by PJ Tracy
Lily straightened slightly in her chair. ‘How many?’
‘Over sixty so far.’
She closed her eyes.
‘You had no idea what Morey was doing all those years?’
She took off her thick glasses, opened her eyes, and looked at him. It was the first time that Magozzi had seen her eyes without the barrier of the glasses. They were beautiful, he thought, and tragic.
‘This is what I knew. He started talking about this thing right after the war. Other people, little groups, were hunting these men down, killing them, and he thought this was just. A noble thing. I told him if he ever left our house to kill another human being, not to come back, and he never talked about it again.’
‘He took trips without you at least twice a year,’ Gino reminded her. ‘You didn’t think that was strange?’
‘You’re such a suspicious person, Detective Rolseth. Your wife goes away for the weekend with friends, do you think, aha, she’s out killing people? Morey and Ben went fishing every now and then. Was that so hard to believe? So anyway, that’s all I knew until the night Morey was shot. I thought he was in the greenhouse, like every night. But then he woke me up at about midnight and said he’d killed the Animal.’
‘An animal?’ Gino asked.
‘The Animal. It’s what we called him. He was S.S. at Auschwitz.’
‘Heinrich Verlag,’ Magozzi said. ‘Also known as Arlen Fischer.’
Jack’s jaw dropped open. ‘Fischer? The man who was tied to the railroad tracks? Are you telling me Pop did that? And then he told you about it?’
Lily nodded. ‘Verlag, I knew. Verlag, I had seen in action. Sixty years, I wished for that man’s death. So Morey wakes me up like a proud cat bringing home a dead mouse, maybe thinking I wouldn’t mind that he had killed this one. All those years, and he never knew me.’
‘You should have told me, Ma.’
‘You think I wanted my son to know his father was a murderer?’
‘But I already knew that.’
Lily gave him a sad little smile. ‘Now you tell me.’
Magozzi laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. It was almost too much information to take in, and almost none of it looked good for either Jack or Lily.
‘We’re going to have to write all this up, turn it in,’ Gino said, echoing his thoughts.
Jack smiled a little. ‘Don’t look so glum, Detective. You’ve been trying to get me in a cell for two days, and now you’ve got your wish. I witnessed a murder, I didn’t report it, and I’ll sign a confession. It’s about time somebody in this family started taking responsibility for what they’ve done.’
Lily patted his hand.
‘Well don’t get your hopes up for any luxury accommodations at Stillwater just yet. Lots of extenuating circumstances here. We don’t know where the county attorney will go with any of this.’
‘One more question, Jack,’ Magozzi said. ‘Marty wanted you to tell us something that would close the Eddie Starr case.’ He glanced at Lily, saw that the name hit her hard. ‘He knew that Morey killed him, right?’
Jack just stared at him for a minute.
‘It doesn’t matter now, Jack. We already had that anyway – the gun Morey and the others used on a lot of the victims matched the gun that killed Eddie Starr . . .’
‘Morey killed the man who killed Hannah?’ Lily whispered.
‘No.’ Jack said quietly. ‘Marty did. That’s what was killing him. That’s what he couldn’t live with.’
Magozzi and Gino looked at each other, then leaned back in their chairs, as if the effort of sitting upright was suddenly too difficult.
Magozzi closed his eyes and saw hatred and vengeance everywhere. Morey killing, Marty killing . . . and only Lily and Jack standing apart, standing alone against the violence that had destroyed their lives. He wondered if they realized how very much alike they were, if anyone could sift through the confusion of all their mistakes to see their essential goodness.
And then he remembered Marty’s words as he lay dying.
All this time, you were the only good guy, Jack. Better than any of us. You’re the hero.
42
Sometime during the night the storm had blown out of Minnesota and into Wisconsin, leaving muddy fields and shattered buildings and ruined lives in its wake. Nine tornadoes had touched down in the state, and for the time being the media was somberly preoccupied with photo-ops of the aftermath.
There had been brief coverage of the shooting at Uptown Nursery, but the press had been too focused on the storm story to do any serious digging yet. But soon, when the public was tired of seeing two-by-fours driven through tree trunks, upside-down trailers, and the flat remains of a pole building near Wilmer that had housed twenty thousand turkeys, the media would come clamoring after Homicide, looking for another ratings grabber. This was not a happy thought for Chief Malcherson as he strode down the hall toward the Homicide office. Then again, there were no happy thoughts in this building today.
Gloria was at her desk in the front, swathed in black, punishing all the mail. Marty Pullman had spent a lot of time in this office when Langer and McLaren were working Hannah’s murder, and Gloria had taken a shine to him. Partly because he had bowlegs and she’d never once met a bowlegged man she didn’t like; partly because he was always a gentleman in a big way, gave her that quiet kind of friendly respect you could never get enough of. But mostly because that man had been heartbroken over losing his wife and wasn’t ashamed to put it right out there. Any man who loved a woman that much deserved mourning.
She looked up when Malcherson stopped at her desk. ‘Did you get any sleep, Chief?’
‘A few hours, thank you. Who’s in?’
‘Peterson took the call on that drunken fool they pulled out of the Mississippi this morning. The rest are here. Magozzi and Rolseth came back in about a half hour ago, looking like somebody’d dragged them through a knothole backwards. If you want my opinion, and I know you do, I think you ought to send them back home.’
‘I’ll give it my best effort, Gloria.’
Malcherson walked to the back of the room, where Langer and McLaren worked at their desks on the left, Magozzi and Gino on the right. He pulled a chair into the aisle between them and sat down, positioning a pristine legal tablet on his knees. ‘Gentlemen, we need to go over some things.’
Langer and McLaren looked all right – as far as he knew, they’d finished their reports on the search of Jeff Montgomery’s apartment and gone home before midnight – but Magozzi and Rolseth had still been in the office when he’d left at 3 A.M. Magozzi looked gaunt and strained; Gino looked like he was wearing little bags of melting Jell-O under his eyes, but the real measure of his exhaustion was that he hadn’t said a thing about Malcherson’s suit.
‘You’ve all done some amazing work on these cases, Detectives. Unless I misread your reports, we cleared four homicides last night.’
‘The hard way,’ Magozzi said bitterly.
‘You saved Jack Gilbert’s life,’ Malcherson reminded him.
‘But we lost Marty Pullman. We were ten seconds too late.’
‘Every homicide committed in this city means we were ten seconds too late to save somebody, Detective Magozzi. We do what we can.’ He pulled his Mont Blanc from his pocket and looked at Langer and McLaren. ‘Do we have a final report on the search of Thomas Haczynski’s apartment yet?’
‘It’s coming, but the preliminary pretty much tells the story.’ McLaren flipped open a little ragged notebook with doodles all over the cover. ‘The kid had a .22 under his mattress that Ballistics confirmed early this morning. Same gun that shot Morey Gilbert. And the nine he used on Marty killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler. Plus we got a journal that lays out what he was doing and why, right up to the last entry, just before he went to the nursery last night to kill Jack. It’s grim reading, I’ll tell you. Gives me the creeps. He’d been planning this for over a year, down to the last detail, even set up that cell phone scam to
make it look like he was living in Germany.’
Malcherson looked up from his tablet. ‘Explain.’
‘We just told Gino and Magozzi about that,’ Langer said. ‘Montgomery had one of those expensive hybrid phones in his apartment – the kind that works here and in Europe. It was pretty simple, really. All he had to do was set up a German account, complete with German telephone number, and no read-back, including ours, could ever tell the difference. He could take calls or call out from anywhere in the world, and it would still look like he was in Germany.’
‘Little bastard,’ Gino grumbled, still seething about being fooled. ‘Bawling one minute, talking German the next, pretending to be his own uncle.’
Malcherson sighed. ‘So essentially, Magozzi’s and Rolseth’s cases are closed.’
‘I’d say so,’ Langer agreed. ‘The Arlen Fischer case is something else. We know Morey Gilbert and his crew killed him, but it’s all circumstantial. A bunch of plane tickets and a lot of conjecture. We can’t actually put a gun in the hand of any of them for even one of the sixty-odd murders we know they committed, let alone Arlen Fischer. And as for Morey’s confession to Lily, a second-year law student could tear her to shreds. She’s old, she was wakened out of a sound sleep, she could have been dreaming . . . like that.’
‘Same thing with Jack’s story about what happened in Brainerd,’ Gino said. ‘From Jimmy Carter, maybe. From a drunken P.I. attorney who walks around downtown Wayzata in his bathrobe – I don’t think so.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ McLaren asked. ‘It’s not like we’re going to prosecute these people. They’re dead.’
‘If we try to close Arlen Fischer based on our conclusions without adequate proof, we are prosecuting these people, without a trial,’ Malcherson said. ‘And I, for one, do not want to try to convince the public to take our word for it that three sweet, elderly pillars of the community, who suffered and survived the horrors of concentration camps only to be murdered in our city, were in fact, a gang of serial killers.’
McLaren threw up his hands. ‘So don’t close the case. Keep it open forever.’
‘That won’t work, either,’ Langer said. ‘Jeff Montgomery’s journal is public information the minute we close the Gilbert, Kleber, and Schuler murders, and that journal details those three murdering his father in Brainerd. Then everything unravels, and we take the heat for not following through.’
Malcherson touched a finger to one cottonball eyebrow. ‘The press is going to have a field day with this. This is the kind of story that journalists dream about. Nazis hiding in plain view, Jewish vigilante death squads . . . the whole city is going to be taking sides over this one on the airwaves for a long time, and we’re going to be right in the middle. And that’s just what happens locally. When the story hits the wires, this department is going to be caught up in a global media firestorm.’
McLaren slid down so far in his chair his head almost disappeared behind his desk. ‘So we’re screwed if we try to close Arlen Fischer, screwed if we don’t.’
‘That appears to be the case, Detective.’
‘Well, great. Langer, give the chief your gun. He can shoot us all, then take his own life.’
‘I might have another option.’ Malcherson had that flinty look in his eyes that meant he might be thinking about smiling in the next six months or so. ‘Technically, when we turn a case over to the FBI, it’s officially closed in our department. Any and all queries would have to be referred to Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer. We would no longer be in a position to discuss the case with anyone. Not law enforcement, not Interpol, and certainly not the media. Our hands would be tied, gentlemen.’
One by one they all started to smile for the first time in twenty-four hours. All except Johnny McLaren, who was looking at Malcherson with undisguised awe. ‘Chief, you are the sneakiest son of a bitch on the planet.’
‘Thank you, Detective McLaren.’
Malcherson was all the way to Gloria’s desk when Gino called after him, ‘Hey, Chief.’ Malcherson stopped in his tracks, but didn’t turn around. ‘Thumbs-up on the navy suit. The average Joe can get away with black in mourning situations, but a man in your position of power? Might have been a little too much drama. I think you nailed it again.’
Chief Malcherson waited until he was out in the hall, and then he smiled.
Twenty minutes later, Detective Aaron Langer walked into the chief’s office just as he was hanging up the phone. Malcherson looked inordinately pleased with himself.
‘That was Paul Shafer,’ he said. ‘He seemed absolutely delighted to hear that we finally realized the Arlen Fischer case was beyond the scope of our investigative abilities.’
Langer smiled. ‘What did you tell him, sir?’
‘The absolute truth. That the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t have the media skills to manage a case of this magnitude.’
‘That had to be irresistible.’
‘I believe it was. He’s on his way over now to pick up the file. Personally.’
‘So as far as we’re concerned, the Arlen Fischer case is now closed.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘That’s good news, Chief.’ Langer removed his sidearm, ejected the clip, and cleared the chamber, then laid it butt first on the desk.
Malcherson stared at it, and then at the badge case Langer laid next to it.
‘May I sit down, sir?’
‘Absolutely.’
Langer settled in the chair, then looked out the window because he couldn’t look the chief in the eye. He hadn’t been able to do that for a long time now. ‘Marty Pullman was at my desk the day I got that call telling us where we could find Eddie Starr. I wrote down the address, then left the office.’
Malcherson waited, his face still, his expression unreadable.
‘Marty overheard the call. He knew whose address that was, and I knew he knew it. So I left the note in plain view and just walked away.’
Malcherson looked down at a fingerprint in the high gloss of his desktop, wondering whose it was. ‘What on earth were you thinking, Detective Langer?’ he asked softly.
‘I’m not sure, sir. Maybe that Marty deserved a chance to beat the shit out of the man who killed his wife before we got there. Or maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking he might do more than that. I honestly don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that when I saw Eddie Starr’s body, I knew damn well what had happened. Marty may have pulled the trigger, but I made it possible when I walked away from my desk that day.’
Malcherson cleared his throat softly. ‘Detective Langer, I will never believe that your intent was for Marty Pullman to commit murder.’
Langer’s smile pulled at one side of his mouth. ‘Really? Well I’m not so sure, and it’s been driving me crazy for months. And I’d spent months before that looking at what Morey and Lily and Jack were going through, watching Marty fall apart a little more each day, and all I could think of was how unfair it was that a scumbag like Starr could destroy so many good people . . . you see what I was doing? I was deciding, sir. Deciding who was good and who was bad and maybe even who deserved to die. Just like Marty did, and Morey and all the rest. Then when this case started to unravel and I realized that Eddie Starr was a piker, that if he’d lived another hundred years he wouldn’t be able to catch up to Morey Gilbert’s body count . . . the good guys and the bad guys kind of blended together until the only thing I was sure of was that I’d never been able to tell the difference.’ His eyes drifted down to his badge. ‘I should have turned that in, turned myself in, a long time ago.’
He stood up then and patted his pockets, already missing the weight of his life that he’d left on the Chief’s desk. Then he met Malcherson’s eyes head on and smiled. Strange, he thought, how good that felt. ‘You know where to find me, sir,’ he said, then turned and walked out.
Malcherson sat quietly at his desk for a long time after he left.
43
&n
bsp; Magozzi and Gino were at the big front table in Homicide, making copies of the reams of paperwork they’d all accumulated since the night Arlen Fischer and Morey Gilbert had been murdered. Paul Shafer was in Malcherson’s office now with a couple of his FBI henchmen, formalizing the turnover of the Fischer case and all related evidence. They’d be here in a few minutes to collect it.
McLaren wheeled in a dolly with four large boxes he’d retrieved from the evidence room. ‘This is the last of the stuff we took from Fischer’s place.’ He stopped at Gloria’s desk and wiped his forehead. ‘You want to give me a hand with this, Miss Gloria?’
She held up ten black-enameled fingers and wiggled them. ‘Look at these and tell me how much of a fool you are for asking such a stupid question.’
McLaren put a hand to his heart. ‘I am a fool. I am anything you want me to be. All you have to do is ask.’
‘I want you to be gone.’
‘I want you to be my woman.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She slammed out of her little cubicle and stomped away on her black platforms.
He grinned and wheeled the dolly over to the table. ‘I think I’m getting to her.’
‘A regular Lothario, that’s what you are,’ Gino said, grabbing a box. ‘You know, McLaren, if you ever lifted anything heavier than a pencil with those little chicken wing arms of yours, you wouldn’t have to ask a woman for help.’
‘Who’s Lothario? And where the hell is Langer, anyway? I swear, that guy finds something else to do every time we’ve got to bring these boxes upstairs.’
Magozzi stepped away from the table when his cell rang.
‘Hey, Magozzi.’
‘Hey, Grace.’
‘I saw the news. I’m sorry about your friend, Marty. That must have been terrible. Are you okay?’
God, he loved it when she worried about him. ‘Not really.’
‘Maybe I could come over tonight, cook you supper, we could open a few bottles of wine.’
Magozzi took a few more steps away from the table and lowered his voice. ‘You want to come to my house?’
