Don't Ever Get Old (29 page)

I'd seen them, the sad cases, sinking into the cushy sofas in retirement homes, mulling their missed opportunities, wondering how they ended up there. If we'd seen it coming, we'd have got out of the way. Bleeding in the mud in 1944, I'd had an opportunity never to look into the city's rotten soul, never to shovel dirt onto my son's coffin, never to watch myself and my beloved Rose wither. All I had to do was give up, but I was too damn pigheaded, so I went ahead and lived another seventy years. And ended up getting shot in the back on my own lawn by a soft and silly man.

“Yeah,” Tequila said. “But what about the gold?”

“It's funny, you know. You said you never believed it was real, and maybe you were right. There was a box of gold bricks, sure, but whatever it was I thought I needed wasn't in that bank. We went to St. Louis chasing a lie we told ourselves. All we hauled out of that vault was death.”

“This can't be how it ends up, with you in the hospital, and the gold gone and Yael's killer still on the loose.”

“Every story has the same ending,” I said. “We just stop telling most of them before we get to it.”

“And they lived happily ever after,” said Tequila.

“That's a nice thought,” I told him. “It would be nice if it was true.”

 

47

I woke up sweating and disoriented in my hospital bed sometime in the night. My side was throbbing despite the painkillers the IV was pumping into me. My palms were sweating and my eyes itched. I felt like I was being watched, but the only other figure in the room was Tequila's silhouette, in the chair next to the bed.

I squinted. Tequila's silhouette was broader and taller than it was supposed to be.

“Evening, Buck,” said the voice of Randall Jennings. “Sorry to wake you.”

“I was up anyway,” I told him. “What are you doing here?”

He moved his chair closer, so I could see his face in the low light coming in through the miniblinds on the window.

“I heard you got popped, and wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Looks worse than it is,” I lied, gesturing at the wound. “In and out. Just flesh, mostly.”

“The word downtown, around the CJC, is that old Buck Schatz is indestructible.”

“I don't know about that,” I said. “An inch to the left, and it would have missed me. An inch to the right, and the doc says it would have shredded my guts. Somebody told me once that it's better to be lucky than good. I figure I'm maybe half and half.”

He exhaled and his shoulders hunched toward me a little mournfully, or at least it looked that way in the half-light of the darkened hospital room. “I suppose the legends are always bigger than the men who make them,” he said.

I nodded. “And I ain't as big as I used to be, either.”

“Our mutual friend Mr. Pratt was neither lucky nor good. Poor guy didn't survive. The doctors worked real hard to save him, but they took him off the ventilator a little while ago.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“He succumbed to his severe head injuries. Blunt force trauma.” Jennings pointed demonstratively at his skull.

I made a series of rapid calculations. “Where is my grandson?” I asked.

The detective let out a theatrical sigh. “He's downstairs, in the back of my car. This gives me no pleasure, but I've got to charge him on Pratt. There's nothing else I can do, under the circumstances.”

“That can't be right,” I said. “Pratt was hurt when we gave him over to you, but not fatally.”

Jennings shrugged. “Well, what can I tell you? Head injuries can be kind of funny. Sometimes they don't seem as bad as they are until the brain starts hemorrhaging, or whatever. I'm no doctor. All I know is the man started having some kind of seizure in my car, and he was unconscious by the time I got him to a hospital.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn't make sense. I've seen what it looks like when a man is beat to death. We may have roughed the son of a bitch up, but we didn't smash his head in.”

“Why are you trying to debate this, Buck?” Jennings asked. “The man is dead. They're putting him through autopsy. How do you argue with that?”

He leaned forward and squeezed my shoulder. “Don't worry about Tequila too much, Buck. I'm sure the D.A. will let him plead to manslaughter, and he'll be a free man inside three years. Under the circumstances, the prosecutor might even drop the charges, or the judge might suspend his sentence. Even if he spends a couple of years in jail, he'll get his life back, more or less. Nobody will hold it against him for getting rid of the fellow who butchered all those nice people.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to convince myself it would work out okay. “Yeah.”

It was my fault. I'd pulled Tequila into my Nazi hunt, because I couldn't run from my real problems without help, and now the poor kid was tangled up with all those corpses and facing prison.

“I want you to know, even though you and I have had our disagreements, it doesn't make me happy to be doing this. If you ask me, Tequila is a hero. But doing police work in a town this dirty is like wading balls-deep in a river of shit. The only way to keep yourself clean is to do things by the book.”

That was something I knew pretty well. I grunted my reluctant assent.

“We're not going to trick the kid into making a damaging statement in an interrogation room or anything like that. Pratt was an evil bastard, and Tequila comes from a good police family. He will have the best chance we can fairly give him,” Jennings assured me.

I shrank sadly into my hospital bed as I told the detective how much I appreciated his help arresting my grandson. My side was hurting, and I was wondering how to go about getting some more drugs.

“Of course, it could go down another way,” said Jennings. And it might have just been the shadows playing off his face in the darkened room, but his expression seemed much less gentle, although his tone was unchanged.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I might decide I have to charge him with all three of the Memphis killings, and let St. Louis charge him for the girl. Then the two departments can take turns raking him over the coals until he makes an admission unhelpful to his cause.”

“I don't understand,” I said. I thought I was beginning to see how it fit together, but I wanted to hear him spell it out.

“Let me make it easy for you.” Jennings grinned magnanimously at me. “Tequila saw Kind brace you for money, and that's a motive. He was also the last one to see the girl in the hotel alive. And I have witnesses who recall the two of you having an unfriendly altercation with Steinblatt at Kind's funeral. On top of that, I caught him red-handed in the act of bludgeoning Pratt. Now you told me an interesting story about how Pratt did the first three killings. Maybe I like your grandson for all four of these murders. You see, Buck, depending on how I stick the facts together, William T. Schatz either stopped a serial killer, or he is one.”

The pain in the bullet wound was white hot. I could feel each individual stitch cutting into my flesh. At least I was fully alert now. I felt coiled, like a spring. But I knew that feeling was a lie my body was telling itself. I had never been more fragile or feeble, and the detective's cool monotone contained an unmistakable threat.

“What is it you want here, Jennings?”

“I've already got what I want. Now, I'm trying to make sure I get to hang on to it.”

“The gold.”

“There you go. I think all this unpleasantness can get explained without anyone having to mention any Nazi treasures. People kill each other over so much less, sometimes even nothing at all.”

I sighed. “Didn't you say the only way to keep clean was to do things by the book?”

He laughed. “I said doing police work in this town was like wading balls-deep in a river of shit. There ain't nothing clean in a river of shit, Buck. And I got bills to pay.”

“River of shit,” I repeated. I squinted in the darkness to get a better look at him, and my detective instinct, my unconscious danger alarm, started screaming inside my skull. My doctor told me paranoia was an early symptom of dementia in the elderly, but I didn't think senility was the thing setting me on edge. “And Norris Feely?” I asked.

Jennings leaned forward in his chair. “It seems pretty clear he's the one that shot you. We'll say it was a dispute over Jim Wallace's assets. He'll shut up about the gold if I threaten to charge him for murdering Lawrence Kind.”

His pieces all fit. But the problem was, the pieces of this thing seemed to fit any way I stuck them together. Everyone had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

On television, the killers always make mistakes and the innocent are always vindicated, but most real murder cases are circumstantial, and circumstance doesn't always point in the right direction. Facts were of less importance to Jennings than hammering together a story that could stand up to reason. Truth was a malleable and relative thing.

“You'll just pin most of the crimes on the dead guy, and Tequila and Feely will shut up and cop to the lesser charges when you threaten to hang a murder beef on them,” I said. “And when your story becomes the official truth, the gold just vanishes. It works out well, except it doesn't explain who killed those people.”

Jennings scratched his head. “It was Pratt, wasn't it?”

“You believe that?” I asked him.

“Why shouldn't I? The story makes sense. It's good enough.” He paused for a moment, pretending to be confused. “Didn't you tell me Pratt did all the killings? You're the legendary Buck Schatz. I trust you.”

Jennings had a point. I couldn't very well play the hard-nosed truth seeker when I'd very recently been trying to frame the thing on the debt collector.

But greater sins were in play here than a few judicious lies, and Jennings was looking to palm the money off the table while moving the chips around.

What I was thinking was that it was a five-hour drive from Memphis to St. Louis, not including stops. Jennings said the St. Louis police had told him we were checked in at the same hotel where Yael was murdered. But there was just barely enough time for him to get from Memphis to St. Louis between noon, when the housekeeper found Yael, and five-thirty, when Jennings met Tequila in the lobby. The St. Louis cops would have had to contact Jennings immediately after they discovered the body, and Jennings would have had to drive the whole way with a blue light on top of his car and the pedal mashed to the floor.

Possible, maybe. But more likely, Jennings was in St. Louis ahead of the murder. And, damn him, I knew what a man with a fatal head injury looked like.

“We didn't beat Pratt to death,” I said. “He wasn't dying when we left him with you.”

“I don't know why you keep coming back to this, Buck. The guy is dead, I promise you.”

I pictured Jennings sticking Pratt in the backseat of his Cavalier and then rolling off down the street. But when he got to the corner, maybe Jennings didn't turn and head toward Poplar Avenue. Instead, he shifted the car into park, and he reached beneath his dash. Maybe he had a scoped hunting rifle hanging under there.

He'd have crouched on the wet grass, glancing around to make sure there were no witnesses. Then he would have braced the stock of the rifle against his shoulder, and his elbow against his knee, and squeezed off one shot.

I pictured him opening his trunk, throwing the rifle onto those four heavy backpacks, and reaching in to pull out a tire iron or maybe one of the gold bricks. I pictured Jennings caving Pratt's skull in.

I sat up straight in the bed and tried not to grimace in pain, even though my side was screaming. “I ain't arguing with the fact that Pratt's dead. But it wasn't us that killed him.”

Jennings was silent for a moment, and then a slow smile split his face, and that pretty much confirmed it for me.

“I am disappointed you didn't figure it out sooner. You didn't quite live up to the legend,” he said. “But then again, you are much harder to kill than I expected you to be.”

There was only one reason for him to stop trying to deny it.

“I reckon you're here now to finish the job.”

“Reckon so, Buck.” He rubbed at his mustache again. “If you were in my shoes, you'd be doing the same thing.”

 

48

First rule of survival is situational awareness; always important to take stock of the surroundings.

I was sitting in a darkened room with a man who had killed at least four people and had come to kill me. I had a bullet hole in my side that was stitched up, but kind of oozy and hurting like a son of a bitch. I was on painkillers for that, and the drugs had dulled my reflexes, which weren't all that sharp to begin with.

The memory notebook and a ballpoint pen were lying next to me on the end table, with all the pills I was supposed to take.

And I knew, somewhere, in that notebook, I'd written what Gregory Cutter had said over Lawrence Kind's coffin:

“In the end, we know we will each come face-to-face with that Enemy, when we are totally alone, in the dark, when we are weak and afraid.”

He'd been right about that.

“You can shout now, if you want,” said the Enemy. “I don't mind. Nobody will hear.”

That sounded true. This was an intensive care ward, so I knew people were coming and going throughout the day and night, crying and screaming in the rooms and in the hallways, coding out against the protests of squealing monitors. I'd heard none of it; when that sliding glass door sealed itself, the room became a cocoon of silence.

“Used to be, they kept the patients separated by curtains so the doctors could hear all the machines beeping,” Jennings said. “They remodeled a few years back. Now it's pretty close to soundproof, so you people don't have to listen to each other dying. If you have an irregularity, your monitor will send a text message to the physicians' iPhones. Pretty amazing.”