Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘I heard a couple of people talking about that on the way out of the cemetery. Sounds like she’s going to file on him any day, if she hasn’t already. No love lost there.’

  Magozzi set his jaw. ‘She still should have come. It would have been the decent thing to do.’

  Gino turned sideways to look at him. ‘Come on, Leo. Jack Gilbert is a drunken asshole. You reap what you sow, and all that, so stop feeling sorry for him.’

  ‘I only do it from a distance. When I get closer, I hate his guts.’

  ‘There’s the partner I know and love.’

  ‘But it’s the chicken-and-egg thing.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Well, you have to wonder, is he a drunken asshole because he’s been ostracized, or was he ostracized because he’s a drunken asshole?’

  Gino blew out an exasperated sigh. ‘I pick door number two. Can we go in now?’

  Magozzi balked. ‘Maybe we should wait a few more minutes before we barge in. Just to be respectful.’

  ‘We’ve been plenty respectful, Leo. It’s not like we’re the first ones here, standing at the door with tape recorders and rubber hoses. Besides, in a crowd this size no one’s going to notice a couple of extra extremely handsome guys in spiffy funeral suits.’

  Within fifteen minutes, Magozzi was questioning the wisdom of attending this reception, even though the reasoning had been sound. The theory was that no one, not even Morey Gilbert, was a hundred percent good, and there was no way a man could live eighty-four years without pissing somebody off. They were hoping that if they listened closely to the people who knew him, they might get a hint of something about the dead man they hadn’t heard yet; something worth looking at.

  But so far all Magozzi had heard were even more weeping testimonials – if the man hadn’t been a saint, he had been damn close, and it was starting to annoy him. Morey Gilbert had given away whatever he had to give – time, money, counseling, food, lodging – and he hadn’t only helped the people he’d stumbled upon – he’d gone out looking for them. It was just plain unnatural.

  Suddenly, a whirl of motion from across the room caught his eye. Jack Gilbert was careening from guest to guest like a poorly aimed pinball, obliterating any sympathy Magozzi had felt for him earlier, advertising himself as the single most obvious failure of Morey Gilbert’s good intentions.

  Magozzi followed Jack with his eyes, thinking hard. It felt like his brain was bobbling over a series of speed bumps.

  He found Gino loading up his second plate from a buffet table that exceeded even his wildest food fantasies.

  ‘Is this great, or what?’ Gino said gleefully. ‘You gotta try the noodle stuff with the raisins.’ He popped a cocktail meatball into his mouth. ‘So, did you get anything interesting?’

  ‘I think we’ve got to look harder at Jack Gilbert.’

  Gino raised an eyebrow, which was the only movement possible with his mouth as full as it was.

  ‘He’s the one and only crack in Morey Gilbert’s halo, Gino.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s a wuss. And a drunk. And neither one of us got feelings from him.’

  ‘That’s just the thing – we considered him as a suspect, and when we didn’t like that, we quit thinking about him. But what if he’s the connection? What if something he was into got his father killed?’

  Gino popped another meatball, decided he could indeed talk around it. ‘What did Jack do?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know…’

  ‘No, no, that’s what Langer and McLaren said, remember? When they were talking about Morey pushing Jack away at Hannah’s funeral? So maybe he got involved in something really bad, way below Morey Gilbert’s moral radar, and maybe the old man actually tried to get him out of it, and got popped for his trouble. He said himself there were people who wanted him dead. Maybe he really meant it. But how does Rose Kleber fit in?’

  Magozzi used a toothpick with cellophane frills on the top to stab a meatball on Gino’s plate. ‘I’ve got a new plan. One murder at a time. If Rose Kleber is connected, it’ll show up eventually. So let’s talk to Jack’s mystery wife, maybe check out his office books, take a look at the kind of people he’s been representing, that sort of thing.’

  Gino nodded thoughtfully. ‘You might have something there.’ He sidled a little closer and spoke under his meatball breath. ‘Besides, I’m getting a little sick of standing around listening to people talk about what a great guy Morey Gilbert was. Two weeks ago I gave twenty bucks to the Humane Society and felt like Mr Charity. Now Morey Gilbert’s making me look like a dirtbag. You know that Jeff Montgomery kid who works at the nursery? Well, turns out his folks were killed in a car wreck right after he started at the U, so Gilbert’s been paying his tuition. Can you believe that?’

  ‘No wonder the kid’s been crying for the past two days.’ Magozzi glanced over Gino’s shoulder and saw Lily approaching in her long, black funeral dress. Marty was at her side, as he had been all day, picking up the slack for her useless son. Magozzi gave him a lot of credit for that.

  Lily stopped and looked pointedly at Magozzi’s empty hands, then nodded her approval at Gino’s obscenely stacked plate of food. ‘You have a good appetite, Detective.’

  ‘This food is amazing, Mrs Gilbert. Somebody told me you cooked most of it yourself.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then I think you should get rid of the nursery and open a restaurant.’

  She didn’t smile exactly, but it was obvious from the slight shift in her expression that even she wasn’t immune to a compliment. ‘I saw the picture of that woman who was murdered in the paper this morning.’

  ‘Rose Kleber,’ Magozzi said.

  ‘Anyway, I thought I should tell you, her face looked a little familiar, so she might have come in a couple times, but she wasn’t a regular. Regulars, I remember.’

  ‘Lily?’ Sol Biederman came up behind her and interrupted tentatively. ‘Have you seen Ben?’

  ‘Ben who?’

  ‘Come on, Lily. Ben Schuler.’ Sol was obviously worried, but a little impatient, too. ‘He wasn’t at the funeral, and if he’s not here, something’s wrong. His heart isn’t so good, you know, and he’s not answering his phone.’

  ‘He’s not here because he’s not welcome in my house and he knows it,’ Lily said sharply.

  Sol’s smile was gentle as he touched her hand. ‘Frightening as you are, Lily, even you couldn’t stop him from coming to his old friend’s memorial. I’m going to drive over there, just to set my mind at ease, but I won’t be long.’

  ‘If he’s not dead, tell him he’s still not welcome in my house,’ Lily said. She turned on her heel, saw Jack moving toward her, then turned and walked in the opposite direction.

  Gino let out a low whistle as soon as Sol and Lily had gone their separate ways. ‘Remind me never to get on that woman’s short list. What’s she got against this Ben guy?’

  Marty shrugged. ‘You never know with Lily. Excuse me, guys. I should get back to her.’

  ‘She’s got about fifty people around her right now, Marty,’ Gino said. ‘Cut yourself some slack and take a few minutes. I just saw a meatball with your name on it.’

  It was tough to watch one of your own going down, Magozzi thought. Gino knocked himself out trying to engage Marty in conversation, and because Marty was a polite man, he tried hard to pretend to be interested in what Gino was saying. But the pretense part was painfully obvious, and after about ten minutes, Magozzi began to feel like they were torturing the guy.

  ‘We should get going, Gino,’ he said, but at that moment, Jack Gilbert came stumbling up, sloshing a drink almost as red as his face down the front of his white oxford. He draped his arm over Marty’s shoulder. ‘Hey, guys! What a turnout, huh?’ He gestured around the room with his drink, spraying an arc of punch. ‘You’d think the fucking Pope died.’

  With a suddenness that surprised everyone, Marty spun toward Jack, dislodging the offending arm from his shoulder, and snatched away
Jack’s drink. For a minute, Magozzi thought he saw a trace of the old Gorilla. ‘Don’t push it, Jack. Not today.’

  Jack stumbled backward and almost lost his balance. ‘Jeez, no offense, Marty. You gotta chill. You want a drink?’

  A heavyset woman with maroon hair approached and handed Marty a portable phone. ‘Somebody’s calling for you.’ When Marty took the phone and stepped away, she moved in on Jack. ‘Jack Gilbert, look at you, sloshing around, spilling drinks, offending people… how could you do this to your mother?’

  Jack’s head wobbled on his neck a little as he tried to bring the woman into focus. ‘Jesus, Sheila, is that you? You look like Dennis Rodman. What the fuck happened to your hair?’

  She narrowed her eyes and leaned close to him. ‘Farshtinkener paskudnyak,’ she hissed, then stormed away.

  Gino’s eyes were wide open. He didn’t know what the woman had called him, but he was absolutely sure Jack had deserved it. ‘You know what, Mr Gilbert? You might want to think about reeling it in a little bit. Sit down on the couch over there, maybe get a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Well, that’s a hell of an idea, Detective, but you see, I just poured my best bottle of bourbon in the punch bowl and there’s this Jewish tradition that says if you pour alcohol at a funeral, you have to drink it all or it dishonors the dead.’

  Gino stared at him for a minute. He was pretty sure he was full of shit, but you never knew with religion. I mean, who would believe the Catholics smear ashes on people’s foreheads?

  ‘He was kidding, Gino,’ Magozzi said.

  ‘I knew that. Let’s get out of here.’

  He and Magozzi started to shoulder past Jack when Marty’s hand shot out and grabbed Gino’s arm. Still a lot of strength in that hand, Gino was thinking as Marty held him fast, murmuring a low reassurance of some kind into the phone before pulling it away from his ear and pushing disconnect. ‘Thought you might want to hear this,’ he said very quietly, looking around to make sure none of the guests were close enough to overhear him. ‘That was Sol. Ben Schuler’s been shot.’

  Magozzi’s face tightened. ‘Dead?’

  Marty nodded grimly.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ Jack said much too loudly, bumbling in a little closer.

  ‘Keep it down, Jack,’ Marty told him. ‘It’s Ben Schuler.’

  ‘No shit? Poor old bastard. What was it, heart attack?’

  Marty hesitated, maybe in a remnant of every cop’s reluctance to share information with a non-cop. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘He was shot. Once in the head. Just like Morey.’

  With those few words, Jack Gilbert became frighteningly sober, and every drop of blood drained from his drunken, red face. ‘Suicide?’

  Marty shook his head.

  Jack Gilbert got a strange look on his face then – one that Magozzi had only seen a few times in his life – a look of genuine fear. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.

  ‘Did you know him?’ Gino asked.

  Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. I knew him.’ And then he turned and walked away in a perfectly straight line.

  Marty found him a few moments later standing over the kitchen table, staring down at the picture of Rose Kleber in the morning paper. His whole body was shaking.

  20

  There were a lot of neighborhoods in Minneapolis that had once been moderately fashionable, until freeways started taking big bites out of the city’s real estate. Ben Schuler’s house was in one of these, perched on a hill where hundred-year-old elms used to shade a boulevard the city had filled with flowers every spring. Dutch elm disease had taken most of the trees within the past twenty years, a new freeway ramp system had taken the rest, and now the locals had little to look at except the six lanes of traffic at the bottom of the hill. Magozzi and Gino could hear the roar of an eighteen-wheeler shifting on an upgrade the minute they got out of the car.

  ‘Used to be nicer up here,’ Magozzi said, looking at a long crack in the stucco of Ben Schuler’s house; the sagging porch of the two-story brick next door. ‘My great aunt had a big old Victorian a few blocks over.’

  ‘Then why the hell did it take you so long to find it?’ Gino grumped, peeling off his suit coat and tie and draping them over the seat.

  ‘Haven’t been up here in years. We only came a couple of times, when I was about six or seven. She was a scary old broad. Never met a person she liked, according to my folks, and that included family. Refused to speak English, and my dad refused to speak Italian, just to piss her off. Last time we came she slapped me right across the face for picking up my fork before she said grace.’

  Gino’s mouth tightened into an unforgiving line. Striking a child was one of the few things utterly beyond his comprehension. ‘Goddamnit, I hate that. I hope your dad slugged her.’

  ‘My dad wouldn’t raise a hand to a woman if she was flaying him alive.’ Magozzi smiled a little, remembering. ‘My mom decked her, though.’

  Gino grinned and blew a kiss eastward toward St Paul, where Magozzi’s parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. ‘I always did like your mother.’

  ‘And she likes you. Are you going to take off all your clothes, or can we go in now?’

  ‘You know what it costs to get a suit dry-cleaned?’

  Magozzi shook his head. ‘Never paid attention.’

  ‘Boy, sometimes I hate single people. I just paid a pretty penny to get this thing cleaned, and I sure as hell don’t want it smelling like a murder house.’

  ‘You’re still wearing your pants.’

  ‘Yeah, well I can’t figure a way around that.’ He slammed the car door and they headed up the drive.

  ‘Looks like Anant and the BCA boys beat us here.’

  ‘Small wonder.’ Gino glanced at the ugly ME wagon in the drive, and the BCA van snugged up behind it. ‘GPS in both those vehicles, and we don’t even get a working air conditioner. There is no justice in this world.’

  Jimmy Grimm met Magozzi and Gino at the back door of Ben Schuler’s house. ‘You gotta stop this guy,’ were the first words out of his mouth.

  ‘Gee, good idea, Jimmy,’ Gino said. ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’

  Jimmy stepped aside to let Gino pass into the small kitchen. ‘What got his nose out of joint?’ he asked Magozzi.

  ‘The high cost of dry cleaning, mostly. Also, you have a GPS and we don’t.’ Magozzi’s eyes strayed to a crayon drawing on the refrigerator door. He had no clue what it was, but obviously no one had stifled the kid’s creativity yet, because the colors were good. ‘How bad is it in there?’ He tipped his head toward a hallway he assumed led to the bedroom.

  Jimmy puffed his cheeks and unsnapped the collar of his white clean suit. ‘We’ve got a minimum of gore and a maximum of pathetic. Anant’s really getting bummed out. He’s got this reverence-for-the-aged business going, which doesn’t help. Is that a Hindu thing?’

  ‘That’s a decency thing,’ Gino said.

  ‘Well, whatever it is, I think it’s cumulative, and I’m telling you, this creep popping old people is even getting to me. I walk into these houses and look around at pictures of grandkids and prescription bottles and Medicare bills and things like that, and I see my folks’ place, you know? I mean, these people are at the end of their lives, just trying to get by… it just doesn’t make any sense. And this one is the worst yet.’

  Gino was shaking his head. ‘Can’t be worse than Rose Kleber. I see that GRANDMA’S GARDEN sign in my dreams; that, and the plate of cookies she’d just baked for her granddaughters.’

  Jimmy looked at him for a minute. ‘I think he took one of those cookies.’

  Magozzi’s brows shots up. ‘I didn’t read that in the report.’

  ‘I didn’t put it in. It was supposition, pure and simple. Inadmissible. No evidentiary value. She just had them arranged so neatly on that plate, covered up with plastic, but it was lifted on one side, and there was this space where a cookie should have been. It was just a mental picture I got, that bastard killing an old lady,
then helping himself to a cookie she’d baked on the way out.’ He tried for a weak smile. ‘That’s what really gets you after a while, you know? The mental pictures that stay with you. And this one is a zinger. Ben Schuler knew what was coming, and he was scared out of his mind. Looks like the killer might have played with him a while; maybe chased him around, maybe talked to him, I don’t know. But the poor old man crawled all over the damn bedroom trying to get away, and that’s the picture I’m taking away from this house.’

  Gino was scowling at him, working hard at erasing the picture Jimmy Grimm had just put in his mind. He’d get his own picture when he looked at the scene, and the trick was, you saw this stuff, you sorted out the details that would help the investigation, and then you forgot the rest. If you spent too much time dwelling on images of whimpering, scared old men crawling away from a killer, it pushed you down, turned you to mush, and then you couldn’t do the job. And Grimm knew that, damnit. ‘Jeez, Grimm, you’re starting to sound like a chick flick. You bucking for meter maid, or what?’

  ‘Right now that doesn’t sound half bad.’ He headed down the hallway. ‘Stay right behind me. We’ve got an entry cleared, but that’s about all we’ve had time for so far. Anant wants you to get a look at the scene before we start taking photos and dusting and bagging.’

  Aging floorboards creaked beneath their feet as they walked past an enormous collection of black-and-white family photographs that had to be at least fifty years old. Halfway down the hall Magozzi and Gino both stopped and looked back at the pictures they’d passed, then forward at the ones ahead.

  Jimmy glanced back over his shoulder. ‘What’s the holdup? You’re not touching anything, are you?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re dragging our hands down the wall, smearing fingerprints,’ Gino grumbled irritably. ‘Jeez, Grimm, ease up a little. What’s the deal with these photos? This is the weirdest thing I ever saw.’