by P. J. Tracy
‘Ah, heck, everybody in town knew that about three minutes after you showed up. It’s a real small place, Miss Belinsky.’
A real closed place, Annie thought as she strolled down the sidewalk toward the chief’s office a little later, feeling a lot of eyes on her. If one little old heavyset woman in a dress could turn this many heads, these locals would purely have a fit when they saw Harley on the streets.
Chief Savadra was the single exception so far, and the minute he gave her his standard morning sad-smile, she felt totally at ease, free to be herself. He was surely the ugliest man in town, with his rough-cut, sun-seamed face and a wiry body that didn’t seem to know where most of its parts were going at any given time; but there was something special about him Annie had liked the minute they met.
‘I hear you got the hacienda.’
Annie went straight for the watercooler she’d had delivered on her second day. ‘I swear, news travels faster in this town than I can walk.’
‘The way I hear it, you do not walk at all, Miss Annie. You sashay.’
Miss Annie. She liked that. Reminded her of Mississippi. Liked it especially because there was no flirtation behind it; just a friendly tease. ‘Wait till this town sees the other three. I’m the conservative one.’
Chief Savadra leaned back in his creaky wooden chair and watched her start packing files into her briefcase. ‘I thought you weren’t leaving until Friday.’
‘I’ve done about all I can do before the computers get here. Now that I’ve signed on the hacienda, I can head back a little early.’
‘You miss your people.’
Annie gave him a sidelong glance. ‘I didn’t expect to, at least not this much, but I do. Don’t tell them.’
The chief smiled. ‘I’ll take a run out to the place next week; make sure the a/c is turned on and the pool is filled before you get back.’
‘Thanks, but Joe Stellan has some people coming out to take care of that.’
‘I’ll still take a look, flash my badge in front of the help, put the fear of God into them.’
Annie smiled. ‘That’s nice of you.’
‘Are you kidding? No way in this world I’ll ever be able to repay you all for what you’re doing for me. What I don’t get is why you’re doing it. What prompts a group of people to travel halfway across the country to give away technology that’s probably worth a million bucks?’
‘That’s kind of a long story.’
‘I look forward to hearing it.’
28
Gino was quiet until they’d passed through Wayzata and were on the freeway, probably because he was afraid Jack Gilbert might jump out of the back if they started questioning him again at anything under seventy miles an hour. He actually leaned over to look at the speedometer before unsnapping his seat belt and turning around to face Jack.
‘Okay, Jack. I’m going to give you another chance to do the right thing. Who do you think is trying to kill you?’
Jack’s head lolled back against the seat. ‘I knew you guys were going to do this. “We’re just offering you a lift” my ass. You wanted to get me alone in this crappy piece of shit car with no air-conditioning and try to sweat something out of me.’
Gino managed a puzzled expression. ‘Gee whiz, Jack. I’m pretty confused here. Now if I thought somebody was hell-bent on putting me in the ground, I’d be tickled pink to have a couple of cops driving me around, keeping me safe. And you know what else? I’d be telling them everything I knew, helping them any way I could so they’d have a chance to nail the guy before he nailed me. But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re just sitting back there all quiet and hostile with your lip zipped, and I gotta tell you, Jack, I can only think of one reason for that kind of attitude, and that’s if you’re the shooter we’re looking for. Maybe you just staged that dog-and-pony show back there to throw us off.’
‘Oh, for chrissake, back off, Detective. I’m not some mouth-breathing, brainless dirtbag you picked up for lifting Twinkies at a 7-Eleven, and I don’t have to answer any of your stupid questions. Think whatever the hell you want. I could give a shit.’
Magozzi glanced quickly to his right, and was pleased to see that Gino’s gun was still in its holster. Still, it was time for him to jump in. ‘We’re trying to help you, Jack,’ he said reasonably. ‘Look at it from our side for a minute. We don’t want to believe you’re a suspect in your father’s shooting, but we are dead sure that you know something that explains why these people were killed, and why you think the murderer is after you.’
‘What makes you think it’s the same person?’ Jack scoffed.
‘Because you do.’
That shut Jack up for a minute. ‘All right,’ he finally sighed. ‘This is straight shit, Detectives. I have absolutely no idea, not the slightest clue, who killed my father, Ben, or that Rose woman, and I don’t know who was shooting at me this morning. You don’t think I’d tell you if I did, just to save my own ass?’
Gino shrugged. ‘Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t. Who knows? Maybe you’re trying to save someone else’s ass.’
Jack laughed out loud. ‘That’s good, Detective. Jack Gilbert, the hero. I should hire you to do my P.R. Crack a window, would you? It smells like barbeque back here.’
Magozzi drove a full half mile in stony silence before saying, ‘I didn’t suggest that you knew who the killer was, Jack. I said you knew something about why these people were killed. There’s a big difference.’
Jack met Magozzi’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t respond.
They made a courtesy stop halfway back to the Cities. Jack said he had to use the can, but when they pulled up to a gas station, he got out of the car and veered left toward an adjacent liquor store.
Magozzi shook his head. ‘Oh, this looks good. Detectives run shuttle service to liquor store. I’m not putting this in the report.’
‘Goddamned son of a bitch beat us bloody,’ Gino grumbled.
‘He did that.’
‘I hate lawyers. Goddamned hate ’em. So what was the wife like? Did she give you anything?’
‘I don’t think that woman gives anybody anything anytime. She was really cold. Minnesota ice. She didn’t know anything about why Jack and his dad were fighting, and never cared enough to ask, as far as I could tell.’
Gino leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a minute. ‘Tell me we’ve got enough to throw him in jail for an obstruction of justice charge.’
‘We don’t.’
‘So where the hell do we go from here? He’s not going to tell us anything.’
‘Maybe Pullman can help us out.’
The front two rows of the nursery parking lot were full by the time they pulled in, and a surprising number of customers were moving through the outdoor display tables, pulling flat wooden wagons that sprouted flowers and greenery.
‘Looks like the flower business is booming,’ Magozzi said.
Jack was already sitting forward in the backseat, anxious to get out. ‘It’s eighty-two degrees. This time of year, you get an extra two cars in the lot for every degree the temperature rises over seventy.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding. Stop this thing and let me out, will you?’
Magozzi glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Two seconds at his mother’s place and the cockiness was gone. ‘Hold your horses. I’m looking for a spot.’
Gino was scowling out the passenger window, still fuming over the abysmal failure of his efforts to get information from Jack. ‘Who are all these people? Why don’t they have jobs? And why can’t they park between the lines? Every one of these goddamned cars is taking up two spaces, at least.’
Magozzi pulled into a slot that faced the big greenhouse just as Marty and Lily came out the door, pulling loaded wagons toward a customer’s pickup. Marty spotted their car immediately and gave them a questioning look and a tentative wave. He looked even more puzzled when he saw Jack climb out of the unmarked and make a beeli
ne toward his Mercedes convertible at the back of the lot.
‘Gee. He didn’t even say good-bye.’
‘Scummy bastard,’ Gino muttered.
They waited in the car, watching Marty load flats into the pickup while Lily supervised.
‘Pullman looks better today,’ Magozzi observed.
‘Hard labor and a female overseer. Builds character, according to my mother-in-law, or at least that’s the line she was feeding me last weekend when she had me up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. She looks like a little kid in those overalls, doesn’t she?’
‘Who? Lily?’
‘Yeah. Let’s go in and rough her up a little. Maybe she’s an easier takedown than her kid.’
Magozzi snorted. ‘She’d eat you alive.’
‘I know. You take care of her, I’ll talk to Marty.’
They followed Marty and Lily into the greenhouse, then waited politely until a customer at the counter had checked out and left. There were other shoppers in the greenhouse, but all were out of earshot. Magozzi stepped up to the counter, but Jack barged in before he could say a word.
‘I need my keys.’ He glanced briefly at his mother, then at Marty. ‘Where are they?’
Marty looked blandly at the bruise on Jack’s cheek and the bandage on his forehead. ‘You mouth off to the wrong person, Jack?’
‘Ran into a tree.’
‘Figures.’
‘Trying to get away from the person who was shooting at me.’
Lily’s eyes jerked toward her son, and for the first time, Magozzi saw the mother inside the woman. ‘Who tried to shoot you?’ the words snapped out.
Jack almost shuddered. His mother hadn’t addressed him directly in a very long time. ‘I don’t know.’
And now the old woman straightened, and her eyes grew hard again.
Shit, Magozzi thought. She knows something, too.
Marty was staring at Jack, wearing a lot of expressions on his face. Anger, disgust, frustration, and maybe a little fear, too; but there was concern behind all of them. It surpised Magozzi a little to see that Marty Pullman actually cared for Jack.
‘What do you know about this?’ Marty asked Gino.
Gino eyed a woman in purple capri pants approaching the register with her cart. ‘Let’s take a walk. I’ll give you what we’ve got.’
‘Keys,’ Jack demanded just as they started to move away.
Marty turned around and pointed a finger at Jack. ‘No keys. You’re staying right here.’ He looked straight at Lily as he added, ‘All day, all night, from now on, until I say otherwise.’
Jack and Lily both blinked at him like startled children.
‘I mean it,’ Marty warned as he and Gino went out the door.
Jack opened his mouth to speak just as the woman in purple capri pants tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me if this is the right fertilizer for rhododendrons?’
Almost without thinking Jack turned around and looked at the green plastic jug she was holding. ‘Oh no. That’s too alkaline. You need something more acidic for a rhododendron. Should be something on the same shelf where you found this.’
‘Really? Do you think you could show me? There were so many brands of fertilizer there…’
Jack pinched his nose while he slipped from one dimension into another. ‘Okay. Yeah. Sure, I can show you.’
‘Sounds like he knows the business,’ Magozzi said to Lily.
‘He should. He grew up with it,’ she said absently, her eyes following her son past a crowd of customers overloading their wagons from a sale table of impatiens. ‘So tell me about this shooting business. Who was shooting at Jack?’
‘Maybe you should ask Jack about that.’
‘I’m asking you.’
Magozzi sighed. ‘Jack thinks somebody took a shot at him in his driveway this morning, so he shot back.’
Lily turned her head slowly to look at him. ‘He thinks? He’s not sure?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘He is. We’re not. At least not yet. There were a lot of slugs and casings around, but they might all be from Jack’s gun. We’re checking on that.’
Lily was giving him one of her Yoda stares through her thick glasses. ‘Jack doesn’t own a gun. He hates guns.’
‘He says it was Morey’s, and that he took it home from here last night after he heard Ben Schuler was killed.’ Magozzi watched her face carefully as he asked, ‘Did you know Morey had a gun?’
Her stare never faltered. ‘If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.’
Magozzi leaned his forearms on the counter, which put his eyes on a level with hers. ‘Listen, Mrs Gilbert,’ he said quietly. ‘We think Jack knows something about these murders – including your husband’s.’
Lily’s eyes flickered at that.
‘He almost fainted at the reception yesterday when he heard Ben Schuler was shot, and not just because he was shocked. He was scared to death, and we think it was because he knew he was next. He knows something, Mrs Gilbert, and we can’t help him unless we know it, too.’
‘You want me to talk to him,’ she said flatly.
Magozzi straightened and spread his hands. ‘He won’t talk to us. Maybe he’ll talk to his mother.’
Outside, Gino and Marty were perched on the front bumper of the unmarked, slamming bottled water Marty had pulled out of a cooler near the entrance. ‘He’s all we’ve got at this point,’ Gino was saying; ‘and he won’t give us diddly squat. My preference, slam him in a cell with a couple of Bubbas until he decides to talk, but Magozzi’s got this ethics problem. I was thinking because you were family and all, you could get away with beating the shit out of him.’
Marty started a smile, then thought better of it and just shook his head. ‘I tried last night, Gino, and I pushed hard. I know he’s holding something back. The funny thing is, I get the feeling he thinks he has a damn good reason. But I’ll try again. Later tonight, after Lily goes back to the house.’
‘You’re really going to keep him here?’
‘If someone’s really trying to kill him, he’s probably safer here than anywhere else.’
‘How do you figure? Morey wasn’t very safe here,’ Gino pointed out.
Marty turned to look at him squarely. ‘Because I’m not leaving, and I’m carrying. Last night Jack asked me to go home and get my gun. He was worried about Lily. Now I’m worried about both of them. I think he’s really scared, Gino.’
Gino nodded. ‘So do we. But he might have shot up his yard all by himself, Marty. We won’t know until we get something back from Ballistics, and maybe not even then. If we get a positive on something that came from a gun other than the one Jack was waving around, we can put a car out here.’
They stopped talking when they saw Jack rushing across the lot toward them.
‘Where the hell are the Big Boys, Marty? They’re supposed to be on the same table as the Early Girls, and I’ve got a customer freaking out back there because she can’t find any.’
Marty rubbed at his forehead, trying to shift gears from murder to plants. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Jack.’
‘I’m talking about fucking tomatoes, for chrissake. Now where are they?’
‘Oh. I think I put a bunch of those in the shade over there by the small greenhouse.’
Jack gaped at him. ‘You put tomatoes in the shade?’
‘I guess. If those things over there are tomatoes.’ He jerked a thumb to the right, and Jack looked in that direction.
‘Oh my God.’ He started to hurry off, then turned around and walked back to Gino. ‘I think I forgot to thank you for the ride, Detective.’
‘Yes, you did.’
Jack nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked off to one side. ‘And there’s another thing.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Sometimes I’m kind of a prick.’
‘You think so?’
‘And in spite of everything, you and your partner have
been pretty decent to me. I wish I could help you out.’ He raised his eyes to meet Gino’s. ‘I really mean that.’
Gino watched him walk away with a miserable expression. ‘Goddamnit. Now I’m really conflicted.’
Marty chuckled. ‘Jack turns everybody upside down.’
29
Gino was mobbed the minute he pushed through the door to Homicide. Langer, McLaren, Gloria, and Peterson all moved toward him like a pack of slobbering puppies. A lesser man, he thought, might have been fearful. ‘Lars, what are you doing here?’ he asked Detective Peterson. ‘I thought they bumped you over to Narc until Tinker got back from vacation.’
Peterson was zipper thin and had just a little more color than most of the corpses they’d seen in the last few days. ‘Just for yesterday. And you know how I spent it? Sitting in a methadone clinic waiting for Ray the Mouth to show up. God knows what I caught there…’
Gloria pushed Peterson aside with a gentle nudge of her hip that nearly dropped him. ‘Yadda yadda yadda, come on, Rolseth, spit it out.’
‘What?’
‘Are you kidding?’ McLaren asked. He was wearing a navy-and-white houndstooth check jacket that looked like an eye test. ‘You’ve been all over the news all morning, and you don’t even call in. So what happened at Gilbert’s place? Where’s Magozzi?’
‘Leo’s dropping off some stuff for Ballistics, and nothing happened at Gilbert’s.’
‘No dead people?’
‘No dead people. Looks like Gilbert killed his wife’s car emptying a clip at a phantom assassin. That’s about it.’
Peterson’s bony shoulders sagged beneath his white shirt. He looked sadly down at his empty desk, probably dreaming of homicides, the bloodthirsty bastard. ‘Sounded like Waco on the news.’
Gloria spun in a swirl of rainbow silk, cornrow beads clattering. ‘I told you fools there was nothing to it. You flick a Bic in Wayzata, everybody gets all worked up. Peterson, you’ve got about three minutes to sign off with Narc before Harrison leaves, or you belong to them.’