Live Bait

17

It was almost sunset when Magozzi stood on the pressure pad outside Grace MacBride’s front door, listening to the security camera whir in the eave above his head, stilling the impulse to push his hair back off his forehead. It was thick and black and too long now, falling all over the place. He should have had it cut Saturday, before people in Minneapolis had started killing each other again.

There was a soft woof from the other side of the steel door as the dead bolts started sliding back, and that made him smile. Charlie, the great, wiry mongrel mix Grace had rescued from the streets, was only slightly less paranoid than his owner. It had taken weeks before he would wait on the other side of the door when Magozzi arrived, woofing an excited welcome instead of scrambling for a hiding place. Magozzi had tossed more than one shirt ruined by muddy paws and enthusiastic doggy kisses, and cared not a whit.

When the door finally opened he got a freeze-frame of Grace’s swinging black hair and smiling blue eyes before Charlie’s paws hit his shoulders and the long, sloppy tongue found his face. It always made him laugh; made the world a better place. He wondered if maybe he should start dating the dog.

‘Don’t let him do that,’ Grace always said. ‘He’s not allowed to jump on people. You’re ruining him.’

Magozzi grinned at her over Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Leave us alone. This is the only hug I’ve had today.’

‘Oh, you two are hopeless. Get in here.’

Grace was wearing black sweats and tennis shoes, which meant they weren’t going out – she wouldn’t take a step beyond the front door without the English riding boots – but her Sig Sauer was snug in the shoulder holster, a sure sign that they might go into the tightly fenced backyard, where she felt she needed the range and power of the bigger gun. The derringer was her close-quarters-inside-the-house weapon. If she’d been wearing that instead, over the thick socks that kept the ankle holster from chafing, he would have known the evening held no hope of fresh air, since Grace never opened her windows, in spite of the iron bars that made the little house look like a prison.

While Charlie danced around Magozzi, claws clicking on the maple floor, Grace closed the door, latched all three dead bolts, and started keying in the code to rearm the security system.

Magozzi watched the familiar procedure with a sadness that was gradually moving toward reluctant, bitter resignation. The danger that had haunted her life was over now, it had all ended last October in a terrifying salvo of gunfire, but her paranoia was still as intense as ever, obliterating any chance at all of a normal life. Gino was probably right. Getting really close to Grace MacBride, expecting her to take even a baby step in that direction, was surely just an impossible dream. She was never going to feel safe. Not with him, maybe not with anyone.

‘It’s habit, Magozzi, that’s all.’ Her back was turned as she punched in the code, and yet she had known what he was thinking.

‘Is it?’

She turned and poked a finger gently into his chest. ‘You have a Neanderthal macho thing going here, you know that, don’t you? You want me to leave the door unlocked because you’re here to protect me.’

‘That is absolutely not true,’ he lied. ‘If you left the door unlocked in this neighborhood, I’d be scared to death.’

She turned with a tiny smile and headed down the stark hall toward the kitchen. Magozzi and Charlie followed at a respectful distance. ‘I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Burgundy ready to decant, and an eight-dollar Chardonnay chilling in the fridge. What’s your preference?’

‘Gee, I don’t know. They both sound good. Can I mix them together?’

Ten minutes later Magozzi took a step out onto the back stoop, wineglass in hand, and stopped dead.

Grace’s backyard looked as it always had – a small patch of scruffy grass enclosed by an eight-foot-high solid wooden fence, with an old spreading magnolia tree in its center, half dressed in buds just beginning to open.

But now there were three Adirondack chairs arranged under the tree, where there used to be only two – one for Grace, and one for Charlie the dog, who believed monsters lived at ground level, and never sat there if there was furniture available.

Get a grip, Magozzi. It’s only a chair. It means nothing. And she probably got it because Jackson is over here after school every day.

‘I bought you a present,’ she said from behind him.

‘Oh?’ he said with all the indifference he could muster.

‘The chair, silly. So Charlie doesn’t end up in your lap every time we sit out here.’

‘Oh. I figured it was for Jackson.’

‘Nine-year-olds don’t use furniture, Magozzi. I got it for you because I like having you here, and I want you to be comfortable.’

‘Okay.’ Magozzi was glad she was behind him, so she couldn’t see his ridiculous grin.

Baby step. She’s getting better, Gino.

The day’s unseasonable warmth lingered for a short time after sunset, and they had their first glass of wine in the backyard under the magnolia tree. They sat in easy silence as they sipped their wine, listening to the occasional noises of night in an urban neighborhood – a door slamming down the street, the clatter of the neighbors’ supper dishes coming from their open window, the sudden twitter of a bird so foolish it thought the branches of the magnolia were a safe place to sleep. Not only did Grace not shoot the bird; she hadn’t even flinched at the sound.

She is, by God. She’s getting better.

‘Look up through the tree branches, Magozzi. You can see the stars. Another week and the leaves will unfurl, and you won’t be able to do that.’

‘I never saw this tree with leaves.’

Grace was silent for a moment. ‘You didn’t?’

‘Nope. It was almost Halloween, first time I sat out here. Poor old tree had about three leaves left, and they were blaze yellow.’

She made a soft sound that had no discernible meaning. ‘That’s funny. It feels like I’ve known you for much longer than that.’

He wasn’t dumb enough to ask if that was a good thing. He just reached for the bottle that sat on the ground between their chairs, and refilled their glasses. He took a sip, leaned back in his very own brand-new Adirondack chair, and felt the last of the day’s stress leak out onto the happily untended grass of Grace’s backyard.

He was pathetic, he decided. Happier here, six months into a relationship with a woman he hadn’t even kissed yet, than he had ever been in his life. Frustrated, certainly, by the agonizing absence of physical closeness; but happy – absolutely. He was a disgrace to Italian men everywhere, but he couldn’t help it. There was a connection here so deep he couldn’t begin to understand it. He’d felt it the first time he’d sat in this yard with this woman and this dog – a feeling of being home, even in this place where there were always reservations lingering behind his welcome.

That’s why I don’t have any furniture, Gino. I don’t live there.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘That I’m happy.’ It never even occurred to him to lie.

‘That’s nice. I’ve been reading the papers, watching the news. You’ve got another mystery to solve. You live for that, I think.’

‘It has nothing to do with my being happy at this moment.’

‘I know. Tell me about the case.’

‘Actually, there are two cases. Morey Gilbert, the man who owned the nursery, and Rose Kleber, but we don’t have anything to connect them…’

‘What about the man they found tied to the train tracks?’

‘Langer and McLaren are working that one. No connection to ours. We’ve got elderly Jews, pretty clean hits; theirs was a Lutheran somebody hated enough to torture.’

‘All right, two then. And you’ve got a bunch of homicide detectives with no homicides to work, while you and Gino are running two of them? Sounds like somebody thinks they’re related.’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘It’s a thin connection. We’re looking at it.’

‘How thin?’

He shifted a little in his chair, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘That’s part of the information we were holding back.’

‘Come on, Magozzi. You want me to plug the names into the new software program, right? See if anything comes up?’

‘Gino and I thought it was worth a shot.’

‘All right, then. You watched that program work your cold cases. You know perfectly well it sorts through hundreds of databases, looking for connections, and some of them are damn slow. I need any link you’ve already got to narrow the search parameters, otherwise this could take days.’

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Grace. Next to Gino, she was the person he trusted most in this world. Hell, he was sitting under a tree with a possibly dangerous bird overhead, wasn’t he? Trusting that Grace MacBride would pull her gun and shoot the thing if it attacked? But violating departmental policy still went against the grain, and Magozzi, to his everlasting dismay, was no rebel.

‘I don’t have days, Magozzi.’ She folded her arms, impatient with him as she always was when he plodded down that narrow path defined by rules. ‘We start loading the computers into the RV day after tomorrow.’

He closed his eyes at the reminder that she was leaving. ‘They both had tattoos on their arms. Morey Gilbert was in Auschwitz, Rose Kleber was in Buchenwald.’

He could feel her eyes on him in the dark; and then he felt them drift away.

Grace was silent for a long time. ‘It could be a horrible coincidence.’

‘Of course it could.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘It’s thin, I told you. I’m reaching here.’

‘You never reach, Magozzi, unless you have nowhere else to go. So what are you thinking? That someone’s killing Jews, or Jews who were in the camps? Which is it?’

She always did that. Said right out loud the things you never wanted to hear expressed, because some of them were just too terrible to contemplate.

He leaned forward, arms braced on his knees, empty wineglass dangling from his fingers. ‘I don’t want to think either of those things. What I want is for you to plug those two into your program and discover that they were really bad people involved in something that got them killed.’

‘A geriatric drug cartel or something?’

‘That would be ideal. Besides, the camp connection thing just doesn’t work. Like an old man told us this afternoon, why kill old Jews? They’re going to be dead soon anyway.’

‘Wow. That’s pretty cold.’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He was in the camps too. Gives him license.’

Grace was quiet for a moment, tapping shave-and-a-haircut on the wooden arm of her chair with her fingertips. She always did that when she was thinking. ‘I don’t know, Magozzi. From what I hear on the news about Morey Gilbert, he doesn’t seem like much of a candidate for criminal activity.’

‘And you haven’t heard the half of it. He spent his life helping people. Saint, hero, pick a title, I’ve heard them all. He was a good man, Grace.’

‘Too good to be true?’

Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘I don’t think so. I think he might have been the real thing.’

‘What about the other one, Rose Kleber?’

‘Grandma Kleber. Cookies, garden, cat, family who adored her.’

‘So another noncriminal type.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘I’m spinning in circles here, aren’t I?’

Grace poured the last dribble of wine into his glass. ‘Then maybe it wasn’t something they did, Magozzi. Maybe they both happened to be in the same place at the same time, saw something or someone they shouldn’t have.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘That would be my all-time favorite scenario, but how the hell do you even start looking for something like that?’

‘That’s what you’ve got me for.’

He watched her get up from her chair, a graceful spill of black water rising into the darkness.

‘No it isn’t.’

Grace smiled and stretched, her fingertips brushing a branch of the magnolia.

The bird went nuts.