by PJ Tracy
‘Matson, sir.’
‘Either of you remember a woman named Rose Kleber shopping here at the nursery?’ Gino asked.
The boys thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘We help out a lot of customers, but we don’t always get their names, you know?’ Jeff Montgomery said. ‘What does she look like?’
Magozzi cringed inwardly, remembering the mottled face, the blood- stained dress. ‘Elderly, a little heavy, gray hair . . .’ he looked at their blank faces and realized this was hopeless. Teenaged boys remembered teenaged girls, and that was about it.
‘Actually, that sounds like a lot of the people who come here, sir,’ Tim Matson said. ‘Maybe she’s on the mailing list. Mr Gilbert sent out sale flyers every now and then. Did you check the computer?’
‘You know how to run that thing, Timothy?’ Lily asked impatiently.
‘Sure. It’s just a computer.’
‘Good. Come with us. Jeffrey, we’re almost out of basil on the herb table. Take care of that, would you?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Jeff disappeared in a flash while Lily led the way through the potting shed into a tiny back office.
There was a fine layer of black dust over everything – soil from the adjacent potting shed, Magozzi assumed. It covered a bookcase jammed with catalogs, a paper-cluttered desk, and the old computer and printer that sat on it. Grace MacBride would have had a fit.
‘Can’t be good for this thing,’ Gino tapped a finger on the top of the computer. ‘Having it right next to the potting shed like this.’
Tim took a seat in the only chair and booted up the computer. ‘It’s an old one, sir. They aren’t as sensitive as the new ones. Better hardware, if you ask me. And Mr Gilbert didn’t use it for much. Just the invoices once a month, and the mailing list.’
‘Hmph.’ Lily folded her arms across her chest in disapproval. ‘That’s what you think. He played games on this stupid machine. You can hear that beep-beep-beep thing all the way from the front greenhouse, so I come back and take a look one day, and there he is, a grown man shooting down little cartoon spaceships.’
Tim held back a smile as he pulled up an alphabetized mailing list, then waved his hand at the screen. ‘Sorry. No Rose Kleber.’
Gino was lifting some of the loose papers on the desk, peeking under them. ‘You got a Rolodex, Mrs Gilbert?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘One of those things with all the little cards?’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
She shook her head. ‘Silliest things I ever saw. You want to find Freddie Herbert’s number? You spend half your day looking at all those little cards, one by one.’ She opened a drawer, slapped a thin address book on the desk and opened it to the H’s. ‘Here. All the H’s on one page. No turning, no little cards, Freddie Herbert right there in a second.’ She paged to the K’s, glanced at the three names listed, then shrugged. ‘No Kleber.’
‘Anything else on that computer, Tim?’ Maggozi asked.
Tim pushed a few keys and called up the main menu. ‘Just the mailing list and the invoices, sir. That’s it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Can I turn it off? I should get out there and help Jeff.’
‘Go, go, go,’ Lily told him, and then turned to Magozzi and Gino, obviously impatient to get back to her customers. ‘Anything else?’
‘Not for the moment,’ Magozzi said. ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Gilbert.’
‘What help?’ Gino grumbled a few minutes later as they were following the asphalt apron around the greenhouse, back toward the parking lot.
‘She showed us the office, she answered our questions.’
‘Yeah, but she didn’t ask any of her own. We’ve been here almost an hour and she didn’t ask once if we had any leads on who killed her husband, and that just pricks my cynic trigger.’
They paused at the place where Lily said she had found her husband’s body.
Gino rubbed the back of his neck. ‘You know, it just bothers the hell out of me that she opens this place the day after her husband was murdered. Shouldn’t she be home covering her mirrors or something?’
Magozzi raised his brows at him. ‘Gino, I am amazed and impressed. You went home and read up on Jewish funeral traditions last night, didn’t you?’
‘Nah. Movie. Melanie what’s-her-name, the good-looking blonde with the baby voice? She was NYPD, undercover someplace with these really religious Jews – can’t remember what you call them, but all the guys had banana curls.’
‘Hasidic Jews.’
‘Whatever. Anyway, somebody died and they covered all the mirrors. She oughta be home doing that.’
Magozzi sighed. ‘She’s not Hasidic, Gino, or even Orthodox. McLaren said they weren’t even religious, remember?’
‘You don’t have to be religious to show respect.’ He looked at his watch and tapped the crystal. ‘What time is it? I told Rose Kleber’s daughter we’d be there at eleven.’
‘Almost that.’
‘We better move it, then. Damn, this is going to be more fun than a barrel of crippled monkeys.’
Marty hadn’t moved since Lily, Magozzi, and Gino had left the greenhouse. Most of the customers were still outside, emptying the sale tables, and for ten full minutes he’d been alone at the counter, staring at nothing, thinking that another six or seven beers from Jack’s cooler might take the edge off the headache that had been with him since yesterday. He’d been stone-cold sober for over twenty-four hours now, and couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Sobriety, he decided, wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
He glanced out the window and saw Jack passed out on his lawn chair, turning red in the sun. He took one step toward the door to holler at him to get in the shade, then stopped.
Let the bastard fry.
14
Detective Johnny McLaren sat behind the stacks of clutter on his desk, tufts of bright red hair barely peeking over the top. Gloria was sashaying down the center aisle toward him, and there was no hope at all of concentrating on anything else when that body was in motion. She was a big, black, beautiful bulldozer of a woman and most of the time she dressed with all the subtlety of a movie marquee. Today she was wearing an intense yellow sari with a matching headdress and Johnny felt like he was staring into the sun.
‘What are you looking at, you little Irish twerp?’ She poked a pink message slip onto his desk with a long, yellow fingernail.
‘Poetry in motion. The woman of my dreams. My soul mate. My destiny.’
‘Give it a rest, McLaren.’
‘I can’t. I look at you, I look at me, I see little red-haired black children . . .’
‘Uh-huh. Grand dreams for a little stick man.’ She tapped the message slip again. ‘That guy called three times this morning. Some Brit with an attitude.’
McLaren’s ruddy face wrinkled into a perplexed frown as he read the message. Just a name and overseas number. ‘What the hell would a Brit be calling me for? I don’t know any Brits.’
‘Well, gee, honey, I don’t know. I was hoping it might be your new tailor. Lord knows they would never have sold you that jacket on the other side of the puddle.’
‘What’s wrong with my jacket?’
‘McLaren, madras was over before you were born. Get used to it. And if Langer gets back from the can anytime this century, Chief Malcherson wants you both in his office by three P.M. with some kind of an update on the train track guy he can feed to the media for the five o’clock news. Those jackals are in love with that murder.’
‘Lucky us,’ McLaren grumbled as he pawed through the wreckage on his desk and tried to find the case file.
Gloria moved in a little closer and eyed him shrewdly. ‘Pretty strange doin’s, that one.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Gloria clucked her tongue. ‘That Arlen Fischer must have been one nasty piece of work to end up the way he did.’ She waited for a response, but McLaren was thoroughly engrossed in a month-old Malcherson memo regarding dress code. �
��Honest to God, McLaren,’ she said irritably, ‘Jimmy Hoffa could be buried under that pile of crap.’
‘It’s all this inner-office shit. I can’t keep up with it. How the hell am I supposed to find time to solve crimes when I’ve got to read a god-damned five-page memo on profanity every week?’
Gloria arched one perfectly plucked brow. ‘Well I am purely amazed. And all this time I thought you weren’t reading those at all. Don’t know where I got such a silly idea.’ She reached under a stack of sales circulars and pulled out Arlen Fischer’s file. ‘This what you’re looking for?’
McLaren blinked at her, amazed. ‘Yeah.’
She cocked one hip and made a low humming sound that reminded McLaren of a cello. Gloria always did that when she was fishing for information, and it always worked. ‘Well, speaking of Jimmy Hoffa, I don’t know what you guys are thinking, but this sure sounds like a mob hit to me.’ She waggled the folder under McLaren’s nose before handing it over.
McLaren beamed at her. ‘I keep telling you, Gloria, we’re soul mates. That’s exactly what I thought at first. Out-of-state mobsters messing up Minnesota with their nasty little vendettas. Too bad we couldn’t make it fit.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Well, for openers, Arlen Fischer was a three-bill, eighty-nine-year-old with bad hips. Not exactly your average mob type.’
‘I got two words for you. Marlon Brando.’
‘And I got one word for you. Movie. Besides, this was the king of ho-hum. You know what he did for a living? Fixed watches. Worked at the same damn jewelry store for thirty-some years, lived on social security and a little pension, no family, no friends, no money. I’m telling you, the man was a nobody. Never even made a blip on the radar screen.’
‘Hmm. You know what I think, McLaren?’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Honey, I don’t have time to talk about your physical deformities right now. But what I think is, you don’t tie a nobody to a train track and leave him to either die of fright or get chopped in half.’
McLaren sighed. ‘Yeah, well, we’re having a little trouble with that part.’
Gloria folded her arms under her extremely large bosom. ‘You just remember that old Gloria told you to look for a mob connection. And when you end up collaring Tony Soprano for this, you owe me a big, fat lobster dinner.’
McLaren sat up in his chair. ‘I’ll take you out for a big, fat lobster dinner anytime you want.’
‘Who said you were invited?’
McLaren watched helplessly as she glided off to continue her rounds, dropping memos and message slips on other desks in Homicide, all of them vacant with Gino and Magozzi out in the field, and the rest of the guys farmed out to other, busier divisions.
McLaren hated the silence of an empty room. He got enough of that when he went home every night. He breathed a small sigh of relief when Langer came in from the hall, then groaned when he saw the cardboard box he was carrying ‘Oh, come on, Langer, you’re killing me. Not another one.’
Langer set the box on a working table they’d shoved between their desks. ‘This is the last of them.’
‘Gloria says it’s mob related.’
Langer smiled a little. ‘The scary thing about that woman is that she’s right more than she’s wrong, which is better than our average. I don’t know why she doesn’t just sign up and get into the job for real.’
‘I asked her that once. Said she wouldn’t be caught dead in the clothes they make us wear. Do we really have to go through another one of those damn boxes?’
‘We do.’
‘It’s depressing as hell.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Langer started sorting through more of the detritus of Arlen Fischer’s life with little hope of finding anything helpful. So far the contents of the old man’s desks and cabinets had yielded little but confirmation that he filed garbage instead of throwing it away. They’d been through four boxes like this already, and the most interesting thing they’d found was an old, empty Chicklets box that had instantly called up childhood memories for both of them. Apparently mothers of all faiths had surreptitiously doled out those precious little white squares of gum to keep their children quiet during sermons.
Johnny stood up and stretched, peered into the box, and plucked out a cellophane packet of crumbled soup crackers. ‘Oh boy. Here’s a clue.’
Langer looked at the pathetic little package, frowned hard, and looked quickly away. It was the kind of thing he’d found in his mother’s house after he’d buried her last year. Single pieces of gum so old and brittle they’d shattered in their tin foil shrouds when he touched them; boxes of candle stubs and scraps of wrapping paper; and the one that still puzzled him – a paper bag of panty hose, all with one leg cut off. The collections of the dead were surely among the saddest things in the world.
‘Something the matter, Langer?’
He shook his head and pretended to study an old political flyer he’d just pulled from the box. He didn’t talk about his mother’s long death to anyone. Not his partner, not his rabbi, not even his wife, who was probably on the schedule as his next failure. His mother had been the first. After a lifetime of love and humor and Chicklets, he’d run from her Alzheimer’s, abandoned her to strangers who left her to die alone, just as he had.
‘Langer?’
And after he’d failed his mother, he failed the job, watching like a blind fool as the Monkeewrench killer passed him in the parking ramps at the Mall of America, pushing the latest victim in a wheelchair. He was a detective, for God’s sake, and he hadn’t recognized a killer just a few yards away. He still woke up in the middle of every night, sweating, gasping, thinking of the lives that were lost after that day, and how easily he could have saved them.
And then, of course, came the big one, when he had failed himself, his god, and everything he had ever believed in, and the funny thing was that it had only taken a moment. No, not even that long. Just the few seconds it had taken him to. . .
‘Jesus, Langer, what the hell’s wrong with you?’
He jumped at Johnny McLaren’s hand on his shoulder, and in that instant thought his heart had stopped, and the possibility moved him not at all.
‘Hey, what is it, man? You got the flu or something? You’re sweating like a pig.’
Langer straightened and wiped at his face, feeling the greasy slick of fear and regret. ‘Sorry. Yeah. Maybe a touch of the flu.’
‘Well, sit down, for chrissakes, I’ll get you some water, and then maybe you better think about going home.’ McLaren was watching him with a wary, almost frightened caution. ‘You really zoned out there for a minute, you know? Creeped me out big-time.’
Langer smiled at him, just because McLaren had offered to get him water. Such a silly, little thing, and yet it touched him, as if it were a kindness far beyond what he deserved. ‘Pigs don’t sweat,’ he said.
‘Huh?’
‘You said I was sweating like a pig. But pigs don’t sweat.’
‘They don’t?’
‘No.’
McLaren looked absolutely flummoxed. ‘Well that’s so stupid. Man, that really pisses me off. Why the hell do they make up sayings about pigs sweating when they don’t sweat?’
‘I just don’t know.’
By the time McLaren returned with a chipped mug of water and two little white pills, Langer was sitting quietly at his desk, watching the grass turn green across the street from City Hall.
‘You look better.’
‘Actually, I feel fine now. Normal, in fact. What are these?’ he pushed at the little pills.
‘Aspirin. Well, not aspirin, exactly. Couldn’t find any of those, but Gloria said they have aspirin or aceta-whatever in them, you know, just in case you had a fever.’
Langer flipped a pill over and smiled when he read the marking he recognized from the pills his wife took for PMS. ‘Thanks, Johnny. I appreciate it.’
‘No problem. You know, I was thinking, you opened that bo
x and then boom, you got sick. Could be some kind of spores living in all that old junk, like when they opened the Egyptian tombs? And you just got a big whiff.’
‘Ah.’ Langer nodded sagely. ‘So we should close that box and forget it, because there may be life-threatening spores inside, right?’
‘Good idea.’ McLaren started to close the box flaps, then stopped, releasing a miserable sigh. ‘Trouble is, that pretty much leaves us with nowhere to go. I suppose we could talk to the housekeeper again, but I don’t know what more she could tell us.’
‘Probably nothing.’ Langer glanced over at the abandoned box. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much to tell about that man’s life.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I was telling Gloria, that he was kind of a nobody, and she said basically that a nobody didn’t die the way he did, and that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Somebody knew Arlen Fischer existed, and apparently he really, really pissed them off.’
Langer thought about that for a minute, then pulled a fresh tablet from his drawer and clicked open a ballpoint. ‘Okay. Who tortures people when they get really, really pissed off?’
McLaren started counting them off on his fingers. ‘Well, you got your mob types, which we’ve already eliminated because there’s absolutely nothing to support it . . .’
‘Right.’
‘. . . and then there’s your sicko serial killers, a bunch of foreign dictators, military intelligence in a couple hundred countries, bad cops, hate groups . . .’ McLaren stopped and blinked. ‘Jeez. That’s kind of a long list, isn’t it?’
Langer nodded. ‘The sorry world we live in.’
‘McLaren!’ Gloria poked her head around the edge of her cubicle. ‘That Brit is on line two; and Langer, pick up line one right now. Your downstairs toilet is backing up.’
Langer grimaced at his blinking phone. ‘I was supposed to fix that toilet last week. Forgot. Who’s the Brit?’
‘Dunno. Some guy with an attitude, Gloria says. Already called a couple times. Probably pissed I didn’t call him back yet.’
‘Not as pissed as my wife.’
It took Langer the better part of ten minutes to calm down his wife and intimidate the plumber she’d called – one of those emergency yahoos who stood in the middle of your flooding house and demanded a thousand dollars to turn a valve. By the time he finished, McLaren had filled three paper napkins with scribbles, and was thanking his caller with uncharacteristic politeness.