Live Bait

20

There were a lot of neighborhoods in Minneapolis that had once been moderately fashionable, until freeways started taking big bites out of the city’s real estate. Ben Schuler’s house was in one of these, perched on a hill where hundred-year-old elms used to shade a boulevard the city had filled with flowers every spring. Dutch elm disease had taken most of the trees within the past twenty years, a new freeway ramp system had taken the rest, and now the locals had little to look at except the six lanes of traffic at the bottom of the hill. Magozzi and Gino could hear the roar of an eighteen-wheeler shifting on an upgrade the minute they got out of the car.

‘Used to be nicer up here,’ Magozzi said, looking at a long crack in the stucco of Ben Schuler’s house; the sagging porch of the two-story brick next door. ‘My great aunt had a big old Victorian a few blocks over.’

‘Then why the hell did it take you so long to find it?’ Gino grumped, peeling off his suit coat and tie and draping them over the seat.

‘Haven’t been up here in years. We only came a couple of times, when I was about six or seven. She was a scary old broad. Never met a person she liked, according to my folks, and that included family. Refused to speak English, and my dad refused to speak Italian, just to piss her off. Last time we came she slapped me right across the face for picking up my fork before she said grace.’

Gino’s mouth tightened into an unforgiving line. Striking a child was one of the few things utterly beyond his comprehension. ‘Goddamnit, I hate that. I hope your dad slugged her.’

‘My dad wouldn’t raise a hand to a woman if she was flaying him alive.’ Magozzi smiled a little, remembering. ‘My mom decked her, though.’

Gino grinned and blew a kiss eastward toward St Paul, where Magozzi’s parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. ‘I always did like your mother.’

‘And she likes you. Are you going to take off all your clothes, or can we go in now?’

‘You know what it costs to get a suit dry-cleaned?’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘Never paid attention.’

‘Boy, sometimes I hate single people. I just paid a pretty penny to get this thing cleaned, and I sure as hell don’t want it smelling like a murder house.’

‘You’re still wearing your pants.’

‘Yeah, well I can’t figure a way around that.’ He slammed the car door and they headed up the drive.

‘Looks like Anant and the BCA boys beat us here.’

‘Small wonder.’ Gino glanced at the ugly ME wagon in the drive, and the BCA van snugged up behind it. ‘GPS in both those vehicles, and we don’t even get a working air conditioner. There is no justice in this world.’

Jimmy Grimm met Magozzi and Gino at the back door of Ben Schuler’s house. ‘You gotta stop this guy,’ were the first words out of his mouth.

‘Gee, good idea, Jimmy,’ Gino said. ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’

Jimmy stepped aside to let Gino pass into the small kitchen. ‘What got his nose out of joint?’ he asked Magozzi.

‘The high cost of dry cleaning, mostly. Also, you have a GPS and we don’t.’ Magozzi’s eyes strayed to a crayon drawing on the refrigerator door. He had no clue what it was, but obviously no one had stifled the kid’s creativity yet, because the colors were good. ‘How bad is it in there?’ He tipped his head toward a hallway he assumed led to the bedroom.

Jimmy puffed his cheeks and unsnapped the collar of his white clean suit. ‘We’ve got a minimum of gore and a maximum of pathetic. Anant’s really getting bummed out. He’s got this reverence-for-the-aged business going, which doesn’t help. Is that a Hindu thing?’

‘That’s a decency thing,’ Gino said.

‘Well, whatever it is, I think it’s cumulative, and I’m telling you, this creep popping old people is even getting to me. I walk into these houses and look around at pictures of grandkids and prescription bottles and Medicare bills and things like that, and I see my folks’ place, you know? I mean, these people are at the end of their lives, just trying to get by… it just doesn’t make any sense. And this one is the worst yet.’

Gino was shaking his head. ‘Can’t be worse than Rose Kleber. I see that GRANDMA’S GARDEN sign in my dreams; that, and the plate of cookies she’d just baked for her granddaughters.’

Jimmy looked at him for a minute. ‘I think he took one of those cookies.’

Magozzi’s brows shots up. ‘I didn’t read that in the report.’

‘I didn’t put it in. It was supposition, pure and simple. Inadmissible. No evidentiary value. She just had them arranged so neatly on that plate, covered up with plastic, but it was lifted on one side, and there was this space where a cookie should have been. It was just a mental picture I got, that bastard killing an old lady, then helping himself to a cookie she’d baked on the way out.’ He tried for a weak smile. ‘That’s what really gets you after a while, you know? The mental pictures that stay with you. And this one is a zinger. Ben Schuler knew what was coming, and he was scared out of his mind. Looks like the killer might have played with him a while; maybe chased him around, maybe talked to him, I don’t know. But the poor old man crawled all over the damn bedroom trying to get away, and that’s the picture I’m taking away from this house.’

Gino was scowling at him, working hard at erasing the picture Jimmy Grimm had just put in his mind. He’d get his own picture when he looked at the scene, and the trick was, you saw this stuff, you sorted out the details that would help the investigation, and then you forgot the rest. If you spent too much time dwelling on images of whimpering, scared old men crawling away from a killer, it pushed you down, turned you to mush, and then you couldn’t do the job. And Grimm knew that, damnit. ‘Jeez, Grimm, you’re starting to sound like a chick flick. You bucking for meter maid, or what?’

‘Right now that doesn’t sound half bad.’ He headed down the hallway. ‘Stay right behind me. We’ve got an entry cleared, but that’s about all we’ve had time for so far. Anant wants you to get a look at the scene before we start taking photos and dusting and bagging.’

Aging floorboards creaked beneath their feet as they walked past an enormous collection of black-and-white family photographs that had to be at least fifty years old. Halfway down the hall Magozzi and Gino both stopped and looked back at the pictures they’d passed, then forward at the ones ahead.

Jimmy glanced back over his shoulder. ‘What’s the holdup? You’re not touching anything, are you?’

‘Yeah, we’re dragging our hands down the wall, smearing fingerprints,’ Gino grumbled irritably. ‘Jeez, Grimm, ease up a little. What’s the deal with these photos? This is the weirdest thing I ever saw.’

Jimmy walked back to join them. ‘Tell me about it. They’re all prints of the same picture. Sixty of them in all. Creepy, eh? His friend – the old guy who found him?’

‘Sol Biederman.’

‘That’s him. He was still here when I arrived. Said this is the only photo Ben Schuler had of his family. His folks, him, and his little sister. Apparently he framed another print every year.’

‘He say why?’

Jimmy shrugged. ‘They died in the camps; he didn’t. Survivor’s guilt, memorial, who knows?’

Magozzi and Gino exchanged a sorry glance.

‘Ben Schuler was in a concentration camp?’ Magozzi asked.

‘That’s what Biederman said.’ Jimmy Grimm met Magozzi’s eyes. ‘Three and counting.’

Anantanand Rambachan stood in the middle of Ben Schuler’s bedroom, his head bent, his palms pressed together just beneath his chin. He looked more like a mourner than a medical examiner, Magozzi thought, hesitating in the doorway, wondering if Anant were praying, and if it would be some unforgivable breach of Hindu etiquette to interrupt.

Gino was a little less sensitive. ‘Hey, Anant. You in a trance, or what?’

Anant smiled only a little as he turned toward them. No teeth; not tonight. ‘Good evening Detective Rolseth, Detective Magozzi. And to answer your question, Detective Rolseth, I was not in a trance. Had I been in such a state, I would have been unable to hear your question. I was merely…’ His slick, dark brows furrowed as he opened his hands, then closed them and brought them to his chest.

‘Taking it all in?’ Gino asked.

‘Yes. Yes, that is precisely the phrase that describes what I was doing. Thank you.’ He gestured them into the room. ‘Straight from the door to where I am standing, if you please. Do you see where the floor is a darker color?’

Magozzi glanced down at a three-foot-wide strip in the hardwood where the gleam of old varnish lingered, unfaded by sun and wear. ‘There was a runner here?’

‘Yes. Mr Grimm removed it for examination before we came in, so we would have a path into this terrible story.’

Magozzi and Gino stepped carefully, walking single file, directly in the center of the path the runner had left. Halfway into the room they stopped and looked around without saying anything, reading Anant’s terrible story with their eyes.

The bedroom was a mess, and mercifully, smelled more like cheap aftershave than anything else. Whatever bottles had been on the dresser were now merely a litter of broken glass and spilled liquid on the floor. A nightstand next to the bed was overturned, with a broken lamp nearby, its green glass shade shattered. What was left of the smashed phone was over in a far corner, and a faded chenille bedspread had been dragged from the bed.

The shoes were a standout in the midst of all this wreckage, somehow untouched by whatever violence had happened here. They were black, highly polished, and neatly placed in front of a hard-backed chair, waiting for feet.

Gino blew out a long sigh. He was looking into the open closet, at a jumble of clothes on the floor that had been pulled from the hangers. ‘Where is he? In there?’

Anant followed his gaze. ‘No. Not anymore. Mr Schuler is under the bed.’

Magozzi closed his eyes briefly and envisioned a terrified old man dragging himself from one useless hiding place to another in a sick, human version of cat and mouse, trying futilely to save his own life up until the end. Or perhaps he’d already accepted his fate and had sought out the shelter of the bed instinctively, like an injured animal, so he could die out of view and in relative peace – if such a thing were possible when you were being pursued by a sadistic psycho with a gun. ‘I don’t see any blood. He was shot under the bed?’

‘I believe you are correct, Detective,’ Anant said, kneeling down and gesturing for them to do the same. He withdrew a mini-Maglite from his coat pocket and illuminated the hidden carnage under the bed. ‘Please, gentlemen, if you will.’

Magozzi and Gino crouched down beside him and stared at what was left of Ben Schuler’s head. The top of his skull had been reduced to blood and pulp and bone fragments, but his face, ghastly white in the intense halo of the flashlight, was still horribly intact and frozen in a grotesquely twisted expression, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to a Picasso portrait.

Gino turned away briefly. ‘Jesus… his face. Why does it look like that?’

‘That is the expression he died with, Detective, frozen in time for us to decipher. I believe you are seeing terror.’ Anant swept the light downward to focus on Ben Schuler’s clothing – a worn, woolen blazer, the blood-spattered shirt beneath it, and a partially knotted necktie. ‘It appears he was preparing to go somewhere.’

‘Morey Gilbert’s funeral,’ Magozzi said quietly. ‘He was going to his friend’s funeral.’

Jimmy Grimm poked his head through the doorway. ‘We’ve got media outside, guys. All four stations and both papers. Things are heating up.’