Live Bait

13

For the first five minutes after they left the crime scene at Rose Kleber’s little blue house, Gino sat in the passenger seat like a normal person – out of respect for the dead, Magozzi supposed – but once they hit the parkway, he cranked down the window and somehow manuevered himself so that most of his upper torso was hanging out of the car. It looked uncomfortable, but his eyes were closed and he was smiling.

‘You look like a golden retriever,’ Magozzi said.

Gino took several gulps of fresh air. ‘Another hundred miles and I just might be able to get that smell out of my nose.’ He slumped back into his seat, suddenly depressed. ‘Shit. Now I feel bad. It’s not fair, you know? You die and it’s sad, and then to top it all off, you end up smelling so bad, people can’t even stay in the same room with you. Dead people should smell good so you can stand around and look at them and feel really rotten about what happened.’

‘I’m going to stand around and look at you and feel really rotten no matter how bad you smell, Gino.’

‘And I appreciate that.’

Magozzi turned into the nursery drive and nosed past the hedge into a jammed parking lot.

‘Well, would you look at this,’ Gino said. ‘The bereaved widow is open for business. Hey, is that clown in the lawn chair Jack Gilbert?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Also looks like he’s getting seriously soused. This is going to be a lot of fun.’

Jack seemed genuinely happy to see them. ‘Detectives! I just tried calling you. Did you get him? Did you get the guy who killed my father?’

‘We’re still working on it, Mr Gilbert,’ Magozzi said. ‘We have a couple more questions for you and your family.’

‘No problem.’ Jack wiped the foam off his upper lip and tried to look sober. ‘Anything you want. Anything I can do. Ask away.’

‘Who’s Rose Kleber?’ Gino asked abruptly, watching carefully for a change in Jack’s expression, disappointed when he didn’t see one.

‘Jeez, I don’t know. Why? Is she a suspect?’

‘Not exactly. She lives in the neighborhood. We were wondering if she was a friend of your father’s.’

‘Beats me. Probably was, if she lives in the neighborhood. He knew just about everybody.’ He frowned hard and tried to steady his gaze on Magozzi’s face. ‘So who is she, guys? What’s she got to do with all this?’

‘She was murdered last night,’ Magozzi said.

Jack blinked, trying to process the information as it seeped through alcohol-soaked brain cells. ‘Jesus, that’s awful. Shit, they’re dropping like flies around here, aren’t they? So what are you thinking? Is there a connection? You think the same guy did both of them?’

‘She had your dad’s number in her phone book,’ Gino said. ‘It’s just one of the things we have to check out.’

‘Shit.’ Jack sagged back down into the lawn chair. ‘Half the people in the city have Dad’s number. He used to pass out cards at the soup kitchen, for chrissakes. The man was totally out there.’

‘Then again, for all you know, she could have been someone your dad saw every day, right?’ Gino asked casually. ‘Seeing as how you haven’t been around here much lately.’

Jack tipped his head thoughtfully to one side, and for a moment Magozzi feared it would fall off his neck. ‘Yep. You’re right about that. Did I tell you I’ve been persona non grata here for a year or so?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘You did. Yesterday. I thought that was kind of a shame. Hate to see rifts like that in a family. It must make this especially hard for you, losing your dad before you had a chance to patch things up.’

‘Nah. There wasn’t a chance in hell we were going to fix that.’

‘Really.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t take out the garbage or something, you know? Never could be what Pop wanted me to be, and like I told you yesterday, to top it off I married a Lutheran. That went over like a pork chop at a Seder dinner.’

Gino nodded sympathetically. ‘Sounds like he was a little hard on you, Jack, and I know just where you’re coming from. I could never please my father, either.’

Magozzi maintained a poker face. Gino’s father thought his only son walked on water.

‘No matter what I did,’ Gino continued, ‘no matter how hard I tried, it was just never enough for that man. Used to really piss me off.’

Jack raised his eyes in drunken disbelief. ‘Jesus, Detective, I’m an attorney. Give me a little credit. Did you actually expect me to fall for that load of sympathetic bonding crap?’

Gino shrugged. ‘Had to give it a shot.’

‘Well for what it’s worth, I didn’t kill my father, okay?’ He collapsed back onto the lawn chair and closed his eyes. ‘Shit. You guys might want to step back a little. I think I might actually hurl.’

‘So who was she, this Rose Kleber?’ Lily was standing at the front window of the greenhouse with her arms folded, staring out at Jack, cluttering the parking lot with his lawn-chair and cooler, lying there like a stunned carp.

‘She lived over on Ferndale, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi answered, ‘and a couple of things caught our attention. She was in the camps for one thing, just like Mr Gilbert.’ He saw Lily’s eyes close briefly. ‘And she had his name and number in her phone book.’

Marty was at the counter, rubbing at an old stain with his thumb. ‘Sounds pretty thin, guys.’

‘It is. Just something we’re checking out.’

Marty nodded absently, and Magozzi had the feeling he was barely interested, barely present.

Lily took a breath and turned away from the window. ‘People buy plants, Morey gives them a card, tells them to call if they have trouble with them. Do you have a picture? Maybe she was a customer.’

‘Not yet. We’ll get one to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, you don’t recall hearing the name?’

She shook her head. ‘Morey was the one who was good with names. Never forgot a name. Never forgot a face. Such a big deal people made over that, like he was giving them a present.’

Magozzi tucked away his notebook. ‘Do you have a customer list? A Rolodex, maybe?’

‘In the office in the back of the potting shed. But mostly it’s numbers I wrote down. Morey never needed to. He heard a number, he remembered it forever.’

‘Maybe we could take a look anyway, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

Back by the potting shed, they ran into the two employees Magozzi had talked to yesterday when they showed up at the impromptu memorial outside the nursery. They were tossing fifty-pound bags of fertilizer onto a wheeled pallet with a careless ease that made Magozzi long for his youth, but they straightened respectfully when Lily approached. They gave her shy, almost identical smiles, then turned to Magozzi and Gino.

‘Good morning, Detectives,’ they piped in unison, wiping their hands on their jeans, then holding them out.

Gino looked positively flummoxed by the apparition of two well-mannered young men greeting their elders with almost old-world politeness. ‘Hey, yo,’ was about the nicest thing anybody under twenty had ever said to him.

‘Jeff Montgomery, right?’ Magozzi shook the hand of the tall blond kid first, then the shorter, darker one. ‘And Tim…?’

‘Matson, sir.’

‘Either of you remember a woman named Rose Kleber shopping here at the nursery?’ Gino asked.

The boys thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘We help out a lot of customers, but we don’t always get their names, you know?’ Jeff Montgomery said. ‘What does she look like?’

Magozzi cringed inwardly, remembering the mottled face, the blood- stained dress. ‘Elderly, a little heavy, gray hair…’ he looked at their blank faces and realized this was hopeless. Teenaged boys remembered teenaged girls, and that was about it.

‘Actually, that sounds like a lot of the people who come here, sir,’ Tim Matson said. ‘Maybe she’s on the mailing list. Mr Gilbert sent out sale flyers every now and then. Did you check the computer?’

‘You know how to run that thing, Timothy?’ Lily asked impatiently.

‘Sure. It’s just a computer.’

‘Good. Come with us. Jeffrey, we’re almost out of basil on the herb table. Take care of that, would you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Jeff disappeared in a flash while Lily led the way through the potting shed into a tiny back office.

There was a fine layer of black dust over everything – soil from the adjacent potting shed, Magozzi assumed. It covered a bookcase jammed with catalogs, a paper-cluttered desk, and the old computer and printer that sat on it. Grace MacBride would have had a fit.

‘Can’t be good for this thing,’ Gino tapped a finger on the top of the computer. ‘Having it right next to the potting shed like this.’

Tim took a seat in the only chair and booted up the computer. ‘It’s an old one, sir. They aren’t as sensitive as the new ones. Better hardware, if you ask me. And Mr Gilbert didn’t use it for much. Just the invoices once a month, and the mailing list.’

‘Hmph.’ Lily folded her arms across her chest in disapproval. ‘That’s what you think. He played games on this stupid machine. You can hear that beep-beep-beep thing all the way from the front greenhouse, so I come back and take a look one day, and there he is, a grown man shooting down little cartoon spaceships.’

Tim held back a smile as he pulled up an alphabetized mailing list, then waved his hand at the screen. ‘Sorry. No Rose Kleber.’

Gino was lifting some of the loose papers on the desk, peeking under them. ‘You got a Rolodex, Mrs Gilbert?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘One of those things with all the little cards?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

She shook her head. ‘Silliest things I ever saw. You want to find Freddie Herbert’s number? You spend half your day looking at all those little cards, one by one.’ She opened a drawer, slapped a thin address book on the desk and opened it to the H’s. ‘Here. All the H’s on one page. No turning, no little cards, Freddie Herbert right there in a second.’ She paged to the K’s, glanced at the three names listed, then shrugged. ‘No Kleber.’

‘Anything else on that computer, Tim?’ Maggozi asked.

Tim pushed a few keys and called up the main menu. ‘Just the mailing list and the invoices, sir. That’s it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can I turn it off? I should get out there and help Jeff.’

‘Go, go, go,’ Lily told him, and then turned to Magozzi and Gino, obviously impatient to get back to her customers. ‘Anything else?’

‘Not for the moment,’ Magozzi said. ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Gilbert.’

‘What help?’ Gino grumbled a few minutes later as they were following the asphalt apron around the greenhouse, back toward the parking lot.

‘She showed us the office, she answered our questions.’

‘Yeah, but she didn’t ask any of her own. We’ve been here almost an hour and she didn’t ask once if we had any leads on who killed her husband, and that just pricks my cynic trigger.’

They paused at the place where Lily said she had found her husband’s body.

Gino rubbed the back of his neck. ‘You know, it just bothers the hell out of me that she opens this place the day after her husband was murdered. Shouldn’t she be home covering her mirrors or something?’

Magozzi raised his brows at him. ‘Gino, I am amazed and impressed. You went home and read up on Jewish funeral traditions last night, didn’t you?’

‘Nah. Movie. Melanie what’s-her-name, the good-looking blonde with the baby voice? She was NYPD, undercover someplace with these really religious Jews – can’t remember what you call them, but all the guys had banana curls.’

‘Hasidic Jews.’

‘Whatever. Anyway, somebody died and they covered all the mirrors. She oughta be home doing that.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘She’s not Hasidic, Gino, or even Orthodox. McLaren said they weren’t even religious, remember?’

‘You don’t have to be religious to show respect.’ He looked at his watch and tapped the crystal. ‘What time is it? I told Rose Kleber’s daughter we’d be there at eleven.’

‘Almost that.’

‘We better move it, then. Damn, this is going to be more fun than a barrel of crippled monkeys.’

Marty hadn’t moved since Lily, Magozzi, and Gino had left the greenhouse. Most of the customers were still outside, emptying the sale tables, and for ten full minutes he’d been alone at the counter, staring at nothing, thinking that another six or seven beers from Jack’s cooler might take the edge off the headache that had been with him since yesterday. He’d been stone-cold sober for over twenty-four hours now, and couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Sobriety, he decided, wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

He glanced out the window and saw Jack passed out on his lawn chair, turning red in the sun. He took one step toward the door to holler at him to get in the shade, then stopped.

Let the bastard fry.