Don't Ever Get Old (25 page)

“I'm so fucking pissed off about Yael.”

I crossed my arms. “Well, instead of acting like an ass, why don't you try to figure out who killed her?”

“Because I don't know how.”

“You can start by telling me a story about how and why Feely might have done it. It's a good first step, before you go peeling faces off of skulls.”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“Pretend it isn't,” I said. “And start from the beginning.”

“Okay,” he said. “Feely wants to kill the minister. He thinks Kind is muscling in on his piece of the treasure, right?”

“It's your story.”

“Okay, Feely told you that he didn't want Kind getting a cut. You told him there was no treasure. He was upset when Kind showed up at the dinner party; he made explicit threats.”

I nodded.

“Then he confronted Kind in the church and killed him.”

This was a problem for me, and I told Tequila so. I was willing to believe a lot of things about Norris Feely, but the idea that the man was adept at hand-to-hand combat strained credulity. Lawrence Kind, pacifist Christian that he was, would still have been stronger and quicker than Feely. Yael would have been, also. Although Feely easily had eighty pounds on the girl, most of it was fat, and she was toned and hard and trained by the Israeli army.

“Maybe Feely caught her by surprise, hit her over the head,” Tequila suggested.

Sure; lots of maybes and no way to get concrete answers, since I didn't have access to the coroner's report. Jennings might let me see it; maybe he was sincere about wanting my help on the case. But I didn't understand what he was up to, and he was not a friend. It seemed a bad idea to ask a favor of him if I didn't understand the ramifications.

The real nut of it was, Feely could have been responsible for both killings. He had no alibi for either, and his presence in St. Louis at the time of Yael's murder moved him right to the top of my list of suspects. But I was still far from convinced of his guilt.

In any case, even if Feely was innocent, his exoneration would refocus Jennings's attention on Tequila, and Feely would probably start plotting to steal the treasure as soon as he got out of jail. I was happy to let the bastard cool his heels downtown while the system sorted things out.

“If you don't think it was Feely, who else could have done it?” Tequila asked. “I think Felicia might have been involved. She didn't carve him up herself, but a woman that good-looking always knows a couple of guys who are willing to do things for her.”

Tequila didn't tell me a lot about the women he dated, but I could tell by his tone that he'd been worked over by someone beautiful he thought had loved him. To his eye, the widow was clearly a user and a manipulator. He brought his prejudices to bear on the question, but that didn't necessarily mean he was wrong. I'd watched Felicia Kind lie to Randall Jennings, and she was utterly convincing. I would be a fool to trust a single thing she'd told me, no matter how honest it sounded.

“What do you think about T. Addleford Pratt?”

“Why would he kill Kind and then try to come after us for the treasure, when he could have just taken whatever Kind might have got from us?” Tequila asked.

“Killing Kind meant he could try to get Felicia to pay him out of the life insurance recovery.”

“Okay, but why would he kill Yael?”

“Maybe to make it look like we killed Kind, or to threaten us, so we'd give him the gold.”

“What is the point of doing that, if he doesn't let us know it was him?”

He was right. Killing Yael would not pressure us to pay Pratt off unless he came out and told us he'd done it. And we had no reason to believe he'd been in St. Louis anyway.

“How are you feeling about the Israelis?” Tequila asked.

That theory was looking a lot weaker. Yael's death seemed to indicate that she had not been working with Yitzchak Steinblatt and Avram Silver, but there was no way to be sure. Maybe they got rid of her after she completed her role in the scheme: one less person who could expose them, and one less person to split the gold with. I suggested this to Tequila.

“I don't buy it,” Tequila said. “Silver seemed like a whiny loser when we spoke to him. I don't think he's some kind of a murderous puppet master. And our only basis for suspecting old Yid's Cock is the fact that he is a large man.”

“An extremely large man,” I said.

“I'll give you that. The motherfucker looks like some kind of pro wrestler from the shtetl. But a spy is supposed to be inconspicuous, and that guy is about as subtle as a goddamn bulldozer. I think Steinblatt is exactly what he says he is, and Avram Silver is a doofus, and this whole Israeli preoccupation of yours is bullshit.”

I lit a cigarette and thought about that for a minute. Steinblatt showed up in Memphis soon after we spoke to Silver, on the same day Kind was murdered. He also had the considerable physical strength that Kind's murder would have required. I was hunting a killer, and the big Russian looked the part. Maybe some ACLU types would call that profiling, but when there's a guy who looks like a killer, he usually is one.

The thing that made this unusual was that even though so many people seemed to have means and motives to do the crime, none of them seemed to intuitively fit as the killer. Murder, contrary to widespread belief, usually doesn't make for much of a mystery. In the stories and on the television programs, cops are always trying to decipher opaque motives and people are never what they seem. But real murder is mean and dumb and unsubtle, and pretty much everyone a detective meets is exactly what they appear to be. If scumbags had the brains or the imagination to manage convincing deception, they wouldn't have to be scumbags.

“Mom told me that Steinblatt is going to be speaking about Israel down at the JCC tonight, to the Jewish Federation,” Tequila said. “It might be worth hearing what he says. Maybe we should go.”

That would at least give me a chance to see if he looked at all like a genuine flack for the Israeli government.

“I'll take your grandmother,” I told him. “You're not going. I don't want you embarrassing me in front of people I know.”

 

40

Tequila gave us a lift to the Jewish Community Center, and despite his protests, he didn't stay for the speech. I wanted him at the house to guard the treasure, and he'd already upset his grandmother enough with the things he'd been saying. I was getting worried about him; even if he'd had his head on straight, it looked like we were dealing with more trouble than we could easily handle. My detective's instinct had been whispering to me all day, but I couldn't understand what it was telling me. I felt sure something bad was about to happen, and I couldn't figure out what it was or where it would be coming from.

I needed my grandson's help to stand any chance of getting ahead of this thing, but I couldn't trust his judgment anymore. Even when he wasn't sobbing or fuming, I could hear emotion welling behind his voice. The kind of cool, flawless logic he'd used to dismantle the LSATs and the bank manager would have been a useful tool in our situation, but his thinking was obviously clouded. And, I was scared of putting him in harm's way. The lousy little jerk was all I had left of my son.

In the meantime, I hoped Steinblatt would be persuasive enough as a Diaspora liaison that I could write him off my list of suspects. I sure didn't want to wake up to find him standing over me with those huge hands of his.

The JCC was crowded. People who were elderly and Jewish found that Memphis offered very little to do on an average Saturday night, so most of them had come out for Steinblatt's speech and for the free refreshments the Center always served at these events. A sizable crowd of people we knew were kibitzing in the lobby.

Rose had insisted on getting rid of the wheelchair, even though it hurt her to stand up and sit down. She was walking with assistance from a steel cane with four rubber feet on it.

“Everybody is looking at me with my cripple cane,” she said. “This sure isn't something Fred Astaire would carry around.”

I smiled at her. “If it's any consolation, I feel just like Ginger Rogers right now.”

“Oh, hush up, Buck.”

But folks were looking; she was right about that. Health problems were big news among our contemporaries, since most of our social calendar revolved around burying one another.

Esther Katz spotted us from across the lobby and shambled over to say hello. She used to play gin rummy with Rose, but then she started getting confused and had to be put away.

“I heard you were in the hospital.” That Esther had heard it wasn't surprising. That she remembered it, though, was nothing short of remarkable.

Rose nodded.

“Is it serious?” Esther's face pursed with concern.

“What business is it of yours?” I asked.

“Well, I just wanted to know if I should ask my daughter-in-law to make her noodle kugel.”

Rose's expression darkened. “What does my health have to do with that?”

Esther started to speak and then realized what she was about to say. Jews customarily bring food when they make condolence visits to a grieving family; she was asking if Rose was planning to die.

Suddenly cognizant of the impropriety of such a question, Esther was left without words; she stood there with her jaw hanging open. I thought she looked like a baby penguin waiting for its mother to vomit some fish guts into its mouth. Then I thought I should probably stop watching so much of the Animal Planet channel.

“The kugel is awfully thoughtful of you, Esther,” Rose said, gently touching her friend's hand. “We were planning to just pick up a bag of day-old bagels on the way to yours.”

I may have made a few wrong decisions in my life, but I damn sure married the right woman.

We chatted, more or less amiably, with various friends and acquaintances for a while longer before the crowd began gravitating into the social hall to hear what Yitzchak Steinblatt would have to say about Israel.

Rose and I found our seats. On the stage at the front of the room, there was a podium with a microphone, three chairs, an American flag, and an Israeli flag. Two of the chairs were occupied by the director of the Center and the president of the Jewish Federation. The third, empty chair was presumptively for Steinblatt.

The president looked at her watch and then whispered to the director, who nodded. Then he stood, adjusted his pants, and moved behind the podium.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I spoke to our guest a short while ago, and you're in for a real treat tonight. Yitzchak Steinblatt is a thoroughly warm and engaging person, and we're thrilled that the state of Israel has sent him here to spend some time with us.”

He spent a couple of minutes making the sales pitch for donations to the Federation, an organization that had been squeezed, like many Jewish charities, by investment losses related to the massive Bernard Madoff Ponzi fraud. The local Jewish women's group had to cancel a trip to visit Israel because the organization's funding fell through.

Of course it went without saying, the director told us, his face a grim and solemn mask, that there would be no government programs for the Jewish community. I whispered something funny to Rose, something about the Holocaust. I must have said it sort of loud, because people sitting around us turned to give me dirty looks.

The community, the director continued, would have to bail itself out. All of us were hurting, and he assured us he knew that, but
tsedakah,
charity, was not a luxury, and it was most crucial, and a bigger mitzvah, to give during hard times.

He paused and looked at his watch.

“Uh, Yitzchak should be almost ready to begin his presentation.”

The president of the Federation stood up, and the director covered the microphone with his hand while the two of them whispered to each other.

Then she walked backstage.

“You've all been very patient, and if you'll indulge us for a moment, we have a very pleasant evening ahead.”

The big, slippery Israeli had ditched town, I knew it. Or worse, he was at my house, killing Tequila. I'd known something was wrong with the bastard from the start.

The Federation president came back onto the stage and spoke to the director. She looked upset.

The two of them went backstage. The audience began to get noisy.

“What do you think is going on?” Rose asked me.

I tried to reassure her, but I knew she could tell how nervous I was getting.

Then the house lights came on, and a young man in a golf shirt with a JCC logo on it came in through the back door of the room and started calling my name.

“Detective Schatz, can you come assist us for a moment?”

“No,” I shouted back, and people started laughing. But Rose poked me with one of those sharp elbows she's got, and I hauled myself to my feet and began to help her stand up as well.

“Mrs. Schatz, perhaps you should keep your seat for the time being,” said the golf shirt man.

“Buck, what's happening?” she asked.

“Don't worry,” I assured her, automatically. “Everything is fine.”

I didn't believe it, though.

I walked back out to the lobby, and the JCC director met me there. The golf shirt went back into the social hall and extracted a guy from the audience who I knew was a doctor but didn't know much else about.

“We appreciate your help,” the director told us.

I looked at the doctor, and he seemed to be as confused as I was, a fact I found kind of comforting.

The director ushered us down a hallway that ran behind the social hall, around to the backstage area. He was talking the whole time, with the fast, nervous inflection of a man on the edge of shock, telling us that he'd never had a situation like this and hoped we'd know how to handle it.