Live Bait

7

When there were no obvious suspects, the first day of any homicide investigation was a blur of interviews and fact-checking that ate up the precious golden hours between a murder and the probability of it ever being solved. If you were lucky, you caught a spark – a tiny scrap of information that might lead you in the right direction, but Magozzi and Gino hadn’t been lucky today. Fourteen hours into the Gilbert case without a glimmer.

Magozzi parked the car on the street next to City Hall, and for a moment he and Gino just sat there in the dark.

You know your big problem, Leo? You take every murder so goddamned personally.

It was the one thing his ex-wife had said to him that still left him dumbstruck, all these years later. Even her endgame confession of all her infidelities had lost its punch as time passed, but not that. It was the very first time he’d ever considered the possibility that murder wasn’t personal to everyone, and he still couldn’t get his head around that.

It had something to do with empathy for the victim, he supposed. Not once had he ever been able to look at a body with the mental distance that would allow him to see it as ‘just’ a body. Some cops could do that. Some cops had to do it, or they’d go nuts. Magozzi had never been able to manage it. To him, it was never just a body; it was always a dead person, and there was a big difference.

But this one was worse than most. Only one day into the investigation and he wasn’t just feeling sorry for the victim; he was starting to feel sorry for himself because he hadn’t known the man, and that had never happened before.

‘Long day,’ Gino finally sighed.

‘Too long. Too many sad people. You know, just once I’d like to work a case where everybody hated the dead guy.’

Gino grunted. ‘That ain’t gonna happen. Nobody hates a dead man. It’s not allowed. You could be the meanest son of a bitch on the planet, but once they put you in the coffin and lay you out in front of the people who hated you when you were alive, they all seem to find something nice to say. It’s like a miracle.’

Magozzi scowled out the windshield at the deserted street. Maybe Gino was right. Maybe Morey Gilbert had been just like anybody else, somehow elevated by death. But in his heart, he didn’t think so.

Gino was silent for a minute. ‘Except I think this one might be a little different, Leo.’

‘Yeah, I know. I was just thinking the same thing.’ Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering all the mourners outside the nursery. It was the kind of impromptu gathering you expected to see when a celebrity died, or a beloved public figure; not some average Joe nobody had ever heard of. The media had covered it, but mostly because it had snarled traffic on the boulevard. They’d never heard of Morey Gilbert either, and most of their attention was focused on the delicious, ratings-grabbing horror of another old man being tortured and tied to a train track.

Beethoven’s Fifth sang out from the pocket in Gino’s shorts. He ripped his pocket pulling out his cell phone before the irritating melody started again. ‘Damnit, I’m going to ground that kid. Teach her to have a little respect for her father and classical composers.’

‘You should get one of those cell phone holsters for that thing.’

‘Oh sure. A cell phone in one holster and a gun in the other. I’d end up shooting myself in the ear. Yeah, Rolseth here.’

When Gino turned on the map light and started taking notes, Magozzi got out of the car and leaned against the door, pushing speed-dial on his own phone, waiting for the answering machine beep on the other end. ‘Hey, it’s Magozzi. We’ve got something going here, and I’m going to be a little late. I’ll try to make it by ten. Call back if that’s too late; otherwise, I’ll see you then.’ He flipped his phone closed and got back into the car, praying that ten o’clock wouldn’t be too late; that his phone wouldn’t ring in the next few hours.

Gino waggled his notebook at him. ‘That was the night manager at the Wayzata Country Club. Jack Gilbert was there last night, just like he said. Apparently he’s there almost every night, solo, which tells you a little about his home life. But the place shuts down at one, and Anant put time of death between two and four, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So he had plenty of time to get to the nursery and pop his father. Which means we don’t have one person in that family we can clear. The old lady’s alone in the house, and the son and the son-in-law are both supposedly three sheets to the wind and can’t remember a damn thing.’ He sighed and tucked his notebook in his shirt pocket. ‘Nobody has alibis anymore. I hate that. So what do you think?’

Magozzi reached into the backseat to grab one of the two grease-stained bags that were probably leaking onto the seat. ‘I think this car is going to smell like barbeque for the next year. Tell me again why we had to pick up dinner.’

‘Because if we’d sent Langer he’d have come back with carrots and sawdust or some such vegetarian crap, that’s why.’

Minneapolis was dressing itself for the evening with a sparkle of lights. It was a pretty city, Detective Langer thought, staring out at the yellow rectangles in a distant tower, climbing into the night sky like some kind of golden ladder. Not the kind of place you’d expect to produce such a killer.

McLaren, as Minnesotan as he was Irish, was convinced that whoever had murdered Arlen Fischer was certainly from somewhere else; Chicago, maybe, or New York, or wherever it was that people like the Sopranos lived. Langer had smiled at that, but had to admit there was an old-time mob taste to the way the elderly man had been killed. You didn’t see creativity like that in many other arenas.

He glanced back at his monitor, jiggled his mouse to bring the report he was writing back to life. He hated writing reports. Hated the arcane, affected cop-speak that mangled the brain and tied the tongue. You never went into a house; you entered a residence. People were never shot to death; they sustained mortal wounds inflicted by such-and-such-caliber firearms. And Arlen Fischer had certainly not been tied to a train track to be turned into oatmeal by the midnight freight to Chicago; he’d simply been ‘secured to the southbound tracks by means of barbed wire.’ You couldn’t even mention that the train was due, because that would imply the alleged perpetrator had actually premeditated a means of death not in evidence. Some junior-high-school defense attorney would jump all over that. Genteel, legalese gobbledygook is what it was. If a cop ever talked like that in real life, he’d be laughed off the force.

He looked out at the lights again, dreaming of his last sentence, wondering if Chief Malcherson would suspend him if he wrote that Arlen Fischer had been left on the tracks to get filleted by a train.

‘C’mon, Langer,’ McLaren chided him. ‘Goose the mare, would you? The caterers have arrived.’

Langer looked up with the guilty start of the grade-school kid who should never be given a desk by a window. McLaren, Gino, and Magozzi were at the big table in the front of the Homicide room, pulling white cardboard containers out of a collection of smelly paper bags. ‘Almost finished,’ he said, turning back to his computer.

‘Well hurry up,’ Gino said good-naturedly. ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’

Magozzi gave him a look. ‘Where do you get that stuff?’

‘What stuff?’

‘All those pithy little sayings.’

‘My father. He’s a very pithy man.’

McLaren found the bag of garlic rolls and stuck his nose in the top. ‘What’s “pithy” mean?’

‘Like in “pithed off,” ’ Gino said deadpan. ‘Say, how come Tinker and Peterson aren’t here? You’re doing a tandem, right?’

‘Nah. We’re catching media bullets on this one, and the chief hasn’t let Peterson near a camera since he told that arrogant prick from Channel Three he was an arrogant prick.’

Gino sighed happily. ‘That was a beautiful moment.’

‘That it was,’ McLaren agreed. ‘Anyway, Tinker was signed out for vacation starting tomorrow morning anyway, so it worked out. Now I get all the glory as soon as Langer solves this thing.’

Langer smiled as he keyed in the command to print, then stood up and stretched. This was good. Being in the office after hours, working an active case, listening to the guys banter… for the first time in what seemed like years, he was beginning to feel as if everything might be all right again.

He was halfway through his fifth barbequed chicken wing, trying to remember if he still had that bottle of Maalox in his bottom drawer, when Magozzi asked a question that reminded him that there might not be enough Maalox in the world.

‘You were pretty close to Marty Pullman, right, Langer?’

He held up one finger and continued chewing, buying time. No one expected Aaron Langer to talk with his mouth full. When he finally swallowed, it felt like a small, hairy dog going down his throat. ‘Barely knew him until I ran the case on his wife.’

‘Sure dogged us on that one, though,’ McLaren put in. ‘Not that you can blame the poor guy. Man, those were some bad days.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Magozzi said. ‘He was at our scene today, you know.’

‘Figured he would be,’ Langer said. ‘He really loved that old man.’

‘Well, the thing is, Marty looked pretty bad…’

‘Walking dead,’ Gino agreed.

‘… which is why I brought it up. Gino and I talked about it. We both got some bad feelings from him, think he might be in one of those holes you can’t get yourself out of, and we thought if you’d been close…’

‘We weren’t,’ Langer interrupted, glancing at McLaren for confirmation. ‘Neither one of us.’

‘Nah, he was totally shut down,’ McLaren said. ‘Truth is, he’s been walking dead since his wife got killed. He still putting it away?’

Gino nodded glumly. ‘Said he woke up this morning on his kitchen floor next to a Jim Beam empty and has no clue where he was last night. And I says, “Gee, Marty, you been drinking like that since you left the force?” And he thought about it for a second, then said, “Well, that would explain the blackouts.” ’

McLaren winced and pushed away the remains of whatever animal he’d been eating. ‘I kind of figured he was headed down that road. Can’t remember seeing him sober once during the whole investigation. Seemed like Morey was the only thing holding him together.’

Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Morey? You knew him well enough to call him by his first name?’

McLaren gave an uneasy shrug. ‘You met him once, you knew him that well. He was that kind of a guy, you know? Really bummed us out when we heard the news this morning. As if that family hadn’t been through enough. And I’ll tell you another thing. Your killer was a stranger, because nobody who ever met that man would want him dead.’

Magozzi crumpled his napkin and pushed away from the table. ‘Yeah, that’s what everyone says, but we’re having a little trouble with that. Morey Gilbert caught it once in the head, real close. It doesn’t look like an accident or some kind of impulse shooting. What it looks like, and what it feels like, is an execution.’

Langer shook his head. ‘Impossible. Morey couldn’t have made an enemy if he tried. You can’t imagine how much good that man did in his life.’

‘Oh, we’re getting an idea,’ Gino said. ‘You saw the crowd outside the nursery today?’

‘Yeah. We got stuck in the jam on the way back from our scene.’

‘Well, we worked it a little, talked to some people, got an earful of good deeds.’ Gino licked some barbeque sauce off his thumb and started paging through his pocket notebook. ‘I got a list here of down-and-outs he gave money to, homeless people he dragged off the street and took home to dinner, if you can believe that, some guy with a gang tattoo and a Perry Ellis suit who claimed Morey Gilbert got him out of the life just by talking to him…’

That made Langer smile. ‘Talking is what he did best.’

‘And most.’ McLaren grinned. ‘Man, he could talk your ear off. But it wasn’t small talk, you know? I mean, this guy thought about the weirdest things in ways you never thought of.’

‘Like what?’ Magozzi asked.

‘Oh, jeez, a million things. Like the day Langer and I went over after the case was all wrapped up, and Morey found out I was Catholic – remember that, Langer?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Anyway, he sits us down at the kitchen table, gives us a beer, and then starts asking me all these questions, like I was a priest or a scholar or something…’ McLaren shook his head a little, smiling, remembering.

So, Detective McLaren. They have saints, the Catholics. You know about these?

Sure, Morey.

Well, it just seems funny to me, the ones they picked. You know, Joan of Arc, she stabbed people with swords, and then there was St Francis who talked to birds… what is the connection there? There’s no consistency. And these are the people who are supposed to be putting in a good word with God when you can’t reach him directly, am I right?

Well, yes…

So my question is this: Now Moses, he had this one-on-one relationship with the big guy, you know? He talked to him personally, just like I’m talking to you. So if anybody should be interceding for anybody, you’d think it would be Moses. But they didn’t make Moses a saint. Now why do you think that is?

Uh, I think you have to be a Christian to be a saint.

Ah! You see what I’m saying? There’s no sense to the way you pick these people.

Hey, I don’t pick them…

Maybe you could talk to the people who do that sort of thing, eh? Because the thing is, they based their whole religion on Jesus and even he couldn’t be a saint because he was Jewish, not Christian. You see? No sense. I need your help understanding this.

Gino was smiling a little. ‘So he was a pretty religious guy, huh?’

McLaren thought about that for a minute. ‘Not religious, exactly. He just thought about that stuff a lot, like he was trying to figure it out, but I suppose that goes with the territory. He was in Auschwitz, did you know that?’

Gino nodded. ‘We knew he was in one of the camps. One of the assistant MEs showed me the tattoo at the scene.’

‘Gotta tell you, it just about blew my mind when I found that out. I mean, I never knew anybody who was in the camps before. Seems like that stuff happened a million years ago, you know? So here’s this guy who lives through God knows what kind of hell, and he comes out the other side loving his fellow man. I’m telling you guys, he was something. You would have liked him a lot.’

‘Aw, don’t say that.’ Gino got up and started shoving empty containers into a bag. ‘I don’t want to like dead people. There’s no percentage in it. Langer, are you just going to leave those chicken wings?’

‘You bet I am.’

Gino grabbed one and ripped off a bite. ‘So tell me. When you were getting all cozy with the Gilberts, what kind of vibes did you get off the son?’

‘Jack?’ Langer shrugged. ‘He was never around. Kind of the black sheep, I guess. Marty said he’d had some kind of falling-out with his folks.’

Gino tossed a decimated chicken wing into the bag. ‘Must have been a pretty major falling-out. The old lady still isn’t talking to him.’

‘Must have been,’ Langer agreed. ‘Jack didn’t even stand with the family during his sister’s funeral.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ McLaren winced. ‘That was tough to watch. I’d almost forgotten. Here’s this middle-aged guy bawling his head off, literally falling apart, and he stumbles over to Morey with his arms out, and Morey just looks at him, then turns and walks away. Left Jack standing there alone, crying, arms stretched out to nobody… man, I’ll tell you, it was pathetic.’

Magozzi felt a prickle on the back of his neck. ‘Well, that’s interesting. Loves his fellow man and turns his back on his own son at a time like that? And that’s everybody’s Mr Nice Guy?’

Langer spoke softly. ‘That’s the thing, Magozzi. He really was Mr Nice Guy, and that business with Jack at the funeral was so totally out of character, you just had to wonder…’ He stopped, frowning.

‘What you had to wonder,’ McLaren finished for him; ‘is what the hell did Jack do?’