Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (7 page)

“You got this kind of moralistic Old Testament view of justice; smiting down the evildoers and shit. You can’t look at crime that way. Crime is, like, a social phenomenon. You have to get past this idea of punishment and look at how to remedy the root causes. Otherwise, you’re just blaming the desperate for being born into adverse circumstances.”

“I’ve met plenty of thieves, but I ain’t never met a man who stole because he was hungry,” I said. “People steal because they want drugs, or because it’s easier than work, or because they lack the moral and intellectual capacity to understand that it’s wrong to hold people up at gunpoint.”

“Even so, we’re still talking about a social problem. I read about this study that finds a very strong correlation between toxic lead exposure and crime. When little kids are exposed to lead, it disrupts their brain development. Lead causes lower IQs and it damages the capacity for empathy and self-discipline.”

“Sounds like a bunch of hogwash to me.”

“You can look at the statistics. The proliferation of lead-burning automobiles predicts the urban crime wave of 1970s, and the widespread adoption of unleaded gasoline predicts the decline of crime through the 1990s.”

I let out a contemptuous belch, and Andre turned up the air conditioner to blow it into the backseat.

“That’s how you and I are different,” I said. “You look at crime as a computer program. As a collection of statistics. It’s easy to take a compassionate view of criminals when you treat them as a group of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden. You have to sympathize with them in the aggregate, because on an individual basis, these motherfuckers are goddamn intolerable. And statistics turn the suffering of the victims into an abstraction. Crime, to me, was always personal; a thing people do to each other.”

He turned his head away from the road and looked at me, like he was appraising a side of beef. “How did your son die, anyway?” he asked.

The stretch of I-240 we were cruising down was called the Avron B. Fogelman Expressway. They had Jewish highways now.

“What kind of question is that?” I said.

“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess. Is it some kind of a secret?”

“No. I just don’t like talking about it.”

“I mean, why not? Was it, like, cancer? Was it a car accident? Was it—something else?”

“There was a thing about it in the
Commercial Appeal.
Go be a policeman and pull it up on the microfiche if you want to know what happened. Just don’t bother me with it.”

“Okay, first of all, don’t get all snippy with me, old man. And second, I don’t think a microfiche is a thing that exists anymore.”

“What does it matter to you, how he died?” I asked. “Is there something you want to understand about me that you think will somehow be illuminated if you know that?”

“I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I was just making conversation.”

“He was my son, and he’s dead, and I buried him. Talking about it just drags him back up, so I have to bury him again. What’s the use?”

“I don’t know. Maybe talking and dealing with it is how you get past it.”

“There’s no getting past it. Better to just leave it alone.”

“Suit yourself, Buck. Ain’t my problem.”

“You’re right. It isn’t.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way to the small Jewish cemetery, out on South Parkway in a blighted part of Midtown Memphis. A hundred and twenty years ago, all the Jews had lived in this area, but over time, the neighborhood turned black, and then most of the blacks moved away and the area turned industrial, and then the industry went away and it turned desolate. The cemetery’s neighbor was now an abandoned factory. Across the street was a freight yard filled with shipping containers.

The railroad tracks were just fifty yards from my son’s grave, and the rumble of trains frequently interrupted funeral services. To the east was some kind of weird quarry; a deep scar cut in the landscape with stagnant, standing water in the bottom of it. The cemetery was small; a couple of green acres amidst the dust and ruin, maintained by the membership fees of an aging and shrinking synagogue congregation.

The people who had lived here had gone. The shipping containers were on their way somewhere over the horizon, and so were the freight trains.

For me, though, this place that everything else passed through was a destination. An ending point. Everything around here was transient except me. I came here to get here; to this tiny patch of earth that held my dead. This place, to me, meant permanence. It wouldn’t be so very long before I’d come here for the last time, and I wouldn’t leave.

We parked in the lot and walked through a gap in the hedge around the cemetery grounds. There was an awning up over a fresh grave, which meant there’d been a funeral recently, but we found the place empty and silent, except for a stray dog chasing a squirrel among the headstones and Elijah, who was looking at graves with his lawyer in the oldest section.

I never really wanted to come here; I had avoided it the previous week on the anniversary of my son’s death. I’d avoided even mentioning the anniversary to Rose, because I was afraid that conversation would end with a trip to this place.

And now I had come to the cemetery without hesitation to arrest a man I hadn’t even thought about in decades, before that morning. I lit a cigarette and decided to take the opportunity to refuse to have a moment of self-realization.

“At least this doesn’t seem to be an ambush,” I said.

“Were you expecting an ambush?” Andre asked.

“I didn’t really know what to expect.”

“I’m glad you pulled me into this.”

By the entrance to the graveyard, there was a plastic barrel full of gravel and a small water fountain. I picked up a couple of small stones. “So that is the legendary Elijah?” Andre asked, pointing at the trim, gray-haired figure at the other side of the cemetery.

“Yes,” I said.

“He don’t look much like a thief.”

“Good thieves never do.” I stopped on the path. “Hang on a second.”

I took a left turn onto the grass, pushing the walker in front of me. Andre followed. Brian’s monument was big and new, made of black limestone. There were empty spaces next to it: for his wife on one side, and for Rose and me on the other. I knocked on the stone with my fist, and set a piece of gravel on top of it.

“What are the little rocks for?” Andre asked.

“It’s what Jews leave when we visit cemeteries, because we’re too cheap to pay for flowers,” I said. I didn’t know what significance the rocks had; somebody must have told me once, but I didn’t remember anymore.

My mother was buried next to the plots where Rose and I were supposed to go. I left a rock on her gravestone as well.

“Esther ‘Bird’ Schatz,” Andre said. “Your people do like their nicknames.”

“I don’t talk about the kinds of names your people like,” I said.

“Not where we can hear you, anyway,” Andre said. He squatted down, to read the inscription on the headstone. “She died in 1998? She must have been ancient.”

“A hundred and four.”

“I don’t see your dad here. Is he still alive or something?”

“He’s in one of the older sections. He died in 1927. I was six.”

“So, I guess not all the Schatzes live as long as you and your mom.”

“My father was murdered,” I said.

Andre waited for me to elaborate on that, and when I didn’t, he said: “I’m sorry.”

My dad’s funeral was one of my earliest memories. Back then, the cemetery was mostly empty; only a couple of small sections filled with graves, and several more that were just empty, rolling lawns. Beyond that, the part of the property where my son would one day be buried hadn’t yet been developed; it was just trees and undergrowth.

Not many people came to my father’s funeral, and I didn’t know most of them. I can’t recall their faces, but I remember how stricken Grandmother Schatz looked.

“Your father believed in something that was inconvenient to some ruthless, powerful men,” my mother told me. “One day, you might believe in something. I hope you’ll remember that the things you believe in won’t keep you safe.”

People were trying to talk to her, but she ignored them and led me off, away from the fresh earth we’d piled onto my father and down a row of graves.

“You’ve learned something about the world today, Baruch,” she said.

“I did?”

“The world isn’t a nice place. The world isn’t a friendly place. The world isn’t a fair place. Your father is dead because he believed in a world governed by fairness and justice. He believed in a world that doesn’t exist.” She led me down to a corner of the cemetery where graves were smaller, to where there was only a space of a couple of feet between the headstones and the footstones.

“Look at that,” she said, pointing at a monument no more than eighteen inches high, made of poured concrete in the shape of a lamb. There were several more just like it, farther down the row.

“Do you understand what you are looking at?”

“These are graves for little children,” I said.

My mother nodded. “Believing the world is nice doesn’t make it true. Believing the world is nice doesn’t make you safe. People will hurt you for any number of stupid reasons. People will hurt you for no reason at all.”

“No, they won’t,” I said. “I’ll hurt them first.”

Eighty years later, in almost the same place, what I said to Andre Price was: “There’s nothing you can do about it.” I stuck my hands in my pockets. Elijah and his lawyer were now examining those tiny monuments in the old section. The years and the weather had worn the little lambs into unidentifiable lumps.

“Let’s go arrest a bank robber.”

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

My mother was always a thin woman. Thin arms; slim waist; pale, pinched lips; narrow eyes, like a gunslinger’s. She wore her hair in a bun so tight that it pulled the skin of her face, which exaggerated the natural severity of her features. She might have been a pretty woman, if she’d allowed herself to be a little softer. But she had no use for softness or prettiness, and after my father got himself killed, she didn’t have much use for men, or the things men believed in.

When I was eight years old, somebody grabbed her from behind and dragged her into an alleyway. I was in second grade, and when class let out, she wasn’t there to walk me home. I remember waiting almost two hours in the office of the Jewish day school before a police officer arrived to get me.

He told me something bad had happened, and I climbed into his squad car—an old tin lizzie with police markings—and took a ride to the precinct house. My father’s death was still fresh in my mind; the funeral service in the hot, crowded little cemetery chapel and the smell of turned earth. I was terrified. The cop sat me on a hard wooden bench and told me not to move. I waited for a long time, watching as officers hauled in the bad guys for booking.

Most of the crooks seemed resigned and docile, and allowed themselves to be led to the holding cell. One man struggled, and multiple officers ran to subdue him with clubs and fists. When they were finished, there was blood on the man’s head, and his body hung limp as two police dragged him away.

Eventually, the cop who had picked me up from school came back, and he told me I could see my mother, but that I mustn’t be scared or cry.

Then he took me into a small office, and she was sitting there, waiting for me. Her face was swollen and purple-black around her left eye. Her clothes were covered in blood; thick red-brown stains.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether to run into her arms or run away.

She just smiled at me. A couple of her teeth were broken, and her mouth was all bloody.

“You should see the other guy,” she said.

She took me home, and cleaned herself up, and fixed my supper and put me to bed. She never told me what happened, and I knew better than to ask. But I was curious, and I was always a bit of a snoop. So, when I joined the police force, eighteen years later, I went to the records morgue to find the report on my mother’s attack.

Here is the earliest thing I can remember about Bird Schatz: I was maybe four or five years old. She took me to a big department store downtown to buy clothes for Rosh Hashanah. We rode a bus together, and she told me that I must hold her hand all the time, or somebody might steal me away and chop me up into little pieces. She bought me an oxford shirt and a pair of slacks in the boys’ department, and then she sat me on a chair in the ladies’ section, and had the salesgirl watch me while she tried on clothes. She chose a plain white cotton blouse and an ankle-length skirt made of stiff blue fabric.

Her new skirt fit fine off-the-rack, but as soon as she got home, she took out the sewing kit.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m hiding razor blades in my clothes,” she said. And then she showed me how she buried the sharp edge inside the reinforced fabric of the skirt’s waistband, and how she secured it with enough threads to hold it in place, but not so many that she couldn’t easily tear it loose if she needed it.

“Why are you doing that?”

“In case somebody tries to rape me,” she said.

If you’re wondering how my mother did her laundry, the answer is: by hand, and very carefully.

It turned out she was still sewing razor blades into her clothes a few years later, when she had an occasion to use them.

I’ve since seen lots of wounds inflicted by women on male assailants; usually scratches on forearms and bruises on faces from open-hand slaps. Since I was a homicide detective, the fact that I ever had a reason to pay attention to those wounds suggests things did not turn out well for these women. I also happen to know that in police-sponsored women’s self-defense classes, we advise striking or kicking at an assailant’s genitals. My mother didn’t scratch at her attacker’s face, and she didn’t kick him in the balls. She went at the bastard like a wildcat; she lunged for his vitals, and she burrowed into him.

With her razor blades and her fingernails, she tore through an inch and a half of belly fat and a wall of abdominal muscle, and she unspooled his guts all over the pavement.