Live Bait

37

It was hard for Marty to leave the bedroom where Hannah had slept as a child. Even though nothing of her remained in that room, he’d been able to look at the walls and the doorknob and the old wavy glass in the windows, knowing that she had seen the same things a thousand times; that wherever he walked, she had walked before him. After he’d put Morey’s.45 back in the tackle box, he couldn’t feel her around him anymore. It was almost as if she’d seen the gun and the story behind it, and had left the room forever.

He sat cross-legged on the floor for a long time after that, letting himself feel empty as the world darkened outside the windows. He had to turn the light on to finish packing his duffel, then turned it off as he headed downstairs, leaving the room dark behind him.

He found Lily alone in the living room, her face stark in the light of a table lamp. She was watching a baseball game with the sound muted. A weather warning scrolled across the bottom of the screen next to a miniature map of the state. Almost every county was colored orange.

‘Where’re Jack and Becker?’ he asked her.

‘They went out to the greenhouse. Jack left his bag out there.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Right after you went upstairs.’

Marty glanced at his watch and frowned, trying to remember what time it had been when he went up to shower and pack.

‘They’ve been out there about an hour,’ she told him. ‘You took a long time up there, Martin… Where are you going?’

‘Out to get Jack. I want to talk to him a few minutes before we leave.’

‘So talk in the car, or at the hotel.’

‘No offense, Lily, but if he knows something about who killed Morey, I don’t think he’ll talk about it in front of you.’

Lily snorted. ‘He hasn’t exactly been running off at the mouth with you, either, has he?’

‘I think I have a little more leverage now.’

That got her attention. ‘You found this in the shower?’

‘Lock the doors after me.’

‘Don’t be silly. Nobody shot at me. I’m the good person in the family.’

Marty smiled. He couldn’t help it. And that had probably been her intention. ‘I mean it, Lily. I already locked the back, and I’m going to stand outside the front door until I hear you turn the lock. And pack an overnight bag while I’m out there.’

Lily sighed in annoyance and got up to follow him to the door. ‘I already packed. Five minutes. You men are so pokey, it’s a miracle you ever get anything done.’

Marty felt the sweat bead up on his skin the minute he stepped outside. It was still breathlessly hot and oppressive. The clouds to the west had blackened, bringing on an early twilight in that eerie, grayish green that always precedes a summer storm, distorting the true colors of the world like cheap sunglasses with yellow lenses. The winding path from the house through the back planting beds was shadowed, grayed, and dulled by the strange light.

He’d helped Morey put down that gravel, running the Bobcat, dumping the loads, trying not to tip the thing over backwards when he lifted the blade. The gravel itself was a wild extravagance, trucked from some pit near the Canadian border, where quartz and agate and other minerals had colored the rock with sparkling streaks of pink and purple and yellow. He’d nearly passed out when Morey had told him what it cost.

But the cheap rock is all gray, Martin, and the old woman hates gray. This is from the camp, I think. Everything was gray there, and nothing sparkled. You see how this gravel sparkles in the sun? This, she will like. This will make her happy.

It was the one and only time Morey had ever said anything about their time in Auschwitz, and Marty had felt privileged to hear it. More privileged to know the reason for the colored sparkles in the gravel path. Hannah didn’t like it much, thought it looked unnatural, even though it was the opposite; and Jack simply thought it was gaudy. But Marty knew the story, kept it close like a gift, and Lily raked the path almost every day.

He’d never been able to define the relationship between Morey and Lily. If it was love, it was a different kind than what he had found with Hannah. He tried to remember if he had ever seen them kiss, or hug, or even touch hands, and came up empty. And yet there were these strange little kindnesses between them – the colored gravel for Lily; the strange spicy cucumbers she made every single morning of her life for Morey, who was the only one who would eat them.

He found Jack and Officer Becker in the windowless office behind the potting shed. The lamp on the desk was turned on, casting long shadows on the walls, leaving absolute patches of darkness in the corners.

Jack was sprawled on the cracked vinyl sofa shoved against one wall, his face silly and red from booze and sun, the omnipresent glass in his hand; Becker was standing in the outside doorway, half in and half out of the building, so that the first fat raindrops splatted on his uniformed shoulders. The inside door that led to the potting shed was closed and bolted.

‘Hey, Marty!’ Jack patted the cushion next to him, making the vinyl crackle. ‘Take a load off.’ He produced another glass from the floor by the sofa, and a bottle of Morey’s Balvenie that he’d obviously filched from the house.

Officer Becker stood aside so Marty could pass. ‘Detective Rolseth told me you’d be armed, sir. Are you carrying now?’

Marty nodded and lifted the hem of the white linen shirt, exposing the.357 uncomfortably tucked in the waistband.

‘Not the best place to holster that, sir.’

‘Tell me about it. You missed the shift change.’

The young cop talked without looking at him, his eyes constantly on the move through the deepening shadows outside. ‘I thought I’d get you all settled in the hotel, then call my relief.’

Marty nodded, pleased. He liked the way Becker handled himself, the way he was taking his assignment seriously. ‘I’ll be glad to have you with us.’

‘Thank you, sir. Is everyone ready?’

Marty glanced over at Jack, who was more intent on his drink than their conversation. ‘I’d like to take a private minute here with Jack, if that’s okay with you.’

Becker didn’t seem too happy about that, and lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Pullman, after spending the afternoon with Mr Gilbert, I was looking forward to having him safely locked in a hotel room with a man at the door. He pretty much hops all over the place, and he doesn’t seem half as concerned as he should be, for a man who dodged a bullet this morning.’

‘Relax, Supercop,’ Jack slurred from the sofa, who had apparently been listening more closely than Marty thought. ‘This guy doesn’t like an audience. Shoots old women alone in their houses, or hides behind a tree and takes potshots, cowardly bastard.’

Becker, who probably knew very little beyond that someone had taken a shot at Jack, raised a questioning eyebrow at Marty, who nodded.

‘That’s the history so far.’

‘All right then. I’ll step away from the building, give you gentlemen some privacy, but I’ll keep the door in sight at all times.’

‘Thanks, Becker.’ Marty watched him move out among the rows of potted arborvitae until he looked like just another shadow, thinking that at least he wouldn’t get wet. Those first few raindrops had made it look like the sky was going to open, but it had stopped almost as soon as it began.

He closed the door, crossed to the desk, and sat down in the chair, shaking his head at the glass Jack was holding out for him at a precarious angle, sloshing good scotch all over the floor. ‘No thanks.’

Jack shrugged and started drinking it himself, even though he held his own glass in his other hand.

‘Did you call Becky to tell her where you’d be?’

‘Becky, my wife?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Well, gee, Marty, that would be like calling Mr Filcher at the butcher shop and telling him where’d I’d be, and he’d say what the fuck do I care? So if you want me to call somebody just to listen to that, I think I’ll go for the butcher.’

‘You’re not making a lot of sense.’

‘Probably not. Half a bottle of scotch’ll do that to you. The way I figure it, I’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning in about ten minutes, and shooting me will be redundant.’

‘Not funny.’

‘Sure it was. Lighten up. The thing is, Becky gave me the one-finger salute last night – and that was before the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Sayonara, fuck off, see you in court. Wouldn’t even let me in the house, so I slept in the pool house, took a shower with the garden hose.’

Marty blew out a breath and reached for one of the partially full glasses Jack was juggling. ‘Sorry.’

‘No prob. I hated that house anyway. Faggot designer Becky hired did the whole master bath in a frog motif. Can you believe that? S’like trying to take a shit in the middle of a Budweiser commercial.’ He drained his glass, filled it again. ‘You want me to top that off for you?’

‘No. I want you to tell me why Morey went to London.’

Jack looked at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Or Prague. Or Milan. Or Paris.’ He tossed over Morey’s passport, and Jack jumped when it hit his lap.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘That’s Morey’s passport. I found it in a tackle box in a closet.’

‘Dad had a passport?’ Jack opened it up and squinted hard. ‘God, this is small print… Is this Paris or Prague? Goddamn Frogs can’t even use a stamp without blurring it…’

‘It’s Paris. He was there for a day. Not much longer in any of the other places. Since when was Morey a world traveler?’

Jack kept drinking as he flipped through the pages. ‘Jesus. He went to Johannesburg?’

‘Are you telling me you didn’t know about those trips?’

‘These?’ Jack tossed the passport on the cushion next to him. ‘Nope. Didn’t know about them. Is that it? Can we get out of here now? It’s hotter than hell with the door closed.’

‘Why would Morey hide his passport in a tackle box? Why would he make a bunch of overseas trips and then turn around and come back the next day? What the hell was he doing in all those places, Jack?’

‘I knew it. I knew this would happen. Was I right? You can take the man out of the cop, but you can’t take the cop out of the man, and now you’re doing all that detective shit. So what now, Marty? Are we going to play interrogation again? You want to move to the equipment shed? We got a bulb hanging from a wire in there. You could swing it back and forth, do the movie thing…’

Marty closed his eyes and took a sip out of the glass without thinking. ‘I was thinking maybe we could skip all the crap and you could just tell me the truth, Jack. I know it’s not normally done in this family – hell, maybe not in any family – but I tried it on Lily the other night and it turned out okay.’

Jack giggled. ‘Oh yeah? What truth did you tell her?’

Marty looked straight at him. ‘That I thought about killing myself.’

Jack’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘Jesus, Marty. Because of Hannah?’

‘Not exactly.’

That seemed to surprise Jack more than anything. ‘Well then why, for chrissake?’

Marty took another drink, then set the glass on the desk and pushed it out of reach with one finger. The alcohol was still seductive. Prison would cure that, he thought with a grim smile. ‘That’s a really big secret, Jack. Quid pro quo. A truth for a truth.’

Jack set his own glass on the floor and hunched forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. ‘I should have been there for you. I let you down, buddy. On the list of a hundred regrets I’ve been piling up over the past couple years, that one goes on the top.’

‘The truth, Jack. What do you know about who killed your father?’

Jack smiled at him without moving. ‘Truth isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, you know, Marty?’

‘Whoever did it is killing other people, Jack. You’ve got to help.’

‘Nah. He’s finished. ’Cept for me.’

‘And how the hell do you know that?’

Jack looked down into his glass, took a breath, then blew it out hard. ‘I think I have to start this at the beginning.’

Sometimes you spitfired questions, hammered them home fast, non-stop; but there was a time in every interrogation when you stopped asking and just went quiet. Marty kept his hands still on the arms of his chair, kept his eyes on Jack, and waited.

‘I kind of hate to do this to you, Marty. I know what that old bastard meant to you.’

‘He was a good man, Jack.’

‘This is going to be like Elvis.’

‘You lost me.’

‘Well, do you remember what it was like when you found out the King was a drug addict? I mean, here was this guy, the one true King, and what does he turn out to be? Some potbellied, pill-popping junkie. Man, the idol crumbles, and that just rocked my world. You ready for that?’

‘Jack…’

‘Pop put a gun in my hand for the first time on my ninth birthday. Did you know that? You have to be ready, he said, and every Saturday morning from then on he took me out to the Anoka Gun Club and we did some target shooting. Ma thought we were going to McDonald’s for some father-son bonding, and I wasn’t allowed to tell her different. Boring as hell. I hate guns. But I was a dumb kid. As long as I was with him, it was great.’ He picked up his glass again and leaned back against the cushions. He took a long drink, then smiled. ‘I’m a hell of a shot, Marty. But I was nothing compared to Pop.’

Marty stared at Jack’s white legs sticking out of his shorts, the little potbelly, the sunburned arches on his forehead where hair had once been. While the idea of Jack as a good shot scared the hell out of him, the image of a gun in the good and gentle hand of his father-in-law was absolutely unbelievable. ‘Is this going somewhere, Jack?’

‘Sure it is.’ Jack’s head wobbled a bit as he tried to bring him into focus. ‘You want to know who would want to kill Pop, right? ’Cause he’s this great guy, loved everybody, everybody loved him… Shit, Marty. I spent the last couple years ruining my life so I wouldn’t have to tell anybody, and now you just want me to spit it out.’

Marty heard the rumble of distant thunder. ‘Whatever it was, the cops will put it together eventually.’

Jack giggled. ‘Those bozos aren’t ever gonna figure it out, and if they did, they wouldn’t believe it anyway.’

‘Figure out what?’

Jack tried to think and keep Marty in his line of sight all at the same time. It was almost too much for him. ‘That somebody finally caught up with them, that’s what. Only it wasn’t the cops, ’cause we’d all be on Jerry Springer right now. But you can’t get away with that kind of thing forever without pissing somebody off, right?’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘Christ, Marty, pay attention, would you? Killing people, of course. Near as I can figure, a couple a year for a long time.’

Marty didn’t bat an eye. ‘You are so full of shit, Jack.’

Jack nodded, a dangerous move in his condition. ‘Yep. I am that. But not about this. This, I know for a fact.’ He leaned forward to grab the bottle of Balvenie off the floor and filled his glass right to the top, spilled some when the thunder clapped a little closer. ‘ ’Bout six months before Hannah died Pop took me up to Brainerd one weekend – said he was going to take me fishing, get me away from the office for a while. When we got to this big old lodge a couple other cars pull up, and there’s Ben Schuler getting out of one, and Rose Kleber out of the other.’

Marty’s eyebrows arched. ‘So you did know her.’

‘First time I saw her, last time I saw her. Sweet little old white-haired lady in this dress with purple flowers on it and these big clunky shoes, and I wondered what the hell she was doing there, fishing with a couple of old guys like Pop and Ben. Never knew her name. Pop just called her a friend. So we go into this lodge, I’m guessing to check in or something, and there’s nobody in the place because there’s some kind of contest going on at the lake, except this old geezer at the registration desk, and what happens then is that Pop pulls a gun out of his jacket pocket and reaches across the desk and shoots the guy in the head.’ He closed his eyes and just breathed for moment while Marty’s mouth sagged open and his heart started hammering at his chest, as if it were trying to get out. ‘I think I might have screamed then, but I can’t really remember. Next thing I know, Pop hands the gun to Ben, and that old bastard walks around the desk and shoots the guy on the floor, and then he hands the gun to sweet little grandma, and she plugs him a few more times, cool as a cucumber. She got blood and some other stuff all over her dress and those black shoes. Funny, what you remember, isn’t it?’ He gave Marty a lopsided, sad little smile.

Suddenly Marty’s throat was bone-dry, and for a second he marveled at that, and then at the way his voice cracked when he finally spoke. ‘Who was he? Who was the man they killed?’

Jack shrugged. ‘Just another Nazi, like all the others. And you know what happened next?’

Marty stared at him, shook his head mindlessly.

‘Well then, Marty, my man, after Rose was finished, she handed the gun to me.’