by P. J. Tracy
‘Langer, would you quit smiling? You’re giving me the creeps.’
He looked at his partner, horrified. ‘I was smiling?’
Johnny McLaren grinned at him. ‘Sort of. Not really. I mean, your teeth weren’t showing or anything. Besides, I know how you feel. After four months of nothing to do I almost went out and killed somebody myself.’
Langer closed his eyes, desperate to justify almost smiling in a bloody room where some poor soul had certainly died. ‘It isn’t that, McLaren,’ he said sadly, and then he looked away, because he couldn’t say anything more.
Most of the carnage in Arlen Fischer’s house was in an otherwise pristine living room – specifically, on a once-ivory sofa that looked like it had spent a good deal of time on a slaughterhouse floor. Jimmy Grimm, star crime-scene tech of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, walked in, took one look at the blood patterns on the sofa, and said, ‘That’s an artery hit, guys. It should have dropped him. He was what? Eighty-nine?’
‘Unless the old guy was the shooter,’ McLaren suggested. ‘Maybe it’s somebody else’s blood, and Fischer’s out there right now burying him in the woods.’
‘God, I love a mystery.’ Grimm put his hands on his hips and looked around, a rotund man in white disposable coveralls and slippers. Langer thought he looked a lot like the Michelin Man. ‘Wow. This is really interesting.’
‘What is?’ asked McLaren, but Jimmy didn’t hear him. He was bent over the sofa, already in another world – his world – where the only things he listened to were the stories blood splatter and minutiae told him.
Frankie Wedell, one of the patrolmen who’d secured the scene, approached the living room entrance and stopped. ‘You guys remember how to do this, or do you need a little refresher course from the boys in the trenches?’
McLaren looked over at him and grinned. Frankie was the oldest officer on the force, a patrol by choice, and had trained more recruits than he could count, McLaren and Langer among them. ‘This is our refresher course, old man,’ he cracked. ‘Homicide Light – no body. How the hell are you, Frankie?’
‘I was a whole lot better before the radio caught fire this morning. Damn near broke my heart to hear about Morey Gilbert over at Uptown Nursery.’
McLaren’s grin faded. ‘That one’s going to break a lot of hearts.’
‘Hell of a way to end a dry spell, losing a good man like that. You two got to know him pretty well last year, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, we did.’
‘Good thing you didn’t catch it, then.’
‘Amen to that,’ Langer murmured. ‘Your partner said you did the walk-through from the front, Frankie. That right?’
‘Yep. Tony covered the back. We started out looking for a shooter, ended up looking for a body.’ His gaze drifted reluctantly to the bloody sofa. ‘Still can’t believe we didn’t find one. That much blood, you wouldn’t think the guy could get very far, especially at his age.’
Langer’s eyes were sweeping the room while Frankie talked, noticing the little things: the high gloss on the hardwood floor, the precisely fanned magazines on a polished side table, the careful alignment of leather-bound classics in a bookcase. Nothing was disturbed; nothing seemed out of place here except the obscenity of the sofa. That, and the three large, glossy books stacked on the floor next to the coffee table. His eyes stopped there. ‘What was the scene like when you got here, Frankie?’
‘Well, the housekeeper – her name’s Gertrude Larsen – was standing on the front steps, totally hysterical, out of control, flapping her arms, wailing… hate to see what she’d have been like if there’d actually been a body in here. Anyhow, I finally got her calmed down and brought her out to the squad, but she’s starting to drift big-time. She must have taken a pill or something. You should probably talk to her before she goes comatose.’
‘Did she move anything in here?’
‘I doubt it. The picture I got was she walked in, saw the blood, went nuts. She called from her cell instead of the inside phone, so I don’t think she made it much past the front door.’
‘Thanks, Frankie. Tell the housekeeper we’ll be right out.’
‘You got it.’
Langer walked over and looked down at his reflection in the surface of the coffee table. ‘This isn’t right.’
McLaren joined him and studied the table for a long moment, frowning. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. I see a nice shiny coffee table, no gouges, no blood, no big smeary fingerprints. So what am I missing?’
‘The books on the floor. They’re supposed to be on the coffee table.’
‘So? Are you telling me that every little thing in your house is exactly where it belongs all the time?’
‘Lord, no, not in my house. But in this one? I think so. Take a look around this room. They’re the only things out of place, Johnny.’
McLaren gave the room the once-over, considering. ‘Gotta admit, the damn place looks like a magazine picture, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Except for the sofa.’
‘And the books on the floor.’
McLaren sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Okay, then maybe they got knocked off the table in the struggle.’
Langer shook his head. ‘If that happened they’d be scattered, at least a little. Look at them. These things are in an almost perfect stack. Someone lifted them off the table and put them there.’
‘Someone being the shooter.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
Jimmy Grimm’s head popped up from behind the sofa, startling McLaren and putting a lie to the general consensus that Grimm never heard a thing when he was working a crime scene.
‘Jesus, Jimmy, I forgot you were even here. What the hell are you doing hiding back there?’
‘I got an exit hole in the fabric I’m lasering up with the entrance in that front cushion. Looks like we’re going to find a slug in that bookcase somewhere.’ He peered over at the coffee table, then grinned up at Langer. ‘Nice call on the books, Langer. I’ll bag them as soon as I finish this, put them on the top of the list at the lab.’
‘Thanks, Jimmy.’
McLaren scratched at the red haze of whiskers sprouting along his unshaven jaw. ‘Still doesn’t make sense. You walk into this place, pop a guy sitting on the couch, then you turn around and take a stack of books off the coffee table and set them on the floor. Now why the hell would you do that?’
‘Good question.’
Gertrude Larsen was obviously long past retirement age, and she looked pathetic, wrapped up in a sagging, faded cardigan and shivering in the backseat of the squad in spite of the sun warming the car’s interior. When Langer approached the open door she looked up with bleary, narcotics-glazed eyes. A few tears traveled the wrinkled valleys down her cheeks, but there was no emotion attached to them.
Langer had seen the look many times, on tranquilized survivors of murder victims, on kids flying on their parents’ Valium, but the shivering concerned him. He knelt down next to the car and touched the elderly woman’s arm. ‘How are you feeling, Ms Larsen?’
She smiled weakly and raised a quaking, arthritis-curled hand to cover his. He couldn’t imagine this work-worn woman still scrubbing and sweeping and keeping a house. ‘A little better.’
‘Did you take something?’
She nodded, a little embarrassed, and handed him a small plastic prescription bottle. ‘One of those pink ones.’
Langer opened the bottle and raised his brows when he looked inside. There were pink pills, blue pills, yellow pills, and a dusty cluster of Tums. The pink ones looked like Xanax, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘I take one of those if I get really upset,’ she explained.
‘I understand.’ Langer made a note of the clinic address on the bottle and handed it back to her. She tucked it in a little-old-lady purse with a metal clasp at the top. ‘Are you feeling well enough to answer a few questions for me?’
She nodded slowl
y, dabbing at her eyes with a damp handkerchief with a lace border.
Langer was exceedingly gentle with the old woman, and it was a slow-motion interview, but eventually they learned that she’d been Arlen Fischer’s housekeeper for thirty-two years, came three times during the week by bus and every Sunday morning, also by bus, to help him get ready for the nine o’clock service at St Paul of the Lakes Lutheran. She was well compensated, cared for him like a brother, and couldn’t imagine who would want to hurt him. And yes, those books were supposed to be on the coffee table, along with a lovely tapestry runner she’d bought him for his eightieth birthday, and no, she hadn’t moved anything.
‘Was the tapestry runner very valuable?’
Her watery eyes crinkled. ‘Well, you don’t often find one with birds on it; certainly not bluebirds; and yes, it was a bit pricey. Eighty dollars plus tax.’ She leaned a little closer to him and confided in a whisper, ‘But I got it on clearance. Nineteen ninety-nine.’
Langer smiled back at her. ‘Quite a bargain.’
‘Indeed it was.’
Langer thanked her, gave her his card, then asked Frankie to drive her to the Hennepin County Medical Center, stay with her until she’d been examined, then drive her home.
Frankie sighed miserably. ‘You know what the ER at HCMC looks like on a Sunday?’
Langer shrugged apologetically. ‘She lives alone, Frankie, she’s self-medicating, and she’s still shivering in that hot box of a car. I’m a little worried about shock.’
‘Okay, okay, but you should have been a missionary or something.’
He and McLaren stood in the driveway and watched the squad pull away.
‘So now what are you thinking?’ McLaren asked. ‘That the shooter moved the books to steal a twenty-dollar tapestry runner?’
‘Don’t forget, it had bluebirds on it. You don’t often find those.’
‘Jeez, Langer, was that you trying to be funny?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well stop it. You’re scaring me.’
An hour later, Jimmy and his crew were still at it, but things were wrapping up. Langer and McLaren found him prone on the living room floor with a tape measure and a notebook, scribbling down figures.
‘Hey, Jimmy,’ McLaren said with as much cheer as he could muster after spending Sunday morning in a murder house. ‘You got this thing solved yet?’
Grimm gave him a tired smile and got to his feet with some effort. ‘At this point, I’m not even sure we have a homicide. Next time, try to get a body, guys. It’ll make things a lot easier. You hear back from the hospitals?’
McLaren thumbed through his notebook. ‘Yeah. Only gunshot wounds reported last night were from a couple of sixteen-year-old gangbangers trying to pop each other with.22’s. The best they could do was soft tissue stuff, no artery hits…’
‘It wasn’t a.22.’ Jimmy held up a little bag with a slug inside. ‘.45 caliber, and some nice rifling, by the way.’
‘.45, huh? Well, in that case, whoever got shot here last night didn’t make it to any hospital or clinic we know about.’
‘Then he’s dead,’ Grimm said matter-of-factly, looking at the sofa.
Langer followed his gaze, feeling a little queasy. ‘That’s a lot of blood.’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘Looks worse than it is. I’ll have to run saturation tests to be sure, but at first blush I’d say your victim left this house alive. There’s not nearly enough blood for a heart shot. I’m guessing an extremity. But arteries don’t heal themselves. He’d bleed out in a hurry without medical attention of some sort, and there’s not a drop of blood anywhere else in the house.’
McLaren grunted. ‘So somebody shot him, bagged him, and carried him out, which means we’re looking for a sumo wrestler. According to the housekeeper, Arlen Fischer weighed over three hundred pounds.’
Jimmy Grimm was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning at them. ‘Nobody carried him out.’
‘Yeah? What then? Aliens sucked him up from the couch?’
‘Better than that.’ Jimmy smiled, enjoying his secret.
‘Jesus Christ, Langer, throw him down, I’m going to take the pliers to his nuts,’ McLaren grumbled.
‘God, the Irish are so impatient,’ Jimmy sighed, pointing to a section of wooden floor marked off with tape. ‘We found wheel marks. From the couch, through the kitchen, out the door and into the garage. Four wheels, not two. Your shooter brought a gurney.’
‘Whoa.’ McLaren’s red eyebrows shot up. ‘Premeditation with a capital P.’
‘I’d say so.’ Jimmy’s plump arms reached for the ceiling in a stretch. ‘Well, we’re about to clear this place and head back to the lab. Apparently they’re bringing in a ton of trace from that scene down at the tracks…’ He stopped in mid-sentence, his hands falling to his sides. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Did you say Fischer went three bills?’
Langer nodded. ‘At least.’
Jimmy closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Man, that blew right past me. My tech said the guy on the tracks was a beefer.’
‘Do they have an ID on him?’
Jimmy shrugged, and Langer pulled out his mobile. ‘Tinker and Peterson caught that, right?’ he asked McLaren.
‘Right.’
Langer punched some buttons, put the phone to his ear, listened for a few seconds, then said, ‘Tinker, this is Aaron. Tell me about your man on the tracks.’
No one had ever accused Tinker Lewis of being reticent. You asked him how he was, you got the story of his life with no hope of a reprieve. Langer tried to interrupt a couple of times, finally gave up and listened in resigned silence, his face infuriatingly expressionless.
McLaren fidgeted and paced for as long as he could stand it, then finally cozied up to Langer and tried to get his ear near the phone.
‘Okay, Tinker, thanks,’ Langer said. ‘I have to go now. McLaren is making a move on me.’ He signed off, tucked the phone away, then simply stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels with a grim smile.
McLaren flapped his arms in frustration. ‘Goddamnit, Langer, you want me to beg?’
‘There was no ID on the body at the tracks. The man was elderly, easily three hundred pounds, with a big hole in his left arm, just above the elbow.’ He gave Jimmy Grimm a nod. ‘Artery hit, just like you said, Jimmy.’
‘So he bled out?’
Langer’s lips tightened, erasing the remainder of his smile. ‘No, he didn’t. They think he had a heart attack, probably when he saw the train coming.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ McLaren muttered, seeing too vividly the picture of an old, injured man tied to the tracks, looking up and seeing the single headlight of a moving train, heading toward him.
‘But if he’d lived,’ Langer continued, ‘the ME says he would probably have lost the arm. Somebody put a tourniquet on it, way too tight, and it was on there way too long.’ He raised his brows at McLaren. ‘It was a tapestry thing, Tinker said, with little blue birds all over it.’
McLaren blinked at him, then blew out a silent whistle. ‘So their guy is our guy.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Jesus.’ McLaren looked over at the couch and shivered a little, absorbing the totality of what had happened here. ‘This is really sick, Langer.’
‘No argument there.’
‘What we’ve got is some sadistic son of a bitch coming in here, shooting the poor old guy in the arm, strapping him to a gurney and rolling him out, then driving him over to tie him to the train tracks…’
‘… making sure to keep him alive the whole time so he would know what was coming,’ Jimmy Grimm finished. ‘God in heaven.’
6
Magozzi watched them load Morey Gilbert’s body into the ME wagon, wincing when the bag bounced hard as the gurney wheels folded. He’d seen a lot of bodies go into that wagon over the years, but he never got used to that final bounce as they all left home for the last time.
It was a relief when the wagon’s doors slammed shut and
the children masquerading as Medical Examiner assistants climbed in and drove away.
‘Who are those kids?’
‘Just a sec,’ Gino said into his cell phone, then held it against his chest. ‘Those are not kids. Those are grownups with medical degrees. They’re starting to look like kids ’cause you’re starting to get so damn old.’
‘I’m in the prime of my life. Forty’s so far away I can’t even see it from here. How come we got assistants anyway? Where the hell’s Anant?’
Gino sighed. ‘Doing the old guy tied to the train tracks, that’s where. And the kids did just fine. I watched them. They wore gloves and everything. Can I finish my call now?’
‘Are you having phone sex with Angela?’
‘No. With Langer. And you interrupted at a critical point. Do you mind?’ He put the cell phone to his ear again. ‘Sorry about that, Langer. Leo’s having a midlife moment.’
Magozzi kept silent for exactly five seconds. ‘The train track guy was old, too?’
‘Jesus. Hang on, Langer… Yeah, Leo, he was old. Way old.’
‘That’s three in one night, Gino. Morey Gilbert, whoever bought it in the bloody house, and the train track guy.’
‘Actually, it looks like it’s only two, and if you’d give me a second to finish this call, I’ll find out everything you ever wanted to know about old dead people. Jeez. You’re like a little kid, tugging at my pants leg.’
‘You don’t have a pants leg.’
Gino gave him a nasty look and stomped away across the parking lot, cell phone pressed to his ear.
Magozzi found a bench in the shade at the front of the greenhouse and sat down next to a stack of bulging plastic bags that smelled like chocolate. Sunday-morning traffic was picking up on the parkway, but he could barely hear it through the dense evergreen hedge that blocked all but the driveway from the street. It made for a nice, quiet piece of real estate in the middle of a city; nice for shopping, living, or shooting an old man in the dead of night without fear of being seen.