Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (4 page)

Even a peaceable man would have had a hard time not punching Paul Schulman, and I’d never been a peaceable man. So it was a good thing that he was a scumbag and I was allowed to beat the shit out of him whenever I felt like it.

He was small-time, mostly: he ran little scams, bilking widows out of pension checks and selling bogus investments to credulous Negroes. But occasionally he overcame his numerous defects and managed to worm his way into a crew working on an elaborate con, or planning some kind of heist.

He wasn’t a thinker, and he wasn’t much good as muscle, but he had nimble fingers and a certain degree of facility when it came to opening doors or cheap safes without using keys. If you were looking to break into something, Schulman was the sort of guy you went to if you couldn’t get a first-rate safecracker. Fortunately for him, a lot of valuables were protected by third-rate locks.

Paradoxically, his capacity to involve himself in these larger crimes was what had kept him from serving any long stretches in prison for his petty offenses. Detective work was kind of like fishing: it was sometimes a good idea to throw the little ones back, so that you might reel in some big ones later on. And Schulman was a strong candidate for catch-and-release because he could be counted on to spill whatever he knew, anytime I roughed him up a little. There are few things more valuable to a detective than a reliable snitch.

But on that particular evening, at the synagogue, Schulman saw my car and he took off running.

Like I explained, there’s a lot of luck involved with police work; and knowing how to capitalize on that luck solves more cases than a capacity to make obscure deductions or a good eye for tiny clues.

A crime novelist gave a speech a couple of years ago at the Jewish Community Center, and he said coincidence is anathema in a mystery. He said that all crime stories are about how the universe is fundamentally an orderly place, and how disorder, in the form of crime and corruption, is systematically expunged. Therefore, the story must also have order; everything must follow logically. Everything must fit together neatly.

I don’t know much about narrative structure or overarching themes of order and disorder, but I know a bit about crime and how it gets punished. I worked plenty of cases that got messy, and I’ve seen more than a few that broke on account of coincidence.

If my son hadn’t been studying at the synagogue with the rabbi, I wouldn’t have been there to pick him up. If Schulman’s father hadn’t died that year, he wouldn’t have come to the evening Maariv service to say Kaddish. If he’d kept his cool, I probably would have ignored him; I wasn’t particularly interested in him that day. And if I hadn’t chased him down, I might never have found any kind of lead on Elijah.

But I was there, and he was there, and he ran when he saw me. And if somebody thinks they have a reason to run away from me, I assume I must have a good reason to chase them. Thus, I pursued.

When Schulman bolted, I was halfway into a parallel space on the street, so I cut the wheel and worked the shifter, and the Dodge lurched back into the road. My son was shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear what it was over the sound of the engine. I popped the clutch and the car jumped forward. I caught Schulman at the end of the block and drove over the curb and onto the sidewalk to cut him off. He was running as fast as he could, leaning forward and off balance. I think he’d been planning to try to dash across the intersection through oncoming traffic and lose me that way, but he wasn’t fast enough.

He put a hand on my car to steady himself and turned to try to run away in the other direction. But I had more experience catching bad guys than he did in fleeing from cops. Before he could pivot and dash off, I kicked my door open and caught him in the back of his legs with the corner of it. He pitched forward and staggered a couple of steps, which gave me enough time to jump out of the car and and smash him between the shoulder blades with my Discretion.

The flesh and bone rippled under the weight of the lead, and the spring flexed, so the club bounced off his back with a satisfying, hollow sound. Hitting somebody with the blackjack felt like banging a bongo drum with a hard rubber mallet. The impact of the blow spiked Schulman straight to the ground. He didn’t even have a chance to get an arm underneath his face before it hit the pavement.

“Seems like you have something you want to tell me, Paul,” I said.

He spit a big wad of wet stuff onto the sidewalk, and I saw there was some blood in it. “I don’t. I swear.”

“If you lie to me, I might get angry with you. And if I get angry, you’ll get hurt.”

“Oh, God. Please don’t.”

“If you have nothing to hide, why’d you run from me?”

He paused just long enough to anticipate the consequences, before he said: “My current circumstances entirely justify that decision.” Then he braced a little, in case that caused me to hit him.

“You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” I said.

“I wouldn’t mind being a little dumber, if I could also run a little faster,” he said.

“It ain’t the weight of your brains slowing you down, Paul.” I pushed the toe of my boot into his soft belly, and he curled himself up into a fetal position.

“It feels like something is grinding inside of me.”

“Those are your ribs. I’ve gone and broken your damn ribs. And if you don’t start talking, I will break something else.”

Schulman didn’t respond, but his gaze fixed on a point behind me. I glanced back and saw that my son had caught up with us.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Get in the car and shut the door,” I said.

“Why did you hit Mr. Schulman?”

“Get in the car and shut the door.”

“It’s okay. Your pop and I are just having a little chat,” said Schulman.

“Don’t talk to my kid,” I told him.

Brian crossed his arms. “This is wrong.”

“Give me something, Paul,” I said. “I don’t necessarily want to beat you in front of the boy, but I’ve got a real bad temper and I might just lose it.” I raised the club and he winced. Usually, it took very little persuasion to get a low-rent scumbag of this caliber to squeal. The list of people who could clam Paul Schulman up like this was short.

I knelt next to him; got my face close to his. I looked in his eyes, and I could tell if he was deciding whether his fear of me outweighed his fear of whoever he was protecting. I made a quick calculation. “Tell me what you know about Elijah. Are you in on this job he’s lining up?”

I tightened my grip on the club. He looked at me for about ten seconds, while I loomed enormous and occupied his entire field of vision, and he realized that I was all-knowing and all-seeing and terrible in my wrath.

“I’m on the outside of this thing,” he said. “I know a little, but not much. Please, Buck, don’t hit me again.”

“Give me what you have, and we’ll see how much mercy it buys you.”

He shuddered, and then he cringed, because shuddering shifted his cracked ribs. Then he screamed a little, because cringing just made it hurt worse. “Ari Plotkin has a piece of it, but he says Elijah don’t trust me. I heard the job has got something to do with the colored boys striking down by the river. That’s all I know.”

I stood silently over him for long enough to see if he had anything else he wanted to say. But it didn’t look like there was anything else for me to get out of him, except for tears and drool.

“I ought to arrest you, Paul. I know damn well you’ve been up to something lately that should earn you six months upstate. But I’m off duty, and I’m feeling charitable,” I said. “When you think about what happened here tonight, think about how nice I was to you. Next time you make me chase you, I will be a lot less forgiving.”

I rose to my feet, which brought me eye-to-eye with Abramsky, who was standing with one protective arm draped over Brian’s shoulder.

“This is a place of prayer, Detective,” he said.

I glanced down at Schulman, who was quivering on the sidewalk. “I guess Mr. Schulman should have prayed a little harder.”

The rabbi pinched his features so hard, his lips turned white. “These are your own people. How can you do this to your own people?”

“Pretty easily, it turns out,” I said. I pointed at Brian with the club. “Get in the car.”

But my son just stood there and balled up his fists. “I want to hear a real answer to that question.” In some ways, he was a lot like his mother.

I looked at the rabbi. “Isn’t there a commandment about how he’s got to do what I say?”

Abramsky crossed his arms. “He’s almost a man, and a man can’t just look the other way when he sees something like this. I think you had better try to justify yourself.”

I was surprised by this show of backbone from such a soft, childlike man. I said to Brian: “Paul Schulman is a scumbag. He is not our people. We are nothing like this man. That isn’t what we are.”

“You may have a big stick, but you are still a Jew, and one day you will learn that,” Abramsky said. “I hope, for the boy’s sake, that lesson doesn’t come at too great a price.”

“If you feel like doing a mitzvah, call an ambulance for this schmuck,” I said to the rabbi. Then I turned to Brian: “Get your ass in the car. We’re done here.”

5

2009

I was lying flat on my back on a soft mat in a windowless interior room, staring up into the fluorescent lights. Getting myself down to the floor had been accomplished with great difficulty, and not without assistance. Getting up would be painful.

“Let me see you do two more sets of leg lifts,” said Claudia, who was a physical therapist or a rehab specialist or something like that.

“I think I’ve had enough for today,” I said.

“If you can swing that axe, Buck, you can give me a couple more leg lifts.” She pronounced her name “Cloudy-ah.” Her people were from someplace in Central America, and if she ever went back there, she was well qualified to work as a torturer for an autocratic governing regime. I’d had hurt put on me by some of the best, and this girl could hang with any of them.

“I’m all worn out from the axe. The axe was a hell of a workout. I think it earned me a day off.”

“There are no days off. There are just days when you get better, and days when you get worse.”

This was the ninety-second day I’d done rehab therapy. This was the ninety-second day I’d spent paying the price for going after an old enemy and tangling with bad guys.

I’d already done fifteen minutes of slow pedaling on the stationary exercise bicycle, and three sets of an exercise that involved pulling on a rope, which was supposed to help my core muscles. My core muscles were a mess. It turns out that getting shot in the back is real bad for the core muscles.

Rose arranged to move us to Valhalla Estates while I was still in the hospital. It was a decision I wouldn’t have approved, but there was no choice, really. The house wasn’t accessible to me anymore. We had no grab bars or seats in the bathtub. We didn’t have a toilet I could slide onto from a wheelchair. The hallway leading back to the bedroom was now too narrow for the chair to maneuver, and even after all my therapy, I still needed somebody stronger than my wife to help me out of bed in the morning.

Rose picked this place over a couple of less-expensive options, in part because it had an on-site rehab facility and a physical therapist on the staff. Using the same criteria, she could have just moved us to the prison at Guantánamo Bay; I hear they’ve got room there, since that Kenyan president turned all the terrorists loose.

“You know, I’ve studied the biomechanics of walking,” Cloudy-ah said. “The human gait is a kind of negotiation with the gravitational pull of the Earth. The planet is always trying to pull you down toward its center, and your body has adapted itself to use that very force to propel you along the surface.”

“Until one day, it doesn’t, and then you get buried,” I said.

“That’s why we have to work to keep all those muscles in good condition. If just one of these complex systems goes out of whack, the whole machine breaks down.”

My machine was a heap of junk; I was made of ground-down gears and worn-out belts, with load-bearing beams held together by spit and Spackle, and that was before I’d gone and got myself shot.

For the elderly, healing is complicated. The doctors’ primary concern was something they called decompensation: essentially, I had become so fragile that the stress of a trauma could cause a cascade of organ failures that would most likely kill me.

The way my doctor had explained it: “With patients in advanced old age, an incidence of a fall or a trauma signals that a subsequent fall or trauma within the next six months is highly probable, even if the injury sustained in the first fall appears minor or superficial. Where we have two injuries within a six-month period, we see a dramatic increase in the probability of death within the subsequent twelve months, relatively speaking.”

“Relative to what?” I’d asked him.

“Well, mortality rates are already quite high within your age cohort,” he said.

He always knew just what to say to make me feel better.

After two weeks immobile in bed, the best someone my age could hope for was irreversible muscle deterioration, but more likely, my legs would just fill with blood clots, which would turn into embolisms and kill me. That particular serious mortal risk was compounded by the fact that my blood thinners had to be discontinued for a while to allow my wounds to start healing.

So, they’d sent somebody in to start the rehab while the gunshot wound in my side was still seeping; just days after they set my broken leg in a cast. They had me raising and lowering my arms, lifting and bending my good leg.

Several times a day, they hauled me out of bed just to make me sit in a chair, even though it hurt like hell to be upright. I was discharged from the hospital after two weeks, but I spent another month in a wheelchair while I waited for the bones to knit. The cast was too heavy to drag around, and crutches or a walker would pull open the stitches in my side.

Despite the effort, when the cast came off, the leg still wouldn’t support my weight. I tried to use the walker, but Rose thought I was unsteady on it. So I went back into the wheelchair for another three weeks while Cloudy-ah made me do lifts and bends until I was stronger.