by P. J. Tracy
Gino plucked unhappily at the legs of his shorts. ‘This is totally unprofessional.’ He blew out a noisy sigh and looked out the window.
He’d always liked this part of Minneapolis. They were on Calhoun Parkway now, circling Lake Calhoun only a little slower than the bikers who decorated the asphalt trail in their brightly colored costumes. There were even a few windsurfers out today, dancing across the water with their triangle sails.
‘Damn, I hate this part.’
‘At least we don’t have to tell her,’ Magozzi said. ‘That’s something.’
‘Yeah, I suppose. But we still have to ask her questions, like did she shoot her husband in the head.’
‘That’s why we get the big bucks.’
There was a squad on the street and another one blocking the driveway of the Uptown Nursery when Magozzi and Gino arrived. A couple of uniforms were standing around with rolls of yellow crime-scene tape, looking lost. Magozzi showed his badge when one of them approached the window. ‘You got a grid staked out? You want us to park on the street?’
The uniform took off his hat and wiped his shiny forehead with a sleeve. It was already hot in the sun, especially on asphalt. ‘Hell, I don’t know, Detective. We got no clue where to string the tape.’
‘Gee, how about around the body?’ Gino suggested.
The cop bristled a little. ‘Yeah, well the wife moved the body.’
‘What?’
‘That’s right. She found him outside and moved him into the greenhouse. Said she didn’t want to leave him out in the rain.’
Magozzi groaned. ‘Oh, man…’
‘Lock her up,’ Gino muttered. ‘Tampering with evidence, destroying a crime scene. Lock her up and throw away the key. She probably killed him anyway.’
‘She’s about a million years old, Detective.’
‘Yeah, well that’s the thing about guns. Old people, kids, anybody can use ’em. They’re equal-opportunity murder weapons.’ He got out of the car and slammed the door and started walking slowly toward the big greenhouse in front, eyes down in case the rain had missed a bloody footprint or something.
The uniform watched him go, shaking his head. ‘That is not a happy man.’
‘Normally he is,’ Magozzi replied. ‘He’s just pissed because I wouldn’t let him stop and change into some long pants before we came here.’
‘You gotta give him points, then. Those are some bad legs.’
‘Who belongs to the other squad?’
‘Viegs and Berman. They’re walking the block, hitting the neighbors. Couple of bike patrols are baby-sitting the body inside, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the old lady has them watering plants or something.’
‘Yeah?’
The uniform wiped his brow with his sleeve again. ‘She’s a piece of work, that one.’
‘You got a feeling about her?’
‘Yeah. I got a feeling her husband’s getting the first rest he’s had in years.’
Magozzi caught up to Gino in the middle of the lot, staring at the hearse angled in front of the greenhouse.
‘We got no crime scene,’ Gino grumbled. ‘Rain trashed it first, then the funeral director drove his tank all over it, and… oh, man. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’
Behind and almost hidden by the hearse was a white ’66 Chevy Malibu convertible, red leather interior, positively cherry. Gino had lusted after it from the first time he’d seen it.
‘Huh,’ Magozzi grunted. ‘What do you think?’
Gino clucked his tongue, the envy as ripe as ever. ‘Gotta be his. There isn’t another one like it in the Cities.’
‘So what’s he doing here?’
‘Beats me. Buying flowers?’
Neither one of them had seen Marty Pullman since he’d left the force a year ago, a few months after his wife had died. Not that they’d known him that well even when they were all carrying the same badge. In Minneapolis, Homicide and Narcotics didn’t mix nearly as often as they did on TV. It was just that once you saw Marty, you weren’t likely to forget him. He still had the wrestler’s physique that had taken him to State in high school. Short bowlegs, massive chest and arms, and dark eyes that had looked haunted even before they were. They’d called him Gorilla back when he’d still had a sense of humor, but those days were long gone.
The big glass door of the greenhouse opened, and Pullman walked out to meet them.
‘Man,’ Gino said under his breath. ‘Looks like he lost about fifty pounds.’
‘Hell of a year for him,’ Magozzi said, and then Marty was there, shaking their hands, his expression as sober as ever.
‘Magozzi, Gino, good to see you.’
‘What the hell, Pullman?’ Gino pumped his hand. ‘You take up gardening, or did you join up again and nobody told me?’
Marty blew a long, shaky breath out through puffed cheeks. He looked like he was teetering on the edge of something. ‘The man who was shot was my father-in-law, Gino.’
‘Oh shit.’ Gino’s face fell. ‘He was Hannah’s dad? Oh man, I’m sorry. Shit.’
‘Forget it. You had no way of knowing. Listen, you don’t have much of a scene here.’
Magozzi heard the quaver in his voice, and decided to hold off on the sympathy until the man was strong enough to accept it. ‘So we heard,’ he said, pulling out a pocket notebook and a pen. ‘Anybody else here this morning besides you and the funeral director?’
‘A couple of the employees – I sent them home, but told them to stay put, that you’d be checking in with them before the day was out. I blocked off where Lily said she found Morey with my car, but that’s about the best I could do.’
‘We appreciate it, Marty,’ Magozzi said, wishing he could walk away from this one. Lily Gilbert had lost her daughter one year, her husband the next. Magozzi didn’t know how you survived that kind of double tragedy, and asking her the questions he had to ask suddenly seemed like an appalling act of cruelty. ‘You think your mother-in-law will be able to talk to us?’
Marty managed a half smile. ‘She’s not falling apart, if that’s what you mean. Lily doesn’t do that.’ He glanced toward the main greenhouse. ‘She’s in there. I tried to get her to go to the house – it’s on the back of the lot, behind all the greenhouses – but that’s not about to happen until they take Morey away. ME’s on the way, right?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘He’ll do a little on-site before they move him. I don’t think you want her around for that.’
‘Hell, no, I don’t. But Lily will be wherever she wants to be. That’s just the way she is.’ He sucked air in through his teeth. ‘There’s something else.’
Magozzi and Gino waited quietly.
‘After she got him inside, she washed him. Shaved him. Changed his clothes. He’s lying in there on one of the plant tables all decked out in his funeral suit.’
Gino closed his eyes briefly, trying to hold his temper in check. ‘That’s not good, Marty.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I mean, her son-in-law was a cop. She had to know she was destroying evidence.’
‘She’s damn near blind, Gino. Can’t even get a driver’s license anymore. Says she never saw any blood. I’m guessing the rain washed it away before she got out here. He caught it in the head, small caliber right behind the left temple, and he’s got this great head of thick white hair… hell, even I had to look for it and I knew it was there.’
‘Okay.’ Gino nodded, letting it go for the moment.
Magozzi made a note to have the crime-scene techs collect the clothes the dead man had been wearing when he was shot. ‘Anything you can think of that might help us out here?’ he asked.
Marty’s laugh was short and bitter. ‘You mean like who’d want to kill him? Sure. Look for somebody who’d pop Mother Teresa. He was a good man, Magozzi. Maybe even a great one.’
The air in the greenhouse was hot and swampy, laden with the scent of wet earth and vegetation. Long tables filled with plants were lined up in two
rows, leaving a narrow central aisle – it looked like every other greenhouse Magozzi’d ever been in, except for the front table, which held a corpse in a black suit instead of potted flowers.
Even dead and laid out for viewing, Morey Gilbert was still a formidable presence. Very tall, very well-muscled, and better dressed than Magozzi had ever been in his life.
Two young bike cops fidgeted near the body, trying to pretend it wasn’t there.
‘Where are they?’ Marty asked them.
‘Your mother-in-law took the old gentleman back there, sir.’ One of the bike patrols tipped his head toward a door in the back wall.
‘What’s back there, Marty?’ Magozzi asked.
‘The potting shed, a couple more greenhouses. Lily probably wanted Sol out of here for a while. He was pretty shook up.’
‘Sol?’
‘He’s the funeral director who called it in, but he was also Morey’s best friend. This is a tough one for him. Hang on, I’ll get them.’
Gino waited until Marty was out of earshot before whispering to Magozzi. ‘Her husband is dead, and she’s consoling the funeral director? That’s a little ass-backwards, isn’t it?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s how she holds it together, by taking care of other people.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she didn’t like her husband very much.’
They walked over to the front table to take a closer look at the dead man before the family came back. Gino used a pen to lift the white hair, exposing the bullet hole. ‘Tiny. I suppose you could miss it if you were half blind, but I don’t know.’ He looked up at the bike patrols. ‘You guys can take off now if you want. We got it covered. Send copies of your reports up to Homicide.’
‘Yes sir, thank you.’
Magozzi was looking at Morey Gilbert’s face, seeing a person instead of a corpse, starting to form the kind of bond that always linked him to victims. ‘He’s got a nice face, Gino. And he was eighty-four, still running his own business, taking care of his family… Who’d want to kill an old man like this?’
Gino shrugged. ‘Maybe an old woman.’
‘You’re just pissed because she moved the body.’
‘I’m suspicious because she moved the body. I’m pissed because you made me come here in short pants.’
They both took a step away from the table when the back door opened and Marty came through with his little geriatric entourage, led by a tiny, wiry old woman with silver hair cropped close to her head. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse under child-sized bib overalls, and thick glasses magnified her dark eyes, making her look a little like Yoda.
A tough Yoda, Magozzi decided as she drew closer. There was no sign that she’d been crying, no surrender to despair, or to age, for that matter, in the straight backbone or squared shoulders. She was barely five feet and probably never saw ninety on a bathroom scale, but she looked like she could roll over Cleveland.
The elderly man who followed in her wake was a different story. Grief was weighing him down, pulling at his puffy, red eyes and a mouth that trembled.
Magozzi thought it was interesting that Marty reached out as if to touch the old woman’s arm, but pulled back at the last minute. Apparently not a touchy-feely relationship. ‘Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth, this is my mother-in-law, Lily Gilbert, and this is Sol Biederman.’
Lily Gilbert stepped up to the table and laid a hand on her dead husband’s chest. ‘And this is Morey,’ she said, frowning at Marty as if he’d been rude to exclude his father-in-law from the introductions, simply because he was dead.
‘Marty tells us your huband was a wonderful man, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi said. ‘I can’t imagine what a terrible loss this must be for your family. And for you, too, Mr Biederman,’ he added, because tears were running freely down the old man’s face now.
Lily was staring at Magozzi intently. ‘I know you. You were all over the news last fall for that Monkeewrench thing. I saw more of you than I did of my own family.’ She gave Marty a pointed look, which he studiously ignored. ‘So, you have questions, am I right?’
‘If you think you’re up to it, yes.’
Apparently she was not only up to it; she decided to skip the questions and go straight to the answers. ‘All right. So this is what happened. I got up at six-thirty, just like I always do, made some coffee, came out to the greenhouse, and there was Morey, lying in the rain. Marty thinks I should have left his father-in-law outside with the rain falling in his eyes; left him there so strangers could come and see his mouth filling with water…’
‘Jesus, Lily…’
‘But this is not how families take care of each other. So I brought him inside, made him presentable, called Sol, and then I called Marty, who hasn’t answered his phone in six months.’
‘Lily, it was a crime scene,’ Marty said tiredly.
‘And I should know this? Am I a policeman? I called a policeman, but he didn’t answer his phone.’
Marty closed his eyes, and Magozzi had the feeling he’d been closing his eyes to this woman for a long time. ‘I’m not a policeman anymore, Lily.’
Magozzi had an immediate flashback to a day almost a year gone, when he’d passed Detective Martin Pullman as he went out the front doors of City Hall, carrying his career in a cardboard box, looking like he’d been run over by a truck. ‘You’ll be back, Detective,’ Magozzi had said, because he didn’t know what else to say to a man who had lost so much, and worse yet, he didn’t understand a man who could walk away so easily from a job he loved. Marty had smiled, just a little. ‘I’m not a detective anymore, Magozzi.’
Magozzi shifted back to the present in time to hear Gino asking the usual litany: Was anything missing? Any sign of a break-in? Did Morey Gilbert have any enemies, any unusual business dealings?…
‘ “Unusual business dealings?” ’ Lily snapped. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? You think we’re growing marijuana in the back greenhouse or something? Running a white slavery ring? What?’
Gino had never responded very well to sarcasm, and his face started to turn red. They’d dealt with their share of grieving relatives over the years, and Gino did okay with the ones who fell apart. They tore him up, and he suffered for a long time afterwards, but at least he knew how to respond to them. People were supposed to fall apart when a relative died. That fit in with Gino’s image of life and death and love and family, and made it easy for him to be softspoken, gentle, as comforting as a cop could be in such a situation. But the angry ones who lashed out, or the stoic ones who kept their feelings close to the vest, always threw him into a tailspin, and Lily Gilbert seemed to be a combination of the two.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi interrupted gently, eliciting an eye roll from Gino. ‘Would it be too difficult for you to take me outside and show me where you found your husband? Maybe walk me through it, step-by-step, while Gino talks to your friend Sol? We can get through this faster, then.’
The reminder of finding her husband’s body brought the first sign of weakness to her eyes. Just a flicker, but it was there.
‘I’m really sorry to have to ask you to do this. If it’s too hard, we don’t have to do it right now.’
Her gaze sharpened immediately. ‘Of course we have to do it now, Detective. Now is all we have.’ She marched toward the door, a little old soldier focusing on the mission, so she didn’t have to think of anything else. Magozzi hurried to open it for her.
‘Wait just a minute.’ Marty frowned. ‘Where’s Jack, Lily? Why isn’t he here yet?’
‘Jack who?’
‘Damnit, Lily, don’t tell me you didn’t call him…’
She was out the door before he finished.
‘Shit.’
‘Who’s Jack?’ Magozzi asked, still holding the door.
‘Jack Gilbert. Her son. They haven’t talked in a long time, but Jesus, his father just died… I gotta call him.’
While Marty went to the checkout counter and started punching numbers into the phone,
Gino walked over to Magozzi and said under his breath, ‘Listen, while you’re out there talking to the old lady, why don’t you ask her how a ninety-pound peanut managed to drag over two hundred pounds of dead weight all the way in here, then heft it onto that table.’
‘Gee, Mr Detective, thanks for the tip.’
‘Glad to help.’
‘You don’t like her much, do you?’
‘Hey, I like her fine, except for the fact that she’s got a personality like ground glass.’
‘Huh. She never mentioned your outfit. I’d say that was a kindness.’
‘This is the deal. I’m thinking, How the hell did she move him? So I answer myself: Gee, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she shot him in here, and just said he was killed outside so we’d think we didn’t have a crime scene.’
Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘Interesting. Devious. I like the way you think.’
‘Thank you.’
Magozzi opened the door to go outside. ‘But she didn’t do it.’
‘Damnit, Leo, you don’t know that…’
‘Yeah. I do.’
5
Detective Aaron Langer had reached that point in life when you stopped hoping the next year would be better than the last, and just hoped that it wouldn’t be as bad.
That’s what happened when you hit middle age. Old people you loved got sick and died, young people you hated got promoted over you, the market crashed and took your retirement funds with it, and your body started to look like your father’s did when you used to think you would never, ever let yourself go like that. If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there’d be a rash of kindergarten suicides.
So far the job had gotten him through the worst of it. Even when his mother had been dying of Alzheimer’s, even when his 401(k) had run off to Brazil with his financial planner, the job had been his refuge, the one part of his life where the line between good and evil was clean and sharp, where he knew exactly what to do. Murder was evil. Catching murderers was good. Simple.
Or at least it had been, before the secret. Now the line he had walked for his whole life was horribly blurred, and he barely knew where to step. What he needed most was a good, clear-cut case of senseless homicide that would perversely make sense of the world again, and at last, it looked like he had one.
