Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman

Author:Daniel Friedman [Friedman, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

On a high shelf in Ziegler’s closet, we found a promising lead: a box containing his financial and health records, assorted correspondence, and an old-looking key in a small brown paper envelope, secreted away among his bank statements.

“What do you think this unlocks?” Tequila asked.

“From the look of it, maybe a safe deposit box,” I told him. I turned to the much-diminished god of Jew bashing. “Hey, Ziegler, have you got a safe deposit box?”

“Who are you?”

“If he has any treasures, I’ll bet they’re in that box,” Tequila suggested, ignoring the drooling wreck in the plastic-covered armchair.

“But if he has the gold, what is he doing here?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t he be someplace, you know, better?”

“As nursing facilities go, this one is actually fairly upscale,” Tequila said. “It seems like that nurse is dedicated to a pretty small cluster of folks. And the residents get private rooms, and the furniture is nice. Some of the places they put people look like army barracks.”

If a man needed a half ton of gold to buy care like this, I was in trouble. All I needed at my age was to be sent back to an army barracks.

“There are documents here that look like they convey his house to the Meadowcrest Manor,” Tequila said. “If a court had declared him incompetent after his stroke, this place might have been appointed as his guardian, and it would have taken his assets to pay for his care.”

“And Meadowcrest got the treasure too?”

“Nope.” Tequila grinned and ran his tongue over his teeth. “How would they know about it? Even if Ziegler was cogent enough at some point to remember he had it, telling anyone about it would put him in a pretty bad situation, you know, with the war crimes tribunals. He’s been in no condition to retrieve it for over a decade.”

Ziegler probably got stuck here after his stroke. He was vulnerable and immobilized, and he couldn’t go anywhere on his own, but there would have been nobody he could trust with a secret like that. With no way to get into the box, and no way to find a fence who could convert the gold to cash, the treasure had been left to sit in the bank vault until Ziegler’s dementia progressed far enough that he forgot it altogether.

“What are you doing?” Ziegler asked, suddenly upset that Tequila was stuffing papers into his backpack. “I think those things are mine.”

I opened a cupboard above the microwave and found a package of Oreo cookies. I gave a couple to the Nazi and he quieted down. Tequila slid the rest of the papers into his backpack and the key into his pocket. He put the empty box back in its place on the top shelf of the closet and closed the door.

The nurse came by a few minutes later and peeked into the room.

“Did you have a nice visit?” she asked, smiling at us. For a moment, my breath caught in my throat, but Ziegler seemed to have already forgotten that we’d searched his home and swiped his stuff.

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