Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (21 page)

“You’re burning me, man,” he said.

“Am I?”

“Looks like.”

“Oh, you’re right. I smell it now,” I said. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m old and I’m clumsy. I guess my hand slipped.”

I brushed the cigarette butt off his chest. The burn was already blistering ugly yellow-gray, and turning red around the edges. He didn’t even seem to feel it.

I lit another cigarette. “Let’s hope my hand doesn’t slip again.”

Lefkowitz’s eyes slid out of focus for a minute, and then he sort of shook off the confusion and said: “Hey, you can’t smoke in here.”

“I can’t?”

“No. This is a hospital.” He paused. He noticed the burn mark on his chest. “Do you ever get, uh, déjà vu? Like we had this conversation already?”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m eighty-eight years old. My memory ain’t what it used to be.”

“We definitely had this conversation already. It’s really weirding me out.” He tried to touch the burn on his chest with his bandaged left arm, and then he winced in pain, as the motion pulled the stitches under his bandages. The gauze turned bright red in several places. His arm must have been shredded.

Well deserved.

“Let’s have a different conversation, then,” I said.

“Yes. Let’s.” The pain was bringing him around a bit. He seemed a little more coherent.

“You called Carlo Cash from your cell phone, while you were following us to the police station. That’s how he knew where to ambush us.”

“No.”

I took a drag off the cigarette. “You work for Carlo Cash.”

“I don’t.”

“I know you do. You’re the only one who could have given them directions to find us while we were driving. Tell me where they took Elijah.”

“I didn’t call Carlo Cash.”

“This is your last chance to spill it, before I get unpleasant.”

“Mr. Schatz, I don’t know anything.”

“Have it your way,” I said, and I reached over with my left hand and pulled his eyelid open. With my right hand, I held my burning cigarette close enough to his naked eyeball that he could feel the heat coming off it. “I don’t have much time, Lefkowitz. I want that man back alive, and if you continue to bullshit me, I am going to burn your goddamn eye out.”

“Oh, please don’t. Please. Please.” At least this was getting him sober.

“You are mobbed up. You are a scumbag.”

He started to twist and writhe, moving his head to try to get his eye out from under the cigarette.

“Be careful,” I said. “I’m old. I get the shakes. My hand ain’t steady.”

“I settle car accidents. I don’t do any business for Carlo Cash. Oh God. I don’t work for them. I barely have a criminal defense practice at all, beyond fixing an occasional DUI.”

I started to feel less sure of myself, and pulled the cigarette back from his eye. “Why did you agree to represent Elijah?”

“Because he came into my office and handed me twenty thousand dollars in cash. I told him he needed to find someone better qualified, and he said he was in a hurry.”

“Him handing you all that currency didn’t make you suspicious?”

“Of course it made me suspicious. That’s why he gave me so much money. So I’d keep my suspicions to myself.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You can’t buy Rolexes and Cadillacs settling car accidents.”

“You can if you settle a whole bunch of them. I outsource most of the work to a company in India that writes my complaints and my briefs for twenty bucks an hour. I’m on the phone all day doing nothing but negotiating settlements with insurers.”

“I will find out if you’re lying.”

“Go check. Pull any court transcripts or judicial opinions from matters involving Carlo Cash or any of his crew. You’ll find the names of the lawyers of record at the top of the first page of any of those documents. It’s the same guys handling all those cases, and I handle none of them. I settle car accidents.”

I took the cigarette out of his face and stuck it between my lips.

“I believe you,” I said. He didn’t have the balls to try to bullshit me while I jammed a burning cigarette in his eye.

But if that was the case, how the hell did Carlo Cash know what car Elijah was riding in, or where to find it?

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

“So, this guy Buck Schatz is in the news again.”

I was watching a show where a tweedy rat-faced liberal host argued with a fat, sweaty conservative who always wore his neckties loose and his collars unbuttoned. This pair made any ideology seem unattractive.

“That’s his name? Buck Schatz?” said Fat-and-Sweaty. “Is that some kind of joke?”

“Apparently that’s the guy’s actual name,” said Rat Face. “This is the ninety-year-old man who keeps shooting people.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about him a few months ago. He shot that killer cop guy in a hospital. What’s he done now?”

“He shot two young black men. Killed one of them.” I could tell Rat Face was winding up a little weasel tirade. “You know, this gets me thinking about our gun policies in America. Do we really need armed ninety-year-olds staggering around and killing people?”

Fat-and-Sweaty put his fingers to his earpiece. “Now, these two guys he shot were participants of a brutal attack on a police officer who was badly injured. The man Schatz killed in the hospital a few months ago was responsible for four murders. And Schatz is a retired cop, so he knows how to handle and care for a weapon. I think a lot of people would point to this guy as a great example of the benefits of an armed citizenry.”

Rat Face did an exaggerated television gesture of flailing disbelief. “According to news reports out of Memphis, this man Schatz suffers from senile dementia. He can’t remember whether he’s got a houseguest or a home intruder, and he’s packing heat. This guy is armed to the teeth and he lives in a rest home! I wouldn’t want to be the nurse who has to risk getting shot every time this man needs his sheets changed or his bedpan emptied.”

Fat-and-Sweaty was getting indignant. “Now, a lot of people would be—a lot of people are—calling this guy a hero. I don’t think it’s fair to speculate about his health.”

“Well, those were black men he shot this time.”

“I don’t see any call to bring race into this discussion.”

“You don’t get to decide whether to bring race into a discussion. When an old white man is shooting young blacks, race is already part of the discussion. It’s incredibly problematic that you and your lunatic gun-fringe allies are hailing this demented gunman as a hero for killing one black man and crippling another.”

“The police officer Mr. Schatz rescued by shooting those men was also black.”

Rat Face sighed. “Your aversion to obvious facts is as shameful as it is unsurprising. This is a ninety-year-old retired Memphis cop. It’s not a praiseworthy thing to have been associated with an outfit like the Memphis police during the years this man was working. The question we should ask isn’t whether or not he’s racist, but rather: How racist is he?”

“Well, speaking of shameful and unsurprising, did you hear what the president said today?”

“And speaking of racist…”

28

2009

If it wasn’t Lefkowitz who gave Elijah up to Carlo Cash, then I had no idea who had done it. I’d watched Andre’s mirrors all the way to the cemetery to make sure nobody followed us, and Elijah certainly would have been able to shake a tail as well.

I needed a fresh set of eyes on the problem, someone smart and helpful who might be able to look at the facts as I understood them and discern new patterns in them. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anybody like that, so I had to ask my grandson.

“Electronic surveillance,” he said. “You can attach a GPS tracking device to a car, and it will transmit its location to you wherever it goes.”

“Like a radio transmitter?” I asked. “Wouldn’t we have spotted its antenna?”

“This thing would be tiny. They could hide it in the wheel well, or under a fender. You’d never find it unless you went looking for it.”

“I think I saw an episode of
CSI
where they used one of those,” I said. “Used to be, if you wanted to know what somebody was up to, you had to follow him around.”

“These days, if you want to know what somebody is up to, you just have to follow them on Twitter.”

“What, exactly, is the Twitter?” I asked. “They talk about it on Fox News a lot.”

Tequila laughed. “I think maybe we should stick to learning about the tracking devices today, and save Twitter for later.”

We were waiting in my hospital room for the doctor to show up. I was back on the adjustable bed, and Tequila was sitting in a chair next to it. His mother had gone to fetch Rose from Valhalla. I was hoping to be able to check out by the time they got back, but the doctor wanted to keep me under observation until they could put me back on my blood thinner, and I couldn’t have the blood thinner until the doctor was satisfied that I wasn’t going to bleed to death out of my nose.

“I think we need to discuss your condescending tone later as well,” I said. “But first, I guess we need to figure out how Carlo Cash planted a GED bug on either Lefkowitz’s Escalade or Andre’s Crown Vic.”

“GPS, not GED.”

“GFY. That’s what I said.”

Tequila flipped through the notebook I had been writing in the day before. “Why does there even need to be a bug? There’s an obvious conclusion to draw from these facts, Grandpa. Lefkowitz called Cash and told him where to ambush you.”

“That’s what I thought as well,” I said. “But I talked to Lefkowitz, and he persuaded me that he didn’t do it. He’s nothing but an ambulance chaser who settles car crashes.”

“Maybe he lied to you.”

“I don’t think so. I asked him pretty hard.”

“I don’t understand what that means, Grandpa.”

“I burned him with cigarettes.”

His eyes widened, and his cheeks went pale. “Jesus. Fuck.”

“Watch your goddamn language,” I said.

“You burned an innocent man with cigarettes, Grandpa.”

“I feel like I’ve told you this before, Prosecco: There ain’t nobody who’s innocent.”

He sat there for a couple of minutes, flipping through the pages of my notebook, but not really reading them. Finally, he said: “There was only a two-hour gap between the time Elijah first walked into Lefkowitz’s office and the time you met him at the cemetery. They’d have to have been tailing Elijah to know he’d retained Lefkowitz, but if they were already following Elijah, they didn’t need to bug his lawyer’s car to find him.”

The cigarette burns would not be discussed further. This new information would go in the vault we filled with our forbidden memories; the things we didn’t want to remember. There was a clock ticking on Elijah’s life, and I’d done what I believed was necessary under the circumstances. But I didn’t feel that great about it.

Truth is, there are a lot of things I’ve done that I don’t feel that great about. But if you look back on whatever the wrath of God is burning down behind you, you turn into a pillar of salt.

So, you just write down the stuff you want to remember, leave out the rest of it, and keep pushing yourself forward, on a walker or in a wheelchair or with anything that can keep you moving.

“Maybe Cash had an informant of some kind in Lefkowitz’s office; a secretary or a security guard or somebody who might have spotted Elijah,” I said.

Tequila shook his head. “That makes no sense. Why would a heroin dealer need to cultivate a spy in the office of a lawyer who settles car accidents? And, anyway, how would a device planted on the lawyer’s Cadillac let them know they needed to attack Andre’s Crown Vic?”

“I don’t see how they could have bugged Andre’s police car. They’d have to know that Elijah met with me that morning, and we assume he’d take care to assure he wasn’t followed when he visited me at Valhalla. Then, I called Andre on the phone a few hours later. They’d have had to get a wiretap on my cell phone very soon after my first contact with Elijah to know Andre was even involved, and if they’d found some way to listen to my calls, they would still have had less than an hour to attach the device onto Andre’s police car, which was parked at a police station. I can’t see how they could have gotten to either of those vehicles.”

“Well, if they didn’t have trackers on the cars, and Lefkowitz didn’t give them your location, I don’t understand how they could have coordinated the ambush.” He scratched his chin, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth in his chair for a minute. “Maybe they somehow planted a tracker on Elijah himself. Maybe something he stole from them was bugged, and he was carrying it with him.”

“I don’t think so. Andre frisked him before he put him in the car. If Elijah had a transmitter, Andre would have found it.”

I took back the notebook from my grandson and flipped through the pages.

“Here’s a list of the things in Elijah’s pockets,” I said. “A wallet with no identification, a book of matches, a hotel key, and one of those phones with no buttons.”

Tequila perked up. “A phone with no buttons? Like, an iPhone?”

“iPhone, youPhone, whoPhone?” I said.

Tequila pulled a slab of black steel and glass out of his pocket. “Was it a phone like this?” He pressed one small button on the side of the device, and the screen lit up with a picture of a numeric keypad and the words:
ENTER PASSCODE.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was just like that. Andre switched it on, and then he asked Elijah for the passcode, and Elijah wouldn’t give it to him.”

“Why would an eighty-year-old fugitive thief need an iPhone? Is he checking his e-mail while he’s on the lam?”

“I don’t know what he does with it,” I said. “I don’t know what anyone does with those things.”

“Does anyone at your nursing home have a phone like that?”

“It’s not a nursing home. It’s an assisted-lifestyle community for older adults.”

“Whatever. Does anyone your age have a phone like this?”

“Nobody I know.”

He pumped his fist, like he’d just had a brilliant idea. “What if it wasn’t his cell phone?”

“Then we’ll have to charge him with taking somebody’s phone, in addition to the eight murders and the theft of fifteen million dollars.”