment.”

“I acknowledged it. And then I went on working as a cop for another twelve years, anyway,” I said. “Nobody gets through life untainted. But my actions did not directly cause the deaths of three civil rights protesters. That is something that I would never want to carry on my conscience.”

He grimaced. “I didn’t cause that; I just made it happen at a time I found convenient,” he said. “I didn’t add a single ingredient to this city’s acrid stew of hostility and bigotry, I just stirred the pot a little. The man I paid off didn’t even discharge his weapon. Your organization killed those protesters. And the shooters weren’t even punished.”