Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (27 page)

Rutledge took out his giant Internet cell phone and started jabbing at the screen with his finger. “And meanwhile, Carlo is scrambling to stack up twelve million dollars, while his people are thinking he looks weak, because he got robbed and is in debt to the Mexicans. It can’t have been hard for Elijah to get to somebody close to him.”

“I think Elijah got to everybody close to him,” I said. “Jacques told me that no single person knew the location of all three stashes.”

“How does he do that? How does he turn a drug-trafficking organization inside out like that?”

“Well, now we’re entering a realm of speculation,” I said.

Clark was looking very interested now. “Go ahead and speculate, Buck.”

“You ever heard of a prisoner’s dilemma?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Rutledge. “It’s one of the most basic interrogation techniques—I have two suspects, and I need a confession or I have to turn them both loose. I want to turn them against each other. So, I put them in separate interrogation rooms, and I tell each of them that the first one to confess gets a lenient deal, but his coconspirator will face serious charges. So they have to decide whether to keep silent, and hope their friend does as well, or confess and take the deal, at the friend’s expense. I’ve tried it a few times, and one of them always confesses.”

“Carlo created the same situation for his men,” I said. “He felt it wasn’t safe to put all his money in one place, so he had three different stashes. But he really couldn’t afford to lose any of them. If he made it to the meeting with the Mexicans with all of the money to get even, and get his supply, then he was back on top, and he’d have fixed the damage the previous robbery had done to his organization. But if he went to the Mexicans without their money, it wasn’t clear at all what would happen. Maybe the Mexicans would kill everybody.”

“So Elijah goes to each of Carlo’s lieutenants, and he tells them the others are already working with him. So the reward for loyalty is most likely the privilege of getting to go down with Carlo and his sinking ship.”

“I figure Elijah showed up at each stash house with someone high up in Carlo’s organization,” I said. “He told the guards inside that they could either open the doors and get a share of the money, or they could have a gunfight. The benefits of protecting Carlo’s interests were minimal, because if he lost any of the other stashes and couldn’t pay the Mexicans, he’d be in no position to reward men who stayed loyal to him.”

“That makes sense,” Rutledge said. “When we take down a stash house, we send in a SWAT team. Those dudes roll in wearing full body armor and blow the doors in with plastic explosives. Then they fill the room with smoke grenades. The only way you break into a place like that is the loud way.”

“Charles Greenfield told me something very similar about his bank vault.”

“Even if the stashes were located in industrial areas, there’s nowhere in the city where you could have a shoot-out with machine guns and shit, without police being alerted. You’re probably right. The guys guarding the stashes must have just surrendered.”

“Wait, so what is the point of the stolen iPhone?” Clark asked.

“The only way Elijah gets away clean is if he takes Carlo out,” Rutledge said. “Carlo was in big trouble with the Mexicans because he lost the money, but if he got through that alive somehow, he’d be coming hard after everybody who crossed him.”

“And Elijah is arrogant,” I said. “It’s not enough for him to get away with the loot. He has to find some kind of opponent, and make some kind of chess game out of it, and he has to gloat about winning it. I think that was what he was doing in the lobby at Greenfield’s bank, the day I ran into him there. He needed to humiliate me; to force me to acknowledge that I couldn’t kill him and I couldn’t arrest him.”

“But you dragged him into the bathroom and kicked the shit out of him,” Rutledge said.

“Yeah. I don’t think he anticipated that. But a beating doesn’t change the way his mind works. He doesn’t just want to steal something; he wants a sort of ideological triumph. He wants to unravel the social order.”

“So, he got up in Carlo’s face at some point, taunted him, and lifted the phone,” Clark said. “He knew that Carlo would come after him in an irrational rage, like a wounded animal, as soon as he switched that phone on. So he switched it on when he was in the backseat of a police car. Carlo came after him, and inadvertently started a war with the police.”

“Carlo thought he was bringing Elijah out to this warehouse to kill him, but really, Elijah was bringing Carlo, because Carlo’s guys were secretly Elijah’s guys,” said Rutledge.

“Elijah forced those men to kill Carlo, by letting Carlo capture him,” I said. “If Elijah confessed under torture, he’d expose them. Once Carlo knew what happened, he was too dangerous for anyone to let him live. And with the police out for payback, those men needed to get their money, get rid of Carlo, and get out of town.”

“So, the stain on the floor is Carlo. I admire the intricacy of the scheme,” Rutledge said. “I’d like to meet your friend Elijah. Preferably across an interrogation table. But I guess he’ll have vanished by now, with the money.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There were plenty of ways he could have gotten himself into the back of a police car, but he chose to drag me into the mix. Whatever he thinks he and I are doing, I am not sure he’s done with it yet.”

Rutledge’s giant cell phone buzzed. He looked at the screen. “Andre’s new CAT scans are showing extensive brain damage. His parents are in a meeting with the hospital’s chief surgical resident right now.”

“Are they going to be able to save him?” I asked.

“No,” Rutledge said. “They’re talking about organ donation.”

39

2009

When Rutledge dropped me off at Valhalla, Rose was waiting for me in our little apartment, looking at the television but not really watching it. She was fully wroth with indignation.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. Your cell phone was going straight to voice mail.”

I pulled it out of my pocket and flipped it open.

“I think the battery is dead,” I said.

She took it out of my hand and pushed the big green button next to the keypad. The little screen lit up.

“It’s just switched off. Someone must have switched it off at the hospital. We got you this thing three years ago. Why won’t you learn how to use it?”

I took it back from her. “Don’t see the point. Got along just fine for eighty years without any cell phone.”

She slapped her hand to her forehead. “That’s what you refuse to understand. Things aren’t the same as they used to be. We aren’t the same as we used to be. You need the phone to be charged up and switched on, because if you fall down, you can’t get off the floor without calling somebody for help.”

“I’m not too worried about that.”

“Well, you should be. We had to move into this place because you got yourself horribly injured. I had to give up my home because of your stupid Nazi-hunting adventure. I told you not to go after the Nazi, but you had to do it anyway. You never even asked me how I felt about losing the house. All I wanted was to be surrounded, during my last few years, by things that gave me comfort. Now those things are all in storage, because we have to live here, because of you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I gave you sixty-five good years, and now I am old and sick.”

“We’re not here because you are old and sick. We’re here because you got shot fighting with desperadoes over treasure. Who the hell does that?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes I tussle with bad guys. You knew who I was when you married me.”

“I thought I knew who you were. But you’ve changed. You’ve retreated into yourself. You’ve become someone different since Brian died.”

“I’ve had a rough couple of days, Rose. Do we have to talk about Brian right now?”

“We’ve never talked about Brian. He’s been gone seven years, and you can’t even begin to deal with it. You want to know the difference between you and me?”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.”

“I’m stronger than you. You can’t deal with losing things. I’ve been preparing for it all my life. I spent the war worrying you were going to get yourself killed over there. A lot of girls had to worry about their men, so I couldn’t complain about that. But those boys came back and settled into ordinary lives. You came back to me with a lot of scars and, for some reason, a taste for blood and danger.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “You don’t understand, because I never wanted to burden you with it. All I ever wanted was to protect my family.”

“You didn’t want to burden me? I spent thirty years worrying that something was going to happen to you. Every morning, you walked out the door, and I didn’t know if you were going to come home or not. And when you worked late, you usually didn’t even call to tell me you were all right. I just had to wait. So when Brian died, I had to handle it alone, because I was the only one who was prepared to handle loss. Your whole life, your only plan to deal with tragedy was to die first, except you could never bring yourself to even do that.”

“My plan was to not ever need to endure tragedy. My plan was to take care of everyone. To keep you all safe.”

“Buck, that is a stupid plan, and I think you know it. And you had no contingency to fall back on when your stupid plan failed. When you got hurt, I gave everything up to bring you here. That was a choice I made. If you were too weak to get up in the morning, I didn’t have to move you someplace that could provide you with physical rehabilitation. I could have just left you in the bed and called in the hospice service.”

“I’d have done the same thing for you.”

“But you didn’t. Four months ago, I fell down and had to go in the hospital. And you left me. You ran away to St. Louis with Tequila to go on your silly treasure hunt. And of course, you ended up getting hurt, because you’re almost ninety years old, and you’re trying to do things you’re physically not capable of doing anymore. You insist on tussling with the bad guys, because you refuse to acknowledge the fact that you’re frail and brittle.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “This is all I’ve got. I’ve lost my health, and I’ve lost my career, and I’ve lost my son, and someday soon, I am going to lose my mind and my past. You say I can’t deal with loss, but this is how I deal with it. By being who I am, for as long as I can. When I’ve got nothing else, I’ve got my integrity, and I’ve got my principles. And I don’t leave things unfinished.”

“You’ve got me. Does that even matter to you? Do you think about how it affects me, when you run off to engage in some preposterous struggle with some ancient foe who nobody has cared about for fifty years?”

“Of course you matter to me. You matter more than anything. But you can’t ask me to be anything other than Buck Schatz. I’m much too old to change.”

“I know who I am, too,” she said, clenching her fists. “I am the one who has to get a phone call about how you’re in the hospital because you got into a gunfight with drug dealers. What if you’d died?”

“What if I had? I’m going to die someday. Maybe someday soon.”

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to go chasing after it.”

“Is it worse to get a phone call than to just wake up one morning and find me cold? Or worse, to watch me die of something slow, like the dementia?”

“I had to lose my home because of you. That was our place, and we had to sell it to some faceless company that wanted it for an investment property.”

This sounded familiar; sounded like something I might have written in a notebook at some point. But I’d forgotten about it.

“Wait. What company?” I asked.

“You know all about this. You were on the phone when William explained it.”

“I don’t remember that. Tell me who bought our house.”

“It’s a real estate trust that buys these properties as speculative investments.”

I pushed my walker over to the rolltop desk in one corner of the room and started going through the drawer where we kept our important papers.

“What are you doing?” Rose said. “You can’t just walk away from this conversation we’re having right now.”

I found the paper I was looking for: a record of the sale of our home to an entity called Fifth Cup Holdings. The fifth cup during the Passover seder was Elijah’s cup. He had bought it. He had taken my house; he’d spent a hundred thousand dollars just to taunt me. Or to tell me something. Could it really be that simple?

“I have got to go,” I said.

“What? You can’t leave.”

“I’ll be back soon. I promise.” I grabbed the keys to the Buick off the little peg on the wall where Rose hung them, because we hardly ever drove anymore.

“You can’t drive now. It’s nighttime. You don’t drive at night.”

“It’s no big deal. I’ll be back soon.” I reached into the closet to get my .357.

“It’s like you don’t hear what I am saying to you.”

“I hear you. I understand. But there are things a man needs to do.”

She’d get over it. She always did.

40

2009

I still had a set of keys to the front door of the house, but somebody had changed out the locks, so I pushed my own doorbell and held it down.

He was here. I’d known it as soon as I spotted the Honda Accord parked in the driveway. It was exactly the car he’d drive, because it was a car that nobody would ever notice. It wasn’t old enough to emit a memorable cloud of smoke, or to look remarkably boxy compared to the sleek edges of the latest models, but it wasn’t new enough to attract the curiosity of owners of older Accords who might take some vague interest in the trim or features of a new model.

The color was the same as the color of every other car you look at the back of for three minutes at a stoplight and never remember having seen. You could look right at this Honda Accord and never notice it. It was the next best thing to being invisible.

It was riding low on the rear shocks, too. Like a couple of fat guys were sitting in the backseat. But there were no fat guys in that car.

Here is something you learn in thirty-five years as a police detective: A twenty-dollar bill, or any paper denomination of U.S. currency, weighs approximately one gram. If you work the math out, five million dollars in twenties in the trunk will weigh a car down on its rear shocks the same amount as a couple of fat guys sitting in the backseat. Most people who aren’t drug dealers don’t think of cash as being heavy, but most people who aren’t drug dealers don’t take the time to consider the implications of large amounts in small bills.