The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

Easier said than done. Fifteen minutes later, she realized that shooting a gun was a lot easier than cleaning one. Big fat F for failure. And maybe that’s just what you got and deserved when you were ridiculous enough to name your weapon, although it made sense to her. A gun was a scary thing, and anthropomorphizing it with a pet name made her pint-sized instrument of death seem less intimidating.

  She wondered if men named their guns. Probably not, although guitar players named their guitars sometimes—she knew that because she’d been stupid enough to date one once. She’d also heard that some men named their penises, which had always seemed a little bent to her, but was a woman naming her gun the feminine equivalent of a guy naming his junk?

  But back to the task at hand. She now had a partially disassembled, dirty gun, and if taking it apart was so difficult, what about putting it back together? What if she did it wrong and it wouldn’t fire? What if tonight was the night the psycho serial killer showed up, her cobbled-together gun wouldn’t fire, and she’d die a horrible death? And if she couldn’t clean her gun, she couldn’t practice with it, so she wouldn’t be able to hit the psycho serial killer anyhow, and she’d still die, with a useless gun in her hand. She realized she was in the midst of a terrible conundrum.

  She looked down at Rex. She wouldn’t be in this pickle if she hadn’t been possessed by a wild hair this afternoon, all amped to hit the range for the first time ever. Hell, the gun had lain untouched in her dresser drawer for six months, and she’d never even had the slightest desire to shoot it. Then suddenly, out of the blue, the minute she’d gotten home from the airport, the range had seemed like not only a good idea, but an absolute necessity. What was that about?

  But in her deepest heart of hearts, she knew exactly what it was about. The man at the airport café.

  For a woman who’d absorbed her mother’s terror of flying through osmosis, it had been a fantastic trip home. In a hugely creepy-fun-amazing coincidence, she’d been seated next to Chuck Spencer, a man whose father had worked with her grandfather on the nascent hydrogen bomb, back when it had been top secret, back when only a handful of men in the world had known about it. What were the odds, with the thousands of flights a day? Astronomical.

  Chuck had calmed her travel jitters and put her at ease right away, and he seemed like a great guy. Nice, salt of the earth, and a real gentleman for suffering her endless, nervous babbling without telling her to shut up.

  But once she and Chuck had inadvertently discovered that their predecessors had rubbed elbows in the age-old quest for bigger and better ways to blow the earth to smithereens, he’d become abruptly fascinating.

  They’d grabbed a quick cup of coffee together once the flight had landed, sharing more weird stories about their unconventionally employed family members, and that’s when she’d felt it. The prickle. She’d turned her head then, and saw a man at a distant table whose eyes didn’t look right.

  Her first prickle had been at the age of five, and throughout her life it happened from time to time, and she’d come to think of it as a nuisance, and definitely something to be ignored as mild craziness or paranoia.

  Until the age of twenty-nine. Having cocktails with friends at an upscale lounge in downtown Minneapolis. Looking across the bar and seeing a handsome man staring at her. Just staring, with eyes too bright, too shiny, too focused. But not drug eyes. Drug eyes were aimless and had no intensity. These eyes were like looking at stars in the nighttime sky—from Earth, stars just twinkled, but if you had ever paid attention in astronomy class, you knew the twinkle was caused by raging storms of gas in the stars’ atmospheres. People were no different.

  She never told her friends about the man at the bar or her curse of the prickles. Not even when she found out later that the man in the bar had raped and killed a young woman on that very same night.

  Lydia never ignored the prickles after that. She also started drawing faces. Two years later, her haunting portraits became the talk of the art world. And four years after that, she still cried for that murdered young woman, and prayed that her rising art star was in some way a tribute.

  She returned her focus to Rex, anxious to merge off memory lane. Interesting that noticing the bad man in the airport hadn’t inspired her to pick up a pencil, as it normally would have, it had inspired her to pick up a gun.

  Listen. Always listen.

  “Oh, I’m listening,” she muttered to herself, picking up the phone and punching in Otis’s number.

  Otis was her geriatric handyman, whom she was certain didn’t have a name for his penis or his guns, although the veracity of that particular speculation wasn’t one she wanted to dwell on for more than the millisecond it had taken for it to pop in on her thoughts like an unwelcome guest.

  “Otis.”

  “Hey, Lydie, welcome back. How was your trip?”

  “Great. Warm. I brought you back a shot glass.”

  “Aren’t you a peach! I only got two states left and my collection is complete.”

  “What are you missing?”

  “Rhode Island and Nebraska.”

  “Sorry, but you’re on your own with those. Hey, Otis, do you have to clean your gun after you shoot it?”

  “You sure should.”

  She thought of all the old movies, where pioneers and cowboys were shooting their guns all day and night, and you never saw them cleaning their weapons. “Really?”

  “Don’t tell me you finally dusted off that little mite your uncle gave you.”

  Lydia sighed. “Yeah. And I’m having some trouble. Is it too late for you to come over?”

  ELEVEN

  Lydia loved Otis. He was an unabashed chauvinist, as old-school as they got, and he could fix anything, build anything. In spite of his age, he was still strong and straight, and his mind was sharp. She paid him, of course, but he refused to take the current market rates for skilled labor, so to make up for the paucity of pay, she baked him pies. And she made great pies—a legacy from her mother, Alice. It was a perfect barter, a true symbiosis, and they were both happy with the bargain. Besides, it was a little window into the way things had been way back when. Men did stuff for women they couldn’t or wouldn’t do for themselves and women did stuff for men they couldn’t or wouldn’t do for themselves. Everybody had a job, a place in the larger scheme of things, and there was perfect balance.

  She watched as Otis briskly took the gun apart, cleaned it, and got it back together within the space of a few minutes. “Wow. You’re good.”

  “I did it fast, so you could see how easy it is. Just takes some practice, and I’ve had plenty. Now let’s see if you can do it. We’ll take it real slow.”

  It took an hour, but she eventually got the hang of it, felt comfortable doing it on her own. Lydia Ascher, soon-to-be-gunslinger beyond compare, could take apart her weapon, clean it, and put it back together again. Astounding. Psycho serial killer was in big trouble now.

  They celebrated the milestone event with strong coffee and the lemon meringue pie she’d baked as a thank-you to Otis for keeping an eye on her place when she’d been in L.A. When they ran out of rural life small talk—the snow that was coming, the cold snap, the gardens they would plant when spring eventually arrived—she told him about her wild meeting with Chuck Spencer and their shared family history.

  Otis loved every minute of it. “Well, my goodness, young lady, you’ve got yourself quite a pedigree.”

  “Well, maybe an ignominious one.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but there’s gotta be the hands of fate tangled up in there somewhere.”

  She smiled and shrugged. “Not really. It’s just the six degrees of separation. Which is getting smaller by the minute.”

  “I suppose so. But I do wish you an enjoyable lunch tomorrow. I’m glad you’re taking the time to revisit family history with this Chuck fella. Those times are long gone now, and it’d be
a damn shame if everything was forgotten. My Pop served in the big war. Never got much out of him until the end, and even then it was sparse, but I still keep everything he told me close, as a memory.”

  As she was wrapping up the rest of the pie for Otis to take home, he came into the kitchen and touched her shoulder. She looked up and smiled, but her smile faltered a little when she saw his eyes. Norwegian bachelor farmer eyes, she called them. Blue as blue could ever get, even at his age, when eyes usually faded to a lesser color. They were warm eyes, jolly eyes, but they were troubled now.

  “I’ll be keeping an eye out. Just so you know.”

  “An eye out for what?”

  Otis just shrugged and looked down at the foil packet of pie. “Trouble.”

  Lydia felt prickles again, and God, did she hate that feeling. “What makes you say that?”

  “I got horses. They get skittish all kinds of times, when a storm’s brewing, when there’s coyotes afoot, if a little wind picks up, if a butterfly pops up from the grass. But you’re not a horse, and you’re not the skittish type.”

  “Uh . . . no. I’m not.”

  “Not usually. But you are now.”

  Lydia sighed and gave him a self-deprecating smile. “Leftover travel nerves, I guess,” she lied. “You know how much I hate to fly. It takes a while to shake it out of your system.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you call if you need me.”

  She frowned after him as he got into his truck and drove away, wondering if she and Otis didn’t have a lot more in common than she’d previously thought.

  As he turned the bend in her driveway, his headlights briefly washed over the thick woods that cuddled up to her yard and she saw a shadow; just a flash, really, and then it was gone. A deer, probably—the woods were filled with them.

  TWELVE

  It was almost midnight by the time Gino and Magozzi were ready to clear the scene at the Chatham. For all their hours spent going through Spencer’s room and rental car, interviewing guests and staff and making phone calls, they had little to show for it. No one had seen anything—no terrified man running for his life, no crazed madman chasing him down the corridors, no upsetting disturbance at all. Spencer’s rental car had been as clean as his room and his life from what they’d been able to gather so far. The unassuming, retired engineer from Woodland Hills had no next of kin that they’d been able to find and no police record—not even a speeding ticket.

  They’d requested a rush on ballistics, but that wouldn’t be in until the autopsy was complete. The lab would eventually process everything they’d pulled from the crime scene in the alley, Spencer’s hotel room, and rental car, but that, too, was something they would have to wait for. Some homicides were obvious and had quick and clean endings, but this wasn’t going to be one of them. A mugging was still on the table, but that had been ringing false all night.

  In the unobtrusive space at the back of the lobby, Magozzi was pacing in small circles, which mirrored the same small circles looping around in his brain. He felt like he’d been waiting forever for Gino to finish a phone call. He had no real energy for physical or mental exertion, just an overabundance of coffee and nervous energy flooding his system.

  There were no guests in the lobby at this hour and only a skeleton crew at the front desk. Jacob Amundson had kindly dropped off a plate of sandwiches an hour ago before signing out for the night, and it was time for them to do the same.

  “Angela?” Magozzi asked when Gino finally shoved his phone back into his pocket.

  “No, that was LAPD calling back. They dispatched the local PD to Woodland Hills to check out Spencer’s house and try to track down next of kin. There was a break-in.”

  “Jesus. The fates really had it in for Charles Spencer today.”

  “No kidding. But it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Dirtbags hang out in nice neighborhoods and watch for taxis. Somebody gets into a cab with a suitcase and it’s a good gamble they’re heading to the airport and they don’t have anybody else in the house to give them a lift. The dirtbags hang around, case the place, make sure there’s nobody else home, then make their move, ruin somebody’s house and peace of mind, and get fifty bucks’ worth of stuff on the black market if they’re lucky. Anyhow, the cop I talked to said the B and E was a little weird. Every single room in the house was tossed, but nothing was obviously missing. TVs, electronics, a couple expensive watches sitting out on a dresser—they weren’t touched. The only thing they think got lifted was a home computer.”

  They both looked up when they heard the boisterous laughter of a couple entering the lobby. They were impeccably dressed and very tipsy. The woman was a little wobbly on her stiletto boots as she shrugged off her coat. The man grabbed her elbow gently to keep her steady and kissed her on the neck, eliciting a giggly trill. In this moment, they were having the time of their lives, and that made Magozzi happy after being steeped in darkness for most of the night. He hoped they realized just how precious life was.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  THIRTEEN

  By the next morning the news was mildly abuzz with two tragedies in one night. The gas explosion in South Minneapolis was the first story, because it was a dramatic cautionary tale and struck fear in the hearts of all Minnesotans who hadn’t gotten their furnaces checked out before winter hit. Besides, it was great art. Nothing like somebody’s home shooting flames into the night sky, especially when the owner was turning into a crispy critter inside.

  Apparently, Magozzi thought, the old maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” no longer applied, since Charles Spencer, who had certainly bled, only ranked second on the morning news hit parade, and the coverage was minimal.

  Magozzi realized his thoughts were trending cynical, but he hadn’t had much sleep, the Mr. Coffee in Homicide was taking forever to grunt out a new pot, and he and Gino had a mountain of reports to slog through.

  After they’d left the Chatham well after midnight, Gino had gone home to the warm arms of his wife, Angela, and a plate of lasagna; Magozzi had gone home to a TV dinner and an empty, silent house. Both of them had worked their home computers for hours, but both of them had come up empty.

  When Mr. Coffee gave a pop and a final, weary sigh, he filled two mugs and walked back to their desks, where he found Gino intensely focused on his computer screen, face scrunched up in what looked like befuddlement. “What are you working on?”

  Gino took the coffee and started dosing it with sugar packets, his eyes still fixed on his computer screen. “Spencer’s cell phone records. He was regularly calling a local number for the past three months—he called it three times yesterday alone. Happy happy joy joy, I’m thinking, we’ve got a person of interest.”

  “Great. Let’s go arrest him for murder.”

  “Can’t. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Remember what the bartender at the Chatham said last night, that Spencer was mourning the loss of a friend? Well, turns out the number Spencer kept calling belonged to a guy named Wallace Luntz. So I look into Wallace Luntz, and guess what? He was the old guy who died in that gas explosion yesterday.”

  Magozzi sat down and stared at the wall for a moment. “That’s weird.”

  “Oh, it gets weirder. Here’s the double-headed kicker. The ME’s preliminary report says Luntz was dead before the house blew—bullet to the brain. And perk up your ears and listen to this. It’s an audio transcript of a nine-one-one call Spencer made exactly seven seconds after his last call to Luntz. I just got it from the call center.” Gino pulled up an audio file on his computer and pressed the play key.

  Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?

  Home invasion at twelve forty Gleason Road! My friend is being attacked in his house, please send help . . .

  Are you at the location, sir?

  No, I was talking to him on the phone and he went to an
swer the door, and started screaming. Please, is help on the way?

  I have emergency vehicles en route to that address right now.

  Thank God.

  “That’s it,” Gino said, muting his computer. “He hung up after that.”

  Magozzi scraped at a piece of stubble on his jaw that his early morning shave had missed. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. So Spencer was on the phone with his buddy, heard him getting attacked, and then the guy’s house blows to kingdom come. And then Spencer ends up dead a couple hours later. What the hell?”

  “That’s exactly what I said to myself. These guys were connected, two friends who end up murdered on the same night? They had to be into something that made them targets, right? But the thing is, they were both dull as dirt—nice, older guys who worked average jobs until they retired.”

  “Luntz, too?”

  “Yeah. He worked for an iron foundry up north most of his life, then came down here to finish out his golden years. I talked to the arson investigator in charge of Luntz’s case. Guy named Cory. They’ve been working the scene hard because they figured foul play from the get-go. The home invasion angle was the icing on the cake. The place was so hot, they’re just getting in there now. They’ll let us know if they pull anything besides charcoal out of the debris.”

  Magozzi reached for his phone when it started skittering on his desk. “Detective Magozzi here.”

  There was a hanging silence, then a tentative female voice. “Detective . . . my name is Lydia Ascher. The manager at the Chatham Hotel gave me your number. This is in regard to Chuck Spencer.”

  Magozzi gave Gino a thumbs-up and put the phone on speaker. “Are you a friend of Mr. Spencer’s, ma’am?”

  “Not really. We met on a plane yesterday and agreed to have lunch today, here at his hotel, but the manager told me to call you.”

  “Are you at the Chatham now, Ms. Ascher?”