Don't Ever Get Old (11 page)

“Don't you think I know that?” Tequila growled at me. He stopped walking and crossed his arms. “How does it help us if he looks at that monitor and sees us bolting for the door like frightened rabbits?”

“It ain't safe here. Under the circumstances, we're better off getting far away from this place,” I told him, flicking my lighter. “You let me do the thinking for us. I have the experience.”

“I don't trust your thinking, Grandpa,” he said, furrowing his eyebrows and leaning forward, forcing himself into my space. “Your thinking brought us out here, because your thinking was that you could tell this guy how things work in his own house. But your tough-guy bullshit was obsolete even when you could put some torque behind a punch.”

“Listen to me,” I began.

But he cut me off.

“I'm through listening to you. You're not an educated man, and you're not in control of this situation. Five minutes of lawyer talk over the phone would have convinced that guy we were a kind of trouble he didn't want. Instead, we've shown him there's blood in the water here. Maybe we've thrown him off the scent, for the moment, with the Steinblatt thing, but he'll be damn hard to get rid of. And on top of that, you want to let him see us run away. What the hell kind of a plan is that?”

I recoiled a little from his outburst. “I may not know law books, but I know people,” I stammered. “You don't understand the kind of man you're dealing with.”

“I know what kind of man I'm dealing with. An ornery, senile, half-crazy old fuck.”

Neither of us said much after that. On the way back to Memphis, I looked out at the soybean fields surrounding the casinos and wondered how many folks were buried under them.

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

On the night Billy was born, Brian brought the baby, wrapped in a blue blanket, out of the delivery room for Rose and me to see.

The baby was small and very pink, with just a little tuft of light-colored fuzz on his head. When I leaned down to look at him, Billy peered back at me with big, bright eyes, green and wet.

“Hi, kid,” I said. “I'm your grandpa. I'm going to help look out for you.”

“I love him so much, Dad,” Brian told me, and his eyes were wet as well.

“If you ever felt before that your life lacked an animating purpose, I reckon you're realizing right about now that you'll never feel that way again,” I said, squeezing his shoulder. “This is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. This is why you try to force a cruel and arbitrary world to take on a shape that makes sense. This is what you are for: to protect this boy. To keep him safe and make sure he knows he's never alone.”

“Yeah, Dad. I think that's just about right.”

I found my whiskey flask in my jacket pocket. I took a long belt and handed it to my son. “Well, I know the feeling,” I said.

 

16

There was an ass in every one of the two thousand cushy movie-theater seats in the stucco-and-glass auditorium. The church had its sheriff's deputies trying to untangle the jammed-up traffic in the parking lot. Judging from the attendance at his memorial service, it seemed that despite his unsettling appearance and his gambling problem, dead Larry had been a pretty solid hand at the pastor racket. A lot of people were crying.

I found a nice perch on the end of an aisle, at the back lip of the room, where I could see the crowd. Tequila slid into the seat next to me. We hadn't talked about yesterday's blowout in Tunica, and I suspected we wouldn't. That wasn't how things worked in our family.

He had showed up at the house earlier that morning with fresh bagels and coffee from Starbuck's. A peace offering.

I accepted it and let him drive me to the funeral. So now we would pretend it had never happened, although the things he'd said had got under my skin.

I'd been to the church three times now in the span of a week. This was the life of an old person—going to the same places all the time, over and over, and attending a lot of funerals.

Somebody had already replaced the carpet on the stage where Kind had bled out. Somebody had repainted the splattered walls. Somebody had mopped up Kind's various bits and scraped them into a heavy-looking oak casket with brass rails for the pallbearers to grab on to. The box was closed, of course, and it was so completely covered with cascading flowers that I could barely see how expensive it was.

“Maybe if the reverend had given that fancy coffin to those guys in Tunica, they wouldn't have ripped his face off,” Tequila said.

A heavyset, middle-aged woman in front of us turned around to give us an ugly look.

Tequila winced a bit and tried to look contrite. “We all have different ways of expressing our grief,” he told her.

“What makes you think the casino people did him?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular,” he said. “My theory is actually that you did it.”

I fiddled with the pack of cigarettes and considered lighting one. I decided against it. “Nobody says you're innocent either,” I told Tequila.

“Well, if anyone starts snooping around and wants to know where I was that night, you can tell them you were with me, and if anyone asks about you, I'll say the same.”

That was reassuring.

Lots of classy folks in the crowd. No Mexican day laborers would need to be conscripted to carry the late reverend; a judge, a councilman, and the mayor were on deck to help bear the departed to his resting place. I wondered idly if those three had alibis for the night of the murder.

The luminaries would be sharing the load with Kind's former assistant and interim successor, a straight-backed, severe-looking fellow called Gregory Cutter. He'd got himself a promotion out of Kind's death, and that was a motive. I added him to my mental list of suspects.

“Hey, there's somebody we know,” Tequila said, gesturing toward T. Addleford Pratt, who was sitting nearby, dressed for the occasion in a red leather coat with a white fur collar.

“We got friends all kinds of places,” I said, jamming an elbow into Tequila's ribs and jerking my head to the left and forward, toward Yitzchak Steinblatt, who was examining a Baptist hymnal with a sort of intense Hasidic zeal.

“Shit,” said Tequila. “That is, like, the Dikembe Mutombo of Orthodox Jews.”

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Detective Randall Jennings had shown up as well; he was sitting near the front, in the same seat he'd occupied the night of the murder.

“I don't see Feely,” Tequila said. “Do you think that means he's the killer?”

I looked around and didn't see him either. What I suspected it meant was, when Norris Feely didn't want to go someplace, his wife couldn't force him to go anyway. I would have to find out how such a feat could be accomplished.

“Nothing means anything,” I told him. “Bad guys sometimes return to the scene of the crime, and sometimes they put rubber to pavement and never look back. I'm not their psychologist. I just lock the bastards up.”

He smirked. “You used to lock the bastards up.”

“That's what I said.” My elbow was starting to throb; sticking Tequila had been a bad idea. I was sure I had bruised it.

“So, how come we're not in St. Louis?” he asked. “I have to go back to New York pretty soon.”

“A man's murdered, and that may be related to our treasure hunt,” I told him. “Wherever the gold is, it's been there a long time, and it can wait a little longer. We need to make sure we're safe before we do anything.”

Kind's parents and brother sat in the front row. The father was crying. I avoided looking at them, but Tequila was staring in their direction.

“Who's the pretty girl sitting with the family?” he asked the lady in front of us.

“That's the pastor's wife,” she said. “Poor Felicia. This must be so hard on her.”

Felicia Kind was younger than her husband, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat, with a black veil on it, and a tight-fitting black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline that put piety's earthly rewards on full exhibition.

“Hard-on indeed,” Tequila said in his best, most sympathetic tone. “That's a hell of a dress for a funeral.”

The big woman clucked like a mournful hen. “She must have been so dazed with grief, she didn't even realize.”

I watched a tall man with carefully mowed hair lean in toward Felicia to whisper in her ear. She laughed at whatever he said.

“She knows exactly what she's doing,” Tequila said. He leaned back toward me. “What do you think, Grandpa?”

“I can imagine a chain of events starting with that woman and ending with that box.”

“You think she did it?”

“Everyone's a suspect,” I said. “But when I look at that shiny coffin, I've got to suspect the life of the departed reverend was heavily insured.”

“So you think she killed him for money?”

I thought about it for a moment. “You have to understand, a filly like that don't want to be kept in the paddock. She wants to nibble at the sweet new grass and get some sweat on those shapely flanks.”

“Does that mean you think she's sleeping with somebody?”

I shrugged. No way of knowing. “It'd be kind of a shame if she wasn't,” I said.

Gregory Cutter, Kind's replacement, patted Felicia's hand, hugged the weeping father, and then stepped up onto the stage in front of the coffin. The crowd fell silent as the preacher grasped his microphone.

“Lawrence would be pleased to see you all here today, I'm sure,” he said. “He was a friend and a counselor and a listener and a guide, and he touched many lives throughout our community with his wisdom and his compassion.”

Kind's father sobbed.

“The way I see it,” Tequila said, shifting in his seat, “if this has something to do with her, it's got nothing to do with us.”

I turned that over in my mind as I half listened to Cutter orating on the stage.

“We've all wondered over the last few days what sort of monster could have done this to someone like Larry. And the police are still hunting for the killer. But I know who was behind this crime. I know who wanted to destroy Lawrence Kind and who wants to destroy this church.”

“That makes things a whole lot easier,” Tequila whispered to me.

“Each of us has an Enemy,” Cutter shouted from the stage, pointing his finger into the audience. “Each of us has a foe, savage and cruel. And that Enemy is fearsome enough to lay low the best among us, even men as pure and strong as our pastor.”

I'd followed General Eisenhower's advice and hung on to my gun, and that had kept me alive for eighty-seven years. But poor Lawrence Kind was never the sort of man who could operate that way. I wondered whether I'd had a chance to save him when he showed up begging on my doorstep. I suspected that by then the trap was already sprung, but even if I could have helped him out, Kind had only himself to blame for his ending.

“The Enemy clouds our judgment. The Enemy tempts us to ruin. The Enemy demoralizes us,” boomed Cutter.

T. Addleford Pratt was looking at us, smirking.

Tequila scowled back at him.

“That guy is a fucking clown,” he whispered. “The wife seems more dangerous to me.”

“But even when that Devil lays the best of us low, we have to stand strong in the face of torment, like Jesus did and like Larry did. And, 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,” Cutter shouted. “But I look at all our friends here today, and I say, we are unyielding in our faith, and we will prevail over evil, and all of us who are strong in our love will walk with Jesus and Pastor Kind in the promised land.”

I rubbed gingerly at my bruised elbow. “Even a silly-ass sumbitch is capable of being dangerous.”

“Capable or not, he doesn't have the stones to get rough with a retired Memphis cop in Memphis,” Tequila said.

“Wouldn't have thought he'd get rough with a minister,” I told him. “But somebody put Larry in that coffin.”

In the front row, Felicia Kind crossed and uncrossed her legs. I squinted at her. Her mascara wasn't running. Her lipstick wasn't smudged. She was a very poised young lady; unusually so, considering the circumstances. If I'd looked at the Kinds in 1965, when I was at the peak of my career, I'd have immediately suspected—hell, I'd have been near to certain—that the death of the lumpy, reptilian pastor was somehow related to his bombshell wife. Kind wasn't rich, but maybe Felicia bumped him off to get out of marriage to a hopeless gambler or to free herself to run off with somebody else. That certainly seemed more plausible than the goofy spy stories Tequila and I had been telling each other. It was unlikely that Avram Silver was capable of deploying an assassin halfway around the world. But it seemed awful risky to turn my back on a man like Yitzchak Steinblatt.

Onstage, Gregory Cutter was chopping emphatically at the air with his raised right hand.

“Here in this church, I say we will not give the Devil his due. We will stand up to the evil that threatens us. And those of us who have worshipped here will not forget Dr. Lawrence Kind, our pastor, our shepherd, our friend.”

The police didn't just escort the funeral procession, they closed off the streets between the church and the cemetery. But a shiny box and a thousand mourners didn't change the fact that Kind was buried forty feet from the fresh mound of dirt they'd piled onto Jim Wallace.

 

17

As the crowd around Kind's grave dispersed, I tapped the Dikembe Mutombo of Orthodox Jews on the arm.

“Shalom, Yid's Cock,” I said to him.

Tequila giggled into his shirtsleeve.

“You haven't met my grandson, Manischewitz,” I said to the Russian. “He's a real mensch. So proud of this one. I got buttons bursting off my shirt, and
nachas
oozing out of every orifice.”