Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) by Daniel Friedman

tendencies. I, for example, believed the world was hard and dangerous, so I was hard and dangerous myself. Similarly, conspiracy theorists and paranoids, the folks who suspected everyone of plotting against them, were often treacherous.
    “I don’t need to listen to this,” I said to him.
    “And I don’t need police coming up into my office. But I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. If you’re going to arrest me, let’s spare the foreplay.” He presented his wrists to me.
    “I just want to ask some questions. If you want me out of here, you need to settle down and give me some answers.”
    He paused for a second and really looked at me. “Maybe I should call my lawyer.”
    Guilty men—the pro-level scumbags—liked to lawyer up real fast, but the self-righteous types did as well. Sanctimonious pricks were very concerned about their rights. I wasn’t sure yet which kind of asshole I was dealing with. I decided not to make any assumptions; I didn’t really care what Longfellow Molloy was up to. If he was scamming his people, it wasn’t my job to stop him. I was after a slippery Jewish bank robber.
    The problem was that I knew approximately bubkes about what Elijah was planning; my only real clue was that it had something to do with the strike. So Molloy was going to have to tell me something.
    “I’ve got a tip that there’s a robbery going down that has something to do with the strike,” I said. “I ain’t accusing you of anything. Your people may be the victims. Your office may be the target. If I am going to stop this thing, I will need you to cooperate.”
    Molloy had clean fingernails, and he kept his hair neat; slicked down close to his skull. He had a way of letting his gaze drift down to the floor as he spoke, and then he would notice himself doing that, and look up deliberately to stare daggers at me.
    In a white man, I’d have seen this as a sign of dishonesty or, at least, of a fundamentally strange nature. But maybe a Negro looked at the floor because he’d been born into a world that expected him to keep his eyes down, and Molloy looked up when he did because he wanted to live in a world that was different.
    He was also wearing a three-piece suit. A lot of cops I knew didn’t like to see a colored boy in a business suit; and they’d have taken one look at this one and bet that he was up to no good. But I suspected that if I put Molloy up against a wall and turned his pockets out, I’d find no label in his jacket, and only a cheap kind of lining.
    There were colored ladies working out of their homes; out of tenements and row houses, sewing clothes to make ends meet, and some of them did very fine work. A white man with similar skills could take home five or six times what any of those ladies earned. Molloy had probably paid only a small fraction of what a comparable garment would cost me at Oak Hall or Goldsmith’s. I’d have had half a mind to try to buy such a suit myself, but the blacks tended not to be forthcoming with referrals for some reason.
    “And yet, somehow, with these supposed criminals out there, you’re interrogating me. Ain’t that the way it goes?”
    “It’s nothing personal. You just might be able to tell me some things I need to know.”
    He sat down behind his desk and held out his hands, palms up. “Well, then ask.”
    “Have you collected any kind of union dues from the strikers?”
    “Ain’t you read the newspaper? The union won’t take us. Can’t make any headway with the leaders of the Local; they’re bigots. The whole lot of them. Been to Washington to visit the national organization. There’s resistance, they tell me, which is a diplomatic way of saying they don’t want our kind.”
    “You didn’t collect money from those men, anyway?”
    “Those men don’t have any money. These men are poor; much poorer than they ought to be, hard as they work. That’s why they’re out there marching.”
    “Have you got a large sum of cash on the