Live Bait

6

Magozzi watched them load Morey Gilbert’s body into the ME wagon, wincing when the bag bounced hard as the gurney wheels folded. He’d seen a lot of bodies go into that wagon over the years, but he never got used to that final bounce as they all left home for the last time.

It was a relief when the wagon’s doors slammed shut and the children masquerading as Medical Examiner assistants climbed in and drove away.

‘Who are those kids?’

‘Just a sec,’ Gino said into his cell phone, then held it against his chest. ‘Those are not kids. Those are grownups with medical degrees. They’re starting to look like kids ’cause you’re starting to get so damn old.’

‘I’m in the prime of my life. Forty’s so far away I can’t even see it from here. How come we got assistants anyway? Where the hell’s Anant?’

Gino sighed. ‘Doing the old guy tied to the train tracks, that’s where. And the kids did just fine. I watched them. They wore gloves and everything. Can I finish my call now?’

‘Are you having phone sex with Angela?’

‘No. With Langer. And you interrupted at a critical point. Do you mind?’ He put the cell phone to his ear again. ‘Sorry about that, Langer. Leo’s having a midlife moment.’

Magozzi kept silent for exactly five seconds. ‘The train track guy was old, too?’

‘Jesus. Hang on, Langer… Yeah, Leo, he was old. Way old.’

‘That’s three in one night, Gino. Morey Gilbert, whoever bought it in the bloody house, and the train track guy.’

‘Actually, it looks like it’s only two, and if you’d give me a second to finish this call, I’ll find out everything you ever wanted to know about old dead people. Jeez. You’re like a little kid, tugging at my pants leg.’

‘You don’t have a pants leg.’

Gino gave him a nasty look and stomped away across the parking lot, cell phone pressed to his ear.

Magozzi found a bench in the shade at the front of the greenhouse and sat down next to a stack of bulging plastic bags that smelled like chocolate. Sunday-morning traffic was picking up on the parkway, but he could barely hear it through the dense evergreen hedge that blocked all but the driveway from the street. It made for a nice, quiet piece of real estate in the middle of a city; nice for shopping, living, or shooting an old man in the dead of night without fear of being seen.

A couple of crime-scene techs were still inside, processing the area around the table where Lily Gilbert had laid out her husband. Two more were around the side of the building, trying to find a scene on the rain-washed asphalt where she said she’d found him, but as far as Magozzi was concerned, they were all just going through the motions. Intentionally or not, Lily Gilbert had washed away any evidence the rain missed.

He hated this case already, because he knew where it was going. Nobody just popped geriatrics for the fun of it. Unless robbery was involved, the suspect list was always short, and almost always family. He’d take a drug-crazed psycho any day over relatives murdering each other. There wasn’t a monster in a closet any bigger than that.

Gino was heading back toward him across the lot, his broad face already pinking from the sun, his holstered 9-mm bouncing a little against the plaid Bermuda shorts. He slumped down on the bench and wiped the gathering sweat from his forehead. ‘Can you believe it was snowing last week? Man, it’s hotter than hell out here. Gotta be eighty already and it’s not even noon. Wish the son would get here so we could blow this pop stand.’

‘What’s Langer got?’

Gino leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. ‘Now that one’s really interesting. He and McLaren have this bloody house and no body, and Tinker and Peterson out at the train tracks have this body and not enough blood. Thanks to the miracle of cell phones they communicate, and voilá. Turns out the old guy that owns the bloody house is probably the guy tied to the tracks. They’re going to get an ID from the housekeeper, but it looks good.’

Magozzi straightened a little on the bench, frowning. ‘Well that’s a puzzler.’

‘No shit. From what they can put together so far, somebody shot this old man in his house, hit an artery in his arm, then get this. They put a tourniquet on him so he wouldn’t bleed to death before they could get him to the train tracks. Spooky, huh? They wanted him alive to see the train coming. Anant’s got him on the table now, but he’s thinking heart attack.’

‘Jesus.’ Magozzi thought about that for a long time, didn’t like anything his brain came up with. ‘They scared him to death.’

‘Looks that way. Anyhow, he was shot with a.45, our guy here was hit with a small caliber, and the m.o. sure as hell doesn’t tie any knots.’

‘So no connection between ours and theirs.’

‘Just that they were both old men, living in the same neighborhood.’

Magozzi rubbed his eyes, felt the sweat collecting on his lids. ‘I don’t even like that much.’

‘Yeah. Me either. But nothing else fits, so on the face of it, we’re looking for two killers.’ Gino eyed the plastic bags next to the bench. ‘Are these the ones the old lady moved all by herself?’

Magozzi closed his eyes and smiled. ‘No. Those are the ones she made me carry. Thirty pounds each. I thought I’d die.’

‘Fine homicide detective you turned out to be, doing hard labor for a murder suspect.’

‘She’s old. She asked. Respect for your elders and all that. And there was a little machismo involved, since she was carrying the fifty-pounders filled with potting soil.’

‘So you think she could have moved the body.’

‘As much as she had to. She used the wheelbarrow to get him inside.’

‘Jesus, that’s creepy. Pushing your dead husband around in a wheelbarrow. Not as creepy as giving him a bath and shaving him, though. I’m telling you, that part bothers the hell out of me. And don’t tell me that’s how they did it in the old days, because I know that. But this isn’t the old days, and it’s weird.’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s still the old days for some old people. But it bothers me, too. I think there might be something there.’

Gino’s brows lifted. ‘Yeah?’

‘I don’t think she killed him, but there’s something else here we’re not seeing.’

‘Like what?’

‘Don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Why do those bags smell like chocolate?’

‘Cocoa bean mulch. You put it around your plants, on garden paths, like that. Smells like Hershey bars every time it rains. Great, huh?’

‘I don’t know. How do you keep the neighbor kids from eating it?’

‘You gotta shoot ’em.’

They both looked up as a brand-new Mercedes convertible swerved into the nursery driveway and screeched to a stop less than an inch away from the squad that was blocking it. The driver looked harmless enough – middle-aged, a little soft around the middle, dressed in an expensive suit that still looked good despite all the wrinkles – but when the cop stationed at the driveway entrance tried to intercept him, he started dancing around like a troll with a hotfoot.

‘Must be the son,’ Magozzi said.

Gino was staring at the man with a silly little smile on his face. ‘Holy shit. I never put it together. You know who that is, Leo? That’s Jack Gilbert.’

‘Yeah, the son. That’s what I said…’

‘No no, he’s the Jack Gilbert. That bottom-feeder PI attorney with all those hokey TV ads. Don’t-let-them-jack-you-around Jack Gilbert. That one. Jeez, poor Marty. Can you imagine having a sleazeball like that for a brother-in-law?’

Gilbert was yelling at the officer now, punctuating his verbal assault with wild, flailing gestures that made him look like a psychotic windmill.

‘Christ, look at him. Goddamn attorneys think they own the world.’

Magozzi stood up and motioned for the officer to let Gilbert through. ‘Try to reel it in a little. This guy just found out his father was murdered, and his own mother wouldn’t call to tell him.’

‘Doesn’t make him any less of a sleazeball.’ Gino stood reluctantly as Gilbert made a beeline toward them, taking a quick step back when the man swooped in on them so close he could see every single vein in his very bloodshot eyes.

‘You guys the detectives?’ He eyed Gino’s shorts suspiciously.

‘Yes, sir. I’m Detective Rolseth and this is Detective Magozzi.’

Gilbert stuck out a palm slick with sweat and pumped both their hands while he bobbed back and forth on his feet. ‘Jack, Jack Gilbert.’

Magozzi was about to go through the standard condolences, but he didn’t get a chance.

‘So what the hell happened here, guys, what do you think? Robbery? Drive-by?’

‘It’s pretty early in the investigation, sir. We haven’t even finished questioning…’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Gilbert pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I can’t believe this happened. There are a hundred people in this city who want to kill me, including my own wife, and it’s my father who gets shot.’

Gino’s brows lifted. ‘Mind if I ask who wants to kill you, Mr Gilbert? Other than your wife, that is.’

‘I’m a PI attorney – I’ll fax you a list. Goddamnit, he was just an old man. Who the fuck would shoot an old man? Where’s my mother? Where’s Marty?’

‘They’re back at the house, Mr Gilbert, but if you don’t mind, we have a few questions…’ Magozzi’s mouth hung open on his last word as Gilbert sped away without a backward glance.

‘Interesting interview technique,’ Gino commented. ‘Pumped that sucker dry, is what you did. Still, I think we might want to do a little follow-up. You know, a couple of routine questions you forgot to ask, like where was he last night, did he kill his father, stuff like that.’

Magozzi glared at him, then noticed an older uniform he hadn’t seen before ducking under the crime-scene tape across the driveway entrance, walking toward them. ‘You know this guy?’

Gino squinted across the lot. ‘Oh, hell, yes. Al Viegs. Don’t say anything about his hair.’

‘Huh?’

‘He just got his first set of plugs. Looks weird. Little tufts of hair and lots of bare space.’

Magozzi caught himself staring at the man’s head as he drew closer. ‘Damnit, Gino, this is like not looking at the elephant.’

‘Yeah, I know… hey, Viegs.’

The officer nodded a somber greeting while Magozzi stared at his bizarrely patterned pink scalp.

‘Berman and I just finished the door-to-door for the whole block. We’ll have to come back and hit a few who weren’t around, but most of them were home. Sunday and all.’

‘Let me guess,’ Gino said. ‘Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything.’

Viegs nodded. ‘Right. But… it was weird.’ He looked around, cleared his throat, shuffled his polished shoes. ‘We must have hit about twenty places, houses and busi-nesses… man, it was really weird.’

Magozzi dropped his gaze from Viegs’s head to his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

Viegs shrugged helplessly. ‘A lot of them cried. And I mean a lot. The minute they heard Mr Gilbert was dead, they started to bawl. Men, women, kids… it was awful.’

Magozzi’s gaze sharpened. This was starting to get really interesting.

‘I just don’t get it. I mean, this is the city. Half the people who live here don’t even know their neighbors by sight, and then you look at what’s going on out there’ – Viegs jerked his head toward the street – ‘and you gotta wonder.’

Gino got to his feet and looked over Viegs’s shoulder at the empty drive. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You been out to the street lately?’

‘Not since we got here.’

Viegs cocked his thumb toward the driveway. ‘Take a walk, then. You’ll want to see this for yourself.’

Gino and Magozzi walked across the parking lot, through the opening where the driveway cut into the hedge, and then stopped, dumbfounded. The sidewalk in both directions was jammed with people of every age and race imaginable, some weeping quietly, others stern and stoic, all standing perfectly still, perfectly silent. Magozzi felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Gino watched as more people crossed the street and slipped quietly into the ranks of mourners. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Who the hell was this guy?’

A tall blond kid next to the tape kept raising his hand just a little, trying to attract their attention. Magozzi walked over and leaned in close to him. ‘Something I can do for you, son?’

‘Um… are you the detectives?’

‘That’s right.’

The kid was probably good-looking under other circumstances, but now his face was blotchy and red and puffy around the eyes. ‘I’m Jeff Montgomery? And this is Tim Matson? We work here, and Mr Pullman told us to stay home, you might want to talk to us? But… we had to come, you know?’

Magozzi thought they looked like a couple of lost puppies. He raised the tape and gestured them under, suppressing the instinct to pat them on their heads and tell them everything would be all right.