The Guilty Dead

by P. J. Tracy

  “Oh, man. The poor woman. First she finds out her husband is dead, then that he’s probably been murdered. And she gets the third degree from two different counties in the process. This is going exactly the way I hoped it wouldn’t.”

  “ ‘Crime-scene tape rolled up by sunset.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

  Gino scowled. “I was being extremely sarcastic.”

  Magozzi’s cell rang again and he cussed before answering sharply, “Magozzi.”

  “Man, you sound pissed,” Jimmy Grimm said. “Is your better half around? I’m hoping he’s in a sunnier mood than you are.”

  “I doubt it, but I’ll put you on speaker and you can judge for yourself.” Magozzi did, and passed the phone to Gino.

  Gino leaned into the phone’s speaker. “Hey, Jimmy, give us some love.”

  “Are you guys really that desperate?”

  “Pretty much. Washington County found Gerald Stenson’s body in William O’Brien state park, dashed over some rocks on the bluffs. Our number-one witness isn’t talking, and probably wasn’t the second he left the Norwood property.”

  Jimmy paused for a moment, a brief silence for the dead. “I’m sorry to hear that, guys. I was hoping there would be one happy ending in this mess. Man, you two really bought a headache.”

  “Actually, it was free.”

  “Well, I’m probably not going to make it any better, but I can tell you some things you didn’t know. We finally found a slug buried in the woodwork in Norwood’s office and it matched with the Colt. There was a full load minus one in the weapon.”

  “We figured. What else?”

  “No foreplay? Jesus, you two are tough customers today. Okay, Norwood was definitely a homicide. The gun was wiped clean. Not a single print. In my humble professional opinion, dead men don’t wipe their guns, so start working up a short list of suspects.”

  “In the pantheon of stupid criminals, this has got to be right up there.”

  “Criminals are stupid. You guys are telling me so all the time. Probably the only reason two schlubs like you have such a great track record clearing cases. Listen, I have to run, but we’ll be in touch. Call if you need anything.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.” Magozzi hung up while Gino rested his forehead on the steering wheel with a tortured groan. “Are you passing out?”

  “I’m just thinking. Norwood is officially a homicide now and so is Gerald Stenson. Two homicides, twice as easy to solve, right?”

  Magozzi chewed his lower lip. “If there’s a personal connection between Stenson and Norwood, yeah, but I don’t see those two running in the same circles. I think you were right when you said Stenson surprised the killer. We’ve got to focus on the primary right now, which is Norwood and motive.”

  “It was personal. Crime of passion. There were no signs of struggle, so Norwood let whoever killed him into the house.”

  “Home invasion,” Magozzi parried. “His door was unlocked, his security system was disabled, and he was blind drunk. Anybody could have walked into the house. Norwood surprises him with his gun and the invader overtakes him, then shoots him.”

  “I still like crime of passion. Minerva Jones is out of the picture, but that doesn’t mean Norwood wasn’t getting extracurricular with somebody else.”

  “Distraught mistress realizes Gregory Norwood the Second isn’t going to ditch Betty after all. That’s your theory?”

  Gino lifted his head from the steering wheel and bristled defensively. “My theories are always intricate masterpieces of psychological insight and this one is currently in progress. We have a lot more legwork to do before I can start fleshing it out. Besides, I’m a flowchart kind of guy. I can’t think right without visual aids.”

  “Then let’s get up to the office with a whiteboard and markers and, while we’re at it, have a chat with Chief Malcherson about his friend.”

  Gino unclipped his seatbelt and reluctantly left the frigid cocoon of the sedan while he ran a potential dialogue. “Afternoon, Chief. We’d like to interview you, since you’re now a person of interest in the homicide of your buddy.”

  “I’m sure he’ll appreciate our devotion to the job.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  ROSALIE NORWOOD LET herself into her house and looked around at a space made chaotic by family heirlooms, artifacts gathered during a lifetime of global travel, and modern pieces her designer had used to stitch together what he had complimented as “a beautifully untidy amalgamation of meaningful possessions.”

  Or maybe it hadn’t been a compliment. Maybe he’d really been inwardly appalled by her insistence on displaying things like a dinged-up teak table with ivory inlays that her grandparents had gotten for her in Bali, or the Tibetan singing bowls Father had picked up in China. Probably more horrifying was the collection of Dala horses she’d been given by her host family while studying in Sweden, and most definitely the tarnished brass bells hanging by the fireplace, strung with fraying pink cord—a gift from Trey after he’d spent some time in India, probably to indulge in the heroin that came across the northern border from Pakistan.

  Hang this on a door, Rosie. It’ll warn you when evil spirits are coming.

  She dropped her handbag by the front door and walked into the living room. The last time she’d been there was a week ago. And so had Father and Mom and Uncle Robert, enjoying a cocktail before dinner. And now, just like that, one more person was erased from her mental photo album, just like Trey had been erased a year ago.

  She sat on a chair near the hearth and ran a finger down those bells. They emitted a harsh, unmelodious clang, but it was strangely comforting to her. “What happened to you, Trey? You were my perfect little brother until one day you weren’t. What happened?”

  He didn’t answer, of course. He never did.

  “Father? Daddy? What happened to you?”

  No answer from him either. No spirits lurking around, evil or otherwise.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and let herself succumb to a torrent of emotion. She might even have dozed off, because at some point she became aware that her eyes and cheeks were wet with tears and she didn’t remember crying.

  “Spirits, huh?” she muttered, grabbing the bells from their spot near the fireplace. They clanked obnoxiously as she walked them to the front door and hung them from a hook that had held a wreath last Christmas. “Maybe you’ll talk to me now.”

  As she positioned them just so, her cell phone rang, startling her out of what was probably a semi-psychotic state of grief: who else would talk to bells and dead people?

  “Hello?”

  “Rosalie, dear, where are you?”

  “I stopped at home to check on things. Is everything all right?”

  “Robert is here to sit with us. Louise was hoping to join him, but she’s been feeling unwell. Some kind of dreadful late-summer bug. Will you be coming soon?”

  “Yes, Mom. I’ll leave in a few minutes.” Rosalie hung up and thought about Louise Zeller—in her opinion a tortured soul if there ever was one. She wasn’t suffering from a late-summer bug and everybody knew it. The poor woman was suffering from crippling, bipolar depression and had been for as long as she’d known her, which was a very long time. Even as a little girl, she’d understood there was something different and sad about Louise.

  But things had gotten worse when Uncle Robert’s political ambitions had begun to take shape—for a very private woman, the prospect of being thrust into an even more public life than she already endured was probably torture. And Rosalie got it, even if nobody else did. There were a lot of times when she wished she could just hole up in her house and not talk to anybody for a month.

  She touched the bells again, and suddenly all the horrifying, speculative images she’d had of Trey in India revisited her memory: Trey left for dead on a filthy mattress in a festering slum, Trey getting killed on the border by a drug trafficker, Trey pushing a dirty needle into a vein and flooding his body with poison …

 
Rosalie shook away the awful visions. He’d made it home from India alive, thanks to Father …

  She froze and took a deep breath.

  I’ve hired a man, a private detective, who promised he would go to the ends of the earth to find Trey and bring him home.

  A private detective. One who’d succeeded in an almost impossible task. It would stand to reason that Father would trust him and hire him again. She punched redial on her phone and waited impatiently for her mother to answer. “What is it, dear?”

  “Do you remember when Trey went to India?”

  There was a long silence at the other end. “Yes, of course I do.”

  “And Father was so worried, we all were, and he hired a private detective to find him?”

  “Rosalie, what does this have to do with anything?”

  “Mom, do you remember his name?”

  “I … Really, this isn’t appropriate under the circumstances.”

  “It might be important, Mom. He might know something.”

  “Know something about what? Rosalie, are you feeling all right?”

  “I feel fine. Please, Mom, think.”

  She heard a sigh laden with anxiety. “The only thing I remember is that he had a strange name. Melchi or Malachai, something like that. Something that sounded Biblical.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you soon, Mom.” She hung up and found the card Detective Magozzi had given her.

  CHAPTER

  21

  CHIEF MALCHERSON’S TIE was still crooked when Gino and Magozzi walked into his office, which neither of them took as a good sign. Worse yet, there was a general aura of mayhem hanging like smog in his immaculate, spit-shined space. Magozzi had seen him endure varying degrees of stress over the years, but his stoic, unyielding armor of propriety and authority had always remained intact. Today was different. He was weathering a storm on two major fronts—a possible terror attack and a personal loss ‒ and seemed frayed to the limits of human endurance.

  Magozzi’s phone blatted in his pocket and he fumbled to silence it. It was Rosalie Norwood, but she was going to have to wait. “Sorry about that, sir.”

  He looked up at them with his scary ice-blue eyes and gestured for them to sit.

  “Sir, what’s the latest on the terror threat? We noticed men on the roof.”

  “We are and will remain on the highest state of alert for the foreseeable future. Our joint terrorism task force team and federal agents cleared the building and there is an overwhelming presence outside, including aerial surveillance. Every precaution is being taken.”

  Which didn’t always ensure a positive outcome, Magozzi thought cynically. Gino was right—none of them were ever going to feel the same way again. “That’s good to know, sir. It sounds like the interdepartmental response is working well.”

  “The task forces are. However, Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer and I have different approaches and vision for the future.”

  Gino nodded in commiseration. “Law enforcement versus government bureaucracy. I feel your pain, Chief. Shafer’s always been a monumental ‒”

  “We all have the same goal, to keep our city and our citizens safe,” Magozzi interrupted, before Gino could say something really stupid, like call Shafer a prick or an asshole in front of the chief. Although, given that the chief had actually called out Shafer in front of them, maybe he would have appreciated a little profanity.

  “Tell me about the Norwood investigation.” The chief changed the subject.

  Magozzi tried to ignore his phone, which was vibrating insistently in his jacket pocket. “Things just turned upside down. His death wasn’t a suicide, Chief.”

  “You think he was murdered?”

  Gino, perennially oblivious to charm, détente, protocol, or any other extraneous fluff held in high esteem by the civilized world, told him straight up. “No question about it. Got any ideas on who would want him dead? Because nobody else we’ve talked to does.”

  Gino’s inelegant comments earned him a deep scowl. “Are you absolutely certain?”

  “We just talked to Jimmy Grimm and evidence doesn’t lie. The gun and entry wound were both on Mr. Norwood’s right side, which made us suspicious from the get-go, but the capper is that the gun was wiped clean. We also found evidence of a recent assault on a photo-journalist by the swimming pool near his office. Washington County just found his body in William O’Brien state park.”

  What little was left of Malcherson’s stoicism degraded visibly.

  “His name was Gerald Stenson,” Magozzi added. “He was on assignment, staking out the Norwood home. We figure he was on the property when Mr. Norwood was shot and he surprised the killer.”

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “No, but there are some moving parts right now. Gerald Stenson is one of them. And Rosalie told us her father recently became obsessed with Trey’s death. He didn’t think it was an accident and he’d hired a private detective.”

  Malcherson frowned. “He certainly didn’t mention anything of that nature to me.”

  “Rosalie said he was secretive about it.”

  Malcherson swiveled his chair and briefly contemplated the view of the street outside his window. “Murder seems impossible. Gregory was beloved. He had no enemies.”

  “From the get-go, the Norwoods believed he was murdered. They were adamant about it.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “They wouldn’t accept that he would take his own life. Turns out they were right, but they had no suspicions or ideas about a possible killer.”

  “Suicide made horrible sense to me.”

  “Mr. Zeller thought suicide fit, too,” Gino said.

  “If you were in Gregory’s inner circle, you knew how tormented by grief and regret he was. You also knew he would try to keep the extent of his agony from his family.” He looked at his watch and finally straightened his tie. “I have a meeting with the mayor in ten minutes, but I want to see detailed reports as soon as possible. Keep me informed of any new developments. Now, go find your killer, Detectives.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  MAGOZZI WAS DEEP into the tedium of crafting a preliminary report while Gino worked his computer, sucking down an unnaturally green energy drink, like it was the water of life.

  “Malachai Dubnik,” he finally said, victorious, pushing away from his desk. “Now that’s a name for the record books. No real on-line presence, except for threads that mention him as part of bigger news stories. Left Hollywood Robbery-Homicide ten years ago and he’s been operating as a PI in Los Angeles ever since. He’s the go-to guy for the rich and famous. He’d be a top pick for Norwood, for sure, and like Rosalie said, if he hired him once and he got the job done, he’d hire him again.”

  Magozzi dragged a hand through his hair, which reminded him he was supposed to have it cut today. “Get him on the phone.”

  “Dubnik doesn’t advertise, referrals only, so we’ll have to hunt him down. I guess he’s so successful he can afford to be a pain in the ass.”

  “Referrals only, huh? This guy is going to be a real prick.”

  * * *

  Malachai Dubnik wasn’t a prick. On the contrary, he was polite, cooperative, and expressed sadness over the death of Gregory Norwood. Whether the origin was genuine sorrow or grief over hearing that one of his paying customers was on a slab, so that particular gravy train had hit the end of the tracks, Magozzi didn’t know.

  “I’ll help in any way I can, Detectives. What do you need?”

  “Can you send us your files?”

  “I can do better than that. I’m in Minneapolis right now, following up on a couple leads for Norwood. Well, I was. If you want to meet up, I’ll pass the baton to you.” He paused for a moment. “Gregory Norwood was a fine man. Not the kind of guy I’d expect to have a target on his back. Rich people usually have more true enemies than true friends, and they can be a real pain to handle. They don’t like to pay their bills and they make unrealistic demands. Nor
wood wasn’t like that. I hope my files can help you out.”

  Gino leaned into the phone. “Hollywood Robbery-Homicide is pretty elite. Why did you leave?”

  “It wasn’t voluntary, but fortunes can turn on a dime, right? I pissed the wrong people off, simple as that. But then I found out there was life after HRH, and the sky’s the limit as far as pay grade. If you two ever want to jump, call me anytime. Business is always booming in Lotus Land.”

  They arranged to meet Dubnik later at his hotel—ironically, it was the Chatham, the one where Betty and Rosalie Norwood were staying. His choice of lodging supported his reputation as PI to the rich and famous, the generous expense account and remuneration for services that went along with it. Dubnik hadn’t been lying when he’d said the sky’s the limit as far as pay grade.

  After the call with Dubnik, Magozzi refocused on his report, until Detective Johnny McLaren interrupted, breezing into the office wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, a golf shirt, and a big smile. His spiky red hair clashed with the orange plaid shorts, and the blue shirt was another fashion misstep, but the smile was nice.

  Gino gave him a critical once-over. “Please tell me you’re on vacation.”

  “You know I’m on vacation as of yesterday at five p.m. Damn lucky, too. I was next on the roster and, man, did I miss a shit storm by the skin of my teeth. First Norwood, now the terror scare.”

  “How’d you hear about the terror thing so fast?”

  McLaren rolled his eyes. “Freedman. His fearsome visage may strike fear in the hearts of all who gaze upon him, but he’s as gossipy as a clique of teenage girls.”

  Eaton Freedman was Johnny’s new homicide partner. He looked like an African American Incredible Hulk at six-five, carrying about two hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle, but he was known to have a soft, caramel center. As unlikely as the pairing was—a scrappy little Irishman with a scary photographic memory and an intimidating street sergeant turned detective, McLaren and Freedman had formed a strong bond and working relationship straight out of the gate. It didn’t surprise Magozzi that Freedman would keep him in the loop. “Probably wanted to save your hide. You’re kind of his mentor.”