Live Bait

26

By the time Magozzi and Gino left Chief Malcherson at the diner, the sun had risen high into a hazy, almost-white sky. The air was soupy and oppressive, and the mercury was already courting the eighty-degree mark. When they turned west on 394, they could see the haze starting to gel on the horizon, stirring the sky.

‘There she comes,’ Gino remarked, looking up from his pointless fiddling with the buttons on the car’s useless air conditioner. ‘Canadian cold front is finally dropping, and when that baby gets here, we’re going to have the clash of the Titans.’

‘They said sometime tonight,’ Magozzi said. ‘The whole state’s under a tornado watch.’

‘How weird is that? Two weeks ago I was shoveling five inches of snow off the driveway; now we’re poaching in our own sweat watching the sky for funnel clouds.’

‘Welcome to Minnesota.’

Twenty minutes later Magozzi was guiding the unmarked along the scenic, curving streets of a wooded development that tried hard to look like Minnesota wilderness. It had all the elements – enormous stands of mature trees, the bubbling rush of creeks fed by snowmelt and spring rains – but nature had not groomed these places. This was what some community planner thought nature was supposed to look like.

There was no fallen brush between the trees, no canted branches to mark the passage of the last storm, and if one leaf had dared to fall on the unmarked tar last autumn, it had long since been swept away.

There were no lots in this part of Wayzata. Here, everyone had ‘acreage,’ and only occasionally could you catch a glimpse of the enormous homes set far back from the street, artfully concealed by strategic landscaping.

Gino was looking out the window with a deeply suspicious expression. ‘Okay, now this is just not right. There are no potholes in this road. It’s spring in Minnesota, for chrissake. You’re supposed to have potholes. And the damn tar looks polished. You get a load of that house we just passed on the hill back there?’

Magozzi shook his head, eyes on the road as he negotiated a hairpin turn that followed the natural course of what was clearly a very confused creek. ‘There has to be another way to Jack Gilbert’s house. No way he could drive this street drunk.’

‘I don’t know. Might help to be drunk. Man, this thing twists like an intestine.’

‘Really pretty imagery, Gino.’

‘Thank you. I kind of like all the curves, actually, and the only place you find them anymore is in some kind of hoity-toity development. Pisses me off how MnDOT straightens all the roads as if none of us had steering wheels. The whole damn state’s turning into one big ugly grid pattern… Uh-oh. What do we got here?’

Magozzi had seen the first of the flashing lights peeking around the curve ahead, and had already started to apply the brakes. The closer they got, the more vehicles they saw, all with light bars flashing. There were four Wayzata police cruisers, an ambulance, security rent-a-cop cars, the fire department’s first-responder truck, and worst of all, a couple of satellite vans from the local TV stations.

Magozzi came nose to door with a WPD car blocking the road. ‘What do you bet that’s Gilbert’s place up there?’

Gino’s voice was tense. ‘Goddamnit. We should have pinned him down last night. I’m going to hate myself if that drunken son of a bitch is dead.’

A tall, blond, buff patrolman who looked like a GQ model walked up to the driver’s side. Magozzi held up his badge. ‘Minneapolis Homicide. Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth. Is that the Gilbert house?’

‘Yes sir, it is. But we don’t have a homicide here.’

Gino and Magozzi sighed in a relieved duet.

‘Glad to hear it, Officer. So what happened? We were hoping to catch Jack Gilbert for a couple questions on a Minneapolis case we’re working. He’s not hurt, is he?’

The officer looked back toward the phalanx of vehicles. ‘I don’t think so. Nothing visible, anyway. The med techs are looking him over now, but he’s pretty shook-up. Says somebody tried to kill him.’

Gino and Magozzi exchanged a glance. ‘We need to get in there and talk to him, Officer. Any problem with that?’

‘I’m sure there isn’t, Detective, but you might want to talk to Chief Boyd first, get some background on what’s been happening here. Gilbert’s version is a little garbled. Hang on, I’ll get him for you.’

They barely had time to get out of the car before Wayzata’s police chief came over and introduced himself. If anything, he was better-looking than his patrolman, with just a little more age on him. Magozzi decided you had to be a pretty person to live in Wayzata.

‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Detectives.’ Chief Boyd flashed a spectacular set of pearly whites. ‘You did some amazing work on that Monkeewrench case last fall. You’re on the Uptown murders now, right? I read Gilbert’s dad was one of the victims.’

‘That’s right,’ Gino said. ‘We were on our way to talk to Jack Gilbert, clear up a few things, when we ran into your parade. You got a pretty heavy call-out here, Chief. What happened?’

‘Last night, or this morning?’

Gino raised his brows. ‘Last night?’

‘That’s when it started. About eleven P.M. Gilbert dialed nine-one-one in a panic. He said he thought he had an intruder on the grounds, so we sent out a couple of cars to take a look. They went over the property pretty thoroughly, but couldn’t find anything, and to tell you the truth, the boys shrugged it off as a false alarm. Mr Gilbert was…’ He paused diplomatically.

‘Drunk out of his friggin’ mind?’ Gino suggested, and Chief Boyd smiled, almost apologetically.

‘Well, he had just come home from burying his father,’ he said, making Gino feel like a heartless son of a bitch. ‘And I think he’s been going through a really rough patch for a while now. We’ve had some problems; stopped him a few times on the road, saw to it that he got home safely.’

Gino looked at Magozzi. ‘I want to live here.’

‘Then this morning,’ the chief continued, ‘we received calls from just about everybody within earshot about gunfire at the Gilbert house. Jack Gilbert was close to hysterical and waving a gun when we got here, and the yard and his wife’s car were pretty shot up.’

‘Jesus,’ Gino murmured. ‘Someone really was trying to kill him.’

‘Well, we’re not so sure about that. There’s a lot of damage, and a lot of brass around, but so far it’s all 9-mm. Slugs, too. We dug a couple of those out of the garage siding and some tree trunks.’

‘Which means?’ Magozzi asked, and the chief lifted one shoulder in an awkward shrug.

‘The gun Mr Gilbert was holding was a Smith & Wesson 9-mm, still warm, and he told us outright he’d emptied the clip trying to hit whomever he thought was shooting at him. We’ll send everything to the lab, of course, just in case there were two men shooting two different 9-mm’s out here.’

Magozzi studied him for a moment. ‘You don’t think there was another shooter at all, do you?’

Chief Boyd looked down at the polished tar beneath his polished boots and sighed. ‘You know, Jack Gilbert’s lived here ten years – as long as I’ve been chief – and he’s always been a little… eccentric. But overall, a hell of a nice guy. Then about a year or so ago he just started to unravel. A lot of drinking, a lot of complaints from the neighbors, and as I said, we’ve had to pull him off the road more than once. One time I was driving down the main street in town on my way to lunch, and there’s Mr Gilbert strolling the sidewalk in front of the shops in his bathrobe and not much more. I put him in the car in record time, but when I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing parading around downtown in his robe, he looked down at himself and said, “Holy shit.” I swear to God, the man didn’t realize he wasn’t dressed. Almost locked him up right there, just so the Court would order a psych evaluation and get him some help.’

‘Might have been a kindness,’ Gino said.

Chief Boyd chuckled softly. ‘Unfortunately, the residents of this community do not think it’s a kindness when their police officers arrest them, no matter how good the intentions. I’ll tell you, this job is more political than I ever wanted to be.’

Magozzi nodded in understanding. ‘We run into the same thing in the city sometimes. If a patrol gets a judge blowing point-one-oh on the Breathalyzer, you know he’s gotta wonder if the arrest is going to come back to haunt him next time he’s got a case in front of the bench. Sad but true.’

The chief looked off into a patch of painfully pruned woods. ‘My officer tells me you wanted to question Gilbert. He’s pretty messed up. I hope you’re not going to tell me he’s a suspect in the Uptown killings.’

Magozzi smiled. ‘You like him, don’t you?’

‘I guess I do. I get a feeling from him, like he’s one of the good people that just got lost somewhere along the way.’

‘Well, for what it’s worth, we’re not looking at him as a suspect right now, but we think he might be holding something back that could help us out. We just want to talk to him.’

They found Jack Gilbert slumped in the back of the ambulance, dressed in shorts and a polo shirt, bare legs dangling over the edge. He looked like precisely what he was – a heavy drinker coming off a long-term toot. Bleary, pouched eyes, sallow complexion, and a looseness around the mouth that made it look like it was melting. There was a butterfly bandage on his forehead, and he was holding a cold pack on his cheek. He looked up as they approached and toasted them with a bottle of water.

‘Hey, guys. Welcome to the burbs. Little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?’

‘How are you doing, Mr Gilbert?’ Gino asked.

‘Doing fine. Little cut up here, little smackeroonie right here.’ He wiggled the cold pack. ‘Probably ran into a god-damned tree, can’t really remember, otherwise I’m just aces.’

Magozzi moved in a little closer until he and Gino had Gilbert flanked. ‘Are you going to the hospital?’

‘Nah. I just figured I paid about a grand to get this rig out here, might as well sit in it for a while.’

‘You want to tell us what happened?’

‘I saw you talking to the chief. He didn’t tell you?’

‘The chief wasn’t here; you were,’ said Gino.

Jack sighed, pulled away the cold pack and pointed his cheek toward them. ‘How’s it look?’

Gino leaned forward and squinted. ‘A little swollen. A little red, but not so bad. Where’d you get the Smith & Wesson, Jack?’

‘Whoa. No foreplay?’

‘Not today. The body count’s going up a little too fast for that sort of thing.’

Jack held Gino’s eyes for a minute while his brain tried to work, then finally shrugged. ‘Pop had it forever. Don’t know where he got it, but I knew where he kept it. I brought it home last night.’

‘After you heard Ben Schuler had been killed. That really scared the hell out of you, didn’t it, Jack?’

A defensive glint in the eyes now. ‘Yeah, you bet it did. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re dropping Jews, Detective, and I happen to be one.’

Magozzi leaned his shoulder against the ambulance door and said reasonably, ‘One of several thousand in the Cities. What made you think you might be a target? You’re too young, for one thing, and so far all the killings have been in Uptown, and that’s a long way from Wayzata.’

‘Oh, come on. First Pop gets it, then one of his best friends? You don’t think that’s a little too close to home?’

Magozzi lifted a shoulder in concession. ‘Okay. I’ll give you that.’

‘Goddamn right you’ll give me that, because some asshole tried to shoot me in my own driveway this morning.’

‘You never did fax us that list, Jack,’ Gino said.

‘What list?’

‘First time we met you, you said you’d fax us a list of all the people who wanted you dead. About a hundred, I think you said.’

‘Oh, for chrissake, it was a joke.’

‘Was it?’

Jack lifted the cold pack back up to his cheek. ‘What are you getting at?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Well, in your line of work, you’re bound to run into a few shadowy characters every now and then. Maybe you stepped over the line, got involved in something where the people play hardball.’

Jack blew a raspberry. ‘And what? Started killing the people around me? Man, you’ve been watching too many DeNiro movies.’

‘Hey. It’s been known to happen.’

‘Your father was a real upstanding guy,’ Gino put in. ‘Bet he wouldn’t like his only son swimming below the scum line. Bet he’d turn his back on you quicker than a dog shakes off water, which would explain the estrangement.’

Jack was incredulous. ‘I don’t believe this. Is that why you came out here this morning? You think something I did is getting people killed? I’m a fucking personal injury attorney. My clients are people who slip in spilled pickle juice in grocery stores, not John Gotti types, for chrissake.’

Gino spread his hands. ‘You’re the wild card, Jack. You’re messed up in this somehow, and we’re going to look you up and down until we find out what the hell you did.’

Jack threw up his hands. ‘Be my guest. I’ve got nothing to hide.’ He eased down from the ambulance and limped off toward the driveway.

Magozzi glanced over at the part of the yard he could see from the street. A heavily wooded hill rose up, blocking any view of the house, and Wayzata cops were crawling all over it. ‘Maybe we’re on the wrong track,’ he said.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time. We gotta make nice now, right?’

‘That’s the way it works.’

They caught up with Jack next to a place where cops were using their flashlights in the shadows under the big pines.

‘You’re limping, Jack,’ Gino said. ‘Did you hurt your leg, too?’

‘Kiss my ass.’

‘Hey, I’m trying.’

Jack smiled a little. ‘You suck at it.’

‘So is this where it happened?’ Magozzi asked.

‘No, up by the house, but who knows where the guy was shooting from?’

They moved on up the paving-stone driveway until they rounded a curve and got their first look at the sprawling house that Jack built, and the scene in front of the garage.

‘Jesus,’ Gino murmured. ‘What a mess.’

The driveway was littered with shards of bark and little branches. It looked like a tree had exploded. The Mercedes SUV parked close to the garage was pockmarked with what were surely bullet holes, with most of the windows blown out or damaged. The big one in the rear gate had cracked and crumbled to the ground, little patchwork pieces of safety glass glinting on the paving stones.

They stopped a few feet from the vehicle, respecting the crime-scene tape around it. One of the Wayzata officers was inside, tweezing something out of the dashboard and into a plastic bag.

‘That’s where I was,’ Jack said, pointing. ‘I was just about to open the rear gate when I heard the shot and felt something whiz by my ear. Scared me shitless, I don’t mind telling you, so I pulled the gun out of my pocket and started shooting back.’

Magozzi looked off through the trees to the right. A few twigs dangled from strips of bark. ‘The shot came from there?’

‘I’m pretty sure.’

‘Just one?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know. I was making a little noise myself by that time.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Okay, that makes sense, but I was wondering about the bullet holes in the back gate if your shooter was off to the side like that.’

Jack frowned at the bullet holes. ‘I might have done that.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Maybe. I was kind of shooting all over the place. I mean, Jesus, I didn’t know where the guy was.’

‘Nice going,’ Gino said dryly. ‘You could have killed half the neighborhood.’

To his credit, Jack went pale.

‘You look a little wrung out, Jack. What do you say we go inside, sit down, relax, and have a little talk,’ Magozzi suggested, but Jack shook his head.

‘Can’t go inside. Slept in the pool house last night after Becky kicked me out, and she sure as hell isn’t going to let me back in after this. I don’t want to be in there anyway. I’m going to call a cab and go get my car at the nursery, maybe bunk at the club for a while.’

‘We’re headed back that way. You’re welcome to ride with us if you like.’

Jack eyed him suspiciously. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘For getting shot at?’ Gino asked. ‘Jesus, Jack, we’re just offering you a lift. You want it or not?’

‘Yeah, I guess. I got a duffel down in the ambulance.’

‘We’d better grab it then, before they drive off with it.’ Gino caught Magozzi’s eye and tipped his head ever so slightly in the direction of the house.

Magozzi glanced behind him and saw a slender woman standing in the shadows of the open doorway, arms folded across her chest. ‘I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.’

Becky Gilbert, like the neighborhood she lived in, was just a little too perfect to be entirely natural. Her pretty, bronzed face was smooth and oddly taut, like fabric stretched too tight in an embroidery hoop. She had the lithe, perfectly toned body of a serious fitness club member, and her tennis whites looked as if they’d been tailored to make the most of it. Diamonds flashed on her wrist – probably the only woman in the world who actually wore tennis bracelets while she played tennis, Magozzi thought.

Her arms were crossed angrily over her chest, and her eyes flashed when Magozzi approached. ‘Mrs Gilbert?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘Detective Magozzi, Minneapolis PD. Homicide.’

She glared over his shoulder at Jack heading down the driveway. ‘He’s not dead yet.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

She let out a frustrated sigh and forced a tight smile. ‘I’m not disappointed, Detective. I’m just furious. The police were here half the night looking for Jack’s imaginary stalker, and now this.’

‘So you don’t actually believe someone is trying to kill him?’

‘Of course not. Jack’s burned some bridges in the past year, but nothing that would get him killed.’

‘Can you think of anything unusual that’s happened recently?’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, strange cars hanging around, late night knocks at the door, hang-ups, threatening phone calls, that sort of thing.’

‘Nothing like that.’ Becky Gilbert tipped her head curiously. ‘Homicide. Is this about his father?’

‘Yes. We needed to ask Jack a few more questions.’

Becky Gilbert’s outright anger at her husband seemed to dissipate, like a teakettle steaming itself dry, but bitterness lingered in her eyes. ‘That was a terrible thing.’

‘Did Jack talk to you about his father’s murder?’ Magozzi asked.

She shook her head. ‘Jack never talked about his father, period. By the time we met, they weren’t on speaking terms. I thought it might be a painful subject, so I never brought it up.’

Magozzi looked at this woman who so clearly belonged in this suburb, who so clearly wanted to be here, and thought maybe she hadn’t really been all that considerate of her husband’s feelings; maybe she just had no use for an elderly Jewish couple who lived in Uptown.

‘Do you know what caused the rift between Jack and his father?’

‘I have no idea, Detective. He never chose to share that information with me.’

And you didn’t ask, Magozzi thought.

He ran into Chief Boyd’s genial smile halfway down the driveway.

‘Detective Magozzi. Did you learn anything that might connect to your Uptown cases?’

‘Not unless Ballistics comes up with something. We’d really appreciate a heads-up when you get some results, Chief.’

‘I can do better than that. We don’t send those folks at the lab much business, and I’m guessing you might have a little more pull than we do.’ He held up a large sealed pouch with a chain of custody log tucked into a plastic insert. ‘One Smith & Wesson 9-mm, eleven casings, and nine slugs. I was hoping you might put these in for us.’

Magozzi grinned at him. ‘And I was hoping you’d say that. Saved me the trouble of asking.’ He pulled out the evidence log sheet, braced it on his knee, and started to sign.

‘The elderly woman in Uptown was shot with a 9-mm, if I remember correctly,’ Chief Boyd said casually.

And so was Ben Schuler, Magozzi thought, but there was no reason to put that information on the table just yet. ‘That’s right.’

‘So you’ll probably be getting some answers on the gun in that pouch pretty soon.’

Magozzi straightened and looked at him. ‘There are a lot of 9-mm’s out there, Chief Boyd.’

‘I know that. And I’m really anxious to hear that the one we took from Mr Gilbert hasn’t killed anybody.’

‘I’ll call you myself, the minute I hear. We should have something today.’

They walked together down to the street, where Magozzi paused and looked over at the news satellite vans. When the reporters and cameramen scattered around the trucks saw Chief Boyd and Magozzi, they converged in a swarm, cameras running, microphones waving, reporters calling out questions. They all moved en masse toward the curb, then stopped as if the ridge of concrete were the Great Wall of China.

Magozzi looked over at the chief, who was waving congenially at the press. ‘You have an invisible fence down there? One of those electric things they use on dogs?’

The chief kept waving like a doped-up prom queen. ‘Why on earth would we need one of those?’

‘Gee, I don’t know. In the city, the media steamrolls pretty much anywhere it wants to go. I’ve turned tail and run a couple times myself.’

The chief chuckled. ‘The street’s public property. They have as much right to be there as anyone else. But the minute they step up on that curb, they’re trespassers and they go to jail.’

Magozzi snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘We told them all that when they arrived, but there was this really attractive young woman from Channel Ten – a little pushy, though – who trotted right after me on the way up Jack’s driveway.’

‘That would be Kristin Keller, the anchor, and the samurai sword in my side.’

‘Could have been. Don’t watch the news much. Anyway, the minute we cuffed her and put her in a car, the others backed off in a hurry.’

Magozzi turned to him in amazement. ‘You arrested Kristin Keller?’

‘I guess.’

Magozzi tried to remain professional, but he just couldn’t manage it. A shit-eating grin nearly broke open his face. ‘Chief Boyd, you are the man.’

‘That’s what I told them.’