Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  Malcherson froze in the middle of taking off his suit jacket and closed his eyes. ‘Not exactly the kind of image I was hoping to project, Rolseth.’

  ‘I meant it in a good way.’

  ‘That’s the frightening part.’ Malcherson settled behind his desk and tapped one manicured finger on a stack of two bright red file folders. He always kept his copies of open homicides in red folders, probably because this ultraconservative man found the color almost as offensive as the crime. Magozzi hadn’t seen one on his boss’s desk in over four months. ‘The media would like to know why our senior citizens are being tortured and murdered.’

  Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Someone actually said that?’

  ‘An intern from Channel Ten.’ Malcherson waved a pink phone message slip.

  Gino snorted. ‘That is such bullshit. This is what happens when you do your job and you don’t have a homicide for a while. The minute two guys get offed in one night some idiot in the media tries to scare the hell out of the city by talking spree, or serial killer, or some such Hollywood crap. Besides, only one of them was tortured, and it wasn’t ours. Morey Gilbert was dead before he hit the ground, and he didn’t have a mark on him except for that one little bullet hole.’

  ‘So there’s no reason at all to suspect a connection between the two murders.’

  Magozzi shrugged. ‘If there is one, we can’t see it yet. They were both old, they lived in the same neighborhood. That’s about it. Arlen Fischer’s name didn’t ring any bells with the Gilbert family or employees; neither did his description, and I’m guessing they’d remember a three-hundred-pound ninety-year-old man.’

  ‘Good. We can quash the serial rumor, then. We’re going to get enough pressure on the Gilbert murder the way it is. The desk logged over three hundred calls last night and this morning.’

  Magozzi raised his brows. The number was unreal. Twenty calls on a case were enough to make the brass nervous; three hundred could break careers. ‘On Gilbert, or the train track guy?’

  ‘The “train track guy” has a name,’ Malcherson admonished him. ‘Arlen Fischer. Most of the calls on that case were from the media, and the stack is pretty slim compared to Gilbert’s, which is amazing when you consider the horrendous nature of Fischer’s murder. So what I’d like to know, gentlemen, is who on earth was this man?’

  Gino shook his finger at the ceiling. ‘That’s exactly what I asked when I saw all those people outside the nursery yesterday. Of course, I said it a little more colorfully.’

  ‘I’m sure. I saw a flash of that crowd on the news last night. Just a flash – there didn’t seem to be a lot of media interest, until they did a little research on the man. Now Channel Three is putting together a documentary, and you know what they’re going to call it? Saint Gilbert of Uptown.’

  Gino chuckled. ‘Oh, that’s rich. McLaren told us Morey Gilbert was putting the screws to him once about why Jews couldn’t be saints, and now here you go; they finally slap the label on the very Jew asking the question, and he’s not around to enjoy it.’

  ‘I’m quite certain the designation is secular, absolutely not Catholic, but real or imagined, the Minneapolis Police Department should not allow saints to be murdered. That was the gist of most of the calls. Frankly, I found it a little embarrassing that I knew nothing about a man who had done so much for others, especially when he was the father-in-law of one of our own.’

  Gino slid down in his chair and laced his hands across his stomach. ‘Yeah, well, Marty Pullman was never much of a talker. Kept his family life close to the vest. But from what we’ve heard so far, Morey Gilbert was a one-man charity. Helped more people than you can shake a stick at, and if that’s not saintlike, I don’t know what is. Trouble is, that doesn’t make him a real likely candidate for murder.’

  Malcherson turned his eyes on Gino. ‘I read your Q & A with Detective Pullman. How was he?’

  ‘He looked like hell, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t put it in the report, but he pretty much fessed up to being on a toot since the day he walked out of here last year. Couldn’t even remember where he was the night his father-in-law was killed. Said he woke up on the kitchen floor holding an empty bottle, and that’s all he knows.’

  ‘You didn’t seriously suspect him.’

  ‘Marty? Jeez, no. But I had to ask. We gotta look at the family, and he knows that. Funny thing is, his brother-in-law? Jack Gilbert? First off, he hasn’t been on speaking terms with his folks for who knows how long – seems he married a Lutheran instead of a nice Jewish girl, which I’m guessing didn’t go over too well – so that’s interesting. And the night his dad bought it he was running the same deal as Marty, only in a better part of town. Got himself looped up at the Wayzata Country Club, woke up in his driveway next morning, and the people at the club say it’s almost an every-night thing. It’s like that whole damn family fell to pieces when Hannah got killed.’

  Chief Malcherson looked down at his hands, and for a moment, no one said anything.

  Even after a year, the mention of Hannah Pullman’s murder still had the power to stop any conversation in this building. Random violence was not unknown in Minneapolis, particularly in those few neighborhoods where gangs clung to a tenuous foothold and innocent bystanders were occasionally caught in the crossfire – but it was a rare thing, and always set the city on its ear. But the murder of an officer’s spouse had multipled the shock value a thousandfold, and everyone on the force had been deeply affected.

  Sometimes cops were killed; that went with the job; but that risk was absolutely not supposed to extend to their families. The murder of Detective Martin Pullman’s wife had been a gut-wrenching wake-up call for every one of them, because Marty had been carrying, standing right next to Hannah when her throat had been cut, and still, he hadn’t been able to protect her. It made them all think of their families as a little more vulnerable, made them all feel a little more helpless, and the sad truth was, a lot of them resented Marty for that.

  Why didn’t he shoot the bastard when he had the chance?

  Magozzi had heard that question around City Hall a hundred times in the months afterwards, and it always made him feel bad, especially when Gino said it.

  ‘Did either of you know Hannah?’ Chief Malcherson was asking.

  Magozzi shook his head. ‘Just to say “hi” to in the hall. She used to pick Marty up sometimes.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about Mrs Gilbert. Her daughter, and then her husband, both murdered within the space of a year. I don’t know how you survive something like that.’

  ‘Well, don’t get all touchy-feely about the old lady just yet,’ Gino said. ‘She didn’t have an alibi either.’

  ‘Gino didn’t care much for Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi explained.

  ‘What I didn’t care for was that she trashed a crime scene, she didn’t seem all that broken up that her husband was dead, and she’s got this attitude.’

  Malcherson frowned at him. ‘What kind of an attitude?’

  ‘Pretty hostile, if you ask me. We’re just doing our job, trying to find out who killed her husband, so I ask her a couple of questions and she’s all over me.’

  Malcherson slid a weary gaze over to Magozzi for a translation.

  ‘Gino asked if Mr Gilbert had had any “unusual business dealings,” and she took offense.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She actually snapped at him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Malcherson looked back at Gino, and for one fearful moment, Magozzi was afraid the chief might actually smile. ‘In summary, then, you questioned her late husband’s integrity, and her response was less gracious than you thought you deserved.’

  Gino started to blush, and his head seemed to be sinking into his neck. ‘You kind of had to be there.’

  ‘I’m very sorry she hurt your feelings, Detective Rolseth.’

  Magozzi wiped his hand across a smile, and Gino saw it.

  ‘Aw, come on, Leo, it was a whole lot more than that and you know
it. There’s something going on with that old lady. Forget that she didn’t shed a tear and she’s got a mouth like a whip. Did she fall to pieces when she found her husband dead? No. She gets him into a wheelbarrow – a wheelbarrow, for God’s sake – pushes him around, flops him on a plant table, then washes him with a garden hose and dresses him up for company. This is not your average grieving widow, and if we get caught up in that scenario, we close our eyes to the possibility that she might also be a killer who did her damnedest to destroy evidence.’

  Malcherson leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘You interviewed her, Detective Magozzi, and you listed her as a nonsuspect in your report.’

  ‘I’ll stand by that, at least for now,’ he said, but he was frowning, thinking about Gino’s image of events – Lily Gilbert dragging her husband around like a sack of grain – and his own picture of a distraught, elderly woman struggling to get her husband out of the rain, to make him ‘presentable.’ Either one worked; he just wasn’t a hundred percent sure which one was accurate, and in the long run, it might make a whole lot of difference. ‘But like Gino said, I agree that there’s something there. She’s a tough lady, and she’s pretty closed off. Could be she knows more than she wants to let on. Could be she’s protecting someone. I just don’t know yet.’

  Gino brightened immediately. ‘Hey, I like that. Maybe she’s covering up for that sleazebag son of hers. Sure, she hates his guts, but she’s got that maternal thing going. So picture this. Jack Gilbert at the club, sucking up scotch like a Wet-Vac. Pretty soon he starts ruminating about his life and the appalling state of his familial ties, and he gets a little maudlin. The old man isn’t getting any younger, and Jack’s thinking maybe it’s finally time to patch things up. So when he gets kicked out at bar time, he decides to pay him a visit and bury the hatchet once and for all. But things don’t go so well, and next thing he knows, his father is dead and he’s holding a smoking gun.’

  Malcherson raised one white brow. He was used to Gino’s off-the-cuff theories. ‘I don’t suppose you found any actual evidence that led to that postulation.’

  ‘Not a scrap,’ Gino said happily. ‘Just came up with it this minute.’

  ‘Does Jack Gilbert have a history?’

  Gino shook his head. ‘Nah. Just a couple DUIs and some speeding tickets. No gun registered in his name or his wife’s name. But that doesn’t mean anything. And he’s a PI attorney,’ he added, apropos of nothing.

  ‘So give me a quick summary of the time line.’

  Magozzi shuffled through his dog-eared mess of frayed spiral notebook paper. ‘Same routine as always, according to Mrs Gilbert – she went to bed right after the news, and Morey stayed up to do some paperwork and a few extra chores in the greenhouse. She said he usually turned in around midnight, but she can’t confirm that on the night of his death.’

  Malcherson frowned his question.

  ‘They had separate bedrooms, sir. She said she slept straight through the night and woke up at six-thirty A.M. as usual. Found him outside the greenhouse shortly after that. But the ME estimates time of death to be between two and four A.M.’

  Malcherson’s brows shot up. ‘A little late for an elderly man to be outside gardening.’

  Magozzi nodded. ‘That’s what we thought, sir. Either something kept Morey Gilbert up and outside past his bedtime, or something brought him out there later.’

  ‘Or someone, like maybe his son,’ Gino pushed his latest pet theory. ‘Or if you don’t like the son, how about the wife? I could go either way.’

  Malcherson gave him one of those long-suffering looks you see on the faces of parents confronting a problem child for the hundreth time. ‘Your empathy for grieving relatives gives me hope for mankind, Detective Rolseth.’

  ‘The thing is I’m not seeing a lot of grieving from that quarter, Chief. You give me grieving, I’ll give you empathy.’

  ‘What it boils down to,’ Magozzi interjected, ‘is that we have to find out a whole lot more about Morey Gilbert, see if anything points us in a different direction. Seems unlikely at this point that he made a lot of enemies, but obviously he made one, and no one we’ve talked to so far will even admit that’s possible – including Langer and McLaren, who got to know him pretty well when they were investigating Hannah’s murder. He had some close friends – the funeral director, for one – and we’ll talk to him again.’

  The red light on Malcherson’s desk phone started flashing.

  ‘Probably another reporter,’ Gino said. ‘Want me to take it?’

  Malcherson almost smiled. ‘Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen. Don’t go anywhere.’

  He picked up, listened for a few moments, then took a pristine legal tablet from his center desk drawer and laid it carefully on his leather blotter. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of these brand-new tablets – Magozzi had never seen him use one that looked even remotely used, and he often wondered if the chief had a closetful of tablets he’d discarded because they were missing the first sheet.

  He and Gino watched with growing apprehension as Malcherson scribbled away with his Montblanc. Benign phone calls did not require copious note taking.

  ‘This is not good news,’ Malcherson said when he finally hung up. ‘Officer Viegs just called in, responding to an elderly woman found shot to death in her home this morning.’ He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Magozzi.

  ‘Same neighborhood?’ Gino asked.

  ‘Good guess, Detective Rolseth.’ Malcherson looked down at his tablet – the second page was marred with pen impressions, sullied by the details of a murder. One more for the closet.

  11

  Magozzi and Gino pulled up in front of a tidy little rambler with gleaming white shutters and a cheery, robin’s-egg blue paint job that made Magozzi instantly sad. Houses like this weren’t supposed to have ugly yellow crime-scene tape clashing with the color scheme.

  The yard did nothing to alleviate his melancholy. It was filled with meticulously prepared flower beds that would probably be weed choked and forgotten within the week, and the sort of kitschy lawn ornaments only a grandmother could get away with. There were birdbaths encrusted with playing marbles, resin frogs with foggy, rhinestone eyes, and smiling troll statues that wore brocade coats of colorful, broken glass. One of the trolls held a painted plaque that read GRANDMA’S GARDEN.

  Gino stared at that troll for a long time, then finally turned away.

  Officer Viegs was waiting in the sun near the front door, little droplets of sweat sparkling between his hair plugs.

  ‘Viegs, you show up at any more murder scenes, we’re going to have to put you on the suspect list,’ Magozzi said.

  ‘Detective, you get any more murders like this on my beat, I’m going to be taking some time off to move my mom someplace safe, like the Bronx. She lives in the senior condos just off Lake, and she and her neighbors were ready to pack up after the two yesterday. This one is going to send them over the edge, and I can’t say I blame them.’

  ‘I hear you. But for what it’s worth, nothing we’ve got so far pulls those two together.’

  Viegs raised his brows, and all his hair plugs moved. ‘Except that now we’ve got three, they were all old, they all lived in this neighborhood, and they were all shot.’

  ‘Yeah. There is that. What do you have for us?’

  Viegs sighed and pulled out his notebook. ‘Rose Kleber, with a K. Seventy-eight, widow, lived alone. Two shots, one to the stomach, one to the chest, no obvious signs of burglary or sexual assault. Her two granddaughters were home from college on spring break, came over to surprise her this morning, found the back door open and their grandmother dead inside. They called nine-one-one, then their mom.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘They were all pretty messed up, so I had Berman drive them home after we got their statements. Nothing much there, though. I mean, she was an old lady. She gardened, she went to the senior center, she baked cookies, for chrissake… well, shit. Sure took them long enough.�
��

  Gino followed his gaze to see the Channel Ten van pulling up to the curb. ‘A fuel tanker rolled on 494 about an hour ago. Every reporter in town was standing around with the cameras running, waiting for the damn thing to blow up. Guess it didn’t. Put up a wall and play dumb, will you, Viegs?’

  ‘Sure. You might want to go in the back door. Jimmy’s crew is working the front room.’

  Just inside the back door, Magozzi and Gino ran into Jimmy Grimm, whose expression was as solemn as they’d ever seen it.

  ‘Hey, guys. Long time, no see.’

  Magozzi clapped him on the back. ‘And we liked it that way.’

  Gino brightened a little, grateful for the distraction. ‘Hey, Jimmy. I thought you were going to retire.’

  ‘Yeah, right. You obviously haven’t looked at your pension fund lately.’

  Magozzi nodded toward the fistful of evidence bags he was clutching. ‘Got anything for us?’

  His shoulders seemed to slump under the weight of a question with no good answer. ‘Not much. No brass. Some dirt, probably from the gardens here, plenty of cat hair, and one 9-mm slug we found drilled into the couch cushion. That was a through-and-through; the other one’s probably still inside the victim. Looks like she took it in the stomach first. But how the hell you could miss a kill shot at close range is beyond me.’

  ‘Maybe he planned it that way.’

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘Then the bastard is a real sadist.’

  ‘Viegs said there was no forced entry, no robbery.’

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Her purse was out in plain view with a wad of cash in it, and we’ve got no jimmy marks anywhere. She either let him in, or the door was open and he let himself in.’

  ‘Or maybe he had a key, or knew where she kept a key,’ Gino added, making a note to check on repairmen, lawn service, anybody who might have had access.

  Jimmy nodded. ‘Could be. By the way, the TV was on when we got here, but I turned it off after we dusted.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘Jerry Springer was on, and there was something obscene about listening to him while we were working this scene. Anyhow, I just turned her over to Anant, if you want to take a look before he moves her. I think he’s waiting for you.’