by P. J. Tracy
A couple of crime-scene techs were still inside, processing the area around the table where Lily Gilbert had laid out her husband. Two more were around the side of the building, trying to find a scene on the rain-washed asphalt where she said she’d found him, but as far as Magozzi was concerned, they were all just going through the motions. Intentionally or not, Lily Gilbert had washed away any evidence the rain missed.
He hated this case already, because he knew where it was going. Nobody just popped geriatrics for the fun of it. Unless robbery was involved, the suspect list was always short, and almost always family. He’d take a drug-crazed psycho any day over relatives murdering each other. There wasn’t a monster in a closet any bigger than that.
Gino was heading back toward him across the lot, his broad face already pinking from the sun, his holstered 9-mm bouncing a little against the plaid Bermuda shorts. He slumped down on the bench and wiped the gathering sweat from his forehead. ‘Can you believe it was snowing last week? Man, it’s hotter than hell out here. Gotta be eighty already and it’s not even noon. Wish the son would get here so we could blow this pop stand.’
‘What’s Langer got?’
Gino leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. ‘Now that one’s really interesting. He and McLaren have this bloody house and no body, and Tinker and Peterson out at the train tracks have this body and not enough blood. Thanks to the miracle of cell phones they communicate, and voilá. Turns out the old guy that owns the bloody house is probably the guy tied to the tracks. They’re going to get an ID from the housekeeper, but it looks good.’
Magozzi straightened a little on the bench, frowning. ‘Well that’s a puzzler.’
‘No shit. From what they can put together so far, somebody shot this old man in his house, hit an artery in his arm, then get this. They put a tourniquet on him so he wouldn’t bleed to death before they could get him to the train tracks. Spooky, huh? They wanted him alive to see the train coming. Anant’s got him on the table now, but he’s thinking heart attack.’
‘Jesus.’ Magozzi thought about that for a long time, didn’t like anything his brain came up with. ‘They scared him to death.’
‘Looks that way. Anyhow, he was shot with a.45, our guy here was hit with a small caliber, and the m.o. sure as hell doesn’t tie any knots.’
‘So no connection between ours and theirs.’
‘Just that they were both old men, living in the same neighborhood.’
Magozzi rubbed his eyes, felt the sweat collecting on his lids. ‘I don’t even like that much.’
‘Yeah. Me either. But nothing else fits, so on the face of it, we’re looking for two killers.’ Gino eyed the plastic bags next to the bench. ‘Are these the ones the old lady moved all by herself?’
Magozzi closed his eyes and smiled. ‘No. Those are the ones she made me carry. Thirty pounds each. I thought I’d die.’
‘Fine homicide detective you turned out to be, doing hard labor for a murder suspect.’
‘She’s old. She asked. Respect for your elders and all that. And there was a little machismo involved, since she was carrying the fifty-pounders filled with potting soil.’
‘So you think she could have moved the body.’
‘As much as she had to. She used the wheelbarrow to get him inside.’
‘Jesus, that’s creepy. Pushing your dead husband around in a wheelbarrow. Not as creepy as giving him a bath and shaving him, though. I’m telling you, that part bothers the hell out of me. And don’t tell me that’s how they did it in the old days, because I know that. But this isn’t the old days, and it’s weird.’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s still the old days for some old people. But it bothers me, too. I think there might be something there.’
Gino’s brows lifted. ‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t think she killed him, but there’s something else here we’re not seeing.’
‘Like what?’
‘Don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Why do those bags smell like chocolate?’
‘Cocoa bean mulch. You put it around your plants, on garden paths, like that. Smells like Hershey bars every time it rains. Great, huh?’
‘I don’t know. How do you keep the neighbor kids from eating it?’
‘You gotta shoot ’em.’
They both looked up as a brand-new Mercedes convertible swerved into the nursery driveway and screeched to a stop less than an inch away from the squad that was blocking it. The driver looked harmless enough – middle-aged, a little soft around the middle, dressed in an expensive suit that still looked good despite all the wrinkles – but when the cop stationed at the driveway entrance tried to intercept him, he started dancing around like a troll with a hotfoot.
‘Must be the son,’ Magozzi said.
Gino was staring at the man with a silly little smile on his face. ‘Holy shit. I never put it together. You know who that is, Leo? That’s Jack Gilbert.’
‘Yeah, the son. That’s what I said…’
‘No no, he’s the Jack Gilbert. That bottom-feeder PI attorney with all those hokey TV ads. Don’t-let-them-jack-you-around Jack Gilbert. That one. Jeez, poor Marty. Can you imagine having a sleazeball like that for a brother-in-law?’
Gilbert was yelling at the officer now, punctuating his verbal assault with wild, flailing gestures that made him look like a psychotic windmill.
‘Christ, look at him. Goddamn attorneys think they own the world.’
Magozzi stood up and motioned for the officer to let Gilbert through. ‘Try to reel it in a little. This guy just found out his father was murdered, and his own mother wouldn’t call to tell him.’
‘Doesn’t make him any less of a sleazeball.’ Gino stood reluctantly as Gilbert made a beeline toward them, taking a quick step back when the man swooped in on them so close he could see every single vein in his very bloodshot eyes.
‘You guys the detectives?’ He eyed Gino’s shorts suspiciously.
‘Yes, sir. I’m Detective Rolseth and this is Detective Magozzi.’
Gilbert stuck out a palm slick with sweat and pumped both their hands while he bobbed back and forth on his feet. ‘Jack, Jack Gilbert.’
Magozzi was about to go through the standard condolences, but he didn’t get a chance.
‘So what the hell happened here, guys, what do you think? Robbery? Drive-by?’
‘It’s pretty early in the investigation, sir. We haven’t even finished questioning…’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Gilbert pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I can’t believe this happened. There are a hundred people in this city who want to kill me, including my own wife, and it’s my father who gets shot.’
Gino’s brows lifted. ‘Mind if I ask who wants to kill you, Mr Gilbert? Other than your wife, that is.’
‘I’m a PI attorney – I’ll fax you a list. Goddamnit, he was just an old man. Who the fuck would shoot an old man? Where’s my mother? Where’s Marty?’
‘They’re back at the house, Mr Gilbert, but if you don’t mind, we have a few questions…’ Magozzi’s mouth hung open on his last word as Gilbert sped away without a backward glance.
‘Interesting interview technique,’ Gino commented. ‘Pumped that sucker dry, is what you did. Still, I think we might want to do a little follow-up. You know, a couple of routine questions you forgot to ask, like where was he last night, did he kill his father, stuff like that.’
Magozzi glared at him, then noticed an older uniform he hadn’t seen before ducking under the crime-scene tape across the driveway entrance, walking toward them. ‘You know this guy?’
Gino squinted across the lot. ‘Oh, hell, yes. Al Viegs. Don’t say anything about his hair.’
‘Huh?’
‘He just got his first set of plugs. Looks weird. Little tufts of hair and lots of bare space.’
Magozzi caught himself staring at the man’s head as he drew closer. ‘Damnit, Gino, this is like not looking at the elephant.’
‘Yeah
, I know… hey, Viegs.’
The officer nodded a somber greeting while Magozzi stared at his bizarrely patterned pink scalp.
‘Berman and I just finished the door-to-door for the whole block. We’ll have to come back and hit a few who weren’t around, but most of them were home. Sunday and all.’
‘Let me guess,’ Gino said. ‘Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything.’
Viegs nodded. ‘Right. But… it was weird.’ He looked around, cleared his throat, shuffled his polished shoes. ‘We must have hit about twenty places, houses and busi-nesses… man, it was really weird.’
Magozzi dropped his gaze from Viegs’s head to his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
Viegs shrugged helplessly. ‘A lot of them cried. And I mean a lot. The minute they heard Mr Gilbert was dead, they started to bawl. Men, women, kids… it was awful.’
Magozzi’s gaze sharpened. This was starting to get really interesting.
‘I just don’t get it. I mean, this is the city. Half the people who live here don’t even know their neighbors by sight, and then you look at what’s going on out there’ – Viegs jerked his head toward the street – ‘and you gotta wonder.’
Gino got to his feet and looked over Viegs’s shoulder at the empty drive. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You been out to the street lately?’
‘Not since we got here.’
Viegs cocked his thumb toward the driveway. ‘Take a walk, then. You’ll want to see this for yourself.’
Gino and Magozzi walked across the parking lot, through the opening where the driveway cut into the hedge, and then stopped, dumbfounded. The sidewalk in both directions was jammed with people of every age and race imaginable, some weeping quietly, others stern and stoic, all standing perfectly still, perfectly silent. Magozzi felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Gino watched as more people crossed the street and slipped quietly into the ranks of mourners. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Who the hell was this guy?’
A tall blond kid next to the tape kept raising his hand just a little, trying to attract their attention. Magozzi walked over and leaned in close to him. ‘Something I can do for you, son?’
‘Um… are you the detectives?’
‘That’s right.’
The kid was probably good-looking under other circumstances, but now his face was blotchy and red and puffy around the eyes. ‘I’m Jeff Montgomery? And this is Tim Matson? We work here, and Mr Pullman told us to stay home, you might want to talk to us? But… we had to come, you know?’
Magozzi thought they looked like a couple of lost puppies. He raised the tape and gestured them under, suppressing the instinct to pat them on their heads and tell them everything would be all right.
7
When there were no obvious suspects, the first day of any homicide investigation was a blur of interviews and fact-checking that ate up the precious golden hours between a murder and the probability of it ever being solved. If you were lucky, you caught a spark – a tiny scrap of information that might lead you in the right direction, but Magozzi and Gino hadn’t been lucky today. Fourteen hours into the Gilbert case without a glimmer.
Magozzi parked the car on the street next to City Hall, and for a moment he and Gino just sat there in the dark.
You know your big problem, Leo? You take every murder so goddamned personally.
It was the one thing his ex-wife had said to him that still left him dumbstruck, all these years later. Even her endgame confession of all her infidelities had lost its punch as time passed, but not that. It was the very first time he’d ever considered the possibility that murder wasn’t personal to everyone, and he still couldn’t get his head around that.
It had something to do with empathy for the victim, he supposed. Not once had he ever been able to look at a body with the mental distance that would allow him to see it as ‘just’ a body. Some cops could do that. Some cops had to do it, or they’d go nuts. Magozzi had never been able to manage it. To him, it was never just a body; it was always a dead person, and there was a big difference.
But this one was worse than most. Only one day into the investigation and he wasn’t just feeling sorry for the victim; he was starting to feel sorry for himself because he hadn’t known the man, and that had never happened before.
‘Long day,’ Gino finally sighed.
‘Too long. Too many sad people. You know, just once I’d like to work a case where everybody hated the dead guy.’
Gino grunted. ‘That ain’t gonna happen. Nobody hates a dead man. It’s not allowed. You could be the meanest son of a bitch on the planet, but once they put you in the coffin and lay you out in front of the people who hated you when you were alive, they all seem to find something nice to say. It’s like a miracle.’
Magozzi scowled out the windshield at the deserted street. Maybe Gino was right. Maybe Morey Gilbert had been just like anybody else, somehow elevated by death. But in his heart, he didn’t think so.
Gino was silent for a minute. ‘Except I think this one might be a little different, Leo.’
‘Yeah, I know. I was just thinking the same thing.’ Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering all the mourners outside the nursery. It was the kind of impromptu gathering you expected to see when a celebrity died, or a beloved public figure; not some average Joe nobody had ever heard of. The media had covered it, but mostly because it had snarled traffic on the boulevard. They’d never heard of Morey Gilbert either, and most of their attention was focused on the delicious, ratings-grabbing horror of another old man being tortured and tied to a train track.
Beethoven’s Fifth sang out from the pocket in Gino’s shorts. He ripped his pocket pulling out his cell phone before the irritating melody started again. ‘Damnit, I’m going to ground that kid. Teach her to have a little respect for her father and classical composers.’
‘You should get one of those cell phone holsters for that thing.’
‘Oh sure. A cell phone in one holster and a gun in the other. I’d end up shooting myself in the ear. Yeah, Rolseth here.’
When Gino turned on the map light and started taking notes, Magozzi got out of the car and leaned against the door, pushing speed-dial on his own phone, waiting for the answering machine beep on the other end. ‘Hey, it’s Magozzi. We’ve got something going here, and I’m going to be a little late. I’ll try to make it by ten. Call back if that’s too late; otherwise, I’ll see you then.’ He flipped his phone closed and got back into the car, praying that ten o’clock wouldn’t be too late; that his phone wouldn’t ring in the next few hours.
Gino waggled his notebook at him. ‘That was the night manager at the Wayzata Country Club. Jack Gilbert was there last night, just like he said. Apparently he’s there almost every night, solo, which tells you a little about his home life. But the place shuts down at one, and Anant put time of death between two and four, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So he had plenty of time to get to the nursery and pop his father. Which means we don’t have one person in that family we can clear. The old lady’s alone in the house, and the son and the son-in-law are both supposedly three sheets to the wind and can’t remember a damn thing.’ He sighed and tucked his notebook in his shirt pocket. ‘Nobody has alibis anymore. I hate that. So what do you think?’
Magozzi reached into the backseat to grab one of the two grease-stained bags that were probably leaking onto the seat. ‘I think this car is going to smell like barbeque for the next year. Tell me again why we had to pick up dinner.’
‘Because if we’d sent Langer he’d have come back with carrots and sawdust or some such vegetarian crap, that’s why.’
Minneapolis was dressing itself for the evening with a sparkle of lights. It was a pretty city, Detective Langer thought, staring out at the yellow rectangles in a distant tower, climbing into the night sky like some kind of golden ladder. Not the kind of place you’d expect to produce such a killer.
McLaren
, as Minnesotan as he was Irish, was convinced that whoever had murdered Arlen Fischer was certainly from somewhere else; Chicago, maybe, or New York, or wherever it was that people like the Sopranos lived. Langer had smiled at that, but had to admit there was an old-time mob taste to the way the elderly man had been killed. You didn’t see creativity like that in many other arenas.
He glanced back at his monitor, jiggled his mouse to bring the report he was writing back to life. He hated writing reports. Hated the arcane, affected cop-speak that mangled the brain and tied the tongue. You never went into a house; you entered a residence. People were never shot to death; they sustained mortal wounds inflicted by such-and-such-caliber firearms. And Arlen Fischer had certainly not been tied to a train track to be turned into oatmeal by the midnight freight to Chicago; he’d simply been ‘secured to the southbound tracks by means of barbed wire.’ You couldn’t even mention that the train was due, because that would imply the alleged perpetrator had actually premeditated a means of death not in evidence. Some junior-high-school defense attorney would jump all over that. Genteel, legalese gobbledygook is what it was. If a cop ever talked like that in real life, he’d be laughed off the force.
He looked out at the lights again, dreaming of his last sentence, wondering if Chief Malcherson would suspend him if he wrote that Arlen Fischer had been left on the tracks to get filleted by a train.
‘C’mon, Langer,’ McLaren chided him. ‘Goose the mare, would you? The caterers have arrived.’
Langer looked up with the guilty start of the grade-school kid who should never be given a desk by a window. McLaren, Gino, and Magozzi were at the big table in the front of the Homicide room, pulling white cardboard containers out of a collection of smelly paper bags. ‘Almost finished,’ he said, turning back to his computer.
‘Well hurry up,’ Gino said good-naturedly. ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’
Magozzi gave him a look. ‘Where do you get that stuff?’
‘What stuff?’
‘All those pithy little sayings.’